A bartender in Harrisburg back in the spring told me she thought the local economy was on the rise, and she pointed to a plan to reopen the long-dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power a fleet of data centers for Microsoft.

Out in western Pennsylvania, when rumors of a data center began spreading in the most depressed corner of the state, local politicians and businessmen were thrilled.

By this fall, data centers had become a boogeyman.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), who was an artificial intelligence and data center cheerleader at the beginning of 2026, last month made a big deal about slapping new regulations on them. His Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, has been attacking him for his love affair with the industry, and Shapiro, in turn, is using AI industry donations to Garrity against her.

And here in the Philadelphia area, where control over both the state Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives hangs in the balance, every candidate who can is attacking the other as a stooge of data centers.

Republican Frank Farry represents part of lower Bucks County in the state Senate. In nearby Falls Township, Amazon is planning a massive data center at the site of a former U.S. Steel plant. His Democratic opponent, Eileen Albillar, is running ads attacking him for coziness with data centers.

Her ad mentions that Farry voted for big tax breaks for data centers while his law firm represented the Bucks County data center developers.

In neighboring Berks and Montgomery counties, the 24th Senate District is another key battleground, and both major candidates are attacking each other as stooges of data centers.

According to Republican state Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, her challenger, Chris Thomas, “answers to radical California donors and data center developers.” Pennycuick’s attack ad on Thomas closes with a shot of him with a picture of data center server racks pasted behind him and the words “Chris Thomas is for them, not us.”

Thomas’s attacks on Pennycuick sound the same theme: She took money from data center developers.

PENNSYLVANIA’S VICE ECONOMY

The politicians know which way the wind is blowing. A Philadelphia Inquirer poll in August found that 60% of likely voters opposed the construction of data centers. A separate Franklin & Marshall poll found that 79% “opposed the construction of a data center in their community.”

Just a few months ago, there was reason to believe Pennsylvania would be ground zero for the data center boom. Now “data center” has become a curse word.

Above the M is a massive LED billboard, which on a Monday morning is alternating between ads for Parx Casino and ads for a marijuana dispensary.

A few miles down the road at Sparky’s, a Caribbean-themed bar in Bristol Township that opens at 10 a.m., customers are glued to the screens of “Pennsylvania Skill Games,” essentially video slot machines that fill the corners of dive bars and corner stores.

A few doors over, at the New Madison Restaurant, a handful of retired ladies wear orange golf shirts emblazoned with the Parx Casino logo on the shoulder.

And at the Bristol campus of Bucks Community College, the poll workers are setting up for the first day of early voting. One woman in her 50s explains that her election-season work is her “Christmas money.” A colleague in her 70s replies, “To be honest, it’s my gambling money!”

In lower Bucks County, the most working-class part of Philly’s suburbs, gambling is everywhere. Everett, my bartender at Sparky’s, tells me that many of his peers in their 20s have had their lives derailed by sports gambling apps.

Ubiquitous gambling and pot are hardly unique to Bucks County or to Pennsylvania. In fact, the state has stricter marijuana laws than do its neighbors, including New Jersey, just across the Delaware River. But spend a couple of days down in this part of the Philadelphia area, and you’ll feel you are bombarded by vice.

Around 8 p.m. on Monday, during a lull at Sparky’s, there are only about 10 patrons total, and most of them are gathered around the three “Skill Games” machines. Two are shaped like arcade machines and sit on the floor. Another machine sits on a high-top bar table, like a 1990s personal computer, but the table is equipped with an extra-comfy Pennsylvania Skill Games chair.

These “skill games” are fundamentally video slots. They offer mindless gambling played by touching a computer screen that flashes with bright lights. The “skill” part is basically a lie. After losing your money at some stylized game of chance, such as Amigos Locos (starring gunslinging Mexican characters), you might earn a free spin if you can solve a memory puzzle. This tiny introduction of games that don’t rely on chance has, for years, put these machines beyond the reach of the state’s gambling laws.

So in every region of the state, you’ll see these machines, with gamblers hunched over them. But look a bit closer, and you’ll see a geographic pattern: They’re much more common in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood than in Chestnut Hill. Sparky’s, with its $3 Miller Lites and yes-smoking policy, has a few of these machines, but you won’t find them at the Capital Grille or the Green Parrot up in swanky Newtown.

It’s similar to pot. Yes, Doylestown, an upper-crust suburb in central Bucks, has one dispensary, but it’s the only one within many miles. Meanwhile, Sparky’s is around the corner from the Beyond Hello dispensary and a 15-minute drive from two others.

The vice economy is growing in America today, and that growth is concentrated in the working class. Put another way, working-class life today in America has less marriage, less churchgoing, and less long-term employment than it did a generation ago, while that same working-class life has a lot more pot and a lot more gambling.

Around 8 p.m. Monday, one very gray-haired couple sat at the end of Sparky’s bar, as close as possible to one of the arcade-style video machines. They took turns going up to gamble away their money while vaping. The man looked up at the television as Monday Night Football cut to a ceremony for former New Orleans Saints star Steve Gleason, who is wheelchair-bound and paralyzed by ALS.

