Tolerating Scandal

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.But scandal does not cut the way it used to.

Erin Doherty at POLITICO:

Americans are largely tolerant of scandals among politicians. But nobody is more willing to stick by an embattled candidate than a MAGA voter.

The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.

Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.

This article is part of an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas.


Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 percentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.

Abuse of Power: Denying Disaster Funds

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Trump is weaponizing the flow of federal funds to the states.

Thomas Frank at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.

Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states — New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries. He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials.

Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February.

“The Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms,” said a NOAA report confirming Rhode Island met the requirement for disaster aid.

Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.

“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, said the former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak about internal decision making.

The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party. The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.

DNC Woes

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

The Democratic Party is so short on cash that leaders at its headquarters have undertaken a new gambit to mask the severity of the problems: asking vendors not to send bills until after the midterm elections.

The bookkeeping maneuver, which was described by three people briefed on it, is the latest sign of financial duress for the Democratic National Committee and its embattled leader as money troubles threaten to undercut Democratic momentum with 100 days until the midterms.

So much is going politically right for Democrats these days. President Trump’s approval is down, gas prices are up and an unpopular war with Iran drags on. But dysfunction and debt inside one of the party’s key institutions — which is getting crushed in fund-raising by its Republican counterpart — are creating rising anxiety for top Democrats.

At the center is Ken Martin, the 53-year-old party chairman, who has found himself increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts, according to interviews with more than two dozen Democrats, including current and former D.N.C. officials and members. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the party’s troubled state of affairs.

The RNC in 2010 was dysfunctional, underfunded, stepped on rakes in every news cycle, and was hated by other outside groups and Capitol Hill honchos

The environment was far more powerful

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) July 26, 2026

One Big Beautiful Bleh...

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

In 2020, I observed:

Thanks in part to the Reagan and Bush 43 tax laws, about 44 percent of Americans have no income-tax liability, though they do pay other taxes.  By definition, a cut in income taxes brought them no direct benefit at all.  Many others pay relatively little in income tax.  Most of the benefit of the tax cut went to the well-off.  Voters understood, which is why they disapproved of the tax cut by a significant margin.

In 2025, about 40% of households owed no federal income tax. 

The 2025 tax cut has had no measurable impact on how voters view their taxes.  Yet Republican pols continue to overestimate how much that tax cuts appeal to people outside the donor class.

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JORDAIN CARNEY and CALEN RAZOR at POLITICO:

THE GOP’S OBBB PROBLEM — Republicans’ signature legislative achievement of the second Trump era is turning out to be a drag.

A new POLITICO Poll finds that nearly half of Americans say they can’t explain the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — including almost half of Trump voters. And those who can are much more likely to say it’s helped others, including the wealthy, but not them, Bernie Becker reports.

Republicans insist there are aspects of the bill tilted toward the working and middle class, like the tip and overtime tax breaks and Trump Accounts. The problem is that other issues have overshadowed those benefits, most notably the war with Iran.

The poll shows a 57 percent majority of Americans say the conflict has made things more expensive for them, even as they struggle to feel the benefits of the tax cuts.

And outside analysts have found that the new tax law gives a bigger boost to wealthier taxpayers.

Why This President Owns This Economy

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Economist Justin Wolfers:

For nine out of the last 10 presidencies, if you’d said, “How much should we blame the president for what’s going on with the economy right now?” I would have said that the president is just one factor among many.

That’s what I would have said nine out of 10 times. This is the 10th time.

There’s literally no question about the cause of the current oil price spike. It is that we decided to go to war in Iran on an open-ended, ill-defined mission, and we’re not quite sure what to do. The Iranians took over the Strait of Hormuz, and now the global economy is substantially fractured and global energy markets are in disarray. There’s no question about what caused that. We know that because we actually saw things get a little bit better in June during the ceasefire, but those happy days are behind us.

There’s also no question that tariffs are a complete own goal. They’ve led to higher prices paid by Americans. And that, I think, explains why, if you look at the United States compared to our peers in the G7—think of these as other economies that are kind of like, if the U.S. economy had mates, this is who they’d be—comparable large industrialized economies, the United States right now has higher inflation than any of them. We’re number one, but it’s not one of those good number ones.

