What do you make of the results of yesterday’s midterm elections?

Yesterday wasn’t a blue wave for the Democrats—it was a tsunami. In a shocking (if not entirely surprising) rebuke of President Donald Trump and the Republicans, Democrats took seat after seat in toss-up races to complete a rout of their opponents. While Democrats were expected to take the House, it’s in close Senate races where Democrats showed the greatest strength. In Maine, longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins was defeated by Democrat Troy Jackson. In Texas, where liberal money usually goes to die, Democrat James Talarico beat Republican Ken Paxton. And in Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed trounced Republican Mike Rogers to become the first Muslim ever to win a US Senate seat. According to New York Times predictions, Democrats have secured 54 seats in the Senate and 228 seats in the House—easily a majority.

Why did Democrats win so big?

All elections have a narrative. Yesterday was a referendum on the Trump agenda more than it was an embrace of Democratic policies. Trump was ushered into office two years ago on a simple pair of promises: fix the affordability crisis and keep American entanglements abroad to a minimum. Instead, Trump doubled over, waging war against Iran, and in doing so, dramatically worsened inflation through increased fuel prices. Meanwhile, Trump has focused on seemingly petty projects like building a golden arch in Washington, putting his name on the Kennedy Center, erecting a new ballroom at the White House, revamping a public golf course near the Capitol, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Americans yesterday didn’t vote for progressive policies. They voted against an administration that seemingly did everything except keep its 2024 promises to voters.

Photo by Matt Paul Catalano on Unsplash

How will Trump’s agenda be affected?

Finally, it can be said: we’ve reached peak MAGA. Now, Trump starts his days as a lame duck president. But that doesn’t mean he lacks any power. While he likely will be forced to combat a slew of investigations in the House over the next two years, Trump’s powers on foreign policy remain largely untouched by the Democrats’ victories. That means how he wages war in Iran, negotiates deals in the Middle East, imposes tariffs, and tries to end the war in Ukraine aren’t affected by Congress turning blue. Moreover, of course, Trump retains the power of executive action, which he’s already used liberally to bypass congressional approval for various policies and projects. What we can say is that any domestic agenda by the president will come grinding to a halt, and we’re unlikely to see any significant pieces of legislation pass in the next two years.

What do Democratic victories mean for the 2028 presidential race?

Tuesday was a taste of victory for Democrats, but we should be careful about reading too much into it for 2028. Big losses for Republicans don’t necessarily mean that the next Republican presidential nominee—whether that’s Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or someone else—will start their campaigns on the back foot. There’s plenty of time for the Democrats to make a mess of their new majority. Perhaps the most damaging path for Democrats is to let their newfound investigative powers go to their heads, or even worse, pursue impeachment of Trump again. We remember how that went the first two times. Impeachment buoyed Republicans, made Democrats look distracted and vindictive, and helped push Trump back into office in the 2024 election after many analysts predicted his inevitable demise. Above all, Democrats should resist the temptation to overreach.

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The post The midterms blue tsunami shows voters’ rejection of Trump’s agenda more than their support for Democratic policies first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

This kind of political courage is at the centre of a new book by our guest on this episode of The Ballpark, Rye Barcott. Rye Barcott is former officer in the US Marine corps and was deployed to Bosnia, the Horn of Africa and Iraq and has built a solar power investing firm. He has also founded nonprofit and civic minded organizations like With Honor, which advocates for veteran leadership in elected office and bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

In his book, Courage Can Save Us, he profiles 10 US military veterans, 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats, to examine political courage in the US today. In this conversation with the Phelan US Centre, Rye Barcott discusses the idea of courage in American politics and why it has become increasingly difficult to see, the role of veterans and service members in American and UK politics and the importance of the 2026 midterm elections for bipartisan cooperation on national security.

Further reading and resources

• Barcott, R. (2026). Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future. Apollo.
• US website – https://couragecansaveus.com/
• UK website – https://couragecansaveus.com/uk/
• Rye Barcott (2011). It Happened on the Way to War. [online] Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
• ‌With Honor

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This podcast was produced by Chris Gilson and Avan Fata.

• Featured image: Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
• Note:  This podcast gives the views of the interviewee and host, and is not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, the LSE Phelan US Centre, nor the London School of Economics.

The post Courage and partisanship in US politics with Rye Barcott | The Ballpark podcast first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

As Americans go to the polls today for the 2026 midterm elections, how would you characterize the state of the race, and what outcome are you expecting?

This summer, Donald Trump began urging Americans to pretend that he was on the ballot when they cast their vote in November. Today it appears they are taking him up on the idea, but perhaps not with the result that Trump intended. All the standard indicators political analysts use to estimate who is likely to win are flashing Blue, pointing toward a Democratic win, from Trump’s dismal approval ratings to the Democrats’ very stable lead in generic congressional ballot, to consumer sentiment being at an all-time low. The only thing pointing in the Republicans’ direction is campaign contributions. Money matters, of course. But here’s the rub. In the face of strong Democratic headwinds, Trump, the Republicans, and mega-Republican donor, Elon Musk, are being forced to spend it on candidates in states and districts that Trump won by double digits in 2024.

Barring massive election disruption and interference, there is every reason to think Trump and Republicans are in for a bad day at the polls today. The House is all but certain to go to the Democrats and the Senate could very well, too. The “known unknown” here is whether the outcome will be decisive enough to break Trump’s vice-like grip on the Republicans and sufficient to enable the Democrats to forge a coherent, politically viable agenda for 2028. America and the world have a lot riding on the answer.

What do you think that outcome will mean for Republicans, Democrats, and the country?

Much depends on the magnitude of a Democratic victory. If the Democrats win big it will likely move the party toward the political center by denying progressives the ability to have a hold over the party’s legislative agenda. As a practical matter, the Democrats won’t be able to pass much legislation given Trump’s veto power and the fact that it takes a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override a presidential veto. But they will be able to put Republicans on the defensive on popular issues: Obamacare, housing, regulating AI. If they underperform, the Democratic leadership will focus on the things the party can easily agree on right now: impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, investigating Trump’s financial dealings and vanity projects (e.g. the White House Ballroom), and reopening the Epstein files.

The story on the Republican side will be quite different. If the election is widely judged a big Trump defeat, it will open up the political space inside the party, bringing latent divisions (e.g. MAGA vs. Big Tech) to the surface and greatly accelerate jockeying for the 2028 presidential nomination. MAGA Republicans will still be a force in Republican politics, but they will need allies and they are unlikely to align with Trump’s putative successor, Vice President JD Vance, as many inside the MAGA movement see him as Big Tech’s candidate.

How might Congress approach continued funding or intelligence sharing for Ukraine if the executive branch pushes for a negotiated settlement that involves territorial compromises?

