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Quarterly fundraising reports for congressional candidates covering the period from July 1 to Sept. 30 were due at the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 15 by midnight ET.

Below are our charts of fundraising data for every Democrat and Republican on the Nov. 3 ballot for the House and Senate, as well as select third-party candidates, as reported to the FEC. All numbers are in thousands.

To see each chart in full, click on the bottom where it reads “+ Show ___ more.” Note that you may need to scroll horizontally to see some columns. An explanation of each column can be found below the charts.

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Leading Off

Colorado

Colorado Democrats have a chance to run the table this year as Republicans head into the midterms dragged down by a toxic nominee for governor whose own party is abandoning him.

That nominee is Victor Marx, a Christian ministry founder who, among many other things, responded to a question from News9 earlier this year asking how many people he’d killed as an adult by saying, “Does it matter?”

Marx’s fellow Republicans have largely kept their distance from a candidate who continues to draw the kind of national attention that no one should ever want. But former Rep. Ken Buck, a conservative hardliner who became an unlikely Donald Trump critic, went even further on Wednesday by crossing party lines to endorse Attorney General Phil Weiser, Marx’s Democratic opponent.

Weiser would have been favored to defeat any GOP nominee in Colorado, a former swing state that has shifted sharply to the left over the last decade, but the downward pressure from Marx’s disastrous campaign is being felt especially acutely in all four of the state’s Republican-held congressional districts.

Democrats had always planned to target the 8th District, a swing seat that Republican Gabe Evans narrowly flipped two years ago. They also had reason to think that Donald Trump’s weak approval ratings might give them an opening in the more conservative 3rd and 5th Districts even before Marx became the GOP’s standard-bearer this summer.

The GOP’s mighty struggles across the state, though, have now given Democrats an unexpected opportunity to go after Rep. Lauren Boebert, one of the most infamous Republicans in Congress, in Colorado’s reddest district.

Two years ago, Trump scored a 58-40 victory in the 4th District, which includes Colorado’s rural eastern communities and Denver’s conservative exurbs.

Boebert had originally represented the 3rd District on the other side of the state, but last cycle, fearing a repeat of her unexpectedly close shave in 2022, she jumped over to the 4th District after Buck chose not to seek reelection. Still, she ran several points behind Trump with her 54-42 win.

Boebert, one of the rare officeholders to endorse Marx during the primary, now faces Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a former Republican who retired from the Navy as a rear admiral. Though she faces a tough race, Laubacher has taken advantage of Boebert’s national notoriety to raise millions, just as prior Democratic challengers have.

Most notably, though, deep-pocketed outfits on both sides are also directing money to the contest.

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PA State Senate

Having given up any hope of unseating Gov. Josh Shapiro and with little chance of reclaiming the state House, Pennsylvania Republicans have launched an all-out war to save their majority in the state Senate—and prevent Democrats from taking full control of state government for the first time since 1994.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, citing data from AdImpact, reported Wednesday that Republicans have spent more than $15 million on TV and streaming ads, both to protect four vulnerable incumbents in the eastern part of the state and to target Democratic Sen. James Malone.

Democrats, likewise, have deployed more than $12 million to unseat that quartet of Republicans and help Malone, who is defending the conservative Lancaster County seat he flipped last year in a shocking special election victory.

Only half of the 50-member chamber is up each election cycle, so both parties will need to wait until 2028 to target other competitive districts.

Democrats, who aren’t at serious risk of losing any of their other seats this year, need to win three of those five races to turn what’s now a 27-23 Republican majority into a 25-25 deadlock. Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, Shapiro’s running mate in next month’s election, would then be able to use his tie-breaking vote to support his party on procedural matters, such as choosing the chamber’s leader and deciding when bills receive a vote.

That would give Democrats more power in the Senate than they’ve had in over three decades, but it still wouldn’t be enough to pass their agenda on a party-line vote. The state constitution prohibits the lieutenant governor from breaking ties on “the final passage of a bill or joint resolution,” so Democrats have good reason to try for an outright majority.

However, there’s one other potential problem for Republicans in November.

Republican Sen. Camera Bartolotta is locked in an unpredictable race against independent Jodi Borello in the southwestern corner of the state, a contest where the Democratic nominee removed his name from the ballot this summer. Borello, an environmental consultant and former Republican who says she voted for Donald Trump in all three of his campaigns, told Spotlight Pennsylvania she wouldn’t caucus with either party.

A recent poll from the website State Navigate showed the two tied at 43 apiece in the 46th Senate District, which Donald Trump carried by an imposing 64-35 margin two years ago. The survey showed Borello, who has made her opposition to data centers a centerpiece of her campaign, largely appealing to left-leaning voters and moderates while still winning enough conservatives to pose a serious threat to Bartolotta.

But while a victory for Borello would complicate the math in the Senate, both parties are largely focusing their attention and resources on the five battlegrounds to the east.

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Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also take stock of the strangely quiet death of Republican John James’ campaign for Michigan’s open governorship, which few outlets have covered despite the high stakes. In addition, the Davids discuss two special reports The Downballot published this week: our guide to the top races for state supreme courts, and our new analysis of House polling that points to a Democratic wave.

If you’re a reader of The Downballot, you’ll now need to subscribe to read the Morning Digest and the comments section, though we are not putting up a paywall! You can sign up as a free subscriber, though of course, we’d be delighted if you’d support our work with a paid subscription. Either way, just click the button below:

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Texas

All five districts Republicans targeted when they gerrymandered Texas’ congressional map at Donald Trump’s behest last year nonetheless remain in play, including two seats that had once looked all but impossible for Democrats to hold.

A new poll from the University of Houston shows Republican Alex Mealer with a modest 48-42 advantage over Democrat Leticia Gutierrez in the open 9th District, a constituency Donald Trump would have carried in a 59-40 landslide just two years ago. Respondents, however, now give Trump a negative 46-53 favorability rating.

And deep-pocketed Republican outfits were already treating the 9th, which now includes the eastern reaches of Houston’s Harris County and areas further east, as competitive even before UH released this survey.

Conservative groups have spent more than $1.1 million since the start of September to boost Mealer, an Army veteran who lost a tight 2022 race to lead Harris County and then spent the better part of a year unsuccessfully challenging the result in court.

Democratic organizations, by contrast, have deployed just over $300,000 to help Gutierrez, an environmental advocate. That sum, though, is still notable given that just about every political observer anticipated Republicans would easily flip this seat following their adoption of the state’s new map last year.

Facing the prospect of campaigning on such daunting turf, Democratic Rep. Al Green opted to run for the heavily Democratic 18th District rather than seek reelection in the 9th, which shared little more than a number with his old constituency. However, he ultimately lost the Democratic primary to fellow Rep. Christian Menefee.

Meanwhile, Gutierrez and five other Democrats campaigned to defend the now-open 9th, but her decisive 54-16 win in the primary generated little attention.

The GOP contest, however, was an expensive fight that continued for nearly three more months after no one claimed a majority in the first round of voting. Mealer, who had Trump’s endorsement, finally claimed the prize just after Memorial Day with her landslide 68-32 over state Rep. Briscoe Cain, Gov. Greg Abbott’s pick.

Mealer’s frontrunner status was reaffirmed this summer when fundraising data revealed she’d outraised Gutierrez by a huge margin, though new reports are due on Thursday.

Trump’s declining approval ratings, however, have put the GOP on the defensive in seats across the country that seemed secure just months ago. And his weak standing with Latinos, a constituency that swung hard in his direction during the last two presidential races, could pose an especially serious risk for his party in districts like the 9th, where Latinos make up over half of the voting-age population.

The 32nd District, another open seat that the GOP seemed to have redrawn into an automatic flip, may also not be a sure thing for Republicans.

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Leading Off

SD Ballot, ND Ballot

South Dakota Republicans are promoting a ballot measure that would endanger Medicaid expansion in the state, as well as a second proposal that would make it difficult for voters to reverse any changes to the program.

Amendment I, which the state’s GOP-dominated legislature placed on the ballot last year, would roll back expanded Medicaid eligibility if federal support for expansion—which voters approved in 2022—ever falls below 90% of its cost.

Republicans have said that passage of Amendment I wouldn’t automatically cost anyone their Medicaid benefits, a claim that opponents vociferously dispute.

State Sen. Casey Crabtree told his colleagues last year, “Really, what we need to do is make sure we’ve got the flexibility to negotiate terms, as well. If the voters go back and clarify they want us to have that flexibility, then, we’ll be able to adjust accordingly.”

The plan’s proponents, therefore, are unhappy with the measure’s official ballot summary, which tells voters that an affirmative vote “ends the expanded Medicaid coverage if the federal funding for expansion drops below 90%.” Should that threshold ever get breached, “Medicaid coverage will once again only apply to low-income children, pregnant women, disabled individuals, and the elderly.”

Another Republican, state Rep. Will Mortenson, argued to South Dakota Searchlight last month that this summary, also known as the ballot title, is “100% inaccurate,” saying the proposal “would absolutely not immediately remove Medicaid coverage for the expansion population.”

But GOP lawmakers aren’t just quarreling with Democrats. Their beef is with Attorney General Marty Jackley, a Republican who drafted the summary that his fellow party members are now complaining about.

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A recent Democratic poll of a House race in Ohio featured a remarkable finding. In the 15th District around Columbus, represented by Republican Mike Carey, the survey found Democratic challenger Don Leonard leading by a 46-45 margin.

What made the result so noteworthy is that Carey’s district voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by a comfortable 10-point spread in 2024. If that poll is indeed accurate, it not only means Leonard could win but also that he’s doing 11 points better than you’d expect given the outcome of the most recent presidential election.

A political environment where Democrats are overperforming to this degree would be a very strong one indeed. But this is just one poll of one race. Alone, it can’t tell us anything about the broader state of the November midterms and whether Democrats do in fact have a mighty wind at their backs.

But what if we look at all the available House polling and compare it to the Trump-Harris numbers for each district? Thanks to a database assembled by FiftyPlusOne, as well as The Downballot’s calculations of the 2024 presidential results for all 435 congressional districts, we can do exactly that.

And when we do, we find that in polls in September of this year, Democrats overall are in fact doing as well as that Ohio survey implies. Compared to the presidential baselines, Democrats outperformed by an average of 11 points across 57 different polls last month. We call this the “named congressional ballot,” a cousin of the more familiar generic congressional ballot.

In early July, FiftyPlusOne performed a similar analysis, finding Democrats polling ahead of their benchmarks in congressional races by 7 points on average. But we can now extend this analysis much further, because our colleagues at FiftyPlusOne don’t just have data on recent polls. Their catalog stretches back decades.

That allows us to calculate the named congressional ballot for prior elections reaching back to 1998. And most importantly of all, these “back tests” let us see whether this approach offers any predictive value.

It does—when it’s evaluated in conjunction with other metrics.

These indicators all point toward a Democratic landslide that’s on track to eclipse even the “blue wave” of 2018.

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Why the “named congressional ballot” is valuable

For our calculations of the named congressional ballot for all prior years, we included all House polls where the midline of the polling window fell between Oct. 1 and the election.1 That choice of dates involves a tradeoff: An earlier cutoff would allow us to examine more data, but it would be more likely to pull in polls that weren’t reflective of the political environment as it stood on Election Day.

The graph above shows that the named congressional ballot has, in recent years, been too optimistic for Democrats. However, in elections before 2010, its track record is better than the generic congressional ballot. This may be related to recent trends in educational polarization (which may be contributing to overestimates of Democratic performance based on special elections as well) if better-informed voters are more likely to make a choice in a named poll for their congressional election.

But there are three years when the named and generic congressional ballot numbers converge. In 2004, 2012, and 2018, the two measures were only about 1 point apart. What’s more, in all three of these years, the actual House popular vote was pretty close to the generic and named polls, and was in fact spot-on in both 2012 and 2018. We can therefore say that when both of these measures show a similar value, it may mean that they will be close to the final value.

Most importantly, they are converging again this year, with the two measures only 1.4 points apart based on September values.

Adding it all up

But what if the polls are wrong?

Let’s add in the two other measures that we know have a pretty good track record by themselves: special elections and the difference in national primary turnout between the two parties.

This chart shows midterm years only, and covers two election cycles for which we lack named ballot data. Notably, there are four years when all available measures are in rough agreement—not as close as 1 point, but more like five points.

In these cases (1990, 2002, 2018, and 2022), the House popular vote wound up right in the middle of that narrow range three out of four times. And this year, we’re seeing a fairly narrow range again so far. Not only that, but the congressional ballot measures have both been moving higher for Democrats over the past few months, tightening the range.

In some years, however, we’ve seen a fairly wide divergence between these measures. Sometimes one particular metric lies very far from the rest (the national primary in 2006, for example, or special elections in 1998), but usually that hasn’t been the case. So what can we do? The answer is simple: average out all of the measures.

This brings us back to the figure that opened this post, repeated here for convenience.

Averaging all four, it turns out, works remarkably well, as shown by how close the yellow and blue dots are in the graph above. In fact, in five of the last nine cycles, the multi-metric average and the House popular vote differed by less than 1 point.

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And in 2018, during the last blue wave, you can’t even see two distinct dots because the results were virtually identical. That year, these four indicators converged on a reading of 8.5. The actual House vote favored Democrats by 8.6 points. As a result, they flipped 40 seats and reclaimed the chamber.

Based on this graph, we would expect Democrats to win the House popular vote—if the election were held today—by no less than 7 points, with a nominal prediction margin of 11 points, as shown by the blue dot in the upper right corner. However, we’ll be watching closely to see how the congressional ballot numbers change over the coming month, and how they affect this prediction.

The big picture: What things look like right now

Two of our four indicators—those relying on special elections and primary turnout—are already in the books. These are based on actual votes cast. About 40-50% of Americans who vote in November vote in the primaries.

The other two indicators, meanwhile, are still “warming up”; they are based on polls. One is an average of polls for individual House races from Oct. 1 to Election Day; the other is an average of generic congressional ballot polls from the final week or so before Election Day. Their warm-up performance is usually—but not always—pretty close to their final values.

Sometimes all four indicators are very different—indeed, sometimes they don’t even all favor the same party. But if we average their performance, we will still have a good indicator of what the voters will do in the end.

Sometimes all four indicators are very similar. When that happens, which is about half the time, the average has an even better chance of being accurate.

So far this year, the indicators based on special elections and primaries are nearly identical, and the indicators based on polls are getting closer to those election-based metrics.