“I’d rather be dead than live like that,” the man said before returning to his video slots.

A group of 20-somethings arrives, and one patron walks over with a smile and starts waving her arms toward her face and inhaling. “I’m trying to get high,” she says, joking about the unmistakable scent they are giving off. This group huddles around the “skill games” machine near the bathroom.

“They pay out cash, like slots,” one young man informed me. “That’s why the casinos don’t like them.”

Sure enough, there’s a case of Baptists and bootleggers going on here.

Parx Casino in lower Bucks is the largest casino in Pennsylvania. The parent company, Greenwood Gaming and Racing, has lobbied the legislature and filed suit in an effort to get the “skill games” classified as what they are: gambling.

You see, the casino owners are horrified that there is gambling going on at Sparky’s. They want all the gambling to go on at Parx.

And it appears the casinos have won. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that these gambling machines are, in fact, gambling machines and thus covered by the Pennsylvania laws that govern video slots. “Skill games” need to be regulated and taxed, but there is no framework in current state law for the regulation and taxation of video slots in dive bars and corner stores.

WALKABILITY BIT FOR CHILDREN

Absent legislative or court action, these machines have to be shut down on Oct. 16.

Then it’s off to the casinos, guys.

The debate is over how long the rest of her life should be.

Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) and Tennessee’s court system believe Pike should be executed. They tried to execute her on Wednesday but failed. Pike is still alive and recovering in the hospital as of this writing.

Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of 2026. Pike’s was the second failed lethal injection in the state this year.

Because Pike is a woman, because her crime was so grisly and demented, because the execution has been postponed for so long, because she was so obviously harmed by repeated sexual abuse as a child, and now because of the failed execution, her case has reignited the debate over the death penalty.

Should the death penalty exist in America today? If so, should it apply to Pike?

These questions aren’t as simple as many seem to think.

The crime

Pike, at age 18, murdered a 19-year-old classmate at a job-training program. The murder was premeditated and gruesome. And before she murdered Colleen Slemmer by smashing her skull with a large chunk of asphalt, Pike and her friends tortured her.

After the murder, Pike kept a piece of Slemmer’s skull as a memento of her crime.

It’s been reported that Pike thought Slemmer was trying to steal her boyfriend, who was also involved in the killing and is still in prison.

This much is not in dispute: Pike murdered Slemmer in cold blood after torturing her. She doesn’t claim innocence. She doesn’t claim any exculpatory motive such as self-defense. Pike is a murderer who deserves life in prison.

In 1996, a state court sentenced Pike to death, and she was first scheduled to be executed in 2002. Decades of legal wrangling ended last month, when she exhausted her appeals and was scheduled to die on Wednesday.

Her most recent appeal argued that her initial defense, 30 years ago, was incompetent. Pike was raped by a neighbor at age 12 and then sexually abused by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. She spent time in a home for troubled youth, and even there, she stood out as troubled.

She now describes herself as a mentally ill 18-year-old at the time she committed the attack — not to deny her guilt, but in arguing against the death penalty.

What is the purpose of the death penalty?

Should Tennessee kill Pike?

A prior question: Should states be in the business of executing criminals at all? Prior to that is the question of what purpose punishment serves.

The primary reason to punish a criminal is to incapacitate a dangerous person. Executing a killer prevents her from killing again. Locking up a thief prevents him from stealing again. The public is safer when criminals are not walking the streets.

In the past, executing a criminal was at times necessary to keep him off the streets, because it was hard to keep someone securely locked up. Today, prison escapes happen but are extremely rare, and escapees are almost always caught very quickly.

If you can effectively keep a criminal locked up, another reason to execute her is if she continues to be a threat in prison. Sure enough, Pike was convicted in 2001 of attempted murder while behind bars. But the victim, Patricia Jones, later testified that Pike had intervened to stop Jones from killing another inmate.

These days, death penalty advocates warn that prison cannot keep violent criminals contained because ideological, left-wing prosecutors, governors, or judges are apt to spring the criminals free through misguided ideas of mercy.

A second reason we punish criminals is to deter them. While it’s reasonable to assume the death penalty might be a stronger deterrent than life in prison, decades of research seem to refute this assumption. The severity of a punishment doesn’t deter crime. What deters crime is the likelihood of getting caught and punished at all.

A third argument for punishment is more abstract: Justice is giving a person what they deserve. It is retribution.

Nigel Biggar, an Anglican theologian, put it this way: “I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing, which might be and should be proportionate.”

Arguably, the proportionate retribution for killing is being killed.

The late Father James Schall, a professor at Georgetown University, put it this way: “The man who puts evil things in the world can best let the world know that he has changed, that he accepts proper order, by himself undergoing a suitable punishment. This penance is not just vengeance. It is what is due. It restores the order of things in the best way open to us.”