And let me just add: it really does hurt my heart because we know how not to screw things up. Any economics textbook, anyone who’s taken introductory economics, would know that there are large economic costs to going to war. They would know that starting a global trade war in a chaotic and incoherent fashion is all downside and no upside.

Openly Weaponizing Federal Grants

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

Tony Romm and Brad Plumer at NYT:

When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste.

But it wasn’t true.

In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.

The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes.

The saga illustrates the stakes as the Trump administration is completing a set of rules that would provide the president even greater control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants. To critics, the new regulation would only make it easier for Mr. Trump to strike wider tranches of congressionally approved funding over political differences.

...

“With one exception,” a lawyer for the Energy Department conceded in a court filing this month, “the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

The lawyer acknowledged that none of the grants were included in the October terminations “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration left untouched hundreds of additional energy grants in states that were represented by Republicans and had backed Mr. Trump in the last election, even though the Energy Department had recommended canceling them, the government confirmed in the July court filing.

GOP Gas Pains

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

 Jessie Blaeser at POLITICO:

Voters’ anxieties about fuel prices could give Democrats a boost ahead of the midterms, further strengthening the Democratic voting base and putting strains on the MAGA coalition as the increasingly unpopular war in Iran drags on. A plurality of Americans — 46 percent — say the change in gas prices will impact how they plan to vote come November.

Most voters overestimated the change in gas prices in their area, according to the analysis of polling and granular pricing data provided by OPIS, a Dow Jones company that tracks gas prices. That includes majorities of voters who supported President Donald Trump and also those who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Roughly one in four Americans say gas in their local area has risen by $3.00 or more. But no zip code has actually seen that degree of change on average in the year and a half since Trump took office, as of early July.

...

What’s more, American’s perceptions do not quickly change even when prices do. The POLITICO Poll asked about gas prices in both May, when they were near their peak, and July, when they had dipped.

The results were the same in both.

...
Roughly 63 percent of Americans selected “the war with Iran” as the primary reason why gas prices have increased since Trump took office, including 59 percent of Trump voters and 70 percent of Harris voters.

Trump Making Things Worse for Republicans

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

An Ipsos/WP poll shows Democrats with only a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot. But other polls and the fundamentals of the election suggest a blowout.

 Sarah Jones & Jason Easley at The Daily:

The Republicans were hoping that the Iran war would end, inflation and prices would drop, and voters would put the pitchforks and torches down and go back to being just angry.

Those hopes have been shattered as the Iran peace process fell apart. The war is back on. Oil is at $100 a barrel. Trump has resumed his tariff obsession, and things went back to being the darkest timeline for Republicans.

The new Emerson College Poll was the stuff of Democratic dreams and Republican nightmares.

According to the Emerson Poll:

A new Emerson College Polling survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.

“Driving the Democrats’ significant lead on the ballot are women voters, who break for the Democratic candidate by a 27-point margin, 56% to 39%, while men are more split: 49% support the Democrat and 44%

Midsummer Intensity

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

An Ipsos/WP poll shows Democrats with only a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot.

Chris Stirewalt at The Hill:

There is a lot of evidence to support the idea that both parties are unpopular, as that Ipsos/Washington Post poll affirms. And that’s what you’d expect in a nation in which voters increasingly see themselves as independents.

Still, the problem for the GOP is that Democrats and Democratic leaners who loathe their own party are still fired up to vote against Republicans.

Democrats in the Post poll enjoy a 10-point advantage over Republicans on voter enthusiasm, 8 points more than in 2018, when Democrats romped. “And more than 7 in 10 Democrats say it is ‘more important’ to vote in 2026 than in previous midterm elections,” says the Post, “compared with just over half of Republicans.”

Now think back to that tied generic ballot of July 2010. The same poll that boosted morale at the Obama White House showed Republicans with a double-digit lead on voter enthusiasm.

And it goes on from there. In July 2014, Democrats were actually ahead in generic congressional ballot polls, but the enthusiasm edge at the time belonged squarely to Republicans.