Who controls the House is likely to be key here. There is already veto-proof support in the Senate for providing financial and intelligence support for Kyiv. Even a moderate Democratic win in the House will provide sufficient support to override a Trump veto given that there are plenty of Republicans who are not happy with Trump’s willingness to trade Ukrainian territory for Russian diesel fuel. Whether any of this would stop Trump from trying to reach a negotiated settlement over Kyiv’s objections is another matter. I doubt it. In fact, the larger the Democrats’ margin of victory, the more time and energy Trump will likely invest in getting to a negotiated settlement, partly to demonstrate his relevance in the wake of a political defeat at home, partly because Putin will think he can get a better deal with Trump than his successor or the Europeans, and partly because Trump will be looking for ways to burnish his legacy.

Photo by Ashley Diane Worsham on Unsplash

Millions of Americans are casting their ballots today. If you could isolate the single most critical signal that international allies—and adversaries—are looking for in the data tonight, what is it?

For both America’s allies and adversaries, the key barometer will be the vote itself. If it is a wave election and gives the Democrats control of both the House and Senate, I think America’s allies will do what they did in 2018 when the Democrats gained 41 House seats: namely, do what they can to wait Trump out figuring that things can only get better under his successor in 2029, Democrat or Republican.

What about adversaries? This is more likely to vary by which one, what they want and importantly, what they are offering Trump and his family in return. In Beijing’s and Moscow’s case, I think they will conclude that the chances of strengthening their strategic position will diminish after Trump leaves office and thus, we shouldn’t be surprised if we see Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin tying to strike a deal on issues that matter most to them (Taiwan in Xi’s case, Ukraine in Putin’s case) sooner rather than later.

This election is taking place in an environment heavily shaped by generative AI disinformation, deepfakes, and deep institutional distrust. How resilient is our civic and electoral infrastructure? If we face days of contested results or razor-thin margins, what is the likely domestic psychological toll on public trust?

I think the last ten years have demonstrated that our civic and electoral infrastructure is robust, even if there are changes we might want to make to the system (e.g. moving to proportional representation, ranked voting). As we have seen the past couple of months, the Courts have been doing a pretty good job pushing back against Trump’s efforts to impose federal oversight and interfere in the electoral process—something that the Constitution leaves to the individual states.

This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t try to disrupt the election today or try to slow and obstruct the certification process at the state level or on January 3 when the Clerk of the House compiles the state-issued certificates into an official “roll” of members-elect. The bigger the Democratic win, the harder these kinds of electoral machinations will be to sustain. In my view, the bigger problem the Trump years have exposed has to do with the separation of powers, which is far more vulnerable to party politics than our 9th grade civics courses led us to believe.

Trump is the beneficiary of a decades-long campaign by conservatives to implement the “unitary executive theory.” Advanced during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, this posits that the limit of presidential power is expansive, especially in foreign policy. In Reagan’s time, the theory stood little chance of finding its way into practice. That’s because America wasn’t polarized enough along party lines. If Reagan had adopted Trump’s expansive view of presidential powers, moderate Republicans in Congress would have balked at the usurpation of their power. In today’s intensely tribal politics, where Republican lawmakers worry more about being primaried by a Trump-backed challenger than facing off against a Democratic opponent in the general election, there are few moderate Republicans left to push back.

• This article is based on comments made by Professor Trubowitz at the LSE & Georgetown event: A Transatlantic Perspective on the Eve of the Midterms, on November 2, 2026, with LSE President and Vice-Chancellor, Larry Kramer.
• Join the Phelan US Centre for an evening of conversation as leading experts of American politics discuss the midterm election results and what they mean for Trump’s presidency and the United States at the free in-person event on 4 November, Making sense of the US midterms 2026.
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The post What the 2026 midterm elections mean for Republicans, Democrats, America, and the world first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

• This article is part of our ‘The 2026 Midterms‘ series curated by Peter Finn (University of Greenwich). The series explores the run-up to the 2026 US midterm elections at the state and national levels. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (P.D.Finn@greenwich.ac.uk).

The Texas Senate race between the Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton is one of the most hotly contested in the 2026 midterm elections. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and former middle school teacher, is running on a left-wing populist platform driven by faith-based language. One thing is for sure: Talarico appears to be genuinely nice. Talarico’s “nice” performance helps him build support through a similar, but opposite, mechanism to Trump’s cruel and disruptive populist style of political performance. Talarico’s nice persona performance is disrupting political norms in the current political climate.

Since Lloyd Bentsen won in 1988, no Democrat has held a US Senate seat in Texas. Yet in 2018, Democrat Beto O’Rourke lost to Ted Cruz by only about 2.6 per cent. Now, Democrat candidate James Talarico leads the polls and is predicted to turn Texas blue.

Talarico’s disruptive political performance

James Talarico’s appeal in a deeply red (Republican) state is open to interpretation. Talarico is seen as presenting a left-wing populism that opposes the corrupt elite and fights for the common people. He rationalises his economic and cultural policies in a Christian framework, in a state that is considered to be part of the Bible Belt. Trump’s declining approval rating may explain why some voters are shifting away from the Republican MAGA candidate, Texas’s current Attorney General, Ken Paxton. While these factors are crucial to understanding Talarico’s appeal, another essential, less-discussed factor is his norm-breaking performance of niceness, especially as it is delivered with a faith-based vocabulary. Talarico’s nice populism is a disruptive mechanism against the MAGA political norm.

Over the past decade, Donald Trump has brought or popularised a populist style of political performance that disrupts norms of political behaviour, respect and decency. Trump’s violation of political norms enables him to “expose” his opponents as stiff, out-of-touch, and inauthentic. MAGA supporters praise and celebrate Trump’s norm-breaking persona as “draining the swamp” of the political elites in Washington, DC. Disrupting conventions of political conduct is often seen as negative, because breaking principles of respect for opponents and institutions can erode democracy. However, what if the norms of politics are already disrespectful and deeply polarised? Is breaking the MAGA norm of an illiberal style of politics a disruptive act?

James Talarico’s political performance can be read as disruptive, as it breaks the old system of politics by being genuinely nice. First, Talarico stood against the norms of most Democratic candidates. Earlier this year, in the Democratic primaries, Talarico won in his primary race against Jasmine Crockett, a progressive politician who has taken a combative stance toward Trump and MAGA. In contrast, Talarico’s approach is more empathetic and favours a “big tent” coalition. Talarico avoids coarse language toward any group, including MAGA members. Yet he cannot be categorised as a centrist establishment figure like Hillary Clinton. Talarico presents as a new style of Democratic candidate, following the path paved by Zohran Mamdani, New York City Mayor, who demonstrated last year that the left can do populism well, and do it while performing niceness with a big smile. 