Schall’s warning against vengeance points toward a danger of the death penalty — it could make us worse. But this isn’t the only argument against the death penalty.

Arguments against the death penalty

We do not tend to think the federal government or state governments are the most capable entities in the world. Conservatives, in particular, would not want the government to run our hospitals or our health insurance, because we believe they would be incompetent.

If you support the death penalty, though, you are trusting the government to mete out death — a task in which it must be flawless, because it cannot be undone. On that point, Tennessee’s recent botched executions demonstrate its lack of perfect competence on this matter.

Also, the United States of America in 2026 is very effective at imprisoning people.

In Tennessee, for instance, three violent criminals have escaped state prisons in the past 20 years, a review of media accounts suggests. All three of them were caught and returned to prison within a week. None have re-escaped.

Pike was involved in a failed escape plan: A pen pal on the outside bribed a prison guard in a plot to set her free. Pike was never charged in the plot, which failed, and the two conspirators were punished.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is never acceptable, because every human being, made in the image, has dignity and infinite worth, regardless of his or her actions.

This is not a popular view these days. As a culture, we tend to judge people by their actions, especially their worst actions. We conclude that not only does a murderer forfeit her freedom, she forfeits her dignity.

In other words, our culture brands as subhuman those who do bad things.

Consider how many people openly cheered the assassinations of conservative activist Charlie Kirk or United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Consider the increase in political violence, such as multiple assassination attempts on President Donald Trump, and polls suggesting 1 in 3 Democrats would be happy if Trump were killed.

Our culture has replaced the idea of just retribution with a thirst for vengeance. The Pike case has highlighted this bloodthirst. Social media is flooded with posters, largely conservatives, suggesting Tennessee execute Pike the same gruesome way Pike killed Slemmer: smashing her head with a rock.

Before the botched execution, people were publicly relishing the prospect of the execution, as if this were a happy event.

MALL CRIMINALS: WITHOUT LAW AND ORDER, WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS

The death penalty, it seems, makes us more pro-death and makes us lose sight of the value of human life and the inherent dignity of each person.

Just retribution makes a criminal better off. Killing a criminal doesn’t make her better — and it seems to make us worse.

Come here on a fall evening, when the desert sun is low and shadows grace the parks and the village squares, and you’ll see a little slice of heaven on Earth — particularly if you’re a parent.

Desi and Allison, aged about 30, sit at their table on the patio of Romano’s cafe on a Thursday night, while their two young sons ignore the pizza for now and instead play with some older girls on the nearby village lawn. Teenagers on scooters and bikes circle the far side of village square and zoom up and down the trail that runs through the adjacent park. A local musician sings Frank Sinatra songs, while inside Romano’s, a few families eat a quick casual dinner before heading to Adventura Park, a mile down the road, for a soccer game.

Over at Adventura, a half dozen soccer practices are going on simultaneously with a Little League game. While parents sit in the bleachers, the older siblings play pickup basketball at the adjacent courts, and the little ones climb the jungle-gym-fort nearby.

Walk through Inspirada, and you’ll see parents gathered on benches while their toddlers toddle around a playground. You’ll see totally unsupervised, liberated middle-schoolers roaming the neighborhood on foot, bikes, and scooters.

What made this all possible?

Part of it was architects and designers who put walkability first, but specifically walkability for children.

Just as crucially, the developers in Inspirada won exemptions from local zoning rules, and they built housing here — dense, single-family housing — that would be illegal in most of the rest of the county.

Packed into these 2.3 square miles are a dozen parks, miles of trails, two schools, 4,000 homes, 11,000 residents, and maybe the most important lesson for American policymakers today.

The biggest story of the past 30 years has been the crisis of belonging and the collapse of community cohesion. The biggest story of the next 30 years will be the disappearance of marriage and family formation. These are mostly cultural matters, rather than economic matters. It’s hard, or maybe impossible, to address them directly through public policy.

But to the extent the crises of community and family can be addressed by policy, it’s by making the built environment more family-friendly and more conducive to community. And the one undeniable economic cause of the baby bust is the high cost of owning a family home, which makes a dense, suburban place like Inspirada a true model.

“Family friendly,” said Jennifer, a mother, pushing her daughter in the swings at Capriola Park, after school on a Thursday.

“We have friends in other parts of Vegas,” say Jen and Richard, two parents picking up their children from school, “and their kids just stay inside all the time.” Jen and Richard, in contrast, set their children free, and childhood freedom is contagious.

Chantel is a high-schooler who works the cash register at Romano’s, and she has loved growing up here. “My family moved here when I was in fifth grade. Honestly, before that, my parents didn’t really let me out — they were too afraid. But you come here, and you see all the kids running around, and it makes you feel safe.”

Low crime is part of this. Henderson is by some measures the second-safest large city in America, and Inspirada is a relatively low-crime part of Henderson.

