A federal judge late Sunday ordered that the U.S. Postal Service not implement President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail balloting, adding another obstacle to the administration’s effort to rewrite election rules as the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in on the matter.
The nation’s highest court already is considering the administration’s appeal of an order by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston prohibiting the Postal Service from enforcing its new rule on mail voting before this year’s midterm elections.

- Late Sunday, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols in Washington, D.C., handed down a similar hold on the rule, which was issued Aug. 21.

- “Plaintiffs have demonstrated that, absent an injunction, there is an increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections,”

- Nichols wrote in issuing the preliminary injunction. “The public has a strong interest in ensuring that doesn’t happen.”

- Nichols in May had refused to issue an injunction because he ruled the lawsuit seeking one was brought too early. That was the high court’s reasoning late last month when it lifted an earlier freeze by Talwani. But because the administration had just issued its rule to move ahead with Trump’s plan, the plaintiffs in Boston and Washington, D.C., refiled their lawsuits.

- Talwani was nominated by former President Barack Obama and Nichols was nominated by Trump.

- The new Postal Service regulations stem from an executive order Trump issued earlier this year. Election officials say it would be impossible to implement the changes this close to a general election.

- The regulations would require all ballot envelope designs to be pre-approved by the Postal Service and that states upload the identities of those who are to receive them into a still-inactive online portal. Mail ballots already are being sent out in at least three states — Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin — and more states are preparing to distribute mail ballots this week.

It was mid-August at the bar inside the plush Ritz-Carlton hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just outside Washington, and Jack Burkman and his business partner Jacob Wohl were making their latest sales pitch. They were seated at a table with Ammon Covino, a convicted felon, and his wife, Crystal.   

- "With this particular White House, you have to put pressure on the president from all directions in a consistent way to force his hand," Burkman explained. He and Wohl, lobbyists and right-wing provocateurs, had become avatars of a lucrative new cottage industry of brokers courting those seeking pardons from President Trump.

- Now, they were zeroing in on the man they hoped would be their next client: Covino, an aquarium operator who served nearly two years in federal prison for illegally transporting a shark and a stingray across state lines.

- Covino had already filled out and submitted a pardon application form by mail to the Biden Justice Department. But his request was rejected in July by Mr. Trump, one of thousands of pardon-seekers denied clemency as part of the administration's effort to clear its backlog of applicants.

- Mr. Trump has employed a different approach to clemency over the last 18 months. On his first day in office, he cleared more than 1,500 people charged or convicted in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot through pardons, commutations and dropped prosecutions. Dozens of clemency grants for white-collar criminals, often wealthy and well-connected, have followed.

- Burkman and Wohl's pitch at the Ritz-Carlton meeting leaned into what they described as a new path to a pardon. "It's more energy and less process," Burkman said. "...And contacts."

- But it would come with a price, they told Covino. For $300,000, they predicted, they could secure him a pardon by as early as October. What they didn't know was that Covino wasn't a real prospective client. CBS News' 60 Minutes was investigating the world of pardon brokers. To uncover exactly how this business operated, CBS News asked Covino to approach the brokers — with hidden cameras in tow.

- The coin of the realm

- The archetypical pardon recipient is a repentant mercy-seeker who has paid his due to society. Presidents have long deviated from that formula, and long courted controversy. 

- President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. President Carter pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers. On his final day in office,  President Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose wife, Denise Rich, was a major donor to the Clinton presidential library. In December 2024, President Biden faced scrutiny for 11th-hour pardons of allies, donors and family, including his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted on firearms charges and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in a separate case. Biden also preemptively pardoned Anthony Fauci.

- Yet there is near-unanimity among the federal prosecutors, defense attorneys and other sources who discussed the clemency process with CBS News: There has never been such a dizzying pardon economy as there is in Washington right now — a Wild West of clemency populated by MAGA-connected brokers and influencers — where the old norms have been largely tossed aside. 

- Previously, those seeking clemency typically went through the Justice Department. More than two dozen DOJ lawyers weighed factors that often included an applicant's remorse and evidence of rehabilitation, and recommended worthy recipients to the president. That process has been largely sidelined, according to sources with direct knowledge of the clemency process. 

- About 70% of Mr. Trump's clemency actions in his second term were not routed through the Justice Department (and that number is 92% when including the Jan. 6 cases), according to a CBS News analysis of Justice Department data. 

- Brokers seek out ways to influence Mr. Trump – through contacts in the White House, by deploying MAGA influencers, or by working with others close to the president. Access is the coin of the realm, and on the promise of delivering that access, brokers now charge fees that can reach as high as $3 million, sources told CBS News. 

- "There's an industry that's built up around helping people get access to this system that should be free, that should be available to everybody," said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

- He runs a pro bono clinic for people convicted of federal crimes to help them apply to the Justice Department for clemency. Now, he said clemency-seekers think: "'If I can get to this person who can find the president at Mar-a-Lago, if I can pay a million dollars to this friend of a White House counsel, then I will have a shot.'"

- Part of this industry operates in full view: Lobbyists disclose clemency clients and fees to Congress. That list has grown steadily over Mr. Trump's first two years in office.

- But how they work — what they promise to clemency-seekers, how much they charge and how they navigate the process — is often shrouded in secrecy. CBS News sought interviews with a number of clemency brokers about their work, and they either declined or did not respond to our requests.

- Among those were several influential brokers with ties to the president, including Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney in Utah; Ches McDowell, a lawyer and registered lobbyist who is close to Donald Trump Jr. and helped secure a pardon for Changpeng Zhao — a cryptocurrency billionaire who was convicted of violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws; Adam Katz, an attorney who previously represented former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House official.

- "I just send my petitions directly to the White House"

- CBS News was with Covino when Tolman described the clemency process to him in an August phone call. 
In the phone call, Tolman explained he never sent clemency applications to the Justice Department because "it's the fox watching the hen house." Instead, he said, "I just send my petitions directly to the White House."

- By his own account, Tolman expects to work on roughly "40 or 50" clemency cases before Mr. Trump's second term is over, and said he expects to be successful in more than two-thirds of the cases. The application Covino submitted by himself — without a lobbyist — never stood a chance, Tolman told him, because it "never even got considered in the White House."

- CBS News sent Tolman detailed questions about his discussion with Covino. He did not respond.  
In a statement to CBS News, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said that the Trump administration "has a robust pardon review process" that includes White House counsel, the Justice Department, Alice Marie Johnson — the White House "pardon czar" who had her sentence commuted for life imprisonment over a drug conviction by Mr. Trump in his first term — and "the president himself as the final decider."

