THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Charles Benjamin voted for the first time in 2024, casting a ballot for President Trump. Since then, he’s watched his McDonald’s order—two McDoubles and large fries—go up seven bucks. His Red Bulls cost more too. One of his fraternity brothers at East Stroudsburg University, who’s in the military, just shipped off to the Middle East to support a war that Benjamin believed Trump had promised not to start. “I don’t appreciate that he lied,” Benjamin, a 21-year-old junior sporting a leopard-print sweatshirt and holding a lacrosse stick, told me. I met Benjamin as he was waiting to see Josh Shapiro at a campus rally. Benjamin was curious about the Pennsylvania governor, but unsure whether to vote for him. The event got off to a lackluster start. A few dozen people stood around a small stage set out on the quad as students walked to class behind them, ignoring the speeches from local Democratic officials. Then Shapiro came out. He talked about high prices and the Iran war and corruption among elected officials. “I understand that there are some of you who showed up today with a little bit of healthy cynicism, a little bit of healthy skepticism, wondering, Is anything ever really going to change?” Shapiro said. Yes, he told the crowd—but only if you care, and only if you vote. Benjamin and his friend Nick Vyprynyuk, a volunteer firefighter with disheveled strawberry-blonde hair who had also cast his ballot for Trump in 2024, listened carefully. By the end, Shapiro had won their votes. He was “electrifying,” Vyprynyuk, a senior, told me. “I like how enthusiastic he was.” Michelle Gustafson for The AtlanticSupporters cheer as Governor Josh Shapiro speaks at the Flip PA-01 Rally with Bob Harvie in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.Shapiro’s exuberance on the stump, in speeches that channel the optimistic pragmatism of former President Obama (not to mention his speaking cadence), could help explain the Democratic governor’s popularity in Pennsylvania, a state that voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024. Shapiro has been able to feed deep-blue Democrats’ loathing of Trump while assembling a coalition that is large enough to include people who voted for the president. It’s an effective strategy: Polls regularly show him leading Republican Stacy Garrity, the MAGA-aligned state treasurer, by more than 20 points. (Garrity is pledging to “fix the problems Josh Shapiro has created,” including Pennsylvania’s relatively high tax burden and rising food prices.) Shapiro’s lead is… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Over the past decade, Andrew Leyva shaded the space next to Donald Trump’s name each time it appeared on his ballot, trusting that a tough-talking businessman willing to challenge Washington would benefit working guys like him. Leyva, a 39-year-old who installs blinds in Arizona, voted to usher in the economic “golden age” that Trump so often promised. Leyva envisioned gas that cost $2 a gallon. Government spending would be cut. The influence of the wealthy and well-connected would be minimized. Regular people would finally get their say, and America would always come first.It didn’t take long after Trump’s second win for Leyva to realize that he had been duped. First, he said, Trump seemed to obstruct the release of the Epstein files, which didn’t live up to the MAGA-sphere hype when some of them were finally made public. Then the president did something he had said he wasn’t going to do: start a war. Leyva now spends nearly twice as much on gas as he did last year—sometimes it costs him $300 a week. I ran into him outside a home-improvement store in Scottsdale, where voters will decide one of the nation’s competitive congressional races. I asked whether he was planning to vote. “Hell no. I don’t think it matters,” he told me as he loaded blinds into his gleaming Toyota pickup. Trump was supposed to be different, Leyva said, but it turns out that he’s just as bad as every other politician. Leyva doesn’t think that he’ll ever vote again.I’d grown accustomed to this sort of response, given the many people who have told me over the past year about their deep distrust of America’s political system. They have no confidence in major parties or the voting process, and they believe that some sort of fix is already in. Their votes won’t make a difference, many told me, so why bother casting a ballot? For some, Trump was their last hope. They hadn’t typically voted, but they made an exception in his case. When he failed to live up to his promises, any expectation that voting could solve their problems evaporated.The Trump era has brought with it a paradox: Even as Americans say that they find politics to be more toxic than ever, more of them are participating; the 2020 election had the most voters in history, and more than 158 million ballots were cast. Republican nonvoters have been… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Standing next to Donald Trump at a rally in 2022, Pennsylvania State Treasurer Stacy Garrity told the crowd that Trump had “won” the 2020 election. Garrity is now running for governor—and she has a very different view of the contest: Joe Biden was the rightful winner, she told reporters earlier this year. As for her assertion four years prior? She had simply gotten “caught up” in the excitement of the Trump rally. This summer, Rick Jackson, a billionaire running for governor in Georgia, suggested using the National Guard to combat alleged election fraud. At a recent debate, he denied ever making the comment, and said that he saw no need for federal intervention in the state’s elections.Garrity and Jackson are not the only Republicans who seem to be rethinking earlier stances that called into question whether election results can be trusted. Trump has long relied on his political allies to amplify the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that have consumed his attention for years. But even though he can’t seem to stop talking about the issue—just last week, Trump offered a $1 million reward to tipsters who help uncover voter fraud ahead of Tuesday’s midterms—others in the party have gone quiet.Many GOP candidates seem to realize that to stand a chance, they need their voters to trust the system and cast their ballot. Political strategists and election experts told us that there are diminishing returns for the GOP in trying to persuade Americans to care about Trump’s six-year-old fraud claims. The system worked well enough to reelect Trump, and the president has failed to produce credible evidence that voter fraud is a threat to the midterms. “Saying that elections are rigged in this country, saying that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election, is not something that appeals to voters in general elections,” Kelly Rader, a research director for States United Action, a nonpartisan election-protection group, told us. Rader and her colleagues, who maintain a database of election deniers seeking office, found that fewer are running this year compared with four years ago. She was not surprised that the ones who are have been downplaying their election skepticism.Democrats have been more than happy to remind opponents about their previous promotion of election denial. In Pennsylvania, Janelle Stelson is running to unseat the longtime Republican Representative Scott Perry, a close ally of the president. (The January 6 committee found that Perry had… [TheTopNews] Read More.

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.