THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Photographs by Brian Finke for The AtlanticAlong the highways and farm roads of the southern tip of Texas, the bright-red campaign signs for Eric Flores are impossible to miss. Flores, the Republican candidate for the state’s Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, has Ken-doll looks, with gel-stiff hair and the kind of physique that Donald Trump admires. His bio appears across the top of the sign: Infantry Officer. Prosecutor. Father.A second set of nearly identical red signs are scattered across the district, only these show Flores with President Trump giving a thumbs-up, sandwiched between the declarations Trump Endorsed and Support ICE! When I first saw these signs, I did a double take. Why would any candidate want to be associated with ICE in the Rio Grande Valley, where the population is more than 90 percent Hispanic? The answer appeared in tiny letters at the bottom: Paid for by Northern Cameron County Democrats.The attack ad captures how much has changed since Trump won in the Rio Grande Valley two years ago. Hispanic voters—especially men—were a key part of the national coalition that put Trump back in the White House. Trump and Joe Biden roughly split the votes of Latinos in 2024, after several cycles of Democratic presidential candidates winning the group by double digits. Exit polls in Texas estimated that Trump won Hispanic voters there by 10 percentage points. But that support appears to have evaporated. Nationally, nearly one-fifth of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 now say they do not want Republicans to control Congress, a poll earlier this month found. And a late-summer survey of Hispanic Texans who are likely to vote in the upcoming election showed Democrats with a 2-to-1 advantage.The Rio Grande Valley had been a Democratic stronghold for decades, and the region is crucial to the party’s midterm-elections strategy. The Texas U.S. Senate race has become the nation’s most expensive contest of 2026, as James Talarico tries to become the first Democrat to win statewide office there in more than 30 years. Recent polls show him in a dead heat with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. For Talarico to win, Democrats need the Rio Grande Valley to swing back, which would make Trump’s 2024 multiracial MAGA coalition look more like a one-off.For Republicans, a Talarico win would be a political and psychological blow, signaling a new purple era for the state made possible by a population that’s trending… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For most of the past two decades, Ohio Democrats have hobbled home in defeat on Election Day, beaten and battered in a state that used to be a national bellwether. In 2024, Donald Trump ran up an 11-point margin, while Sherrod Brown lost his seat in the Senate. But earlier this month, I found Brown campaigning at Ohio State University, his red L.L.Bean fleece blending in with the students’ scarlet-and-gray apparel. It was the last day for Ohioans to register to vote.“O-H!” Brown said. The students’ response came automatically: “I-O!” they screamed. Maybe they could try “O-H … I-vote,” Brown suggested with a smile. It didn’t quite catch on. After blowing a 20-point lead against Texas early in the college-football season, the Buckeyes have turned things around—and Democrats are clearly looking to borrow more than a chant from their playbook.Beating a Republican Party that has dominated the state for the past two decades, they believe, requires speaking directly to voters’ frustrations. Brown, in particular, has focused his campaign on reminding everyone how terrible things are, and is betting that tapping into Ohioans’ anger—spurred by a combination of high prices, an unpopular war, and a flailing president—might just be enough to return to the Senate. Less than two weeks from Election Day, there are signs that the strategy may be working. Most polls show Brown and Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor—a first-time politician and physician who served as director of the Ohio Department of Health during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic—leading or tied with their GOP rivals.  At Ohio State, Brown’s cheery greeting was prelude to a bleak speech about the future that awaits young Ohioans. The 73-year-old warned that life would be much harder for these students than it was for him when he graduated (Yale, but he went on to earn two master’s degrees from Ohio State) five decades ago. “The system’s rigged,” he began, then listed all of the ways that young people are screwed: Corporations make more money than ever. Their CEOs earn hundreds of times more than the average worker. The dream of homeownership might be entirely out of reach for young Americans. Normal people, Brown kept repeating, just cannot get ahead anymore.Brown was telling a group of ambitious students at the state’s top-ranked public university that they don’t have a future—or at least not the future they want. And they were… [TheTopNews] Read More.