His current rival in the Texas Senate election contest is Republican Ken Paxton, a quintessential MAGA-style politician and a close ally of Trump. Paxton defeated the long-established incumbent Republican Senator, John Cornyn, who was not a big Trump supporter. While Paxton defeated a long-established Republican candidate, he is not a political outsider like Trump was considered to be in 2016, serving as Texas Attorney General for the past 11 years. If Trump’s appeal was that he was an outsider to the political order and spoke to people’s grievances against the corrupt elite, then after a decade of Trump-era politics, for Republicans MAGA has become the new establishment, the new political elite. While Talarico is not a complete outsider either, he has served as a Democratic representative in the Texas House of Representatives since 2018. Still, he is not considered to be establishment Democrat. Now he faces an arguably deeply corrupt Paxton, who is exactly the kind of politics MAGA was said to oppose.

“Ossoff Talarico Event-15” by Louise Palanker, CC BY-SA 4.0

Talarico, who has two million followers on TikTok, performs the same kind of economic populism as MAGA has used, but with niceness rather than cruelty. Talarico talks calmly, smiles, and uses inclusive rhetoric. He does not scapegoat any minority group to address people’s grievances. Instead, he directs his grievance at billionaires and corrupt elites to address the people’s problems. Talarico offers a new kind of populism, a nice populism.

His nice populism, which in this case is voiced through Christian rhetoric, drives MAGA to counter his religiosity, as a left-wing candidate is stepping on their “values” territory. Talarico’s style of Christianity runs against the foundation of the MAGA style of Christian nationalism ideology. Talarico’s nice Christian posture draws a lot of interest from his opponents, making him the focus of attention in his Senate contest with Paxton.

The social media performance of niceness vs the performance of cruelty

In the 2016 Trump-Hillary presidential race, Trump was the centre of attention. Trump supporters love to praise him, laugh at his jokes, and admire his norm-breaking behaviour. Trump still relies on his usual tactics, keeping his cruel humour, calling Talarico “Talafreako.” At a rally in early September, Trump ridiculed Talarico as vegan, saying Talarico is “beat meat”. This joke circulated widely in the MAGA TikTok network as Trump supporters celebrated it.

However, Trump isn’t on the ballot; Paxton is. Where are the Paxton supporters on TikTok? Paxton has about 3500 followers on TikTok and MAGA members barely even mention his name in their videos. They target Talarico directly or through Trump. They talk about Talarico as a threat, as they are mainly concerned with identity-type issues such as Christianity, abortion, and gender issues. Paxton has tried to pull off Trump’s cruel style of humour, but his words are not being echoed through the MAGA network. Thus, the populist message of anti-elites and political disruption seems to resonate much more than the performance of cruelty. The performance of niceness, with the right message, can also resonate even in a red state.

Moreover, Talarico sets the agenda by targeting Paxton as a corrupt elite on TikTok. Previously, Trump was able to turn his felony court cases into a victimhood narrative that transcended himself to represent the entire MAGA movement. Trump basically said to his supporters that when “they” (the deep state) are after me, “they” are after you (his supporters). Talarico’s videos are full of accusations against Paxton, allegations of felonies and corruption. Paxton does not react and does not turn these allegations into victimisation. Paxton instead speaks against Talarico using the same conservative arguments about gender, socialism and so on.

In the social media sphere of campaigning, a network of political actors who constantly voice their support for a candidate in a way that seems organic and authentic is crucial to a candidate’s image-building. A politician needs to seem revered, have his supporters validate his messages, and be talked about. Paxton does not get that attention. Being talked about is also done by trolling opponents, as Trump does, getting his opponents and mainstream media to talk about him constantly. Now, Talarico trolls MAGA, getting them to talk about him instead of Paxton constantly.

Now, James Talarico, the Democratic candidate in the Texas Senate election, is disrupting the new norm of MAGA-style politics that has dominated the American political landscape over the past decade with a new kind of disruption: being nice.

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The post The 2026 Midterms: Why James Talarico’s nice populism keeps MAGA TikTok talking about him first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Eisenstadt, Peter, Integration at Second Base. UVA Press, 2026

 Every April 15^th since 2004, US Major League Baseball (MLB) has observed “Jackie Robinson Day”. All players and coaches wear the number 42 on their shirts, as they mark the date in 1947 when Robinson became the first Black MLB player, representing the Brooklyn Dodgers with “42” on his back.

As we approach the 80^th anniversary of that historic landmark, historian Peter Eisenstadt provides a vivid account of the background to Robinson becoming a trailblazer. However, if the movie “Jaws” was not really about the shark, Eisenstadt’s new book, “Integration at Second Base” is not really about baseball. Eisenstadt digs beneath the cultural cliches (and appropriation) to place Robinson’s story in the wider context of integration and civil rights in the US. In doing so, he addresses some of the political complexities, some of which Robinson embodies. Finally, and most importantly, the book asks what progress has been made for African Americans since Robinson took the field in 1947.

Prior to Robinson signing for the Dodgers, he and other African American professional baseball players competed in segregated Negro Leagues. These were high-quality, mostly well organised and quite lucrative competitions, but they reenforced the “colour bar” that ran through US society. As Eisenstadt points out, there was an argument in some African American quarters that the Negro Leagues should have stayed separate and enjoyed their own company, without seeking admission to the racist world of white supremacist baseball.

This perspective reflected the wider Black nationalist, separatist politics of Marcus Garvey and others, but it was not Jackie Robinson’s. He maintained a determined belief that the only way for Black people to assert their equality was to demand and fight for unconditional access to each and every corner of US society, as Eisenstadt puts it: “What Robinson sought to join was not white America, but America itself.”

Jackie Robinson and the struggle for racial equality

However, Eisenstadt’s book invites us to consider the deeper issues beneath superficial slogans for “racial equality”, particularly the need to combine understanding and condemnation of racism in the context of social class. To some extent Jackie Robinson could be considered the prototype for the vaunted Black middle class. But there remains tension between a few Black Americans achieving financial stability and, in some cases, status, while the many struggle for economic survival, a condition they share with millions of white Americans.

Jackie Robinson stood for equality at exactly the moment the long struggle for civil rights was reaching its zenith. But he did not approach the struggle for integration from the political left, or even the liberal centre. To the extent that Robinson expressed political allegiances, it was with the Republican Party, including supporting some of its more right-wing representatives. He initially endorsed Richard Nixon in 1960, before later renouncing him. But Robinson was a political sophisticate and to some extent, his wavering political loyalties reflect the limitations and contradictions within the binary US party system.

Redrawing a 21st century “colour line”

As we approach this year’s critical midterm elections, Robinson’s pragmatism echoes. He wanted to “keep the parties guessing”, in the hope that in courting the votes of African Americans, each would be more likely to offer reforms and concessions. Robinson was also a businessman, so perhaps had a particular understanding of what has become known as “retail politics”. It often feels like most of the American electorate adopts a Robinsonesque attitude to the US political establishment, feeling no sense of loyalty to either party, but open to offers, a sensibility that Donald Trump has proved particularly attuned to.