“I walk around at night, am not looking over my shoulder,” says Aaliyah, a young mother pushing her 3-year-old in a heavy-duty wagon. She’s lived here for about three years and is picking up her oldest at Ellis Elementary School. “You couldn’t do that everywhere, especially as a woman with kids.”

But child-walkability and bikability are at the core of childhood freedom here. Within most of Inspirada, there are no wide roads — every street is one lane in each direction. The larger thoroughfares through the neighborhood, the ones adults would drive to get from one end to the other, generally have grassy medians (or entire parks) in the middle, making it easier for pedestrians to cross easily.

Long blocks have pedestrian cut-throughs. Everywhere there are sidewalks, foot trails, or both. The family homes generally have parking in the back, down alleys, which allows for narrower roads (a shorter distance to cross) and more visibility (no children stepping out from behind a parked car).

The built environment sends the message: This place is for walking. You can see the effect on cars, which drive slower, and which defer generously to pedestrians of all ages — which is not the norm in much of America.

But there’s a very important way in which Inspirada is not walkable: adults cannot walk to work.

Except for Tony Romano, who walks to his cafe, basically nobody who lives here works here. They all have to drive to work. Adults also have to drive to the hardware store, and probably to Albertson’s supermarket. Frankly, most parents drive their children to elementary school because the average home is about a mile away.

That is, this place isn’t “walkable” by the standards of many urbanists, because the adults are still car-dependent. The key is that the children are not car-dependent, especially once they are old enough to scoot and ride around with their friends.

And the neighborhood events and customs have an obvious audience. Aaliyah gushes about the holidays in Inspirada. Everyone decorates for Halloween and Christmas. The Homeowners Association hosts a Halloween pumpkin patch. There’s a “Food-truck Friday” in the village square. “It’s all for the kids,” Aaliyah says. “They have a bounce house at the harvest festival.”

Parents and children are both liberated by all this. “When I grew up, my mom was like, ‘I don’t want to drive you,’” explains Allison, and so she was often stuck inside. Here, children have endless fun accessible without a ride. And that’s a treasure beyond value to parents — but that doesn’t mean Inspirada is unaffordable.

Inspirada was built about 20 years ago as a “master-planned community.” As such, it won exemptions from the county’s normal requirements for the minimum lot size and the minimum setback from the street. Thus, Inspirada is thoroughly suburban, but unusually dense. It’s not high-rise dense, though. It’s townhouses and small-yards dense. That is, it was planned for family-friendly density.

A typical three-bedroom, three-bathroom home in Inspirada is just about 2,000 square feet, comes with a small backyard and front porch, and lists for $515,000.

Is this expensive for a starter home? Yes, but not outrageously so. A house costing $515,000 is affordable for a household earning $115,000, which is just above the median income for a married couple in Las Vegas.

The children would be steps away from Adventura Park, and so they could play basketball and soccer with zero parental effort. Albertson’s supermarket and CVS are a five-minute drive. So are the elementary school and the charter school. A house like this gets bid up because it gives the parents and children such freedom and convenience.

If more neighborhoods were built like Inspirada — if the supply of family-friendly housing were higher — then homes like this would be even more affordable.

TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: THE PRO-FAMILY CASE FOR WALKABILITY

Of course, there’s one massive downside to Inspirada: It was built in the desert that is the Las Vegas area. The sun is enough to kill anyone’s appetite to walk around — hence the ubiquitous swimming pools and the shade canopies in every park.

Nevertheless, anyone who wants to see what an affordable walkable neighborhood looks like for families ought to come here and grab a slice at Romano’s on a fall evening.

From the early days of the smartphone, I recall ads promising me I could watch the NCAA tournament on my phone, maybe while riding a city bus, or sitting by a peaceful stream.

So much for that! In this brave new world, it’s impossible to even watch the biggest games at home on your own TV.

In the old days, to catch a playoff game in baseball, football, or basketball, you would turn on the TV and turn the dial: if it’s not on Channel 2, 4, or 5, it’s probably on 7.

These days, you need to be a tech wiz with secret insider knowledge in order to catch the game.

Set aside that one of the National League Wild Card games began at 10 p.m., it’s hard to know where to even find the games. Maybe you paid more than a hundred bucks this season for MLB.tv, and you think you could watch the MLB playoffs on this app. You’d be mistaken.

The Wild Card round is on NBC, which sounds simple. But no, some games are on NBC, and some are on NBCSN (a special NBC sports channel), while others might end up on CNBC, where you normally watch how your retirement portfolio is doing. Because those latter two are not available over the antennae, you need to buy a cable bundle that includes both NBCSN and CNBC. Alternatively, you can pay for Peacock, NBC’s own streaming service.

But that won’t do you any good after the first three games. The National League Division Series and National League Championship Series games will air on Fox — except for the games that air on Fox’s FS1. If you want an American League, you need TBS (and maybe another channel called TruTV).

Fox will carry the World Series.

That’s seven channels, none of which are available on the same streaming apps. It’s possible you can get all of the games if you pay $80 for YouTube TV. Alternatively, you might be able to see most of the games on Sling, as long as you choose the Blue and Orange package (though who knows what the Mets’ colors have to do with the postseason).