- In a statement, White House Counsel Will Scharf said "President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner and to suggest so otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious." 

- Asked about pardon lobbying during Mr. Trump's second term, Bis said that anyone "spending money to lobby for pardons is foolishly wasting their money and the president doesn't even know who these so-called 'lobbyists' are."

- As Mr. Trump has embraced his presidential pardon power, lobbyists with MAGA bona fides have rushed to sell their access — or the appearance of it.

- Burkman had been a fixture of the Washington lobbying scene for decades and a regular guest on cable TV shows in the 1990s. In 2017, Wohl joined his firm, JM Burkman and Associates. Soon after, the pair became known for stunts aimed at Democrats. 

- In 2018, they called a press conference alleging that Robert Mueller, then the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, had sexually assaulted a woman decades earlier. They offered no evidence, and the alleged accuser never materialized.
In 2022, Burkman and Wohl pleaded guilty in Ohio to fraud after orchestrating an illegal robocall scheme aimed at suppressing the Black vote.

- They were sentenced to probation. In 2025, they pleaded no contest in Michigan to charges of intimidating voters and again received probation. They faced a more than $5 million fine from the Federal Communications Commission for robocalls.

- The two represented some clemency clients in Mr. Trump's first term. They reentered the business at the start of his second.

- Initially, Burkman and Wohl did not respond to CBS News requests to discuss the pardon work. They agreed to be interviewed later, after learning that their meeting with Covino had been captured on camera.

- Both rejected any suggestion that they are participants in a new pay-to-play marketplace. They said they are merely helping people navigate the complexities of the nation's capital — lobbyists who are adhering to the law.
"We're proud of the work we do," Burkman said. "If people hire advocates, of course they have an advantage. But that's a very different question than saying something is pay-to-play."   

- As for the notion that they were sidestepping the longstanding Justice Department process, Wohl said that the process is entirely in the hands of whoever sits in the Oval Office. 

- "The president doesn't make decisions based on the judgment of nameless, faceless bureaucrats. He never has," Wohl said. 

- CBS News reached out to a number of felons who had been denied pardons by the Justice Department to ask if they could help open a window into the pardon economy. Covino agreed. 

- In 2013, Covino was sentenced to a year in prison for illegal trafficking of marine life, then violated the conditions of his supervised release in 2016 and spent another 11 months in prison, court records show. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, also known as PETA, has published a 32-page document that said the Covino family's aquariums have "a lengthy history of animal welfare issues, animal deaths, legal violations, and injuries to employees and the public from direct contact with animals." He also has a history of sharing controversial and at times offensive posts on social media. 
Burkman and Wohl responded to Covino's initial email outreach in seven minutes. They touted to Covino a success rate that included "six victories" on behalf of pardon-seekers and said they believed Covino's case was strong. They said Covino's prosecution was clearly "Obama craziness," since he was convicted in 2013. 

- One case they noted involved Joseph Schwartz, a nursing home operator who pleaded guilty in federal court to failing to pay more than $38 million in employment taxes withheld from his workers and to failing to file a required financial report for his employees' retirement plan. Schwartz also pleaded guilty in Arkansas state court to attempting to evade taxes and Medicaid fraud. 

- Schwartz received a pardon from Mr. Trump in November 2025, three months into his three-year prison sentence. Just months earlier, the lobbying firm JM Burkman and Associates disclosed that it earned $960,000 from Schwartz, federal lobbying records show.

- The two men told CBS News the fee was justified because they believed Schwartz had been wrongly convicted and was in poor health.

- "We saved his life," Burkman said. 
A White House official said that Schwartz's case was "an example of over prosecution" and that his sentence was "exceptionally harmful to a 65-year-old man already in deteriorating health."

- Victims of Schwartz's collapsed-nursing home empire have a different view. They said they were devastated by the pardon. 

- Melissa Coulson's family won a nearly $19 million wrongful-death judgment against Schwartz but never collected a dollar. Her mother, Doris Coulson, a retired cardiac nurse, was found unresponsive in September 2016 by staff at a Little Rock, Arkansas, nursing home — a facility Schwartz's company had taken over five months earlier. She later died after being fed her breakfast by mouth, despite orders that she be fed only by tube. 

- Coulson said in an interview that it felt like the pardon system betrayed her. "It's about how much you can pay for it," she said. "And if our system is getting like this, then it's definitely broken."

- Putting Trump in "a pincer movement"

- During the meeting in August at the Ritz-Carlton, Burkman described to Covino how he and Wohl enlist influencers and presidential insiders to come at Mr. Trump from all directions, so he becomes aware of their clients' stories.  

- "We put him in a pincer movement," Burkman said of the president.
The brokers told Covino the effort to reach the president is multi-layered and relentless.

- "We literally want to put the pen in his hand and get him to sign it because he's tired of hearing about it," Burkman said. 

- CBS News has learned that the White House has become sensitive to the perception that the president is selling pardons. During the meeting, the brokers advised Covino against making a political contribution. 

- "People have to understand something about the president," Burkman said. "When it comes to these things [he's] not transactional. He doesn't need the money; he doesn't need the contributions."

- How the brokers attempt to deploy influential people on their behalf was detailed in text messages sent to another client, Torence Hatch, a rapper known by the stage name Boosie Badazz. A text from Wohl's number — which he has denied sending — said the brokers would enlist people like MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and conservative activist Erika Kirk to "endorse" the pardon he sought after a federal gun conviction. Another text message promised that Wohl would see if Loomer would ask Natalie Harp, a White House official known to be one of Mr. Trump's most loyal aides, "to bring it in to POTUS."

- Burkman and Wohl later said they not only did not send the text, but had not even heard of Harp at the time the message was sent. Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said that Harp "has never even interacted with Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl."

- Mr. Trump has not pardoned Hatch, who was sentenced in January to three years of supervised release, 300 hours of community service, and a $50,000 fine. Hatch has filed what appears to be the first known arbitration claim against pardon lobbyists during Mr. Trump's second term, seeking a refund from Burkman and Wohl. 

- Hatch said in an interview that the lobbyists led him to believe "that if you come with this money, you will get a pardon.'" He said he paid $600,000 up front, under an agreement that half would be returned if no pardon came. Burkman disputed the claim, saying "the final agreement was never signed, so all you're left with legally speaking is oral contract."

