THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

David Crowley had every reason to exalt as he bounded into a campaign rally at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater on Thursday. The night before, the Milwaukee County executive’s hometown Brewers won the World Series for the first time in their 56-year existence. A new poll released the same day found Crowley to be in a strong position to make his own history next week, by becoming the first Black governor of Wisconsin. But it was an even bigger potential victory that prompted Crowley, wearing a Brewers pullover and sneakers the color of Wisconsin cheddar, to declare to the crowd: “This is where I get a little giddy!”Democrats in Wisconsin have begun to imagine that they can not only retain the governorship but also capture control of both chambers of the state legislature for the first time since 2008. “Think about what we’re going to be able to do with that,” Crowley told the crowd of students who cheered the possibility. Such a sweep would cap a remarkable comeback for Democrats in Wisconsin, a swing state at the presidential level where, until recently, Republicans have maintained a tight grip on the legislature. Unified government would allow Democrats to undo a raft of conservative policies first enacted by former Governor Scott Walker and reverse years of budget cuts imposed by GOP lawmakers.The Democrats’ drive for a trifecta in Wisconsin is part of a broader effort to take maximum advantage of what seems to be one of their most favorable national electoral environments in decades. They have a chance to win full control in states including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota while cutting into Republican majorities in many others. “We’re looking at what could be a generational shift in state legislative power,” Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.Sweeps at the state level could yield more immediate policy changes than even Democratic victories in the battle for control of Congress, because a split federal government would likely result in legislative gridlock during President Trump’s final two years in office. Full Democratic control in more states could also upend the nationwide redistricting wars, giving the party fresh opportunities to counter Trump’s red-state gerrymandering push.[Read: Redistricting isn’t going as Republicans planned]For years, Republicans devoted far more attention and money to state legislative races than Democrats did. In 2010, that focus paid off when a GOP wave during President… [TheTopNews] Read More.

One day over the summer, Morris Katz slouched into our booth at a diner in Brooklyn Heights, removed his backwards baseball cap, and stuffed a Zyn pouch into his mouth. He took out his iPhone (no case, gaping crack down the back) and put it face down on the table. Then, while claiming, “I never do this,” he plunked a Hershey’s kiss into his espresso. The 27-year-old political strategist and Zohran Mamdani confidant was ready to speak.Katz believes that the Democratic Party is beholden to billionaire oligarchs and is out of touch with the economic issues that working people care about. The world has worsened for most Americans, and he thinks Democrats are afraid to name the culprits. “You can’t tell someone they’re getting fucked and not tell them who’s fucking them,” Katz said. He loathes politicians who seek incremental change. The party, he says, needs to run outsiders who promise to blow up a corrupt system.Katz is articulate (profane, but articulate), confident, and podcast-ready. When it comes to his day job, making campaign ads, even Katz’s critics concede that he is a generational talent. He made his name on Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign. David Axelrod became a mentor. Other campaigns across the country couldn’t wait to hire him.He was on a vertical trajectory through much of 2026. One of his biggest victories came in June, when his client Graham Platner defeated Maine Governor Janet Mills in the state’s Senate primary. Then everything imploded. Platner dropped out of the race following a cornucopia of scandals, involving everything from Nazi tattoos to rape allegations. Katz was ridiculed, and Democrats seemed to recognize the risk they’d taken in entrusting a crucial Senate race to someone too young to remember September 11.But Katz remains a force in Democratic politics heading into the midterms. Fight Agency, the firm where Katz is a partner, was set up to support progressive outsiders running for office. Katz seeks out candidates who can be credible populist messengers. Whether they are in fact members of the working class—Platner relied on money from his wealthy parents well into adulthood—matters less to him than whether they come across that way. They need to look the part: beards, Carhartt, and tattoos (except Nazi ones) are a plus. And they must be charismatic public speakers, both in front of a crowd and mediated through an iPhone. The ads that Katz makes… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Nicole Irvin voted for Donald Trump three times because she thought he had business savvy and appreciated that he was politically incorrect. “I like his roughness,” she told me. I met her in the parking lot of a Walmart Supercenter in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a planned suburban community in the state’s First Congressional District, a midterm battleground. She used to get her news from the right-wing commentator Candace Owens, and she cried when Charlie Kirk was killed last year. Lately, though, she has tuned out the GOP’s messaging because it is so discordant with her own experience.She had just paid $10 for a phone charger—her son had broken her old one—and recalled when she paid half that much. “I asked the lady, ‘Is there any clearance section?’” The cost was significant because Irvin, who works at a tire-repair company, lives paycheck to paycheck. Meanwhile she sees politicians protecting their own wealth, and she can’t remember the greed ever being so blatant as under Trump. “They all make deals with each other,” she said.Corruption is topping voter concerns in recent polls, dominating Democratic messaging, and forcing Republicans to play defense in red states. If that marks a sharp shift from recent American elections, in which such allegations have played a relatively minor role, it mirrors a growing global trend. Around the world, a backlash against corruption has roused voters and undercut populist, right-wing politicians. Now it may play a decisive role in the midterm elections.I first noticed this in Hungary earlier this year. Viktor Orbán, an ally of President Trump and a model for his MAGA movement, was ousted in April after 16 years in power. I asked his former political director, Balázs Orbán—who is not related to the former prime minister—whether he saw parallels between the campaign that cost his boss his job and the contest that could end Republican control of Congress. Like Trump, the long-serving prime minister had confronted corruption accusations in previous elections, but won anyway. “Why is that?” Orbán asked me. “It’s because of the economy. If people feel the economy is going in a good direction, they say, ‘Okay, there are some rich people, but we are also doing well.’” As Orbán sees it, these were the terms of a basic social contract. “The problem right now is that since people don’t feel that they are doing well, they want politicians to keep the social agreement:… [TheTopNews] Read More.

