Supporters of Proposition 39, the statewide ballot initiative that would implement additional Voter ID requirements for California elections, pitch the measure as a "common-sense reform to increase trust and participation in our elections." Its sponsor, Assembly member Carl DeMaio (R–San Diego), touts widespread support for such measures by Democratic, Republican, and independent voters.
Yet the latest polls show the measure tanking, with a Public Policy Institute of California survey last month showing it losing 55 percent to 43 percent—dismal numbers this late in the election season. The official ballot arguments provide some insight into the reasons. While supporters stick with their "nonpartisan" shtick, opponents tie the measure to President Donald Trump's election denialism.
"Stop Trump from rigging our elections. Don't believe the lies. Prop. 39 MAKES VOTING HARDER, MORE EXPENSIVE, AND LESS SAFE for Californians," per the "no" argument. It refers to the measure's funding from "MAGA rightwing billionaires." That point was reinforced by a recent CalMattersreport showing large donations from "deep-pocketed Republican donors." The publication says it's a "signal that conservatives view Prop. 39 as a test of support for future battleground states in the broader push by…Trump to tighten voter restrictions."
That's a fair assessment. In a Democratic state where the president's approval ratings are 24 percent in one poll, it's hard to imagine that most voters will spend much time thinking about the ins and outs of election policy and analyze the measure based on its specifics. They'll no doubt see it for what it largely is: a Republican Party effort to aid and abet Trump's unfounded election conspiracies. That said, its requirements aren't overly obtrusive, only unnecessary.
Currently, Californians must show a state identification or provide the last four digits of their Social Security Number when registering. No identification is needed to vote in person, but election officials use signature verification for vote-by-mail envelopes. Around 90 percent of Californians vote that way, so the main issue involves the requirement that voters add the last four digits from their government IDs on the outside of the envelope—thus adding an additional checkpoint (and sadly an additional opportunity for identity theft).
There's no need to worry about compliance costs for election agencies, as it's their job to administer elections. The measure likely will marginally reduce voter participation (by increasing disqualified ballots, even from legal voters if they forgot the ID they used when they registered), while marginally increasing security. It would force many Californians to re-register, which is a hassle. It would no doubt burden our excruciatingly slow ballot counting.
I don't have any theoretical problem with requiring an identification before voting, but California's elections are remarkably secure. There's no evidence of widespread fraud. Basically no one risks prison time by pretending to be someone else on a ballot. It's not about fixing a problem.
Since his defeat in 2020, Trump has traded in election conspiracy theories. The new GOP game is to trot out evidence-free election-fraud claims whenever they lose. We shouldn't play along. Despite the nonpartisan rhetoric, Proposition 39 is the state GOP's way of leaning into Trump's priorities and, as that CalMatters article noted, build momentum for less-defensible nationwide restrictions—apparently the only way Republicans think they can build a lasting majority. The measure won't do much damage in California as it's fairly modest, but it energizes the party's worst instincts.
Consider what DeMaio wrote in 2024 about his seven-point plan to overhaul the state GOP: "Do you remember a time when Republicans controlled a majority of statewide offices in California and were competitive in the state Legislature and congressional delegations?" He rightly blames the party itself, then offers his first item on a platform to revive it: "Make election integrity CAGOP's top ballot priority." I, too, would prefer more competitive California elections, but my first point would be for the GOP to make a better case for fixing California's messes.
Others see the measure as a means to gin up Republican turnout for a November election that's going to be a referendum on Trump by giving them some high-excitement issue to rally around. But some savvy political observers think that it might backfire. We'll see, but it reminds me that the California GOP has too long relied on cute strategies rather than good candidates.
What about supporters' main claim that Voter ID is necessary because it will restore voters' flagging trust in election integrity? Well, Republicans are the ones who don't trust our elections—and that's precisely because Trump spent the last six years poisoning the well. Do you really believe the people who think MAGA Republican Spencer Pratt could have only lost a Los Angeles mayoral primary (where only 15.9 percent of voters are Republicans) because of fraud will have their faith restored if Proposition 39 becomes law? Doubtful.
Republicans can restore their fortunes by acting normal again. The rest of us needn't enable them by backing a measure based on an election-integrity fantasy.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
On his last morning as a professor, Vladimir Mihić taught both an ordinary and quite unique class.
It was early June, the final day of the academic year at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, Serbia's second biggest city, and Mihić had recently celebrated his 24th year in its classrooms.
The day before, the University Senate had voted — in a secret ballot he and his lawyers say was unlawful — not to reappoint him.
A student asked him to give one more lecture, in public, in front of the Rectorate.
Hundreds attended. There were tears, hugs and gifts.
But it was the quiet morning class with his students, Mihić says, that nearly broke him.
“If you went to the same local tavern for 24 years and it closed down, that would be hard,” he says. “Now imagine walking into a faculty with thousands of students you have taught behind you, and someone tells you: ‘You can't do this anymore’.”
Mihić is one of hundreds of Serbian citizens who have paid for supporting the country's student-led protest movement with their livelihoods.
The movement started on November 1, 2024, when the concrete canopy of the recently renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16 people — a disaster protesters blamed on corruption, and which ignited the largest demonstrations in Serbia's history.
Nearly two years on, the movement has firmly reshaped Serbian politics. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned all the way back in January 2025. After originally just reshuffling the government, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić called for snap parliamentary elections — the protesters’ main demand for more than a year at this point — which are finally taking place on Sunday, October 25.
A month before the election, on September 27, Vučić stepped down from the presidency to lead his Serbian Progressive Party’s election campaign and run for prime minister, a job he held between 2014 and 2017. Vučić, who has been President since 2017, resigned eight months before his term was due to end in May 2027. He would have been barred from running for a third term, while no such Constitutional barrier exists for prime ministerial terms. Critics argue Vučić, by looking to remain in power, is behaving in the manner of other Eastern European strongmen.
But, for the first time in his reign, Vučić’s grip on power might slip. His main rival is the so-called Student List, a leaderless movement born out of the protests, and the polls constantly disagree on whether it or Vučić is ahead in the race.
Opposition to Vučić has not been confined to just students, however – and nor has the crackdown against it.
In the wake of the student protests, supportive teachers, professors, civil servants, doctors and workers at state-owned companies have been dismissed, demoted, transferred or pushed out. Officially, trade union and civil society groups say, the reasons for dismissal are almost never stated to be support for the students.
But more than 100 school employees alone lost their jobs or had their contracts not renewed in the 2024/2025 school year, according to the Independent Trade Union of Education Workers. The number now far exceeds that, says Civic Initiatives, a prominent local civil rights organization.
Serbia's Commissioner for Protection of Equality keeps no separate tally for “political discrimination,” but on the two grounds that fit — union or political membership, and political convictions — complaints more than doubled in a year, from 31 and 25 in 2024 to 70 and 76 in 2025.
These complaints about discrimination rarely yield redress: of eight formal recommendations made in last year's 85 employment-related cases, only two employers complied, the office said in an email response to Coda’s questions.