The polls in July 2018 turned out to be very predictive of the 8-point stomping Democrats delivered in House votes nationally on their way to the best midterm for their party since the Watergate washout of 1974. No surprise that they had the edge on enthusiasm, too.

Four years later, summertime polls in 2022 started cropping up in July showing Democrats actually in the lead on the generic ballot. And, yet again, the party in power started talking seriously about holding the House. And while the Republicans failed to deliver on their own overhyped promises of a red wave, the ripple was enough to take back the House.

The best evidence for the GOP’s fizzle wasn’t in the generic ballot but, again, in the measurement of enthusiasm. After the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats rallied and closed the gap with Republicans. They might not have been willing to come out to boost a faltering Joe Biden, but Democrats were absolutely willing to come vote against Republicans.

Just more than 100 days before the elections, can Republicans replicate a similar enthusiasm booster for a base dispirited by high prices, the Iran war, very swampy behavior in Washington and a president who’s still trying to settle old scores?

Whenever incumbent parties are losing, they say they want a “choice not a referendum.” That’s what Republicans are saying this time with their “hate election” business. The problem for that plan is that a lot of Democrats already hate their own party, but they definitely hate Trump more.

The Iran War is getting worse, and oil prices are rising again.  The economic outlook might brighten this fall, but for GOP fortunes, any improvement will be too little, too late.  Perceptions bake in by Labor Day.

Trump to Hill Republicans: Meh!

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

ADAM WREN, DASHA BURNS and WILL STEAKIN at POLITICO:

House Republicans are hurtling toward August recess and a 105-day sprint to midterm elections, and President Donald Trump is showing little interest in boosting their prospects.

"Zero," a person close to the president told Playbook when asked about his engagement on the Hill.

Trump "doesn't care about anything beyond SAVE, Iran, and the ballroom,” another White House ally put it.

Republicans are staring down Election Day with a short list of accomplishments to sell, forcing them to reconcile two truths: The president doesn’t appear interested in helping Speaker Mike Johnson ram legislation over the finish line, and one of the only cases they have to make back home is to frame Democrats as communists.

Rep. Lisa McClain (Mich.), the GOP conference chair, who not long ago shared Republicans’ midterm messaging strategy with Playbook, told us she’s whittled that down to something simpler: Democrats are crazy.

“We voted for capitalism,” McCLain told Playbook. “We voted to lower your taxes: every Democrat voted to raise your taxes, and they are crazy. They want communism. They hate this country. They hate what this country stands for. That’s crazy.”

Never mind the president pitching federal stakes in private companies himself, McClain said. “He’s doing that to level the playing field for America.”

Is the White House leaning into their agreed-upon messaging enough? “No,” she said.

“We need to use it, and then when we think we've exhausted it, we need to use it some more,” McCLain said.

Voter Motivation 2026

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

Gregory S. Schneider and Scott Clement at WP:

Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans in the congressional midterm elections by only a slim margin, but Democratic supporters are far more motivated to vote, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Because of partisan redistricting that favors Republicans this year, analysts estimate that Democrats need to win by three to four percentage points overall to gain a majority in the House. The poll shows Democrats leading Republicans by about that margin, 48 percent to 45 percent.

The blue advantage grows to eight points among those “absolutely certain to vote,” with 53 percent of highly motivated voters supporting Democrats and 45 percent supporting Republicans.

Republicans are not losing by a wide margin among the broader electorate despite President Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity and broad concerns about the economy, the war with Iran and immigration issues.

But their supporters just aren’t as energized to turn up at the polls, the Post-Ipsos poll suggests. If Trump is able to mitigate some top concerns by Election Day — for example, by bringing down the price of gasoline or ending the war with Iran — then his push to draw new congressional districts in red states could be enough to retain the GOP majority in the House.

But the latest news suggests that the GOP's best-case scenario is increasingly unlikely. 

 

War, Oil, and the Economy: Ominous News

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Aaron BoxermanYan Zhuang and Hari Raj at NYT:

U.S. and Iranian forces edged closer to wider war over the weekend after the killing of two American service members in Jordan during an Iranian missile barrage.