For more than 60 years, the Department of Justice has sent its attorneys and staff to polling places across the country to ensure that Americans can vote free of discrimination or intimidation. They’ve watched to see if Black voters were illegally hindered in any way, if those who use a wheelchair or walker could get into facilities, and if those who couldn’t read the ballot for any reason—blindness, lack of English proficiency, or simply not having the skill—had help. Officials selected locations that had had problems in the past or where people had reported concerns.  When the feds would show up in the Tucson area of Arizona, where Spanish speakers and retirees are as numerous as the cacti dotting the Sonoran Desert, local officials considered the monitors partners in protecting the right to vote. But ahead of the primary election this past July, when Pima County Elections Director Constance Hargrove learned that DOJ was sending six representatives—most of whom were criminal prosecutors—she became worried. Would they just witness the vote, as in years past, or were they planning to gather evidence to later try to undermine the results? Would they know the basic rules? She told DOJ’s coordinator during a phone call: “Remind them that they cannot take a gun or weapon into the vote centers.”On Primary Day, the monitors’ activities seemed normal, Hargrove told us. But she’s still concerned about the plan to send 1,000 of them to polling locations in every state for Tuesday’s election. The number itself is “a tall order,” Hargrove told us, as most previous administrations—Republican and Democratic—have detailed far fewer. And then there’s this department’s track record on elections. DOJ under President Trump has taken up his years-long quest to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Officials have seized ballots in Georgia, gathered material from Arizona, and questioned election officials in Wisconsin—but still have not found evidence of the widespread voter fraud the president has alleged. In recent days, DOJ reminded all state election officials to preserve materials from their elections.“I’m not going to freak myself out before Election Day, or my poll workers, or the voters,” Hargrove said. She has reminded workers to follow their training should the monitors—or anyone else—be disruptive: “You can always call 911.”Her concerns and suspicions are widely shared among the dozen-plus local and state election officials we spoke with across the country. Some worry that… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The photograph, from April 1993, shows a burly sheikh sitting on a couch wearing a gray kaftan, a white-and-crimson turban, and black sunglasses. His beard is thick and white. Reporters crowd into his Jersey City tenement apartment, waiting to hear him speak.Omar Abdel-Rahman—the man newspapers called the Blind Sheikh—by then had a reputation throughout the Muslim world as the religious leader of Egypt’s largest jihadist group. In 1981, his words inspired the assassins of President Anwar Sadat. His rhetoric could be unremitting, as in a speech in Brooklyn in early 1993: “We must be terrorists, and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” By spring of that year, law enforcement was investigating Abdel-Rahman’s possible involvement in at least two killings, including that of a prominent extremist rabbi. And that March, the FBI and foreign agencies had arrested several of Abdel-Rahman’s close followers, among them a man reported to be the sheikh’s part-time driver, on charges of helping carry out the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people but had aimed for far more.Adam Hamawy, who will almost certainly represent New Jersey’s Twelfth Congressional District come January, was at the press conference in the sheikh’s apartment the day the photograph was taken. He has said that he went there to translate something for Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy had met Abdel-Rahman two years earlier and became something of an acolyte, going to mosques across New Jersey to hear him speak, visiting the sheikh at home, and traveling with him to an Islamist conference in Detroit, where Abdel-Rahman and other speakers held forth on the necessity of violent jihad. In that photo, a bearded young man who resembles Hamawy kneels in front of reporters, his eyes trained on Abdel-Rahman. I asked Hamawy’s campaign multiple times whether that man is the candidate; the campaign did not reply.Najlah Feanny / Corbis / GettySheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman speaks at a press conference in Jersey City, New Jersey, in April 1993.Two months after that press conference, in June 1993, Abdel-Rahman would be arrested for plotting what would have been another catastrophic day of terrorism in New York City; the plan included blowing up two Hudson River tunnels and the United Nations, and assassinating the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Hamawy would testify as a defense witness at Abdel-Rahman’s trial in 1995, and Abdel-Rahman… [TheTopNews] Read More.