Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.
Politics
If you use a mobile phone with location services turned on, it is likely that data about where you live and work, where you shop for groceries, where you go to church and see your doctor, and where you traveled to over the holidays is up for sale. And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is one of the customers.
The U.S. government doesn’t need to collect data about people’s locations itself, because your mobile phone is already doing it. While location data is sometimes collected as part of a mobile phone app’s intended use, like for navigation or to get a weather forecast, more often locations are collected invisibly in the background.
I am a privacy researcher who studies how people understand and make decisions about data that is collected about them, and I research new ways to help consumers get back some control over their privacy. Unfortunately, once you give an app or webpage permission to collect location data, you no longer have control over how the data is used and shared, including who the data is shared with or sold to.
Mobile phones collect location data for two reasons: as a by-product of their normal operation, and because they are required to by law.
Mobile phones are constantly scanning for nearby cell towers so that when someone wants to place a call or send a text, their phone is already connected to the closest tower. This makes it faster to place a call or send a text.
To maintain quality of service, mobile phones often connect with multiple cell towers at the same time. The range of the radio signal from a cell tower can be thought of as a big bubble with the cell tower in the center. The location of a mobile phone can be calculated via triangulation based on the intersection of the bubbles surrounding each of the cell towers the phone is connected to.
In addition to cell tower triangulation, since 2001 mobile phone carriers have been required by law to provide latitude and longitude information for phones that have been used to call 911. This supports faster response times from emergency responders.
When people allow webpages and apps to access location data generated by their mobile phones, the software maker can share that data widely without asking for further permission. Sometimes the apps themselves do this directly through partnerships between the maker and data brokers.
More often, apps and webpages that contain advertisements share location data via a process called “real-time bidding,” which determines which ads are shown. This process involves third parties hired by advertisers, which place automated bids on the ad space to ensure that ads are shown to people who match the profile of interests the advertisers are looking for.
To identify the target audience for the ads, software embedded in the app or webpage shares information collected about the user, including their location, with the third parties placing the bids. These third parties are middlemen that can keep the data and do whatever they want with it, including selling the data to location data brokers, whether or not their bid wins the auction for the ad space.
The data acquired by location data brokers is sold widely, including to companies called location-based service providers that repackage it and sell access to tools that monitor people’s locations. Some of these tools do things like provide roadside assistance. Others are used by police, government agencies and others to track down individuals.
In October 2025, news outlets reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had purchased a location surveillance tool from a company called Penlink that can track movements of specific mobile devices over time in a given location. Tools like this allow users to access location data from “hundreds of millions of mobile phones” without a warrant.
The invisible collection, sale and repackaging of location data is a problem because location data is extremely sensitive and cannot be made anonymous. The two most common locations a person visits are their home and where they work. From this information alone, it is trivially easy to determine a person’s identity and match it with the other location data about them that these companies have acquired.
Also, most people don’t realize that the location data they allowed apps and services to collect for one purpose, like navigation or weather, can reveal sensitive personal information about them that they may not want to be sold to a location data broker. For example, a research study I published about fitness tracker data found that even though people use location data to track their route while exercising, they didn’t think about how that data could be used to infer their home address.
This lack of awareness means that people can’t be expected to anticipate that data collected through the normal use of their mobile phones might be available to, for example, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
More restrictions on how mobile phone carriers and apps are allowed to collect and share location data – and on how the government is allowed to obtain and use location information about people – could help protect your privacy. To date, Federal Trade Commission efforts to curb carriers’ data sales have had mixed results in federal court, and only a few states are attempting to pass legislation to tackle the problem.
Emilee Rader receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
A largely overlooked directive issued by the Trump administration marks a major shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, one that threatens bedrock free speech rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, is a presidential directive that for the first time appears to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.
You’ve probably heard a lot about President Donald Trump’s many executive orders. But as an international relations scholar who has studied U.S. foreign policy decision-making and national security legislation, I recognize that presidents can take several types of executive actions without legislative involvement: executive orders, memoranda and proclamations.
This structure allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight.
This seventh national security memorandum from the Trump White House pushes the limits of presidential authority by targeting individuals and groups as potential domestic terrorists based on their beliefs rather than their actions.
The memorandum represents a profound shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy, one that risks undermining foundational American commitments to free speech and association.
Executive memoranda instruct government officials and agencies by delegating tasks and directing agency actions.
They can, for example, order a department to prepare reports, implement new policies, coordinate interagency efforts or review existing programs to align with the administration’s priorities.
Unlike executive orders, they are not required to be published. When these memoranda, like NSPM-7, relate to national security and military and foreign policy, they are called national security directives, although the specific name of these directives changes with each administration.
Many of these directives are classified. They may not be declassified, if at all, until years or decades after the end of the administration that issued them.
The stated purpose of NSPM-7 is to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence, focusing mainly on perceived threats from the political left. The memorandum identifies “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views as potential indicators that a group or person will commit domestic terrorism.
The memorandum claims that political violence originates with “anti-fascist” groups that hold the following views: “support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The strategy laid out in NSPM-7 includes preemptive measures to disrupt groups before they engage in violent political acts. For example, multiagency task forces are empowered to investigate potential federal crimes related to radicalization, as well as the funders of those potential crimes.
The memorandum directs the Department of Justice to focus the resources of the FBI’s approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces on investigating “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.”
