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This story was originally published by the Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Democrats are poised to achieve trifectas—control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers—in at least three states in this year’s midterm elections, and maybe even more.

This matters because states play an outsize role in climate and energy policy. And when Democrats control state government, they often take substantial action.

This isn’t a partisan statement. It reflects recent history in Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Mexico, and Virginia, which passed climate and energy legislation after Democrats gained control. The states now have laws designed to cut carbon emissions and increase the use of renewable energy. Each state has its own story, and I spoke this week with people monitoring the races.

Headed into the election, Republicans have trifectas in 23 states, Democrats have them in 16 states and 11 states are split. Democrats have momentum, entering election season with a Republican president whose approval ratings are low, and Democrats have polling advantages on major issues, including concerns about consumer prices and access to healthcare.

One leading factor is “grassroots anger” about many topics, said Bill Kramer, vice president and counsel at MultiState, a lobbying firm that tracks state issues and elections. The anger is “not particularly partisan,” he said. “But if you’re the incumbent party, that’s who [gets blamed], and right now Republicans control a lot more of the states than the Democrats do.”

This landscape creates opportunities to advance climate and clean energy policy, said Caroline Spears, executive director of Climate Cabinet, an advocacy group that focuses on state-level issues and elections.

State trifectas “are the most powerful tool for 2027 policy outcomes on clean energy,” she said.

The outcome depends on the results of just a few races, Spears said. Fewer than 25 races out of more than 7,000 legislative seats could determine whether Democrats gain five new trifectas, or none at all, she said.

Here are those five states, plus some others to watch.

Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin are the most likely to shift from split control to Democratic trifectas. Since they’re in close proximity on the map, let’s call them the Northern Three.

To regain a trifecta in Michigan after two years of split control, Democrats need to add four seats in the House, maintain a majority in the Senate and win the governor’s race. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, is polling ahead of US Rep. John James, a Republican, in the contest for governor. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer cannot seek another term because of the state’s term limits.

In Minnesota, Democrats control the governor’s office and Senate and are in a 67-67 tie in the House. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, is likely to prevail in the race for governor against House Speaker Lisa Demuth, a Republican. The winner will replace Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, who decided not to seek re-election. The party had a trifecta until losing it when the 2024 elections led to a tie in the House.

Wisconsin has new legislative maps following a state Supreme Court ruling that found the previous maps improperly favored Republicans. The new districts give Democrats a decent chance of gaining majorities in the House and Senate, where Republicans now hold majorities of 54-45 and 18-15, respectively. Democrat David Crowley holds a narrow polling lead in the governor’s race over Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany. Incumbent governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, chose not to run.

Of the three states, Wisconsin has the most potential for rapid progress on climate and clean energy. The state hasn’t had a Democratic trifecta since 2010 under Gov. Jim Doyle and there is pent-up enthusiasm to take action. Wisconsin has plentiful wind power but has underachieved relative to its neighboring states in passing legislation that would encourage utility-scale and customer-owned renewable energy and battery energy storage.

In basketball terms, Democrats picking up trifectas in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin would be like making free throws. Doing the same in Arizona and Pennsylvania would be like making three-pointers.

For years, Arizona and Pennsylvania have been just out of reach for Democrats. The party has elected governors, but didn’t get full control of the legislature, which has constrained them.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, is running for re-election and leads in polls over Republican US Rep. Andy Biggs. Republicans hold majorities of 33-27 and 17-13 in the state House and Senate, respectively. An outside observer may look at those narrow majorities and national fundamentals and think it’s easy to flip both chambers in Arizona, but people who follow the state say the path ahead for Democrats, especially in the Senate, is far from smooth. “I feel like every year the Democrats are saying they’re going to try to flip that Legislature, and they just never do,” Kramer said.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, is running for re-election and likely to win. His Republican opponent is Stacy Garrity, the state treasurer. Democrats hold a 103-100 majority in the House and Republicans have a 27-23 majority in the Senate. Like Arizona, the path to a trifecta in Pennsylvania looks simple, but Republicans have a strong position in Senate district races and are fighting to regain their majority in the House.

“Those final couple of seats are really hard to flip,” Kramer said of Democrats’ chances in the Pennsylvania Senate.

That said, plenty of people said the same thing about the Pennsylvania House before Democrats won a narrow majority in 2022 and then held on to it. The main difference is that Republicans have run the Senate since the 1994 election, which is a much longer run than the 12 years of House Republican control that preceded the shift in 2022.

If Election Day turns out to be a rout for Democrats across the country, then it’s plausible that Arizona and Pennsylvania would be part of the national trend, giving the party hard-fought trifectas in each state.

The policy opportunities are substantial.

Arizona is rich in solar power, and clean energy advocates have long lamented that the state has underachieved when it comes to harnessing the economic and environmental opportunity of this resource.

Pennsylvania is a leading natural gas producer and has a powerful fossil fuel lobby. The state has low levels of renewable energy development. Even modest changes to state policy could open the door to more diverse power sources, with new solar and battery projects.

Nevada is a category of its own. This one comes down to the race for governor, with Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, running for re-election against Attorney General Aaron Ford, a Democrat. Democrats have majorities in the state House and Senate.

The only reason I didn’t put Nevada in the same category as Arizona and Pennsylvania is that Lombardo has the advantage of incumbency and has been ahead, or within the margin of error, in polls. The state has a history of surprising results, including Lombardo’s 2022 win over incumbent Democrat Steve Sisolak.

Neither Kramer nor Spears had a strong sense of which way the governor’s race is tilting.

The states that fall short of being trifecta opportunities for Democrats include Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Texas. If the party has a win for the ages, and Republicans suffer an apocalyptic defeat, then there’s a chance in one or more of those states, but the probability is low.

Kansas is the one state where Republicans are likely to win a new trifecta. In the governor’s race, state Senate President Ty Masterson, a Republican, is leading in polls over state Sen. Cindy Holscher, a Democrat. Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, cannot run because of term limits.

Kansas has a robust clean energy economy, with ample wind energy generation, but the state has shown little interest in passing laws to reduce emissions and support renewable energy.

Republicans also hope to attain trifectas in many of the same states that are in Democrats’ sights. If Republicans have a better-than-expected election nationwide, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin could become new trifectas for the party.

But at this point in the election season, the big picture is that Democrats are poised to gain ground. The main question is simply how much.