However, Eisenstadt argues that Robinson would have been aghast at the extent to which the hard lines of US politics have become defined by skin colour, with President Trump explicitly seeking to unwind some of the progress achieved by the civil rights movement – albeit that Trump retains Jackie Robinson as an “American Hero”. The polarisation of US politics and society is redrawing a hardened 21st century “colour line”. Eisenstadt argues there has “not been a time as hostile to Black citizenship since the end of Reconstruction”.

Sport continues to be a vector for challenging social and political inequality. Robinson was wary of supporting one of its most famous manifestations, when John Carlos and Tommy Smith raised black-gloved fists at the 1968 Olympics. But Robinson grew less conservative with age and as his less-confrontational approach failed to deliver the kind of change he and millions of others wanted. Herein lies another of the complexities addressed by Eisenstadt. The capacity of individual hero-figures to produce lasting social transformation is limited, particularly when they are promoted by and sometimes absorbed into, the political establishment. Robinson did not seek leadership status. He just wanted to be treated like anyone else, with respect.

Eisenstadt argues, persuasively, that the single word “respect” conveys more transcendent meaning than the multiple complexities around integration. His book concludes:

“The demand for respect was another way of demanding full citizenship, a test for the real meaning of integration. It was a rejection of the need to seek approval from those who would dominate your life or to live by their standards. It was a rejection of the crushing societal hierarchies that presumed to tell Black people (or women, the disabled, gays and lesbians, or any group in American society hobbled by the burden of disrespect) how to live their lives, how to be full American citizens.”

Seventy-nine years since Jackie Robinson got to second base, this excellent biography reminds as that there is still a long way to go to get to home.

• Image credit: Statue of Jackie Robinson in Jersey City where, in April 1946, Robinson played his first minor league game on his way to the major league (Photo, Glyn Robbins)
• Featured image: “National Baseball Hall of Fame – Jackie Robinson ROY Souvenir Pin” by Dan Gaken, CC BY 2.0.
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The post Book Review: Integration at Second Base by Peter Eisenstadt first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

• This article is part of our ‘The 2026 Midterms‘ series curated by Peter Finn (University of Greenwich). The series explores the run-up to the 2026 US midterm elections at the state and national levels. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (P.D.Finn@greenwich.ac.uk).

2026 is shaping up to be a fascinating election for scholars to examine across the United States. Here in Iowa, after three consecutive election cycles where Republicans have dominated up and down the ballot, the state’s Democrats have reason for some optimism a few days out from the November election. The sheer volume of campaign advertisements from both Democratic and Republican candidates on TV, radio and by mail, along with parallel campaigning from outside organisations, suggests that Iowa voters, political candidates, and the major political parties believe that individual races are going to be competitive. The statewide race for governor and the five federal races on the November ballot are in particular focus in these elections.

The Iowa midterm races to watch

Prominent election forecasters and polling aggregates a few days out from the midterms show how competitive the races may be on November 3^rd. In the Iowa Governor’s race, Democratic challenger and current State Auditor, Rob Sand, is slightly favoured in his race against Republican candidate Zach Lahn. After holding the governor’s office since 2017 (Republicans have controlled the governor’s office since 2010), incumbent Republican Governor Kim Reynolds chose not to seek re-election in 2026, leading to the first open seat race for governor since 2006. Republican Senator Joni Ernst also chose not to seek re-election to a third term in the Senate, creating an open seat race between current US Representative Ashley Hinson (IA-2) and Iowa Representative Josh Turek. That race is currently viewed as a toss-up.

In Iowa’s four US House races, two of the four districts have open seat contests (IA-2 and IA-4) and three of the four races are considered toss-ups or slightly favouring the Democratic nominee (IA-1, IA-2, IA-3). IA-4, in western Iowa, is considered a safe hold for Republicans as Chris McGowan is expected to hold the seat of retiring US Representative Randy Feenstra, who chose not to run for re-election and instead ran for the Republican nomination for governor. The races in IA-1, between Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannon, and IA-3, between Republican incumbent Zach Nunn and Democratic State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott, are rated as “Lean Democrat” in forecasts by RealClear Politics, the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, and The Center for Politics: Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In IA-2, an open seat race due to Hinson’s candidacy for the US Senate, Republican nominee Joe Mitchell is running to hold the seat for Republicans against Iowa Representative Lindsay James. While RealClear Politics and the Cook Political Report rate the race as a toss-up, Crystal Ball has the race currently rated as “Lean Democrat.” If the Democratic nominees in IA-1, IA-2, and IA-3 win, it would be a net pick up of three seats in the US House for Democrats which would be the first time since 2018 that the state party controlled a majority of the US House delegation from Iowa.

While the election forecasts rate the races mentioned above as toss-ups or “Lean Democrat,” polling data available to the public is not nearly as definitive. For the US House Races, there is very little available polling data at the House district-level providing politicos a snapshot of the electorate. A recent Marist Poll from early October does note that in a generic ballot test statewide, Republican candidates have a three percentage point advantage (50 percent-47 percent) and 63 percent of likely voters believe the Republican candidate in their House district will win. In the US Senate race, the RealClear Politics average is Hinson +0.4, but polls included in the average since late September are mixed with four polls showing Hinson with a small lead ranging from +2 to +3. In addition, three polls have shown Turek with a small lead ranging from +1 to +3, suggesting how close the race might be on November 3^rd.

In the governor’s race, it appears that Rob Sand is well positioned to win based on publicly available polling data. The RealClear Politics average for the race is currently Sand +6.7 and polls included in the average since the end of September have shown Sand with a lead as small as +4 and as large as +12. Of all the Democrats running in statewide or federal races, Sand was probably best positioned to be successful going into the general election campaign. As the sitting State Auditor, he enjoyed the advantage of name recognition not afforded many of the other Democratic candidates running for office. Additionally, Sand has long established his brand as a moderate Democrat who wants to work across party lines for Iowans, which in our current hyper-polarized climate is attractive to some No Party Voters and even Republicans who are willing to crossover and vote for a Democrat in a statewide race. Finally, Sand’s lead in the polling data, on average, is large enough to absorb up to five percentage points of measurement or weighting error in the polling data that might mask the true level of support for either candidate.

“Election Day 2022” by Phil Roeder, CC BY 2.0

What will the partisan share of the Iowa midterm electorate be?

Polls are snapshots of the electorate that are built upon fundamental assumptions about who will vote early or on Election Day. Similarly, election forecasts are built upon readily available data, in some cases, election polling, but make assumptions about the electorate as well. Short of having exit polling in Iowa which will give us a snapshot of voter attitudes and behaviour immediately after voting, after election day I will be most interested in the composition of the electorate as it will have a significant impact on who wins these close races.