Dismissals are only one of the tools of repression the government has used. Since the start of 2026, at least 14 students, activists and opposition politicians have been targeted with advanced spyware, says digital rights group SHARE Foundation. And some of that spyware was installed while they were in police custody, says Amnesty International. Additionally, Serbia recorded 209 press freedom violations in 2025, compared to 84 in the year before. Protesters have been charged with attacking the constitutional order, civil society groups have been branded foreign mercenaries, and university teachers have had their pay cut over the blockades.
Ana Brnabić, currently the acting president of Serbia, was leader of the National Assembly at the time of the student protests and claimed that state institutions had no information that spyware was used against students. Vučić, for his part, has claimed, without evidence, that the Student List is being financed by foreign agents, its political ascent part of a plot to undermine Serbia.
Student List — whose lead candidate (not quite the same thing, the group insists, as a figurehead or party leader) is cardiologist Ilija Srdanović – claims to represent voters fatigued by traditional politics and politicians. It is a posture acknowledged by several opposition parties which have chosen to sit out the elections and endorse Student List instead.
On Sunday, as in so many recent elections around the world, a deeply divided electorate will go to the polls, with watchdogs already warning about intimidation and alleging surveillance and possible electoral manipulation.
Professors on the front lines
But back to June, and Vladimir Mihić’s last day as a professor in Novi Sad. The purge at the Faculty of Philosophy was already underway before Mihić became a national topic.
The first to go was Jelena Kleut, a media studies professor and one of the most visible academic supporters of the protests: in January 2026, the University Senate refused, by secret ballot, to promote her to full professor, thus ending her employment even though expert bodies had approved her promotion and more than 1,200 professors signed a letter of support.
“Sadly, we have indication that this is just the beginning,” Kleut warned, referring to a colleague whose reappointment was also in question.
That colleague was Mihić.
The social psychologist, a tall man with a few grey hairs in his beard and a calm voice, had been, like Kleut, an active supporter of the student protests.
“I could not watch it on television while just sitting around,” he says.
On paper, his reappointment was beyond dispute, his file reviewed by a committee that included two of the most cited psychologists in the world.
"It was not just that my file was not disputable,” Mihić says, “it exceeded the standards several times over.”
What his unimpeachable file could not survive, though, was an objection lodged twice by Patrik Drid, the dean of the Faculty of Sport and Physical Education and a vocal opponent of the protests.
Drid claims his complaint concerned what he described as Mihić's active political organizing. The chief example of which, Drid said, was a social media call for students to gather in front of Drid's own faculty, “blocking access to those who wished to work and study.” Mihić maintains he organized nothing of the kind, and that Drid’s objections were personal.
On June 4, the University Senate voted, again in secret, which Mihić said the university’s own legal department warned was against the rules. Eight members voted for his reappointment, four against and six abstained. Under the current rules, the abstentions counted against him.
Trade unions from ten faculties called the outcome a brutal attack on university autonomy, but no explanation was given for why Mihić had lost his job.
He appealed, but the expanded Senate confirmed its decision. Now he plans to take his case to the Administrative Court, a legal battle he says could take years.
Filip Stevanovic/Anadolu via Getty Images
Fired for standing still
The unjust dismissals extended beyond university campuses.
Biljana Hrnčić spent 21 years working for the government of Vojvodina, Serbia's northern autonomous province, most recently as head of its press department. She says she had never once faced a disciplinary measure.
That changed after the protests.
Every Friday at exactly 11:52 a.m., the exact time the roof caved in at the Novi Sad station in 2024, Serbians would leave their desks and head out to the streets to honor the dead in silence. Managers walked the halls, watching.
“They went around the offices to see who took part and who didn’t,” Hrnčić said. “At one point they were so malicious that they simply locked people out of the building.”
For Hrnčić, joining in the protests was unavoidable. Both her children are students. “My children are in the streets,” she said. “It is more than natural that I would walk out onto that same street.”
In September 2025, with street demonstrations still ongoing, Hrnčić and six colleagues were moved into a new department at work. Two months later, the government abolished the department and its entire staff became “unassigned.”
The provincial government of Vojvodina did not respond to Coda’s questions for this story.
“It is a horrifying feeling,” says Hrnčić, who still looks harrowed by her ordeal. “20 years of daily work, never a single disciplinary problem, and you find yourself on the street asking what just happened.”
She and her colleagues are living off their severance pay and their savings while they wait for their cases to be heard in the Administrative Court.
For every few hundred dismissals, one court victory
Many of those dismissed have taken their case to Administrative Court, but even winning there guarantees little.
Dragoslav Ljubičić was chief steward of the Nezavisnost union at the Serbian state’s largest thermal power plant. Five years short of retirement, he was a marked man even before the student protests as a rare insider willing, in his words, to call out the mismanagement of the utility.
When the roof fell, he joined the protests immediately, holding 16-minute silences at the plant — one minute for each victim — and organized the first joint rally of students and workers in front of the state-owned electricity company EPS’s Belgrade headquarters.
In January 2025, he received a formal warning citing his Facebook posts. On February 12, managers tried to hand him a dismissal letter at work. He refused to sign it. Six days later, he signed and then sued.
EPS has publicly denied he was dismissed over the protests or his union activity. It said Ljubičić broke its code of conduct, without specifying how. EPS did not respond to questions for this story.
A judge ordered EPS to reinstate Ljubičić until his case could be heard, a decision it could not appeal. But, he said, “they did not give me back my job. They gave me a fixed-term contract and a post that did not match my qualifications at nearly half my previous pay.”
For continuing to complain about his treatment, EPS transferred him to a job that included an exhausting commute from his home.
Ljubičić’s lawyer, Ivan Ninić, who represents a string of dismissed workers, says this is the EPS playbook. Every ruling against the company is automatically appealed, at the expense of the public budget. “We took you back because the law says so,” Ninić said, describing EPS’s attitude. “Now we will make your life hell until you quit on your own.”
Serbian law, he says, is largely on the side of workers; the problem, though, is that the process takes years.
Still, Ljubičić has little patience for the slogan his supporters chant.
“The message ‘Justice for Ljubičić’ misses the point,” he says. “The real message is: stop the dismissals. Mine was the first. And then there came a wave of dismissals across Serbia, most of which the public never heard about.”
Despite the professional and financial hardship, neither Ljubičić, Mihić or Hrnčić expressed any regret. “There has not been a fraction of a second in which I have thought, ‘why did I need to do this.’I could never forgive myself if I hadn't done what I did,” says Mihić.
On Sunday, Serbians will have a long-awaited chance to exorcise their feelings of injustice. The answer to the question of whether it will be enough for a student movement to unseat the populist, autocratic Vučić will reverberate around an embattled Europe.
Like the man in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky may be crying, “I’m not dead.” It is too early to perform a postmortem on Zelensky’s political career. But it may not be premature to attempt an analysis of his deteriorating condition and struggle to survive.
Zelensky’s strength is being undermined on four fronts: overall domestic support, support from his party, financial support from Europe, and a collapsing relationship with President Donald Trump.