NSPM-7 also allows the attorney general to propose groups for designation as “domestic terrorist organizations.” That includes groups that engage in the following behaviors: “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder.”
Existing laws allow the secretary of state to designate groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” that are then subject to financial sanctions.
But these laws do not permit the president to label domestic groups this way.
NSPM-7 marks a major conceptual shift in U.S. counterterrorism policy. Its focus on domestic terrorism significantly departs from historical approaches that primarily targeted foreign threats.
Earlier presidential directives largely defined terrorism as a foreign threat to be countered through military power, diplomacy and international cooperation.
Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the U.S. government had treated terrorism as a global menace to democratic institutions, emphasizing protection of citizens and allies abroad. By moving away from a traditional law enforcement framework and recasting terrorism as an act of war, the Reagan administration situated the issue within the broader realm of Cold War geopolitics and military advantage.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration reframed terrorism as both a foreign policy and domestic security challenge, particularly after high-profile attacks such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton’s policy highlighted the dangers of transnational networks and the need to defend critical infrastructure.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration fused counterterrorism with national defense. The Bush-initiated global war on terrorism expanded the concept of who constituted a threat to include countries that harbored or aided terrorist organizations.
The Obama administration tried to narrow and regulate those powers by embedding counterterrorism within a system of legal rules and procedures. The key question, according to the declassified guidance, was whether the targeted individuals “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”
This standard was not focused on ideology but rather on tactical considerations, such as the feasibility of capture and continued threat to U.S. interests.
For example, the lethal drone strike on al-Qaida propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 was justified on the basis that he was actively involved in plotting attacks and remained unreachable for capture.
During the first Trump presidency, executive orders were used to change counterterrorism policy, most notably through several iterations of a “travel ban” that attempted to restrict immigration from terror-prone countries such as Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
The Biden administration redirected attention toward preventing catastrophic threats, especially from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of groups or individuals outside of governments, such as terrorist organizations.
There is no single official definition of terrorism in U.S. law.
Instead, laws use different definitions based on their purpose, whether criminal law or laws relating to intelligence collection or civil liability.
Definitions in all those areas typically focus on identifying violent or dangerous acts done with the intent to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy.
But more than redefining terrorism, NSPM-7 reorients the machinery of national security toward the policing of belief.
The First Amendment generally prevents the government from punishing people for unpopular opinions. It also protects the ability for people to associate to advance public and private ideas in pursuit of political, economic, religious or cultural goals.
The directive’s emphasis on ideological orientations – “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-American” views – as indicators of domestic terrorism potentially jeopardizes First Amendment rights.
Thirty-one members of Congress sent a letter to Trump expressing “serious concerns” about NSPM-7, warning that it poses “serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest or ideological speech.”
As the ACLU warns, any definition of terrorism that includes ideological components risks criminalizing people or groups based on belief rather than based on violence or other criminal conduct.
Congress has declined to create a domestic complement to the foreign terrorist designation in large part because of the potential for impinging on First Amendment–protected association and speech.
But I fear that chilling speech may be the point.
NSPM-7 does not authorize new actions in the legal and institutional framework for counterterrorism. It does not criminalize previously legal conduct.
Rather, it states that the Trump administration’s investigative focus will be around the identity and ideology of supposed perpetrators. Prioritizing investigations into this broad swath of ideologies serves to instill fear, silencing anti-fascist and other messages in opposition to the Trump administration.
Law professor Steve Vladeck frames this chill as “obeying in advance,” in which organizations self-censor rather than risk investigation, prosecution or defending against the “domestic terrorist” label.
Although left-wing violence has risen in the past decade, empirical evidence proves that this violence remains at very low absolute levels, well below historical levels of right-wing or jihadist violence.
In fact, most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.
Yet NSPM-7 focuses disproportionately on left-wing ideologies. NSPM-7 departs from prior U.S. counterterrorism frameworks by prioritizing the suppression of ideologically motivated dissent, even in the absence of concrete evidence of violent intent.
Melinda Haas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
New polling shows many Americans have begun to blame President Donald Trump for the high costs they’re feeling across virtually every part of their lives — and it’s shifting politics.
Almost half — 46 percent — say the cost of living in the U.S. is the worst they can ever remember it being, a view held by 37 percent of 2024 Trump voters. Americans also say that the affordability crisis is Trump’s responsibility, with 46 percent saying it is his economy now and his administration is responsible for the costs they struggle with.
Those are among the new results from The POLITICO Poll that crystallize a growing warning sign for Republicans ahead of next year’s midterms: Some of the very groups that powered Trump’s victory last year are showing signs of breaking from that coalition, and it’s the high cost of living that’s driving them away.
It’s a growing vulnerability that Democrats exploited repeatedly in recent months, with campaigns focused on affordability sweeping key races in last month’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia and powering an overperformance in a deep-red House seat in Tennessee on Tuesday.
“This is a small warning, but it’s one that Republicans need to understand, is that to hold the House in 2026, it’s going to be an all-hands-on-deck effort,” GOP strategist Ford O’Connell said after the Tennessee election, where Republican Matt Van Epps beat Democrat Aftyn Behn by 9 points, but underperformed against Trump’s 22-point margin in 2024.
One year ago, Trump’s economic message helped him piece together a diverse winning coalition, fueling his return to the White House amid widespread frustration over spiraling inflation.