They were the first U.S. soldiers killed by hostile fire since a truce with Iran unraveled in recent weeks, bringing the death toll to 16 among U.S. military personnel since the war began in February. Another service member is still missing after Iran on Friday bombarded a military base in Jordan where U.S. forces were stationed.

The deaths of the soldiers capped a week of spiraling attacks that chipped away at what remained of the deal that President Trump agreed to with Iran last month and that was supposed to end the war. Sensitive infrastructure targets like bridges and water facilities have come under fire in Iran and in U.S.-allied countries on the other side of the Persian Gulf

Even as the United States and Iran expanded the scope and intensity of the attacks in the region, there was little sign that diplomatic efforts to end the fighting were gaining traction.

The U.S. military said early on Sunday that it had struck Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defense facilities, as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps forces responsible for striking U.S. forces in Jordan.

On Sunday, Iran launched strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, all Middle East countries where the United States maintains a significant military presence. In recent days, critical infrastructure has increasingly come under fire; the Kuwaiti government said on Saturday that an oil facility, as well as a power and water treatment plant, had been attacked.

In an unusual worldwide warning, the State Department said Sunday that Americans traveling abroad should exercise heightened vigilance as tensions in the Middle East had created the “potential for unforeseen escalation.”

Here’s a montage of Trump saying over the past five months that the war with Iran is about to end and that the Iranians want to make a deal “so badly.” https://t.co/dM82kx29yJ pic.twitter.com/NZL0YhNfxb

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 18, 2026

Mike Zapler at Axios:

Just when Republicans thought they'd caught a break on gas prices, the collapse of President Trump's Iran deal is derailing their best chance to change the inflation story before the midterms.

Why it matters: Falling gas prices are one of the most tangible ways to ease voter anger over inflation. Renewed combat — and the threat of escalation — has prices shooting back up.

The big picture: Trump has said repeatedly that gas prices will "drop like a rock" when the war is over. But the war doesn't look like it's ending anytime soon.When the U.S. first launched attacks on Feb. 28, average gas prices nationally were $2.98 a gallon, per AAA. They eclipsed $4.50 in May, gradually dropped to about $3.75 earlier this month, and are now flirting with the $4 mark since combat broke out again.

Zoom in: Surprisingly, Americans typically don't punish politicians for their own economic suffering; instead, they tend to look at how government policies are affecting the country overall.But gas prices are a different story, says Stanford's Jon Krosnick, who's studied how they affect politics.

"It's hard to think about any other economic indicator where the number is literally posted on signs on the streets where everybody's traveling," he told Axios.

Corruption Update, Mid-July

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

Bernard Condon at AP:

America’s first billionaire president may soon be profiting from a new line of business tied to his office: charging access for a first peek at certain posts on his Truth Social platform.

Donald Trump's struggling media company plans to sell Wall Street traders the chance to see posts from “highest-ranking” accounts — including possibly his own — milliseconds before others.

That could mean big money for them, and Trump.

Trump's posts are often important enough to rattle financial markets, sending prices soaring and plunging within seconds. Until this moment, presidential policy announcements were considered sort of public property that should be free and available to all at the same time.

Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman at CNN:

President Donald Trump hopped on Truth Social last year to share some “very big and exciting news.” Nvidia, the computer chip manufacturing behemoth, had just announced plans to build AI supercomputers in the United States.

“All necessary permits will be expedited and quickly delivered” to Nvidia and similar companies, Trump vowed in the April 15, 2025 post to his more than nine million followers.

What the president didn’t disclose at the time was that days earlier, he had purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 of the company’s stock.

A CNN investigation found that Trump has promoted more than 20 companies on his Truth Social account days after buying stock in those firms – at times announcing government actions that could benefit the companies he just invested in.

...

Trump’s assets are “held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”

But unlike many past presidents, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust — meaning he can know which stocks his money managers are buying or selling. It’s not clear whether Trump was aware of any of his purchases when he was posting about the companies.

Aaron Blake at CNN:

Trump, through his revocable trust, is the largest shareholder in the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social. And Trump Media just announced that a new data feed, known as an API, will be for sale next month.