Just when you thought concerns over datacenter power generation in the US couldn't get any worse, the Trump administration gets rid of emissions restrictions on power plants. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live. The EPA is also considering getting rid of reporting requirements on small-scale polluters (e.g., datacenters with on-site power generation), meaning all those unrestricted emissions at new bit barns might not even be mentioned to the public. But hey, at least Nvidia is riding to the rescue with some datacenter energy efficiency improvements, as self-serving as they may be for the company's bottom line. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, systems editor Tobias Mann, and IT infrastructure reporter Dan Robinson as they discuss these developments and why coal may not come roaring back as a datacenter power source anytime soon. A lightly edited transcript is included below: Brandon (00:01): Hi everyone and welcome to the latest episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm Reg Reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and this week we have a couple of stories to review on the topic of datacenter power. AI is driving the construction of massive datacenters around the US, and people are beginning to push back. But recent moves by the Environmental Protection Agency are threatening to keep more people in the dark while making it easier to pollute in the name of progress. Some relief might surprisingly enough be coming from AI itself. And with me to discuss this is Systems Editor Tobias Mann and reporter Dan Robinson. Welcome to you both. Tobias Mann (00:35) Good to be here. Dan (00:35) Hi. Brandon (00:36) So Tobias, let's start with the story out of the AI Infra Summit this week from Nvidia. Apparently they've got some new iterations of some old technology that could make datacenters a bit more energy efficient, is that right? Tobias Mann (00:48) Yeah, it's kind of interesting because you start looking at this and going, Well, why does Nvidia need to care about datacenters? But as it turns out, it's a big bottleneck for their revenues. So this is, you know, all of a sudden something that they're really interested in because their ability to sell GPUs is entirely dependent on there being enough power or people being able to get more out of the power that they already have. Brandon (01:18) Right. Tobias Mann (01:18) And so this has kind of been the focus of this DSX platform that's been slowly rolling out since I think about around this time last year, they introduced this. And this is part of this AI factory push that they've been kind of dogging on for the last couple of years. and there's and there's some good news here because there's a lot of technologies that have been introduced over the last couple decades. You know, kind of based on the idea of as chips get hotter, we could be running datacenters more like smartphones. You know, you leave, you leave for the day. Brandon (01:56) Scaling up and scaling down, right? Yeah. Tobias Mann (01:59) And you don't need to be running your air conditioning on full blast. You're just wasting electricity. It's basically the same idea of getting all of the pieces within the datacenter talking to each other so that you can have those kinds of automations and then the deeper that automation goes, you could have it based on a kind of demand response from the workloads themselves telling the rest of the datacenter how to adjust its settings to run efficiently, but also keep everything within their proper operating margins. That's the entire idea behind what Nvidia has built with DSX. And this week, we got, prior to this, some hand-wavy kind of explanations. It all sounds good on paper, but this week we finally got some kind of proof of concept examples of how this is actually playing out in live deployments. Brandon (02:54) Okay, so that was not announced this week, but more like a 'Hey, yeah, you guys knew this exists, but here's some actual case studies or examples of this actually functioning in the real world.' Tobias Mann (03:06) Right. I mean, that's really kind of the thing that everybody who might adopt this needs to see. Because we've seen versions of this where everything's gonna talk to each other. Well, if you buy this thing from Schneider, we can't work with that, or you gotta put it through our software platform and certain capabilities get locked out. This is if you're in the Nvidia ecosystem, which everybody is at this point. Whether it's Vertiv or SN, because you have to buy their equipment and in order to deploy these GPU systems, you have to have power cabinets, you have to have cooling systems. Everybody has gotten on board, and so now you actually have a system where everything genuinely does talk to each other, and you can have these kinds of automation. Brandon (03:54) With, I'm assuming, AI. Is AI kind of the orchestration layer here, right? As opposed to trying to build APIs to make these things talk to each other in a more old-fashioned way, there's a little bit of an easier problem to solve here now that you have some machine learning to layer on top? Tobias Mann (04:10) I'm sure machine learning comes into play here. I don't know the degree to which AI is actually influencing how the platform works. I'm sure it does. Brandon (04:20) Okay. Tobias Mann (04:20) Because Nvidia loves to shoehorn AI into everything just as another claim to do it. Brandon (04:25) Of course. Tobias Mann (04:27) But the two examples that they gave are pretty interesting because they demonstrate how you can get more out of the available capacity that you have. And on the flip side of that. Not all datacenters are going to be running at full load all the time. And so they've also demonstrated how they can give back to the local grid during periods of you know high demand. You know, prior to us starting recording, we were talking about heat waves in London over the summer. This is a prime example of one of the things that they're doing with this DSX Flex program, where the utility can send a demand signal to datacenter operators to say, 'Hey, we're gonna need a whole lot of power because it's hot and everybody wants to run their air conditioning, and people are gonna be heading home early or starting them up before they normally would. Please cut your power.' That works great for things like forges and other, you know, systems where it's a switch and you can just say, 'Okay, we gotta switch off half of the equipment in the facility.' You go click, click, click, click. With datacenters, that's not so simple because you can't just shut off the machines. You gotta shut down the workloads. You have to let them get to this to a checkpoint where they can save. And so the the platform is built down to a granular level where you can have this demand signal come in and it automatically figures out what workloads can be shut down right away, which ones have to be kept running, which ones can be migrated to a different datacenter, kind of chasing the sun, so to speak in order to keep the grid stable. And one of the big benefits that Nvidia sees in all this is again it comes back to money. I mean it it sounds really great for the you know you and I who are worried about brownouts during a hot summer day, but from Nvidia's perspective, if the utility knows it can claw back, say 30 percent of the power that's been allocated to the datacenter, they might green-light, say, a 150 megawatt datacenter buildout, knowing, if they're not quite sure about, say, fifty megawatts of that capacity. Whereas they might not have said, you know, we can give you a hundred, but we can't give you a hundred and fifty. You know, so there's you know, there's that and every kilowatt that gets opened up is an opportunity to drive revenues for Nvidia. Brandon (07:06) Right, right. And of course, you know, I think as you mentioned toward the end of your story, this is not also an entirely benevolent move on Nvidia's part either, right? But this is creating a lot more lock-in for them, right? Like you said, companies using other chips, other designs like AMD kind of setups and everything, they're gonna have to probably invent their own version of this, you know, because Nvidia is creating an opportunity for people to to get more hardware more locked into Nvidia's ecosystem, basically. Tobias Mann (07:34) Right. You know, the other example that they gave, this was working in collaboration with Lambda Labs, was this what is it called? DSX MaxLPS. And it was, you know, this example of where by knowing where all of the power is going in the datacenter, you can run a whole lot closer to the actual capacity available to the facility. Cause usually traditionally you might run at 80 percent of the available capacity because if you had too many things click on, or you had failures for redundancy, you didn't want to end up in a situation where you were pulling more than you actually had access to. And so this visibility lets them run closer to that edge. Now, from an economic standpoint, somebody buying into this sees that they can get 19 GPU nodes running in a power envelope that previously supported only 16. That's a huge economic driver and a very attractive one to go with Nvidia now. And so they're building this walled garden around this AI factory push where it's like, well, it's an Nvidia AI factory. So you can cram more GPUs into the same number of megawatts that you would have, and you can probably convince your utility to give you more megawatts than they otherwise would, because we have it so tightly integrated that you know it won't be a problem. Whereas if you go with AMD or any of these other AI chip startups, you might get some of those features from Schneider and others, but it might only work with their equipment. It might not be as feature rich. And so it then becomes just a you know a gamble to go with somebody else other than Nvidia. This is the sales pitch here. So then you know, once you build this in a DSX spec Nvidia AI factory, are you going to risk putting in AMD GPUs? Now Nvidia says that they're going… Brandon (09:45) Yeah, that won't talk or to you know, yeah… I was gonna say that these GPUs might not talk to the rest of the stack now, right? Tobias Mann (09:55) And so there is definitely some walled garden building going on here and some lock-in. I don't know how long it will last though, because I think Nvidia recognizes that that kind of lock-in is potentially problematic from a regulatory standpoint, but also they want everybody building to their spec. And so, in some cases, they have opened up the technology so that everybody can have like 80 percent of it, and then they get like the 20 percent on top of extra feature stack with their stuff is enough for them to be okay. They did this with their rack designs with MGX. So we might see something like that happen from them just to get more datacenters buying into the design. But it's hard to say at this point. They may just use it to block out competition. Brandon (10:49) Yeah, we'll see, right? I mean, but it seems like in general this might have a net positive effect on datacenter energy footprints, right? We're talking running more efficiently, you know, getting more out of each kilowatt, out of each megawatt. This is a net positive for energy concerns when it comes to datacenters, it seems. Tobias Mann (11:09) I think I think this is absolutely the right direction that we should be going. Historically, and I know Dan has written about this quite a bit over the last couple of years. Historically, these power saving features don't get used. They're there and they look really promising, but when you have a datacenter that's serving customers, there is a great deal of concern about meeting your SLAs. And so the risk inherent to enabling these kinds of power savings features has always been that you might not, you know, you might lose performance, you might introduce latency, you might not be able to reach your your SLAs, and so you might end up not being able to charge your customers for the the work that has been done. And the power but the power consumption prior to what, 2022, 2023, has been pretty benign relative to the kinds of datacenters we're talking about now. Brandon (12:11) Sure, yeah. Yeah, this is a huge increase. It is interesting that we have kind of like this opportunity for AI to solve a bit of the problem that didn't exist before AI came along and and and caused this, right? So I guess we'll see. There's some good news here, but on the flip side of that, we have some recent announcements out of the EPA that make the datacenter energy problem, at least in the United States, seem like it's gonna get a heck of a lot worse. Dan, you covered a story in late August about some proposed changes with public reporting requirements for air pollution. Is that correct? Dan (12:45) That's right, yes. The story was that the EPA was proposing to eliminate basically federal rules that would require participation in minor source air permits is what it's called but what it basically boils down to is to whether there's any kind of public notification about things like datacenters that are going to be causing pollution and whether there's any feedback on that, whether there's any say, the public gets any say on it. Dan (13:34) So, at the moment, this thing exists as part of the Clean Air Act, I believe, but they want to undo that and basically it will go back to state level, so it will be up to the local authorities as to whether they actually bother to do that when there's a new datacenter or something being built. Brandon (13:58) Right. So when we're talking about sort of minor or small emissions issues. This is we're talking about like datacenters that are building their own on site energy production facilities, correct? I mean, this isn't talking about grid connection or new construction being done for existing grids that datacenters are gonna connect to, or is that covering both here? Dan (14:21) Yeah, I mean it's basically causing anything which might add extra pollution into the area. It possibly doesn't include things like power stations and things which is where the minor comes in. But a lot of datacenters these days are generating their own power and effectively having small on-site power stations in addition to the backup power generators that they all have. And so it's just a kind of... They pitched it as a rolling back of power, deregulation, removing unnecessary regulation. All these woke rules that people have to follow. Tobias Mann (15:16) I was gonna say that I feel like the residents of Boxtown, Tennessee probably would disagree with all of this already. Brandon (15:22) Mm-hmm. Tobias Mann (15:23) You know, the emissions coming off of these quote unquote portable gas generator plants, that they're portable in the sense that they're they're an extra wide load that can be hauled behind a a large semi-tractor. and what if you looked at the Colossus datacenter that SpaceX AI built what a year and a half ago. They had 30 some of these running because they were waiting on a 150 megawatt interconnect to the utility. Dan (15:59) I think it was more than that at one point, wasn't it? Brandon (16:01) Yeah, I think it ramped up. I think there's maybe fifty or more there now. Yeah. Tobias Mann (16:05) Yeah, yeah, it's increased now. But the challenge that happened was for a certain period of time, I think it might have been about a year that they could run these gas generator plants without all of the air handling equipment that would make them more you know, less polluting, and cut down on the smog-generating materials. And so they just didn't. They're just like, well, you know, we're not required to. Brandon (16:33) Right. I mean that's the thing. There's no requirement. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing is there's no requirement that these companies or that datacenter operators who are bringing on their own site power have to choose the cleaner version, right? There are multiple kinds of gas turbines available. Some, like you said, include pollution mitigation technology, but there's nothing that says you have to use that and they're more expensive. So if you're a datacenter operator that's trying to keep their bottom line up, you're probably not gonna opt for these if you don't have to. And now if you don't have to report to the local community the potential emissions from this thing, there's even less of an incentive to do that. Dan, do you know if this rule has been finalized or is it still the sort of thing that's in discussion? Dan (17:15) This was only a month ago, I don't think I have heard about it being finalized. Brandon (17:21) Okay. Dan (17:23) We heard of it because of a pressure group called the Environmental Protection Network, which is actually made up of former EPA employees who were raising the alarm about this because they were saying that apart from the greenhouse gases, extra greenhouse gases that might be emitted by these things. There's actual pollution, know, the nitrogen oxides that generate smog and also, there can be heavy metals and other pollutants in there which are not very nice to breathe in. Brandon (18:03) No, definitely not. I mean, and so that's still kind of in the maybe this will make things worse category. But in the actually making things worse category, I don't know if you guys had heard this week that there was a G20 energy meeting in Houston, that was going on and the Environmental Protection Agency, which I mean, is barely even worthy of that name anymore, they decided this week to announce that they were eliminating these Biden-era greenhouse gas requirements for power plants, basically getting rid of restrictions on on power generation facilities that capped their greenhouse gas emissions, right? And they basically were saying in the EPA's press release, they said, you know, this was gonna be a cost-saving measure, it was gonna save $310 billion. and there were some additional proposals they rolled out to eliminate, quote, every remaining greenhouse gas standard for the power sector, unquote. And that they said would save an additional $370 billion in direct compliance costs, which, you know, fantastic, right? But now they're saying that this is gonna probably cause an increase in coal production for power sector use by a factor of 10, right? So basically we're being reintroduced to the era of soot covered cities and smog and, like you said, heavy metals and all this in the name of essentially. I think a lot of this is probably gonna be rolled out to support the AI industry, right? I mean that's what the power push is for right now. So why is the American government deregulating pollution requirements if for no other reason than to ensure that we win this supposed AI race that we're in with China right now? Dan (19:42) Yeah. Tobias Mann (19:42) Yeah, this is one of those that the US government is sometimes disconnected from the realities of the power sector. There is the potential that we'll see increased coal use. I'm not sure that that will necessarily be true. One of the factors here is that getting coal out of the ground and maintaining those facilities is just getting really expensive in general relative to other sources of electricity. But the other part of this is that power utilities in the United States have been burned so many times on speculative markets that they're really conservative to the point of being infuriating to the AI sector. They don't want to add capacity based on demand that hasn't materialized yet. Because if they do the ratepayers end up paying some of it, but they end up eating a lot of the cost as well, 'cause they can't put you know, they can't push the entire cost under the ratepayer. It's just not possible to do that. And so while the vision of Blade Runner and and the blackened sky and the perpetually orange smog is a visceral one. At this point the fuel costs have gotten to such that I don't know that this is going to necessarily have the negative impact that we fear, but also I don't necessarily think it will have the economic impact the US government is pushing with this. Brandon (21:18) Yeah, I mean Trump has been touting bringing back coal for a long time, right? And he's gonna cause a resurgence in the coal industry. And it hasn't happened, right? Because like you said, it's prohibitively expensive. A lot of the mines have already shut down, or getting the remaining coal out is more and more work. I hope you're right. Dan (21:37) Sure, sure. But some of those coal-burning power plants were due to have closed down and basically the demand for energy has meant that they're being kept online instead of being shut down. Brandon (21:54) Right. Right. And if they are still online and they're now less beholden to environmental regulations, I mean that's probably a net negative, especially now if there's at least enough demand to keep them fired and keep them fired with less for new requirements. And also on again, right, I'm sure this touches on-site power generation for datacenters too. Right. If you're building your own datacenter and installing gas turbines – I mean, no one's going to be putting coal-burning generators beside a datacenter anytime soon. Tobias Mann (22:24) One would help. Brandon (22:25) Yeah. But, you know, I mean they do mention natural gas in this too, right? So they're basically saying that they want to eliminate clean energy requirements for natural gas turbines too. So, you know, even if you theoretically wanted to get these cleaner ones, that might get harder if there's already a huge wait for turbines. Tobias Mann (22:44) Right. Brandon (22:44) That the queue is getting bigger. So I can't imagine that everyone's gonna wanna burn this gas responsibly. So we're gonna get in the longer line for cleaner turbines that are now necessarily not gonna be in as high demand because there's less requirements that we have to do this. So they've been actually repurposing old jet engines to turn them into the kind of turbines that can be used to generate energy. Yeah, and as we all know, jet engines are incredibly environmentally efficient. Tobias Mann (23:18) There's also an interesting play here. The race to get compute capacity up is so intense right now that the cost of choosing the most efficient fuel or energy generation mechanism is in some cases secondary to getting it deployed in the first place. And so we've also seen adoption of natural gas fuel cells. So similar to what you see and have seen in NASA spacecraft, but instead of hydrogen and oxygen running on these things, it's predominantly natural gas reacting with oxygen to form CO2. The greenhouse gas emissions are roughly similar to gas turbines, but the pollutants tend to be fairly smaller because you're not combusting anything. So you don't necessarily have as much kind of smog producing output from these systems. The downside is that they're not particularly power dense and so you need a ton of these fuel cells and they're expensive. Brandon (24:28) Right. Tobias Mann (24:28) But if you can't get turbines and you want your capacity now, that's what people are doing. Brandon (24:33) Yeah. That would be nice if more of those became more of an option, right? How are they to produce compared to turbines? I mean the turbine queue is big, but are these fuel cells, can they ramp up production quick enough that they're a better option? Tobias Mann (24:47) This is an open question right now. There's I think what one or two companies in the US that actually make these things. Brandon (24:54) Okay. Tobias Mann (24:55) Bloom Energy is the big one and big neoclouds like Nebius are deploying them in pretty large volumes in order to to supply power to their datacenters because they wanna deploy in areas that have good connectivity but are constrained on power. It's oftentimes in those situations easier to get a natural gas line out to the building, than it is to get, you know, transmission lines hooked up. Brandon (25:22) Sure. Yeah. Dan (25:23) Yeah, yeah, in fact there was a report out just this week that the ability to build extra infrastructure, the grid, is actually holding back on datacenters. It's outpacing the rate at which the utility companies and the grid operators can actually add and build new lines to supply the power. Brandon (25:52) Yeah, I believe it. I believe it. I mean there's a lot of projects happening in a lot of very remote areas, you know, that require a lot of transmission. Up in my part of Michigan, no one is actually discussing building a datacenter, but a lot of people are worried about it. And those of us who know this stuff are pretty much like, you need to relax. There's no transmission out here. And also beyond that, there's no space for someone to build their own co-located power facility. You know, there's a lot of protected land, a lot of occupied space and the zoning and everything, you know, doesn't allow it. But there are a lot of areas like mine where there is space, but no transmission lines. And yeah, those areas are ripe for the picking, but you're gonna need to supply your own power. Tobias Mann (26:39) Hermantown, Minnesota, right outside of Duluth on Lake Superior. Lots of water, plenty of power, cheap land – and not popular at all. Brandon (26:51) With datacenter operators? Yeah. Yeah, totally. And that's the thing is I think a lot of people they Tobias Mann (26:52) No, no, not popular with the residents of that area. So yeah. Brandon (27:00) They don't want them here. I mean, people don't want them here. People don't want them there. No one wants these things in their backyard, but increasingly I feel like we're running out of space to do that. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Dan, I guess you're just lucky you're not here dealing with all this deregulation. Hopefully the air stays a little bit cleaner over over where you're at. You know, and I hope Tobias is right that we don't have a whole bunch of coal plants going up in the near future. Dan (27:26) Yeah, we've got rid of all our coal plants over here, but there is a shortage of energy and we've got the most expensive energy in Western Europe, if not the whole G7 in the UK. And there's no shortage of datacenters. Tobias Mann (27:46) No. Brandon (27:46) Yep. Dan (27:46) Plenty of datacenters and I know of at least three new ones that are being built within about a 20-mile radius of where I live, which is just to the north of London. So they're coming. And people are worried about where the energy is going to come from to supply them. Brandon (28:09) Totally. Tobias Mann (28:10) I guess here's a good place for us to place the bet. Which happens first? Small modular reactors or space datacenters at scale? Dan (28:22) Hahaha Brandon (28:23) My god. Yeah. I don't want to take a bet on either side of that equation because I don't know that I'll be alive to see either one happen. I would love it if small modular reactors won out because that would mean that there would be more safe nuclear in more places. But I jeez, I don't see it happening anytime soon. Tobias Mann (28:45) If you thought the NIMBY for datacenters was bad, just wait till you attach nukes to the sides of them. Brandon (28:52) I can't imagine people will like it even if it is relatively safe compared to you know, we're not in the Three Mile Island-Chernobyl era of nuclear power anymore. But I don't think very many people have really bothered to learn to understand that. So, well, no matter which way it swings, we will be here at the Kettle to tell you all about it, and we hope you'll tune in and not be too miserable by the end of our future episodes. Thanks for listening. ®