Then Trump, after campaigning against Joe Biden, inherited the economy he spent months attacking, and both parties were anticipating the moment when voters would begin to turn their blame to the new incumbent.
Almost one year into Trump’s term, that shift is well underway.
The POLITICO Poll, conducted by Public First, found that despite Trump’s continued support among the Republican base, his softest supporters — the ones the GOP most needs to hold onto next year — are expressing concern.
Republicans were already worried about how they can turn out lower-propensity voters during a midterm cycle when Trump himself is not on the ballot. Now Democrats are also trying to peel away their voters by focusing aggressively on affordability, which remains a top priority for 56 percent of Americans, according to The POLITICO Poll. As was the case in November, affordability was central to the Tennessee special election, with Behn repeatedly centering her campaign on an affordability pitch.
“Republicans have long had the advantage on dealing with the economy, but if [it] remains in the doldrums and prices remain high, it’s harder to find a good job, they will blame the party in power, and that’s Republicans,” said Arizona-based Republican strategist Barrett Marson.
Republicans’ growing vulnerabilities on the economy represent a stark inversion on an issue that has long defined the GOP, and presents an emerging splintering in Trump’s 2024 winning coalition as his party heads into a high-stakes midterm fight.
Three-quarters of Trump voters say they trust the Republican Party over Democrats to reduce the overall cost of living. But his numbers are far weaker among those who say they voted for him, but do not identify as “MAGA Republicans” — 61 percent, compared to 88 percent of MAGA-aligned voters — pointing to a possible weak spot in his coalition.
Even among Trump voters a meaningful portion — nearly 1 in 5 — say Trump holds full responsibility for the state of the current economy.
The White House disputes that Trump is losing ground on the economy. “Cleaning up Joe Biden’s economic disaster has been a Day One priority for President Trump,” spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement.
“President Trump is just getting started implementing the policies that created historic economic prosperity in his first term, and Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come.”
Across parties, age groups, races, genders and income levels, Americans say the cost of living is the nation’s top problem, The POLITICO Poll finds, a sign that the economy will again overshadow other political topics in next year’s midterms.
The poll underscores just how pervasive the affordability crisis cuts across Americans’ everyday lives. A 45 percent plurality list grocery costs as the most challenging things to afford, followed by 38 percent who say housing costs and 34 percent who say health care. (Respondents could select multiple responses.)
Forty-three percent of Americans — including 31 percent of Trump voters — say there is less economic opportunity in the U.S. now than there has been in the past.
Other indicators present a similarly bleak view: Consumer sentiment fell in November to one of its lowest levels on record, according to the University of Michigan.
And while Trump frequently points to his predecessor to deflect blame for inflation and high prices, the survey reveals that defense is starting to crack.
More Americans say Trump holds most or all responsibility for the economy (46 percent) than say Biden does (29 percent).
“Voters aren’t going to go, ‘I voted for Trump to better the economy, but Biden just hamstrung [him] too much,’” Marson said. “Voters are going to very quickly forget about Joe Biden and just as quickly turn their ire to Trump unless things get better.”
The survey underscores how Trump is now running into the kinds of economic headwinds that dogged Biden and the Democratic Party during the 2024 campaign.
While inflation rates have fallen from a high of 9.1 percent during the Biden administration to roughly 3 percent last month, voters’ frustration with the cost of living has remained elevated.
Biden repeatedly pointed to job growth to argue the economy was strong, even as prices rose. Now Republicans — who repeatedly hammered Biden over his handling of affordability concerns — are increasingly concerned that Trump is taking a similar tact.
“It’s striking to see President Trump make the same mistake,” said Michael Strain, the director of Economic Policy Studies at the historically conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
The survey shows that there is a limit to how long Trump voters are willing to give him to deliver on a core campaign pledge. Already, 1 in 5 say he has had a chance to change the economy but has not taken it, underscoring how an issue that helped Trump form his coalition is now splitting it.
A significant portion of Trump’s voters last year did not come from his base — more than a third, 38 percent, self-identified as not being a “MAGA Republican” in the survey — and those voters are more likely than self-identified MAGA Republicans to hold a pessimistic view of Trump’s handling of the economy.
Among non-MAGA Trump voters, 29 percent say Trump has had a chance to change things in the economy but hasn’t taken it — more than double the 11 percent of MAGA voters who say Trump had not taken his opportunity.
Non-MAGA Republicans were also much more likely than MAGA voters to say the Trump administration is more responsible for the things they find difficult to afford, including grocery costs, utility bills and health care costs.
Democrats are eager to take advantage of the shifting politics of affordability and make the 2026 midterms a referendum on Trump’s economic record — and plan to link GOP candidates up and down the ballot to his policies.
Democrats from New York to Georgia zeroed in on affordability to propel them to victory in last month’s elections, and many party leaders believe it’s a playbook that candidates should follow closely next year.
“House Republicans should 100 percent expect to see ads next year calling them out for their broken promise to lower prices and for supporting Trump’s tariffs,” CJ Warnke, a spokesperson for the Democratic super PAC House Majority PAC, said in a statement.
Republicans, for their part, argue they’re the ones focused on reducing costs. “While Democrats are fighting amongst themselves on who can be the next Zohran Mamdani socialist, Republicans are laser-focused on lowering costs, rebuilding prosperity, and delivering relief for the middle class,” NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement.