The API gives firms real-time data from the 10 most popular Truth Social accounts — the most popular of which is, of course, Trump’s. Such firms use these feeds to scan for signals and execute trades automatically, before other investors can catch up.

Trump routinely uses his Truth Social account to make major announcements and send signals about his intentions.

Often, those signals actually seem intended to move markets. Witness just how much his posts about the Iran war were timed as markets were opening or closing for the weekend.

And in announcing the new API, Trump Media actually played up how much Truth Social impacts the markets.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts,” said Kevin McGurn, its interim CEO.

Trump's Election Speech: Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

David E. Sanger and Dustin Volz:

For years, President Trump has offered a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and baseless charges to support his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that America’s election system was hijacked by a combination of outside powers and “deep state” insiders.

But when he declassified a raft of intelligence reports, hastily drafted emails between officials at the F.B.I. and other agencies, and formal “assessments” late Thursday, he was unable to prove his case.

An examination of the more than 270 pages of evidence released by the White House supports the broad conclusions already announced in 2020 and 2021, albeit with some finer details. For example, China considered modest attempts to influence opinion in the United States, and downloaded publicly available voter rolls from several states, but never manipulated a single voting machine or ballot.

Even new assertions, such as a document from the Department of Homeland Security claiming to have found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, came devoid of supporting evidence and immediately was met with pushback from state officials.

 

The documents are so damning in refuting Trump's own case that I wonder if anyone in the White House actually read them (or understood what they were looking at) https://t.co/8jUP0zVMTp

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 17, 2026

The Economy Will be a Problem for the GOP

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

At WP, Dan Balz and Scott Clement report that Trump's approval rating is stuck at 37%.

Assessments of Trump’s handling of the economy and Iran are worse than his overall ratings, with 33 percent of Americans saying they approve of his economic stewardship and 29 percent approving of his conduct in overseeing the war with Iran. Immigration is a relative strength, with 40 percent approving. That is unchanged from a low point in February but significantly lower than at the beginning of his current term, when 50 percent approved of his immigration actions.

...

Most Americans now doubt their living standards will improve. Asked whether they and their families will “have a good chance of improving your standard of living,” 40 percent said yes and 59 percent said no. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, 65 percent responded positively to a similar question in the long-running General Social Survey.

A new high of 43 percent say they are “not as well off” as when Trump returned to office, a 12-point increase since February and on par with views toward the Biden administration. In 2018, only 13 percent said they were worse off than when Trump began his first term.

Two-thirds of Americans say groceries are unaffordable (66 percent), up from 45 percent before the war began in February. Inflation data doesn’t show a sharp increase in grocery prices, but this might reflect the broader impact of months of higher prices for gas and other items.

A year ago, the Republican-controlled Congress passed, and Trump signed, what they then called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The measure extended tax cuts approved during Trump’s first term and included a variety of other tax and spending measures. Republicans have since begun calling the bill the “working families tax cut,” hoping that rebranding will reshape public opinion about the bill.

The strategy is not working, with 19 percent saying they paid less in taxes due to the measure while 25 percent think they paid more in taxes, according to the Post-Ipsos survey. Another 25 percent say they see no difference, and 30 percent say they are unsure what impact the bill had on their taxes. Even among Republicans, about as many say they saw their taxes increase or did not change as said they paid less in taxes.

David Goldman at CNN:

The largest-ever global oil supply shortage has topped economists’ lists of concerns since the start of the Iran war. But even as the United States and Iran resumed their blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil surging above $80 a barrel the economy faces a new problem.

Gasoline. That is, the world’s ability to make it.

The hundreds of millions of barrels of oil that exited the Persian Gulf and hit the market over the past few weeks helped add cushion to the world’s supply of oil — but they aren’t good for much of anything on their own. Oil needs to be refined into products and fuels people can use, including asphalt, plastic, heating oil, jet fuel, diesel and gasoline.

But the world’s refining capacity is deeply constrained. That’s in part because the supply chain got messed up during the war. It’s also because Iran attacked dozens of Middle Eastern refineries. And, more recently, Ukraine started blowing up Russian energy facilities.