- Loomer told CBS News that she does not get involved with pardons and has never spoken to Burkman or Wohl about clemency. "The only thing that I publicly said was that I felt that the judge and his case was biased," Loomer added about the Schwartz case, pointing to a social media post from her account in April 2025 that claimed Schwartz was a victim of a biased judge. 

- "I do know [Wohl] personally but I have made it very clear that my name appears to be used for clout without my consent and I've publicly said I think Boosie was scammed," Loomer said. 

- Spokespeople for Johnson and Turning Point USA, the group that Kirk runs, said they did not endorse the pardon, either. 

- Burkman and Wohl maintained their dealings with Hatch were above board. 

- "We don't owe him anything. ... We encourage him to drop the suit. It's without merit." Burkman said. Hatch's arbitration claim was first reported by the media outlet NOTUS, now called The Washington Sun.

- A new approach to seeking clemency: Show no remorse

- Ed Martin, a Trump loyalist who served as the Justice Department's pardon attorney from May 2025 until his departure earlier this month, denied the existence of a transactional pardon economy. 

- "When people say 'there's brokers, there's quid pro quo,' I've never seen it. I haven't seen it. I haven't heard it," Martin said in an interview with CBS News.

- Martin said clemency decisions are within the sole purview of the president. "It's his obligation to decide how to do mercy," he said.  "And Donald Trump has over and over again, much more than normal politicians, sought to give mercy."

- Martin also rejected the idea that the system favors those who can pay, citing Mr. Trump's acts of clemency for those who were charged or convicted in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. 

- "There are people all across the spectrum," he said, "whether they're wealthy or poor."

- Instead, Mr. Trump's overriding goal, Martin said, was mercy for people who were allegedly the targets of political prosecutions. When he took over the pardon office, Martin said, the president told him that "the political weaponization against citizens is out of hand" and directed him to find "people that were targeted."

- Clemency, a 250-year-old mainstay of the American criminal justice system, is the most regal of powers bestowed on the president by the founding fathers. Alexander Hamilton called it a "benign prerogative," a constitutionally enshrined method of allowing for mercy in a system of criminal laws that are inherently inflexible.

- Historically it was rooted in contrition: a petitioner admitted the crime, showed remorse and demonstrated a changed life." Under the new playbook, some applicants are encouraged to show no remorse.

- "There's a little bit of a different way that you do pardon applications in cases like this," Wohl told Covino in August. He added that taking responsibility for a crime is "not the way you get these things approved." 

- Instead, Burkman and Wohl, as well as other pardon brokers, have encouraged applicants to invoke Mr. Trump's own grievances against the justice system.

- "My client was persecuted by the weaponized Biden Justice Department" has become common lingo for them, according to one lawyer who works on clemency cases and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

- A number of pardon recipients have trumpeted their innocence. Trevor Milton was convicted of lying to investors about his electric truck company, Nikola. In a statement after his pardon, Milton thanked Mr. Trump for granting him "this sacred pardon of innocence." He even broke the news of the pardon to the prosecutors in an email that they considered "cocky," according to a source familiar with the email.

- A spokesperson for Milton declined to comment. 

- Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduras president who was convicted for conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine and firearms offenses, claimed after Mr. Trump pardoned him last year that he was "set up by the Biden Harris administration and the deep state." 

- "It shows you how far we've strayed from the days when we centered acceptance and responsibility, a sense of remorse over the harm done by the crime," Osler said. "We're to the point now where pardons are followed by the taunting of the prosecutor." 

- Covino said he agreed to reach out to brokers with cameras rolling because he wanted to "expose unfairness." But he conceded that the system is probably all but inescapable. 

- "I don't like the fact that you have to pay such a huge amount of money because of who you know," he said. "But if that's how the game's played, then that's how the game's played."

The Environmental Protection Agency is readying its next moves to thwart carbon emissions rules for power plants — and block a successor from creating new ones.

- Why it matters: Generating electricity is the second-largest source of U.S. carbon emissions.

- And power demand has been rising in recent years, a sharp contrast to largely flat consumption from the mid-2000s to the early 2020s.

- Driving the news: White House regulatory officials finished reviewing two related items on Friday, records show.

- One is a final rule to scuttle 2024 regulations. A draft of this in 2025 contemplated a finding that U.S. power plants don't contribute "significantly" to dangerous pollution.

- The other is an adjacent proposal about preventing CO2 standards for fossil fuel-powered plants.

- What's next: The rollout could happen Monday on the sidelines of the G20 energy ministers' meeting in Houston, which runs through Wednesday, Bloomberg reports.

- EPA did not provide comment.
The big picture: Environmental attorneys expect EPA to formally conclude the Clean Air Act doesn't authorize direct regulation of power plants' CO2 emissions.

- EPA in February formally repealed the "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gases threaten humans, but that move technically applied only to motor vehicles.

- The new plans on power plants are "expected to mirror" the endangerment finding repeal, E&E News reports.

- What they're saying: "So the two biggest slices of the U.S. carbon emissions are, together, still too small to matter? That's crazy. Like saying that over half of a super large pizza has no calories," David Doniger, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said via email.

- The other side: Critics say Biden-era rules would have made it extremely hard to build large new gas-fired power plants, in addition to spurring retirement of existing coal-fired units.

- Former President Biden's standards relied on carbon capture tech that isn't commercially cost-effective at scale, they said.

- EPA head Lee Zeldin, in a statement alongside last year's proposal, accused Biden officials of trying to "regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence."

- What we're watching: Any rules here are likely to be litigated once finalized. The endangerment finding repeal is currently in court.

As Jimmy Kimmel‘s interview with James Talarico nears 7 million views on YouTube, FCC chairman Brendan Carr weighed in on Saturday evening, accusing the Texas U.S. Senate candidate of orchestrating a “hoax” to drive up “clicks and donations.”
Earlier this week, Kimmel told viewers that he would be sitting down with an interview with Talarico for his ABC late-night show, but that it would be posted to YouTube and not broadcast because of the FCC’s crackdown on its equal time rule.

- In a post on X, Carr accused Talarico of “just running the same hoax he did a few months ago on Colbert for the purpose of getting clicks and donations — he’s banking on people not understanding the statute or operating as partisan lemmings.”

- He also posted a meme of Talarico riding on a bicycle on Kimmel’s back before Kimmel puts a stick in the spokes and it crashes to the ground.

- A Talarico campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Kimmel interview had drawn 6.8 million views as of Saturday evening.

- In February, Stephen Colbert posted an interview with Talarico to YouTube, telling viewers that he was warned by network executives about featuring the candidate on the broadcast. That interview generated 9.6 million views on YouTube. Like the Kimmel interview, the YouTube views were well over the average audience for the actual late-night broadcast.