As I wrote in my last post for this blog in 2024, the Republican share of registered voters and share of the electorate has grown significantly since 2018. Based upon data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, in 2018 when Democrats last won three of four US House seats and narrowly lost the governor’s race, No Party Voters accounted for 36.7 percent of the electorate and the Democratic share of registered voters was 31 percent. In 2018, the Democratic share of the electorate was 34.5 percent while the Republican share was 37.1 percent. In October 2026, the Democratic share of registered voters is 28.7 percent and Republicans have nearly 170,000 more registered voters in the state, which suggests that Democrats may need to exceed 35 percent of the electorate on November 3^rd to remain competitive statewide in 2026.

Some of the public polling assumes the Republican share of the electorate of 40 percent or larger with at least one poll assuming it is nearly 44 percent. To be clear, in the best election cycles for Republicans since 2018, the size of the Republican electorate on Election Day did not exceed 42 percent (it was 41.6 percent in 2022). If the Republican share does remain in the range of 40-42 percent, as it has over the last two cycles, Republicans in the most vulnerable Iowa US House races could narrowly hang on to their seats and Ashley Hinson most likely is elected to the US Senate. President Trump’s recent visit to Sioux City and upcoming visit on November 1^st to Dubuque certainly suggests that Iowa Republicans are pulling out all the stops to get their voters to the polls as Sioux City, in western Iowa along the Missouri River, and Dubuque, in eastern Iowa along the Mississippi River, are key regions of the state where turnout for Republicans needs to be robust to be successful statewide.

If Iowa Democrats can push Democratic turnout higher or if some Iowa Republicans frustrated with national economic conditions or President Trump’s inability to move key campaign promises forward over the last two years stay home, and the Democratic share of the electorate exceeds 35 percent, they could sweep the three contested US House races, win the governor’s race, and Josh Turek might even win the US Senate seat.

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The post The 2026 Midterms: Why the Democrats may have reason for optimism in Iowa first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

Last month, on September 10, Barack Obama found himself in a room full of Democratic donors. No doubt it was a room he had occupied often. This time, however, according to a partial transcript given to the New York Times, Obama deviated from his usual script to focus on a topic making waves across the globe: artificial intelligence (AI). According to the former President, AI is moving too fast in private hands and is becoming dangerous without oversight, meaning Democrats need to make AI regulation one of the party’s “central agendas” for the 2028 election. As a description of the problem, this is not entirely wrong, but as a prescription, it is incredibly unwise. AI is far too important to become another frontline of partisan warfare.

Americans are becoming more anxious about AI

To be charitable, one can begin with what Obama gets right. The instinct to campaign on AI is not irrational, nor is it even a bad political move. Fox polling from earlier this year found seventy percent of voters opposed new data centres being built in their own communities, and anxiety about jobs and rising electricity bills is growing among ordinary Americans. No doubt there are votes to be won from campaigning on the issue; the problem is what that campaign would be about. Because most Americans know AI primarily from the so-called ‘slop’ in their feeds and their occasional interactions with ChatGPT, alongside the eerie humming from any nearby data centres, an electoral debate on AI will be fought almost entirely over its least consequential yet most visible manifestations. The most important applications of this technology, above all in the military, scarcely enter the calculus.

AI has become an important warfighting tool

This is a huge problem given that the age of AI warfighting is well and truly here. Alongside the sheer bravery of her forces, Ukraine has held her ground for four-plus years in large part because of killer robots and AI-assisted drone technology. In March of this year, drones accounted for ninety-six percent of the over 35,000 Russian casualties Kyiv has recorded, and in April, for the first time in the history of war, a Russian position was taken by ground robots and drones working together, with no infantry involved at all. Ukrainian forces have released footage of Russian occupiers emerging from their dugouts to surrender to a machine-gun-mounted TW-7.62 assault droid, and an AI system inside Ukraine’s DELTA command platform now watches roughly 50,000 video feeds per month and flags enemy targets automatically, day and night.

Beijing has been equally busy. Chinese state television has aired footage of a single operator launching more than 200 AI-enabled drones that coordinate among themselves and continue missions even after losing contact with their controller, and China’s People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Theatre Command (the one facing Taiwan), now runs urban warfare exercises centred around this capability. All of this is to say that AI is revolutionising combat and will decide the victors of the next major war. Donald Trump’s blunt line that “whoever wins AI wins” sits closer to the truth than most in Washington, and in polite academic circles, want to admit.

AI policy is too complex and important for voters to decide

To subject a question with the military stakes of AI to the machinery of American electoral politics, to let it be decided by whichever framing plays best in Pennsylvania, is therefore a ridiculous proposition. Elections exist to aggregate what citizens want, and we have found no better way to settle questions of preference. How much compute the United States requires to maintain a targeting advantage over the PLA, however, is not a question of voter preference, and the right answer depends entirely on what Beijing has built rather than on what voters would like to be true.

Nor could a vote ever produce the right answer even if the electorate were so minded. AI policy is immensely complex, comprising dozens of issue areas (from capability thresholds and liability standards to grid allocation and export controls) each requiring judgements the average voter has no basis for making. Unlike similarly complex policy areas such as healthcare, where every American has direct experience to draw on, the relevant facts in military AI are classified and technical. No voter in Erie County, New York, can know what the PLA fielded in the Eastern Theatre last quarter nor how many Shahed variants rolled out of Tatarstan’s Yelabuga drone factory this month. Indeed, an election campaign fought on AI would only reconfirm that the public is anxious about it, and such anxiety is poorly timed given that the costs of AI infrastructure burden the people who vote in November while the benefits arrive late and accrue substantially to Americans not yet of voting age.

DAF Accelerates Joint C2 with AI, Space Force Integration in Latest DASH Experiment, by Debora Henley. The appearance of U.S. Department of War (DoW) visual information does not imply or constitute DoW endorsement.

And of course, all of this assumes a country capable of a sober national conversation, which the United States in 2026 plainly is not. Intense partisanship now frequently closes off agreement and incentivises opposition regardless of the merits of any given proposal. Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab finds that Americans sort their views according to signals from party leaders, which is what making AI a party issue would supply. Moreover, polarised systems reward intensity over breadth, meaning a loud constituency of data centre opponents can shift a marginal district while the diffuse national interest has no electoral constituency at all. There are questions that electoral politics are genuinely well-suited to solve and questions it is not, and the question of how to maintain military technological dominance over two authoritarian, adversarial great powers is emphatically the latter. Decisions about AI capability must be set by the people actually responsible for winning wars, and no-one but them.