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

A new poll came out that offered a striking finding. The Democratic candidate has a real lead in the Senate race in Alaska. One of the pollsters behind that survey is Donald Trump’s pollster. A quality poll like this one, putting Democrats ahead in Alaska, suggests a Democratic Senate takeover has become a real possibility. Republican panic is becoming palpable in a series of new leaks, with one Republican saying the midterms will be a bloodbath. There’s still a long way to go, though. The Senate is very, very tough, and a lot can go wrong.

So we’re lucky to be talking about all this today with the Democratic pollster on that Alaska survey, John Anzalone. John, thank you so much for coming on.

John Anzalone: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: OK, so your new poll is with Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio. It’s for AARP. It’s a very good poll, and you find Democrat Mary Peltola leading GOP Senator Dan Sullivan by 46 percent to 41 percent.

Then, after ranked-choice processes run through, Peltola is up 53 to 47. John, you rarely get quality polling out of Alaska. So this is quite something. Can you tell us what struck you about what you found on the head-to-head?

Anzalone: There’s a couple things going on. First off is that, you know, Mary Peltola is a really good candidate. If you talk to people in Alaska, one of the big things about her candidacy is that they believe that she is an Alaskan, and her Alaska kind of defines her.

But what we see in the internals, for example—we see this all across the country, we just came out of the field, for example, in Texas—we see this same dynamic where, one, Mary is consolidating Democrats at a higher rate than Dan Sullivan. But the real story is with independents. She leads 58 percent to 26 percent. That’s a 32-point margin.

Peltola has a 60 percent favorable with independents, is plus 30 in the favorable, not favorable. Sullivan, again, just underwater with independents, because independents right now have left Republicans. And so Sullivan’s favorable among independents is at 26 percent, 53 percent unfavorable.

So his rating is underwater by 27 percentage points with independents. So that kind of becomes the whole story there, is what’s happening with independents.

Sargent: Well, I’ve got to think that you’re not going to see something like this with independents, this kind of Republican collapse, without Donald Trump. Trump is underwater in Alaska in your poll, at 45 percent approve to 53 percent disapprove. That’s striking. Trump won Alaska in 2024 by 54 to 41. That’s a 13-point spread. He’s now eight points underwater. That’s a big swing.

But what I saw in there is that Donald Trump in Alaska—again, a state he won by double digits—is thirty-eight points underwater with independents. I mean, that’s just crazy stuff. Let me ask you, though, John: you don’t get a Republican collapse with independents without Trump collapsing among independents. That’s what’s driving this, right?

Anzalone: Well, I think there’s two things. Absolutely correct. What’s stunning is that Trump’s disapproval is minus 38 with independents. The Democratic Party has terrible imaging; in this state, it’s underwater by 14 points. But the other thing is, the Republican Party’s image has collapsed from January, right? It’s minus seven here, not as bad as Democrats. But again, when you take a look at independents, the Democratic Party net favorable is only minus one. The Republican Party image is underwater by 34, even though statewide they have a better image—there’s more Republicans, et cetera, et cetera.

So it is a combination of Trump and the Republican Party writ large. He without a doubt has caused this problem. You’ve got the combination of tariffs and the Iran war, either increasing gasoline prices or grocery prices or utility prices, et cetera. This is expectations not being met. They thought he was the economy president. They anticipated that he would fix the economy and make it roar. And now they’re seeing gas prices at 4.33. They’re seeing diesel at six something. They’re seeing ground beef almost—well about six dollars.

If you get in and talk to real people, they are struggling. And it’s not just a matter of that they are struggling—they don’t see a way out. And that’s where you get in real trouble, is, you know, how are they looking not only at the present, but the future? And that’s caused the Republicans a problem.

Democrats don’t have a great branding. Like, there’s not a whole lot of positive things that people say about Democrats. And so we’re winning when they’re losing, and they’re losing spectacularly on just about every diagnostic.

Sargent: Well, we are getting more signs of Republican panic. Republicans leaked to the Times that they’re quietly considering diverting resources away from the Georgia Senate race, which may mean they think Jon Ossoff’s win might be unstoppable at this point.

Another GOP pollster from Florida leaked to Axios, saying the party is just bleeding Hispanics. This is quite a quote from this pollster: “The support is just evaporating, the economy sucks, and ICE is just out of control.” That’s what’s driving Hispanics away in huge numbers.

And another GOP consultant on a lot of top races literally sent a turd emoji to a HuffPost reporter who asked about how the polling is looking.

Anzalone: When it’s a really good Republican year, you see a lot of Republican polls being released publicly, right? And when it’s a good Democratic year, you see a lot of Democratic polls released publicly. That’s just kind of how you do it, right? And you don’t see a lot of Republican polls being released right now.

And, you know, when they’re doing it, they’re in Trump-plus states, and they’re releasing it just to show that it’s closer, it’s within the margin of error.

Sargent: Well, you mentioned your poll of Texas, which I want to talk about for a sec. Just to remind people, you found James Talarico leading Ken Paxton by 48 percent to 44 percent. This is the AARP poll. But here again, you found Trump’s approval at 43 percent to 54 percent disapproving.

Anzalone: Fifty-four percent. Yeah.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s in Texas—43 to 54 in Texas. And you have him thirty-three points underwater with independents again in Texas. I mean, I’ve been saying on this show that Trump’s collapse among independents is, like, an undercovered story. John, why is Donald Trump 33 points underwater among independents in Texas?

Anzalone: Again, I think it’s about expectations. They elected this guy to be the economy president, and it was his biggest strength, and now it’s his biggest weakness. And, you know, they’re hurting. People are struggling. I mean, Texas is a great example.

Again, you were talking about some Republican operatives—James Talarico is getting 60 percent of the Hispanic vote, right? And this was a place where Trump did really well with Latinos, so well that the legislature redid the congressional maps to have more Hispanic kind of Republican districts. That’s going to bite them in the ass, right?

I mean, Latino voters are persuadable voters, and they’re not going to be beholden to one party or the next. And right now they’re with Democrats. Again, young people and Latino voters are coming home, right? There’s good consolidation. African American voters, good consolidation.

I think it’s taken a long time for guys like you and me to believe Texas is real. And it took me until mid-September. Texas is real. It took me a long time to get there. And one of the big reasons I think that it’s real is candidate quality, right? You just get a feeling that Paxton is such a bad candidate and has so many negatives on him on the corruption side, people get a bad feeling about him.

Sargent: Yeah, he’s just a nasty fucker, let’s face it.

Anzalone: That money is not going to matter, right? And James Talarico is just so unique and he’s so different. And he can sit there—

Sargent: Different. That’s the key, John.

Anzalone: Well, he’s, you know, as a Christian, he’s something new.

Sargent: He’s something new. And I want to ask you about Talarico for a sec, because in your polling, the AARP polling of Texas, you find the Democratic Party really in the toilet, right? Which isn’t surprising, because it’s Texas.

But Talarico seems to be running well ahead of the party, right? Why is that? And let me ask you this too: they’re going really heavy with the anti-trans attacks. Are those not working? And why not? And why is Talarico running so far ahead of the party?

Anzalone: You know, let me tell you what. I have a couple theories. One is just Paxton—they just don’t like Paxton.

Two, you know, you do get a feeling that the trans issue has just run its course, right? I mean, it was one thing with Kamala Harris, because it was her own words. She was sitting there in an interview talking about supporting federal funding for prisoners getting trans surgery, all that type of stuff. And so, one, I think voters’ bullshit meter is really high, and they don’t necessarily believe all of it.

But the other thing is that this is not an important issue to them. Like, they are worried about the cost of gasoline and ground beef and what it costs to get school supplies to send their kids to school. They’re concerned about the fact that health care is so expensive and insurance companies deny claims at a high rate. They’re concerned about the fact that groceries are so expensive and everything in their life is expensive. They’ll never be able to buy a home.

And so, quite frankly, the trans issues just seem small to them, right? And it’s just—I’m not saying that it won’t work in some places against some people. It depends on how you’re actually doing the negative. But I’ve got to tell you, in Texas, against a Christian—and everyone knows his faith, that he can talk about his faith—[I doubt] that it’s really going to work in any way.

Sargent: Well, OK, let’s talk about some of these other outer-tier races. Do you take any of them seriously? Do you take Nebraska seriously? Do you take Kansas seriously? Then of course you’ve got things like South Carolina, where there’s a very good candidate, but man, does that seem like an unlikely one? If you’re going to get a surprise somewhere—and you often do get surprises out of nowhere—it’s in an environment like this one.

This is where you’re going to get a surprise, with independents turning against the president by such dramatic numbers and Trump collapsing so badly and Republicans unsure what to do about it. If you’re going to get a surprise, it’s in this kind of situation. Are we going to get a surprise? What do you think?

Anzalone: Well, listen, clearly we don’t know, but where we get a surprise is where there’s a quality candidate and they’re different. Like this Kansas Democratic Senate—like, you’ve seen the debate clips, right? And, you know, I mean, he’s just really good. And you take a look at Osborn, who—Ricketts has one line, which is calling Dan Osborn a Democrat, right? And that may work at the end of the day. But the reality is, both of those races are close. And so it is causing Republicans agita. It means that they have to move resources.

Listen, right now the Senate Leadership Fund and the Republican National Committee and MAGA Inc. are making decisions. They’ve pulled out of Georgia. They’ve got Collins. Then they’ve got to decide whether they’re going to pull money in North Carolina, right? You’ve seen how much money they’re putting in Michigan, right? And in Iowa. And right now, Ohio is a friggin’ rescue mission.

And you remember this, when Tim Ryan was leading JD Vance in that U.S. Senate race and he was doing it all on his own. And then the Republicans had to come in and put in, what, forty or sixty million dollars for JD Vance to win this, where Ryan had no help from the Democrats.

Well, right now, Sherrod Brown probably has more money spent for him in the Democratic community, in the independent expenditure world. And it is a rescue mission by the Republican Party and MAGA Inc., et cetera, to go in there and try to pull this thing out.

Sargent: OK, well, so let me ask you this, then, John. What keeps you up at night? How does this not come together? What can still go wrong here? These races are all extremely close. You’re going to get outspent, I think, by a few hundred million dollars at the end of the day.

Anzalone: Yeah, I think there’s three things. I think that, listen, the Democratic Party image is in shit, and you’re probably going to see most of October more about these candidates being part of the Democratic Party and going up and voting for—so I think that they will turn on that and kind of move away from some of the negatives that they’re trying to do on this, that, or the other thing, right?

The second is money. I mean, money’s going to matter in some races. There’s just no doubt about it.

And the third that keeps me up is the stuff you don’t see. In 2024, you know, the Musk field operations in places like Pennsylvania really had an impact. The people that they had doing that—they had Phil Cox, who is an absolute brilliant Republican operative. I remember getting kind of reports from the Harris team, and Pennsylvania, we got all this stuff going on, we never see the Trump people.