Polls show that Ukrainians, who wanted Zelensky to lead them through the war, no longer want him to lead them after the war. Indeed, having fed Ukrainians with fantastical promises of pushing Russia out of all Ukrainian lands and being welcomed into NATO, and having depended on a cooperative relationship with Ukrainian ultranationalists who oppose a compromise peace with Moscow, Zelensky may have put himself into a position where his presidency cannot survive the war. Polling shows a collapse of domestic support for Zelensky, suggesting that he would lose by a wide margin in the next election.
But, while the foreign media has been entirely focused on the war, domestic attention in Ukraine has also turned to corruption. Zelensky was elected on the twin platform of making peace with Russia and ending Ukraine’s self-destructive corruption. He has delivered on neither.
A key metric is Zelensky’s trust rating. Asked recently which political figures they trust, Ukrainians ranked their president a damning sixth, with only 18 percent of respondents fully trusting him. His main potential political rivals, Valeriy Zaluzhny, Kyrylo Budanov, and Mykhailo Fedorov are all more trusted. A fifth of those who say they do not trust Zelensky cite corruption as the main reason, and 72 percent of Ukrainians say he is personally responsible for corruption in his government. Amid his latest spat with Trump, one recent poll found Zelensky’s trust rating had risen, but the overall trend is still bad, and the rally-around-the-flag effect may prove fleeting. Zelensky has hurt himself with his handling of a snowballing corruption scandal that is reaching deeper and deeper into his inner circle.
And Ukraine’s president is not only losing ground with voters—he’s also losing the support of his party, which once was solidly behind him. He is being confronted by unfamiliar resistance, with dozens of MPs in his Servant of the People party boycotting or rebelling. His legislative supermajority is reportedly at risk as a result of defections.
The lack of support at home also puts in jeopardy EU funding on which the Ukrainian government relies. Ukraine is facing a massive budgetary shortfall totaling tens of billions of dollars. Kiev wants money promised by the EU for 2027 to be provided sooner. But the release of badly needed funds from the EU is contingent on the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, enacting corruption reforms—and Zelensky’s party has refused to pass such measures. Even a package of tax bills that was passed last week and that could unlock $4.3 billion dealt only with less controversial items, and avoided addressing many of the more serious demands being made by the EU.
Earlier this month, the EU rejected Zelensky’s appeals and refused to accelerate payments to cover the shortfall, again tying funding to corruption reform. According to Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico, neither Slovakia nor Hungary will participate in another EU loan to Ukraine. Other, more pro-Ukraine EU nations would have trouble filling the gaps. France, for example, is convulsed by riots motivated in part by the rising cost of living, and populist critics of the establishment are quick to remind voters of the vast sums that have already been sent to Ukraine. The right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, currently the favorite to win France’s next presidential election, recently said that, if she wins, Paris will cut financial aid to Ukraine.
But Zelensky’s biggest challenge comes from Ukraine’s most crucial supporter. Shaky relations with U.S. presidents are nothing new for Zelensky. In the first year of the war, when Joe Biden authorized further military assistance for Ukraine, Zelensky complained about what he wasn’t getting. Biden reportedly “lost his temper” during a call with the Ukrainian leader. “Raising his voice,” he told Zelensky to “show a little more gratitude.” The next year, Thomas Friedman of the New York Timesreported, “There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—considerably more than has been reported.”
But Zelensky managed those challenges. Even following last year’s public debacle that saw Trump throw him out of the Oval Office, Zelensky was able to repair his relationship with Trump. That work has now exploded.
Earlier this month, Trump made three decisions that seemed to collectively amount to a breaking point for a reluctantly conciliatory Zelensky. He made a deal with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that would allow Russia to sell diesel fuel, he announced a surprise energy ceasefire that demanded Ukrainian armed forces stop all strikes on Russian refineries, and he waived new sanctions on Russia.
This trio of announcements apparently led Zelensky to conclude that his conciliatory approach was no longer working. According to a person close to Zelensky, he let it be known that “plain speaking” was now needed, and he made the decision to publicly criticize Trump.
Zelensky said Trump’s behavior “is certainly not how partners should treat each other.” When Ukraine struck another Russian refinery, Trump said Zelensky “better damn well stop.” Zelensky said Trump was not being fair or honest. He called Trump weak, and juxtaposed his leadership to the “real leaders” in Europe. Trump fired back, declaring, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president…. I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal.” Trump later expanded: “I think if they are going to end up with a settlement of some kind, they are not going to do it with him.” On Monday, Trump added, “To be honest, I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.”
The gloves were off, and Zelensky was in danger of losing Trump. The military-grade version of Starlink, which Ukrainians use for battlefield communications, as well as U.S. early warnings of incoming Russian missiles went silent. “He is not a good guy for us to deal with,” Trump said of Zelensky Friday, adding that he is “more difficult to deal with than Putin.” Zelensky, he said, had “destroyed that country.”
When Russia kept pounding Ukraine’s electricity grid with drones, ballistic and hypersonic missiles, and with access to U.S. intelligence was restricted, Zelensky defied Trump’s orders, letting it be known that the block on attacking Russian refineries was off.
Zelensky is a political survivor, but the latest constellation of crises is the most difficult challenge to his leadership yet.
If one were seeking to create something like a modern-day folk tale based on current realities and having the theme of “good versus evil” there are any number of real-life narratives available that could be exploited to invite speculation on actual environments that might have served as models for the fiction. I have found much of the bizarre and blood-soaked evil relationship between the United States and Israel, which serves no US interest at all, to be one such arrangement in which two countries have through their own behavior become the most hated in the world. They have successfully established an odd partnership based largely on a common view of which other nations they hate and would like to destroy.
One must consider the monstrous joined-at-the-hip relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv, which is likely soon to become a true military and policy partnership by act of Congress. It will leverage the already existing ability of tiny Israel to manipulate and dominate the large and powerful United States. And there is also something else that should be reckoned with in the arrangement, and that is melding of the desire of the two countries to dominate not only their neighbors but also far beyond that. One can cite the aberrations in behavior that reveal how neither government wants to get along with other nations except in those rare cases where America and the Jewish state are accepted and even honored in spite of not being bound by any rules, decency or even democratic norms.
A prime example of how the completely murderous pathology that guides both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has come to dominate the relationship surfaced last week when Trump endorsed Netanyahu in the upcoming Israeli election. It was a case of two completely evil men finding common ground to congratulate themselves and advance their respective careers, which nearly all of the rest of the world would like to terminate!
Both men are in trouble with their respective electorates in large part because their obsession with endlessly killing anyone annoying be it in the Caribbean or Gaza, has become suspect, largely because the killing is without any actual objective and no real good comes out of the process. This is particularly true for voters in the US who have suffered the bullying by Israel and its domestic Lobby and also bear the tax burden and shortages that are the only fruit that falls from the trees of the conflicts. In Israel the equation is somewhat different as 90% of the Jewish voters want to eradicate even more Muslims and Christians and fully support a new Prime Minister who will kill even more of the vermin.