Military and civilian AI are one and the same, and regulation hurts both

There is also a particular absurdity in that the kind of private actors Obama wants to regulate are the ones currently demonstrating why he is wrong. Spurred by the war, Ukraine’s increasingly AI-driven drone industry has grown from ten domestic manufacturers in 2022 to approximately 500 by 2025, and private firms now produce around ninety percent of Ukraine’s FPV drones. In fact, Ukraine likely produces more drones than all of NATO combined. These companies are built around the battlefield, meaning that any AI software or drone design that cannot be improved by the end of the week is replaced by one that can. This is why Ukraine has routinely out-innovated Russia, whose defence sector remains dominated by state conglomerates descended from the Soviet system. In America, private firms like Palantir and Anduril have been able to move at blistering pace for the same reason, because they aren’t waiting for a regulator to approve their models. Obama’s danger, then, is Kyiv’s lifeline.

To be fair to the former president, Obama did not propose to disarm the Pentagon. His comments were about safety and job displacement, and military AI could be said to sit in a separate box far away from domestic regulation. The problem is that there is no “separate box”. The model that identifies Russian armour in a drone feed is built by the same engineers and trained on the same silicon as the model that generates the “slop” in social media feeds. Restrict the power supply to data centres and you restrict the compute that trains military systems, and imposing cumbersome regulation on model developers will by extension impose it on the firms the Pentagon now depends on. Civilian and military AI are not adjacent industries, and there is no mechanism by which a government slows one down while leaving the other untouched. Nor should legitimate civilian uses be touched either, given what AI promises economically.

Slowing AI development in the US will do nothing to stop China and Russia

This is not to say that AI carries no genuine risks. Although critics argue that recent warnings from AI bosses serve as much to entrench their market dominance as to reduce the risks of human extinction, ignoring the risks of unchecked development would too be foolish. Nobody is seriously saying that we should do nothing to minimise the danger. What should be rejected, however, is the fantasy that one democracy hamstringing itself does anything whatsoever to reduce those risks. China’s military doctrine already treats AI as central to what it calls “intelligentized warfare”, and it is utter (and dangerous) nonsense to believe that Beijing will slow down because America does. Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO whose essay on the dangers of AI has been at the centre of last month’s calls for an AI slowdown, even conceded stark limits on what coordination with China could realistically achieve. Russia, meanwhile, is already putting autonomous targeting on the cheap drones it produces and cannot be considered an honest broker in any prospective international agreement at all. In other words, pacing the frontier in California changes the actions of nobody in Beijing or Moscow, who will simply celebrate the immense military advantage handed to them for free before quite obviously continuing their programmes unabated. The only way to deal with that threat is to stay ahead.

And though some will point to the nuclear precedent (UN Secretary General António Guterres backed calls for a global AI watchdog modelled on the nuclear one as early as 2023), the problem is that the comparison simply doesn’t work. Nuclear arms control was successful, for a time, because fissile material is scarce, enrichment plants are enormous, launchers can be counted and, critically, neither side was actively using the technology on a battlefield during negotiations. None of that is true of software. Nor do the physical controls stand: earlier this year, WireScreen found roughly 500 instances of PLA units seeking the Nvidia chips American export restrictions sought to withhold. A treaty regime where verification is impossible binds the honest and liberates the rest. All that America’s unilateral restraint would do is decide who arrives first at whatever threshold the doomers are worried about, and hand that lead to states with far less interest in transparency or accountability (or, for that matter, human freedom) than the one being asked to slow down.

Regulate AI conduct, not development

None of this amounts to an argument for doing nothing. The United States should impose controls to combat specific uses of AI (for example, in fraud and deepfakes), and aggressive action should be taken against AI firms that put children at risk. These are questions of conduct that can be legislated for without constraining the technology. What a future administration must not do is mindlessly throttle the industry purely for electoral gain, whether through moratoriums on data centres or compliance regimes that stifle the kind of competition that has served Ukraine so well. That line between policing conduct and slowing down development is what a campaign built on an exploitable fear of AI will not draw.

Power is and always will be king. A rules-based order can exist only if the West, and above all the United States, has the military capacity to enforce it, and that capacity now rests on AI. Obama is right that AI is dangerous, but he is wrong about where the danger sits and ruinously wrong about who has the luxury of deciding the pace. An America that lets its AI policy be set by electoral politics will find out it was wrong in the Taiwan Strait, and by then the argument will be over.

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The post AI development is too vital to US security to become a partisan issue first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

• This article is part of our ‘The 2026 Midterms‘ series curated by Peter Finn (University of Greenwich). The series explores the run-up to the 2026 US midterm elections at the state and national levels. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (P.D.Finn@greenwich.ac.uk).

The United States is obviously focused on Congressional races this fall. However, the ballot in Virginia is a little more complicated, with elections at all levels of government.

While some of the more important House races are happening in Virginia, there are also a number of special elections for municipal and county offices, and new state law on school funding has led to a record number of local ballot initiatives. At the state level, voters have been invited to consider three different amendments to the state constitution. These statewide ballot questions are especially worth examining, as they may have ripple effects on the federal races, with important consequences for control of Congress.

Constitutional amendments on the Virginia ballot

Under the American federal system, all 50 state governments have their own supreme law enshrined in a state constitution. These important documents are often overlooked and understudied; indeed, half of Americans do not even realize that their state has a constitution.

All three of this year’s proposed constitutional amendments have been in the works for some time, by necessity. Before an amendment can get on the ballot in Virginia, it needs to be approved by two different sessions of the state legislature, and the second session must come after an election. (You can see an infographic of the process here.) There is an implied principle behind this structure: amending the Constitution is so important, voters should have two chances to weigh in. First, voters can presumably vote out legislators who have already given initial approval to a bad amendment; and then if the legislature still goes ahead, the people get to vote again, this time directly for or against the amendment.

A redistricting amendment was rushed onto the ballot earlier this year, and then narrowly approved by voters. But it was invalidated by a court in large part on procedural grounds because the Democrats who sponsored it didn’t respect this timeline or the principles behind it. Democrats had already had these other three amendments in the works, but luckily for them these measures were following the normal timeline. So, if any or all these current amendments on the ballot are approved by voters, they should not be subject to the same legal challenges that stopped the redistricting vote.

All three amendments on the ballot concern policy issues that state Democrats believe are political winners, especially in Virginia.

Ensuring reproductive rights

The first ballot question is a reproductive rights amendment, which has returned to the fore as an important distinguishing issue between America’s two parties. In many ways, abortion was the political issue of the 1980s and 90s, driving partisan realignments around a “culture wars” divide. Still, after many political and legal challenges to a framework set by the landmark Roe v Wade case were thwarted, the issue went mostly dormant at the federal level, with activists on either side pursuing favorable rules in states friendly to their cause.

That equilibrium went out the window with the 2022 Dobbs decision, where the US Supreme Court threw out the framework established by Roe and removed federal protections for abortion. Virginia is now the only state in the American South that has not passed restrictions on abortion since Dobbs. This first proposed amendment would ensure that abortion protections would continue, even if conservative Republicans win power in the state. Republican Glenn Youngkin was Governor from 2022-26, but Democrats in the state legislature blocked any of his abortion restrictions.