All four point to a very strong political environment for Democrats—and one that’s even better than what we saw in 2018.

Leading Off

FL-AG, FL-Sen, FL-Gov

The Democratic Attorneys General Association is sending $5 million to former state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez’s campaign to unseat Republican James Uthmeier as attorney general of Florida, a former swing state where Democrats are eager to prove they can win again.

DAGA, which tells Politico this money is “just the start” of its involvement, is jumping in at a time when polls show conflicting signals about Rodriguez and the rest of the Democratic ticket.

Uthmeier enjoys a wide 50-40 advantage in a Targoz Market Research poll released Friday by the James Madison Institute, a conservative Florida-based think tank. That poll also finds the two most prominent members of the GOP ticket, Sen. Ashley Moody and gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds, with identical 52-42 advantages in their respective contests. (See our Poll Pile section below for other results from this survey.)

But Rodriguez and his fellow Democrats got some considerably more encouraging numbers the previous day when St. Pete Polls, working on behalf of the news site Florida Politics, gave Uthmeier just a 45-43 edge.

That survey similarly showed Moody ahead just 47-45 in her race against Democrat Angie Nixon and found Donalds deadlocked at 45 apiece against Democrat David Jolly in the race to succeed termed-out Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The Sunshine State’s sharp lurch to the right over the last decade, as well as strong fundraising on the GOP side, has left Democrats in a difficult position, though DAGA’s contribution will help Rodriguez make up what had been a huge financial gulf. Campaign finance reports filed Oct. 2 showed Uthmeier with about $10 million on hand, compared to $1 million for Rodriguez.

Democrats are also hoping a scandal involving a charity called Hope Florida will have voters looking for new leadership—a scandal that could be especially troublesome for Uthmeier.

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At a time when Donald Trump and the MAGA movement seek to undermine fair elections, civil rights, and the rule of law—and with much of the federal judiciary under the sway of conservative ideologues—state courts remain a powerful bulwark for democracy.

Next month, two dozen states will hold elections for their supreme courts, along with many other judicial posts. Below, we detail races in eight key states that could alter the balance of power on the bench or set up opportunities for pro-democracy jurists to win majorities two years from now.

Arizona - Retention (1 R-appointed)

Justice John Lopez, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, faces a retention election for another six-year term after authoring an unpopular decision two years ago that upheld Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban. (Soon after, voters approved an amendment enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution.)

Although progressive groups spent very little to defeat two of Lopez’s conservative colleagues in 2024, they won retention with just 58 to 59% of the vote. However, no justice has ever lost a retention election since Arizona implemented the practice in 1978.

Liberals have not campaigned heavily against Lopez, and his defeat appears unlikely. But if he were to lose, and if Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs wins reelection, she could appoint a replacement. Republican appointees hold a 6-1 majority on the court, though three more are up for retention in 2028.

Kansas - Retention (2 D-appointed)

Two Democratic-appointed justices face retention elections for six-year terms. Chief Justice Eric Rosen, who was appointed by former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius in 2005, is eligible for a final term before mandatory retirement rules kick in. Meanwhile, Larkin Walsh, appointed by Gov. Laura Kelly last year, is seeking her first full term. Democratic appointees hold a 6-1 majority.

Republicans have unsuccessfully pushed multiple ballot measures over the past decade to undo the court’s rulings protecting abortion rights. Most recently, voters rejected an amendment in August that would have paved the way for a switch to partisan elections in a 61-39 landslide. The GOP hasn’t yet devoted the same effort, however, to unseating either of the incumbents on the ballot this fall.

Michigan - Nonpartisan (2 D)

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Leading Off

KS-AG

Democrat Chris Mann is getting some high-profile help from an unusual corner in his rematch against Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach: Kansas’ statewide police union.

The Kansas State Lodge Fraternal Order of Police announced Tuesday that it was endorsing Mann, the first time since 2002 it’s supported a Democrat in the race to become the state’s top lawyer.

The FOP, which backed Republican Ty Masterson’s bid for the open governorship that same day, didn’t mention Kobach in a statement praising Mann’s background as a “former police officer turned prosecutor.”

The Democrat, however, soon used the new endorsement to bolster his case that Kobach, an extremist who has spent well over a decade pursuing conservative causes far outside state lines, is the wrong person to serve as attorney general.

“My opponent has never worn a badge,” Mann said at a debate on Tuesday. “He’s never stood toe to toe with violent criminals on the street or in a courtroom. Instead, that man has run for almost every office in the state of Kansas, and he’s done it because he wanted to push his political agenda.”

A survey last month for the Democratic Attorneys General Association found Mann, who lost a tight race to Kobach in 2022, narrowly leading 47-46 this time, while Republicans have not publicly released any recent polling. Mann has also dominated in fundraising this year.

Kobach pushed back at the debate by arguing that crime was “plummeting” under his watch because of “how we’ve removed violent illegal aliens who are allowed to remain in Kansas”—the very issue that first garnered him national attention years ago.

Kobach, who held a high-level position in the U.S. Justice Department during the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency, was the primary author of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, the 2010 anti-immigration bill that authorized the police to demand proof of citizenship during routine traffic stops.

He swiftly parlayed that effort into conservative stardom and began instructing other states and municipalities on implementing similar policies. Kobach’s profile only grew when he was elected Kansas secretary of state later that year.

In office, he convinced the GOP-controlled legislature to allow him to prosecute voter fraud—a power no other secretary of state in the nation possessed, according to the Brennan Center.

Armed with that new authority, Kobach spent his eight years in office winning the type of adulation from conservatives—and scorn from critics—that most Republican politicians could only dream of. The liberal publication Mother Jones profiled him in a 2012 piece titled “Kris Kobach, Nativist Son,” while Donald Trump chose him to lead his bogus “Election Integrity Commission” in 2017.

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Kobach often saw his agenda blocked in court, and on one memorable occasion, a federal judge ordered him to take a remedial legal education course after he violated evidence disclosure rules. (He completed a six-hour course called “Civil Trial: Everything You Need to Know”—and charged it to taxpayers.)

But in 2018, he nonetheless appeared to be on the cusp of climbing the next rung of the political ladder when he ran for governor.

Thanks to a Trump endorsement, Kobach secured a 343-vote win in the GOP primary against Jeff Colyer, who had become governor just six months earlier after the extremely unpopular Sam Brownback resigned to take a post in the Trump administration. He thereafter spent most of the general election as the favorite to lead this conservative state.

There was even talk that Kobach could eventually seek the presidency following his anticipated win against Democrat Laura Kelly and Greg Orman, an independent whom Democrats feared would siphon away votes Kelly needed. But Kelly, who relentlessly tied Kobach to Brownback’s disastrous financial stewardship of the state, turned the Republican’s national fame into a liability.

“He goes on television and he talks and he talks and he talks,” Kelly told the Wichita Eagle during the campaign. “He probably watches it over and over again, and he loves every bit of it. And I’m glad somebody does. I don’t think any of us have enjoyed it.”

Kelly went on to upset Kobach 48-43, and for a time that seemed to be the end of his once-promising political career.

The Kansas City Star published a story shortly after the election in which fellow Republicans trashed his effort, with one source saying, “The joke was, you’d say ‘the Kobach campaign’ and [then] you’d say, ‘what campaign?’”

Axios reported the following year that Trump’s transition team had considered Kobach to become his first secretary of Homeland Security, but his reported ties to avowed white supremacists were a “red flag,” and he was never nominated. Still, Kobach stubbornly refused to go away.

In 2020, he campaigned for an open U.S. Senate seat, a prospect that excited Democrats enough to spur them to meddle in the GOP primary on his behalf. But Rep. Roger Marshall, who benefited from a well-funded conservative effort to stop Kobach, decisively beat him and went on to comfortably win the general election.

Kobach, though, got another chance for a comeback in 2022 when Attorney General Derek Schmidt gave up his post to challenge Kelly, and this time, things aligned just right. Kobach beat his nearest primary opponent 42-38, and he edged past Mann 51-49 in the general election even as Kelly was narrowly outpacing Schmidt.

Mann is back for a second round in a year when his fellow Democrats have high hopes in Kansas. Marshall is struggling against Democrat Adam Hamilton even though the state last elected a Democratic senator in 1932. Polls show Masterson better situated against Democrat Cindy Holscher in the race to succeed the termed-out Kelly, but the race remains competitive.

Mann, for his part, is seeking to flip a post that Democrats have won just once during the last five decades. That victory took place during the 2006 Democratic wave, when incumbent Phill Kline, a Republican whose crusade against abortion clinics similarly made him a notorious figure far outside of Kansas, went down in a landslide against Democrat Paul Morrison.

Morrison, however, became embroiled in a sex scandal that resulted in his resignation after just a year in office. Then-Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, picked Stephen Six to replace him, but the 2010 Republican wave powered Schmidt to an easy win against Six on the same night Kobach won his first election to statewide office.

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The Senate battlefield is exploding

Republicans are giving up on races that would have once been unthinkable to abandon—and rushing to save candidates in states we can scarcely believe are competitive. On this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard examine the fallout from the GOP’s decision to abandon North Carolina’s Senate contest, combined with it…

Listen now

8 days ago · 7 likes · David Nir and David Beard

Senate

KS-Sen

Republican Sen. Roger Marshall has apologized after an attack ad his campaign ran about allegations of sexual abuse at church youth retreats featured images of the wrong campsite.

The alleged incidents took place two decades ago at retreats hosted by the Church of the Resurrection, a Methodist megachurch run by Marshall’s Democratic opponent, Adam Hamilton.

However, Marshall’s ad used a photo of a different Kansas camp called Tall Oaks, which is unaffiliated with Hamilton’s church. That prompted a stern response from Tall Oaks, which demanded Marshall stop running the ad unless he removed the photo, which included children.

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Leading Off

MN-01, OH-15, NV-02

Both parties are spending heavily in House districts that Donald Trump carried by double digits, broadening the battlefield to include turf that Democrats have not seriously contested in many years.

The players on these expanded front lines include groups beyond the usual suspects, such as the DCCC and NRCC. One notable participant is Your Community PAC, a Democratic-aligned group that has spent $1.5 million since the start of September in Minnesota’s 1st District to help Democrat Jake Johnson unseat Republican Rep. Brad Finstad.

This outlay represents nearly all of the independent expenditures the FEC has tracked from either side as of Thursday, though Republicans are reportedly deploying resources as well. Punchbowl News reported Tuesday that a group affiliated with House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who represents another Minnesota district, would spend $600,000 to help Finstad.

All this spending comes after a frustrating decade for Democrats in southern Minnesota. The 1st District was once one of the most competitive House seats in the nation, but it shifted hard to the right in 2016 after Trump took over the Republican Party.

That year, Democratic Rep. Tim Walz narrowly won a sixth term against Republican rival Jim Hagedorn despite those headwinds, but his decision to wage an ultimately successful bid for governor in 2018 gave the GOP a major opening in an otherwise tough election cycle. Hagedorn prevailed by a slim margin that year, and he hung on during another close race in 2020 as Trump once again decisively carried his district.

Hagedorn seemed to be finally on track for an easy victory when he sought a third term, but he died in early 2022, prompting an August special election. Both parties anticipated that Republicans, who looked set for a strong midterm cycle, would easily hold the district, so it was therefore a big surprise when Finstad beat back Democrat Jeff Ettinger by just a 51-47 margin. That result would foreshadow the GOP’s disappointing election night three months later.

Finstad, though, rebounded quickly from his near miss. He won a rematch against Ettinger 54-42 that fall, and he easily secured his second full term in 2024 following a race that both parties—this time correctly—viewed as uncompetitive.

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Democratic groups, however, are taking a much closer interest in Johnson, a public school math teacher. While the House Majority PAC, the top pro-Democratic super PAC in House campaigns, hasn’t begun spending here, it released a poll late last month showing Johnson with a narrow 47-46 advantage over Finstad. (No other recent surveys have been made public of this contest.)

But Your Community PAC, an affiliate of the deep-pocketed Sixteen Thirty Fund, is picking up the slack—and Finstad isn’t the only once-secure Republican it’s going after.

In central Ohio, Your Community, HMP, and other groups have spent a total of just over $1 million since September aimed at defeating Republican Rep. Mike Carey in the 15th District. Conservative groups, led by the campaign arm of the Republican Main Street Partnership, have deployed roughly $700,000 to help Carey against Democrat Don Leonard.

Leonard, an Ohio State University professor who is seeking office for the first time, is trying to flip a constituency that would have backed Trump 55-45 in 2024. But Trump’s weak approval ratings give Democrats the chance to reassert themselves in what used to be one of the nation’s premier swing states, and Leonard’s allies say he has the chance to be part of this breakthrough. Last month, HMP released a survey giving him a 46-45 edge.

Carey’s district, like Finstad’s, was competitive turf during the early 21st century, but GOP gerrymandering took it out of play well before Trump’s rise. The 2010 Republican wave propelled Steve Stivers to a decisive win over freshman Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, the Democrat who had narrowly defeated him two years before, and Republican mapmakers soon seized their chance to protect the new congressman.

Stivers easily held the seat for the rest of the decade, and there was no question a fellow Republican would replace him after he resigned in 2021 to lead the state Chamber of Commerce.

That candidate was Carey, a former coal company lobbyist who secured Trump’s endorsement ahead of his triumph in a busy primary. But while Carey had no trouble in the ensuing special election or in either of his next two campaigns, well-funded groups from both parties have now converged on the first competitive election for Ohio’s 15th District in over a decade and a half.

GOP groups are also hoping to shore up seats that normally are never at risk—including a seat in Nevada that hasn’t elected a Democrat in its more than 40 years of existence.

That seat is the 2nd District, a constituency in the northern part of the state that Trump last carried 56-42. But Republicans are spending heavily to aid Air Force veteran David Flippo, a candidate whom retiring Rep. Mark Amodei has loudly denounced for relocating from Las Vegas earlier this year to run for Congress.

A pair of hardline conservative outfits, the Club for Growth and House Freedom Caucus, together have spent $1.2 million since September to promote Flippo and attack Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson. Democrats, however, have yet to file any independent expenditures to promote Benitez-Thompson, who served as majority leader during her time in the state Assembly.

The Nevada Independent flagged Wednesday that a third right-wing group, Restoration of America PAC, was set to begin spending $750,000 on ads praising Flippo’s military service. Flippo, however, continues to face unwelcome questions about his record during his time in the Air Force.