Trump allies also say he’s making an affordability pitch, even if voters aren’t yet feeling improvements in their daily lives. But Trump himself has sent mixed messages on the issue.
On Saturday, he posted on Truth Social about drug prices that he claimed are falling so fast Republicans should easily win the midterms, declaring: “I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT.”
Days later, he said “affordability” is a “Democrat scam” and “con job” during a Tuesday Cabinet meeting.
“They just say the word,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it — affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history, there was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
Politics
Democrats are vowing to expand the midterm map into redder territory next year after strong showing Tuesday night in Tennessee, but prominent moderates warn the party must still overcome its tarnished national brand.
State Rep. Aftyn Behn’s overperformance in a district President Donald Trump won by more than 20 points last year further emboldened Democrats, after sweeping victories last month. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is planning to soon expand its 35-seat target list of Republican-held seats, according to a person familiar with the committee’s thinking who was granted anonymity to share details. And in a memo to donors and allied groups obtained by POLITICO, Senate Majority PAC President JB Poersch said Tuesday’s results “mean Ohio, Florida, Alaska, Texas and Iowa could be competitive.”
But Behn’s progressive credentials — and the GOP’s ability to spend-heavilly and bring her down with previous comments about police funding — is inflaming debates about the future of the Democratic Party and what types of candidates it should nominate in primary contests.
Former Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, who flipped a deep-red district in a 2018 special election, called the race “a missed opportunity.”
“It just sort of looks like we ran a standard to progressive Democratic campaign and we got the result you would expect,” Lamb said. “What a successful candidate would have done is motivate people, exactly the way that she did around Nashville, but also appeal to some more people who are less partisan outside of it.”
He added, “to win enough of a House majority to really be able to do anything of significance, we’re going to have to do that.”
The internal sniping comes despite a string of special election overperformances this year — Democratic candidates won by double digits in New Jersey and Virginia’s gubernatorial races last month. Those victories spurred fundraising surges and candidate recruitment for Democrats.
Behn’s race turned into a national flashpoint after those successes, drawing more than $3.5 million in outside spending from Republican groups to attack her as “a very radical person” in TV ads. She outran Harris by less than any other Democrat in a special congressional election since Trump took office — though those other races didn’t draw any significant outside spending. That triggered a round of finger-pointing, particularly on social media, over whether a more moderate candidate might have performed better.
When pressed in media interviews during the campaign about her previous social media posts, Behn said she’d “matured,” adding she was a private citizen when she made the comments. She also said police funding should be decided at the local level.
“I don’t think it’s radical to have spent my entire career organizing to make healthcare more affordable or groceries cheaper,” she said ahead of Tuesday’s election.
Ian Russell, a Democratic consultant who worked on Behn’s campaign, responded to post-election criticisms, saying that in her interviews and campaign ads, “Aftyn was laser-focused on lowering costs — a message that our polling showed worked very well with both Democrats and the very small pool of persuadable voters.”
Internal Behn campaign analytics shared with POLITICO showed thousands of Democrats who did not vote in the 2022 midterms had come out in the early vote. Early voting data out of rural counties also suggested she won over some voters who previously cast ballots for Trump or GOP Rep. Mark Green.
But some Democrats lamented Behn’s “politically toxic positions” as “anvils weighing [her campaign] down,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left Third Way, said.
After an election that many viewed as a disappointment for the GOP given the pattern of Democratic overperformances, Republicans were eager to exploit those divides.
“Democrats can daydream about ‘expanding’ the House map all they want, but reality keeps smacking them in the face,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Marinella said in a statement. “Their party is splintered, their messy primaries are a socialist free-for-all, and voters are consistently reminded that the Democrat Party is on the wrong side of every single issue.”
Even so, Behn’s ability to narrow Republicans’ margin-of-victory coupled with stronger-than-expected turnout gives Democrats reason for optimism heading into the midterms. That’s why Democrats say they are casting their eyes deeper into the electoral map, which includes 46 GOP-held congressional seats that Trump won by 13 or fewer points in 2024 — the margin by which Behn closed the gap between Trump and Harris.
“If Democrats do 13 points better than [Kamala] Harris did next November in every district, we flip the House and it’s not even close,” Democratic pollster Brian Stryker said. “Add this to New Jersey and Virginia, and it’s clear if the election were today we’d clean Republicans’ clocks.”
Courtney Rice, the DCCC’s communications director, said in a statement that the committee “started the 2026 cycle on offense with our original list of ‘Districts in Play,’ ranging from true swing districts to districts Trump won by 17 points.” She said recent elections “are further proof that our strategy of expanding the map and holding Republicans accountable for their broken promises to lower costs is the right one.”
The Tennessee race — which drew the attention of Trump and Harris — also yielded higher turnout than other special elections this year. Votes cast in the special election slightly surpassed the 2022 midterm in the district, and were roughly 54 percent of the total cast in the 2024 presidential election. None of the other congressional special elections where Democrats made bigger gains this year came near that.
That means Behn’s overperformance can’t just be chalked up to low-turnout conditions that typically favor Democrats. Narrowing Republicans’ margin even with midterm-like turnout gives the party new reason for optimism heading into 2026.
“There is a lot of excitement based upon what we saw last night in the 7th [District],” said Columbia, Tennessee’s Democratic Mayor Chaz Molder, who is challenging Rep. Andy Ogles in the state’s neighboring 5th District, which encompasses part of Nashville as well as suburbs and exurbs to the south.