Well, the reality is that Musk operation that was being run by Phil Cox was doing real work and actually had an impact. So there’s stuff going on out there in these battleground states that we don’t see, to try to move up the motivation level and get Republicans out—that we see in our polling right now that there’s low motivation.

So you could see that move up. You could see these operations actually work. So I think that’s really it. You know, I mean, it’s without a doubt the money, and it’s the operations that we really don’t see.

Sargent: So John, have Democrats learned from what happened in 2024? You pointed out—and I was one of them too, who was totally shocked by Elon Musk’s thing working. I didn’t expect any of that to happen. Are Democrats paying the right amount of attention to some of this more under-the-radar stuff that Musk is doing? Are Democrats focused on it?

Anzalone: Listen, here’s what you hope is happening. Like, you just saw Jon Ossoff transfer three million dollars into the coordinated campaign. Well, that’s all for infrastructure. That’s all for field operations. You know, probably again to help maybe Keisha Lance Bottoms to get that African American vote out in Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, et cetera. And, you know, clearly in North Carolina, Roy Cooper, who’s on his own—he doesn’t have a presidential, he doesn’t have a governor, and so that whole field operation he has to create himself.

But he did it in eight years as governor. And so, you know, I don’t really know each place, who has a strong field operation, who doesn’t. But the fact is that we’ve got to do some real work on the ground.

Sargent: If there’s a path, what do you think is the most likely path to the Democratic majority? What are the races that they’re going to win?

Anzalone: Well, I think we’re going to win Maine, right? And I think we’re going to win North Carolina. I’m the pollster, so full disclosure there. And then listen, we would be happy with fifty-fifty, even though that’s not what we want. But I actually believe that you then go to Alaska. I think she’s a unique candidate that truly fits that state.

Sargent: OK, that’s three.

Anzalone: And that’s three. And I think people will think I’m crazy, but I’m really bought in on Texas. And while Ohio is—Ohio is thirteen points, too, right? Ten, eleven, twelve, something like that. I think that race is still, you know—I think there’s going to be so much money in that race that we should be looking at it in two weeks, three weeks, et cetera. I think that’s more of a week-by-week. I just have this feeling that Paxton is so soiled that there may be no coming back.

Sargent: So you think Texas is more likely than Ohio?

Anzalone: People would think I was crazy saying that, because, sure [Sherrod Brown has] been up. But what I like about Texas is that [Talarico] doesn’t have to get fifty-plus-one. I think the libertarian’s going to do real work for him. There’s going to be so much money in Ohio—that’s the one place where it actually may be impacted.

And I think with the vice president being from Ohio, that is going to be the number one race in the country, and then followed by Michigan, because they feel that there’s an opportunity because of Abdul El-Sayed.

Sargent: Can Michigan and Maine hold?

Anzalone: Maine can hold. I think we’re winning. I think we’re going to win Maine. I feel very good about Maine. I think we all feel nervous about Michigan. And I think we’ll all feel nervous about Michigan until election night. And we all may be surprised that we didn’t have anything to worry about. We just don’t know yet.

Sargent: John Anzalone, the way you describe it, it sure seems like there’s a path. Thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Anzalone: Thanks for the time. Good talking with you, Greg.

Editor’s Note: 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 that the MAHA–MAGA alliance is wearing thin, from squabbles over inaction to a tense standoff 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.

The first time Jesse Gabriel was asked to consider a food safety bill, in 2023, he was wary—to say the least. Banning food dyes? It sounded a little “California woo-woo.” Gabriel, a third-term Democratic member of the California Assembly, was trying to establish himself as a pragmatist. And anyway, food wasn’t his thing.

Still, Gabriel took home a memo from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG). What he read, he said, was “mind blowing”: Page after page laid out the potential dangers of chemicals found in everyday foods. There was Red No. 3, a colorant that had been prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration for more than 30 years in cosmetics because of links to cancer in rats, but was authorized for use in the food we eat. There was potassium bromate, a dough conditioner banned in food in the European Union, China, India, and Brazil, but found in store-bought pastries and breads in the United States. He also learned about the so-called GRAS loophole, which permits US food companies to legally declare their own ingredients “generally recognized as safe” and to add them to the food supply without regulatory review.

“I always assumed there was someone in Washington, DC, watching my back. When I learned that that wasn’t the case, it actually made me angry.”

“My eyes were opened to a situation that, frankly, I had no idea existed,” Gabriel said. “I always assumed there was someone in Washington, DC, watching my back. When I learned that that wasn’t the case, it actually made me angry.”

That same year, Gabriel introduced the California Food Safety Act, which proposed banning five chemical additives: Red No. 3, potassium bromate, brominated vegetable oil, propylparaben, and titanium dioxide, a whitener then found in Skittles. Industry pushed back hard on what was soon dubbed the “Skittles ban”—a moniker that garnered headlines worldwide. But to no avail. After the bill was signed in October 2023, Gabriel’s staff jokingly gave him a Skittles pillow, with felt candies visible through a plastic window, which still sits on his office sofa.

As a presidential candidate and later as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put a new spotlight on potential dangers lurking in common foods, whipping up fear and outrage at the way federal regulators do—and, for the most part, don’t—police ingredients. Yet even as he and his Make America Healthy Again movement have touted food reform, the FDA under Kennedy has so far taken little meaningful regulatory action, opting to try to extract voluntary commitments from manufacturers instead.

Meanwhile, Gabriel has continued to introduce bills that have become laws banning certain dyes and additives from school lunches and establishing the nation’s first statutory definition of ultraprocessed foods. Yes, these are state laws, but, given California’s huge market, ones with outsize impact: It’s typically impractical for food manufacturers to reformulate their products state-by-state. And in any case, Gabriel’s laws have served as models: Similar food policy bills have since been introduced in 43 states, and 15 have passed legislation.

Gabriel has succeeded by educating colleagues on both sides of the aisle and forgoing political tribalism for bipartisan compromise. “Jesse Gabriel is determined to make progress, not just drop bills and issue press releases,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at EWG, which co-sponsored the California Food Safety Act. In a few short years, “he’s passed more food legislation than the most heralded food legislators have in their whole careers.”

With Kennedy either unable or unwilling to enact meaningful regulation, Gabriel has quietly become America’s de facto food safety chief. He and his counterparts in legislatures across the country are addressing concerns that cross party lines and succeeding where national political leaders have repeatedly failed. With the midterms looming and Democrats still searching for messages that resonate beyond their base, Gabriel is proving that smart food safety regulations are winning politics.

Gabriel, who is chairman of the California Assembly Budget Committee, looks over his notes as one of the budget trailer bills is discussed in the capitol in Sacramento in 2024. Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Gabriel, 45, has trim dark hair and a boyish face. In interviews, he is prepared, earnest, and polished—too polished, perhaps, in a moment when authenticity is signaled by unfiltered rants. When I asked him about the food he ate growing up, he said his parents were “mindful,” but he also ate lots of pizza and ultraprocessed food. He hesitated before continuing, “I don’t want my mom to be angry at me about what I said about her.”

Political engagement was a family tradition. Both of Gabriel’s parents were involved in protest movements while students at the University of California, Berkeley. Even as a child growing up in Southern California, Gabriel set his sights on becoming the third generation to attend the famously liberal university. Once there, he became deeply involved in campus politics, becoming president of the student government, a job that included overseeing 105 staffers and a $20 million budget. James Gallagher, a conservative Republican who served in the Assembly until he won a US House seat in a special election in June, went to Berkeley with Gabriel and remembers him as a tactician with a “knack for maneuvering things and being able to put himself in a position to pass things that he cared about.”

After college, Gabriel ticked the boxes of a progressive rising star: studying constitutional law at Harvard, working on the legal team that defended immigrant Dreamers at the Supreme Court. But he wasn’t focused on elected office until 2018, after the Assembly member in his suburban Los Angeles district resigned in a #MeToo scandal. Spurred by the chaos of President Donald Trump’s first term, Gabriel ran a campaign that promised to stand up to the administration, prevent gun violence, and defend progressive values. “Food,” Gabriel said, “wasn’t on my dance card.”

The $2.5 trillion food industry is used to getting its way. Attempts to regulate it are typically met with manufactured doubt about nutrition science, accusations of nanny-statism, and a reflexive defense of that all-American value: personal choice. Back in 2023, nearly two years before RFK Jr. built MAHA into a political force, Gabriel’s Republican colleagues—and many in his own party—were sympathetic to the industry’s concerns. As trade associations like the National Confectioners Association and American Beverage Association ramped up lobbying, some expressed concerns about regulatory overreach.

Gabriel responded by knocking on the doors of every Democrat and Republican on the committees that would decide whether to bring the California Food Safety Act to the floor. He explained the Kafkaesque system in which nearly 99 percent of new chemicals that enter the food supply use GRAS to bypass FDA review. He reframed the very idea of choice, arguing that parents really didn’t have one when the grocery store was filled with unknown, untested ingredients. He traded on his reputation as a “proud incrementalist” and moderate. “I don’t color outside the lines a lot,” he told me. “So I think people thought, if he’s worked up about this issue, there must be something going on.”

It worked. Shock at how little FDA oversight existed brought his colleagues around, just as it had for him. “I walked into a room with Republican colleagues who were like, ‘Happy to take time with you, but I’m not supporting this bill,’” Gabriel said. “And then I’d watch them go through the same process I did.”

The California Food Safety Act passed with a wide margin, including one-third of California’s admittedly small Republican caucus. But Gabriel made compromises to get there. The law ultimately banned four, not five, chemicals; titanium dioxide, once found in Skittles and more than 10,000 other food products, escaped the ban to ensure bipartisan support.

In 2024, Gabriel introduced the California School Food Safety Act, which proposed prohibiting public schools from serving meals containing six synthetic dyes, including ones found in breakfast cereals and flavored applesauce. The Consumer Brands Association, National Confectioners Association, and California Grocers Association joined forces to oppose it. Officially, their concern was that these additives were still permitted by the FDA. But it was really about money: The federal and state government spend more than $4.5 billion feeding children in California schools. If the bill were to pass, it would effectively mean reformulating products nationwide.

The California School Food Safety Act, which kicks in starting at the end of 2027, prohibits public schools from serving meals containing six synthetic dyes. Because California is so massive, the law will effectively force companies to reformulate their products nationwide.Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times/Getty

Again, Gabriel barnstormed the Assembly, sharing a 2021 study of state data that suggested a link between synthetic food dyes and neurobehavioral problems, including ADHD, the diagnosis of which has increased nearly 70 percent in children over the last 20 years. He also cast the ban as a boon for the state’s agricultural districts, which would have more opportunity to put their food on students’ trays. “A lot of the issues here are regional, not partisan,” said Heath Flora, a Republican Assembly member whose family has farmed in the Central Valley for nearly a century. “Jesse is one of those guys that’s willing to look at things from an agricultural perspective.”

In the end, not a single state legislator voted against the California School Food Safety Act.

By the following year, awareness of the possible dangers of food additives had surged. MAHA voters had helped swing the election in Trump’s favor. RFK Jr. was trumpeting the dangers of America’s lax food regulations in speeches, on podcasts, and on 60 Minutes, where he called ultra­processed foods “poison.” Suddenly, it wasn’t so crazy for Republicans to take an interest in food regulation—they had political cover.

Gabriel, though, has been careful not to align himself with MAHA. Instead, he has consistently cast the new regulations as being common sense, science-based, and, notably, given that it’s California and Gabriel didn’t need Republican votes, bipartisan—all the things that conventional wisdom says are dead in the Trump era. “In an era of hyper-polarization,” he said, “the right policy solution and the right messaging are the same thing.”

By the time Gabriel’s 2025 bill hit the Assembly floor, both Flora and Gallagher had signed on as co-authors. The Real Food, Healthy Kids Act established the nation’s first legal definition of ultraprocessed foods—something Kennedy has yet to do at the national level. The act also sets up a process to ban some ultraprocessed foods that contain both one or more additives and a high level of sugar, salt, or fat from California schools—including vending machines. Squarely in its crosshairs are products like sugary breakfast cereals, flavored milks and yogurts, and some versions of chicken nuggets. Flora told me that industry lobbyists were “surprised we were working with Jesse on it. But we did it because he gave us a seat at the table.” The bill passed the state Senate unanimously and the state Assembly by a vote of 79–1.