The Washington Post reported last month that he’d falsely said that he won a Bronze Star with a special distinction for heroism in combat on multiple occasions.

Flippo was awarded a Bronze Star in 2004 for managing aviation fuel distribution in Kuwait, according to documentation provided to The Downballot by a consultant for his campaign. The citation also praised him for helping to set up an air base in Iraq and for giving “life saving care” to a soldier who had been burned in a fire.

However, Flippo did not receive the much rarer distinction of a Bronze Star with a “V device,” which is reserved only for those who demonstrate valor under fire. Just 6% of Bronze Stars awarded by the Air Force during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars included that designation.

Flippo, whose campaign told the Post his repeated claims about his medal were “an honest mistake,” recently said to NPR in a piece published Wednesday that he was “taking ownership” of what happened. The candidate, though, used that same interview to say that his grandchildren were the reason he’d worn a hat with “V” pins in public appearances.

“You know if you’ve lived with grandkids, and you know, you kind of know, when you ask them to put those things on your hat,” the candidate said. “Actually, answer me this. I do have another hat that’s just like it, because you misplace one or whatever, and that does not have any V devices on it, so, and I was like ‘where did that other V device go?’ So, the grandkids ended up doing that.”

NPR’s report came out one day after the Reno Gazette Journal published a separate story in which the candidate’s former commanding officer, retired Col. Steven Lawlor, told the paper he’d “relieved” Flippo in 2008 “shortly thereafter for loss of confidence in his ability to command.”

Flippo’s campaign responded by defending his service and seeking to discredit Lawlor by calling him “a veteran turned union organizer.”

Lawlor in turn said his only connection to the labor movement came when he worked as a shop steward at a Tennessee post office. He also said he’d backed Trump in all three of his campaigns, and when the Gazette Journal asked whether he’d ever affiliated with the Democratic Party, he responded, “Not only no, but hell no.”

As Republicans find themselves on the defensive in deep red turf, the House battleground is only likely to expand further in Democrats’ favor.

Ally Mutnick of Punchbowl reported Wednesday that Everytown, a gun safety group funded by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, was “taking over a ton” of reservations from HMP. While information is still coming in about where Everytown intends to be active and how much it might spend, Mutnick noted that its intervention would “free up HMP resources to run ads elsewhere in the final weeks.”

The Downballot Podcast

The Senate battlefield is exploding

Republicans are giving up on races that would have once been unthinkable to abandon—and rushing to save candidates in states we can scarcely believe are competitive. On this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast, co-hosts David Nir and David Beard examine the fallout from the GOP’s decision to abandon North Carolina’s Senate contest, combined with its last-minute rescue mission in Kansas of all places. Perhaps the most amazing thing: The Republican spending spree doesn’t even seem to be working.

The Davids also talk with Eric Ming at the State and Local Election Alliance, an organization devoted to deep downballot elections where control over the machinery of democracy is at stake. Eric walks us through some of SLEA’s top targets, including a judge in Nevada known for always favoring Republicans, a MAGA election administrator in Colorado who’s simply terrible at her job, and the leader of one of Texas’ biggest counties who just shut down a bunch of polling sites in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

3Q Fundraising

• AK-Gov (Aug. 9 through Oct. 2):

  • Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D): $2.1 million raised, $1.2 million cash on hand

  • Bernadette Wilson (R): $500,000 raised, $200,000 cash on hand

  • Treg Taylor (R): $270,000 raised (over half self-funded), $100,000 cash on hand

  • Dave Bronson (R): $35,000 raised, $28,000 cash on hand

• OH-07: Brian Poindexter (D): $2.4 million raised

Governors

TX-Gov

The Democratic Governors Association and wealthy Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are each giving $1 million to Texas Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who’s locked in a close race with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott despite a massive financial disadvantage.

That huge gap, however, has diminished considerably following a gigantic spending spree on Abbott’s part. Thanks to Texas’ lack of campaign finance limits and Abbott’s long tenure—he’s now seeking a fourth four-year term—the governor entered the year with nearly $106 million in his war chest.

But facing what’s been by far his most competitive race, Abbott has spent down most of his stockpile. According to new fundraising reports, he had $17.3 million on hand as of Sept. 24, compared to $4.1 million for his opponent.

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However, despite his spending avalanche, Abbott holds just a 48 to 46 lead over Hinojosa in an aggregate of polling compiled by FiftyPlusOne. The New York Times, which first reported the new contributions to Hinojosa, characterized the infusion as reflecting a broad belief among Democrats that she could “pull off an improbable upset.”

“There’s been not enough attention on her race,” Pritzker told the paper. “Gina is running really a spectacular campaign, and I’m really pleased to be able to support her. And I think hopefully we’re going to see others join in in supporting her, as they have been for James Talarico.”

POLL PILE

All polls must comply with The Downballot’s requirements.

• IA-Sen: CNN/SSRS:

  • Ashley Hinson (R): 45, Josh Turek (D): 43.

• KS-Sen: GBAO for Adam Hamilton:

  • Hamilton (D): 46, Roger Marshall (R-inc): 41, David Graham (L): 7.

  • Hamilton (D): 49, Marshall (R-inc): 44.

• MI-Sen: Guidant Polling and Strategy for Public First Action:

  • Abdul El-Sayed (D): 48, Mike Rogers (R): 43, all others 1% or less.

  • El-Sayed (D): 49, Rogers (R): 45.

  • Public First Action, which is supported by the AI company Anthropic, tells The Downballot it hasn’t taken sides in this race or any of the others below.

• OH-Sen: CNN/SSRS:

  • Sherrod Brown (D): 49, Jon Husted (R-inc): 43.

• TX-Sen: Guidant for Public First Action:

  • James Talarico (D): 47, Ken Paxton (R): 44, Ted Brown (L): 4.

• IA-Gov: CNN/SSRS:

  • Rob Sand (D): 51, Zach Lahn (R): 42.

• MI-Gov: Guidant for Public First Action:

  • Jocelyn Benson (D): 50, John James (R): 45.

• NY-Gov: Emerson College for PIX11:

  • Kathy Hochul (D-inc): 52, Bruce Blakeman (R): 40.

• OH-Gov: CNN/SSRS:

  • Amy Acton (D): 50, Vivek Ramaswamy (R): 42.

• PA-Gov: Quinnipiac University:

  • Josh Shapiro (D-inc): 59, Stacy Garrity (R): 34.

  • July: 53-40 Shapiro.

• PA-Gov: Susquehanna Polling & Research:

  • Shapiro (D-inc): 52, Garrity (R): 31.

  • March: 58-36 Shapiro.

  • Susquehanna, a conservative firm, did not say if this poll was done on behalf of a client.

• TX-Gov: Guidant for Public First Action:

  • Greg Abbott (R-inc): 46, Gina Hinojosa (D): 44, Pat Dixon (L): 4.

• VT-Gov: State Navigate:

  • Phil Scott (R-inc): 46, Amanda Janoo (D): 43.

• NC-01: GQR for Don Davis:

  • Davis (D-inc): 47, Laurie Buckhout (R): 39, Tom Bailey (L): 8.

  • Unreleased September poll: 42-40 Davis.

• NC-01: Neighborhood Research and Media:

  • Davis (D-inc): 51, Buckhout (R): 41.

  • The memo did not mention Bailey.

  • Neighborhood Research head Rick Shaftan wrote in the release that he’s a Buckhout supporter who is releasing the poll to urge her and GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley “to stop running 1980s-style personality campaigns and instead draw contrasts on issues, polarize the electorate, and win.”

• TN-05: Impact Research for Chaz Molder:

  • Charlie Hatcher (R): 46, Molder (D): 41, all others 1% or less.

  • Aug.: 48-40 Hatcher.

• TX-02: Impact Research for Shaun Finnie:

  • Steve Toth (R): 46, Finnie (D): 37.

• MD Ballot - Question 3 (redistricting amendment): University of Maryland, Baltimore County:

  • No: 53, Yes: 25.

• VT-LG: State Navigate:

  • Molly Gray (D): 59, John Rodgers (R-inc): 32.

Correction: This Digest incorrectly stated that David Flippo won a Bronze Star for service at a base in Ohio. His Bronze Star was awarded for service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In our previous Digest, we incorrectly stated that Scott Colom would be Mississippi’s first Black senator. He would be the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.

The Davids also talk with Eric Ming at the State and Local Election Alliance, an organization devoted to deep downballot elections where control over the machinery of democracy is at stake. Eric walks us through some of SLEA’s top targets, including a judge in Nevada known for always favoring Republicans, a MAGA election administrator in Colorado who’s simply terrible at her job, and the leader of one of Texas’ biggest counties who just shut down a bunch of polling sites in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

Leading Off

SC-Sen, MS-Sen

Two Southern states that haven’t elected Democrats to the Senate since the last century are suddenly drawing late spending as Democrats hope the political environment will allow them to pull off major upsets.

In South Carolina, the Senate Leadership Fund plans to spend $5 million to protect Republican Sen. Darline Graham, Axios reported Tuesday.

An unnamed GOP source described the move as an “insurance policy” to help the new senator, the sister and successor to the late Lindsey Graham, fend off pediatrician Annie Andrews. SLF’s opening commercial isn’t available yet, but the same source said the ad campaign will “remind voters that Andrews is a Democrat.”

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, American Bridge PAC informs the National Journal that it will spend just over $2 million to help Scott Colom, a Democrat who serves as district attorney for four counties in the eastern part of the state, against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

American Bridge, a prominent opposition research group that has expanded its operations in recent years to include advertising, begins its opening ad with a woman who identifies herself as Susan. “Because my daughter has autism, she’s on Medicaid for her health care,” she explains. “People like Hyde-Smith, they just don’t see us, they don’t understand my life at all.”

“She voted for that ‘One Big Beautiful Bill,’” Susan continues. “And that cut Medicaid coverage. It’s already costing us, and we’re terrified about what might happen next.”

Both SLF and American Bridge’s new activities mark notable escalations in states Donald Trump easily carried in all three of his campaigns.

With Trump’s ardent support, Graham narrowly held off Rep. Ralph Norman in an expensive special Republican primary runoff. But that bruising contest—which Graham almost lost after she admitted in a debate, “I’m not that informed on national security”—left the new incumbent without much money to counteract Andrews’ well-funded effort.

The Democrat has made full use of her financial advantage in a state that Trump won 58-40. NBC, citing data from AdImpact, reports that Andrews has spent over $6 million on ads since the start of September, while GOP groups have deployed just under $700,000. Graham’s own campaign “has not spent any significant funds” since she defeated Norman, the network says.

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Things have been quieter in Mississippi, where Hyde-Smith and Colom easily won their respective primaries back in March. Republican groups, though, haven’t overlooked the race. FEC data shows that Hyde-Smith’s backers have spent about $1.6 million since the start of September through Tuesday, compared to $500,000 from Colom’s allies.

But despite the state’s heavily Republican lean—Trump carried it by a 61-38 spread—prominent progressives have taken an interest in the Democratic nominee. The Wall Street Journal wrote late last month that a super PAC funded by the Soros family has spent nearly $1 million to aid Colom, who would be his state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, while other major donors have contributed directly to him.

“We’re not going to pretend it suddenly became an easy state to win,” Democracy Alliance head Pamela Shifman, whose group advises big Democrats where to invest their resources, told the paper. “It’s that the political potential has been chronically undervalued.”

Colom also argued in a recent interview with the Washington Post that, while national Democrats have become “conditioned not to care about Mississippi,” he can score a historic breakthrough for his party.

Mississippi, like South Carolina and every other state in the vanquished Confederacy, was dominated by segregationist Democrats from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until the Civil Rights Movement nearly a century later.

But after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964—a year that saw South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond defect to the GOP—Republicans began making major inroads with white voters. However, it would take many more years for the region’s shift to the Republican Party to reach its end-point.

In South Carolina, Democrats held on to the state’s other Senate seat in 1966 when former Gov. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, who began his career as an ardent segregationist but went on to help peacefully integrate the state’s public schools, won a special election.

Republicans were never able to unseat Hollings, who convincingly won his final term in 1998, but GOP Rep. Jim DeMint won the race to succeed him in 2004 after the longtime incumbent opted to retire. Republicans have since had little trouble holding both of the state’s Senate seats, with one notable exception.

Lindsey Graham, who was elected in 2002 when the 100-year-old Thurmond finally stepped aside, went through an intensely watched contest in 2020 against Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the state Democratic Party. Polls showed Harrison, who raised more than $130 million, with a real opening. Graham, though, defied the polls and won 54-44.

Democrats, though, hope that Darline Graham, who lacks her brother’s experience on the campaign trail and in Congress, will face a tougher time against Andrews. If she does, the presence of two minor right-wing candidates, Constitutional Party nominee Mark Hackett and Libertarian Kasie Whitener, could make the difference this time.

Mississippi Republicans, meanwhile, got their foothold in the Senate in 1978 when Thad Cochran won the race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. James Eastland, a notorious segregationist.

The state’s other Senate seat, though, remained in Democratic hands for a good while longer. Sen. John Stennis, another segregationist who had ardently opposed civil rights, won a final term in 1982, in part by appealing to Black voters by supporting the extension of the Voting Rights Act.

But while Stennis crushed Republican Haley Barbour, a future governor, he was hardly a transformed man. The next year, he voted against designating Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday, with a spokesman explaining that “we already had more than enough holidays.”

Stennis finally retired ahead of the 1988 election, and Republican Trent Lott was elected to replace him. Lott resigned in 2007 to begin his lobbying career, and Republican Roger Wicker, whom Barbour picked to replace him, still holds the seat.

Hyde-Smith arrived in the Senate the same way a decade later after Cochran, who was in poor health, resigned in 2018 and then-Gov. Phil Bryant chose her as his replacement. (Cochran would die the next year.)

Democrats hoped that a backlash against Trump during his first midterm cycle would give former Rep. Mike Espy an opening in a special election that, thanks to the state’s unusual laws, was decided in a runoff that took place just after Thanksgiving. Hyde-Smith, though, prevailed 54-46, and she won a 2020 rematch for a full term by a larger 54-44 spread.

Hyde-Smith will now go up against Colom, whom she blocked from being confirmed to a federal judgeship during the Biden administration, in a race that also includes independent Ty Pinkins, who unsuccessfully ran for the state’s other Senate seat under the Democratic banner in 2024.

Because Mississippi does not hold runoffs for regularly scheduled Senate races, however, Pinkins’ presence on the ballot could end up costing Colom Democratic-leaning voters in a state where he has essentially no room for error.

