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This November, President Donald Trump’s free rein ends as Democrats are slated to win the House and perhaps even the Senate. Obviously, our main focus should be on that effort. But we can walk and chew gum, can’t we? Because while 2026 is front and center, there is already a race under that race going on, with 2028 hopefuls testing their message, building their profiles…

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Ed Martin, a trench-coat donning former “Stop the Steal” advocate whose work at various senior Justice Department jobs was charactered by brash, bumbling efforts to use the department to punish critics of President Donald Trump, is leaving DOJ, Trump announced Friday.

“Ed is now leaving to go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election, and the Presidential Election of 2028,” Trump posted.

Martin, early in the Trump’s term, was the most vocal proponent of Trump’s claim that he could order federal prosecutors to pursue his critics. But Martin’s exit is not victory for the rule of law. It is a sign that newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been a critic of Martin’s attention-seeking antics, is ushering in an era in which Trump’s wish to weaponize DOJ against his foes is more competently pursued.

Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Martin is a political journeyman who lost a series of races in Missouri and ran far-right advocacy organizations. He wasn’t hugely successful: in 2017, Martin was hawking a coloring book based on Trump tweets. But Martin, who gave himself the moniker “Eagle Ed,” gained national attention in 2020 as an advocate of Trump’s false claims about that year’s election, and later as a lawyer for indicted January 6 rioters. Martin’s statements in that period include claiming that antifa was behind the attack, calling it a “hoax,” dubbing Capitol rioters “patriots,” and arguing those prosecuted for the riot deserved “reparations.” 

Trump’s selection of Martin as interim US attorney for Washington, DC, last year, along with the pardon of 1,600 Capitol attackers, was a middle finger to DOJ and the federal prosecutors in Washington who brought almost of all the January 6 cases.

As the acting US attorney, Martin fired and demoted many of those prosecutors. He also began issuing a torrent of typo-strewn tweets and letters in which he threatened to investigate or prosecute Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, anti-Trump protestors, Georgetown University, and many others, all for what appeared to be protected speech at odds with Trump’s pronouncements.

“Noone [sic] is above the law,” Martin wrote in one letter to Elon Musk threatening to prosecute people who publicly identified DOGE employees.

Martin’s days as US Attorney ended amid fixed opposition to his confirmation by Senate Democrats and by Sen. Thom Tillis, who opposed Martin due to his connection to the January 6 attack. Martin hurt his own chances when, as Mother Jones reported, he lied about his ties to a January 6 defendant infamous for dressing as Hitler.

With his confirmation as a US attorney blocked, Trump named Martin head of the so-called weaponization task force set up to hound critics, local prosecutors and other connected to investigations and multiple indictments Trump faced during his first term and the Biden presidency. Trump also made Martin his chief pardon attorney, a job from which Martin memorably hatched a plan for Trump to issue pardons for so-called fake electors, though those people, prosecuted in state courts, could not benefit from presidential pardons. Trump did it anyway.

In a press conference held last year, Martin said that the task force would work to publicize its work. Even if people they targeted could not be charged, he said, “we will name them…and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” That was a pledge to violate DOJ tradition and written rules that the department pursue justice by prosecuting crimes in court rather than through public relations offensives.

But Martin made good on it. He appeared outside the Brooklyn home of New York Attorney General Letitia James in August 2025, wearing a trench coat, and posed for pictures taken by the New York Post—part of a bid to draw attention to claims that James committed fraud in private real estate dealings, a largely undisguised effort to retaliate against James for the successful civil case her office brought against Trump for fraud.

But it wasn’t all bluster. Martin had a role in investigations into former CIA Director John Brennan and Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, the Letitia James indictment, and that of former FBI Director James Comey, though the cases against Comey and James were thrown out. (DOJ later charged Comey again for allegedly threatening Trump by posting a picture of seashells arranged to say “86 47.”)

But Martin’s role at DOJ was steadily curtailed by Blanche, who reportedly believed Martin was overly focused on publicity with minimal achievement. Martin was ousted from the weaponization task force in February. Trump’s April firing of Pam Bondi as Attorney General and elevation of Blanche to acting AG was bad news for Eagle Ed. Martin’s exit comes a few weeks after Blanche’s confirmation.