“We saw a clear message from the voters that they want sensible leadership and candidates are focused on the issues that matter — lowering costs, that includes housing and grocery costs. I think affordability certainly remains a key theme here,” Molder said. “And so I’m going to use last night to show as a sign that I need to remain laser focused on those issues.”
An Ogles’ spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The high turnout in the race is spooking some in the GOP, where the mood was already sour following Democrats’ victories last month. While some continue to dismiss Democrats’ ballot box strength as an off-year anomaly, others see a rough cycle ahead.
“I think the results are more good for Republicans than bad, but it’s clear the left is energized to turnout and if that continues a year from now it will be a rough year for Republicans,” said Republican strategist Matt Wolking.
And while Trump campaigned harder for Van Epps in Tennessee than he did in other races this year, he still hasn’t hit the trail, instead opting to rally voters remotely from Washington. To keep control of the House next year, Republicans believe Trump — who maintains a near-total grip on his MAGA base — needs to be more visible.
And as polls show that voters are losing faith in the president’s ability to handle the economy, Republicans need to find a cohesive message, fellow GOP members say.
Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s top pollster, told House Republicans during a closed door meeting to “stay the course and talk about the realities of the economy,” arguing the closer-than-desired margin was in part because of how Van Epps discussed the economy, POLITICO reported Wednesday.
Some of that is already underway. James Blair, Trump’s 2024 political director, told POLITICO after the GOP’s losses in November that the president “is very keyed into what’s going on” economically.
“I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living,” Blair, who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff, said in the interview.
Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the results on Wednesday, telling reporters, “This doesn’t concern me at all.”
“Democrats put millions of dollars in,” Johnson said. “They were really trying to set the scenario that there’s some sort of wave ongoing. There’s not.”
Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
Politics
Political cartoons from the desk of Matt Wuerker
Politics
A record number of Colorado children died in 2024 as a result of domestic violence, despite a statewide reduction in overall homicide.
Of the eight children who died, five were involved in active custody disputes. These deaths took place when families faced high stress but also when legal systems should have been well placed to intervene. Multiple children were killed alongside a sibling or a parent.
As a researcher studying domestic violence, crime and anti-violence policy, I have watched these numbers with a sense of resignation rather than surprise.
Domestic violence homicide is persistent. Local, state and federal governments spend millions of dollars each year to operate hotlines, fund shelters and engage in prevention programs for victims of domestic violence. Yet more than one-third of homicides of women are still perpetrated by intimate partners. And there has been a steady increase nationally in domestic violence-related deaths of children over the past 20 years.
It’s clear that something is different about domestic violence that resists our attempts to reduce overall violent crime. But researchers have struggled to identify exactly what those differences are in ways that can inform effective policy.
To start addressing these deaths, we first need to effectively measure them, a task that is more challenging than one might expect.
Studying domestic violence is, at best, difficult — not least because data is highly limited.
Researchers often try to ask causal questions about what works to prevent domestic violence. To do this, they use large-scale national datasets, including the Uniform Crime Reporting Program and the National Incident-Based Reporting System. However, these datasets are often incomplete or have inconsistent reporting from responding agencies.
Law enforcement may not recognize and interpret a fatality as resulting from domestic violence if abuse was not previously reported. It is particularly challenging to identify whether a death involved dating or sexual partners unless witnesses who knew the victim closely cooperate with the investigation.
Additionally, the vast majority of victims of domestic abuse do not contact law enforcement or seek medical care. Often, this is due to fears that police will not believe them or that their abuser will find out. Parents may worry their abuser could take custody of their children, or that calling 911 will instigate child welfare system involvement.
The result is that half of the perpetrators of domestic violence fatalities in Colorado in 2024 did not have a prior domestic violence-related arrest. Only one-fifth had been previously convicted of domestic violence.
Domestic violence affects more than intimate partners or spouses. It can also affect siblings, roommates and even neighbors, co-workers or bystanders. These are collateral victims – people harmed by domestic violence without directly being part of the abusive relationship.
Colorado and Wisconsin have expanded their definition of domestic violence fatalities to account for some of these collateral deaths. For years, Colorado has included abusers who died by suicide, or whom law enforcement killed in the line of duty, in statewide counts. But states disagree on how wide to cast the net, making comparisons between states difficult.
These fatality reviews are further hamstrung by the boundary between domestic violence and child abuse.
In Colorado, deaths due to child abuse and neglect are counted in the Domestic Violence Fatality Report only if the death can be traced to violence between intimate partners. Children can therefore get lost in the count when violence between parents or caregivers is hidden behind closed doors.
These data gaps present challenges to understanding, predicting and preventing domestic violence. Policymakers struggle to gather up-to-date information to make effective public safety policy, including over how and when to detain alleged abusers before their day in court.
In Colorado, pretrial detention recommendations are made using a rigid scoring rubric. This rubric includes the accused’s prior criminal sentences or time served in jail or prison. However, it does not include information about domestic violence protection orders or prior charges that did not result in conviction.
In general, this is a well-intended policy that upholds the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” But in domestic violence cases, it creates a catch-22. The vast majority of abusers have never been found guilty in court. This can be due to dropped charges, lack of victim cooperation or unclear evidence. These abusers can have long histories of abusive behavior that aren’t visible to a judge when making pretrial detention decisions.
Despite these challenges, policymakers have made substantial steps forward.