But Colom, who was born the month after Stennis won his final term, thinks he can give Democrats their first Senate victory in his lifetime.

“The wave doesn’t have to be humongous for us to capture Mississippi,” he told the Post. “To me, you can’t be a party that cares about working people if you don’t care about working rural people in Mississippi who are struggling.”

The Downballot

Republicans are looking sooo rusty

Here’s the downside to comfortably winning year after year: Your campaign skills get rusty in a hurry. As David Nir and guest-host Joe Sudbay discuss on this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast, that problem is now in full bloom for Republicans across the country who are suddenly facing competitive elections in states where Democrats have often bee…

Listen now

16 days ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · David Nir and Joe Sudbay

3Q Fundraising

• AL-Gov: (September fundraising)

  • Tommy Tuberville (R): $1.13 million raised, $6.5 million cash on hand

  • Doug Jones (D): $1.12 million raised, $2.2 million cash on hand

• NE-Gov: Lynne Walz (D): $2.1 million raised (from June 17 to Sept. 29)

• MI-01: Callie Barr (D): $700,000 raised

• VA-07: Eugene Vindman (D-inc): $3.4 million raised, $5.7 million cash on hand

Judges

NC Supreme Court

Republican Sarah Stevens appears to be barely campaigning for the North Carolina Supreme Court, The Assembly reports, even though early voting begins next week.

Stevens has yet to run any ads against Justice Anita Earls, the Democrat she’s trying to unseat, nor has she made many public appearances, the site explains. When The Assembly asked her spokesperson how many fundraisers and public appearances she’s done, he vaguely responded, “Several.”

Earls’ team, meanwhile, says she’s held approximately 200 events in the last two years. She’s also had little trouble advertising, as Earls had about 13 times as much money at the end of the last reporting deadline in June as she seeks a second eight-year term.

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Republicans hold a 5-2 majority on the state’s highest court, which the GOP has controlled since the 2022 elections, so the balance of power won’t change next month no matter who wins next month. The contest, however, still has implications going into 2028, when Democrats will have the chance to complete their long-term drive to retake the court.

If Earls wins reelection, her party would next need to win races for two of the three GOP-held seats that will be on the ballot in two years’ time. A Stevens upset, conversely, would require Democrats to sweep all three.

Poll Pile

All polls must comply with The Downballot’s requirements.

• FL-Sen: YouGov:

  • Ashley Moody (R-inc): 49, Angie Nixon (D): 44.

• FL-Sen: Mason-Dixon for Telemundo/WTVJ:

  • Moody (R-inc): 50, Nixon (D): 40.

• IA-Sen: Suffolk University:

  • Josh Turek (D): 48, Ashley Hinson (R): 44, Thomas Laehn (L): 2.

  • Aug.: 45-41 Hinson.

• IL-Sen: Public Policy Polling for Chicago News Weekly:

  • Juliana Stratton (D): 49, Don Tracy (R): 36.

• KS-Sen: YouGov:

  • Adam Hamilton (D): 48, Roger Marshall (R-inc): 45.

• MI-Sen: YouGov:

  • Abdul El-Sayed (D): 49, Mike Rogers (R): 48.

• NE-Sen: YouGov:

  • Dan Osborn (I): 48, Pete Ricketts (R-inc): 47.

• NH-Sen: Saint Anselm College for the AAPR:

  • Chris Pappas (D): 51, John Sununu (R): 44.

• NH-Sen: YouGov:

  • Pappas (D): 51, Sununu (R): 43.

• OH-Sen: YouGov:

  • Sherrod Brown (D): 49, Jon Husted (R-inc): 45.

• TX-Sen: YouGov:

  • James Talarico (D): 50, Ken Paxton (R): 44.

• FL-Gov: YouGov:

  • Byron Donalds (R): 47, David Jolly (D): 45.

• FL-Gov: Mason-Dixon:

  • Donalds (R): 48, Jolly (D): 41.

• IA-Gov: Suffolk:

  • Rob Sand (D): 55, Zach Lahn (R): 43.

  • Aug.: 48-44 Sand.

• IL-Gov: PPP for Chicago News Weekly:

  • JB Pritzker (D-inc): 54, Darren Bailey (R): 34.

• KS-Gov: YouGov:

  • Ty Masterson (R): 47, Cindy Holscher (D): 44.

• MD-Gov: University of Maryland, Baltimore County:

  • Wes Moore (D-inc): 51, Dan Cox (R): 24.

• MI-Gov: YouGov:

  • Jocelyn Benson (D-inc): 48, John James (R): 45.

• MI-Gov: Mitchell Research & Communications:

  • Benson (D): 46, James (R): 39, all others 2% or less.

  • July: 46-44 Benson.

• NE-Gov: YouGov:

  • Jim Pillen (R-inc): 44, Lynne Walz (D): 43.

  • The poll did not include Brett Lindstrom, the America First Party nominee, as an option.

• NH-Gov: Saint Anselm:

  • Kelly Ayotte (R-inc): 52, Cinde Warmington (D): 45.

• NH-Gov: YouGov:

  • Ayotte (R-inc): 49, Warmington (D): 40.

• NV-Gov: Noble Predictive Insights:

  • Joe Lombardo (R-inc): 42, Aaron Ford (D): 40, Danielle Ford (I): 7.

• NY-Gov: co/efficient for Coalition to Protect Nassau Taxpayers:

  • Kathy Hochul (D-inc): 48, Bruce Blakeman (R): 41.

  • July: 47-41 Hochul.

  • The Coalition to Protect Nassau Taxpayers is a conservative organization.

• NY-Gov: Marist University:

  • Hochul (D-inc): 53, Blakeman (R): 42.

• OH-Gov: YouGov:

  • Amy Acton (D): 48, Vivek Ramaswamy (R): 44.

• SC-Gov: Resonance Media Services:

  • Alan Wilson (R): 45, Jermaine Johnson (D): 35.

  • Resonance, a Republican firm, did not say whether it conducted this poll on behalf of a client.

• TX-Gov: YouGov:

  • Gina Hinojosa (D): 48, Greg Abbott (R-inc): 47.

• NV-AG: NPI:

  • Nicole Cannizzaro (D): 45, Adriana Guzman Fralick (R): 37.

• NV-SoS: NPI:

  • Cisco Aguilar (D-inc): 44, Jim Marchant (R): 37.

• FL Ballot - Amendment 3 (cut property taxes for homeowners): Mason-Dixon:

  • Yes: 55, No: 26.

  • The amendment needs 60% of the vote to pass.

• IA Ballot - Amendment 1 (require a two-thirds legislative vote to raise income or corporate taxes): Suffolk:

  • Yes: 40, No: 36.

  • Aug.: 36-33 “no.”

• NV-LG: NPI:

  • Sandra Jauregui (D): 41, Stavros Anthony (R-inc): 38.

• NV Treasurer: NPI:

  • Tya Mathis-Coleman (D): 40, Drew Johnson (R): 39.

• NV Controller: NPI:

  • Michael MacDougall (D): 42, Andy Matthews (R-inc): 37.

Correction: This Digest incorrectly stated that Scott Colom would be Mississippi’s first Black senator. He would be the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.

Leading Off

NY-03

Rep. Tom Suozzi is facing an onslaught of GOP money, yet his fellow Democrats are behaving as though he has little to worry about.

Newsday reported Friday that Republican groups have spent more than $11 million to help former Assemblyman Mike LiPetri win his rematch against Suozzi for New York’s 3rd District, a sum that may include future reservations. The FEC had tracked close to $7 million from GOP groups as of Monday, with most coming from Donald Trump’s No Going Back PAC.

The National Journal, citing data from AdImpact, also reported Friday that LiPetri and his allies have spent roughly $9 million more than Suozzi’s side. Democrats, though, don’t sound at all concerned that they may need to step in to help Suozzi, who has spent a quarter century as one of the most prominent politicians in populous Nassau County.

“Explained to a Senior Democratic Strategist today that Republicans are spending $11+ million to try to beat Suozzi and I think they thought I was on drugs,” Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin tweeted Wednesday. “Two parties just seeing entirely different races.”

Recent history gives both sides reason to feel optimistic about their prospects in the 3rd District, which includes northern Nassau County and small portions of neighboring Queens and Suffolk County.

Ever since his 2001 victory in the race for county executive that marked the end of Nassau’s once-all-powerful Republican machine, the centrist Suozzi has experienced many electoral ups and downs, but he remains a powerful political force.

Still, just a few years ago, he seemed to be finished in politics following his disastrous 2022 primary campaign against Gov. Kathy Hochul, when he finished a distant third. But he got the chance to reclaim the 3rd District after Republican George Santos, who flipped this seat just before his history of lies and scandals became the subject of international attention, was expelled by his colleagues.

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In an expensive and closely watched special election in February of 2024, Suozzi blew past Republican Mazi Pilip by a comfortable 54-46 margin, a showing that left few Republicans eager to take him on again. LiPetri eventually became the GOP’s pick to retake the 3rd, which became slightly bluer after the Democratic-led legislature made minor tweaks to the congressional map, but just about no one gave him much of a chance.

It was therefore a major surprise when Suozzi defeated LiPetri just 52-48 on a night that also saw Trump become the first Republican presidential nominee to carry Nassau County since George H.W. Bush in 1988. That breakthrough allowed Trump to score a 51-47 win in the 3rd District, a sea change from Joe Biden’s 55-44 victory in 2020.

And while Trump’s weak approval ratings nationally have Republicans struggling to hold on in areas that swung toward him in the last presidential election, the Nassau County GOP has been on the upswing.

County Executive Bruce Blakeman won reelection by a wide 56-44 margin last November as fellow Republicans across the country suffered severe losses. The rest of the GOP ticket also convincingly turned back Democratic attempts to regain influence in an area that just a few years ago seemed lost to Republicans.

Blakeman quickly set out to capitalize on his success by launching a campaign against Hochul and nailed down the GOP nomination before 2026 even began. And though Blakeman remains the underdog in this heavily Democratic state, he could give LiPetri a lift back on Long Island.

Suozzi, for his part, is framing his own race as a choice between an independent-minded moderate and a partisan Republican.

“It’s OK for [LiPetri] to be supportive of his president, of the president and the party, but not 100% about everything,” the congressman told CBS New York. “Not when everybody’s prices are going through the roof, when people are unhappy about things that are happening in the country.”

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The Downballot

Republicans are looking sooo rusty

Here’s the downside to comfortably winning year after year: Your campaign skills get rusty in a hurry. As David Nir and guest-host Joe Sudbay discuss on this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast, that problem is now in full bloom for Republicans across the country who are suddenly facing competitive elections in states where Democrats have often bee…

Listen now

15 days ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · David Nir and Joe Sudbay

3Q Fundraising

• SC-Gov: Jermaine Johnson (D): $700,000 raised

• TX-Gov (from July 1 to Sept. 24):

  • Greg Abbott (R-inc): $20.3 million raised, $17.3 million cash on hand

  • Gina Hinojosa (D): $13.3 million raised, $4.1 million cash on hand

• IA-03: Zach Nunn (R-inc): $800,000 raised

• MI-04: Sean McCann (D): $1.8 million raised

• NJ-07: Rebecca Bennett (D): $3.9 million raised, $1.6 million cash on hand

• VA-06: Beth Macy (D): $1 million raised

Senate

KS-Sen

People Over Politics, a group backing Democrat Adam Hamilton, will spend an additional $3 million on TV and digital ads, Politico reports, a move that brings its total investment to $6 million. Data from the FEC shows that People Over Politics is responsible for the majority of independent expenditures boosting Hamilton against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall.

The additional outlay comes just days after the Senate Leadership Fund began airing ads to help Marshall win another term in Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in close to a century. Punchbowl News reported Monday that SLF intends to spend $14 million to help the incumbent.

MT-Sen

Steve Bullock, the last Democrat to serve as Montana’s governor, has endorsed independent Seth Bodnar’s bid for the Senate. Bodnar faces both Republican Kurt Alme and Democrat Alani Bankhead, who previously secured the support of Bullock’s predecessor, Democrat Brian Schweitzer.

House

CA-48, NE-02

Two Republican-held House seats that were reportedly “almost cooked” now seem closer to well-done.

On Monday afternoon, Punchbowl’s Ally Mutnick reported that the House Majority PAC had pulled $1.1 million from its ad reservations in Nebraska’s open 2nd District. Just an hour later, she added that HMP had likewise cut more than $200,000 from California’s 48th District, another open seat. Both reports were based on data from AdImpact.

Late on Monday night, HMP’s Republican counterpart, the Congressional Leadership Fund, followed suit in Nebraska and cut $1.1 million in planned advertising, according to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman.

Last week, Mutnick included both districts in a catalog of nine races where operatives in both parties “privately agree” that Republicans “are in deep, deep trouble.” Nebraska’s 2nd and California’s 48th were both included in a category she labeled “almost cooked already.”

Days later, CNN placed the Nebraska race on a list of three contests where “Republicans are discussing pulling money from once-competitive races they see as too difficult to win.”

The Omaha-based 2nd District was one of Democrats’ top pickup targets from the very start of the cycle. Kamala Harris carried it by a 52-47 margin in 2024, making it the bluest district won by Republicans in 2024. But it moved even further up the ranks after five-term GOP Rep. Don Bacon announced his retirement last year.

Earlier this year, HMP said it had booked almost $2.9 million in fall ad time for the 2nd, while CLF reserved $2.2 million. HMP’s move shows it has confidence in Democratic nominee Denise Powell, while CLF’s retreat suggests it feels exactly the opposite about Republican Brinker Harding.

HMP’s cuts in California were less dramatic, but the San Diego-area 48th District became a much tougher hold for Republicans after voters approved a new Democratic-drawn congressional map at the ballot box last year. While the previous version of the district had backed Donald Trump 56-41 two years ago, Kamala Harris would have carried the new iteration 50-47, according to calculations from The Downballot.

Following that transformation, longtime Rep. Darrell Issa said that he, too, would retire, leaving the task of defending the seat to fellow Republican Jim Desmond. CLF never reserved ad time here, though, while HMP booked more than $4.8 million. Its cutback is therefore small, but presumably the PAC feels good about Democrat Marni von Wilpert’s chances of flipping the district.

We’ve added both races to our continually updated House triage tracker, which now features four elections where one or both parties have pulled back from their planned spending. All have favored Democrats so far.