Blanche appears to have sought Trump’s support for the nomination as Attorney General by advancing cases like the Comey seashell indictment and by pushing Trump’s plan for a $1.8 billion fund to pay January 6 defendants and others who claim they were politically prosecuted.

Blanche said he dropped the plan for the fund, though not a connected agreement that purports to spare Trump and his family members from IRS audits, amid pushback from Senate Republicans.

But any hope that Blanche’s confirmation would lead to his backing off from efforts to make DOJ a tool of Trump’s personal agenda quickly took a hit. First, Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for a Trump-endorsed candidate, in alleged violation of a law barring federal employees from partisan political campaigning while on the job.

Then, in a recent television appearance, Blanche declined to say that the Justice Department is independent of presidential directives. “I’m not going to pledge that,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press, adding that he would allow Trump to weigh in on individual prosecution decisions. “The elected president of the United States says something to me,” Blanche said. “And I’m supposed to say to you, ‘I would say no.’ I mean, that’s not the way it works.”

Blanche’s problem with Martin was not his effort to launch political prosecutions, but Martin’s poor execution of them, it seems. Martin is not leaving DOJ due to his intentions. The problem, apparently, is incompetence. With more effective advocates of Trump’s weaponization wishes consolidating power, fans of the rule of law may already miss Martin’s ineptitude.

Washington, D.C. residents are facing a traffic nightmare thanks to President Donald Trump’s decision to use the city to host the Freedom 250 Grand Prix IndyCar race over the weekend. Traffic has come to a near standstill in parts of the capital city and problems are expected to persist into September. Trump has been hyping the event for several weeks and is expected to take a lap around the…

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Flock Safety is having a hard month. The surveillance technology company, which has sold more than 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras to some 6,000 police departments across the US, is up to its neck in cancelled contracts—at least 34 since the start of 2026—and public backlash.

Dozens of police officers have lost their jobs or faced criminal charges for allegedly abusing the technology, which allows police to track vehicles’ movements, to stalk people. Flock’s safety reforms in response to the stalking issue, which mostly consist of voluntary security practices police departments can adopt if they choose, left advocates unimpressed.

“Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7.”

In total, at least 56 municipalities have canceled contracts, deactivated their cameras, or rejected potential Flock contracts since the beginning of this year, according to the advocacy group DeFlock. Many of those towns are simply contracting with competitors like Axon or Motorola instead—so they’re still working with surveillance-tech companies, but encroaching on Flock’s market share as they do so.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to invent creative ways to break a Flock camera: one House candidate in Tennessee allegedly took an extremely direct approach and shot some Flock cameras with a gun, while comparatively pacifist Flock-haters online post satirical videos teaching viewers how to saw through a Flock camera’s pole or spray-paint over its lens.

In response, Flock is trying a new public-relations tactic: Some of its leadership team is publicly arguing that stories keep coming out about Flock abuse not because Flock is especially liable to be abused, but because Flock is better at catching abusers.

You're going to see more stories about Flock catching bad cops misuse the database. We're the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale. If the others had this level of auditing, you'd see a lot more stories about cops abusing DMV data, etc. https://t.co/O2bHuXLjJ1

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

Rahul Sidhu, the company’s chief strategy officer, called Flock “the only company in the industry with this level of auditing at scale” in a series of posts in which he also wrote that taking away a police officer’s Flock database access would be tantamount to taking away their gun.

Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person. Cops break the law when they run plates for buddies or criminal histories on their daughter's boyfriends. Do we take all that away from them?

— Rahul Sidhu (@rahul) August 19, 2026

“Guns can break the law if you choose to use them that way, and if used incorrectly, would kill an innocent person,” Sidhu posted. “Do we take all that away from them?”

“One of the many problems with Flock as a company is that they they treat legitimate privacy concerns as if they are just PR issues,” said ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow, “and so once again they are seeing this uprising against Flock throughout the country as a public relations problem.”

Flock, Marlow said, created the problem. In dozens of cases dating back to at least 2021, police officers have reportedly used Flock cameras to stalk their partners, their exes, and even women traveling across state lines to get abortions. And now, “[Flock] thinks if it just includes itself as a watchdog of the problem it’s creating, it somehow deserves a pat on the back.” 