John Quillin thought America’s Middle Eastern wars were safely in the past. He spent two decades in the Navy, enlisting not long before the September 11 attacks and retiring as a chief petty officer about 18 months after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. “Now we’re right back in it,” he told me, “and it’s taking a huge toll on everybody.”I met Quillin as he handed out Democratic sample ballots outside an early-voting location in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is one of more than 80,000 veterans—along with more than 30,000 active-duty and reserve personnel—who live in Virginia’s Second Congressional District, where the debate over the Iran war is about far more than rising gas prices. The district wraps around Naval Station Norfolk, home of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command. Since 2008, the seat has toggled between the major parties four times, and the results have mirrored overall House control. Polls show a tight race with money pouring in from both sides.Both Jen Kiggans, the Republican incumbent, and Elaine Luria, the Democratic challenger, are veterans who have centered their campaigns on the military, but in very different ways. Luria, a former Navy commander, is telling voters that the conflict in Iran has needlessly weakened the military and is endangering strategic goals in other parts of the world. Iran is a war of choice, she argues, that is taking a toll on service members through extended deployments, even as costs balloon and the timeline for bringing it to a close keeps shifting. People are worried about their friends and family members on active duty, she told me, and are “concerned about the fact that we are running the fleet into the ground.”Kiggans, a former naval-helicopter pilot, presents herself as a candidate who can work with the opposing party, and she has broken with the administration to champion an offshore wind development. But she is putting no distance between herself and Trump on the war, echoing his insistence that America must prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Kiggans told the Associated Press last week that Luria has “chosen the side of Iran” and that “it’s like the Democrats are now siding with the Iranians and not standing with our military.”Many Republican voters in the district told me they agree with her support for Trump’s war, and are willing to endure temporary hardships if it means long-term success. Lance Lesher, a Navy veteran and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Lynsey AddarioI.We drifted past abandoned drilling platforms, ghostly remnants of better days. Cormorants perched on the metal bars of broken oil rigs, drying their wings in the sun. When we reached a swirling, brown-green oil slick, Carlos slowed his motor. Raw oil could damage the engine, he said, and we’d already had to return to shore once that day to swap boats. We floated for a bit. Carlos, who makes his living as a fisherman on Lake Maracaibo, pointed out some surface bubbles, evidence of a leaky pipeline beneath the water. There was a strong smell of gas. He lit a cigarette anyway and laughed.That morning, Carlos and his team had caught about 30 pounds of fish in the lake, a brackish estuary where oil was discovered more than a century ago. The subsequent boom built the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo, three generations of wealth, and four decades of democracy. A century later, tens of billions of barrels’ worth of reserves remain beneath the water. Some of them might now be controlled by the American government.They will not be easy to extract. After the boom came the bust, at first slowly and then very fast. Hugo Chávez, who ruled the country as a leftist authoritarian from 1999 to 2013, and then Nicolás Maduro, the autocrat who succeeded Chávez and ran the country until he was removed by an American military operation early this year, undermined the industry, chasing away engineers and impoverishing workers. Even as they said they were building “Bolivarian socialism,” they removed benefits, lowered salaries, and created a capricious, repressive regime. Millions of people left the country.Most American and European companies left too. The Russian and Chinese companies that arrived to replace them invested very little. Lake Maracaibo, the largest body of water in South America, also became one of the largest environmental disasters in South America. Two decades of neglect produced leaks, spills, poisoned water, and the ghostly drilling platforms I saw from the fishing boat. Fishermen sometimes rinse their crabs and shrimp with gasoline to remove the crude oil. All of their nets turn brown.Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Sign up for Inside the Trump Presidency, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump term.Donald Trump Jr. had a simple vision for his father’s foreign policy during the 2024 presidential campaign: If elected, Donald Trump was going to keep America out of another war in the Middle East.“Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” he wrote on X that April, as Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones toward Israel. “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.”Two and a half years later, the president has enmeshed the United States in a full-blown war with Iran—and Trump Jr. isn’t happy about it.Trump Jr. has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the ongoing Iran war in private conversations, two people who have spoken directly with him about the conflict told us. The president’s son, these people said, opposed the war from its outset and made his opposition known to his father. He has long been skeptical of foreign intervention, these people told us, and believed the U.S. should not enter another Middle East war. Trump Jr. was also especially close to Charlie Kirk, the late conservative activist, who had broken with the Trump administration to oppose the war in Iran.“Don has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this, but I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views on the subject,” a person close to the president’s son told us. A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment. The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump Jr.’s position on the war, and an official said in a statement, “Iran has been decimated, and one way or the other, the conflict in Iran will be over very soon.”The White House’s decision to ally with Israel against Tehran has exposed a deepening rift within MAGA—not just over Iran, but also over what “America First” actually means. The divide pits nationalists who see foreign wars as a betrayal of domestic priorities against hawks who argue that American power must be wielded more aggressively against its adversaries. For years, the two camps coexisted under Trump’s promise of strength without the cost of another major war. Iran has made that balancing act harder to sustain. “Don… [TheTopNews] Read More.