Observe what a brain dead Trump has to say about his good buddy Netanyahu in a shared phone call in which they first exchanged pledges that they would soon “finish the job,” the “job” in question being the “extermination” of Iran and most particularly its government. Bibi told Trump “Donald, we have a job to finish. You said it, and we’ll finish it together. We’ll finish it, and no one else will do it.” Bibi explained later how “I have spoken about this with President Trump more than once, including the day before yesterday… Finishing the job means bringing down the terrorist regime in Iran. It is the head of this poisonous octopus. You cut it off, and it will fall. We will also have peace with Lebanon. We must complete the elimination of the Iranian regime — that is the primary objective.”
Trump then responded in kind, telling Netanyahu that “You’re a warrior, and you’ve been treated unfairly by your country and from some others … but you’re a great warrior, and we will prove that. We will prove that very soon. I think you’re terrific, Bibi … You’re the man I want by my side, Bibi.” On Truth Social Trump later elaborated how “Bibi Netanyahu has been a Great Warrior Prime Minister and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” He is “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant, the kind of Partner that the United States of America is demanding of Israel, a Country for which it has done so much.”
Clearly Netanyahu wants to get reelected to stay out of jail for corruption, apart from anything else, and he knows that unconditional support from the United States is essential to achieve that end and keep the wars in Lebanon, Syria and Iran going. What the two monsters were pledging was the total destruction of a nation of 90 million people that prior to the war initiated by Israel and the US had not threatened in any way either nation. That means it was per the Geneva Convention a war crime and besides which it is a violation of the War Powers Act and the US Constitution that Trump had sworn to support. Israel was admittedly the driving force behind the war against Iran, which has done huge damage to the world economy, because it saw the country as a political-military competitor in the Middle East region and Netanyahu was able to convince a stupid and willfully ignorant Trump that the war would be over in a week or two, a walk-over.
In a move that is being interpreted as an additional American support for Netanyahu in the upcoming election, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday and met with the Prime Minister. The talks reportedly took place at the Ovda Air Base in southern Israel, where US refueling planes and fighter jets are deployed. Hegseth also met with some US troops. As Netanyahu and President Trump have discussed the possibility of restarting the full-scale bombing campaign against Iran the appearance and timing of the Hegseth visit, as he is the strongest supporter of resuming strikes on Iran within the administration, suggests that the war will soon be resuming.
Beyond the depressing likelihood that the war against Iran will soon start up again, there is the language employed by Trump, which as usual is inane. So Bibi is a “great warrior”? That comes from a draft dodger who avoided US military service in 1968 not for any moral reason but because it was inconvenient for him so his father arranged for a Jewish doctor to fake the records for a medical deferment. Trump had “bone spurs,” a condition largely unheard of in the real world before Trump came up with it on paper. And now the draft dodger is praising a “great warrior” who sends his men and women out to shoot three year olds as part of a regime that has been killing children systematically and without any consequences since the conflict with Gaza began.
And, unfortunately, the bad news is still coming. There is no doubt Trump has been the most servile president in US history when it comes to his constant supporting Israel even when it carries out genocide and kills American citizens. Trump has never failed to obey Netanyahu, but, it must be observed, he has only done slightly more so than Biden and the Democrats did when they preceded him in office. So one should have doubts that a possible change-over in the US Congress and Senate, where Israeli flags can be seen flying in some of the offices, is going to make much difference when it comes to the United States “standing with our best friend and closest ally Israel.”
Deep in cattle country, voter sentiments in an evangelical stronghold help explain why the country’s leftist president is the underdog in Sunday’s election.
Former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel encouraged the Democratic Party to appeal to moderate "McCain-Romney Republicans" in an op-ed Wednesday.
"The top story from the 2026 cycle will be the electoral opening Democrats seized — and will have to maintain," Emanuel wrote for The Wall Street Journal. "Most important, the McCain-Romney Republicans, who are politically homeless, need to be welcomed into Democrats’ governing and electoral coalition."
Emanuel argued that moderate Republicans who associate their politics closer with former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and former Arizona Sen. John McCain have been dissuaded from the GOP by President Donald Trump and could be the deciding factor in the 2026 midterm elections.
Romney and McCain were the last Republican nominees for president before Trump in 2012 and 2008, respectively, losing each time to Barack Obama.
"Millions of McCain-Romney voters are redefining their political identities, and they will be most responsible for Democratic gains in November. These voters don’t want to be associated with MAGA, and they see themselves as free agents. The question for Democrats is whether we’re willing to give them a permanent home," Emanuel wrote.
The former Clinton advisor pushed back on the idea that the Democratic Party should embrace the more extreme Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members, warning that the results of the midterm elections would be less a show of support for socialism than a rejection of "MAGA" politics.
"The activists who reside in blue bubbles are sure to interpret the election results as vindication. But the party’s ascent won’t be born of some newfound enthusiasm for far-left policies such as defunding the police or offering free healthcare to illegal immigrants," Emanuel wrote.
He added that Democrats should hesitate to impeach Trump and instead be focused on passing meaningful legislation, which is what moderate Republicans support as well.
"Rather than vilifying those whose support we need, Democrats should be inviting them into our coalition. Voters willing to give Democrats a second look need convincing to trust us," Emanuel wrote.
In a comment to Fox News Digital, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Trump's record and encouraged all Republicans to double down on his agenda.
"President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress. The President signed the largest working-class tax cuts in history, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, sealed the border, drove violent crime to the lowest level in nearly a century, unleashed an energy revolution, added more than a million private-sector jobs and sent Americans’ 401(k)s climbing to record highs. The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction," Ingle said.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) also denied that Republicans could align themselves with the values of the Democratic Party.
"Democrats are the party of abolishing private healthcare, defunding the police and hammering working families with higher taxes — those are not Republican values, or American values for that matter. If Democrats had their way, our country would look more like Caracas or Moscow," RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Democratic National Committee for comment.
While speaking on the "Hang Out with Sean Hannity" podcast earlier this month, Emanuel downplayed the impact the DSA candidates have on the Democratic Party as a whole.
"I don't believe the socialists are a wing," he said. "I think they are a separate party. They believe in defunding the police, which is not the party position. They believe in open borders and open prisons. That's not the party’s position."
Voters across the country are making big decisions about the education of their children at a local, state and federal level in this year’s midterms. Ballot initiatives, school board elections, governor races and Senate spots are all on the line as parents head to the polls thinking about AI, school choice and what topics should…
Voters across the country are making big decisions about the education of their children at a local, state and federal level in this year’s midterms. Ballot initiatives, school board elections, governor races and Senate spots are all on the line as parents head to the polls thinking about AI, school choice and what topics should…
Without citing specifics, Carr decried what he called “a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm.”
“Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations,” Carr warned Wednesday.
It’s possible Carr was referring to news this week that an obscure group called Wedgewood Polls had propagated fraudulent polling data that, despite news outlets’ due diligence, made its way into polling aggregations at several outlets, including The New York Times and MS NOW. The problem of apparently malevolent actors fudging poll numbers before an election is not something to take lightly, but responsible news organizations have been transparent with their audiences, appending corrections, editor’s notes and updating their aggregations as needed. (The commission’s lone Democratic appointee, Anna Gomez, posted to X on Wednesday, “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”)
This would hardly be the first time Carr has used his office to threaten broadcasters from airing bad news about his boss.