Flock Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. The firm is apparently no longer sending out the auto-reply with which it responded to journalists earlier this month: “Thanks for reaching out to Flock. Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

“I think more accurately they’re probably smoking grass if they think they can do an entire PR campaign and then disappear so they don’t have to defend it,” Marlow said.

Vice President JD Vance brought his unlikable visage to Ohio to stump for Republican Sen. Jon Husted, delivering a speech full of shameless lies and racism. “If you look at it, at every step of the way, these Democrats have voted for foreign workers and fraudsters over American citizens and hard-paying taxpayers,” Vance said before accusing Democrats of voting “for corporations.”…

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After unexpectedly losing a Democratic primary on Tuesday to challenge Florida GOP Sen. Ashley Moody, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman said he will donate his campaign war chest to help fellow Democrats get elected in the Sunshine State, saying that defeating Republicans in November is paramount to anything else. “Here in Florida, we have a governor’s race, and House races we need to win to…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Who will replace Karoline Leavitt as Trump’s chief liar?

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The Justice Department appears to have hired a convicted election hacker to monitor elections.

Democracy Docket reported that David Michael Levin appears to have joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. A Florida attorney, Levin in 2016 was charged with three felonies for hacking a Florida state elections website as well as a county elections website. The hacking had no impact on the vote counting or outcome, but Levin pleaded guilty to the crimes.

Levin argued he just wanted to check in on “the integrity of elections.” He went to jail for 20 days and did two years of probation.

Democracy Docket reported that he was recently involved in a Minnesota election operation alongside William F. Mohrman, a senior counsel in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the attorney who represented Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. The Justice Department has not confirmed Levin’s hiring or his role in the operation.

The Trump administration has made a habit of offering vindication for people who flat out violated election laws in an attempt to stop what they believe was fraud—a lie their president has constantly tried to manifest into existence. Colorado’s Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, was hosted at the White House last month. And more broadly, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has changed the purpose and function of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division entirely.

The apparent hiring of Levin—a hacker watching over elections—may also be a prelude for the midterms, as the DOJ has already announced plans to send 1,000 poll monitors to ballot boxes around the country during the midterms.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed slammed his Republican rival, former Rep. Mike Rogers for cowardice on the issue of the unpopular Iran War during an MS Now appearance on Thursday night. El-Sayed was asked by host Jen Psaki to respond to recent comments by Rogers, who claimed that in his interactions with voters he has heard “hardly anything” about the war.

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In a bright red power suit, Ashley Moody, the former Florida attorney general who nabbed the state’s GOP Senate nomination in Tuesday’s primary, strolled onto the stage of Florida Republicans’ “Victory Rally” on Thursday and did not waste time attacking her opponent, state Rep. Angie Nixon.

“If I told you last year that Florida would have a nominee to the United States Senate that was a self-declared socialist, would you believe me?” Moody asked the crowd of more than 150 people who gathered at a Tampa event venue to hear from candidates on the Republican ticket. “This is not a joke. This is not a fictional TV series. This is reality.”

“Let me make this very clear,” Moody continued. “Angie Nixon wants the United States of America to look like Cuba.”

Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker from Jacksonville who helped lead the charge against Florida’s Republican-led redistricting earlier this year, defeated Alex Vindman, the presumed frontrunner, who raised millions of dollars against Nixon’s $975,000, in a stunning upset Tuesday. A union organizer, Nixon is running a campaign centered on affordability, Medicare for all, free childcare, paid family and sick leave, and a national rent freeze. She’s also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though the organization did not endorse her. 

The rally marked the GOP’s launching point for the 74 days until the general election in November. It also provided a glimpse of how Republicans will stoke fears of rising socialism against their opponents, especially those who embrace a version of the term, like Nixon.

In a state like Florida, where many Cubans and Venezuelans who fled communist regimes now live, the socialist label can be particularly toxic—and if Thursday’s rally is any indication, the GOP won’t hold back on attempting to leverage that kind of rhetoric this election season.

