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By now, it’s no longer in doubt that Donald Trump’s towering unpopularity—driven by a Trumpian trifecta of failure comprised of inflation, tariffs, and war—is allowing Democrats to contest some pretty red territory this fall. So how wide is the battleground map actually getting as we enter the final stretch of the 2026 midterms?

One simple way to answer this question: Follow the money. Trump’s super PAC, which is called MAGA Inc., has just unleashed well over $100 million in spending via two smaller organizations its operatives have created. We obtained data on TV ad spending by those groups from a Democratic source that shows which districts they’re targeting.

Here’s the big topline finding: Trump’s super PAC and its cutout organizations are spending big money in at least 17 districts that Trump carried in 2024 by over five points. That includes six districts that Trump won by over 10 points.

Here it is in chart form:

That’s a very broad battlefield. The list we obtained—compiled by a source who relied on Democratic Party ad-tracking data—comprises House districts that MAGA Inc. is already spending in or has reserved time in via two cutout organizations, “No Going Back PAC” and “Safety and Affordability PAC.” Our list roughly tracks (but isn’t precisely the same as) the districts obtained by Teddy Schleifer of The New York Times and other reporters.

But what really makes this list of districts significant and eye-opening is ranking them by Trump’s 2024 totals, as we did above. Of the 27 House districts this MAGA Inc. spending is targeting, 19 are GOP districts, and 26 were carried by Trump. That he won most by more than five points sheds more light on what this expanding battlefield really looks like, with areas that Trump won solidly two years ago suddenly in peril for the GOP.

“It’s an acknowledgment that things have shifted in a huge way since 2024,” David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the Cook Political Report, told me. “Republicans have hemorrhaged support among independent voters, they’ve got a real enthusiasm problem, and as a result, districts that ordinarily would vote handily for Trump and Republicans are now in play.”

Notably, six districts that Trump carried by double digits are also being targeted by MAGA Inc.’s cutouts. It’s telling that GOP-held districts like Texas’s 15th and Kentucky’s 6th (which went for Trump by very large margins) now require major reinforcements.

“If those are in danger, then a lot of other seats that are considered similarly safe for Republicans must be on the chopping block,” Larry Sabato, the founder of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told me.

The targeting of Texas seats that Trump won by double digits captures another big story: Trump’s dramatic slippage among Latinos. Texas’s infamous redistricting this year was supposed to make Democratic-held seats (the 36th district and the 35th, the latter of which has been redrawn to transform it from a previously Democratic to a safe Republican district) easy GOP pickups.

But Trump’s deep unpopularity and the potential for a blue wave mean Republicans must spend heavily to try to flip them anyway. As Wasserman told me, when Republicans redrew the Texas map, they assumed that “if they just made these seats redder to turn them into double-digit Trump seats, they would win them.” Now, he said, the erosion of Latino support for Trump in places like the Rio Grande Valley means “these races are very close.”

In short, Trump’s super PAC empire now sees an urgent need to spend big on districts that Texas Republicans just heavily gerrymandered to the GOP’s benefit, after Trump corruptly commanded them to do so. Oops.

None of this, of course, guarantees that Republicans will lose the elections. Overall, Republican spending is now projected to swamp Democratic spending from today to Election Day by a significant margin. That is going to hit hard. We’re talking about a GOP edge that could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet there are other signs that the map is now expanding in Democrats’ favor. This week’s Times poll found Democrats ahead in the generic House ballot matchup by nearly nine points. A new Fox survey finds that lead at seven points, and a YouGov poll has Democrats up 12 points. That last one is probably too high, but the polling averages also show the Democratic position slowly continuing to improve. That suggests the Times’s finding of a nearly nine-point spread—comparable to the party’s 2018 House popular vote victory, which was a blue wave—could very well be right on the money.

Meanwhile, some forecasters have Democratic odds of winning the Senate at their highest point yet. Democrats must flip four GOP-held seats—at least three in states Trump won and at least two he carried by double digits. Given all this, while the Senate is on a knife’s edge, those improving Democratic odds themselves hint at a battlefield that’s now reaching deep into Trump country.