I guess this is called progress.

We were about 10 and 12 years old, visiting my grandparents in Bethesda, Maryland. As I recall it, Mike and I were first busted for going up a down escalator, and soon thereafter, the same security officer caught us riding down a different escalator by hoisting ourselves up on the rubber handrails. We were told to leave the mall and threatened with a permanent ban if we loitered.

As fate would have it, 35 years later, my sons are banned from the same mall. This isn’t a case of punishing the sons for the sins of the father, but it’s a different sort of guilt-by-association: My sons are the same rough age as other kids throughout the county who have gone on a multi-year crime spree, including assaults, shootings, and, of course, theft.

Increasingly, this criminality is occurring in the county’s malls, so this month, Westfield, the owner of the Wheaton and Montgomery malls, has barred all children after 3 p.m. unless accompanied by an adult over age 21.

The roots of this problem go back to 2020. Since the county closed its schools for a year, removed the hoops from the backboards, and outlawed Little League, the youth of Montgomery County have gone feral.

As the county politicians took away civilizing, pro-social activities from kids, they also handcuffed the cops. In the name of wokeness, the County Council barred armed security guards from high schools. County Executive Marc Elrich declared a policy of “Lessen[ing] police presence on streets as a direct measure to help diminish impacts of racial bias in interactions with Montgomery County police officers….”

The result was predictable: a youth crime wave. “As I review all of my detectives’ investigations,” one MoCo police official stated in 2023, “the individuals involved are getting younger and younger.”

By 2024, police noted that “juvenile-related violent crime increased 95% since 2019, and robbery, specifically, increased 108%.”

Arrests of juveniles fell in this same period, thanks to Maryland’s “Juvenile Justice Reform Act and the Child Interrogation Protection Act,” which made it harder to arrest young criminals.

The youth violence and criminality flared in the school hallways, at the football games, in the streets, and more recently in the county’s shopping malls.

A gang of teenagers followed a stranger into a bathroom at Wheaton Mall in March and stabbed him just for fun. Surveillance cameras show the boys’ glee at the occasion.

YOUTH CRIME WAVE IN WEALTHY DC SUBURB

A 17-year-old in July shot a 13-year-old at the same mall, for apparently no reason. He’s being charged with attempted murder. The tonier Montgomery Mall doesn’t have quite the same record of stabbings and shootings, but assaults in the first half of this year set a record pace, and they’ve started back up again along with the school year.

So the malls have decided that no schoolkids may hang out at the mall anymore. In other words, if we don’t have law and order, we can’t have nice things.

Republicans are going to get destroyed in this fall’s elections. Democrats will probably take the House of Representatives and the Senate, too. It would be a surprise if they didn’t also win most governor races while taking over state legislatures.

This won’t be the biggest wave election of our lives, but it will be a wave election — far worse for Republicans than the average second-term midterm election is for the party in power.

President Donald Trump is the root of the problem. His approval ratings are historically low. He has failed on his central promise — improving affordability — and he brought that problem on himself with slapdash tariffs and an ill-advised war against Iran.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is becoming the party of corruption and immorality, with self-dealing, philandering, and perversion omnipresent among the party’s Senate candidates and in the Trump administration.

With more than six weeks until Election Day, plenty of details will change, but already we can see some contours of this coming tsunami.

The polls

Voters generally approved of Trump when his second term started. They don’t anymore. In fact, his approval ratings are historically bad.

From 49% approval in January 2025, Trump has fallen steadily to 39% these days, according to Emerson’s polls. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans disapproving of Trump’s performance has skyrocketed from 41% last year (just barely larger than the Democratic base) to 58%.

That means millions of Americans who voted for Trump in 2024, and who were neutral or positive on him in 2025, now say he’s blowing it. His net approval has gone from positive 8 points to negative 19.

All pollsters show similarly grim numbers for Trump. Reuters/Ipsos’s September poll had Trump 27 points underwater, with 69% of independents disapproving and 25% approving.

Voters still trust Republicans more on immigration and crime, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, but they trust Democrats more on “cost of living,” which was the most important issue.

Emerson College’s pollsters ask voters in general whether they plan to vote Republican or Democratic for Congress. Throughout 2025, the parties were basically tied. Since April, though, Democrats have led the generic poll by about 10 points.

In September, Democrats posted their biggest lead of the cycle, 53% to 42% — and the trend seems to be in Dems’ favor.

The races

All this puts major wind in the sails of Democrats running for office everywhere and at all levels of government.

Republican control of the U.S. Senate is in grave danger, but it shouldn’t be, considering the election map. Republicans have a three-seat majority, and because they control the vice presidency, Democrats would need to gain four seats to take over the chamber.

Ten of the thirteen open seats are in states Trump won in 2024. Only one Republican incumbent (Susan Collins) is trying to defend in a state Trump lost, while Democrats have to defend seats in Georgia (Jon Ossoff) and Michigan (open), both of which Trump won.

