THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Don Davis was born in Snow Hill, a small town on the coastal plains of North Carolina. Growing up, he spent Sundays worshipping at the local Presbyterian church and summers working in the surrounding tobacco fields. At 29, he was elected Snow Hill’s youngest-ever mayor. He went on to represent the town of about 1,500 in the state legislature and then in Congress. The Democrat is now running for a third term, but in a very different district: If he wins, his constituents will no longer include his wife, his kids, or anyone else in Snow Hill.   Davis is used to having to figure out exactly who can vote for him. The first time he was elected to Congress, in 2022, he triumphed in a district that slightly favored Democrats. The North Carolina legislature redrew it to favor Republicans, and Davis won reelection in 2024 by less than two percentage points.Then, in the summer of 2025, President Trump called for the GOP to gerrymander as many seats as it could to protect the party’s House majority, even though redistricting is typically done only once a decade, after a census. Democrats in some states retaliated with their own gerrymanders. North Carolina was one of seven states, both red and blue, to hastily redraw its maps after Trump’s demand; four more redistricted after the Supreme Court’s April Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the Voting Rights Act. Many of the incumbents being targeted for defeat by Republicans are Black Democrats. Davis, who had his home and base of support in surrounding Greene County cut out of his district, is one of them. But the gambit may not succeed as planned.Republicans are forecast to gain fewer than half of the seats they expected when they redrew the maps, in large part because voters are mad—over inflation, over corruption, over the Iran war. Here in North Carolina’s First Congressional District, many have an additional cause for anger: their gerrymandered map. The state, which is among the most politically divided in America, already has district lines that give Republicans a significant edge. The congressional delegation includes just four Democrats out of 14 representatives. The GOP-dominated legislature wants to cut that to three, and has drawn lines tailored to end Davis’s congressional career. If the new boundaries of his district had existed in 2024, Trump would have won the area by almost 12 points. (He carried the old… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The most important decision facing California voters this year is not which candidates to support for higher office, but whether to approve a wealth tax on the state’s approximately 250 billionaires. The ballot initiative that would impose the tax has plenty of enemies, among not only the superrich but also the many Californians, including Governor Gavin Newsom, who worry about losing the superrich to other states. But thanks to a deviously cynical electoral maneuver by the measure’s opponents, the people who ultimately doom it might include some of those who vote for it.Proposition 40 was spearheaded by Dave Regan, who leads California’s large and powerful health-care workers’ union, in response to the Medicaid cuts in Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. If approved, the initiative would create a onetime 5 percent tax on all billionaire wealth, and the proceeds—perhaps as much as $100 billion—would be earmarked mostly for state health-care spending. To make sure the superrich don’t flee before they can be taxed, the policy would apply retroactively to anyone who lived in the state at the start of 2026.Predictably, some of the billionaires in question are seeking to defeat the initiative. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin preemptively moved his residence and businesses to Nevada in 2025 and seeded the new political organization Building a Better California with $102 million from his stash. (That might sound like a lot, but the tax would have cost him about $12 billion.) Thanks to the donations of other tech tycoons, the group has raised more than $333 million in total.[Read: If you tax them, will they leave?]Plan A is to convince voters that Proposition 40 is unwise via a barrage of TV and social-media ads. In case that doesn’t work, the opponents have come up with Plans B and C: Propositions 41 and 42. These initiatives take advantage of a feature of California law: If two conflicting ballot measures pass in the same election, the one with more votes prevails. On the surface, both look innocuous and unrelated to the wealth tax. Proposition 41 is being pitched as a fiscal-responsibility measure, and Proposition 42 is ostensibly about protecting voters’ retirement savings. But the initiatives are designed to directly conflict with the wealth-tax measure. Proposition 41 would institute audit requirements for new special taxes and void any programs that are exempt from the state’s existing spending limit, which the new wealth tax would… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Many Democrats have a post-midterm dream that goes something like this: Pete Hegseth, the push-up-loving, beardo-mocking former Fox News host who has led the Pentagon for almost two years with bombast and theatrics, is either fired or hauled before their new majority in the House to face impeachment—which would make him just the third Cabinet secretary in history to face such a sanction. “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is in line to be speaker of the House should the Democrats win that chamber, declared at a rally this month, the closest he’s come to saying the I-word.Many of his colleagues feel the same. Hegseth helped steer the U.S. into war with Iran, and then failed to deliver victory. He initiated strikes against speedboats allegedly carrying narco-traffickers off the coasts of South and Central America that many Democrats view as