Gabriel and Jennifer Siebel Newsom at a press conference in 2025 where California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, which established the nation’s first legal definition of ultraprocessed foods and bans some ultraprocessed foods from school lunches.Jill Connelly/ZUMA

Gabriel’s success reflects a pent-up demand for action. Eighty-four percent of Americans say it is the government’s responsibility to keep food safe from harmful ingredients and pesticides, according to recent polling from progressive firm Navigator Research. Less than half believe it’s doing a good job. And no wonder. RFK Jr. began his term as HHS secretary with grandiose promises to reduce industry influence. But he appears to have fallen prey to the same corporate capture that he once criticized. Following a flurry of lobbying, HHS did the bare minimum when it finally unveiled its GRAS proposal in August: requiring only that companies—after unilaterally declaring new chemical additives in their products as safe—inform the FDA. (Previously, they weren’t required to report this.) Meanwhile, barely a day went by over the summer without more news of a cy­clospora outbreak hitting another region of the country.

“When you ask: ‘Is this FDA coming to the rescue?’ You quickly decide it’s the state legislatures who are going to protect us.”

But state legislatures have taken up the slack, introducing more than 150 food safety bills since 2023. The 15 states that have passed new laws are about equally divided between red and blue. “When you ask: ‘Is this FDA coming to the rescue?’” said EWG’s Faber, “you quickly decide it’s the state legislatures who are going to protect us.”

In February, Gabriel introduced his fourth food bill, which would create a voluntary label to help shoppers identify foods with minimally processed ingredients. The bill sailed through the legislature with little discussion and was on the governor’s desk at the time of this writing. Even the California Grocers Association is backing it.

Still, Gabriel and other state legislators worry that new federal laws might undo their progress. In 2025, Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall, a Kansas Republican, included state law preemption in his so-called MAHA bill, which advanced several of Kennedy’s priorities. But after public outcry and a near-revolt by MAHA-aligned GOP members of Congress, he was forced to strip the provision.

In April, Rep. Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, published draft text of a bill called the FRESH Act that proposed to override all state food chemical laws with a weaker federal standard, prompting protest from food safety advocates, including Gabriel. “This is a Trojan horse for the food chemical industry,” Gabriel said at a press conference. “This would move the federal government, which for many decades has been asleep at the switch, from inaction to obstruction—to actually getting in the way of public health, getting in the way of laws that are meant to protect our kids.” Cammack never formally introduced her bill. But Gabriel is still planning a trip to Washington in the fall to educate the California delegation, in case Republicans try to quietly add the measure to a must-pass bill.

Gabriel characteristically demurred when I asked him whether he considered himself the nation’s shadow food safety chief. “That would be a fairly bold claim,” he said. But he did suggest that Democrats across the country might follow his lead by championing food regulation; in his eyes, it’s one of the issues that actually unites people. “Eighty percent of Democrats and Republicans in Washington don’t agree on what day of the week it is,” he said. When it comes to food safety, “it’s fairly unprecedented, the depth of the support and the depth of the response. I can’t figure out why people wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

This story was produced with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Top image: Illustration by Mark Harris; Rich Pedroncelli/AP; Getty(4)

➤ Para leer el artículo en español, haga clic aquí.

Yumi Mondragon, 32, originally from Tokyo, Japan, worked a range of jobs in grocery stores and warehouses while raising her four children in Watsonville over the past six years. But she always felt a drive to get her American high school diploma so she could start her journey to becoming a dentist. 

The Rust project has warned that attackers appear to be targeting its contributors and crate owners in an attempt to compromise their devices and accounts, potentially allowing malware to be distributed through its package ecosystem. Posting to the Rust blog, security-focused software engineer Adam Harvey said the tactics resemble those used in North Korean fake recruiter campaigns. "A video call is set up for something positive – maybe for a job, maybe for a project, maybe for a contract opportunity – and then that's used as a vector to either get the target to install something on their computer (such as a purportedly missing audio codec) or execute another command (for example, via putting a command on the clipboard)," Harvey wrote. "These attackers are setting up new but legitimate-seeming company profiles, including plausible LinkedIn presences, in order to pass cursory inspection." The warning follows several attacks targeting the Rust community over the summer. In June, Rust developers were targeted with fake interview approaches purporting to come from a Singaporean venture capital firm. Matt Mastracci, who maintains packages on Rust's crates.io registry, said the supposedly recruiting business turned out to be defunct. The initial approach nevertheless appeared convincing and almost led to his machine being infected with a remote access trojan (RAT). The attempted deployment of a RAT resembles activity described in an international advisory issued last week by agencies in Australia, Germany, Japan, and the US. The advisory said North Korean operators had used fake job interviews to compromise more than 30,000 devices and steal over $10 million. Separately, Rust's package ecosystem suffered a supply chain attack in August, when malicious versions of the arrayref crate were published that downloaded malware onto users' machines. Arrayref had recorded 245 million downloads over its lifetime, although the malicious releases were available for less than two hours. The evidence suggested that a maintainer's credentials had been compromised rather than the malware being deliberately introduced by the project's developers. Harvey urged Rustaceans to scrutinize unsolicited approaches even when the sender appears legitimate, and to conduct calls through trusted platforms. ®

The City of Santa Cruz is hosting an open house on Wednesday to seek feedback on initial plans for intersection improvements and new bicycle facilities on Water Street and in the surrounding area.

The project, named the Water Street Safety Project, envisions one-way separated bike lanes on each side of Water Street between Poplar Avenue and Branciforte Avenue, an area where many Branciforte Middle School students commute to and from school every day. The city is also considering changes to the intersection of Poplar Avenue and Water Street, according to Transportation Planner Amelia Conlen.

Yumi Mondragon, de 32 años y originaria de Tokio, Japón, trabajó diversos empleos en supermercados y almacenes mientras criaba a sus cuatro hijos en Watsonville durante los últimos seis años. Pero siempre sintió el deseo de obtener su diploma de escuela secundaria estadounidense para poder iniciar el camino hacia la profesión de dentista.

Después de decidir regresar a la escuela el año pasado, y tras muchas noches de estudio sin dormir, Mondragon completó los cursos necesarios para obtener su diploma. Ahora, asiste a Cabrillo College y al programa de asistencia dental de la Oficina de Educación del Condado de Santa Cruz.

“Sentí que reiniciaba mi vida,” comentó. “Como un bebé, no tenía nada, no dominaba el idioma y me sentía en desventaja frente a los demás. Pero al obtener el diploma de secundaria, sentí que ahora tengo algo aquí [en Estados Unidos].”

Mondragon es una de los cientos de residentes del condado de Santa Cruz que han vuelto a estudiar en los últimos años para obtener su diploma, ya sea para alcanzar sus metas educativas o para cambiar de carrera profesional. El programa ha crecido significativamente desde 2021, cuando había solo 58 personas inscritas, hasta llegar a 251 estudiantes durante el último año académico, un aumento del 332%. Conocido como Career Advancement Charter (CAC), el programa gratuito de estudio independiente es administrado por la Oficina de Educación del Condado de Santa Cruz en distintos lugares del condado. Está dirigido a estudiantes mayores de 18 años que no cuentan con un diploma de escuela secundaria.

Nick Ibarra, portavoz de la Oficina de Educación del condado, señaló que alrededor de 25,000 residentes del condado de Santa Cruz no tienen un diploma de escuela secundaria.

“El crecimiento del programa ha sido significativo en términos relativos, pero en comparación con el número total de estudiantes que no tienen un GED ni un diploma de preparatoria, apenas estamos empezando a abordar el problema,” afirmó. “El potencial es enorme y la necesidad de estos servicios en nuestro condado es realmente significativa.”

Sony Guerra-Sanson, directora ejecutiva de Servicios de Carrera y Aprendizaje para Adultos de la oficina del condado, supervisa el programa de diplomas.

“Creo que la gente debe saber que nunca es demasiado tarde y que estamos aquí para servirles,” declaró. “El sistema, tal como está diseñado, no funciona para todos. Estamos aquí para ayudar a las personas a obtener su diploma y avanzar hacia la siguiente etapa de sus vidas.”

Yumi Mondragon, who graduated from the County Office of Education’s high school diploma program, stands for a photo. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

Ella señaló que el crecimiento del programa se debe principalmente a las recomendaciones de boca en boca de los propios estudiantes, y que el impacto de la pandemia en el empleo también pudo haber impulsado el interés en el programa durante los últimos cinco años.

Guerra-Sanson explicó que Career Advancement Charter ofrece servicios en Sequoia Schools en Freedom, en la Oficina de Educación del Condado en Santa Cruz, así como en centros penitenciarios y centros de libertad condicional en Santa Cruz y Watsonville.

Los maestros y el personal ofrecen horarios personalizados, tanto diurnos como nocturnos, según la disponibilidad de los estudiantes. Se exige a los alumnos que asistan a una reunión semanal de seguimiento con un profesor y que completen al menos 20 horas de trabajo escolar a la semana.

Guerra-Sanson indicó que la mayoría de sus estudiantes se identifican como latinos; al menos la mitad son padres o madres y, aunque la mayoría tiene entre 18 y 26 años, el rango de edad es muy variado. Comentó que muchos estudiantes provienen de escuelas de educación alternativa, algunos buscan cambiar de carrera y otros simplemente quieren terminar sus estudios de preparatoria.

A los 19 años, Rebeca Reyes — hoy de 39 años y recién graduada del programa — ya había tenido a su primer hijo y había abandonado la escuela secundaria. Para mantener a su familia, consiguió un empleo en el sector bancario, donde trabajó con éxito hasta que fue despedida de Wells Fargo en 2023.

“Durante el COVID, el mercado empezó a ponerse algo extraño… por un momento me sentí perdida,” dijo. “Pero como mi hija estaba en la secundaria, quería ser una motivación para que ella siguiera estudiando y fuera a la universidad, para que no siguiera mis pasos.”

Reyes se inscribió en el programa para obtener el diploma en el otoño de 2023 y lo terminó pocos meses después. Posteriormente, se inscribió en el programa de asistencia médica de la oficina del condado y, al mismo tiempo, tomó cursos en Cabrillo College. Completó el programa de asistencia médica en mayo de 2025 y sus estudios en Cabrillo en mayo. Actualmente trabaja como asistente médica en Dignity Health Dominican Hospital mientras postula a programas de enfermería. 

“Nunca es demasiado tarde para volver a estudiar y obtener un título,” dijo ella. “Todo es cuestión de creer en uno mismo y en que realmente se puede regresar.”

Para estudiantes como Reyes y Mondragon, que deben equilibrar diversas obligaciones, la flexibilidad del programa y el apoyo del personal son fundamentales para su éxito.

Mondragon ya tenía un diploma de su país de origen, pero descubrió que las carreras profesionales aquí exigían contar con un diploma de escuela secundaria estadounidense. Solo necesitaba cursar cinco asignaturas para obtener su diploma de EE. UU.: inglés, historia de Estados Unidos, economía, geografía y gobierno.

Algunas noches dormía apenas tres horas. Muchos días sostenía a su hija menor, Elaina, en un brazo mientras usaba el otro para hacer las tareas. Pero, avanzando paso a paso, ahora está en camino de convertirse en dentista.

“Tiene un gran impacto,” dijo ella. “Este programa me brinda una oportunidad para el futuro. Se trata del diploma de escuela secundaria; aquí no puedo hacer nada sin él. Ha impactado y cambiado mi vida.”

Para obtener más información sobre el programa, complete el formulario de interés para estudiantes en línea o visite su sitio web.

The post ‘Sentí que reiniciaba mi vida’: más adultos del condado de Santa Cruz regresan a la escuela en busca de una segunda oportunidad appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Everyone, it seems, is turning on Donald Trump these days. Two-thirds of Latino voters—a bloc that helped propel him to victory less than two years ago—now disapprove of his presidency. He has a 44-point deficit with young voters, another group he performed surprisingly well with in 2024. After the debacle of last week’s faux Republican National Convention, even some of his fellow Republicans are turning on him. His vice president, JD Vance, has resorted to begging voters to give his party another shot.

But there’s one group that’s sticking with Trump: billionaires.

According to a recent analysis from the Financial Times, “More than a third of the $2.8 [billion] raised for the current 2025-26 election cycle comes from the 20 biggest mega-donors,” 16 of which have “plowed money” into the Republican midterm campaigns, a marked shift from prior cycles. The balance in this election, political scientist Adam Bonica told the FT, is “especially skewed.” Remember, Kamala Harris significantly outraised and outspent—and ultimately lost to—Trump in 2024. Now, even as much of the country has rapidly recoiled from the president’s authoritarianism and demagoguery, billionaires are drawing ever closer to Trump, the MAGA agenda, and the Republican Party. What gives?

A closer look at the donors themselves tells much of the story. The shift is driven primarily by Silicon Valley boodle—particularly money tied to concerns about the regulation of artificial intelligence—as well as special interests like crypto and gambling.