Layer on extreme temperatures disrupting the cool conditions refineries need for proper distillation, and you’ve got yourself a big problem. Global refineries are processing 8.4 million fewer barrels of crude each day than they were before the war started — making 10% less fuel, according to Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research at JPMorgan.

Lisa Friedman and Rebecca F. Elliott at NYT

President Trump’s first naval blockade on Iranian ports in April caused oil prices to rise, but not to the stratospheric levels some feared. And Tehran’s oil exports plunged, depriving Iran of billions in revenue.

The strategy may be harder to pull off a second time without inflicting broader collateral damage to markets.

U.S. oil reserves, which have been steadily drawn down since the start of the war to help combat global shortages, are now at their lowest levels since 1983. Commercial inventories also have been run down. And other oil-producing countries in the region may have a harder time getting their ships out because of the heightened risks.

Another wild card is China. Usually the world’s largest oil importer, China has been helping to keep oil prices at bay by significantly decreasing imports of crude. New data on Tuesday showed that pattern held at least through June. But China might not continue on that path.

The Akin Ploy in the WI Governor Race

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.  And it has happened in 2025 and 2026. (See the LA Mayor race.)

A network of GOP groups is supporting beatable candidates in Democratic primaries.

Kellen Browning at NYT:

A super PAC tied to Republicans is spending $2.2 million on television advertisements that appear to be aimed at boosting the chances of Francesca Hong, a Democratic candidate for governor in Wisconsin.

Some Democrats in the state have fretted over the prospect that Ms. Hong, a democratic socialist with unabashedly left-wing views in a distinctly purple state, might advance out of a crowded August primary — and then deliver the governor’s mansion to Representative Tom Tiffany, the likely Republican nominee, in November.

Republicans appear to agree. The PAC running a new ad about Ms. Hong, Right Direction Wisconsin, is tied to the Republican Governors Association. The 30-second ad, which will begin airing on Thursday in liberal parts of the state, including Madison and Milwaukee, criticizes Ms. Hong for being too liberal, in what appears to be a counterintuitive strategy to grow her appeal among Democratic primary voters.

Both parties have used similarly misleading tactics in the opposing party’s primaries around the country this year, seeking to boost candidates they perceive as weak in general-election matchups.

Family Succession

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The sudden death of Lindsey Graham was a shock to the system.

A total of 48 women have been elected or appointed to fill congressional vacancies created by the deaths of their husbands, 8 to the U.S. Senate and 40 to the U. S. House of Representatives.

Less often, other family members have succeeded deceased lawmakers:  According to Claude:

Vetted father-son and father-daughter congressional successions, excluding edge cases

Here's a rundown, organized by relationship, of family members other than widows who directly succeeded a deceased House member or senator (via special election or gubernatorial appointment):

Sister succeeding brother: Darline Graham Nordone was appointed just this week (July 13, 2026) by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to fill the Senate seat of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly on July 12. Graham never married or had children; McMaster's pick to serve out the remainder of his term, which runs through January 2027, is his adopted-and-raised younger sister. She's set to be the first woman to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. CBS News 

• Sons succeeding fathers: John Dingell Jr. won a 1955 special election to succeed his father, John Dingell Sr., in Michigan's 15th District — beginning a Dingell family run in that seat that lasted decades. Wikipedia: John Dingell
• Donald Payne Jr. won a 2012 special election to succeed his father, Donald Payne Sr., in New Jersey's 10th District. Payne won the general election 56-44 percent and never faced a competitive race again. Wikipedia: Donald Payne Jr. Insideelections

Daughters succeeding fathers:

• Adelita Grijalva was elected in 2025 to succeed her father, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), after his death — though her swearing-in was delayed several weeks by Speaker Mike Johnson during a government shutdown. House.gov coverage / AP via WSB-TV WSB-TV
• Marcye Scott is currently running (special election set for July 28, 2026) to succeed her father, the late Rep. David Scott (D-GA), who died in April 2026 — not yet resolved, but worth flagging since it's live right now. WSB-TV

Daughter succeeding mother: Erica Lee Carter won a November 2024 special election to succeed her mother, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), after Jackson Lee's death from pancreatic cancer — the first (and so far only) daughter to succeed her mother in Congress. House.gov: Family Firsts U.S. House of Representatives

Changing Identity Pollitics

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it covers voter demographics.