In 2022, the national Bipartisan Safer Communities Act closed the so-called “boyfriend loophole” whereby married individuals convicted of domestic violence offenses were prohibited from gun ownership but dating partners were exempt. This is particularly important given that the majority of firearm mass shootings in the U.S. are domestic violence-related.
States and counties nationally are improving the way courts assign pretrial detention and arrest and charge offenders. Mandatory arrest policies require law enforcement to make an arrest when they suspect abuse. No-drop orders prevent abusers from intimidating survivors into dropping charges.
However, these laws have limited effectiveness and introduce new harms, including increasing domestic violence homicides. Colorado’s own mandatory arrest law has been criticized for increasing arrests of victims of domestic violence. This can threaten victims’ own custody of their children and cause further economic precarity, increasing the risk of lethal violence.
Because laws and law enforcement cannot do everything or support every survivor, solutions must come from outside of the criminal-legal system. Community-based services and programs such as emergency housing, counseling and cash assistance help survivors to overcome barriers to safety.
However, access to these programs and services varies. Not all counties – in Colorado or most other states – have emergency domestic violence shelters. Recent federal funding cuts threaten many programs’ continued operations. Even when programs exist, local availability of housing and services can limit service providers’ effectiveness for their adult clients and their children.
Failing to effectively measure, prevent and respond to domestic violence can be a matter of life and death. Given how survivors’ needs vary, policymakers need to recognize that policy solutions and programs are not one-size-fits-all. And tailored, local policy solutions require improved data and better resources.
Read more of our stories about Colorado.
Kaitlyn M. Sims receives funding from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, the Arnold Ventures Foundation, and the Institute for Humane Studies.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
American democracy is straining under countless pressures, many of them rooted in structural problems that go back to the nation’s founding. Chief among them is the “pick one” plurality voting system – also called winner-take-all – used to elect nearly all of the 520,000 government officials in the United States.
In this system, voters select one candidate, and the candidate who receives the highest number of votes wins.
Plurality voting is notorious for producing winners without majority support in races that have more than two candidates. It can also create spoilers, or losing candidates whose presence in a race alters the outcome, as Ralph Nader’s did in the 2000 presidential election. And it can result in vote-splitting, where similar candidates divide support, paving the way for a less popular winner. This happened in the 2016 Republican primaries when Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and John Kasich split the anti-Donald Trump vote.
Plurality can also encourage dishonest voting. That happens when voters are pressured to abandon their favorite candidate for one they like less but think can win. In the 2024 elections, for example, voters whose preference for president was Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, might have instead cast their vote for Democrat Kamala Harris.
An increasingly well-known alternative to plurality voting is ranked choice voting. It’s used statewide in Maine and Alaska and in dozens of municipalities, including New York City.
Whereas plurality voting allows voters to select only one candidate, ranked choice lets them rank candidates. If a candidate secures a majority of first-place rankings, they are the winner just like they would be under plurality.
But the two systems diverge when there is no majority winner. Plurality simply chooses the candidates with the most first-place votes, while ranked choice voting eliminates the person with the fewest first-place votes and transfers their votes to the next candidate on each ballot. The process is repeated until there is a majority winner.
Ranked choice voting makes use of more information from the voters than plurality, but does it avoid some of the problems plurality suffers from?
We are a team of mathematicians who recently concluded a study aimed at answering this and related questions. We analyzed some 2,000 ranked choice elections from the U.S., Australia and Scotland. We supplemented those real-world results with 60 million simulated elections.
The results were clear: Ranked choice voting performed much better across all the measures we tested, including spoiler, vote-splitting, strength of candidates and strategic voting.
Plurality voting produced a spoiler up to 15 times more often than ranked choice voting. And it was 50% more likely to elect an extreme candidate. Plurality, furthermore, was highly susceptible to vote-splitting, while ranked choice voting was nearly impervious to it.
Ranked choice voting picked strong candidates up to 18 times more frequently than plurality voting, where by “strong” we mean candidates who received many first-place votes and also had broad support, even among their noncore supporters. This method also rarely elects a weak or fringe candidate and typically elects a candidate near the electorate’s ideological center.
Ranked choice voting is also more resistant to various forms of strategic behavior such as bullet voting, where voters choose only one candidate despite the ability to rank more, and burying, where voters disingenuously rank an alternative candidate lower in the hopes of defeating them.
Our research also studied the ways in which election systems can influence behavior. In a plurality election, voters are afraid that their ballot could be “wasted” on a candidate who doesn’t have a shot at winning, or that they might contribute to a spoiler. Our study shows that ranked choice voting largely avoids these pitfalls, empowering voters to express their true preferences rather than being strategic.
We found that candidates in ranked choice voting elections do best when they adopt the policies the greatest number of people support, meeting the voters where they are.
In Alaska’s 2022 special U.S. House election, for example, Democrat Mary Peltola positioned herself firmly within Alaska’s center-left base – while still embracing some positions considered conservative outside of Alaska. She won by garnering enough second-place votes from supporters of Republican Nick Begich.
And in the New York mayoral primary in June 2025, Zohran Mamdani won by creating a coalition with another progressive candidate, Brad Lander, and occupying a progressive space representing a range of voters.
The Alaska and New York examples highlight some differences with plurality voting, which often favors appealing to a narrow base without the necessity of reaching out beyond it.