“The Democratic Socialists of America today is the Democratic Party, and that’s why we need to work triple time to ensure that the party of boys playing in girls’ sports, open borders, and unaffordability never, ever gets a foothold in the state of Florida,” Republican Blaise Ingoglia, the state’s chief financial officer—an elected position— who is running to keep his job this November, told the cheering crowd, which included women donning bedazzled red hats and a baby dressed in a US-flag-printed footie pajama. 

The evening ended with a speech from Byron Donalds, the House Representative who won the Republican nomination for Florida’s gubernatorial race this week. Donalds, who was endorsed by President Trump, began his remarks by mentioning that he had spoken to the president—who “was obviously in high spirits”—that morning.

After explaining the highlights of his platform, including the need to DOGE every government agency in Florida, Donalds pivoted to David Jolly, his Democratic rival—a centrist and former congressional Republican—calling him a “Trojan horse” for the Democratic Socialists of America. (Jolly is not affiliated with DSA or endorsed by them.) The audience erupted in cheers, raising signs with Donalds’ campaign slogan: “Defending the Florida Dream.”

“If you’re going to bend the knee to the Democratic socialists, you’re abandoning common sense,” Donalds continued. “You’re abandoning families. You’re abandoning sound economics. You’re abandoning parental rights. And in Florida, we are never going to abandon the hardworking people. We are going to fight for them every single day.”

The Supreme Court is letting President Trump move forward with his expensive White House ballroom.

On Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts ordered a stay in the preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that would have halted work at 11:59 p.m. This means that for now, construction can resume while the high court gives a full review to the lower court’s ruling earlier this month that the ballroom is illegal due to a lack of congressional approval.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2-1 on August 7 that Congress has the “exclusive authority to regulate the construction and demolition of White House structures,” and since Trump began construction on his ballroom with congressional approval, it was against the law.

“At this preliminary stage, the National Trust [for Historic Preservation] has shown, compellingly, that Congress has not ceded unfettered authority to the Executive Branch to dramatically redesign, reshape, and reconstruct the White House—the People’s House—to fit a particular President’s desires,” the ruling stated.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation initiated the legal challenge against Trump’s ballroom, on the grounds that he doesn’t have the authority for its construction, which has resulted in the demolition of the White House’s East Wing. The organization’s lawyers say that Trump is trying to “outrun the courts” by speeding up construction without waiting for judicial rulings.

Last year, Trump vowed that the ballroom “won’t interfere with the current building,” a promise that was quickly broken when the public saw pictures of the gutted White House. He claimed that it would only cost $200 million, only for that number to soar to $300 million and then $400 million after he added extra construction. Later, it emerged that taxpayers would be footing half of the bill for a $600 million project.

For now, Trump gets to keep building his unnecessary ballroom, and by the time the Supreme Court issues a final ruling, the American people could be stuck with it, whether it’s legal or not.

This story has been updated.

Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters appeared on NewsNation Friday to give a withering defense of his party’s prospects in the coming midterm elections. After mentioning President Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and the fact that the GOP has controlled all of government “for 18 months now,” host Markie Martin asked, “How do you convince people that you’re the right…

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President Trump is trying to sue for defamation after yet another report found that the National Guard takeover of cities across America had no significant impact on reducing violent crime levels.

In July, the Center for American Progress, or CAP, published a study analyzing the impact of Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Memphis, and Washington, D.C., which he has claimed time and time again saved those cities. In reality, the report found that the effort cost $1.7 billion and did virtually nothing.

“The findings of this analysis confirm what many already suspected: At the time of the administration’s federal law enforcement and National Guard deployments, the primary goal was never to stop crime,” the report noted. “There is no compelling evidence that these deployments reduced homicides, violent crime, or gun violence.”

That scathing finding led Trump to threaten another defamation lawsuit, arguing that the report was false and malicious. Trump’s personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, contacted CAP on Monday with the lawsuit threat, giving the liberal think tank until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract the study and say sorry to Trump, The New York Times reported.

“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates,” Trump ranted earlier this month. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.”

CAP President Neera Tanden called Trump’s allegations “baseless” and vowed to fight back.

“Silencing research that is inconvenient to government policy is anathema to free speech and the First Amendment,” she wrote on X. “CAP will neither cower nor bend to this attack on independent research.”