Elon Musk is behind much of it. Despite his much-publicized rift with Trump last year—and his claim last May that he thought he had “done enough” political spending—the tech billionaire and gutter racist is spending hundreds of millions to elect Republicans. Much of that spending is driven by Musk’s increasingly reactionary views on gender and race, which he typically posts about several dozen times a day. But it’s also part of a larger shift away from Democrats in the tech world that is being driven by fears of regulation and government scrutiny, should the party regain control of Congress or the White House.

Musk, of course, is a special case—documentarian Alex Gibney, whose forthcoming film focuses on the billionaire, told the Los Angeles Times that he thinks Musk believes “he might go to jail” if Democrats are elected. But the larger dynamic is true for much of the increased spending on behalf of Republicans: Tech billionaires no longer see Democrats as allies because of shared social beliefs; instead, all they care about is immunity from regulation or scrutiny—which is why they’re cozying up to the GOP.

Musk is hardly alone among tech billionaires. According to the FT, “Crypto entrepreneurs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss donated about $11 million. Silicon Valley tycoons Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and their spouses have given $18 million, while OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his spouse donated $25 million.” It’s not hard to figure out what these investors expect from Republicans and fear from Democrats. They want concentrated power, and the right to continue to push cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence, and tech products with little oversight or regulation—even as concerns about the potential harms of AI and the data centers that power it continue to grow, and continue to alienate ordinary Americans.

Gambling and crypto interests have followed a similar pattern this cycle, although powerful companies in both fields have funded candidates from both parties. Fearing that Democrats will regulate—or perhaps even outright ban—their product as evidence of its obvious harms pile up, The New York Times reported earlier this year that gambling companies spent tens of millions in primaries supporting pro-gambling, anti-regulation candidates. Per the FT, Fairshake, a crypto super PAC, “has raised more than $99m in individual contributions—nearly all from a handful of companies and investors, including Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen/Horowitz.”

Naturally, this level of spending is hardly new in American politics, especially since the 2010 Supreme Court Decision Citizens United v. FEC opened the floodgates to corporate spending. But what’s notable isn’t just the pro-Republican tilt of the spending in this year’s election—it’s the fact that nearly every other group of voters is abandoning Trump and his fellow Republicans. With the possible exception of the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, this is maybe the worst time since the start of the launch of Trump’s political career to go all in on MAGA. Prices are rising, Trump’s approval is plummeting, and everywhere you look there are signs of dissatisfaction and anger over every facet of his agenda, from immigration to the war in Iran, to his efforts to remake the White House and the capital in his own image.

This is also a bad time for many of the interest groups that are spending big on behalf of Trump and his party. Voters are rapidly souring on AI amid concerns about its harms, use, and the current lack of oversight over a rapidly evolving technology whose own adherents are now saying it could end the human race inside of a decade.

Tech companies have faced growing antitrust scrutiny from both parties, though much of the serious inquiry has come from Democrats—Trump has sidelined pro-regulation voices in his party (including his own vice president) in favor of tech overlords who have shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars into his pet projects, like the White House ballroom. Some of that money may stem from a feeling of genuine kinship among an increasingly reactionary—or like Musk, a genuinely authoritarian, and racially motivated subset. But nearly all of it comes from billionaires representing industries that are desperate because they are hated as much as, if not more than, the president they are increasingly spending tens of millions to prop up.

“If something cannot go on forever,” the economist Herbert Stein once said, “it will stop.” A logician would scorn this as a tautology, but it’s a useful one for contemplating all sorts of problems that never seem to end. Some things that feel like they can’t go on may continue for a very long while. The subject of Stein’s famous comment (at a 1986 economic symposium) was the national debt. Today it’s more than ten times its size in 1986, so the national debt turns out to be something that can go on—if not forever (forever’s a long time), then far longer that anyone would have believed.

But a less dismal way to read Stein’s tautological pronouncement, subsequently known as Stein’s Law, is that some things that feel like they will go on forever may surprise us by stopping. An example would be what John F. Kennedy called America’s “long twilight struggle” against Soviet communism. When Kennedy recited that phrase in his inaugural address, the struggle had already lasted 40 years (subtracting four when the United States and the Soviets were allies in World War II). By 1961 the Cold War seemed a cinch to last another century. Instead, it ended 28 years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Today the bad thing that feels like it will go on forever—or anyway, for 28 more months—is the presidency of Donald Trump. Is Trump like the national debt, or is he like the Berlin Wall? Trump’s political career has certainly lasted longer than anybody (including me) could have conceived when it began in 2015, and his comeback after the January 6 insurrection was particularly unsettling. But lately I’ve started to consider that our nightmarish political epoch may end sooner than we expect. Even as some worry that Trump will defy the Constitution and run for a third term, I’ve come to doubt that he can finish his second.

My reason for thinking Trump may be like the Berlin Wall is the recent acceleration in Trump’s mental deterioration. Yes, I know that in May Trump passed his Montreal Cognitive Assessment with a score of 30 out of 30 (or anyway that’s what his doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said). I also know that while that test is said to be pretty good at diagnosing dementia, it isn’t great at detecting mild cognitive impairment. “Mild cognitive impairment” basically means grandpa doesn’t have to check in to an assisted-living facility. It doesn’t mean grandpa should be handed the nuclear codes (which apparently may reside soon inside the Arc de Trump). And mild cognitive impairment can worsen to severe cognitive impairment.

Questions about Trump’s mental capacity aren’t new. Nine years ago STAT News asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment to compare Trump TV interviews from the 1980s and 1990s to unscripted samples from 2017. “They all agreed there had been a deterioration,” wrote the late science writer Sharon Begley, “and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.” In the 1980s and 1990s Trump “spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought,” and so on. By 2017, Trump’s vocabulary was narrower and less polysyllabic. He repeated himself and lurched from one topic to another. The Maryland governor Martin O’Malley compared Trump’s 2016 rhetorical style to “a monkey with a machinegun.”

In 2024 a group of 225 mental health professionals said in a published open letter (bankrolled, granted, by an anti-Trump PAC created by George Conway) that Trump suffered from “malignant narcissism” and appeared “to be showing signs of cognitive decline” including “a dramatic decline in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words,” and “exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait).”

This past April a different group of mental health professionals, this time including both Democrats and Republicans, said in a follow-up statement that in the intervening 18 months Trump’s mental state had “deteriorated even further.” Among the worsening symptoms were “disorganized and tangential speech,” “unexpected sudden changes of course in strategic matters,” “episodes of apparent somnolence during critical public proceedings,” “advocacy of lethal force against civilians,” “encouragement of extrajudicial actions by armed supporters,” “seemingly compulsive, manic late-night communications—e.g., 150 social media posts in one night—fixation on perceived enemies, persecutory ideas.” One could go on, and they did:

Grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility, imagery of himself as Pope suggestive of a divine mission, being a mythical warrior hero, depicting himself as combat pilot—dropping feces on civilians, and claims that his decision-making authority is unlimited—with no need to consider domestic and international laws and constrained only by his “own morality.”

I added evidentiary links here with the vague hope that some potential swing voter might click through. But I doubt many of TNR’s regular readers will bother, because none of this is exactly a secret. Imagine that President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in October 1919, which incapacitated him until he left office in March 1921, was never hushed up by his wife and his Cabinet, but instead witnessed by the whole country. Trump’s present state is like that, only in this case it isn’t a stroke, it’s a mental unraveling. The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman said last month that Trump spends 70 percent of his time playing Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, gilding this, redocorating that, and building ever-more elaborate monuments to himself. Meanwhile, “the rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous media posts each weekend,” wrote Peter Baker in The New York Times earlier this month, “has become a fixture of the president’s second term, seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state.”

How long can this go on? Last week Thomas B. Edsall wrote in The New York Times that “no action to remove Trump from the White House will happen until he does something so threatening and damaging that drumming him out of the White House becomes an inescapable necessity.” But does anybody honestly think that day is far off?

Not me, and not most people. According to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll, belief that Trump already lacks the mental sharpness necessary to be president has risen from 43 percent in May 2023 to 59 percent in April 2026. Trump’s approval rating has been sloping downward since his second inauguration; the decline has been gradual, but consistent, with approval falling from 48 percent to 36 percent. The all-time lowest presidential approval rating in history, according to Gallup, was President Harry Truman’s 23 percent in late 1951 and early 1952. Trump’s approval rating is on track to beat Truman’s humiliating record.

Trump’s behavior will grow more erratic. Already Trump’s children are frantically stuffing their pockets with cash as if this bonanza could end tomorrow. If the midterms are as catastrophic for Republicans as political professionals expect, Trump’s political sway over his party will weaken dramatically, along with his ability to do mischief. Everything we know about Trump tells us he will not take that well. He’ll deny the midterm results as he denied the 2020 election, and will probably attempt some chicanery to keep newly-elected Democratic House and Senate members from being seated. I believe he will fail. But whether he succeeds or fails, anything Trump does to further subvert democracy will drive his approval ratings down further, and drive further upward the public’s conviction that he’s lost his marbles.

There is a point at which Trump’s approval number will fall so low, and make Trump such a liability to fellow Republican officeholders, that they’ll move to get rid of him. I don’t know what that number is, but I expect he’ll reach it during the first half of 2027. The mechanisms to get rid of Trump are pressuring him to resign, as Republicans did to Richard Nixon in 1974, or impeaching him, as has occurred twice already with Trump. Getting Trump to resign will be at least as difficult as wrestling the car keys away from grandpa. So probably the mechanism will be impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, and this time I think the necessary 67 Senate votes will be gettable. Among other benefits, moving Trump out will allow the GOP to run JD Vance as a presidential incumbent, which is probably their best shot at holding the White House in 2028. There’s a decent chance Vance won’t be able to wash off the stink of Trump and will lose, as Gerald Ford did in 1976. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

This scenario may strike you as implausible. But before you dismiss it as fantasy, show me a more plausible scenario in which an increasingly gaga Trump remains president until January 2029. When I try to imagine that, my mind just goes blank.

If I said to you, “Quick, name three states with competitive Senate races,” I’m guessing you’d probably say Texas, Michigan, and Maine. Those are the three that get the most consistent media attention. Then, under those three, there are a number of races in red states where we know the Democrat either is generally ahead or has a great shot at winning—that’s North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, and Nebraska (where the challenger is an independent, not a Democrat). Finally, there are a couple blue states where Democrats need to defend seats, and where the Democrat is usually ahead in polls, but they’re still very close and far from done deals: Minnesota and New Hampshire.

Then, there are three other states where something very interesting may be taking shape. They’re all deep red states. One was recently a purple state but has lately become a very MAGA shade of red. The second hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century. The third started the Civil War. And improbably enough, in all three states, the Democrat is tied or maybe even a smidge ahead. And if these results hold for seven weeks, I’ll be watching these three especially closely on November 3.

Let’s start with, believe it or not, South Carolina. A poll came out in early September showing Democrat Annie Andrews narrowly leading Darline Graham, who was named to the seat when brother Lindsey died in July. Graham, as you’ll recall, then narrowly won the GOP primary after being forced into a run-off. The reason it wasn’t a clean succession is that she made a fool of herself at a debate by saying national security “is not my thing.” Andrews is a pediatrician who’s been campaigning aggressively on affordability and health care. She came out for a two-year moratorium on data centers.

She is 45 and comes across as affable, smart, and very normal. She cut an ad with her father, a Republican, who said he’s crossing party lines on this one (“Annie’s not some crazy socialist!” Dad avers). Graham is counter-punching on, of course, guns and trans athletes. The two will debate on October 11, a Sunday night. If Andrews does a good job of deflecting those parries and keeps the focus on economics, health care, and the fact that someone shouldn’t get to inherit a Senate seat, she has a shot.

In Kansas, Methodist minister Adam Hamilton is hoping to become the first Democratic senator since George McGill, elected in 1930 (right after the Great Depression hit, in other words) to serve out the term of a Republican who died in office and then elected in his own right to one term in 1932. Hamilton had a two-point lead over GOP incumbent Roger Marshall in a poll that hit last week. That poll came out a few days after The New York Times broke a devastating story detailing how Marshall, an obstetrician, sued more than 700 patients for unpaid bills as small as $101. It’s also been revealed during this campaign that Marshall and his wife, while claiming Kansas as their home, have been spending a suspicious amount of time in Sarasota, Florida.

Hamilton, 61, leads the nation’s largest Methodist church. He built it from “a few people meeting in a funeral chapel in 1990,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, to a 25,000-strong congregation. He’s written some 30 books on Christian theology, which is impressive but also gives Marshall’s oppo team a lot of material to comb through. Marshall, predictably, says Hamilton is “too woke” for Kansas. The Christian right calls him a heretic for a 2022 sermon in which he said it’s possible for non-Christians to get into heaven. Ted Cruz laid into him. Hamilton responded: “If he’s going to call me a heretic, he’s not the first. He won’t be the last.”