A mathematically interesting feature of Alaska’s 2022 special U.S. House election is that Begich beat both Peltola and Republican Sarah Palin in head-to-head contests – meaning that more people ranked Begich above Peltola than the other way around – but lost the ranked choice voting election to Peltola.
Critics seize on such cases as reasons to avoid ranked choice voting. But our work shows that these are statistical outliers, occurring fewer than 1% of the time.
Overall, our research shows that ranked choice voting elects candidates with broader support and greater democratic legitimacy than plurality. It therefore seems sensible that voting reform advocates continue to pursue this method as an alternative to plurality voting.
At a time when Americans are losing faith in democracy, voters cannot afford systems that hand victory to unrepresentative candidates and force them to play tactical games. The math is in, and the evidence is overwhelming: Plurality voting is broken. Ranked choice voting will not solve every democratic ailment, but it is a good step toward mending them.
Ismar Volić receives funding from Schwab Charitable.
Andy Schultz receives funding from Schwab Charitable. He is a registered Democrat.
David McCune receives funding from Schwab Charitable.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
Republicans won Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee. But instead of celebrating, many are dreading what it means about the midterms.
Republican Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps’ roughly nine point win marks a massive shift toward Democrats from 2024, when President Donald Trump carried the district by 22 points. That double digit swing — on the heels of crushing losses in off-year elections in November — could be a harbinger of what House Republicans will face in the midterms next year, members and strategists warned, as they seek to hold on to their narrow control of the chamber.
“Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle,” said one House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain.”
Democrat Aftyn Behn’s overperformance in the Tennessee special election — which attracted millions of dollars in spending and national attention in its final days — continues a trend of concerning electoral results for the GOP. Earlier this year, Democrats saw big overperformances in losses in other special elections in deep-red seats, and last month they swept a slate of critical off-year elections, including gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey.
In the wake of those victories, some Republicans urged the White House to retool its political message to better engage moderate voters and independents who broke for Trump in the presidential election.
“I’m glad we won. But the GOP should not ignore the Virginia, New Jersey and Tennessee elections,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who is retiring from his swingy Omaha-based district, said. “We must reach swing voters. America wants some normalcy.”
House Republican leadership had been preparing for Tuesday night’s results. And while Speaker Mike Johnson leadership’s team was bracing for a tighter-than-comfortable race, the single-digit margin was still a hard pill to swallow after national Republicans pulled out all the stops — including a Trump tele-rally and Johnson visit to the district — to rescue Van Epps in the final days.
“It was too close,” said one House GOP leadership aide, who was also granted anonymity to candidly discuss the race.
Trump himself projected confidence after the win, celebrating Van Epps’ victory. “The Radical Left Democrats threw everything at him, including Millions of Dollars. Another great night for the Republican Party!!!,” he wrote on Truth Social.
But Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and appointee in the first Trump administration, said the single-digit margin for Van Epps continues the momentum Democrats already feel after the New Jersey and Virginia races.
“None of it bodes well for the GOP in the midterms,” Bartlett said. “Being an ostrich with your head in the sand on the key issues that matter most to Americans is not a strategy, or certainty not a winning one.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) directly tied Van Epps’ underperformance to Democratic voters motivated by their disapproval of Trump, and he pleaded with Republicans to “set out the alarm” with Republican voters about the consequences of losing control of the House and the Senate.
“It was dangerous. We could have lost this district because the people who showed up, many of them are the ones that are motivated by how much they dislike President Trump,” Cruz said in a Fox News interview Tuesday evening.
“In a year, it’s going to be a turnout election, and the left will show up,” he added. “Hate is a powerful motivator.”
Turnout was extraordinarily high for a special election, pacing the 2022 midterms. Van Epps got roughly 90 percent of the number of raw votes Republican Mark Green — whose retirement triggered the special election — got that year, while Behn got over 115 percent of the 2022 Democrat nominee’s total.
One GOP consultant, granted anonymity to speak candidly, worried the result in Tennessee signals that Republican voters won’t turn out in significant numbers for candidates other than Trump — a problem that has plagued Republicans in the past.
“The Trump coalition is captivated by the force of his personality and willingness to disrupt the established order. There’s not much interest in supporting other ‘politicians’ when Trump isn’t on the ballot,” the consultant said. “The winds are likely to blow against Republicans in federal races in 2026. People are rarely satisfied anymore and they’re looking for someone to punish.”
In a statement celebrating his victory on Tuesday, Van Epps acknowledged Trump’s importance in the race.
“Running from Trump is how you lose. Running with Trump is how you win,” he said.
Ahead of Tuesday’s election, National Republican Congressional Committee chair Rep. Richard Hudson sought to downplay the results of an election that was projected to be uncharacteristically competitive, telling House Republicans in a closed-door meeting that special elections are unique. And after Tuesday’s win, he celebrated Van Epps, saying in a statement “no one is better positioned to take up the mantle and deliver results” for Tennessee.
But coming out of that meeting, one House Republican said that a narrow result could send shockwaves among the House GOP conference.
“If our victory margin is single digits, the conference may come unhinged,” the House Republican said prior to polls closing on Tuesday.
Elena Schneider and Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.
Politics
When the framers of what became the U.S. Constitution set out to draft the rules of our government on a hot, humid day in the summer of 1787, debates over details raged on.