Nevertheless, the polls, betting markets, and forecasters all point towards a likely Democratic takeover.

The Cook Political Report, for instance, rates the GOP-held North Carolina seat as leaning Democratic, and puts five other GOP seats in the toss-up category, along with only two Democratic-held seats (New Hampshire and Michigan). Even Kansas is within reach for Democrats, according to Cook.

Nate Silver gives Democrats a 69% chance of taking over the Senate. In his poll average, Democrats are ahead in 7 of the 9 battleground states: North Carolina, Texas, Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio. Alaska is a tossup, and Republicans are slightly favored in Nebraska.

Silver gives Democrats a 91% chance of taking over the House of Representatives. Other models give Democrats the advantage, but by slimmer margins. Decision Desk HQ gives Democrats 72% chance of taking the House, and a 54% chance of taking the Senate. The forecaster “50 Plus 1” puts the Dems’ House odds at 85% and Senate odds at 55%.

No major forecasters give the GOP even a 1-in-3 chance of holding the House or a statistically significant edge in the battle for the Senate.

The problems

What is dragging Republicans down?

A recent focus group administered by the New York Times provided a peek into voters’ concerns. When asked what issues Texans are facing nowadays, most of the answers were about affordability. “I feel like right now the buying power of middle-class America is really shrinking,” said one Democrat. “Everything’s going up except for our paychecks,” one Republican voter remarked.

Corruption was also a salient issue. Voters were asked which word came to mind when they heard the name of Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas. Paxton was impeached by his own party, cheated on his wife, and has been accused of selling political favors. Participants answered “bad, amoral, morally corrupt, disgusting, womanizer, and crook,” — and those were just the Republican participants.

Affordability and corruption aren’t the only headwinds facing Republicans, but they are probably the two biggest, along with the Iran War.

Emerson asked voters how much a given issue affects their vote. One should not take this as gospel, because voters aren’t reliable on which issues actually move them. But it’s noteworthy which issues ranked near the top: The four most salient issues were Iran, jobs, tariffs, and gas prices. Ranking lower were data centers, Israel/Gaza, and AI regulation, among others.

While 39% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, and 37% approve of his work on crime in the latest Ipsos poll, Trump is doing much worse on every other issue. Most starkly, only 22% of voters (and 16% of independents) approve of Trump’s handling of inflation.

Trump was elected in 2024 largely in response to inflation, which Biden directly caused with his overspending. (Opening the border and embracing the worst extremes of wokism also killed the Democrats in 2024.) Trump has failed at fighting inflation, and largely because he made avoidable mistakes.

High prices are inseparable from the Iran War, which has since March blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil leaves the Persian Gulf. Higher gas prices directly cause higher prices for everything shipped by air, by truck, or by sea.

The Trump administration is also driving Republicans’ image as the party of corruption. In a September poll, 56% of likely voters agreed that “corrupt” was an apt description for Trump. Among moderates and independents, the number was 62%.

Trump and his family have enriched themselves in this second term in ways more similar to third-world regimes or Cook County than to any previous administration. He and his family operate a financial company that has received heavy investments from Qatar’s government. He’s sold access to himself by selling otherwise worthless cryptocurrency. The IRS he controls settled a lawsuit with him, promising to pay him $1.8 billion (this settlement was voided by a judge).

Fundamentally, the party’s problem is Trump. The problem is his policy failures (Iran, inflation), his corruption, and also the asymmetric nature of the party realignment he accelerated:

Trump activated many politically disconnected working-class voters (what political analyst Sean Trende called “the missing white voter” after the 2012 election). Picking up these voters helped Trump dominate in Ohio, and win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin twice.

At the same time, Trump pushed away many college-educated suburban white voters — accelerating that half of the realignment.

VIRGINIA’S EXTREMIST ABORTION VOTE

The difference: The voters Trump pushed towards Dems are voters who reliably show up to vote; the ones he pulled towards himself do not show up unless Trump is on the ballot.

The result will be a very bad year for Republicans in 2026 — and maybe 2028, too.

I needed the fresh air. I needed to move my legs. But mostly, I needed Howie’s voice in my ears.

Howie Rose was the New York Mets radio announcer for decades, and he was the best in the business. I listened and walked that October night in 2024, using the MLB app on my iPhone, as the Mets went down weakly in the eighth. By the time the Mets came up in the ninth, I was holding vigil on a bench in “Pope Park,” a tiny park in this formerly Polish-Catholic enclave, honoring Pope St. John Paul II.

After the commercials, the broadcast played a few seconds of nervous-but-almost-jubilant fan noise from Milwaukee. Then came Howie’s voice, “Well, we go to the top of the ninth inning. Do the Mets have another comeback in them?”

Howie is, was, and always will be a Mets fan. But unlike the average radio or television announcer, Howie was no homer. Where lesser announcers would groan or downplay excellence by the other team, Howie gave opposing players credit, often loudly and emphatically.