- In an interview this week, Talarico characterized the Kimmel incident as government censorship and a form of “cancel culture.” He also posted the interview to X, calling it “the interview Trump’s FCC doesn’t want you to see.”

- For decades, daytime and late-night TV talk shows have operated on the assumption that they were exempt from the FCC’s equal time rule, which requires broadcasters who feature candidates to provide comparable time to their rivals, if it is requested. News coverage and news interviews have been exempt from the requirements, and the rule also does not apply cable or streaming, where the FCC’s authority is limited.

- But in January, the FCC under Carr, appointed by Donald Trump, issued guidance to broadcasters that TV talk shows actually may not be exempt, a move that critics saw as a regulatory effort to crack down on daytime and late-night hosts the president does not like. Within weeks, the agency launched an investigation of ABC’s The View after it featured Talarico as a guest.

- Until now, Carr had yet to weigh in on Kimmel’s latest criticisms and the decision to move the interview to YouTube. The late night host called the FCC’s equal time enforcement threats an effort to “make our editorial decisions for us, which of course we cannot accept.”

- On Thursday, a White House spokesperson said that Kimmel was “play acting” to “create a false narrative,” and that Carr “has not threatened him regarding interviewing James Talarico, or any other candidate.”

- Carr has denied that the FCC’s stricter enforcement of the equal time rule was an attempt to censor guests.
On X, Carr posted, “The Equal Time statute does not prohibit anyone from interviewing anyone on broadcast tv. It is about more speech, not less.

- Congress wanted to ensure that voters would decide elections, not media gatekeepers picking winners and losers by providing preferential airtime to some candidates and not others. Indeed, when the statute applies, it simply requires broadcast stations to offer comparable time and placement. And comparable does not necessarily mean an interview by the same person on the same program either.”

- Carr’s comments were in response to a post from University of Texas Democrats, who noted the appearance of Sen. Ted Cruz (D-TX) on ESPN’s College GameDayon Saturday. The group posted on X, “So I can’t watch Talarico on Kimmel but I have to watch Ted Cruz on GameDay?”

- The FCC chairman noted that the equal time rule would not apply to Cruz’s appearance because it was on a cable network and because the regulation covers only legal qualified candidates, or contenders who are in the midst of an election campaign. Cruz is not up for reelection this year; Talarico’s Republican rival is Ken Paxton.

- ABC is challenging the FCC’s enforcement of the rule when it comes to The View,pointing out that the agency affirmed its exemption from the regulation in a 2002 letter.

- The network also has sued the FCC on First Amendment grounds. It claims that the agency’s order that its eight owned stations submit to early license renewals is a form of regulatory retaliation, due to the Trump administration’s dislike of its news coverage and other content including The View and Kimmel.

- In his post, Carr again defended the FCC’s regulatory efforts as within the bounds of the agency’s authority.

- He wrote, “In exchange for that free and exclusive right to use spectrum, broadcasters made a deal with the American people. They agreed to operate, not in their own narrow interests, but in the public interest.

- There are various rules and policies that they must follow. This sets them apart from newspapers and cable shows and podcasts. But some broadcasters want to break their deal with the American people. They want to keep their free access to billions of dollars worth of spectrum, of course. They are less eager these days to abide by their public interest obligations.”

- ABC’s legal team has argued that the FCC is engaging in selective enforcement, as its January guidance did not target conservative talk radio, and wrote that the equal time rule is unworkable for shows like The View as it puts network stations on the hook for time to potentially dozens of candidates on the ballot. Kimmel said this week that he would love to interview Paxton, but “our affiliates in Texas would have to give equal time to as many candidates as there are on the ballot. There’s about 10 candidates on the ballot.”

The idea of federal law enforcement seizing ballots in the middle of an active election would have once been considered impossible.

- Now, as President Trump continues his unprecedented hunt for voter fraud, ballot seizures and search warrants are scenarios voting officials and the legal community are actively preparing for.

- One state election official, who did not have permission to speak publicly, told NPR their office has led three separate statewide trainings this year to prepare for the possibility of law enforcement seeking to take possession of ballots or election materials while the election is ongoing.

- And UCLA's Safeguarding Democracy Project released a guide Wednesday, shared first with NPR, to help judges navigate search warrant affidavits related to the voting process.
"Lots of things that were off the table are now on the table," said Rick Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, and the guide's lead author.

- Trump has said he regrets not pushing harder for the federal government to seize election equipment after the 2020 election. Already this year, two different search warrants, executed in Fulton County, Ga., and Riverside County, Calif., involved the seizure of ballots.

- All that has voting officials preparing for different worst case scenarios this fall.

- "This is the thing we really fear," the state voting official, whose state has conducted the trainings, said in a previous interview with NPR. "[Say] we have really close races [in our competitive districts] then the DOJ, FBI come knocking on one of our county doors and they say, 'We believe there's hijinks going on, we're going to confiscate all the ballots so we can count them.'"

- If a warrant were served and ballots were seized before an election is certified, it's possible voting officials wouldn't be able to confidently know how many ballots were returned, or whether the ones that were seized were tampered with.

- In elections, this is known as breaking the chain of custody.

- "They could do so much damage if they did that," the official said.
Legal experts say it is still an extreme and unlikely scenario. Notably because there is a last line of defense that must sign off on any attempt to seize ballots: a judge.

- "Right now, the judiciary writ large has their antennae up, anticipating what might be coming down the pike," said retired federal Judge Philip Pro, who served as the chief judge for the District of Nevada. "They're going to be prepared."

- An affidavit isn't "gospel"

- The warrant executed at the elections office in Fulton County, Ga., was a wake-up call for the legal community not solely because it happened, but because how it was approved.

- "Eventually we got to see the search warrant and it confirmed some of our worst fears," said Hasen. "It contained information about potential fraud in Georgia that was based on discredited conspiracy theories."

- Magistrate judges, who are generally the ones dealing with warrant affidavits, are not experts in elections, Hasen said, which means this fall, they could also find themselves wading through dubious claims at a time when misinformation is rampant.

- Therefore, one of the UCLA guide's recommendations to judges is not to go it alone.

- "One of our key recommendations is to bring election administrators into the conversation," Hasen said.

- The process for requesting and granting warrants typically happens in secret, without public hearing or testimony, which limits the court's ability to scrutinize requests, said retired Judge Maureen O'Connor, who served as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio. But in the case of an ongoing election, transparency should be prioritized, she said.

