With 29 days until the end of the voting period for the midterm elections, we begin today with Patricia Mazzei, Ruth Igielnik, and Sophie June of The New York Times and the latest NYT/Siena polling showing that Democrats are doing well in U.S. Senate polling in consistently Republican states.
“Democrats lead among likely voters in the Senate races in Texas and Alaska, two states that consistently vote Republican, the polls found. They have an edge in Ohio, which has been tilting rightward for years. Republicans have a slim edge in Iowa, and Democrats are neck-and-neck with Republicans in Kansas, which has not voted for a Democratic senator since 1932.
President Trump’s deep unpopularity, disapproval of the Iran war and frustration over high gas prices and the cost of living are reshaping the electoral landscape, the polls found. […]
The polls suggest Democrats are performing well with independent voters, who often decide elections. Across the five states, Democrats hold a 24-point advantage with the group. On issue after issue, independent voters say they trust Democrats over Republicans — including a 30-point advantage on which party does what’s best for ordinary people in their state. […]
It is a striking transformation in five states Mr. Trump won every time he was on the ballot. In Ohio, which he carried with 55 percent of the vote in 2024, only 38 percent now approve of Mr. Trump’s job performance, down from 44 percent in June.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reiterates that in most years, relatively weak Republican candidates would probably survive…but not this year in this political environment.
“…I think the real story here is another we’ve discussed: candidate quality. Hinson has run in and won a number of competitive races over the last decade. And she’s objectively a solid if not necessarily a terribly candidate. She’s a former newscaster and those always benefit from some level of familiarity and trust based on many voters feeling they know them. The others range from meh (John Husted in Ohio) to catastrophic (Ken Paxton). Again and again we’re seeing cases where Republicans have been able to run passable and even sub-standard candidates in red states. And there’s a good chance that will continue to be the case where it’s no a Cat-5 Hurricane year. But a big storm comes you find out the levee ain’t very strong.”
Here’s an interesting story by Naomi Bethune and James Barrata of The American Prospect about the citizen activism in a majority Black county in Alabama to prevent a data center from being built.
“As Alabama’s plantation and sharecropping economies withered away in the Black Belt, so named for its fertile, dark soil, the region’s local white power brokers turned to another style of racism. They have burdened the residents—60 percent of the men, women, and children who live here are African American—with substandard infrastructure and poorly maintained industrial projects that have produced environmental catastrophes.
Many Lowndes County community members fear that Project Red Clay would lead to another such crisis.
Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a Houston-based company, is a data center real estate developer. It does not own, operate, build, or even own data centers. Company officials identify parcels of land for future development, often signing options to buy them at a fraction of the purchase price while working to secure power, water, and tax concessions from local governments. Cloverleaf then sells the primed site to a data center developer—as it plans to do with Project Red Clay. […]
LOWNDES’S STORY IS NOT unique. Data centers are cropping up across the country, but Southern political leaders have been particularly welcoming. Black communities across the region have suffered repeated abuses. “The pattern is to disenfranchise and target our communities for these poisonings, and so that we don’t have representation to fight,” Robert Bullard, founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, told the Prospect. “If you look at the counties, they’re disproportionately poor, Black, rural, and lack representation.”
Naiara Galarraga Gortázar of El País in English rpeorts on the (highly probable) first round of presidential elections taking place today in Brazil.
Anyone who has closely observed the past eight years in Brazil will have noticed that the society is exhausted, apathetic and resigned to its fate. The enthusiasm that once electrified crowds at political rallies has evaporated. The incipient social division — which was slowly tearing apart this conciliatory nation — has transformed into full-blown polarization. There are now, effectively, two Brazils.
The pendulum swings back and forth between different ends of the political spectrum, but life isn’t substantially improving. Structural problems persist. The same old faces are still in power, while corruption dominates the news. And, once again, many Brazilians will be voting against a candidate, rather than in favor of a vision for the country.
How can it be explained that another Bolsonaro — and such a weak candidate, at that — manages to garner the level of support that the polls indicate? For weeks, the surveys have presented a stable picture: Lula, the leader of a united left that’s allied with certain parties from the center-right, is tied with Bolsonaro Jr., the strongest candidate amidst a divided right.
Yesterday was the 36th anniversary of German reunification. To mark the occasion, the German magazine “Der Spiegel” interviewed historian Timothy Garton Ash. The entire interview text is posted on Mr. Garton Ash’s “History of the Present” Substack.
“DER SPIEGEL: The lack of experience with democracy in the GDR is often cited to explain eastern Germany’s turn toward parties on the political extremes. Does that not play a role?
Garton Ash: If that were true, you would have to say the same of the Spaniards after 1975, or of Portugal, where democratization succeeded quite well despite the preceding dictatorship. I don’t find it convincing. The fact that the West German parties never really established themselves in eastern Germany has to do with the period of transformation. […]
DER SPIEGEL: In Berlin, the leftwing Die Linke party managed to win the election. How do you interpret the party’s success? Was it also driven by emotion?
Garton Ash: Also. But by no means only. The problem of unaffordable housing in big cities, for example, is very real. In Berlin, too, this was overall a vote of no confidence in the established parties, especially among younger voters. What’s interesting is that across Europe, young women are more likely to give their vote to left-wing anti-establishment parties, while young men prefer the right-wing ones.”
Finally today, Richard Morgan of The Guardian implores us to take back the weekend.
“Almost exactly a century ago, on 25 September 1926, Henry Ford instituted a policy of weekends for his workforce. Although various labor campaigns had existed for decades to try to carve out what we now call the weekend, this was the first widespread adoption.
It caught on, buoyed by portraits of leisure gracing the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, drawn by an idealistic young artist from New York named Norman Rockwell. In 1929, Walt Disney leveraged Saturday matinees of his animated films to launch The Mickey Mouse Club. On Saturday 25 June 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, formalizing the weekend as federal policy. […]
Today, after 5,200 weekends since Ford’s first, try explaining the once-sacrosanct status of Saturdays and Sundays to a TikTok influencer, a personal trainer, a flight attendant, a local election canvasser, an Uber driver, or a blogger. In 2023, Pew found that married Americans had relatively unleisurely lives: 24.5 hours of leisure a week for those with children under 18 and 30.4 hours a week for those without. Divided over seven days, tho