But Carr’s track record as an anti-free-speech warrior for Trump makes it hard to see his comments as an earnest effort to prevent the distribution of incorrect information before an election. In nearly two years as FCC chair, Carr has demonstrated that he’s an unprincipled, hyperpartisan hack who cosplays as an advocate of free speech and limited government. Examples abound of him using his office to try to silence Trump critics and strong-arm risk-averse media corporations that prioritize nothing more than their bottom lines.
More likely, Carr is helping lay the groundwork for Trump to — once again — falsely claim fraud in the event of a GOP wipeout in the midterm elections, lest Trump’s historic unpopularity be blamed for Republicans losing control of one or both houses of Congress or any number of statehouses.
In March, as it became evident that Trump’s war on Iran was destined to become an unwinnable quagmire, Carr threatened broadcasters from airing “hoaxes and news distortions” in war coverage. Those words, in MAGA-speak, typically translate to “reports that accurately reflect the president’s incompetence.”
Carr also effectively censored Jimmy Kimmel after the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk by jawboning ABC’s corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, into suspending the late-night comic, even boasting, “When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” So egregious was this government gangsterism that no less a Trump lickspittle than Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, condemned it as “mafioso” behavior. When Carr wasn’t acting as the comedy police, he went after ABC’s daytime talk show “The View,” claiming the program violated the FCC’s antiquated “equal time” rules regarding political candidate interviews, despite the fact that talk shows had historically been considered exempt from that regulation.
The FCC’s censorship campaign has been such a success that ABC’s lawyers claimed in court recently that the network’s news division has been tempering its election coverage to avoid further harassment by the Trump administration.
Thankfully for Carr, his efforts earned him a good-boy pat on the head from Trump at an Alaska campaign rally this month, when the president praised his FCC attack poodle as “the most-feared man in government.” If you were wondering, yes, it is bizarre that the head of the historically bipartisan FCC would be attending a partisan political rally. But then, Carr — who’s known for wearing a lapel pin in the shape of Trump’s head — broke decades of precedent when he told a Senate committee in December 2025 that the FCC is not an independent agency. References to “independent” have also been removed from the FCC’s website.
Twelve former FCC officials — who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations — issued a joint statement Wednesday condemning Carr’s “dangerous and unconstitutional” attempt to “censor and control the information available to Americans as they prepare to vote.” They added, “Make no mistake: this is a direct attack on free and fair elections, which is especially concerning in the days and weeks when Americans are heading to the polls.”
In an X post Wednesday, The Bulwark’s Will Saletan aptly summed up Carr’s pathology: “Stephen Miller might look the part, but Brendan Carr is actually Trump’s most dedicated authoritarian apparatchik. In a fascist regime, he would do anything the boss ordered.”
Trump’s recent claim that Carr is the “most feared” person in government is in keeping with the president’s flattery of thugs, and Carr no doubt appreciated the ego-stroking. That’s probably overstating the case a bit — the Trump administration does have high-ranking officials who brag about committing likely war crimes, after all — but Carr is most certainly a giddy soldier in Trump’s war on the Constitution.
STERLING HEIGHTS, Michigan — President Donald Trump promised that his tariff policies would make the country richer and would bring in enough revenue to eliminate the need for income tax and to pay down the country’s debt. Instead, Trump voters in Michigan told MS NOW they feel poorer, as income tax is still on the books and the national debt has soared to $40 trillion.
Increased prices due to tariffs continue to pinch consumers across the country, and few are paying a higher price than Michiganders.
In September, a study for the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, a nonpartisan “small government” research group, estimated that the impact of tariffs on Michigan households since January 2025 has been somewhere between $23 billion and $26 billion, which breaks down to an estimated burden of about $6,000 per household.
“I hate them. They suck,” Dennis Walls, a three-time Trump voter who works in landscaping and is looking for a second job, said of tariffs.
Walls, who is from Imlay City, said the tariffs have made groceries more expensive and cost his landscaping business more for equipment.
“Our backpacks, leaf-blowing backpacks, stick edges, weed whackers, machines, even keep going up higher and higher,” he said.
Michigan’s exposure to Trump’s trade war is amplified by its proximity to Canada and the deep ties between their economies. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative estimated that Michigan exported $23.2 billion in goods to Canada in 2025. The Canadian government estimated it exported about $43.5 billion in goods to Michigan that same year.
This year, Trump imposed significant tariffs on Canada, drawing retaliation from Canada — which ended in a stalemate this September, when tariffs on billions of dollars of goods went into effect.
Kenneth Matthews, 57, is another three-time Trump voter who’s juggling work at a factory and his own lawn care business.
“I’m pissed off about them,” he said. “It’s even harder when you’re running your own business.”
Matthews said he regrets his support for Trump.
“He’s not making America great again. He’s putting us farther in the hole,” he said.
His message to the president is simple: “Knock the tariffs off. Get rid of them. We shouldn’t have them.”
Michigan’s historic automotive industry is on the front line of the trade wars Trump has picked with Canada and Mexico. But it’s the small businesses that keep the industry humming that are being hit hardest.
Andi Asliwa, 28, is an owner and mechanic at New Testament Auto Service in Sterling Heights. The entrepreneur told MS NOW that the tariffs are making his business untenable as he has to pass on higher prices for parts to his customers.
I think the richer people got richer, but the average person — no, it’s tearing us apart.”
—Andi Asliwa
“I used to get brake pads for $35, $25. Now they’re $70 and up,” said Asliwa, who voted for Trump in 2024. He said his brake pads are imported from China, and he’s sticking with them as they remain less expensive than domestically produced brake pads, which he said are worse quality.
Asked how the tariffs have affected the country, Asliwa said, “I think the richer people got richer, but the average person — no, it’s tearing us apart.”
Oil filters seen in Asliwa’s auto shopMS NOW
Last month, Trump announced an import ban on select Canadian alcoholic beverages, and Canada retaliated, putting bars on both sides of the border on the rocks. But it’s not just the booze that’s drying up; it’s also the boycott by Canadian tourists, spurred by the escalating trade war, that’s making a dent on Michiganders’ bottom lines.
Bob Roberts owns McShane’s Irish Pub & Whiskey Bar in Detroit, which employs 32 people. Roberts, who voted for Trump in 2016, said Canadian tourists from just across the border in Windsor, Ontario, have stopped their patronage.
You would see Canadian plates everywhere. Now you walk around, you don’t see any Canadian plates at all.”
—Bob Roberts
“We used to enjoy a pretty big crowd from Canada, because they have no sports teams there,” Roberts said. “You would see Canadian plates everywhere. Now you walk around, you don’t see any Canadian plates at all.”
Roberts put the damage to his revenue from the Canadian tourism boycott at about 15%, or about $30,000. He said the hospitality industry in Detroit right now is “fragile.”
“If you continue down the road that we’re on, there’s not going to be any way that I can survive as a restaurateur, and because of that, you know, I’ll go out of business,” Roberts said.