A similar report from The Washington Post this month found that the crime numbers Trump so often touted in Washington, D.C.—an 88 to 92 percent decrease in crime and an 18 percent decrease in homicides—were due to a downward trend in crime that appeared long before the National Guard did.

This all of course means that American taxpayers paid billions of dollars for the National Guard to loiter in the streets of blue cities—in metro stops, in beautiful public parks, by Trader Joe’s— for nothing.

President Trump isn’t spending any campaign cash on close midterm election races, irking his fellow Republicans and putting contests like the Texas Senate seat in jeopardy. 

In July, Politico reports, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC didn’t spend any of its $400 million in the bank on Republican candidates, not even Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who only narrowly won his state’s GOP Senate primary and faces surging Democrat James Talarico. 

Republican donors say that Trump needs to step up to keep the Lone Star State from sending its first Democrat to the Senate since 1993, considering that he endorsed scandal-ridden Paxton at the last minute over incumbent John Cornyn. That endorsement was probably the deciding factor in the close runoff election and now Paxton is polling just one point ahead of Talarico, unheard of in staunchly red Texas. 

“The message to Trumpworld is, ‘you broke it, now you own it. You gotta spend some of your money to defend him because we’ve got bigger fish to fry,’” one GOP donor told Politico. 

A second donor told the publication that “the general view is that’s Trump’s responsibility to bankroll, especially since Paxton took out one [of] the GOP Senate’s best fundraisers and is currently running a lackadaisical campaign.”  

These donors would prefer to spend their money on open Senate races in Michigan and North Carolina, kicking out Democrats like Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and protecting vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents like Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska. 

“There’s a lot of people that, one, don’t really like Paxton at all, they think he’d be a terrible senator or they were loyal to Cornyn—or both,” a third GOP donor said to Politico. “This is a situation that we didn’t need to spend this money at all. We need it in North Carolina, in Georgia. To make Texas a toss-up is just a foolish, foolish decision.” 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is also staying out of Texas, preferring for now to spend its money on eight other races, making Trump’s unwillingness to open his coffers all the more glaring. While the NRSC plans to help set up a joint fundraising campaign with Paxton, any money above a certain amount would go back to the committee, according to Politico. 

Trump has not spent any of his campaign money on a candidate since March, and the candidates he endorses keep losing. He’s refusing to accept any blame for Republicans becoming more and more unpopular, either. It seems like he cares less about his party controlling Congress than he does about his own pet projects. 

Regarding the firestorm around President Donald Trump’s assistant Natalie Harp, Josh Marshall made an excellent observation in a recent Talking Points Memo newsletter: Trump has never been ashamed of his affairs, and the supposedly moral right wing ignores or even defends that stuff, similar to how the online far right worships Andrew Tate. It’s masculinity and virility…

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The Fix List In the last week, we’ve made a couple of small improvements to hopefully make scheduling posts easier. Now, instead of clicking on the word “immediately” to trigger the scheduling pop-up, the text says “Now or Schedule”, as below. And, once a post is scheduled, the time zone appears next to the scheduled time, which will hopefully remove some confusion. Next…

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Inside Washington

Do Democrats have a chance to flip a Senate seat in Arkansas? One poll this week suggested they might—stunningly finding that Republican Senator Tom Cotton is trailing his Democratic opponent in the deep red state. Experts say not to take it too seriously: The poll is almost certainly an outlier. But, they add, there might be some useful lessons in it.

This week, Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College released a survey of 1,217 likely Arkansas voters, finding that Democrat Hallie Shoffner, a farmer and businesswoman, was narrowly ahead of Cotton in the race for Senate. 47.4 percent of respondents said they would vote for Shoffner, and 44 percent backed Cotton. That’s a shocking result; the Cook Political Report considers the Arkansas race a “Solid Republican,” and another poll of likely voters found Cotton ahead by 16 points. Arkansas has been solidly red for around 15 years, and the last time the state elected a Democratic senator was in 2008.

So why does it look like a Democrat has a chance? One answer can be found in the nature of polling itself. “People like to sometimes call polling a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a measurement,” said Robert Coon, managing partner with Impact Management Group, who helped craft the questions for the poll. The poll doesn’t necessarily reflect how Arkansans will vote on November 3, but instead captures how they feel in the present, before spending and advertising has kicked into high gear.