In this inning, possibly the final frame of a miracle season, Howie provided the hope: “Do the Mets have another comeback in them?” But he also dealt straight. “There is no margin of error now,” because the Mets were facing “Devin Williams, the brilliant closer for the Brewers.… Last night, Williams picked up the save, needing 10 pitches to get the top of the Mets order.”

I had listened to Howie throughout my adult life, but I only became a real fan in 2015. That’s when I first got the MLB app, which allowed me to listen to Mets broadcasts. It’s also when my wife asked me to build a dining room table and accompanying benches for our large and growing family.

Throughout August and September, and then the amazing but ultimately failed October playoff run in 2015, I listened to almost every night game as I sawed, sanded, and drilled. Howie’s broadcast kept my mind occupied, made the hours pass more enjoyably, and allowed me to be a baseball fan again without taking time away from family. Here I was doing my impression of St. Joseph — working with wood in service of my family — while catching my team’s playoff run. Every win, he would sign off with the words, “Put it in the books!”

If the Mets were off or rained out, I would tune into the broadcast of our division rivals or root against the Yankees. Hearing these other announcers, I began to realize how great Howie was.

I noticed one game where Howie used the same phrase in three straight innings — “flyball to rightfield” — and his intonation told me each time just what was happening.

If Howie said “flyball to rightfield,” very matter-of-factly, but hanging, almost like a question, you knew it was foul. You were waiting for him to conclude “out of play.”

But Howie might also say “flyball to rightfield,” with a rising, but calm tone. The listener could see the routine flyball in his mind’s eye.

And sometimes “flyball to rightfield” was said with a dire excitement. You knew before even the folks watching on TV that this one had a chance to go out.

The Cardinals’, the Giants’, and certainly the Yankees’ announcers had no such ability to paint with their words.

I had become a connoisseur of radio announcing, a distant cousin of my own occupation as a writer. And it was clear to me that there were some greats — such as the Nationals’ Charlie Slowes — but there were two kings: Vin Scully and Howie Rose.

Over the years, Howie became a regular voice in our home and in our car. My son and I listened to him call a Mets’ combined no-hitter in 2022. We hugged in the kitchen as Howie exclaimed, “Put it in the books.”

Later that season, in one of Jacob deGrom’s first games back, I loaded my children into the car to drive home while the Mets led the Dodgers 2-1 after the seventh inning. The Mets’ bullpen, so dreadful in recent years, had to shut town Joey Gallo (38 homers the prior year), Cody Bellinger (former rookie of the year), Mookie Betts (former MVP), Trea Turner (the prior year’s batting champion), Freddie Freeman (the batting leader at that moment), and Will Smith (who always killed the Mets).

Howie’s voice held us transfixed in the dark of the Honda Odyssey on the Beltway, as Adam Ottavino dealt a 1-2-3 eighth. And then throughout the ninth, Howie painted the picture of Edwin Diaz’s slider at its nastiest. For my children and me, that was the sports highlight of 2022. We all remember it crystal clear, and most of us never saw a minute of it.

You can understand, then, why I felt weirdly at ease in Pope Park when the Mets somehow needed two or more runs against Devin Williams. With a man on base and one out and Brandon Nimmo batting, Howie said, with a knowing tension, “Pete Alonso is on deck.”

If you followed the Mets, you knew the drama. Alonso had set the record for rookie home runs. He was the Mets’ best slugger. But he had never delivered the big hit, and here he was at the end of a mediocre season, and his contract was expiring. It was hard not to fear he would end the season.

Nimmo singled to right fielder Sal Frelick. The go-ahead run was coming up.

Howie concisely set the stage: “And NOW, if you’re a script-writer and you think back to Pete Alonso’s career with the Mets, and the chance that this could be his final at bat as a Met…”

Howie laid out the details: bad season, 0-for-3, contract on the line.

Alonso took four pitches, three of them balls.

Howie painted the scene: Lindor and Nimmo leading off the bases, the Brewers’ outfielders playing very deep, the Milwaukee crowd standing, holding their breath, and Williams uncomfortable on the mound. I could see it all from my seat in Pope Park.

“Three-and-one to Alonso, Williams sets. Here’s the pitch.” Crack.

“Swing and a flyball to rightfield” — tension in Howie’s voice. “Pretty well hit”  — excitement. And then, in Howie’s next words, I heard near ecstasy I had never heard before: “Frelick back, at the wall, he jumps—”

If you are a Mets fan, you’ve been here a hundred times. Glory was in reach, but you end up on the wrong side of someone else’s highlight reel. It would have been the least surprising thing in the world if Frelick had made the catch of the season and robbed Alonso of a home run.

But I knew he wouldn’t. I knew it because of Howie’s intonation. “He jumps” somehow conveyed a jump of desperation, adding color to what would come next.

“IT’S GONE! HE DID IT! HE DID IT!”