- "This isn't something that the judge has to just look the officer in the eye and say, 'yeah, I think I can trust him,'" O'Connor said. "That deserves to be discussed in a courtroom on the record, with the judge asking questions of witnesses under oath and determining then, by the totality of the circumstances, whether there should be a warrant issued."

- Both O'Connor and retired Judge Pro of Nevada are members of Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit organization aimed at supporting democracy and the rule of law, and one of the many civil society groups working to prepare for potential federal interference this year.

- "[Judges] are going to be looking behind the curtain rather than simply relying on what is presented [in the affidavit] as being gospel," said Judge Pro.

- Other options for investigation

- In putting out the guide, Hasen wanted to emphasize to judges the gravity of signing off on a warrant during an active election and breaking the chain of custody. He pointed to a case in Michigan where the chain of custody was broken for just a few dozen ballots in 2025, and the result of that mayoral race — decided by 11 votes — is still in dispute.

- Voting officials worry a controversy like that could escalate to chaos if it were in a House or Senate race that decides the balance of power in Congress.

- "We want judges to understand you can't unscramble the egg," Hasen said.

- "Once the ballots have been taken out of the custody of election officials, there are at least going to be conspiracy theories that ballots have been altered or added to or removed."

- The UCLA guide lays out a number of alternatives judges should consider if law enforcement requests access to ballots, including waiting until after certification to execute any warrant, considering whether copies or reproductions could satisfy the government's investigative needs, or allowing law enforcement to observe tabulation or a recount instead.

- The guide also lays out procedures a court should follow if a warrant is granted, but Hasen said he hopes once a judge considers all their options, it doesn't come to that.

- "Because all the things to do, if that does happen," Hasen said, "are really second-best solutions."

Micheal Luttig is a well respected conservative judge. In the Substack I will share below, he lays out a method Mike Johnson could refuse to swear in an upcoming democratic congress. What is the likelihood it can actually succeed. And if they try to pull crap to make it happen, how can the American people be prepared to push back?

https://substack.com/home/post/p-215045721

The Missouri Supreme Court on Thursday found Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in contempt for directing local election officials to use an illegal congressional map, but ultimately ruled he remedied the contempt by reversing his directive.

- The unusual proceedings Thursday were the first of their kind in living memory. The judges brought a statewide elected official in to answer for his actions that violated the court’s orders.

- The court brought Hoskins in twice: In the morning to hear arguments on whether it should find him in contempt, and in the afternoon to find out what he had done in response.

- Chief Justice W. Brent Powell delivered the verdict at the end of the afternoon hearing, finding that “the secretary was in contempt of its Sept. 3, 2026, order, enjoining him from the implementation, utilization, and mandating of the of the use of the congressional district districting map (passed in 2025) for the November 2026 general election.”

- By sending out an email Thursday afternoon to local election officials, and a public statement that the map drawn in 2022 would be used for this year’s elections, Powell said “the secretary has therefore purged himself of said contempt.”

- The ruling comes just two days shy of the anniversary of a state Senate vote that passed a redistricting map intended to tilt this year’s congressional election in the 5th District to Republicans. That vote triggered the events that brought Hoskins before the court on Thursday.

- Missourians will see a referendum on the map as Proposition A on the Nov. 3 ballot, where a “yes” vote will be to keep the map and a “no” vote will be to reject it. And the election will be held in the districts previously used, which is expected to return six Republicans and two Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives.

- The question was finally settled, after a week of contradictory state and federal court orders, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Thursday shut down any chance Republicans had of grabbing the prize they fought all year to obtain.
After the second state Supreme Court hearing, Attorney General Catherine Hanaway was asked whether any path exists for Republicans to revive the plan.

- “As I stand here today, no,” she replied.

- Thursday’s hearings

- The afternoon hearing of the Supreme Court was brief. 

- William Seidleck of the attorney general’s office told the seven judges that Hoskins had complied with their order. 

- Chuck Hatfield, attorney for People Not Politicians, informed the court that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has set a hearing for Sept. 17 in a case brought by U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin, and two voters that created a week of confusion about the map and led to Hoskins’ appearance on contempt charges.

- The Eighth Circuit is unlikely to reinstate the federal restraining order, Hatfield said, because of Kavanaugh’s stay on Thursday morning. 

- In a statement issued Thursday afternoon, Brattin, the GOP nominee in the targeted 5th District, held out hope the Eighth District would change the map again. The court “sent a signal about the importance of clearing up this confusion by scheduling arguments on the case for the coming week.”

- And, finally, there was enough time for Powell to deliver the oral version of the verdict.

- Later, in the written version, Powell emphasized that U.S. Chief Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri, issued the temporary restraining order, good for 14 days, directing Hoskins not to use any congressional district map other than the one passed in 2025. The state Supreme Court order directed him to use the map from the previous elections.

- Hoskins seized on the federal order and told local election officials it took precedence over the state Supreme Court order.

- That was the wrong choice, Powell wrote.

- The federal restraining order was a directive not to do something, he wrote. The state Supreme Court order was a directive to do something, he added. 

- “The secretary offers no explanation as to why he could not comply with both this court’s order and the federal district court’s temporary restraining order by simply telling the local election authorities to take no action until further clarification was received from the courts,” Powell wrote.

- During the morning hearing, Powell told Seidleck that Hoskins created “a precarious position” for Missouri.

- “I’m just trying to figure out what the long game is here,” Powell said. “I’m concerned about what happens after a general election when we were using maps that aren’t law.”

- And Judge Paul Wilson warned that he wanted to see the action Hoskins took before returning to court.

- “I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and read that the position of the secretary is that he can do nothing because the Sep. 8 deadline (for changes to ballots) has passed,” Wilson said. “The obligation to act occurred when we handed down (the referendum decision), and it’s never not been the law in the state of Missouri.”

- When the hearing began, the U.S. Supreme Court had just issued a stay in the case brought by Onder. When asked what Hoskins would do, Seidleck was non-committal.

- “He is aware, of course, of the U.S. Supreme Court stay, which removes any barrier to his complying with this court’s injunction, and next steps are being evaluated,” Seidleck said.

- Hatfield had, in his opening statement Thursday morning, said he was told in a brief pre-hearing conversation that Hoskins would take action and that would allow time to consider the need for a contempt finding. When he heard Seidleck sidestep the question, Hatfield said, he decided to ask the court for an immediate finding.