“There’s a ton of time between now and the general election,” said Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College who helped design the poll. “Tom Cotton has dramatically more resources than Shoffner.”

Cotton ended June with nearly $10 million in cash on hand. Shoffner had just $864,000. In the 45 to 60 days before the election, both campaigns will likely start spending their money in earnest, putting up more TV ads and sending out mailers. According to Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University, most voters don’t start paying full attention to the candidates until at least September; it’s not unusual for earlier polls to yield some bizarre results.

So far in 2026, polls have already proven to be bad predictors of how voters actually behave in the ballot box. In Michigan’s Senate primary, polls predicted that Abdul El-Sayed would defeat Haley Stevens in a blowout. Instead, he won by just one percentage point. A similar phenomenon happened in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, where Francesca Hong was widely expected to beat David Crowley by double digits according to polling; she ultimately lost by less than one percentage point.

“People definitely shouldn’t overweight what one poll says, and there will obviously be more outside polls [and] inside polls that are done,” said Coon. “Really, it’s about a trend line.”

Still, the poll suggests that independents in Arkansas are increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump and the war in Iran. “Over the last eight election cycles, independent voters have traditionally [leaned] two to one with Republicans,” Coon explained. In this poll though, independents supported the Democratic candidate at a roughly two to one margin.

Even if Shoffner isn’t headed to a shocking win in a solidly red state, the poll still offers some useful guidance for the campaigns as they hurtle toward November. Cotton seems to be underperforming in the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas region, Barth explained. Shoffner has spent time in that part of the state, which could be paying off. But as spending increases, Cotton may put more resources into that area. Shoffner was also doing better with voters in suburbs around Little Rock than Democrats have done in past cycles. That could be because those areas are becoming more and more racially diverse and thus more Democratic, he suggested. Unsurprisingly, Cotton did well among voters 65 and older, a reliably Republican demographic in the state.

In November, independent voters will be the most important group to watch. Barth wonders whether the shifting attitudes among independents could be an early sign of the state becoming less red. “As there starts to be partisan change in a state or in a place, one of the first things we see is those independents start to kind of lean towards one party or the other,” he said. “And I think we are maybe seeing with younger voters some enhanced Democratic lean in response to frustrations with the Republican administration.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Xavier Becerra’s senior slump of a “campaign” for California governor continues, to sporadic outbursts of frustration from commentators. Reviewing the Democrat’s almost comically vague statements on everything from AI to gas cars to housing, CalMatters’s Jeanne Kuang notes that Becerra is practically guaranteed to “win based on Democrats’ voter registration advantage in California alone.” Political science professor Melissa Michelson tells Kuang that Becerra “doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb,” since the only thing he can do is “mess up.” It’s possible Becerra has taken that message a little too seriously: The Sacramento Bee’s Ben Paviour notes that Becerra has clocked “almost no public appearances” since his June primary win. Despite that, Capitol Weekly’s Dan Morain calculates that Becerra’s campaign raised $1.9 million “in the first 15 days of August” alone. While Becerra has said he’ll debate his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, they have yet to set a date. “I still don’t really know why Becerra is running and have no expectation that I’ll get an answer before he becomes governor, or even after,” Californian policy analyst Ned Resnikoff recently wrote on Bluesky. “This is a campaign for governor. Not a coronation,” griped Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times.

“Cities are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to address one of the most persistent sources of housing permitting delays: incomplete applications,” reports Robbie Sequeira at Stateline. Baltimore, Denver, and Los Angeles are some of the recent converts, joining many others who have already adopted or are exploring the option. Honolulu and Seattle have both reportedly reviewed the accuracy of the permitting tool CivCheck, finding it somewhere between 87 percent and 92 percent accurate while shortening review time—but no one seems to think it can fully replace human review.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In a new report for the Roosevelt Institute, Diana Hernandez and Lauren Ross argue that energy insecurity is no longer an issue just for low-income households, but is in fact a growing “mainstream crisis” driven not just by “rising utility rates, inflation, stagnant wages,” but also “outdated” housing stock and heating and cooling systems. Not much remains of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, they acknowledge, but some lessons can be pulled from the wreckage. Among them: Cross-agency cooperation between bodies like the Department of Energy and Department of Housing and Urban Development better facilitates “whole-home retrofits,” which are likely to be the most effective in achieving “lasting reductions in energy consumption and improv[ing] overall housing quality.”