Republicans never counted on Trump being quite this toxic. Trump himself probably still can’t accept what a massive drag he’s become on his party. But whatever data they’re feeding him to keep the Audience of One’s spirits high, his super PAC operatives certainly have.

There's no need to actually read a whole research paper when you can ask a bot to explain it to you. Scientific papers can transform into AI agents that, according to the Stanford team behind the project, should speed up the dissemination of new scientific discoveries. Paper2Agent, the team's new framework described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, converts scientific papers and their associated research outputs into agents that can discuss a paper’s findings, reproduce analyses and results, apply its methods to new data, and even collaborate with other paper agents on new research problems. “Papers have been static documents for centuries,” James Zou, a Stanford computer scientist and biomedical data science professor and one of the paper’s authors, said in a LinkedIn post announcing P2A’s publication. “Paper2Agent turns them into active AI agents that can answer questions, apply their methods, and collaborate with other papers to make new discoveries.” Giving a large language model access to a scientific paper is unpredictable, Zou added. What his team wanted was an agent that could act as a “virtual author” that had hands-on experience with a paper’s work, not just reading it and attempting to understand it. What that means in practice, as explained in the paper, is a workflow that uses a paper and its associated data, repository, and codebase to create a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server exposing the research's tools, resources, and workflows. An LLM agent can then connect to the server and use natural-language requests to autonomously run demonstrations, reproduce analyses, apply a paper's methods to new data, and the like. “Paper2Agent agentifies the full research outputs, including manuscripts, supplementary materials, code, datasets, executable examples and analysis workflows,” the researchers explained in their writeup. According to the paper, the MCP server itself can be hosted remotely, but Zou explained to The Register in an email that it can also be run locally to protect sensitive information, though such info will still be sent to whichever LLM backend P2A is connected to. “If the user has sensitive data (e.g. protected health information) that they don't want to send to an LLM then they should exclude that data from P2A,” Zou told us, adding that P2A should be compatible with any AI coding agent, but that not all have been tested. AI hallucinations are an obvious concern, and the paper notes that researchers should always evaluate anything P2A presents to be sure it’s correct. “We … view Paper2Agent as a tool for augmenting scientific discovery and improving access, reproducibility and reuse of papers, rather than as an autonomous or authoritative source of scientific conclusions,” the paper notes. That said, P2A still does its best to prevent such errors from cropping up. The paper explains that each tool used by a paper agent is validated against the paper’s results and figures and “locked to ensure reproducibility.” This decreases hallucination risk and minimizes randomness, but still - best to double-check its work. Tests to see how well P2A scales appear to have gone well, with the researchers evaluating it across 136 papers in three groups, including 100 computational-biology papers. Of those 100 papers, 74 were successfully turned into agents, with the researchers attributing failures largely to incomplete codebases, missing documentation, or unresolvable environment configurations. Still, it’s a massive leap in what could be possible when it comes to getting new scientific discoveries into the hands of more researchers. P2A is open source, and is available on GitHub for those who want to take a stab at it. There’s also a live version online that can explain the P2A paper in more detail and reproduce its results, and Zou tells us it can also ingest other papers to see how it works on their projects. Zou explained to us that he hopes the open source community will help improve P2A, but notes that his team isn’t done with it either. Next up, they hope to create an online platform for paper agents to collaborate and discuss various “agentified” scientific discoveries. Let’s just hope those boffin bots behave a bit better than their counterparts. ®

The FBI believes women pretending to be “tradwives” are targeting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in order to dox them, The Guardian reported Thursday.

In February, the FBI in Chicago disseminated a brief memo warning that a “small group of women allegedly were creating fictitious online dating profiles with the purpose of attracting and then doxxing law enforcement participating in immigration enforcement.”

“These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to … individuals in law enforcement,” the memo continued. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online. The tactic is intended to generate public embarrassment and deter immigration enforcement activity.”