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CO-05

Jessica Killin and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a joint ad Monday featuring two relatives of Virginia Giuffre, who accuse Republican Rep. Jeff Crank of ignoring them as they tried to secure the release of files related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

“My sister Virginia was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims,” Sky Roberts tells voters in Colorado’s 5th District. “She spent her life trying to expose the truth. After she died, we promised to carry on her fight.”

His wife, Amanda Roberts, continues, “But our own congressman, Jeff Crank, refused to meet with us. Then, when he had the chance to expose the truth and release the Epstein files, he repeatedly voted to cover them up.”

“Virginia deserved better,” Sky Roberts says of his sister, who died by suicide last year after writing a book detailing her allegations against Epstein. “Jeff Crank covered up Epstein’s crimes to protect Donald Trump. He has no business being in Congress.”

Crank, like almost every Republican in Congress, refused to sign on to an effort to compel the federal government to release the Epstein files last year and has opposed similar measures. The congressman told News5 a year ago he favored a solution that involved “the release of all documents that shed light on what occurred, while protecting the identity of the victims.”

The Roberts family, however, did not accept that response. Sky Roberts told the station during a protest outside Crank’s office in Colorado Springs last year that “the right thing to do is to come forward” and that “we will not be going away anytime soon.”

Crank ultimately voted to release some of the files in question last November after Trump relented and called on Congress to do so, but the Roberts say that both he and his staff have ignored their calls to back a new effort to mandate further disclosures.

“We met with his staff, and they promised to follow up. We got silence,” Sky Roberts said at a press conference Monday. “When we brought the petition to his office, they locked the doors.”

At that event, the couple also showed reporters text messages from a year ago that they said depicted an exchange between themselves and a Crank staffer who repeatedly ignored their inquiries. Amanda Roberts also said that the aide responded to one of those year-old texts with a “haha” reaction on Monday morning.

“It was hit unintentionally when taking screen shots to demonstrate Rep. Crank’s office set up a meeting with the Roberts family, clearly this tragedy and family grief are no laughing matters,” Crank’s team told the conservative Washington Examiner in response.

Crank’s team earlier in the day had reacted to the new Democratic ad with a statement praising the congressman’s handling of the matter and accusing Killin, a one-time chief of staff to former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, of “preying on a grieving family with the help of the Washington Democrats.”

Sky Roberts, though, used his press conference later that day to praise Killin as someone who “chose to listen” to them when their congressman ignored them.

Killin is challenging Crank for a Colorado Springs-based constituency that Democrats have never held since it came into existence following the 1970 census. Killin, though, is waging a well-funded campaign to flip a district Trump carried 53-44 in a year where many comparably red districts are also in play.

DCCC

The DCCC added six more candidates, all of whom are running in conservative districts, to its Red to Blue program on Monday:

• AR-02: Chris Jones

• CO-03: Dwayne Romero

• FL-27: Eliott Rodriguez

• NV-02: Teresa Benitez-Thompson

• NY-21: Blake Gendebien

• TN-09: Justin Pearson

Ballot Measures

ID Ballot

The campaign to restore abortion rights to Idaho has raised nearly double the amount of the effort to defeat the ballot initiative next month, the Idaho Capital Sun reports.

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Idahoans United for Women and Families, which placed what’s now known as Proposition 1 on the ballot, hauled in $4.9 million through Sept. 29, compared to $2.5 million for its opponents, Too Extreme for Idaho. The Sun also notes that over 3,000 people contributed to the abortion rights campaign, compared to just 83 for its rival.

Proposition 1, which is statutory in nature, needs to secure a simple majority of the vote to end Idaho’s near-total abortion ban that went into effect in 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

It would be replaced with a new statute that “establishes a right to make private reproductive health care decisions, including abortion up to fetal viability and in medical emergencies.” Fetal viability, which refers to the point at which a fetus can survive outside a womb, is generally viewed by experts as beginning at around 23 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

Obituaries

Dennis Hastert

Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who admitted to sexually abusing his students when he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1960s and 1970s, died Saturday at the age of 84. Hastert made that admission in 2016 during his sentencing hearing after he pled guilty to paying hush money to one of his accusers. He went on to serve 13 months in prison.

In 1986, Hastert, an Illinois Republican, was elected to represent the 14th District, a longtime GOP stronghold in the western Chicago area. He went on to unexpectedly become speaker following the 1998 elections after Newt Gingrich stepped down under pressure from his party and Gingrich’s would-be successor, Bob Livingston, resigned following a sex scandal.

Hastert maintained a subdued profile compared to Gingrich but lasted twice as long in the top job and stepped down only after Democrats won control of the House following the 2006 elections. The following year, he opted to resign from Congress rather than complete his term, setting up a closely watched special election that saw Democrat Bill Foster flip the ex-speaker’s seat.

Hastert briefly was back in the news in 2010 when his son waged an unsuccessful primary campaign for the right to take on Foster, but he otherwise attracted little attention during his post-congressional life until 2015. Everything changed that spring when federal authorities indicted the former speaker for allegedly concealing almost $1 million in cash withdrawals from the IRS and lying about it to the FBI.

That indictment led to a series of events that resulted in Hastert accepting a plea deal for hiding financial transactions and acknowledging he’d abused students as young as 14. While the statute of limitations for sexual abuse had expired, Judge Thomas Durkin called Hastert a “serial child molester” during his sentencing.

“Some actions can obliterate a lifetime of good works,” Durkin said. “Nothing is more stunning than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”

Poll Pile

All polls must comply with The Downballot’s requirements.

• ME-Sen: Maine People’s Resource Center:

  • Troy Jackson (D): 49, Susan Collins (R-inc): 47.

  • The Maine People’s Resource Center is a nonprofit that does not endorse candidates. However, the Maine People’s Alliance, which identifies itself as the MPRC’s “sister organization,” has endorsed Jackson.

• ME-Sen: Marist University:

  • Jackson (D): 51, Collins (R-inc): 47.

• MI-Sen: Mitchell Research & Communications:

  • Abdul El-Sayed (D): 46, Mike Rogers (R): 41, Lydia Christensen (L): 3, all others 2% or less.

• NM-Sen: SurveyUSA for KOB:

  • Ben Ray Lujan (D): 54, Larry Marker (R): 36.

• CA-Gov: David Jay Wolfson for Steve Hilton:

  • Xavier Becerra (D): 46, Hilton (R): 40.

  • Aug.: 49-41 Becerra.

• CA-Gov: Independent Voter Project:

  • Becerra (D): 48, Hilton (R): 38.

• ME-Gov: Marist:

  • Hannah Pingree (D): 52, Bobby Charles (R): 40, Rick Bennett (I): 6.

• NM-Gov: SurveyUSA:

  • Deb Haaland (D): 47, Gregg Hull (R): 41.

• AZ-01: FirstStrategic: Amish Shah (D): 44, Jay Feely (R): 42.

  • FirstStrategic tells The Downballot this poll was not done on behalf of a client

• FL-16: Public Policy Polling:

  • Sydney Gruters (R): 43, Kelly Kirschner (D): 39.

  • PPP, a Democratic firm, did not say if this poll was done on behalf of a client.

• CA Ballot - Proposition 39 (voter ID): IVP:

  • Yes: 43, No: 40.

• CA Ballot - Proposition 40 (wealth tax): IVP:

  • No: 42, Yes: 38.

• CA Ballot - Proposition 41 (new rules around audits of state spending): IVP:

  • Yes: 49, No: 15.

• CA Ballot - Proposition 42 (bar taxing certain assets): IVP:

  • Yes: 48, No: 24.

Leading Off

KS-Sen, NC-Sen, GA-Sen

Republicans are suddenly plowing money into a Senate race they never expected would be competitive while pulling back from contests that had once been among their top targets.

On Friday, the Senate Leadership Fund began airing ads for the first time in Kansas, a state that last elected a Democratic senator in 1932—by far the longest dry spell in the nation for either party.1 CNN, citing data from AdImpact, reports that SLF is spending at least $10.1 million to aid Republican incumbent Roger Marshall against Democrat Adam Hamilton, though that total could rise as more information comes in.

Those funds will come at the expense of North Carolina Republican Michael Whatley, whom SLF has now abandoned altogether as polls show him far behind Democrat Roy Cooper in the race to hold retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis’ seat.

Whatley’s bad day began early Friday when Semafor reported that SLF was “pausing its ad campaign” to help him against Cooper, a proven vote-getter who served two terms as governor. But the pause didn’t last long.

Just hours later, the New York Times reported that the super PAC, which had already spent $30 million on the race, was not simply pausing its campaign but instead canceling all of its remaining ad time. CNN later reported that $13.2 million was axed.

Republicans have spent weeks speculating that deep-pocketed conservative groups could leave both Whatley and Georgia Republican Mike Collins—who is also in bad shape against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff—to fend for themselves so they could direct their money to more competitive races.

An unnamed source informed NBC on Friday that SLF was still spending in Georgia, but some of Collins’ fellow Republicans think the race is already over. One especially pessimistic Republican told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in late September, “At this point, it’s about making the patient comfortable.”

Some other groups, however, have already decided to pull the plug. Punchbowl News reported on Friday that the National Republican Senatorial Committee isn’t running coordinated ads with either Collins or Whatley and added that Donald Trump’s No Going Back PAC had less than $90,000 still reserved in Georgia and nothing in North Carolina.

Trump himself offered little solace for Whatley when reporters asked him about SLF’s departure from North Carolina. He instead said, “I am worried about him.”

While Whatley and Collins have long struggled in states that Trump won only narrowly in 2024, Marshall spent most of the cycle looking secure in Kansas, a state Trump last carried 57-41.

With just a month to go before the midterms, we’re doing everything to keep our readers sane—and well-informed. If you appreciate The Downballot’s commitment to calm, cool-headed analysis and our extreme aversion to histrionics and hot-takes, then we hope you’ll consider supporting our work by upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s just $9 a month or $75 a year. Thank you!

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But things began to change at the end of April when Hamilton, the founder of the largest United Methodist church in the country, joined the race and quickly began raising large sums.

Hamilton went on to decisively win the Democratic primary in August, and several polls now show him locked in a tight general election with Marshall. A new aggregate of surveys compiled by FiftyPlusOne shows Hamilton with a narrow 46.1 to 45.4 advantage over the incumbent as of Sunday.

Still, Republicans had reason to feel confident that Marshall would continue their 88-year winning streak in the Sunflower State. Six years ago, Marshall, then a congressman, prevailed 53-42 against a well-funded Democratic effort to flip what was then an open seat.

But Marshall, a former obstetrician, attracted the worst attention of his decade-long political career early last month when the New York Times reported he’d sued more than 700 patients over unpaid bills and had his attorneys seek garnishments and even arrests.

“They arrested me because I didn’t make a $50 payment to Roger Marshall,” Meischa Zimmerman, a former patient who was heavily featured in the story, said in a subsequent ad for Hamilton. “I was eight months pregnant, and I said, please do not handcuff me in front of my two-year-old daughter. Roger Marshall preyed on the low-income families of Kansas.”

Marshall’s attorneys responded to the spot last week with a cease-and-desist letter to Hamilton, whom they alleged was making “defamatory” claims against the senator. Among other things, they objected to the idea that Zimmerman was arrested for “missing a single $50 payment” when, they say, she had failed to make that monthly payment as part of her $3,595 debt.

Hamilton responded by sharing a letter from his attorney concluding the ad was true and would continue airing.

“[T]he existing evidence shows that a now-sitting U.S. Senator’s practice chose to set exorbitant interest rates to claw back his patients’ debt, sought warrants for his patients’ arrests, and then used their bond payments as a method to pay back the patients’ debt,” his lawyer wrote. “Ms. Zimmerman may not have been in a position to defend herself against Senator Marshall’s practices. Our client is.”

The GOP, meanwhile, has zeroed in on Hamilton’s own career as a pastor to argue that he’s the wrong choice to represent Kansas. SLF’s opening ad features a clip of Hamilton saying that “Black Lives Matter is just a fundamental philosophy and statement” to bolster the narrator’s case that he’s “a two-faced extremist.”

Marshall himself also debuted a new spot Friday arguing his opponent failed to protect children from a “child predator working at Adam Hamilton’s megachurch.” The ad says that Hamilton didn’t contact the police after victims came forward and instead “welcomed … back” the alleged abuser the following fall.

Hamilton responded later that same day with his own ad in which the candidate tells the audience Republicans are “lying about a tragic event decades ago.”

“Over 20 years ago, the church investigated serious allegations against a volunteer at a youth retreat,” Hamilton says. “Ultimately, the church reported him to law enforcement and banned him from church programs. ​​Now this is exactly the kind of dirty politics Roger Marshall is playing that everybody hates.”

The story originally surfaced in May during the Democratic primary when one of Hamilton’s rivals accused him of concealing the abuse that a volunteer named Scott Preston Moore committed during the 2000s.

According to court documents that were part of an eventual criminal case against Moore, several teenagers approached camp leaders following alleged incidents of sexual abuse in 2005. Though the camp conducted an internal investigation, an appeals court said leaders “were dismissive of their claims,” and that the investigation failed to establish Moore as the perpetrator.

Hamilton was not mentioned in the documents concerning the matter, and his campaign told the Kansas Reflector he wasn’t at the camp that year.

Court records said Moore returned as a volunteer in 2006 and entered campers’ sleeping quarters at night. This time, however, the church contacted authorities and put in place new rules to screen volunteers.

Moore, though, did not face charges until several years later, when an unidentified man told Hamilton that Moore had abused him in 1979 when, as a five-year-old, Moore was his babysitter.

The man approached law enforcement after confiding in Hamilton, and though the statute of limitations had expired, police began investigating Moore over a different abuse allegation. He was sentenced to a year in prison in 2013 and died two years later.

Hamilton is now arguing that Marshall is bringing up the matter to divert attention away from his own problems.

“Roger Marshall’s at it again, lying about Adam Hamilton to cover up having his own patients arrested,” says the narrator in another commercial. “The truth? Over 20 years ago, Hamilton’s church reported incidents involving a volunteer to law enforcement and then cut ties with him. Hamilton later helped get this predator convicted.”

It remains to be seen, however, whether Democratic groups will rush in to help Hamilton keep pace. As of Friday, FEC reports showed that Hamilton’s allies had spent $3.7 million in independent expenditures since August compared to $1.4 million for Marshall, but those figures don’t reflect SLF’s new offensive.