Patrons drinking at Roberts’ barMS NOW
Roberts said he is still undecided on whether he will vote for Democrat Abdul El-Sayed or Republican Rep. Mike Rogers for Michigan’s Senate seat.
“If these tariffs don’t get cleared up, if the Republicans win either the House or the Senate — I mean, there needs to be a dramatic change in Washington,” he said.
“Otherwise, I mean, quite frankly, we’re screwed,” he added.
El-Sayed has opposed Trump’s tariff policy from the beginning of his campaign, in contrast to Rogers, who only came out against the president’s trade war with Canada with less than a month before Election Day.
“As a politician, he came out in support of Canada and against the trade wars; in my opinion, [he] came out a little late,” Roberts said of Rogers.
“It doesn’t pass the sniff test: It smells like politics, as opposed to being genuine,” he added.
Earlier this week, during a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, President Donald Trump admitted that Democrat Roy Cooper is “going to become your senator and it’s crazy.”
It was especially embarrassing for Cooper’s Republican opponent. As chair of the North Carolina GOP, Michael Whatley ingratiated himself with Trump to such an extent that Trump made him chair of the Republican National Committee. But Cooper, a popular former governor and attorney general, has consistently led Whatley in the polls. His current average lead is more than 10 points.
Just down the Atlantic coast, Georgia Republicans are also reeling in their Senate contest. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., is running away with the race against Rep. Mike Collins, an ultra-MAGA conservative who has come under fire for his ties to his white nationalist influencer son-in-law.
The two Senate contests, though, are just portents of much bigger problems facing North Carolina and Georgia Republicans — two state parties hollowed out in the age of Trump.
Just over a decade ago, North Carolina Republicans were riding high. After the state voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans, led in part by state House Speaker Thom Tillis, took control of both legislative chambers in 2010 for the first time since 1898. In 2012, voters elected Republican Gov. Pat McCrory with a veto-proof legislature. In 2014, Tillis defeated Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan.
Though McCrory narrowly lost the governorship in 2016 to Cooper, Trump won the state by nearly 4%. The state GOP largely maintained its grip in the years following until 2024, when Trump backed then-Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson as the party’s nominee for governor.
Democrat Josh Stein would win the race by almost 15 points against Robinson, who had a history of inflammatory remarks even as Trump won the state. Late in the race, CNN reported that Robinson “made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a ‘black NAZI!’ and expressed support for reinstating slavery.” Robinson denied writing the messages, but thanks to Stein’s margin of victory, Republicans lost the lieutenant governorship while Democrats held the attorney general’s race, their legislative supermajority and a seat on the state supreme court.
And Trump’s clash with Tillis forced the latter into retirement after they split over the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Tillis likely would have struggled in a midterm year. But Trump booting him and filling the state party with loyalists made matters worse.
The state GOP’s reversal of fortune is almost as bad in Georgia. The Republican takeover of Georgia began in 2002 when Roy Barnes lost to Sonny Perdue to become the first Republican governor of Georgia since Reconstruction. The state senate also flipped thanks to multiple party switches. In 2004, Republicans would win the state house.
Georgia has elected Republican governors, most recently Brian Kemp, ever since. Trump endorsed Kemp in 2018. But Trump turned against Kemp, who now enjoys a 70% approval rating, after he refused to help overturn the 2020 election results, when Joe Biden won the state. While Kemp easily won re-election in 2022 without Trump’s help, the latter’s endorsement of former football player Herschel Walker led to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock winning re-election.
And this year, the president boosted Collins over a Kemp-backed rival. Republicans in Georgia would likely be in trouble anyway this year, largely due to migration from other states, particularly from African Americans and suburban college-educated whites. But Trump has accelerated this trend propping up apparatchiks. Even those loyal soldiers have their limits. Look no further than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represented a deep-red district, only to quit after a public falling out with the president.
In fact, the one Republican statewide candidate doing well in Georgia right now is Rick Jackson, the self-funded businessman who beat Trump’s preferred candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Jackson now leads most polls against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. But if Bottoms somehow wins, she likely will also flip at least one chamber of the Legislature.
If Georgia and North Carolina’s state Republican parties want to see where Trump-driven hollowing out leads, they can look to Arizona. The home of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee for president, Arizona was long a bastion of conservatism. But it has been 10 years since a Republican last won a Senate seat, when Trump’s nemesis John McCain was re-elected to his final term.
Since then, Democrats have won every Senate race. In 2022, the same year Mark Kelly won a full term for McCain’s old seat, fellow Democrat Katie Hobbs narrowly won by beating election denier Kari Lake in the gubernatorial race. Lake had famously said McCain Republicans should “get the hell out,” but she would be joined in defeat by Trump-endorsed ideologues for secretary of state and attorney general.
While Trump, over the past decade, has displayed a remarkable ability to survive and win elections, his acolytes in these former GOP strongholds are losing down the ballot. These two phenomena are connected: Trump has turned the Republican Party that cares about electing like-minded individuals into a party meant to support him, and him alone. In doing so, it has lost its ability to save itself.
FORT MYERS, Fla. — Mercedes Price Harry drives a 4Runner, and with gas back above $4 a gallon in Florida, she says it hurts every time she fills up. But the chair of the Lee County Republican Party is not giving up on President Donald Trump.
“You don’t save the country giving up the ship because gas prices are high,” she said.
Not everyone here feels the same way. Trump won nearly 64% of the vote in Lee County in 2024, but Price Harry said there are “a lot of people that feel a lot of apathy and frustration right now” over the economy and the war with Iran. When the president arrives for a rally Friday, she is hoping he can reassure them.
“We’re hoping that he’s just going to remind us that he is doing all that he can to move us in that right direction,” she said. “Hopefully, he’ll make everybody feel good about the bumps that we’ve had in the last year, and that we can continue to put all of our faith in him because I think that most of us do, but not everybody is staying on the Trump train.”
Trump’s visit comes with early voting underway and Election Day less than two weeks away. Republicans are fighting to hold slim majorities in both chambers of Congress, and the president’s approval rating has fallen to a record low of 31%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday. The question here is whether loyalty to Trump will carry over to the Republicans he is backing, and whether he can motivate enough of his voters to turn out.
Two of those Republicans are expected to join him at Friday afternoon’s rally: Byron Donalds, the party’s gubernatorial candidate, and Jim Schwartzel, its candidate in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. Donalds leads Democrat David Jolly by just 4 percentage points in the closely watched governor’s race, according to an MS NOW/Fifty Plus One polling average.
Florida Republicans, for their part, have spent the year trying to make the state’s congressional delegation even more conservative. Led by outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis, GOP leaders passed a new map this spring that could leave Democrats with just four of Florida’s 28 House seats, down from eight under the old lines.
But Republicans could fall short in at least three of the seats they redrew in their favor, including a coastal district where Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz is running. About $50 million has been spent on that race since the start of July, according to AdImpact, making it one of the year’s most expensive House contests.