extrajudicial killings. He pushed out scores of seasoned generals, many of whom were held in high esteem on Capitol Hill. All the while, he has flouted any notion of congressional oversight. His acidly partisan approach to Hill relations dates back to his contentious 2025 confirmation process, when he broke tradition by declining courtesy calls with most Democratic senators. And he has, in his political opponents’ view, brought a macho crassness to the job, railing against “fatties,” “weirdos,” and “beardos” and introducing hormone supplements to ensure “high T” troops. Former President Obama last weekend mocked the well-coiffed Hegseth for focusing on “the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops” and for being consumed by vanity. “How much time,” Obama asked, “do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning?”From a Democratic standpoint, what’s not to impeach? Yet precisely because Hegseth and his behavior present such a ripe target for House Democrats, they might ultimately decide against pursuing that measure. After all, even if a Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Hegseth, and even if the Democrats win a majority in the Senate and convene a trial, Hegseth almost certainly would retain enough support in the upper chamber to fall short of the required 67 votes for conviction. The alternative is for Democrats to try to rein in Hegseth without the spectacle of impeachment, relying instead on the aggressive pursuit of their more traditional… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The most powerful members of Donald Trump’s government, security details in tow, filed into the Capitol Hill Club in February for a pep talk from the president’s top political adviser, James Blair. Weeks earlier, Trump had predicted midterm defeat because, he explained, “when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.” But in the green-awninged building just a couple of blocks from Congress, Blair wanted to share a more optimistic vision, urging everyone to focus on a particularly notable exception: In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt overcame economic headwinds to expand his party’s House and Senate majorities.Blair is brash and intense, a combination that has irked some administration officials and lawmakers who prefer their staff to behave more like staff. The 37-year-old keeps his head shorn shiny and his lips pressed together—half smirk, half quiet skepticism—not unlike a drill instructor. His goal that day was to apply data-driven discipline to the careening Tilt-A-Whirl of Trump’s governing style. The team had already decided that it would abandon the traditional midterm playbook of downplaying the president. Trump would command center stage no matter what. “The ground you have is the ground you have, and you have to fight on it,” one Trump strategist told us. Like others, the strategist spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategies.But that was just the start. Blair laid out a strikingly optimistic view of the coming eight months. The map was stronger than in 2018, with fewer swing seats and a real chance of Republicans holding both the House and the Senate, Blair told the assembled crowd, which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Blair emphasized that FDR was careful to calibrate his message in the 1934 campaign, arguing not that the problems had been solved but that things were getting better —and would continue to improve.No one had any illusions that Trump would be as disciplined as FDR. The president would be “doing his own thing,” and that would help Republicans by exciting his base of loyal but infrequent voters, Blair told the group. But everyone else needed to stick to a message shaped by polling, so they could speak to people beyond the MAGA bubble. There was little doubt—then or now—about the dominant issue. “I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide. But many stretch-run messages prove deeply ineffective and are quickly forgotten. Ahead of the 1998 midterms, Republicans went all in on investigations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton only to be rebuked by voters. President Obama’s insistence in 2010 that the country was coming out of the financial crisis led to his party enduring a “shellacking.” And during the 2018 midterms, Trump and his fellow Republicans tried to stoke fears about an alleged caravan of migrants headed toward the United States, only to have skeptical voters hand the House of Representatives to Democrats.This time around, Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” Bill Maher is a “loser,” and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique. That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps. Just for starters, he’s belittled the impact of his stalled war with Iran, sided with Russia as it continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, defended an attack ad from the GOP candidate for Ohio governor that repulsed other top Republicans, downplayed high energy prices while boasting that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making a freaking fortune,” embraced AI as the nation turns against it, obsessed over White House construction projects, and spent a lot of time talking about handsome men, Husted being just one.Many Republicans, and even some in Trump’s orbit, don’t quite get it. What has happened, they ask, to the instincts of the man who authored two of the most improbable victories in American political history? Trump’s superpower was his intuitive understanding of what motivated his supporters. Many Republicans privately tell me that he’s lost that feel. Trump now lives, they think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to—and, even worse, uncaring about—the problems facing so many voters. His approval rating has slipped to the low 30s. He’s become so toxic that some Republicans in tight races don’t… [TheTopNews] Read More.