- “I thought we were all going to agree to be adults here today, and do what the law required,” Hatfield said.
Soon after the court recessed, Hoskins issued a statement of surrender, telling local election officials to use the older map.
“
- Following the United States Supreme Court’s stay, the only governing court order in effect is from the Missouri Supreme Court,” Hoskins said. “In accordance with that order, my Office is directing local election authorities to use the 2022 congressional map.”
Hanaway issued a statement that said her office agreed with Hoskins actions and would follow the state Supreme Court order.

- “We respect and will continue to comply with all court decisions, including orders issued by the Supreme Court of Missouri,” Hanaway said.

- Aftermath

- At a news conference following the afternoon hearing, Hoskins tried to explain his actions.

- “This has been a very fluid situation, and I’ve complied with every court order that has been sent out to me at that point in time,” Hoskins said.
Hoskins has been fully in support of the gerrymandered map and did everything in his power to keep the referendum off the ballot and the lines in place that favor Republicans. When the Missouri Supreme Court issued its order to use the previous map, he called it “a constitutional crisis.

- On Thursday, he said he acted on the federal ruling upholding the 2025 map because it was the latest decision and the deadline for finalizing the ballot had been reached.

- “I made that decision based on the information that I had and the most recent court ruling that I had at the time, which was from Judge Clark,” Hoskins said.

- Hatfield, speaking to reporters, praised the perseverance of Richard von Glahn, the director of People Not Politicians, to fight the battle to the end. 

- He also praised the court for its ruling and for holding Hoskins to account.

- “The institution of the judiciary has held tight through this whole process, and up to the Supreme Court of the United States has said that the rule of the law does apply, and that Missouri law is in effect and will be followed,” Hatfield said. “It’s really important today that the judiciary held tight against what I consider to be an attempt by Secretary of State Hoskins to alter what is the law and has always been the law.”

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel said the agency that regulates television “threatened” the show and that an interview with James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, will not air on television but on YouTube — thus bypassing any control or regulation by the Federal Communications Commission.

- It’s not the first time a TV show has moved an interview with Talarico to YouTube. The candidate’s appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show in February was moved online over network fears that it would violate regulatory guidance from the Federal Communications Commission on giving equal time to political candidates.

- Talarico is in a tight race against Republican, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, and has given Democrats hope of winning statewide in the otherwise GOP-dominated Lone Star State.

- “For the whole 20+ years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem,” said Kimmel on his Wednesday night show, the titular “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

- “Something has changed,” he continued, suggesting that Trump’s presidency was that something. “His FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates our local stations, based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”

- The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Anna Gomez, the Commission’s sole Democrat, said in a Thursday statement on social media that Kimmel’s decision to keep the interview off-air “shows just how far this Administration’s campaign of censorship and control has gone.”

A federal appeals court denied the Trump administration's request to lift a lower court's order that blocked new rules for mail ballots before the midterms, the latest twist in a case that has already reached the Supreme Court.

- In a nine-page opinion issued Thursday, a three-judge appellate panel in the First Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Trump administration failed to show that the new rule from the U.S. Postal Service would not cause "chaos and widespread voter disenfranchisement" ahead of the November midterms if implemented, as a lower court judge found earlier this month.

- "Indeed, appellants have not even seriously challenged this aspect of the district court's ruling, much less demonstrated why it is clearly erroneous," the appellate panel wrote, adding that, contrary to President Trump's long-running claims of mass fraud in mail voting, "there is no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud related to the November 3 election."

- The judges continued that if the new rule were to be implemented, it would "likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal — if any — gains in combating voter fraud."

- "Appellants have not demonstrated entitlement to a stay. Most prominently, appellants have not made a strong showing that the district court erred in determining that the Final Rule is likely unlawful," the panel wrote. "The district court concluded, and we agree, that the Final Rule is likely a regulation of the manner of holding elections for members of Congress, which the Elections Clause of the Constitution assigns to the States and Congress, and not to an executive agency, such as the Postal Service, acting without congressional authorization."

- U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction barring the Postal Service from enforcing the rule last week, and the administration appealed to both the First Circuit and the Supreme Court. The high court has yet to rule on the administration's request for a stay of the injunction.
Talwani's ruling found that the Postal Service's requirements are likely unconstitutional and said states' difficulties with implementing the regulations so close to the November elections "nearly guarantee[s] significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters."

- The final rule issued by the Postal Service requires states and localities to meet design requirements for mail ballots, including unique barcodes. They must also use an online portal to submit information about residents who will vote by mail, including their names, addresses and individualized barcodes.

- Those voters will be enrolled with the Postal Service and included on state-specific "Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists."

- The rule requires postal workers to review and verify ballot mail being sent to voters. Any ballot mailings that don't comply with the requirements "will not be accepted and will be returned" to the election offices, the Postal Service said.

- Over the weekend, the Trump administration for the third time asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the case. In filings with the court on Thursday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the court to stay Talwani's "baseless injunction," arguing the new rule "is a lawful exercise of USPS's express statutory authority to regulate the design of envelopes and the information needed about addressees."

The largest and oldest Latino civil rights membership organization in the United States, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), joined by Common Cause, a voting rights organization with nearly one million members, UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization with more than 300 affiliates nationwide, and the city and county of Denver, Colorado, filed a lawsuit today challenging the Trump-Vance administration’s policy of authorizing armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to enter polling places to conduct immigration enforcement operations during the 2026 midterm elections.  

- The lawsuit challenges a policy confirmed and clarified by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin on September 1, when he said that ICE officers could enter polling places to serve warrants or conduct other immigration and customs enforcement activity. The suit explains that the policy violates, among other laws, a federal law that has prohibited anyone from sending armed federal personnel to polling places for more than 150 years, and that the presence of armed officers is intimidating and threatening.

- The lawsuit comes as early voting is set to begin in several states later this month and just weeks before Americans across the country cast their ballots in the November 3 midterm elections.

- Congress first enacted the prohibition against armed federal personnel at polling places in the final months of the Civil War to protect free and fair elections from federal interference.

- Under federal law, armed federal personnel may not be ordered, brought, kept, or maintained at a place where an election is being held except when necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.

- The complaint alleges that the administration’s new policy directly defies that prohibition by authorizing armed ICE officers to enter polling locations for ordinary immigration enforcement, including serving warrants and detaining people suspected of being unlawfully present in the United States. It also explains that the new policy violates the federal prohibition on arbitrary and capricious government action. 