Trump has repeatedly said gas prices will “drop like a rock” once the war with Iran is over. As the conflict enters its ninth month, the average price of gas in Florida has climbed back above $4 a gallon, according to AAA.
“I think what voters are hoping to hear from Trump is some sort of a promise for solutions for issues of affordability,” said Bethany Conrad, an assistant professor of political science at Florida Gulf Coast University.
Eight in 10 Americans rate the economy as fair or poor, according to the latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey, which also found Trump’s approval at an all-time low. Voters MS NOW interviewed at several of the president’s recent campaign stops echoed that sentiment, saying the economy is top of mind.
“I think what we’re looking for is that he’s just going to instill in us the confidence that we had in him when we voted for him in ’24,” Price Harry said.
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — In Florida’s race for governor, the Democrat is a former Republican congressman, and the Republican would be the state’s first Black governor. That has left Democrats in an unfamiliar position: fighting to hold on to Black voters, one of their most reliable constituencies.
The Democrat, David Jolly, made that fight the clear focus of an interfaith event this week at the Koinonia Worship Center in Pembroke Park. Former President Bill Clinton and a lineup of Florida Democratic leaders joined him.
Speaking to a mostly Black crowd, Jolly invoked the state’s 2023 African American history standards, which said some enslaved people developed skills that benefited them. He also cited remarks his opponent, Rep. Byron Donalds, made in 2024 suggesting Black families were more intact during the Jim Crow era.
“When we are a state that actually suggested years ago that we might want to teach our kids the ‘good parts’ of slavery, or when my opponent suggests there were ‘good parts’ of Jim Crow — Folks, if the test at this moment is about our goodness, we are failing,” Jolly said with a tone that prompted Clinton to later refer to him as the “Reverend Jolly.”
During his own remarks, Clinton said, “The real story is who is unemployed and who is underemployed, and who can’t pay their bills. The black unemployment rate in the state is 8.6 percent.”
Fedrick Ingram, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, was blunter. He said his remarks were aimed at Florida’s “African diaspora.”
“All your skin folk ain’t your kin folk,” he said.
Black Floridians make up only about 13% of the state’s active voters. But while Republicans have dominated Florida in recent cycles, recent polls show this race closer than many expected, likely to be decided on the margins. That gives Black voters an outsize role.
For Donalds, gains among Black voters could offset Republican slippage elsewhere. Some Latino voters have been alienated by President Donald Trump’s deportation push. Donalds has also shown weakness with rural voters: Most of the counties he lost in the August primary were in Florida’s largely rural, White panhandle.
For Jolly, the challenge is holding the party’s base. He has pointed to a recent poll showing him with 76% of Black voters, short of what the party’s last two nominees for governor won. In 2018, Andrew Gillum carried 90% of Black voters and came within less than a percentage point of defeating Ron DeSantis.
“There’s about 10% of Black voters who are currently undecided, and they might well decide the next governor of the state of Florida,” Jolly told reporters after the event with Clinton.
Both campaigns are now competing for those voters.
Donalds has long been the face of Republican efforts to bring Black voters into the party. As a Trump surrogate in 2024, he headlined several events aimed at Black men in heavily Democratic cities, including Detroit and Atlanta. His bet was that a message about economic opportunity and lower costs could overcome voters’ skepticism and mistrust of the GOP.
“It’s something I feel that Republicans should have been doing for a long time, because I think Black voters are more conservative than modern Democrats are anyway,” Donalds told MS NOW. “I think it’s important as Republicans to not just say, ‘Well, this group of people typically don’t vote our way. Let’s just focus on the votes we can get.’ I think you always have to find ways to expand your tent, expand the electorate.”
Rep. Byron Donalds, far right, shakes hands with radio host Shelley Wynter, far left, at an event entitled “Black American Business Leaders Round Table,” at Rocky’s Barber Shop on June 26, 2024, in Atlanta.Gerald Herbert / AP Photo
As a candidate for governor, Donalds has appeared alongside Black business and faith leaders and held town halls before largely Black audiences. Last month, at a town hall at Florida A&M University, a historically Black university, he was hammered over his support for changes to how race is taught in Florida’s public schools; the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and Trump’s immigration crackdown.
He has also been buoyed by endorsements from several Black Democratic officials. Among them was a surprise endorsement from Gainesville City Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut. She faulted Jolly for not choosing a Black or Hispanic running mate and cited Donalds’ chance to make history.
“Representation is not window dressing. It is respect. It is recognition. It is power. And when that power is overlooked, we have every right to call it out,” Chesnut said in a statement on her decision. “I want to see a Black governor of Florida in my lifetime, and I will not apologize for saying so.”
Jerome Gayman, 65, of Fort Pierce, voiced a similar sentiment after attending a Donalds campaign event there.
“For a gentleman like me who has a son, who was able to see the rise of Barack Obama to being president, as the first [Black] president, to see Byron coming up as potentially the first black governor of Florida, it’s historic,” he said.
Gayman, who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, said he is not alone.
“You talk about the ‘silent minority,’ that’s who we are,” Gayman said. “There’s a lot of [Black voters] that will vote for Donald without coming public.”
Earlier this week, Jolly campaigned in Eatonville, which bills itself as the state’s first all-Black, self-governing municipality. While he was there, the town’s vice mayor, Angela Thomas, endorsed Donalds. Donalds cast the endorsement as especially meaningful.
“She decided to join a growing list of Democrats in this state who have looked at my campaign, the things that we’re working on, things that we stand for, and they’re deciding to cross party lines and support me,” Donalds said.
Still, winning over a significant share of Florida’s Black voters will be an uphill battle for Donalds. Despite the occasional defection, the turnout for Jolly’s event with Clinton showed how thoroughly Jolly has consolidated support among the state’s Black Democratic establishment. His challenge is making sure rank-and-file voters follow.
Jolly has accused Donalds of pursuing an “anti-Black agenda” and of refusing to confront persistent inequities in the state.
“The difference between Byron and I is I recognize that the economic disparity between Black and White America still exists today,” Jolly said. “The disparity in education outcomes in healthcare access still exists today. The attack on education disparately impacts Black and Brown communities … We’ve tried to build a coalition and a platform to actually address that.”
Democrats’ most potent argument, though, may be a simpler one: tying Donalds to Trump. Data suggest Black Americans have borne a disproportionate share of the economic strain since the president returned to office. Nationally, Black unemployment hit 7% in September, roughly double the rate for White workers, and Black median wealth fell by about a quarter from 2022 to 2025.
Democrats have also accused Donalds of trying to obscure that connection. After his campaign made Trump less visible on its website this month, Jolly said his Republican opponent was distancing himself from the president as part of a wider effort to court Black voters.
“His scrubbing of Donald Trump from his history is singularly about the undecided Black voter,” Jolly said at a Tallahassee campaign event.
Jolly has also said that having Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate nominee, on the ticket “helps a lot” in turning out Black Floridians. Nixon, he said, is “energizing a base that is excited.”
Donalds is also working against history that suggests Republican voters have been unwilling to elect a Black state executive, as MS NOW political analyst Anthony Coley outlined.