The Downballot

Republicans are looking sooo rusty

Here’s the downside to comfortably winning year after year: Your campaign skills get rusty in a hurry. As David Nir and guest-host Joe Sudbay discuss on this week’s episode of The Downballot podcast, that problem is now in full bloom for Republicans across the country who are suddenly facing competitive elections in states where Democrats have often bee…

Listen now

15 days ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · David Nir and Joe Sudbay

3Q Fundraising

• VT-Gov: (September fundraising):

  • Amanda Janoo (D): $291,000 raised, $280,000 cash on hand

  • Phil Scott (R-inc): $223,000 raised, $296,000 cash on hand

• AZ-06: JoAnna Mendoza (D): $3.3 million raised

• FL-13: Leela Gray (D): $1.4 million raised

• FL-14: Kathy Castor (D-inc): $2.5 million raised

• KY-06: Zach Dembo (D): $1.35 million raised

• TX-15: Bobby Pulido (D): $3.4 million raised

Senate

ME-Sen

The Senate Majority PAC is putting a reported $3.4 million behind a new ad campaign hammering Republican Sen. Susan Collins over corruption allegations brought to light by ProPublica last month.

The spot features a variety of news clips referencing the story, which received heavy exposure both in Maine and nationally, but is chiefly narrated by an unnamed older woman with a distinct Maine accent.

“Susan Collins took illegal campaign money and steered millions in government contracts to the donor,” she says. “But Donald Trump’s administration shut down the investigation.”

“Maybe there’s a reason Susan Collins does whatever Donald Trump wants her to,” she concludes.

Last month, ProPublica reported on a previously unrevealed corruption investigation involving Collins.

According to the outlet, a Hawaii defense contractor had used a shell company to donate $150,000 to a pro-Collins super PAC in exchange for Collins’ help in securing government contracts.

The firm’s CEO, Martin Kao, later pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions—government contractors are barred from making political donations—but was reportedly working with prosecutors to expose his “sprawling pay-to-play operation” in exchange for leniency, ProPublica wrote.

That probe quietly died, however, after Donald Trump returned to the White House and decimated the FBI’s anti-corruption unit.

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TX-Sen

The star of the newest ad supporting Ken Paxton’s beleaguered Senate bid is none other than the candidate’s estranged wife—who mentions neither her husband nor the race he’s running in.

Angela Paxton, who herself is a member of Texas’ state Senate, begins by introducing herself and telling viewers, “People have asked my thoughts about this election, and turns out, I have some. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.”

“In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team,” she continues. “It’s about getting the whole team across the finish line. Either we hold every Republican seat, or we hand the future of Texas to the other team. That’s why I’m voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd. Let’s hold the line together.”

The ad is being run by Texas PAC, which is an affiliate of the Senate Leadership Fund, the top GOP super PAC involved in Senate races. SLF has now spent a reported $131 million on the contest.

Paxton’s appearance on her husband’s behalf follows her announcement last year that she was seeking divorce “on biblical grounds.”

“Today, after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds,” she posted on X in July. “I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.”

In divorce papers, Paxton used more traditional legal language and accused her husband, who’s served as state attorney general since 2015, of “adultery.”

As early as 2020, the Associated Press reported that Ken Paxton had engaged in an affair with a legislative aide named Laura Olson, who was later hired by real estate investor Nate Paul.

In 2023, when the state House impeached Ken Paxton on 20 different grounds of misconduct, one article charged that Paul’s decision to employ Olson constituted bribery of the attorney general. Paxton’s efforts to conceal the alleged affair were a central part of the case against him.

As the Texas Tribune explained, lawmakers argued that Paul hired Olson, who’d been living in San Antonio, “so that she could move to Austin and helped Paxton clandestinely meet with her through a secret Uber account that the two men shared.” Ultimately, though, the Senate acquitted Paxton, who’d been accused of threatening political retribution against impeachment supporters.

Last year, the Daily Mail, a conservative British tabloid, reported that Paxton also had an affair with Christian influencer Tracy Duhon, who was married at the time. A Paxton spokesperson attacked the paper as a “trash blog” in a statement but did not dispute the reporting.

Mayors & County Leaders

Jacksonville, FL Mayor

Republican state Rep. Wyman Duggan on Friday became the first major candidate to announce a campaign against Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan in next spring’s officially nonpartisan race to lead Florida’s largest city.

In 2023, Deegan gave Sunshine State Democrats a rare high-profile victory when she prevailed 52-48 in an open-seat race, flipping the mayor’s office in what had been the largest city in the country with a Republican leader. That victory made her just the second Democrat to hold the post since the early 1990s.

All candidates will face off on March 9 of next year. If no one secures a majority of the vote, a second round of voting would take place on May 18.

Poll Pile

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All polls must comply with The Downballot’s requirements.

• AK-Sen: Siena University/The New York Times:

  • Mary Peltola (D): 50, Dan Sullivan (R-inc): 43.

  • June: 47-45 Sullivan.

• IA-Sen: Siena/NYT:

  • Ashley Hinson (R): 48, Josh Turek (D): 47.

  • June: 48-46 Hinson.

• ID-Sen: Peak Insights for Jim Risch:

  • Risch (R-inc): 49, Todd Achilles (I): 24, all others 3% or less.

  • Aug.: 52-18 Risch.

• KS-Sen: Siena/NYT:

  • Adam Hamilton (D): 45, Roger Marshall (R-inc): 45, David Graham (L): 5.

  • Marshall (R-inc): 47, Hamilton (D): 46.

• KS-Sen: Global Strategy Group for the Democratic Attorneys General Association:

  • Hamilton (D): 47, Marshall (R-inc): 43, Graham (L): 5.

  • Hamilton (D): 49, Marshall (R-inc): 47.

  • A memo for this poll was released last week that did not include results for the Senate race. The portions of that poll covering the governor and attorney general races were featured in the last Digest.

• ME-Sen: YouGov for CBS News:

  • Troy Jackson (D): 50, Susan Collins (R-inc): 50.

  • YouGov allowed respondents to select “Not Sure,” but this option rounded out to 0%.

• NE-Sen: co/efficient:

  • Pete Ricketts (R-inc): 45, Dan Osborn (I): 40, all others 2% or less.

  • Ricketts (R-inc): 48, Osborn (I): 43.

  • Co/efficient, a Republican firm, says this survey was “[n]ot sponsored by any candidate committee, party committee or other independent expenditure.”

• OH-Sen: Siena/NYT:

  • Sherrod Brown (D): 49, Jon Husted (R-inc): 46.

  • June: 50-47 Husted.

• TX-Sen: Siena/NYT:

  • James Talarico (D): 51, Ken Paxton (R): 45.

  • June: 47-47 tie.

• AK-Gov: Siena/NYT:

  • Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (D): 40, Bernadette Wilson (R): 20, Dave Bronson (R): 15, Treg Taylor (R): 11.

  • After simulated ranked-choice: Kreiss-Tomkins (D): 52, Wilson (R): 48.

• IA-Gov: Siena/NYT:

  • Rob Sand (D): 52, Zach Lahn (R): 41.

  • June: 48-47 Sand.

• KS-Gov: Siena/NYT:

  • Ty Masterson (R): 49, Cindy Holscher (D): 44.

• ME-Gov: YouGov:

  • Hanna Pingree (D): 56, Bobby Charles (R): 44.

• NE-Gov: co/efficient:

  • Jim Pillen (R-inc): 43, Lynne Walz (D): 38, Brett Lindstrom (America First Party): 5, Rick Beard (Legal Marijuana NOW Party): 3.

• OH-Gov: Siena/NYT:

  • Amy Acton (D): 49, Vivek Ramaswamy (R): 45.

  • June: 47-47 tie.

• TX-Gov: Siena/NYT:

  • Gina Hinojosa (D): 49, Greg Abbott (R-inc): 46.

  • June: 51-44 Abbott.

• AK-AL: Siena/NYT:

  • Nick Begich (R-inc): 47, Bill Hill (I): 35, Eric Hafner (D): 8, Jim McDermott (L): 5.

  • After simulated ranked-choice: Begich (R-inc): 53, Hill (I): 47.

• CA-11: Tavern Research for Jobs And Democracy PAC (pro-Scott Wiener):

  • Wiener (D): 45, Connie Chan (D): 34.

• KY-06: GQR for Zach Dembo:

  • Dembo (D): 42, Ralph Alvarado (R): 37, Jay Bowman (I): 8, Pete Lynch (I): 3.

• ME-02: Tulchin Research for Matt Dunlap:

  • Dunlap (D): 50, Paul LePage (R): 48.

• SC-01: co/efficient for Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter PAC (pro-Jenny Honeycutt)

  • Honeycutt (R): 46, Nancy Lacore (D): 40, Bill Reeside (L): 4.

• VA-06: co/efficient for Ben Cline:

  • Cline (R-inc): 59, Beth Macy (D): 29.

• WI-01: Impact Research for House Majority PAC:

  • Mitchell Berman (D): 48, Bryan Steil (R-inc): 47.

• IN-SoS: The Tarrance Group for Hoosier Leadership for America (pro-Max Engling):

  • Engling (R): 38, Beau Bayh (D): 37, Lauri Schillings (L): 6, Greg Ballard (Lincoln Party): 5.

Democrats across the country have been worried about getting swamped by a late flood of Republican money, but a new report shows they have less to fear than the raw dollar totals might indicate.

That’s because even though Republicans have built up a massive spending advantage on the airwaves in key races, they aren’t getting anywhere near the bang for the buck that Democrats are.

New data from AdImpact shows that, across nine of the most competitive Senate contests, Republicans had spent $563 million on advertising through the end of September versus $375 million for Democrats—a gap of 60% to 40% in favor of the GOP.

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But in terms of the actual number of ads aired, the difference is much smaller. In total, Republican ads have run roughly 290,000 times, while the Democrats’ have appeared approximately 250,000 times. That’s a difference of just 54% to 46%.

We’ve illustrated this disparity race by race in the chart at the top of this piece created by Daniel Donner. In all but two states, the proportion of Republican ads is smaller than the proportion of Republican ad dollars. (And those two exceptions, New Hampshire and Kansas, have seen the lowest total spending among the nine featured contests.)

Why hasn’t the GOP spending spree translated into a comparable advertising edge? Because Republicans have heavily relied on third-party groups like super PACs, which have to pay prevailing market rates for ads. Candidates, by contrast, are entitled by law to the lowest rates that broadcasters offer, which greatly benefits strong fundraisers like James Talarico in Texas and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

In many cases, the GOP’s cavalry has also been late to arrive. Organizations that book ad time early can obtain lower prices, because demand for airtime inevitably increases as an election draws closer and drives up rates. Latecomers will therefore find themselves paying a premium.

These two factors work in tandem as well. As Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin noted last month, super PACs in Texas were already paying more than twice as much as candidates by the second week of September, and that multiplier is only going to grow.

In 2024, Rubashkin pointed out, that ratio was 3-to-1 by Election Day, but it’s already worse now. According to an unnamed Democrat who recently spoke with CNN, GOP super PACs in Texas are paying an “absolutely punishing premium” that’s as much as five times greater than what Talarico’s campaign is getting charged.

What's more, there’s little evidence so far that the GOP ad deluge is working. In Talarico’s case, his margin in the polls—a 3-point edge, according to FiftyPlusOne—hasn't shifted since the onslaught began, and Democratic operatives told CNN that their internal polling looks similar.

Still, many Democrats, including Talarico, are getting out-advertised by their opponents, and it’s understandable to be concerned about that gap. But as AdImpact’s report shows, it’s critical to look beyond the raw dollar numbers for a true understanding of the landscape.

Paul, whose eponymous newsletter is a must-read, asked us penetrating questions about the metrics we’re relying on to forecast next month’s elections, from the generic congressional ballot to primary turnout to special elections to forecast models. We also spoke about gerrymandering, the price of diesel, potential polling errors, anger over data centers, why the media misread Donald Trump’s last election, and much more.

You can watch our entire discussion above, and you can also read a complete transcript below. I hope you enjoy watching this conversation as much as I enjoyed participating in it!

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Paul Krugman: Like almost everybody I know, I spend about 17 hours a day thinking about the midterms, and I’ve got G. Elliott Morris and David Nir from Strength In Numbers and The Downballot here to talk to me about: What do we know? What’s going to happen? What are the indicators? And then maybe some broader issues about what the heck we think is going on in U.S. politics. So, hi, guys. Welcome.

Elliott Morris: Hey, thanks, Paul.

David Nir: Paul, it’s a pleasure.

Krugman: So, yeah, as we record this, I guess it’s one month and two days before the midterms, and if I believe you guys, the polling and other indicators, which David will talk about, seem to be almost kind of shocking right now. Elliott, I just looked at your Fifty Plus One post, and I believe you now have 99% odds of Democrats controlling the House.

Morris: Yeah, well, it’s October, Paul. So we’re in what I consider spooky probability territory. 99% is when you start to go, “I hope these models are parameterized correctly.” Look, the way to unpack this: Our model at 50 Plus One shows a 99% chance that the Democrats will win 218 seats or more. 99% seems very large. As the forecaster, I don’t want to be wrong on the 99, but it makes sense when you look at the numbers on paper.

So, let’s take 2018 as a comparison case. That’s when Democrats won 235 seats in the House. That year, the generic ballot—which is a question that asks people how they will vote in their local congressional district, for which party they will vote—that has Democrats up somewhere between 8 and 9 points. Democrats won in 2018, leading the polls by about 8 or 9 points. They actually won the House popular vote by seven and a half points or so, if you account for some weirdness with, like, uncontested seats. So we are in a more favorable environment, if the polls are right, than 2018. And we also have a lot of other district-level indicators pointing the same way.

Krugman: But, I mean, the gerrymandering was fairly extreme before this, and if we go back to the beginning of this year, it was looking a little iffy, if I recall.

Morris: Yeah. So gerrymandering seems to have shifted maybe a handful of seats at most to the Republicans, accounting for some pretty rosy polling, for example, in South Texas and in Florida for the Democrats, where there’s been a larger shift than the national shift, which is about 10 or 11 percentage points. So if we are around eight points, our model says Democrats need to win the House popular vote by about three and a half points. So there’s room for the polls to be wrong by about five.

The average expected error for the polls at this point, 30 days before the election, is about three and a half percentage points. So we’re looking at a larger-than-average error in the polls. And then if you account for other indicators, district-level surveys, the race raters like we do, that’s how we get up to that 99. But yeah, I acknowledge this is a very, very large probability.