It was the perfect call. Packed into those words was an entire career. We had questioned Alonso for years. Can he come through when it counts? Can he prove his worth to this team? There were a hundred questions, and Howie answered them: He did it.

“Pete Alonso keeps this fairy-tale season going with the fairy-tale swing of his career!”

TIM CARNEY: IT’S NOT ‘REGULATORY CAPTURE’ BY THE AI GIANTS, BUT IT’S STILL REGULATORY ROBBERY

Of course, this is the Mets. We didn’t make the World Series that year. We let Alonso go the next year. And now Howie’s gone. He retired at the end of this past, deeply disappointing season.

There should have been — in 2015, in 2022, or in 2024 — a World Series, Game 7, “Put it in the books!” Howie deserved it. But Howie chose to be a Mets fan. Mets fans don’t get happy endings. We knew it was a sad road when we chose it. But it is a road that was beautiful, thanks to Howie’s words.

The idea here is that government regulators end up being a boon to the big businesses they are regulating, at the expense of competitors, customers, workers, and taxpayers. The reason: Nobody cares more about the actions of the regulators than do the regulated, and so over time, the regulated companies will take over the agency.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution described the end of the process this way: “The industry never looks away. It lobbies Congress, hires former regulators, trains future ones, and supplies much of the information the agency needs. As the agency matures, accommodation replaces confrontation. By old age, the regulator has become the industry’s protector.”

Tabarrok discussed this concept in a recent blog post to argue that this is not at all what is happening today, as the chieftains of the artificial intelligence industry call for regulation.

“Notice that classic regulatory capture takes time,” Tabarrok wrote. “It’s a process of erosion rather than a battle, it happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye.”

Tabarrok makes this argument as a defense of Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, who are in charge of Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok, respectively, and all of whom want stricter federal regulation of AI.

This isn’t a case of regulatory capture, Tabarrok argued.

Fine. Maybe. But I think that’s a semantic argument that accidentally obscures the larger truth.

The fact is this: Big Business often lobbies for and benefits from stricter regulation. As with Anthropic, OpenAI, and X, Big Business is often the architect of the strict new regulation, or at least the first to propose it. No “capture” by industry is needed because Big Business has custody, as the father of the regulations.

Some examples off the top of my head, of industries that proposed or supported federal regulation before there was federal regulation of them: Tax preparers, hedge funds, casualty insurers, financial planners, toymakers, foodmakers, meatpackers, light-bulb manufacturers, Big Tobacco, trucking companies, flood insurers, and Portland, Oregon, cabbies. I could name others if I wanted to.

Tabarrok’s account of capture is too innocent. He posits an innocent, even populist origin to regulation and to regulatory agencies, and a later corruption, or capture. This is probably true in some cases, but it’s hardly a rule.

George Stigler, the great economist behind the idea of regulatory capture, put it this way: “Regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.”

AI IS HARDLY THE FIRST INDUSTRY WHERE THE BIG GUYS DEMANDED REGULATION

The Progressive Era was largely a story of Big Business and politicians teaming up to combat the evil of unbridled competition. Same for the New Deal.

In much of the past 150 years, industry hasn’t been capturing regulatory agencies — it’s been fathering them. And now the AI giants want to do the same thing. I call it “regulatory robbery.”

Public schools in blue states are — according to some parents, at least — convincing girls that they are boys, and if the parents object, the state will take away custody.

State law in multiple blue states explicitly lays the groundwork for this atrocity, and one Catholic family in Massachusetts says it is living through this nightmare.

Joseph and Arlene Kutzko say that a counselor at Algonquin Regional High School, their daughter’s suburban high school between Boston and Worcester, convinced their daughter she was a boy. The parents refused to “affirm” this fiction, and for that, they say, they were branded abusers.

The state of Massachusetts now has custody of their daughter.

The school district and the state are staying mum on this, but if the essence of this story is true, it is, of course, tyranny.

Democrats are using the schools they control and the state power they wield to impose their morality and their brand-new ideology, and they are dragging children away from parents who don’t abide by this novel dogma. It’s a godless theocracy.

At the same moment that CNN and the Washington Post are giving airtime to a California Democrat whose book warns us all about Christian nationalism, his state party has tried to make this kind of transgender-based family separation official policy.

California passed a law banning teachers from telling parents if their child was beginning to identify as the opposite gender. Another bill that passed the legislature — but was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) — would have required courts to consider whether a parent affirmed a child’s gender identity when determining the child’s health, safety, and welfare in custody disputes.

CHILDCARE SUBSIDIES ARE WORK SUBSIDIES

It’s no surprise that tyranny would flare up over the transgender issue. The movement has always had totalitarian tendencies. It has tried to deny free speech on the topic based on the false claim that even questioning a person’s stated gender identity would cause that person to resort to suicide — and that such speech was therefore “unsafe.”

Public schools brainwashing your children into totally rejecting how you raised them, and then stripping you of custody — that sounds like a right-wing fever dream. Well, increasingly, that nightmare is becoming reality.