“Ken Blackwell in Ohio and Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania in 2006; Daniel Cameron in Kentucky in 2023; Mark Robinson in North Carolina in 2024; and Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia in 2025. Each of those Black candidates was held up by the GOP as proof that the party is new and more diverse. Each of them lost,” Coley wrote.
But this is Florida, where no Democrat has been elected governor in more than three decades. Republicans outnumber Democrats in voter registration, and more Republicans turned out for the August primary. Donalds faces a steep climb with Black voters, but Jolly faces a steeper one against the state’s Republican tilt.
Both candidates are getting reinforcements as the race enters its final weeks. On Tuesday, Donalds released two ads featuring his mother aimed at Florida’s immigrant communities, and Trump is set to rally voters in the state Friday. Despite suggestions that he has been distancing himself from the president, Donalds told MS NOW he welcomes the visit.
“The president coming in, of course, that’s just going to be a boost of getting people excited about getting to the polls, and we love that,” Donalds said.
Jolly, meanwhile, has campaigned in recent weeks with prominent Black leaders. They include the Rev. Al Sharpton, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and former Rep. Al Lawson, whose majority-Black district was dismantled in Florida’s 2022 redistricting. On Tuesday, the Democratic Governors Association announced a $1 million investment in Jolly’s campaign. His campaign said Clinton has helped raise more than $3 million for him.
Jolly’s words and Donalds’ campaign stops point to the same bet: The race will be won at the margins.
“What I know we’re seeing in our camp, and I believe Byron’s camp is as well. I think there are two final fronts in this race. The first is the disaffected Republican,” Jolly said at the Tallahassee event. “But I would say the most important front that this entire race could come down to is that 10 percent of undecided black voters in Florida.”
Rep. Byron Donalds, far right, shakes hands with radio host Shelley Wynter, far left, at an event entitled "Black American Business Leaders Round Table," at Rocky's Barber Shop on June 26, 2024, in Atlanta.
SIOUX CITY, Iowa — President Donald Trump's loyal base of supporters still have his and Republicans’ back in Iowa, but some are growing concerned over lingering issues, like the economy and gridlock in Congress, as Election Day nears.
Trump and Republicans ran on a platform of lowering inflation, halting "forever wars" and repairing an economy that they say was wrecked by former President Joe Biden and his administration. But prices are still high, and the war in Iran is still ongoing, causing a spike in fuel prices that have stuck around heading into Nov. 3.
Outside of Trump’s rally in Sioux City, Iowa, where the president was set to rile up support for Rep. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, in a tightening Senate race against Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek, his supporters who spoke with Fox News Digital still backed Republicans but expressed hope that change would soon come.
Beth Fitzl, an Iowa voter, said of Trump that she didn’t "agree with everything he does, but in the end, he's here for us."
"This is the way I see it," Fitzl told Fox News Digital. "He's like the Packers, OK? They may be getting in deep, but they always pull it off in the end, and I truly think he's going to do something to turn it around. I really think he's going to pull something to turn it around."
Chuck Jones, a veteran and Purple Heart recipient who made the trek from Minnesota for the Iowa rally, was frustrated about the divisive, tribal nature of politics.
He told Fox News Digital that "these politicians, they're fighting for one thing on one side, and other people are fighting for something on the other side, but there's nobody sitting at the table in the middle."
When asked if Republicans and Trump needed to do something different should they hold onto control of Washington, D.C., after the election, Jones said, "Well, I think it's time that we're going to have to show some difference, because people aren't happy with the way things have been in the last few years."
"And we're going to have to do something about it and decisively show the American public that you can get it done and get it done correctly," he said. "They're going to have to work together instead of fighting each other."
Hinson’s race is one of six toss-ups that Republicans in the Senate are trying to hold onto. She and Turek are vying for Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s seat after she opted to retire from the upper chamber last year.
Their race, like others during this cycle, has become surprisingly close, given that Trump won the state in 2024 by roughly 13 points and has won it each time he’s been on the ballot.
Dawn Stanley, an Iowa voter who has voted for Trump in each of the last three elections, still planned to support him and Hinson. She told Fox News Digital that Turek hadn’t "showed up" for Iowa and noted that he’d been absent from the state legislature "42% of the time" — Turek missed 261 votes between January and May of this year while on the campaign trail.
Still, her biggest frustration with Republicans was their inability to pass the SAVE America Act, voter ID and election security legislation that has been consistently blocked by Senate Democrats.
"I really do think it comes down to the SAVE Act," Stanley said. "I really do, because we can't have all these Democrats in there and bringing over all these illegals who are going to vote for those people and have chaos. That's what it is."
"The United States is in chaos and I really believe it's because of the illegals and the Islamic terrorists that are coming over," she continued. "And just look at what's going on in France. I mean, it's terrible. And I don't want that for our country, and that's what Trump can stop. And that's why we need to bring in all the conservatives that we can."
Others were concerned about Democrats regaining power and feared that Republicans may not show up on Nov. 3 to support GOP candidates.
"We need to get the people out to vote," Kurt, who traveled from South Dakota for the rally, told Fox News Digital. "Republican people need to get out the vote. They stay home too much. This is a war to be won with the Left, as far as I'm concerned."
America still gives every citizen one vote, but its billionaires are spending fortunes to determine which political choices voters get to make. The Billionaire Election Machine With the November 3 midterm elections approaching, the extraordinary concentration of private wealth in American politics has become impossible to ignore. Elon Musk has emerged as the largest known […]
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed New Hampshire officials to reject student IDs as a valid form of identification when voters cast their ballots in next month's midterm elections.
A lower court judge previously found that state officials had improperly gone further than a new law restricting the use of student IDs to obtain a ballot, ruling that officials still had to consider student IDs alongside other evidence when voters lacked other means of verifying their identity.
But the Supreme Court took issue with the judge intervening this close to the elections.
The high court has said orders handed down too close to an election can cause voter confusion, an idea known as the Purcell Principle. The court cited the recent legal back-and-forth over Missouri’s redistricting maps.
"Here, the District Court did not point to anything that would justify deviating from that principle," the majority wrote in its opinion.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the rule did not apply since the lower court judge was helping ensure the public received accurate information.
"When a federal court determines that material misrepresentations are being made about a State’s election rules, an injunction to prohibit that conduct does not contribute to public confusion, it prevents that very problem," Jackson wrote. "I would not disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order issued to ensure that the public receives accurate information about a State’s electoral processes," she wrote.
This comes after Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 323 into law in April, removing student IDs from the list of identification expressly considered valid for obtaining a ballot. The law took effect June 2. After the law went into effect, New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan issued guidance to election officials about the change, and multiple trainings were held.
"New Hampshire has a responsibility to protect the integrity of its elections and ensure that election laws are applied as written," New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, said in a statement.
"The Supreme Court’s decision is an important victory for our efforts to defend those laws and prevent last-minute court orders from creating uncertainty for voters and election officials. We will continue to defend New Hampshire’s election laws and the safeguards they provide," he continued.
The Supreme Court's decision was not a final ruling on the merits of the case, and the underlying litigation over the law remains ongoing.
Login