Damian Murphy, Allison McManus, and Andrew Miller pen an article for the Center for American Progress evaluating the Iran war at the half-year mark. The bottom line: “Six months in, Iran has emerged as the strategic victor, and the longer the Trump administration fails to reach a durable conclusion to the conflict, the more the United States stands to lose.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Angie Nixon

Florida Representative Angie Nixon’s win in the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Florida was very surprising. Her opponent, Eugene Vindman, had a massive fundraising advantage. Nixon is a Democratic Socialists of America member and Vindman from the center-left Resistance wing of the party, so this is being covered as an ideological result, another win for the surging left. That’s true. But another explanation is that Nixon is fairly rooted in Florida and the political scene there, while Vindman is more of a national, D.C., MSNBC figure.

Bad Week: Natalie Harp

It’s not just that Jon Ossoff made a quip about her that turned into days of news coverage. It’s that many of the salacious, unflattering details that emerged about Harp must have come from other people inside the Trump White House. Her enemies are not only Democrats! That said, she truly seems to have an audience of one and there is little evidence that the president wants Harp to leave his side.

—Perry Bacon

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On this date in 1858, the first of seven of these historic events took place. What events were these? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

President Trump is trying to take away the American Bar Association’s ability to accredit law schools due to its being too woke.

The ABA is the leading accreditor for almost 200 law schools in the United States. Without its accreditation, a school’s graduates may not qualify to take the bar exam, and the school itself may not qualify for federal funding—two massive implications. Now the Education Department has published a 500-page report recommending the removal of that long-standing power because it believes the ABA is trying to “inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” assistant Secretary of Education David Barker said to The Wall Street Journal. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

The Education Department’s recommendation is not final and will take some months to be adjudicated, but the right is already celebrating.

“This will be one of the most meaningful changes to open doors for Americans and steer legal culture toward justice, not radical indoctrination,” former Trump adviser May Mailmain wrote on X. “The American Bar Association (ABA) is a left-wing advocacy group, filing 80% of its amicus briefs for liberal arguments and 0% for conservative. It uses its monopoly on recognizing which law schools are ‘accredited’ (get student loans) to force DEI hiring, recruitment, and inflate the cost of education.”

The right has railed against both the ABA and higher education in general for some time now. The Trump administration has ratcheted up those attacks, going after law firms that won’t capitulate and freezing university funding on DEI grounds. Accreditation is just another tool in this culture war—Trump even called it his “secret weapon.” It’s also worth pondering why the most corrupt president in history would want to cripple the law school education apparatus.

The ABA continues to maintain that it is operating well within the Education Department’s requirements.

“ABA presidents have issued 15 separate statements dealing with judicial independence, security and the integrity of the justice system in the U.S. in the past eight years. That’s Democratic and Republican administrations. And it’s not who we’re opposed to, it’s what we’re in support of,” ABA president William R. Bay told NPR back in 2025 when asked about accusations of liberal bias. “If we want America to be great, we must do the right thing every day. And that’s why we support the rule of law, the bedrock principles of our democracy. And that’s [why] we’re speaking once again for the rule of law, because there’s a clear pattern we see that would suggest it is under considerable duress.”

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on Donald Trump’s bandwagon in 2024, he brought with him the wellness-obsessed, vaccine-rejecting, food-label-reading Make America Healthy Again voters—who’ve been credited with helping Trump take back the White House.

But there are signs the MAHA-MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense stand-off over regulating the herbicide glyphosate. In our MAHA and the Midterms series, a partnership between Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network, we consider how MAHA is shaping the political landscape and upcoming elections. We start with a piece on the Iowa gubernatorial candidate harnessing MAHA’s power in farm country; stay tuned for more stories in coming weeks.

Zach Lahn Is MAHA’s Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be?He’s running for Iowa governor on promises to bust up Big Ag. But some farmers are questioning his authenticity.

Top image: Illustration by Mark Harris; Anna Moneymaker/Getty;  Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty; Getty (9)