This question is much broader than just abortion and positions it as part of reproductive health more broadly, including prenatal, postpartum and fertility care. A longstanding strategy of pro-choice advocates is to ask the public to recognize abortion as an important, even standard healthcare procedure. The strategy makes political sense, as other types of reproductive care— birth control, particularly — are widely considered under threat from the Supreme Court after Dobbs.

“Voting Sign” by VCU Capital News Service, CC BY-NC 4.0

Preserving marriage equality

The second ballot question is like the first in reverse. While the reproductive amendment adds constitutional language to protect a right that has been threatened by an existing court decision, this marriage equality amendment would remove constitutional language that could be activated by a future court decision by removing wording that bans same-sex marriage and affirming that two adults may marry regardless of sex, gender, or race.

In 2006, Virginians approved an amendment that added language to the Constitution stating that marriage could only be “a union between one man and one woman.” This amendment never came close to failing; roughly three-fourths of legislators voted for it, and voters approved it by 57 percent. Looking back, though, this amendment represents a kind of last gasp of national opposition to gay rights, and marriage equality especially. In 1996, two-thirds of Americans opposed same-sex marriage; in 2026, two-thirds now support it. Americans have essentially changed their mind on the issue; this second amendment updates constitutional language to reflect those changed minds.

However, while the current language is out of step with most of the country, it is potentially not with the current conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. So, supporters say Virginia should remove that outdated language before any decision comes along to overturn marriage equality, like Dobbs did to Roe.

Voting rights for convicted felons following incarceration

The final ballot question concerns voting rights. Virginia, like many states (and some other countries), takes away the right to vote from those convicted of a serious crime (in America, a “felony”). Unlike most other states, however, Virginia does not automatically restore the right to vote for these felons once they complete their sentence. In Virginia and only two other states (Kentucky and Iowa), these returning citizens must send a personal appeal to the Governor to have their right to vote restored. This third amendment would allow voting rights to be restored automatically once a person leaves incarceration, taking the decision out of the Governor’s hands. The importance of the issue was highlighted by the previous Governor Youngkin greatly slowing down the restoration process, essentially turning the restoration request process into a black hole.

The politics of amending Virginia’s constitution

Why are Virginia Democrats so fascinated with constitutional amendments? Each amendment represents longstanding ideological commitments from the national party. Democrats have become the party of reproductive and gay rights nationally. And thanks to the election denialism that has taken hold among the Trumpist right, Democrats have also found themselves the defenders of voting rights as well. This is especially true in Virginia, where Democrats have been at the forefront of expanded election access for almost a decade.

But these political commitments have not-so-hidden political benefits as well. Democrats clearly feel like they are on the right side among the public for each of these issues. Most Americans have consistently supported reproductive rights. As noted earlier, thinking on marriage equality has shifted dramatically towards support, and many Americans are increasingly worried about threats to voting rights. These three issues are political winners, and Democrats know it.

Ballot initiatives have often proven to be smart politics in other states, especially in lower-turnout elections like the Congressional midterms. As antipathy to President Trump and his administration grows, there seems to be more and more bad news for Republicans in terms of the outlook for next week’s election; a Blue Wave of Democratic victories seems increasingly likely. But in Virginia, the question is whether these ballot initiatives will help drive Democratic turnout even further. With some key races for the House here in Virginia, the question of who controls Congress may end up depending on the Constitution of Virginia. That’s American federalism at work, although possibly not quite how it was originally intended.

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The post The 2026 Midterms: Progressive constitutional ballot amendments may boost turnout for Virginia Democrats first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump benefited from a wave of voter resentment against the perceived laxness of Biden-era immigration and border policy. Poll after poll that year showed that voters were dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s handling of immigration and receptive to the far more restrictive approach favored by Trump. In the summer of 2024, for the first time since 2009, most respondents told Gallup that they wanted to decrease overall immigration to the country.

How have these views held up after two years of extreme immigration crackdowns and mobilization against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)? And as the midterm elections approach, will immigration again be one of the central issues on voters’ minds?

A backlash to the backlash?

In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, some analysts (and at least one unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate, former US House speaker, Newt Gingrich) warned that pro-deportation public opinion might be short-lived. Once mass deportation was transformed from vague abstraction to a reality involving law-abiding community members being detained and families being forcibly separated, they argued, American voters’ relative anti-immigration turn could reverse itself.

These predictions were vindicated rather quickly. Just five months into the second Trump administration, Gallup found that 79 percent of Americans – the highest ever percentage – viewed immigration as a good thing overall for the country. Just as the perceived openness of the Biden administration’s border policy fueled a surge in anti-immigration sentiment, a “reverse backlash effect,” which political scientists have previously linked with European far-right parties’ electoral success, appears to have taken place.

Throughout 2026, a year that began with mass anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis and the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, did this trend towards more positive immigration attitudes continue? To help determine this, I compiled polling responses by Democrats, Republicans, and independents to four immigration-related questions asked about people’s feelings towards the number of legal immigrants, the benefits of immigration for the US, abolishing ICE and deporting immigrants here illegally or offering them a path to citizenship.

As Figure 1 shows, we see evidence here of positive change among all three partisan groups. Independents, who per Gallup made up a record-high 45 percent of American adults in 2025, were the only group that significantly moved on all four questions. But even Republicans’ views have changed, with a majority no longer saying that they would prefer legal immigration to decrease. For Democrats, perhaps the most notable shift is a massive rise in the favorability of abolishing ICE, a position that had been all but abandoned by their elected representatives just a couple of years ago but now appears to be the mainstream voter consensus.

Figure 1 – Americans’ attitudes towards immigration policies 2025-2026

While these results are encouraging for those hoping for public opinion to swing back towards welcoming immigrants, they also underscore some of the complexities and inconsistencies that hide underneath a positive general trendline. For example, while the events in Minneapolis (shaded on the timeline in Figure 1 in grey) were a clear inflection point for voters’ views on abolishing ICE, they seem to have made less of an impact – if any – on opinions about deportations. Similarly, the conflicting trends in Republicans’ attitudes since Trump’s second inauguration suggest that their antipathy towards immigration in general has subsided somewhat – e.g., their endorsement of the statement that “Immigration makes the US better off” nearly doubled in the first year – but that their positions on immigration enforcement have not changed. 

“NoKingsProtest-LACA-ConnerRobbins-20260328-013” by Conner Robbins, CC BY 4.0

A key takeaway here is that Americans’ immigration views are too complicated to fully capture along a single dimension. When we refer to voters’ “immigration attitudes,” we’re really talking about a diverse set of positions that implicate a wide range of related policy areas, including law enforcement and labor policy. Depending on one’s opinions regarding these other issues, these different components may not always line up or move uniformly with one another.

Are voters still concerned with immigration?