But one thing the men agreed on was the power of a new, representative legislative branch. Article I – the first one, after all – details the awesome responsibilities of the House of Representatives and the Senate: power to levy taxes, fund the government, declare war, impeach justices and presidents, and approve treaties, among many, many others.
In comparison, Article II, detailing the responsibilities of the president, and Article III, detailing the Supreme Court, are rather brief – further deferring to the preferred branch, Congress, for actual policymaking.
At the helm of this new legislative centerpiece, there was only one leadership requirement: The House of Representatives must select a speaker of the House.
The position, modeled after parliamentary leaders in the British House of Commons, was meant to act as a nonpartisan moderator and referee. The framers famously disliked political parties, and they knew the importance of building coalitions to solve the young nation’s vast policy problems.
But this idealistic vision for leadership quickly dissolved.
The current speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, holds a position that has strayed dramatically from this nonpartisan vision. Today, the leadership role is far more than legislative manager – it is a powerful, party-centric position that controls nearly every aspect of House activity.
And while most speakers have used their tenure to strengthen the position and the power of Congress as a whole, Johnson’s choice to lead by following President Donald Trump drifts the position even further from the framers’ vision of congressional primacy.
By the early 1800s, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, first elected speaker in 1810 as a member of the Whig Party, used the position to pursue personal policy goals, most notably entry into the War of 1812 against Great Britain.
Speaker Thomas Reed continued this trend by enacting powerful procedures in 1890 that allowed his Republican majority party to steamroll opposition in the legislative process.
In 1899, Speaker David Henderson created a Republican “cabinet” of new chamber positions that directly answered to – and owed their newly elevated positions to – him.
In the 20th century, in an attempt to further control the legislation Congress considered, reformers solidified the speaker’s power over procedure and party. Speaker Joseph Cannon, a Republican who ascended to the position in 1903, commandeered the powerful Rules Committee, which allowed speakers to control not only which legislation received a vote but even the amending and voting process.
At the other end of the 20th century was an effort to retool the position into a fully partisan role. After being elected speaker in 1995, Republican Newt Gingrich expanded the responsibilities of the office beyond handling legislation by centralizing resources in the office of the speaker. Gingrich grew the size of leadership staff – and prevented policy caucuses from hiring their own. He controlled the flow of information from committee chairs to rank-and-file members, and even directed access to congressional activity by C-SPAN, the public service broadcaster that provides coverage of Congress.
As a result, the modern speaker of the House now plays a powerful role in the development and passage of legislation – a dynamic that scholars refer to as the “centralization” of Congress.
Part of this is out of necessity: The House in particular, with 435 members, requires someone to, well, lead. And as America has grown in population, economic power and the size of government, the policy problems Congress tackles have become more complex, making this job all the more important.
But the position that began as coalition-building has evolved into controlling the floor schedule and flow of information and coordinating and commandeering committee work. My work on Congress has also documented how leaders invoke their power to dictate constituent communication for members of their party and use campaign finance donations to bolster party loyalty.
This centralization has cemented the responsibilities of the speaker within the chamber. More importantly, it has elevated the speaker to a national party figure.
Some successful leaders have been able to translate these advantages to pass major party priorities: Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Democrat from Texas, began his tenure in 1940 and was the longest-serving speaker of the House, ultimately working with eight different presidents.
Under Rayburn’s leadership, Congress passed incredible projects, including the Marshall Plan to fund recovery and reconstruction in postwar Western Europe, and legislation to develop and construct the Interstate Highway System.
In the modern era, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and the first and only female speaker, began her tenure in 2007 and held together a diverse Democratic coalition to pass the Affordable Care Act into law.
But as the role of speaker has become one of proactive party leader, rather than passive chamber manager, not all speakers have been able to keep their party happy.
John Boehner, a Republican who became speaker in 2011, was known for his procedural expertise and diplomatic skills. But he ultimately resigned after he relied on a bipartisan coalition to end a government shutdown in 2014 and avert financial crises, causing his support among his party to plummet.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted in 2023 from the position by his own Republican Party after working with Democratic members to fund the government and maintain Congress’ power of the purse.
Although these decisions angered the party, they symbolized the enduring nature of the position’s intention: the protector of Article I powers. Speakers have used their growing array of policy acumen, procedural advantages and congressional resources to navigate the chamber through immense policy challenges, reinforcing Article I responsibilities – from levying taxes to reforming major programs that affect every American – that other branches simply could not ignore.
In short, a strengthened party leader has often strengthened Congress as a whole.
Although Johnson, the current speaker, inherited one of the most well-resourced speaker offices in U.S. history, he faces a dilemma in his position: solving enormous national policy challenges while managing an unruly party bound by loyalty to a leader outside of the chamber.
Johnson’s recent decision to keep Congress out of session for eight weeks during the entirety of the government shutdown indicates a balance of deference tilted toward party over the responsibilities of a powerful Congress.
This eight-week absence severely weakened the chamber. Not being in session meant no committee meetings, and thus, no oversight; no appropriations bills passed, and thus, more deference to executive-branch funding decisions; and no policy debates or formal declarations of war, and thus, domestic and foreign policy alike being determined by unelected bureaucrats and appointed judges.
Unfortunately for frustrated House members and their constituents, beyond new leadership, there is little recourse.
While the gradual, powerful concentration of authority has made the speaker’s office more responsive to party and national demands alike, it has also left the chamber dependent on the speaker to safeguard the power of the People’s House.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