Mike Madrid:

Pew Research is the gold standard of Latino public opinion research in this country. When Pew releases a new National Survey of Latinos, people in my line of work stop what they’re doing and read it. Their new report, “U.S. Hispanics Are Divided on Whether Their Identity Helps or Hurts Them in America,” is one of those studies. It confirms something I have argued for years, most fully in my book The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. Latinos are changing identity politics in this country. But they are not changing it in the direction either party wants to believe.

The topline numbers in the Pew study tell the story. Sixty-one percent of Hispanic adults say being Hispanic is an extremely or very important part of how they think about themselves. That is a real number. Identity still matters to most Latinos. But ask whether that identity helps or hurts their chances of getting ahead in America, and the answer splits three ways: 26 percent say it helps, 33 percent say it hurts, 40 percent say it makes no difference at all. There is no consensus here. There is no single Latino experience for either party to build a coalition around, whether that coalition is built on grievance or on advantage.

...

Generation tells the same story from a different angle. Seventy-one percent of Hispanic immigrants say their identity is extremely or very important to them. That falls to 57 percent among the second generation and 51 percent among the third generation or higher. Ask if they consider themselves “a typical American,” and the numbers move in the opposite direction: 27 percent of immigrants say yes, 60 percent of the second generation, 72 percent of the third generation and beyond. Distance from the immigrant experience is doing more to shape Latino identity than party registration is.

...

Equis surveyed 2,000 registered Latino voters in May 2026 and asked them, without prompting, what they consider the most important issue facing the country. The answer is not immigration. It is not close. Economy and jobs came in first at 29 percent. Cost of living followed at 24 percent. National security came in third at 14 percent, and concerns about the erosion of democracy and government overreach came in fourth at 13 percent. Immigration enforcement and ICE registered at just 6 percent. Border security, counted separately, came in at 7 percent. Even added together, the two immigration categories trail the top issues badly.

Social Media Oppo

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.

Kellen Browning at NYT:

[Social media] uproars have become so frequent that the pattern of reaction to them now feels routine.

First: Long-ago social media posts or video clips by political candidates get exposed online, prompting a backlash from rivals.

Second: The candidates downplay the comments and distance themselves, often insisting their views have changed.

Third: In some cases, voters and the news media tire of the topic and move on. Or they don’t.

With a new generation of candidates who were active on X, Reddit and YouTube years before announcing political careers, it’s unsurprising that so many are seeing their past statements come back to haunt them. (It has become so common that Ms. McMorrow is not even the only Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan to deal with such a controversy: Abdul El-Sayed, 41, also faced backlash for deleted posts from 2020, in which he had described the police as “standing armies we deploy against our own people.”)

Opposition researchers have never had more content to draw from. Yet they say that voters also seem more willing than ever to forgive past unsavory viewpoints and social media misdeeds — spurred in part by President Trump, who has proved that voters can overlook outrageous statements.

“Before Trump, you could be really surprised by something you saw in the news about a politician,” said Pat Dennis, the head of American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research firm. “After Trump, everything is kind of boring in comparison, compared to the level of scandal.”

Emilio Perez Ibarguen at POLITICO:

[Abdul] El-Sayed, for one, has repeatedly emphasized that he isn’t interested in litigating the past — which opponents have sought to do over his since-deleted 2020 posts lamenting that police departments are overfunded relative to other social services and referring to them as “standing armies.”

He told POLITICO that “the idea that you stand by everything you ever said, out of context, is an insane thing to assume about anybody.”

But El-Sayed’s shifting recollection of the past has put him in bind. After telling the Detroit News that he “actually never, never called for defunding,” CNN reported that he said “we do need to defund the police” in a June 2020 interview with Detroit Public Radio. In that interview, the former health official said that he considered defunding to mean reducing funding for prisons and police while investing more in “the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.”

El-Sayed has characterized such reporting as superfluous to the actual issues present in the campaign.