Just as notable as the rise in pro-immigrant sentiment is the drop in the importance of immigration relative to other issues. At the beginning of the Trump administration, per Economist/YouGov polling (Figure 2), over 20 percent of Republicans named immigration as their single top policy issue priority. This figure quickly dropped, and aside from some momentary spikes during high profile ICE activity and protests in LA and Minneapolis, has hovered around 15 percent since March 2025, as tariffs and cost of living began dominating voters’ attention. Among independents, this percentage dropped by about half over a similar period, from a peak of 11 percent immediately after the 2024 election to about five percent currently.

Figure 2 – Immigration as the single most important issue

Note: Share naming immigration from a list of ~15 issues

For the midterm elections, this drop in the importance of immigration may be even more significant than any changes in immigration preferences. A robust scholarly literature, focused mostly in European democracies, has argued that far-right party success is largely driven by the increased importance of immigration, rather than changes in attitudes, which are relatively stable. According to this theory, a spike in the importance of immigration– during, for example, a high-profile surge in border crossings – politically activates voters who hold more restrictionist attitudes, pushing them towards anti-immigrant parties and politicians.

Republican leaders, who would certainly prefer to change the subject of midterm election campaigns away from the cost of living and high gas prices, are at least intuitively aware of this and would favor immigration coming to the forefront of voters’ minds again. Hence, for example, the renewed right-wing media attention on migrant caravans. Their challenge is that voters have now shown that they are very worried about the economy over everything else, and that they directly blame the president’s policies for those anxieties. As long as that’s the case, it’s not clear that any messaging tactics can refocus voters’ attention to an issue on which Republicans are on firmer ground.

In terms of immediate electoral consequences, then, the biggest immigration story may be that voters currently just aren’t thinking about the issue all that much.

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The post Since 2024, Americans have grown more supportive of immigration even as it has become a less important issue first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.

• This article is part of our ‘The 2026 Midterms‘ series curated by Peter Finn (University of Greenwich). The series explores the run-up to the 2026 US midterm elections at the state and national levels. If you are interested in contributing to the series, contact Peter Finn (P.D.Finn@greenwich.ac.uk).

The US electoral system has many levels, changes across time, and presents challenges for anyone wishing to keep up to date, no matter how much time or experience they have. That said, some underlying knowledge about the US political system in general, and US elections in particular, can help ground those looking to understand a particular election. Whether you are new to the study of US politics, or in need of a brush-up, and building on a previous post from 2022, this is your introduction to the political system that underpins the 2026 US midterms.

A cyclical election system

US elections generally run on a four-year cycle. Most visible and prominent are presidential elections, which happen every four years, with the last in 2024, when Donald Trump was elected, and the next in November 2028. At the current midway point between these are the 2026 elections – known as the midterms.

Some elections occur in the years between presidential and midterms, and these are known as off year elections. In 2025 there were off year gubernatorial elections of national note for governors in New Jersey and Virginia, for the Mayor of New York City, all of which were won by Democrats. California’s redistricting ballot initiative was also successful with the new maps creating a greater lean towards Democratic candidates.

From 13 to 50 states, Washington DC and Overseas Territories

There are currently 50 US states. There were 13 when the US Constitution was written in 1787, and this number increased from 48 to 50 in 1959 when Alaska and Hawaii joined the union. Beyond the 50 states, US territory also contains Washington DC and five overseas territories (American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) which do not have statehood. All of these send a non-voting delegate to the US Congress but only those living in Washington DC have been able to vote in presidential elections since the 1960s due to a constitutional amendment.

The Senate and the House

Operating outside of the standard four-year election cycle at the national (federal) level are elections to the Senate. All fifty states have two senators that are elected to six-year terms which, bar special elections, are split evenly across three November elections (33, 33, 34). Key Senate elections in 2026 include Kansas and Texas, with special elections for the chamber in Florida and Ohio.

There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, all of which are contested every two years. Unlike in the Senate, the number of seats that a state has in the House are set by its population. This apportionment occurs every ten years via census data. States that have a growing population relative to others gain seats, while those that shrink in relative terms (though not necessarily in absolute population numbers) lose seats. Once the number of seats has been apportioned between states, district boundaries are often redrawn within states in a process known as redistricting.

Redistricting can be controversial, with courts often deciding on whether maps are valid in complex long running cases. The last year and a half have been notable in this regard as various states have engaged in mid-cycle redistricting after Trump directed Texas Republicans to gerrymander, as partisan redistricting is known, the state to favour Republicans. It was this cascade of redistricting that led Democratic dominated California to put the redistricting proposition mentioned above to voters in the state in November 2025.

Democratic, Republican, Other

Since the 1860s, US politics has been a battleground between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. As of 2026, Democratic leaning states, often referred to as blue states, include most of those above the Mason-Dixon Line that generally separated the North and South during the US Civil War, the West Coast, and some outliers, such as: Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, New Mexico, Colorado, and Hawaii. The Republican Party controls most other states, with a few purple (also called swing) states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, that do not have a set party voting pattern. New Hampshire is an exception, currently being the only state in New England with a Republican controlled legislature.

“They Gave Me a Cool Sticker” by John, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The policies and identities of the Democratic and Republican parties have shifted significantly over time. Indeed, given that Democrats and Republicans represent constituencies and interests across a vast and diverse country, it is often better to think of them as coalitions that can shift and evolve rather than entities that stick to a fixed set of ideals or policies. However, at present the Democratic Party is associated more with liberal leaning and left wing ideas, even recently supporting democratic socialist candidates who advocate for ultimately replacing capitalism with socialism such as Angela Gonzales-Torres who is running for a California congressional district. The Republican Party is generally aligned with right wing thinking and a distrust of government. That said, the Trump era has often scrambled the clarity of Republican Party messaging, via the adoption of a narrative technique designed to keep others off guard that Trump labels “the weave”.

There are also voters that choose to support a certain party or candidate in opposition to the alternative, rather than actually supporting a party’s ideologies and positions. This “negative partisanship” can have perverse outcomes, as one headline from a recent commentary piece put it, “Americans keep voting for scandal‑prone candidates because they just don’t want the other party to win”. Voters can also register as independent, meaning they are not aligned with, or do not want to be listed as being aligned with, any single party. Rules vary, but registering as an independent may mean that someone is unable to vote in primary elections. Finally, there are other US political parties, with notable examples being the Libertarian Party and the Green Party. Though not generally drawing in large numbers of votes in percentage terms, such parties can garner millions of votes in Presidential elections collectively. In 2024, for example, the Libertarian and Green parties received around a million and a half votes between them, whilst candidates from parties beyond the Democrats and Republicans, including the Libertarian and Green parties, garnered 2.9 million votes collectively that year.

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The post The 2026 Midterms: Your guide to the elections happening across the US first appeared on LSE United States Politics and Policy.