Nir: And Paul, just to address your point about the gerrymandering, which did heavily favor the GOP, it’s important to remember that Republicans were not doing that from a position of strength. They were doing it from a position of weakness, precisely because they knew that they were facing a very difficult midterm election. And they definitely—I can say this with certainty—definitely will not pick up, they will not flip, all of the seats that they targeted in Texas and Florida and elsewhere. And that has a lot to do with the quality of candidate recruitment on both sides.

And also, in particular in Texas and Florida as well, has a lot to do with Latino voters moving back against Trump after moving heavily for him in 2024. So, 2024 in a lot of ways was a high watermark. And so when you’re looking at how Trump performed in these districts two years ago, in a lot of cases, expect really a lot of fallback for the GOP.

Krugman: Tell me if I’m being underinformed here, but my understanding is that the gerrymandering was based, at least partially, on the assumption that the Hispanic shift towards Trump that took place in ‘24 was an enduring feature of the landscape, and that it all kind of goes wrong if, as now appears to be the case, it’s not enduring. Right?

Nir: That’s definitely what it appears to be. Because if you look at these redrawn districts, and instead of looking at how they went in 2024, if you go back a few years earlier and look at how they performed in 2020, when Joe Biden did much better with Latino voters than Kamala Harris did in many parts of the country, they show a much more competitive picture. And so you have Republicans talking about, you know, “Oh, these districts are Trump plus five, Trump plus ten, Trump plus 15.” But that’s 2024. You dial back to 2020, and suddenly we’re talking about districts that Joe Biden won, that Democrats have a real chance of holding on to in 2026.

Krugman: Okay. And I want to talk about other indicators, and polling in general. But just a question about the Senate: So now, we’re up into the 70s again for the Senate, right? And that’s a lot less. I mean, the Senate is sort of inherently gerrymandered. States that have about the population of some neighborhoods in the Bronx have as many seats. So, yeah. But that’s also looking pretty strong, right?

Morris: Well, speaking of state gerrymandering, don’t get me started about the drawing of the state border of Nevada. I mean, that was a gerrymander, right? So, look, the Democrats have 47 seats right now. They need 51 to have a majority and to overcome JD Vance’s tiebreaker as president of the Senate. So they need four pickups. They look likely, according to our model, to get a pickup in North Carolina, where the former governor, Roy Cooper, is running against the current chair of the Republican National Committee. So that’s what’s on my mind.

They look then likely as well to somewhere between a sort of toss-up and a lean Democratic seat in Texas and Ohio, where Democrats have got some good recruits in James Talarico and Sherrod Brown, a former incumbent senator of Ohio. And I should say Democrats are also very likely to hold on to their seat in Georgia, just for what it’s worth. And then we get into the seats that are, like, a lot, a lot tighter. That’s Iowa, currently Republican-held, but where the Democrat, Josh Turek, is leading the polls; Maine, where the polls were somewhat, you know, incredibly wrong in 2020, showing Susan Collins losing to—

Nir: Sarah Gideon.

Morris: See, this is why we do it together, Paul, right?

Krugman: Yeah, I know, it’s okay.

Morris: And then there’s Michigan, which seems like it should be a Democratic win in an environment where Democrats are ahead by eight points on the generic ballot. But the race is surprisingly close between Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers. And there’s like a bunch of other reach seats that might be competitive. We can talk about Kansas, where Democrats currently have a polling deficit of under half a point in Kansas. Like, what’s the matter with Kansas?

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, objectively, Trump policies, especially a war that’s driven up diesel prices and fertilizer prices and all of that, has been really pretty bad for farm country. But I don’t know to what extent we’re seeing that, to what extent we’re just seeing really just bad Republican recruitment or just general Trump fatigue.

Morris: I’ll say one thing about the numbers and then hand it over to David. But the other Plains states—Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas are the ones I’m thinking of—are all much more competitive than you would expect, given the fact that Donald Trump won these places by, you know, between 10 and 28 percentage points. I think in the case of Nebraska, if I’m remembering correctly. These are all within a point or so in the polls today, and back in 2025, when I was looking at Trump’s approval rating and all of the polling we do at Strength in Numbers.

So these are individual interviews from these Plains states. Donald Trump was also much less popular than you would expect, given his margins, and deportations and, and tariffs especially were very unpopular, or even more unpopular than Trump overall in these places. So, I think you’ve triangulated maybe there’s more economic pain in these places. Donald Trump has certainly very publicly pushed for these policies. So I can imagine voters are putting more blame on him directly because of the press conferences for tariffs in the early part of last year.

Nir: And Paul, I would say you’re exactly right to bring up diesel prices, because as bad as gas prices have gotten, you know, diesel has gotten much more expensive. And an attack on diesel prices is almost perfectly an attack on Trump’s base, because diesel is what’s used to carry goods in these Plains states that Elliott is talking about. It’s so important to the agricultural world, and Trump is really assaulting his own most loyal voters as hard as possible.

But it’s not just on that front, as Elliott said. You know, Republicans are upset about the stepped-up ICE raids in Kansas affecting the cattle industry. And so I think it’s just so many factors all combined together. You probably can’t pull just one out of them. And I think that they combine to make a lot of people feel like they’re just not being heard in general at all.

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, it’s one of those things where, for once, being an effete, liberal northeasterner makes me understate the amount of trouble that Trump is in, connected to diesel, because there’s not a whole lot of people driving tractors down the New Jersey Turnpike.

Nir: Not usually.

Krugman: But yeah, it’s actually kind of shocking to realize that gas sales are about two-thirds gasoline, one-third diesel, and the price of diesel is way up. So the actual pump shock out of the Iran war is more diesel than it is gasoline. And that’s hitting the states really hard.

One of the questions we all have now is, you know, polling. But David, you have this other indicator, which is kind of a cross-check on the polling, right? I want to hear about that, because I think it’s important.

Nir: It’s really fascinating, and I’m glad you brought it up. So at The Downballot, my colleague Daniel Donner published a new study recently, and we’re pretty sure that no one has actually looked at what Daniel looked at in precisely this way. So folks often ask, does turnout in primaries have anything to say about general elections? And they usually look at it on a state-by-state or case-by-case basis. Democrats, for instance, had incredibly strong turnout in the Texas primaries this year, better than Republicans, which is extremely unusual for Texas. So, does that actually mean anything for November? And when you look at these individual data points to compare primary turnout and general election performance, things kind of go all haywire.

But what Daniel did was he decided to look at primary turnout across the entire country. And he didn’t just do it for one year. He went back more than 100 years. And it turns out that there is a very close relationship in what we’re calling this national primary, when you add up primary votes for all 50 states, and then you look at the national House popular vote in the subsequent general election.

And what Daniel did, his real innovation here, it’s almost like he took the first derivative, because instead of looking at what primary turnout is in a given year, he looked at the change from midterm to midterm. And so if you look at the 2022 turnout, Democrats didn’t do particularly well that year. In fact, they are doing in 2026, 18 points better in this national primary that Dan essentially created synthetically. And what that extrapolates to, is that Democrats are looking like they’re doing 16 points better than in 2022, when you modify things a little bit, because, you know, Kamala Harris lost the popular vote in 2024.

But what this points to is a Democratic margin in the House popular vote of 13 points, which is considerably higher than what the current congressional ballot, the generic congressional ballot that Elliott was talking about, is pointing to. That’s around D+8. But what’s so important is that these metrics are all pointing in the same direction. And when we back-test this, when we look at how these perform historically, if these metrics are pointing in the same direction, then they tend to collectively be pretty accurate in predicting the House popular vote, which points to a real blowout for Democrats.

Krugman: I’m supposed to pretend to be objective and say “just the facts,” but actually I do care about how this election turns out. And what’s a little bit reassuring is these are actual votes. It’s sort of like the two things that we have that are actual votes, which are primary turnouts, and then special elections are not just based upon: Do people actually pick up the phone or actually respond online?

But how worried should we be? Response rates on polling are so low now, and how well are the pollsters managing to deal with this environment where people—I think two-thirds of the time when my phone rings, it’s from my good friend, Spam Risk?

Nir: Hey, I’m buddies with them too.

Morris: Look, I really don’t have a whole lot of comfort for people who just want the polls to be right, because we just don’t know. Like, we just don’t know if the decisions pollsters are making to combat non-response bias—and I will define that—if their methodology, their decisions are right. Because, you know, the capital-P problem in polling is that the people that answer the phone are very often not like the people who don’t answer the phones. They’re not representative of the whole population.

That was true in 1936, the first big test of scientific polling, when there were too many high-income, Republican-leaning voters. It was the same case in 1948. It’s just been true for the entire history of this instrument. And pollsters have a lot of really fancy things they can do to try to make the poll look like the population in terms of demographics, because we do have a national poll funded by the U.S. government called the census every ten years. So we know how many white or Black or young or poor people there should be. We don’t know how many Democrats there should be in a poll, or how many Democratic voters for the upcoming election there should be, because that election hasn’t happened yet.

So we’re just left looking for signs that the polls are wrong. And I’ll say a couple words about that, and also just exploring what potential outcomes could happen given the fact that polls have been wrong before. That’s what our election forecast does. But the polls are +8 right now. As I said earlier, average error in the generic ballot is three points. Let’s simulate a lot of different elections given that distribution of error, the three-point standard deviation on error. What could that election look like? And we answer that question through the election forecast.

So then the thing that’s left is checking—checking the polling data. One thing we do at Strength in Numbers is to take a predictive model of how people voted in 2024, trained on 2024 data, not our current polling data, and predict the Democratic or Republican lean of the people who are actually answering our survey. And there’s some potential bias in that. But the trendline is really important, because if the types of people who are answering your poll in 2025, for example, look like a Donald Trump plus-one electorate based off of your predictive models, and then that drifts over time to be, you know, Harris +1, Harris +4, Harris +5, then you have some good indications that the types of people you’re getting are too Democratic. But we do not see that. It’s a totally flat line.

That’s one thing we’ve done. And there’s some other things we can do to look for red flags of non-response ahead of time, and basically they’re all fine right now. So I’m as confident as I ever am that the polls are right. I’m never really all that confident. That’s why we simulate the election.

Krugman: And in both your guys’ modeling, how much are you also doing fundamentals? For instance, state of the economy. And also, economic surveys, which may be less politicized.

Morris: The only fundamental that matters in a midterm election is the president’s approval rating. That might not be a fundamental for an economist. But historically, you know, growth in GDP, change in real disposable income, change in employment rate—these things have very little correlation to midterm election outcomes.

Krugman: Okay.

Morris: The only real structural factor is who’s the party in the White House. And to some extent, how many seats do they hold right now? There tends to be a slightly larger punishment historically when the party in the White House holds a bunch of seats. But that’s maybe a gerrymandering factor.

So, I do think the economic discontent in the country matters, but it is probably being proxied through the polling right now. It’s not the type of thing that is historically predictive of a midterm election in the way that these things are predictive of presidential elections.

Krugman: That’s interesting. I’ve been maybe a little off on that. I knew about the historically very strong predictive power of the economic variables, but for presidential elections. And so are you saying there’s no independent effect, or really just that it doesn’t help you at all with midterms, even if you didn’t have the polling?

Morris: Yeah. There’s a very weak correlation between some of these economic fundamentals and the outcome of the election. If you then look out of sample at your predictive accuracy of a model that is trained on previous elections using these fundamentals and test out-of-sample, it’s even worse. And yes, once you start accounting for some other factors, like literally not even the president’s approval rating, just which party’s in the White House, then any relationship totally falls away.

Krugman: Which does kind of raise a bit of a question, right? If you drop the presidential approval rating, then you still don’t get very much, right?

Morris: So, yeah, I mean, there is a positive correlation, but I think we’re looking at a +0.4 correlation here.

Krugman: Yeah. But then there are the obvious fundamentals: there’s the price of diesel, there’s just generally really bad vibes about the economy. But how do we reconcile that with the fact that the midterms look at this point so much like a blowout? What’s driving that?

Morris: Well, I think the economic discontent is a big part of the equation here. You know, Paul, we’ve talked about the “vibe session” on your podcast previously. So, there might be some other residual, just disapproval or poor rating on the economy that people map onto politics. Just because this isn’t a historical explanation for why midterms go the way they go doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t matter this time around.

The thing I’ve identified in U.S. politics over the last year and a half of writing my Substack is just a very endemic, anti-status-quo, anti-incumbent bias. In our polling, like 70% of people say that they face significant hardship from inflation even this year. So I think these are all jumbled together.

Nir: And also we have seen some pretty remarkable correlations. In particular, when you drill down on Donald Trump’s approval rating about the economy and prices in general. Elliott, we have these wild graphs that when you look at Trump’s approval rating and overlay it with the change in gas prices and just shift it just by a couple of weeks, because the polls always lag a little bit, then they match up almost perfectly. Gas prices really do seem to dictate how people view Donald Trump’s success on prices. And so there’s no question that this anger is feeding into his low approval rating.

Krugman: During the Bush years we used to talk about that correlation a lot. And then, it seemed to go away. And now it’s kind of back. We used to say it was really terrible that so much seemed to depend upon gas prices over which the president really has no control. Which is not exactly true at this point, though, right?

Morris: Yeah. Historically I think that is right, yeah. This president has done a remarkable job of very publicly taking very unpopular stances on the policies that Americans notice the most, which is a very unique combination. And that might be the most simple explanation for why this midterm is going the way it looks like it’s going to go.

Krugman: Yeah. I mean, a couple of questions related to that. How much do you think Trump is paying a price for all of those extravagant promises he made in 2024? Do people remember that? It’s always a question in my mind. For political pundits, we’re always saying, “You said this, and now you say that.” But does the public have a memory of these things?

Morris: I don’t have any quantitative data on this, so I will get into anecdotal territory here. I watched a segment on CNN—yes, I do watch cable news sometimes—earlier this week, with a reporter just interviewing people at a gas station in Florida and interviewing former Trump voters. And there’s some sentiment of dissatisfaction. People say, “Oh, things aren’t going well.” And maybe two out of the ten people they interviewed said, “I feel betrayed.” Someone said “hoodwinked.”

So I think that is definitely an undercurrent we could identify, but it would be very hard, putting on my quantitative hat here, to identify how many voters the Republican Party has lost over the last year and a half due to Trump making such large promises. There’s definitely, in hindsight, I think for him, a bit of an own goal to be promising prices are going to go down on day one. But maybe he doesn’t actually care about the midterms or 2028. He just wanted to be president again, in which case maybe it was worth it for him.

