THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

As the Bernie Sanders road show traveled south through Maine earlier this month, the crowds grew bigger and louder with each stop. About 650 people showed up at a convention center in Bangor, then 700 packed a former church in Lewiston, and finally more than 1,000 filled a high-school gymnasium in Biddeford. Sanders was stumping for Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate, and the faithful were nodding along to the hits. He pitched Medicare for All and raising taxes on billionaires. He decried wealth disparities (“an obscenity”) and Donald Trump (“the most dangerous president” in American history) with equal fervor.What was surprising about Sanders’s appearance in the middle of one of the nation’s hardest-fought Senate races was less what he said and more that he was there at all. Mid-October in an election year is not usually Sanders’s busy season. The Vermont senator last had a tough race in his home state during President Bill Clinton’s first term. And although Sanders can draw a crowd like few other progressive politicians, Democratic candidates typically embrace him during primaries and then stick him on the sideline for the stretch run, when they’re rediscovering their love of capitalism and bipartisanship.This fall, however, Sanders is in far more demand than usual. He’s campaigning for Democrats in some of the most competitive battlegrounds, entrusted not only with juicing turnout on college campuses—his assigned role in earlier years—but with persuading voters in Republican-leaning areas as well. From Maine, Sanders headed to Florida and then on to Texas and Michigan.That Sanders finds himself, a decade after his first run for the presidency, arguably at the peak of his influence is all the more remarkable given that he recently turned 85 and that Democrats have spent the past two years wringing their hands over their party’s gerontocracy. According to YouGov, Sanders is the most popular current elected official in America—only the retirees Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger have higher ratings. Many of this year’s primary candidates whom Sanders backed defeated establishment opponents in states and districts that Trump had carried in 2024, and they now appear poised to help Democrats retake a majority in the House, and possibly the Senate. And when the party’s 2028 presidential free-for-all kicks off, Sanders’s endorsement could be among the campaign’s most sought-after prizes.“He will be seen as one of the most consequential political leaders of the 21st century,” Representative Ro Khanna of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

At 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in a corner booth at the Cheesecake Factory, emerging from the fog of war.Before me were a dozen half-empty plates, a cluster of dirty napkins, and several depleted beverages. The food had come in waves, unrelenting, like Normandy. There had been egg rolls, four ways; Roadside Sliders; a sheet tray of Factory Nachos; and something called Chicken Parmesan “Pizza Style.” Coke Zeros, I’d told the waitress at the beginning, and keep ’em coming. There had also been cake. Much cake.I checked in with myself. I was nauseous, for sure. But another feeling, too, was detectable within the churning volcano of my digestive tract: It was something like joy.Let’s back up. Over the weekend, Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s schlocky White House aesthetic by saying it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” My first reaction was to laugh. It’s true! The restaurant is over-the-top opulent—as if ancient Egypt and Tuscany had a baby in Las Vegas. Any true Cheesecake Factory fan would certainly appreciate the joke, especially if they remembered the Iraq War and Saddam’s own design sensibilities.What happened next, though, was disheartening. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory,” the conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Other Republicans, and even some Democrats, logged on to police the former president’s tone. This was classic elitist Obama, they argued, making fun of the working man and his primitive taste. It was why Trump won and why Democrats will never win back blue-collar America. My “For You” page filled with commentary about which political party could more confidently claim ideological custody over the Cheesecake Factory.Immediately, my head began to swirl like the raspberry drizzle in a Georgia Peach cocktail. My rage was congealing, like Cheddar Cheese Fondue on room-temperature Pretzel Bites. Enough! I wanted to scream. Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of your culture wars! Like any number of kitschy, charming American chain restaurants—Rainforest Cafe, Johnny Rockets, and even, God love them, Applebee’s—the Factory can obviously be mocked. But it must be mocked from a place of love. It should exist above partisan politics as a sacred third space, one of the few we Americans have left.Quickly enough, my frustration gave way to hunger, then introspection, and then to investigatory zeal. Which is how, an… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When Eloise, a veteran who lives in Michigan, first heard about Trump Accounts last year, her mind immediately turned to other projects that had borne the name of the businessman turned president: a university, an airline, steaks, casinos. All had gone bust, and several had left creditors or investors holding the bag. Pregnant at the time, she wondered whether opening a Donald Trump–branded investment account would put her first child’s financial future at risk.“Both my husband and I, our first reaction was like, Oh, this is a scam,” Eloise told me. Despite her initial skepticism, she did further research to determine whether to claim the $1,000 seed money the government was offering to most babies born during Trump’s second term. In the end, she decided not to accept it, opting instead to open a more traditional account to put money away for her child. She said she was skeptical that the Trump Account would work as promised and had a “moralistic” opposition to associating her newborn with the president. “Ultimately, it’s like, the man’s a con man,” said Eloise, who asked to be identified only by her middle name owing to fear of reprisals from the commander in chief.It is rare for people to turn down free money from the government. But that’s what happens when a polarizing president attaches his name to a taxpayer-supported program originally pitched as a vehicle to help America’s children achieve financial security. An investment idea once championed by Democrats as a pathway to stability for millions of minors is now at risk of becoming yet another casualty of the country’s partisan divide. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say the program has promise. But its greatest obstacle to achieving widespread acceptance may be its name.Tax advisers and economists told me that the president’s decision to brand the accounts in his image had become a major impediment for potential beneficiaries. “I have had personal experience where people have said, ‘I just can’t go along with something that has that man’s name on it,’” said Tom O’Saben, the director of tax content and government relations for the National Association of Tax Professionals.[Read: The Santa presidency]About 7 million children had been signed up for Trump Accounts by late September, before the shift to automatic enrollment. That amounted to about 10 percent of the eligible population. With the pace of enrollment lagging, the Treasury Department late last… [TheTopNews] Read More.

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.