And finally, it’s Florida that interests me most of all. No one saw Angie Nixon’s Democratic primary win over Alexander Vindman coming. That includes me; after I wrote a column earlier this year assuming Vindman as the party’s nominee, a reader wrote in with a stern warning: Pay attention to Angie Nixon, she’s out there hustling. I was wrong, and the reader was right. Nixon destroyed Vindman, by 12 points.

Nixon is facing another appointed GOP incumbent, Ashley Moody, who was handed the seat when Marco Rubio became secretary of state. There have been three polls this month. Moody led by seven in one, but the other two showed the race a tie.

Nixon fascinates me. She joined the Democratic Socialists of America, she says, in June. In other words: In the middle of a campaign in which she was seeking a prominent statewide office in a souped-up-MAGA state run by a souped-up-MAGA governor, she joins a controversial socialist organization! Which didn’t even endorse her! This is definitely not someone who is just doing whatever her media consultants and pollsters tell her to do. In fact, on the topic of media consultants, it appears that she may not have any: During the primary, on her way to that landslide victory, she did not run a single television ad.

Just 42, Nixon is a state representative from Jacksonville. Raised by a single mother, she graduated from the University of Florida, went into politics immediately, and has opened a bookstore and coffee shop that’s a hub of local organizing and after-school efforts. She does speak her mind. On MS NOW recently, she called Moody “a liar, a cheater, a thief, a scammer who stole $10 million from sick, low-income kids to put into a political slush for Ron DeSantis.” She is referring to this sickening Florida Medicaid scandal, and she is pounding away at it.

Andrews, Hamilton, and Nixon are all still longshots, in a certain way. And I trust you know all the reasons why the experts sniff at them and say they can’t win.

But I want to tell you the reasons why they can win. They’re all smart, they’re all playing offense, they’re all unafraid. None of them seems over-consultant-ified. They’re running to some extent on the obvious things—affordability, gas prices, Iran. But they’re all throwing the kinds of punches and saying the kinds of thing consultants usually wouldn’t have candidates in red states say.

And the other reason they can win? Precisely because the experts say they can’t. Experts base their expectations on past patterns. This is a rational enough thing to do, and most of the time, it results in reasonably accurate predictions.

But sometimes, conditions change. The past patterns are no longer as relevant. I remember 1994 very well. I thought maybe the GOP had an outside shot at taking the House, but past patterns for the prior 40 years suggested that the Democrats just couldn’t lose the House. Then, at Mario Cuomo’s “victory” (actually, loss) party at the New York Hilton, I saw Chuck Schumer hanging up a payphone (?!) with an ashen look on his face. What about the House, I asked? It’s bad, he said. Like very bad. Could be 50 seats. It was 54.

Donald Trump is the author of disaster after disaster. And now he’s banning media organizations from the White House. I doubt your average voter cares enough about that to base her vote on that kerfuffle. All the same, it’s yet another “mad king”-y thing to throw on the pile, and groupable in that sense with his attacks on the Kennedy Center and all the rest of his monu-mania. (His new excuse for the planned “triumphal arch” is that it will be a “military base” with “drones and snipers.”) And that he’s doing all these things while gas is climbing toward $5 a gallon, and he’s telling people that it’s “an inexpensive price to pay” to prevent Iran from having the nuclear weapons it wasn’t anywhere near having until he huffily and foolishly tore up the JCPOA, is something our average voter cares about a lot.

Is this one of those sea-change years? Perhaps not. As I noted above, loads of Senate races are still close enough that it’s conceivable that Republicans could hold their current margin or even expand it, or at the very least retain their majority.

But it’s important to remember that sometimes, conditions are so extreme that past patterns don’t matter. That’s why these three races in particular are worth paying attention to. Because if these three Democrats somehow win, we’ll know an earthquake happened.

It rained in Amsterdam last week. There was a 24-hour public transport strike. And something called LOTA stopped working in the elevators of the Mövenpick hotel. Digital signage in elevators is all the rage nowadays. Where once there might have been peeling menus or faded posters extolling the virtues of long-closed bars, there are now displays trying to grab the attention of elevator passengers who want to get from one floor to another with minimal fuss. We're not sure if LOTA decided to walk out in sympathy with the public transport workers. In fact, we're not one hundred percent sure what LOTA is, although AG Neovo is notable for its digital signage and video wall displays. "Future-proof, Reliable and Durable" are cited as reasons for using its wares, although we'd argue that a pop-up bleating about an app having a bad day means that at least one of those reasons is perhaps not the whole truth. Still, using Android as the operating system seems a better choice than some of the examples of digital signage we've seen over the years. Compared to a Paris elevator running what would otherwise be a useful PC in order to sling ads at passengers, this Dutch hotel has opted for something considerably lighter weight. Sure, Android undoubtedly has its own issues with bloat, but compared to Windows, it is positively featherweight. The elevator didn't hang around long for us to find out what would happen if we jabbed the "Close app" link. At least, we think it was a link – the vagaries of modern interface design make it hard to tell these days (insert a picture here of an old man yelling at a cloud: "If it's a button, make it look like a button!") and, to be frank, we're not sure we'd want to go poking at a screen against which someone has doubtless laid a weary head. It's bad enough seeing someone have a rummage in their nostrils before selecting a floor, or wondering exactly where that finger might have been before it was used to press a button. Still, it is good to see an Android app reflecting the gloom of its surroundings. Cloud, rain, industrial action, and now even the software has given up and asked the user to end it all. ®

Nothing demonstrates how deeply Fortune 500 companies depend on Salesforce quite like a global outage lasting more than seven hours. The interruption struck during the second day of last week's Dreamforce conference, where the $40 billion-a-year SaaS vendor was pitching AIforce and a growing collection of AI products. The question now is how the company will charge for them. AIforce illustrates why the per-user licensing model is becoming harder to sustain. Unveiled at Dreamforce, it uses Salesforce's Headless Toolkit to make the company's data, workflows, and business logic available through interfaces including Slack and Claude. When AI agents and APIs perform the work instead of named human users occupying seats, charging per user becomes a less natural fit. Earlier this month, Bill Patterson, executive veep and general manager of CRM applications, told an investor webinar that Salesforce was devising "a new pricing structure that really aligns to the benefits that customers realize from this new technology." Under one such arrangement, AI customer service agents would be priced according to the cases they resolve. Outcome-based pricing will not suit every use case, however. Patterson acknowledged that some agents operate across multiple disciplines, domains, and products, making it difficult to identify a single measurable result. Salesforce is therefore also developing bundles and using Flex Credits to charge customers according to consumption. The company has reason to look beyond traditional licensing. License revenue is dragging on growth, while AI agents complicate an approach built around charging for human users. "Licenses are weighing things down right now. They're a headwind," Mike Spencer, Salesforce's deputy CFO and head of finance, told the Deutsche Bank 2026 Technology Conference last month. Spencer described Salesforce's experiments as "an anxiety-filled architecture right now of different pricing structures and contract frameworks." The company is testing three ways to charge: conventional seat licenses, consumption through Flex Credits, and fees tied to outcomes. Spencer expects consumption revenue to grow as more customers put AI systems into production and purchase additional credits – what the company calls "refilling the tank" – although he said it would take another three to five years to become a material share of revenue. Alongside those charging mechanisms, Salesforce offers several contract structures. Traditional annual commitments sit alongside Agentic Enterprise License Agreements (AELAs), which provide broad access for a fixed price, and the newer Salesforce Commit. Salesforce Commit resembles the model used by hyperscalers. A customer might commit to spending $10 million over three years, for example, then divide that allowance among seats, Flex Credits, and other forms of consumption as its requirements develop. Outcomes are harder to price because both sides must agree on an objective measure of success. "The key with outcome-based pricing is you've got to be very objective about the measurements that are driving the outcomes, and that always tends to be the challenge," Spencer said. For now, customers must navigate the contracts already on offer. In January, Gartner warned Salesforce users that all-you-can-eat AELAs might not be available at renewal, making future costs harder to predict. The analyst firm recommended negotiating limits on price increases if Salesforce moved customers to contracts with defined usage allowances. Salesforce denied that it was moving away from capped agreements. It said renewals would remain flexible and tailored to help customers get the most value from their usage. Preet Takkar, PwC's global and US Salesforce leader, expects outcome-based pricing to become far more prevalent by 2030, although "it will take time." PwC has a global alliance with Salesforce. Takkar said PwC had already introduced outcome-based pricing for some customers, putting its own fees at risk through gain-sharing or risk-and-reward agreements "so that our clients do not have to print new money" for digital and AI transformation. Takkar argued that seat-based licensing makes less sense when AI agents, rather than only human employees, access applications and their data. Charging for every API request could discourage use, he said, whereas completed work or business outcomes could provide more meaningful units for billing. Takkar said he did not expect capped agreements to disappear immediately, but predicted that all-you-can-eat deals would gradually give way to spending commitments and, eventually, charges tied to results. Customers should press Salesforce on the economics rather than merely demanding more features and agents, Takkar said. Mature buyers increasingly want to know how the technology will affect profit and loss and what business outcomes it will produce. Some Salesforce customers may be questioning the business outcome of this week's outage. Although service has been restored, the interruption demonstrated how dependent organizations already are on the platform – a reliance likely to deepen as they entrust more work to its AI agents. ®

A striking new poll finds Democrat Mary Peltola leading GOP Senator Dan Sullivan by 46-41 in the Alaska Senate race. This is big news: Because quality polling of Alaska is so rare, it’s a real indicator that a Senate majority is now truly gettable for Democrats. The poll also finds Trump badly underwater and absolutely tanking with independents—in Alaska! The kicker? The survey was done for AARP by Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, along with top Democratic pollster John Anzalone, so Republicans will take it very seriously. Indeed, GOP panic is worsening: Republicans are privately talking about pulling money out of the Georgia Senate race. Other GOP operatives warn that the party is bleeding Latinos. One GOP strategist expressed his dismay by sending a poop emoji to a Huffpost reporter. And GOP Representative Nancy Mace said: “The midterms are going to be a f--king bloodbath.” We talked to John Anzalone, the Democratic pollster on the Alaska survey. He explains what the numbers really show about Trump’s collapse, why he thinks Texas is “real,” and what he still fears could go wrong. Listen to this episode here.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone. Great lyric, lousy data retention policy. Amazon Web Services said last week that war damage to its Middle East infrastructure had permanently destroyed resources and data hosted exclusively in its now rather badly named Bahrain Availability Zones. The damage overwhelmed the resilience built into the region. Customers without copies elsewhere no longer had their data. Sorry about that. This may have surprised anyone who mistook cloud redundancy for an intrinsic guarantee of safety. AWS is far from the only American operation to have suffered in the region: the US Navy has reportedly had its local maintenance and supply network badly mauled, with serious consequences for its operations. If systems designed to withstand war cannot cope with sustained physical attacks, civilian bit barns have little chance. The episode also underlines a familiar but easily neglected lesson: resilience within one cloud region is not the same thing as maintaining an independent backup elsewhere. Physical destruction is not the only threat. A major outage of the UK air traffic control system in September, which stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and led to thousands of flight cancellations, was reportedly triggered by a military aircraft filing an incompatible flight plan. Presumably Flight Lieutenant Bobby Tables has been reprimanded. The apparent failure to validate the flight plan data was not the worst of it. NATS, which runs the UK's air traffic control system, reportedly told airports and airlines that no backup system was available because it was undergoing a "complete overhaul." Nor was there a backup of the live data, supposedly because of the "vast amounts" involved. If your system produces too much data to back up, you had better be running a particle collider or a giant telescope. Otherwise, you may be in the wrong business. More charitably, backup strategies are complicated, expensive, and difficult to test. They also suffer from the insurance problem: while nothing is going wrong, management sees only capital and operating expenditure with no obvious return. The AI infrastructure boom has made that problem considerably worse. A backup is a copy, and a copy needs storage. AI datacenter operators are swallowing much of the available capacity, with drives selling out faster than tickets for a Taylor Swift tour. Western Digital had allocated its entire 2026 hard-drive production run by mid-February. The only consolation for those responsible for keeping data safe is that they can say "Yeah? You buy it, then" to anyone who smugly invokes the 3-2-1 backup rule. Three copies on two different media with one kept off-prem? Lovely idea, if you don't have to provision it. Someone is provisioning it for all those giant datacenters that will run our lives, right? Right? Even outside the immediate reach of drones and missiles – a distinction that feels less reassuring with every passing month – infrastructure is operating in increasingly hostile conditions. Cables get cut, climate goes chaotic, criminals encrypt, commanders-in-chief go crazy. This makes planning for and implementing a sound data resilience strategy very hard, at exactly the same time as it becomes more important. Inter-cloud data duplication gets more complicated if digital sovereignty is a factor, especially if your sanctified region is in the firing line. Commerce has confronted a similar problem before, if we extend the backup-as-insurance metaphor. The development of marine insurance in 14th-century Italian city-states spread risk and helped make what became today's global trading network viable. The loss of a vessel was no longer an existential disaster for its owner. Provided insurers understood and priced the risks correctly, the market could grow in lockstep with mercantile activity. Data resilience has a similar dynamic, although it is rarely described in those terms. Modern IT would be impossible without it, and moving off-premises amounts to sharing some of that risk with an outside provider. Risk can evolve rapidly. The Lloyd's of London insurance market prospered around the turn of the 20th century amid two technology booms: steam-powered merchant shipping and the cable and wireless networks that supplied the information needed to coordinate global trade. Then war came. Insurers responded by separating war risk into its own category, with government support helping to keep ordinary marine insurance affordable while covering higher-risk voyages separately. It may take the combination of geopolitical instability and intense competition for storage to make enterprises perform similar calculations about their own precious cargoes of information. When AWS can lose an entire region and critical national infrastructure can fail without an adequate backup, those risks have plainly not been priced in properly. There is no global market where AWS, NATS, or your organization can buy the data equivalent of war-risk insurance, although imagining what one might look like suggests some intriguing possibilities. Until something like that happens, we'll have to play by the old rules. Work through what happens if your primary data store disappears. Match backup provision to the actual risks, and if you cannot afford to protect all the data your organization needs to survive, determine how to survive with less. Backups, like insurance, are all too easy to let slide. Then a drone sinks your ship. You can't say you weren't warned. ®

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

A set of bills signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday aims to rein in the topsy-turvy expansion of bachelor’s degrees at California community colleges.