Nir: And we’ve seen the same thing with his immigration enforcement policy. How many articles have we read featuring quotes from ordinary Americans, many of whom voted for Trump and said, “Oh, I voted for him to deport the violent criminals. I didn’t vote for him to deport the lovely fellow who’s been living and working in my community for 20 years,” and we might all smack our foreheads or get very angry about what feels like a lot of naivete about that.

But I am struck, even to this point, we’re now in October of 2026, how many times voters say, “This is what I thought Trump was going to do and he did X.” So two years later, people are still saying, yeah, “This was what we thought the promise was and he’s breaking it.”

Krugman: Yeah. Again, you guys are tracking this systematically. I’m not. But there does seem to be an abnormally large number of people willing to say, “I made a mistake in 2024.”

Morris: Yeah, about 15%, I believe, of Trump’s voters on average, according to some polls. A Navigator Research poll came out last month, in September, that showed 20% of Trump’s 2024 voters say they regret—they will agree with a poll question using the words “regret” their vote in the last election.

I don’t have comparable numbers, but just in absolute terms, if Donald Trump loses a quarter of his vote, or even if he loses a quarter of that 20%, then the 2024 election is like a Dukakis-style electoral defeat for the Republican Party in 2024. That’s a meaningful slice of the electorate, even 4 or 5%.

Krugman: I am still thinking about “vibe sessions” and all of that stuff. And there’s one thing I noticed, and maybe it’s just one poll, but in the new AP-NORC poll, one of the things that was true consistently through the whole Biden era was that if you asked people, “How is the national economy doing?” they said, “Terrible.” You asked them, how is your local economy doing? And it was much better. And that gap is now gone.

It’s an interesting thing. I don’t know exactly where this fits in all this. But it is interesting that we’re no longer in a period where people are, you know, hearing bad stuff, but personally experiencing better stuff. Just generally, everyone is really pretty mad at the state of things now, which probably has something to do with all of these numbers. I think that was a complete non-sequitur given our previous conversation, but whatever.

Morris: No, I think there’s something to triangulate here. And in that same poll, I think Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy among Republicans is at an all-time low in this new survey out this morning from AP-NORC.

But, I’ll back up from first principles here. Much of the conversation about the inflated or deflated consumer expectations and consumer sentiment over the past year has been about this idea that people are overindexing on the national economy, which may or may not be true. This survey seems to indicate maybe some movement towards convergence. If that’s the case, Republicans are, I hasten to say, dramatically more exposed to inflation in diesel and gas prices.

Krugman: Yeah.

Morris: And so I think we’re at the point in this cycle where after 15 months of inflationary statistics and inflationary news, Republican voters would be now coming around to the idea that this isn’t working out for them the way that they wanted.

In our Strength in Numbers September poll, we also found Trump at an all-time low approval among Republicans. So, our mental model is that maybe independents are super rational and everyone else isn’t. And so Democrats and Republicans wouldn’t be reacting to economic news as much as independents. That’s just the traditional understanding. So it would take a pretty cataclysmic-like event for Republican voters to then be saying, “I disapprove of this Republican president.” About 20, 25% of them do now. So I think these are all sort of related in my mind and my sort of mental model of voter psychology at this point.

Krugman: Okay. So backing up from there, we think we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen in the midterms, maybe—definitely in the House, and maybe the Senate—but Elliott, you’ve written a lot about this, and I think David as well—the extent to which people treated 2024 as a real seismic moment, defining a fact that American politics is never going to be the same. That’s really awesomely wrong, isn’t it?

Nir: Yeah. I mean, there’s this old saw in baseball that the good teams win close games, and that’s just not true. The good teams win blowouts, and the pundit class and so much of the media and frankly, a lot of politicians, including politicians in the Democratic Party, they failed to grasp that Trump won by one and a half points in 2024. That’s really about as close as it gets.

And I think that because the stakes of Trump winning felt so extreme and so dramatic, and you knew it was going to be so much worse than his first term, that kind of mentally or maybe even emotionally translated into something that felt like an absolute drubbing. But electorally, it simply wasn’t. And anyone at the time who was crowing about some Republican conservative era of cultural dominance, a massive sea change, wound up being wrong. And there were a lot of people who were saying, no, this is totally wrong. People like Elliott. Elliott was outspoken on this. He said it was a close election. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. And folks who hew to that view were totally vindicated.

Morris: Well, lo and behold. You know, I actually give people a lot less credit than David did, given my previous employment situation. I think that there’s just an endemic bias in Washington, D.C. Well, there’s a couple of them. One is to make every story the biggest story. If you want to run like three or four days of TV coverage of Donald Trump because people are tuning in, you can’t just say, “Oh, he won a small election.” He has to have won a big election so that you can do that TV coverage that is performing well so you can justify seeking the ratings journalistically. I think that’s part of it.

And maybe you saw this in your past lives as well—a tendency for pundits to draw patterns out of one or two data points for the sake of narration. And I think that’s something that’s going on here, too. But I think the real meat of it was just that a lot of journalists write stories to seem smarter than everyone else. And one way to seem smarter than everyone else in Donald Trump’s victory is to just say that the liberal class of journalists were all wrong: “Look at this. Look at this huge victory. We now have to adapt to this new world we’re in where Donald Trump is winning huge victories so that we continue to not be—not be like a Democratic liberal herd.” That’s an instinct that is especially strong in the more rationalist, empirical publications, say, and I think it breeds a lot of bad storytelling.

The other thing that was a product of this was the constant humdrum about illiberalism on college campuses, starting in 2010 and right up to 2022, 2023. Well, what’s the real illiberalism on college campuses after 2025? What’s the real threat to free speech on college campuses after 2025? It’s probably not students preventing certain speakers from coming. It’s probably more the attacks on freedom of collegiate education writ large. So I think that that is another example of journalists missing the broader story going on for the sake of trying to appear smart to their peers.

Krugman: Yeah. When I was more part of the sort of conventional, journalistic milieu—which I never was very much, but somewhat—the idea was everything had to be counterintuitive. And then being against liberal pieties, and so precisely because Trump was so horrible from the point of view of any kind of conventional liberal perspective, therefore it seemed important to talk up how epoch-making and transformative he was. That was part of being counterintuitive.

And in some sense, the fact that somebody so self-evidently harmful to have won had to mean that there was something supernatural about his appeal, when in fact, the reality is that most normal people don’t actually pay that much attention.

Nir: You know, Paul, when I first started reading you, it was back when you were at Slate. And that reminds me of the infamous Slate pitch. Not that you were ever guilty of that, but the contrarian, counterintuitive, anti-liberal piety article that Slate made famous.

Krugman: Yeah, exactly. Most people won’t even remember, but the Slate pitch was, roughly speaking, “Here’s why running down cyclists is a good thing.”

Morris: It’s the “Um, actually...” article, right?

Krugman: Right, yeah.

Morris: And this goes back to that sort of anti-incumbency bias that stems from economic hardship. There’s just a tendency for voters to want to throw the bums out, to borrow that old phrase. There’s just an endemic negativity in the American public right now. And voters really want some big changes. I mean, in our survey, like 55% of voters every month—this percentage barely changes—say that major disruptive changes are needed to the nation’s political system and economy, whereas like 7% of people say things are going well for them. There is a middle option, for what it’s worth. But like those extremes, there’s a very wide imbalance in those extremes. And you would expect from that a tendency to punish the incumbent party, or pretty much whoever is in charge.

Paul, in one of our earlier conversations last year, we also talked a lot about the low-information voters who I know you’ve written about. This is a good part in our conversation to remind all the high-information listeners out there: Most Americans are not like us, not like you. About 50% of Americans say they do not get news on a weekly basis.

Krugman: Isn’t your definition of the information voter—you think it’s some kind of insult, but you just mean people who don’t know which party controls Congress, right?

Morris: Right. So this is sort of the low-engagement voter. And then there is the actual low-information people, which is not really a putdown. Like we all have stuff going on. It takes a lot of energy to know what’s going on in politics.

In our survey only about 80% of people can say who controls both houses of Congress. We will be asking this question on a recurring basis in an upcoming project that is yet to be announced, a weekly survey at Strength in Numbers, which is exciting, and I imagine this number will be really helpful for us to track Democratic and Republican vote share, Trump approval and such by those voters who are or are not high or low information, or high or low engagement.

Those are the people who decide elections, and this is my broader point. Those are the people who decided the 2024 election: People who sort of remembered in the folds in their brain that things used to be better, so let’s go back to those things. Now, they’re in the sort of find-out stage of the F.A.F.O. And I think they will inevitably vote Democrats in charge and expect big changes.

And the three of us can probably forecast the number of major transformative changes that will come from Democratic Party leadership in Congress under the Donald Trump presidency, or even under a unified Congress in 2028, which is probably not a whole lot, let’s be honest. I imagine the American people will then punish the Democratic Party just as harshly.

Krugman: Yeah, well, certainly the next Democratic president, by inheriting reality, will simply be at a disadvantage.

I’m going to ask one last thing: the AI data centers. This is the political storm that I did not see coming. The apparent intensity of opposition is a surprise. And Trump—I’m sure that he has absolutely no idea about how the models work, but—

Morris: “Let data reign!” He had a tweet where he said, “Let data reign,” right?

Krugman: Yeah, but is this going to matter? I’ve been seeing some people saying that at least in a couple of swing states, it might actually be an important factor.

Nir: I think so. Like you said, Paul, this issue almost feels like it came out of nowhere. The intensity of the anger. When you look at the polls now, I mean, huge majorities say that they oppose, for instance, building new hyperscale data centers in their neighborhoods or in their areas. And even six months ago, the numbers were much less opposed. And there is no question in my mind that so many voters are using this as an opportunity to take a stand against so many of the things that they don’t like: you know, the tech bro oligarchs, AI being shoved into every last corner of our lives. And these data centers are a stand-in for that.

And, boy, there have been so many ads run on them, Paul. And most of the ads are being run by Democrats. It is definitely one of the top issues that we are seeing coming up this year. It’s not just gas prices. It’s not just Trump’s mass deportation policy. Data centers are definitely playing a real role in some of these races. And what we’re going to see is a lot of races, especially governorships in Midwestern states that have leaned red in recent years, they’re probably going to be pretty close. And I think that when you’re on the wrong side of an issue like this, that you could lose a close race as a result.

I look at the example of Governor Greg Abbott, who has never had to sweat a general election. Now he’s running against Democrat Gina Hinojosa. Polls show it very, very close. And all of a sudden, Greg Abbott, this ultraconservative team-player guy for the MAGA movement, is coming out in favor of data center moratoriums and issuing executive orders to that effect. And so I think there’s no way he’d be doing that if he wasn’t afraid that this was a real issue that has lit a huge fire under voters.

Morris: I mean, he was approving the Starbase project for Sam Altman and Oracle, I believe in Texas, just this time last year. And now he says you have to go through “special approval,” which just means delays, right?

One place this might show up in our polling data from September is our question: which party do you think cares more about people like you? This was really bad for the Democrats in 2024, for example. Now they have a pretty large lead. About 38% of people say Democrats care more about them. 26% of people say the Republican Party cares more about them. It’s very interesting. There’s the next category of people, the 7% who say both parties care equally about them, and I guess people could be reading that as both parties care a lot about me, or neither party cares about me at all. 22% of people say neither party cares most about people like me. It’s kind of a comparative question. So maybe we’ll change that wording now that I’m thinking about it.

But I imagine getting up at his press conferences with the tech billionaires, hosting them at state dinners, tweeting—or I guess, truth posting via Truth Social? Truthing? Truthers? Yeah. Truthing that “Let data reign” comment and saying communities are going to be backwards if they reject data centers, it makes sense to me that they would say, “Oh, that guy, the Republican Party guy who’s on the wrong side of the biggest land use issue right now, which is dramatically unpopular—that party doesn’t care about me. Maybe the Democrats do now.” But there is a notable seesawing in that question across the elections, too. It just goes back to the sort of anti-incumbency undercurrent.

Nir: Yeah. And Elliott, I think, to that point, and Paul, getting back to what you said earlier about how the punditry just totally misunderstood 2024, how much talk did we see about polls showing that the Democratic Party’s brand was in poor shape? Those polls are absolutely true, and those voters’ feelings were absolutely understandable, but it simply missed the fact that people have to actually vote for one or the other. And even if they dislike both parties, these so-called double haters, they have to make a choice or stay home altogether.

And so I think ignore the polling on political parties’ standing and look at the polling of voter intentions. And that’s going to tell you a totally different story. People can still vote for Democrats even if they’re not happy with them.

Krugman: Yeah. Neither of you, happily for your own sanity, is in the business of modeling the mind of Donald Trump.

Morris: Thank God.

Krugman: But to choose this of all issues to really go on. I guess I thought maybe he doesn’t care at this point, but I would have thought that this would be a good time to pretend to be worried about data centers and AI and all of that.

Morris: Well, we have to consider maybe—I don’t want to do too much putting myself in the mind of Donald Trump because, oh, God. But we can think about the information environment he’s operating under, which is like the CNN headlines: about 99% of self-identified MAGA voters still approve of Donald Trump. You say, okay, well, that’s tautological. Whatever. He’s just insulated by these tech billionaires in and out of the White House. That’s practically his social circle at this point.

Nir: Right.

Morris: And then to the extent he gets information, it’s either fed to him by staffers who spend all day on X or Truth Social or whatever. Streaming news, or whatever cable news service currently exists for the right. But especially X, which is very endemic with super right-wing tech bros on there. I mean, Elon Musk being the number one example. If you’re operating any type of business and that’s the information environment you’re in, maybe you just don’t believe all the polls for the midterms. Maybe you don’t believe that people see these moves as unpopular.

Not to give him any credit, right? But I think the “X factor,” as David has called it, I believe, is a real problem in American politics. And you can see it operating chiefly in the chief executive.

Krugman: And there we are. Okay. Well, let’s hope that they’re in the bubble and we aren’t. Thanks a lot. And we’ll probably want to have a conversation after the midterms and figure out now what.

Morris: I’ll tell you if they happen.

Krugman: Yeah, if they happen.

Morris: That’s a joke. Hoping they happen.

Nir: Oh, Elliott! Don’t go there.

Morris: Okay, I’m kidding.

Krugman: No, I’m quite sure the elections will proceed. And then we’ll have a coup that will overturn it. But never mind. Sorry.

Nir: Guys! Let’s pull it together!

Krugman: Ok, ok. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me.

Morris: Always a pleasure.

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