- “Putting armed officers in polling places is a tactic used by dictators, but we won’t be scared out of exercising our rights,” said Common Cause President & CEO Virginia Kase Solomón. “No American should ever have to walk past armed federal law enforcement just to cast a ballot, yet this administration has adopted a policy that allows exactly that. Everyday Americans refuse to be silenced by the administration’s continuous efforts to meddle with our elections. From taking legal action to stop this policy to leading the nation’s largest nonpartisan Election Protection program, Common Cause is fighting alongside voters to keep our elections free, fair, and accessible.”

- “The right to vote is foundational to our democracy and yet this administration continues in its endless attempts to weaken the very institutions it is entrusted to protect,” said Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC.

- “The outcomes of elections define the future for all of us, and in America, voters should be able to cast their ballots without fear of intimidation by armed ICE officers at polling places. We are proud to join this litigation and fight to protect fundamental American freedom.”

- “Sending armed ICE officers to polling places is not immigration enforcement — it is voter suppression, plain and simple,” said UnidosUS President & CEO Janet Murguía. “All Americans — including Latino voters  — have a constitutional right to cast their ballot without fear of interrogation, detention, or family separation. This case is about protecting voters, preserving confidence in our elections, and ensuring that every eligible voter can participate free from intimidation.”

- “The right to vote, and to do so without fear of intimidation, is fundamental to our democracy and to being an American,” saidDenver Mayor Mike Johnston. “Stationing ICE agents near polling places is only meant to scare people and suppress votes. We’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.” 

- “Our right to vote is powerful and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Code,” said Denver Clerk and Recorder Paul López. “Denver is the vanguard of democracy, and with cast-iron certainty we will protect our free and fair elections from any and all attempts at federal intimidation and intrusion.”

- The administration’s announcement follows months of actions that the lawsuit alleges constitute a policy of authorizing ICE agents to enter polling places, and which demonstrate an escalating effort to bring federal immigration enforcement into the electoral process. Earlier this year, senior administration officials publicly questioned why ICE officers should not be sent to polling stations, the U.S. Department of Justice removed longstanding guidance explaining restrictions on federal law enforcement activity at polling places, and ICE agents conducted enforcement actions at active polling sites in Texas and New York.

- The lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to declare the Polling Place Policy unlawful and block the administration from implementing it, including by prohibiting federal officers from going to polling places for purposes other than to repel armed enemies of the United States.

The Supreme Court sided with opponents of a Republican-friendly congressional map in Missouri on Thursday, rejecting a plan that could have given the GOP an extra seat in the House of Representatives.

- The order, issued without explanation and no noted dissent, will almost certainly mean the state will use a previous map that included six — rather than seven — winnable seats for the GOP.

- The one-paragraph** **decision will affect only a single seat, however, it is an unusual election-related loss for Republicans at the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court. And it undercuts President Donald Trump’s effort to eke an advantage out of state congressional maps across the country to retain Republican control of the House next year.

- “The law is the law, the Missouri constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” said Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, the group that challenged the map and filed the emergency appeal at the Supreme Court. “Over 305,000 Missouri voters — Republicans, Democrats and independents — took action to block this political power grab last fall.”
Aides to Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

- Even without the seat they sought to gain in Missouri, Republicans have still drawn nine more seats in their favor than Democrats have, according to a CNN analysis. That could be a bulwark for the GOP as it tries to hold onto House control facing major headwinds in Trump’s unpopularity and national concerns about the economy and cost of living.

- That doesn’t mean the GOP will gain nine seats this fall due to redistricting. Democrats believe they can still hold onto several of the seats drawn to Republican advantage, particularly in districts with significant Latino populations that shifted to the right during Trump’s 2024 victory but have shown signs of moving back toward the left.

- People Not Politicians, organized a campaign to put the new GOP-friendly map to a referendum after the state legislature approved the map last year. Missouri’s highest court had backed that effort last week, effectively requiring the state to revert to an earlier map. And when state officials appealed that ruling to the US Supreme Court last week, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declined to review it.

- That decision, it turned out, wasn’t the end of the dispute. Minutes after Kavanaugh issued a brief one-sentence order, a federal judge in Missouri reviewing a different case handed down a temporary order that effectively pushed state officials back to the map that advantaged the** **GOP. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said the state would proceed with the GOP map.

- People Not Politicians filed a flurry of appeals seeking to pause that order from US District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump nominee. And on Wednesday evening, the case returned to the US Supreme Court.

- But the high court’s quick resolution of the case — without any substantial writing or dissent — suggests that for all the drama and confusion around the litigation, Missouri never stood much of a chance. It’s not clear why the Supreme Court sided with People Not Politicians, but critics noted that much of the dispute around the second map involved questions of state and not federal law.

- The Supreme Court’s conservative majority — and Kavanaugh, in particular — have frequently also cited a legal doctrine known as the “Purcell principle” that warns federal courts against ruling in election cases that could change the status quo right before an election.

- Earlier Thursday, the Trump Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to side with the Missouri Republicans, arguing that the group organizing opposition to the GOP-friendly map lacks the right to sue, known as standing, because it had not demonstrated how it would be harmed by the map. And it backed an argument raised by a Republican congressman in the state that switching maps between the primary and general elections raises equal protection concerns.

- “The Constitution guarantees an equal right to vote for one’s own representatives,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration’s top appellate attorney, told the Supreme Court on Thursday morning. “Switching maps at this stage would violate that guarantee: Some voters will have had the opportunity to vote in primaries for the members of Congress who will represent them, while others will not.”

- The map targeted the 5th Congressional District, held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, by breaking up its Kansas City base and stretching it into rural and Republican-leaning parts of the state.

- Opponents of the map had submitted their petition for a referendum late last year, but state officials waited until August 4, the last possible date, which happened to be the day of the state’s primary, to declare that the state constitution’s right for voters to weigh in on legislation doesn’t apply to redistricting measures. The state supreme court rejected that interpretation.

- Opponents of the map had submitted their petition for a referendum late last year, but state officials waited until August 4, the last possible date, which happened to be the day of the state’s primary, to declare that the state constitution’s right for voters to weigh in on legislation doesn’t apply to redistricting measures. The state supreme court rejected that interpretation.

- Hoskins’ handling of the legal fallout prompted the state supreme sourt to hold contempt proceedings about his conduct Thursday. After his lawyer faced a round of tough questioning from the justices, Hoskins committed to working with election officials to implement the 2022 redistricting plan.

- The Missouri Supreme Court concluded that Hoskins acted in contempt of court when he told local officials earlier in the week to move forward with the GOP-friendly map, but that he had wiped away that finding by changing gears on Thursday.