The memo was obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, a government transparency non-profit. The memo came shortly after Chaya Raichik, the conservative influencer behind LibsOfTikTok, sounded the alarm about groups of TikTokers who were organizing to lure federal agents onto dates and expose their personal information. Her post did not include any mention of “tradwives.” It is unclear if Raichik’s claims were true.

Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, slammed the FBI for issuing such a humiliating memo in the first place.

“It’s absurd the FBI issued a thinly-sourced security alert about ICE agents’ online dating troubles,” he said in a statement. “It’s equally ludicrous the FBI is spending taxpayer dollars to protect ICE agents from possible ‘embarrassment’ at the hands of a supposed ‘small group of women’ who might name and ridicule them online.”

Recently, ICE reportedly began quietly firing new officers hired during the agency’s chaotic push to recruit thousands of “Homeland Defenders,” citing poor performance and red flags that should have been identified in the vetting process.

A Republican congresswoman running for reelection in Florida’s 27th congressional district has come out with an ad criticizing President Trump.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, whose district voted for Trump by 15 percentage points in 2024, said in the ad. She cited statistics pointing out that 50 percent of ICE’s 50,000 detainees in July had no criminal record.

A Message to President Trump on Immigration | María Elvira Salazar pic.twitter.com/memcf4jags

— María Elvira Salazar 🇺🇸 (@MaElviraSalazar) September 17, 2026

“Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” Elvira Salazar said. “You can be for immigration what Lincoln was for slavery and Reagan was for communism.”

That point makes no sense, as slavery ended with Lincoln and Reagan presided while the Soviet Union fell, and Elvira Salazar is not proposing an end to immigration. But the Cuban-American representative’s main point with the ad appears to be saving face with her Hispanic constituency. The district she represents is 54.2 percent foreign-born and more than 70 percent Hispanic, many of whom are of Cuban descent like her.

If a member of Congress in a solidly Republican district is afraid of being associated with Trump, that doesn’t bode well for November’s midterms. Trump and Republicans keep polling lower and lower, and among the many reasons why are ICE’s violent mass deportation tactics, paid for by billions of dollars in government funding.

Elvira Salazar herself voted for that funding, and now she’s trying to run away from it. Meanwhile, ICE’s arrests of Cuban nationals have gone up by a staggering 463 percent since December 2024. One political ad might not be enough for her to survive at the polls in November.

TechCrunch Disrupt is where the tech community comes together to build, debate, and connect. And while the main event takes over Moscone West from October 13-15, the conversation doesn’t stop when the Expo Hall closes.

Apple is changing its App Tracking Transparency prompts in parts of Europe after competition regulators said the system favored Apple over third-party apps, giving developers more flexibility over how they ask users for tracking consent.

Republicans are in major political peril after President Donald Trump’s massive failures on the economy, and now even a poll from the conservative Fox News is confirming the data. Fox’s poll, released Wednesday night, shows that 63% of voters say that Trump has made the economy worse than the recovering economy he inherited from former President Joe Biden. Overwhelming numbers of Democrats…

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Senator Mitch McConnell’s handlers would like the American public to believe that he’s still physically and mentally fit to be in office, but that no longer seems to be the case.

The longtime Kentucky Republican suddenly reappeared in Congress this week after an unexplained three-month absence, apparently ready to vote on Senate proceedings. But when tasked to do so during Wednesday’s Senate Agriculture Committee meeting on the Farm Bill, McConnell hazily sided with the Democrats.

The “no” vote was clearly a mistake, and visibly concerned North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who was seated on McConnell’s left. Hoeven leaned over to the Kentuckian and said something quietly, as did committee chairman and Arkansas Senator John Boozman, seated on McConnell’s right. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the committee’s top Democrat, smiled and nodded along encouragingly as the trio struggled to address the lapse.

Nonetheless, the momentary error spurred murmurs from the table and the surrounding crowd of congressional aides.