But the bills themselves caused new friction: In a last-minute shift, the community colleges that were championing these bills came out to formally oppose them after the lawmakers substantially revised the measures a day before a key constitutional deadline. 

The two laws —  Senate Bill 960 by Sen. Christopher Cabaldon, a Democrat from Napa, and Assembly Bill 2694 by David Alvarez — allow college districts to have anywhere from two to 12 new bachelor’s degrees a year starting in 2028. The bills bake in accountability metrics: Districts with higher graduation and transfer rates will be permitted to add more degrees. The new caps do not apply to existing bachelor’s degrees at college districts. 

Today, 49 colleges either offer or will soon offer 66 bachelor’s degrees. Districts would also need to prove that there’s a workforce need in their region to justify the creation of a bachelor’s degree. The caps apply to all districts, whether they have one campus or nine. 

The community colleges opposed tying the number of degrees they can offer to student metrics, arguing that they punish districts that educate low-income students who are less likely to finish their certificates and associate degrees or transfer to a four-year university but would also benefit from more bachelor’s degree offerings that are tied to local labor market needs. 

Other community college leaders said the bills’ numerous last-minute provisions were unclear.

“We’re being asked to … support a process that is not completely understood or vetted at the last minute, and so that’s just not great policymaking,” said Larry Galizio, president and chief executive of the Community College League of California, an association representing community college presidents and board leaders, in an interview for a previous story.

The bills directly address the central tension that buffeted relations between the community colleges and the California State University. Since 2022, the community colleges were allowed to introduce no more than 30 bachelor’s degrees annually, as long as they didn’t duplicate degrees offered by any Cal State or University of California campus. But Cal State routinely objected to the bachelor’’s degrees community colleges sought. And a few times the colleges went ahead with the degree programs anyway.

Community colleges and influential lawmakers said it was unfair to block the colleges from creating bachelor’s degrees that local students and employers wanted, especially if the existing UC or Cal State degree is at a university hundreds of miles away. Some students bemoaned the inability to earn bachelor’s degrees close to home. Many are priced out of relocating to those universities.

There are 115 local community colleges in the state, far more than the 31 UC and Cal State campuses offering bachelor’s degrees.

The bills Newsom signed Friday allow community colleges to create bachelor’s degrees even if a nearby Cal State offers a similar program, but only if that Cal State program rejects more than 25% of applicants from that nearby community college for three consecutive years.

The bills also insert a process for handling an impasse between the colleges and Cal State, something missing in past law. A review by the state’s secretary of labor siding with the colleges would remove the Cal State system’s challenge to the degree. But if the labor secretary sides with Cal State, the district is barred from submitting an application for a similar program for five years.

The Cal State system, which opposed earlier versions of the bills, changed its position to neutral after the latest versions were published.

The community colleges are generally barred from duplicating a degree a UC campus offers, unless they come to a written agreement with the UC.

Newsom vetoed a related community college bachelor’s degree bill — one that he’s rejected twice before. For the third year in a row, Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat from Merced, sought a bill to allow students to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing at a community college, something they cannot currently do. Newsom wrote in his veto message Friday that the bill is unnecessary because of the two bills by Alvarez and Cabaldon he signed.

“It is neither necessary nor appropriate to authorize an additional pilot or create an exception to the framework, as this bill proposes,” Newsom wrote. “California’s public higher education segments should instead focus on implementing this newly created, comprehensive system.”

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VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Running some housekeeping workloads on SmartNICs can also improve isolation and security – AWS often points to the benefits of its “Nitro” system which relies on SmartNICs. VMware’s push into private cloud assumed that its customers wanted an on-prem version of a public cloud – at least in terms of their operating model. Back when it was an independent company, VMware guessed that its customers would also appreciate borrowing from hyperscalers’ approach to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to run on the SmartNICs so they could host network functions. It also created a version of its NSX distributed firewall to run on the devices. At its VMware Explore conference earlier this month, Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's application networking and security division, said the virtualization giant has “walked back from that space.” Mahajan said VMware was able to get its wares running on SmartNICs from AMD and Nvidia but struggled with Intel hardware. The effort was non-trivial, Mahajan said, because it involved microcode. Once VMware got its product working, buyers weren’t excited. “Customers kept talking, but not buying,” Mahajan said, making it hard to justify ongoing development work. Meanwhile, conventional NICs evolved – and increased throughput – to the point at which SmartNICs afforded fewer benefits. VMware has therefore quietly stopped selling the distributed firewall. “VMware was ahead of the industry in using DPUs, or SmartNICs, to offload capabilities and improve data center infrastructure efficiency; however, the overall ecosystem around SmartNICs has been slow to materialize,” a VMware spokesperson told The Register. The Distributed Services Engine that allows VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation suite to use SmartNICs remains a part of the product and continues to receive support. “We've also continued looking at ways to simplify the customer experience and adapt our product approach as needed,” the spokesperson wrote. For example, we've developed a direct offloading capability that accelerates network traffic with ConnectX-7, which is a different mechanism than the Distributed Services Engine. It's part of our continued focus on giving customers practical paths to infrastructure efficiency.” The spokesperson also pointed to VMware innovating with memory tiering, global deduplication and its AI Factory. Nvidia also uses the term “AI factory” to describe a collection of hardware – including SmartNICs – necessary to run inferencing at scale. VMware and Nvidia are firm partners. The virtualization pioneer has also teamed up with AMD, whose own “Helios” rack-scale AI rigs also use SmartNICs. VMware’s therefore almost certainly not done with the devices forever. And because many of the processors on SmartNICs use the Arm architecture, the work it did to create the Distributed Services Engine may live on in its version of ESX for Arm. ®

Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstations to enterprise laser printers." They sold it all through hefty paper catalogs, because this was before broadband and Marco's company had only a 19k baud dial-up connection. Marco's boss, whom he described as a "sciagurato" – Italian for a wretch – kept one of those catalogs on his desk. "He perused it every day, like a kid waiting for Christmas," Marco told The Register. "One day he found an exceptional laser printer at almost one-seventh the cost. It was such a good a deal he ordered two of them." Marco said the boss told anyone who would listen that this feat of cost-cutting would surely propel him out of the tech team and into management. "The wiser among us were already counting the days until the disaster," Marco wrote. Disaster duly arrived with the delivery. "When the courier delivered the printer, it came in two huge packages, but not big enough for a laser printer," Marco observed. After wrestling with the packaging, the horrible truth emerged. "Our boss had bought two laser printer stands," Marco wrote, "because the catalog showed the stands with the printer on top." The company therefore had two stands and no printers. The boss's claim to promotion-worthy procurement prowess had collapsed. "We promptly hid the two pieces of junk in the darkness of our 'obsolete hardware store' and they are probably still there," Marco wrote. He suspects they are not alone, but surrounded by "other good deals, all waiting for the mercy of incineration." Have you or a colleague ordered the wrong thing? If so, click here to send your story to Who, Me? We'll put it on display rather than hide it in the back room. ®

UK-based networking hardware vendor Cambium Networks has entered administration and advised customers that its cloud services likely won’t survive for long. The company has not been in the best of health for some time. In August 2025, management admitted that its financial reports for financial years 2022 and 2023, plus reports for six subsequent quarters, were unreliable as they included errors. The NASDAQ stock exchange later delisted the company, which unsuccessfully tried to rejoin the bourse. In May, a filing [PDF] revealed that the company’s officers had “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.” Sadly, they appear to have been correct, as last week the company published another filing [PDF] revealing it had let go of 260 staff – 53.6 percent of its workforce – without any severance payments. A statement [PDF] soon followed, revealing the appointment of administrators and an end to production of the company’s Wi-Fi access points, NSE firewalls, and cnMatrix switches. “At this point, it is anticipated that the fixed wireless broadband business will largely resume after a relatively short pause,” the statement reveals. While administrators try to stabilize the bits of the biz they think are worth saving, distributors are free to offload any existing products in their possession. Administrators will try to sell Cambium’s own stock of products. So far, so fire sale. But the statement includes another important line: “The intention is that cnMaestro Cloud will continue to operate at least through 1 October.” cnMaestro Cloud is the hosted management plane for Cambium’s products and looks set to close. In a knowledge base article titled “Guidance for cnMaestro Enterprise Customers,” the company admits “the cnMaestro Cloud may not support Enterprise devices post October 1st, 2026” and therefore recommends users install the on-prem version of cnMaestro, ASAP. If users can get that done before October 1, it won’t be the end of the matter, because Cambium has only made the software available under a 90-day trial license. Once that period expires, the software will lose some functionality. “We expect that if the Enterprise business is acquired by an entity, they will help you with an appropriate extension or replacement of trial and will guide you with the process,” according to an FAQ. Cambium customers therefore face a sprint to keep their kit manageable, and an uncertain future after that. “Cambium Networks recognizes and appreciates the shock and situation our customers and partners have been placed in,” reads the statement advising the company is in the hands of administrators. “Cambium Networks will work to provide additional communication and direction in the coming days.” Also in coming days, The Register imagines Cambium customers will ponder whether to ever again let themselves to be tied to a cloud service when an on-prem alternative is available. ®

Google has admitted that its AI agents escaped a sandbox and mounted an attack – but only because testers mistakenly gave its bots internet access. The Big G didn’t disclose the May incident, but The Wall Street Journal learned of the situation, which happened after Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to test its bots’ prowess in a capture-the-flag test. The goal of the exercise was to acquire information from a fictional company without leaving a sandbox. Irregular, which set up the test, made two mistakes. One was to allow internet access from the sandbox. The other was to use the name of an actual company. When Google’s AI made it onto the open internet, it went looking for the actual company – three of them, in all. According to the Journal, Google’s bots found passwords for two targets on the public internet. The software guessed the third password. In a statement sent to The Register, Google said, “In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test.” According to Google, its models stopped work before using the credentials. “We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they’ve now made to their testing processes,” a Google spokesperson told The Register. “These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly.” Clearly there’s lots of blame to go around on this one. Irregular clearly erred in allowing internet access from a sandbox. The two companies that left their creds discoverable online should also know better. Whoever used a guessable password may also have been careless. Google’s culpability is another matter because these incidents took place in May – around two months before OpenAI admitted its agents were the source of the July attack on Hugging Face. The search advertising giant therefore sat on the news of its own agents’ activity for around two months and seems to have been in no hurry to disclose the incident until the WSJ learned of the incident. We understand the company decided on that stance because its agents stopped when they perceived danger – unlike OpenAI’s software – and because the incident was clearly the result of several errors. Whether it was right to keep the incident secret in the current climate of growing distrust in AI is another matter. One person who sees no risk of AI causing calamity is US president Donald Trump, who has shrugged off warnings as a “hoax” and said work on AI must not slow due to its economic and strategic significance. Over the weekend, that stance appears to have shifted a little, as Trump used his personal social network to announce he is “forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force” – a reference to the new branch of the US military the president created in his first term. “To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar,’” Trump added. No detail on either proposal was available at the time of writing, nor did the president explain why a new branch of the military or Czar are needed. Indeed, the same post he used to announce the new agency also states “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System.” ®