“Aye,” McConnell quickly corrected.

Here is McConnell voting in the Farm Bill markup. He votes 'aye' after a little prompting from fellow Senators and aides. https://t.co/WH3rmU006K pic.twitter.com/mjhE1Ozeep

— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) September 16, 2026

McConnell’s office issued a statement on the senator’s X account shortly after the vote. The statement was written in the first-person, suggesting that despite McConnell’s vacant expression hours earlier, he was suddenly well enough to articulate via the written word that he was “proud to vote yes on the Farm Bill on behalf of the hardworking farm families across Kentucky.”

“America’s farmers are the cornerstone of our nation and the backbone of Kentucky’s economy and I wish our Democrat colleagues would have joined Republicans supporting the many important provisions in this Farm Bill,” the post continued. “My hope is the bill receives robust bipartisan support on the Senate floor and demonstrates our commitment to our Nation’s farmers and rural communities.”

McConnell was found unconscious and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, his office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill. But the 84-year-old is clearly not the same: since returning to Congress this week, McConnell has been repeatedly photographed with a blank gaze and his mouth hanging open, including just after his Farm Bill vote. He does not seem lucid or aware—save for the occasional wave towards the camera—and has refused to speak with reporters trying to assess his current health condition.

Sen. Mitch McConnell leaves the Senate after casting his vote in the Senate Agriculture Committee this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/htdrqaG25w

— Desirée Townsend (@DesireeReports) September 16, 2026

London property management biz City Relay has warned customers that intruders may have stolen financial data, passwords, and codes used to access keys after compromising its Metabase Cloud instance. City Relay, marketing itself as "London's most trusted property management company," told landlords via email - seen by The Reg - that attackers accessed the third-party provided cloud twice "as a result of a vulnerability in the platform that we were unaware of." The message to customers stated: "Personal data was extracted from the platform." The potentially compromised data on the platform includes names, email and physical addresses, telephone numbers, financial information, property access details, and account passwords. City Relay said the exposed financial data included bank account numbers, sort codes, IBANs, SWIFT references, and account names and addresses. Attackers may also have obtained data about property amenities and access, including the locations of stored keys and codes for lockboxes containing them. Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, explained that Metabase connects to customers' databases, so the information exposed in an attack depends on the access each customer granted it. "A company linking Metabase to a general analytics database will only expose harmless user metrics," he said. "A company that connects it directly to their core transactional database risks exposing highly sensitive financial records and credentials." Agha said that if the exposed passwords and financial details were stored in readable form, that would point to inadequate data protection practices. "Sensitive financial details should also be encrypted or tokenized when held in a database. Keeping this information readable creates a massive risk if a connected reporting tool is ever compromised." The Register understands that City Relay sent the emails to current landlords and former users of its services. One source claimed City Relay learned of the intrusion on September 8 and notified affected customers on September 14. "As property access and key-storage information was potentially included, we immediately took precautionary action to update the relevant access and key-storage codes," the emails stated. "This work has now been completed. The previously exposed codes can no longer be used and we have no evidence of any unauthorised property access arising from the incident." Beyond the immediate physical security risks, City Relay urged customers to check their bank accounts for suspicious transactions, watch for phishing and other scams, and change any reused passwords on other accounts. The company told us it had found no evidence that the exposed data had been misused. It is continuing to investigate alongside cybersecurity specialists and "the relevant authorities" to establish the attack's full scope. City Relay's website says it has hundreds of "partners" – landlords who outsource management of their property portfolios – and that it manages, or has managed, thousands of London properties. The company has not said how many customers were affected in London or Paris, where it also operates. The Register asked City Relay for more information. City Relay did not identify the vulnerability used in the attack. Metabase disclosed a zero-day SQL injection flaw on August 6, saying attackers compromised fewer than 3 percent of its customers before fixes were automatically deployed, but it has not confirmed that the City Relay incident was part of that campaign. Known victims included laptop maker Framework and workflow automation platform n8n. ®