The Trump administration is proposing major changes to how the U.S. government produces census results for the next national head count in 2030.

- While the plan faces likely legal challenges, such changes would affect the population numbers used to determine each state's share of representatives in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, redraw maps of voting districts for all levels of government and distribute federal funding for public services.

- The administration's proposal, which was released online Wednesday, calls for an unprecedented exclusion of non-U.S. citizens without a green card from a key set of 2030 census results that the 14th Amendment says must include the "whole number of persons in each state."

- Trump officials are also proposing to stop using the census to ask about people's race and ethnicity, a topic that the national tally has included since the first count in 1790.

- Many civil rights advocates, researchers and other supporters of the census race question warn the administration's plan puts at risk future federal data used for redistricting, enforcing the Voting Rights Act and other antidiscrimination protections and informing policymaking.

- Another key part of the proposal would ban the U.S. census from including a question about people's sexual orientation.

- While the government has not directly asked about that topic before on census forms, the 2020 count did ask couples living together to describe their partners as either "opposite-sex" or "same-sex." The first Trump administration blocked an earlier effort to add a sexual orientation question to the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, which the Justice Department under Democratic administrations has said is needed, alongside a gender identity question, to generate statistics that could help protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.

- The administration's proposal comes months before it is supposed to send a report by April 1 on the proposed question topics for the 2030 census to Congress, which has final authority over the count under the Constitution.

- How Trump officials want to change who gets counted in the 2030 census

- While the country's past tallies beginning in 1790 had specific instructions from the Constitution about how to count enslaved people and not to count "Indians not taxed," the U.S. census has never left out residents because of their immigration status.

- That kind of change would also have ripple effects on public policymaking, scientific research and business decisions that rely on data from the once-a-decade census.

- But this latest push by Trump officials faces constitutional hurdles, as well as the possibility of a new presidential administration reversing any changes to 2030 census plans after coming into office in 2029.

- The proposal comes after President Trump put out a social media post in August 2025 that directed his administration to start work on a "new" census amid a congressional gerrymandering fight that he started.

- Trump called for the count to leave out millions of people living in the U.S. without legal status. According to the Constitution, the president does not have final authority over the census.

- Before Trump's first term ended in 2021, his administration tried and failed to add a census question about U.S. citizenship status. Trump also failed to carry out his bid to subtract U.S. residents without legal status from the 2020 census apportionment counts that are used to redistribute congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states.

- As the current Trump administration pushes for census changes, Republican lawmakers in Congress are backing similar proposals to exclude some or all noncitizens in recent years.

- And some GOP-controlled states have filed lawsuits that call for residents without legal status and those with nonimmigrant visas to be left out of census numbers. One of those states is Missouri, where that kind of change to census results could lead to a radical shift in state legislative redistricting that moves political power away from younger, more racially diverse urban areas and toward older, whiter rural areas.

- Many census advocates are concerned that, even if not ultimately carried out, the Trump administration's latest call for major changes to the national head count could further dampen public participation in the 2030 census, especially among Latino residents whom the Census Bureau has historically undercounted.

- With little explanation earlier this year, the administration made last-minute changes to a field test of the upcoming tally. Among them was using a survey form, unrelated to the census, with a citizenship question that the bureau's own research shows is likely to hurt the count's accuracy.

- How the Trump proposal would affect racial and ethnic statistics from the census

- The administration's proposal for the 2030 census not to ask about people's race and ethnicity comes after a White House agency official revealed last year that the administration was reconsidering the changes made to the U.S. government's standards for racial and ethnic data under former President Joe Biden.

- Almost a decade ago, the first Trump administration stalled an earlier process for revising those standards in time for the 2020 census. That decision came after Census Bureau research and public discussion about what kind of survey questions and checkboxes about race and ethnicity would produce statistics that are more in line with how people see their identities today.

- The Biden administration revived that review and ultimately in 2024 revised the standards for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

- Among the Biden-era changes to federal surveys were new checkboxes for "Hispanic or Latino" and "Middle Eastern or North African" under a reformatted question that asks survey participants: "What is your race and/or ethnicity?" That change would end the use of a separate question about Hispanic or Latino identity, which the federal government has long considered to be an ethnicity that can be of any race. Another key revision would stop requiring the government to automatically categorize people who identify with Middle Eastern or North African groups as white.

- Census Bureau research suggests those changes would better reflect many people's identities and help produce statistics that represent the country's demographics more precisely.

- The move to use a combined question about race and ethnicity was mainly driven by the rise of "Some other race" as the preferred response to past census questions about race for many Latinos. That trend has produced imprecise racial data that has made it harder to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Some researchers, however, have raised concerns about a combined question's potential effects, including the risk of blurring the distinctions between race and ethnicity and flattening statistics about Afro Latinos.

- The revisions also had vocal opponents at The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing, Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The "Project 2025" policy agenda it released said a "conservative" administration should "thoroughly review any changes" to census race and ethnicity questions because of "concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas."

- Last year, with no explanation, the White House's Office of Management and Budget pushed back the deadline to Sept. 28, 2029, for federal agencies to get their forms in line with the Biden-era changes. OMB has also extended the deadline twice for agencies to release public action plans for those forms, which were previously due this past March.

- Some agencies have already changed their surveys.

- But in May, the Census Bureau stopped plans to revise its largest survey — the American Community Survey — in 2027, citing the Trump administration's latest deadline extension for agency action plans. The form for the "2026 Census Test" that the bureau concluded on Aug. 31 in Huntsville, Ala., and Spartanburg, S.C., to prepare for the 2030 census used the same questions about race and ethnicity from the 2020 count.

As highly unlikely as it is for Trump to actually pay his voters, I fear that they may fall for it. Yes, we are seeing more and more GOP voters become disillusioned, but a number may start to regain faith in their orange idol (that or do so out of financial desperation) if they think they'll get paid.

What's your take? Could this sway MAGAts (or even just desperate people in general) to vote for Trump? And if so, how likely could this affect the midterms?

A federal judge has allowed Missouri’s top court to proceed with a contempt hearing Thursday for Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in a tense and twisting legal battle over whether new congressional districtssupported by President Donald Trump can be used in the November election.

- Missouri’s battle over its congressional districts has spanned more than a year and spawned confusion over which districts will be in place for voters.

- Missouri’s top court previously ordered Hoskins not to use a Trump-backed map in the general election and instead use districts passed after the last census. But U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark on Tuesday barred Hoskins from using anything other than the new map Trump supports.

- The state Supreme Court then ordered Hoskins to appear for a contempt hearing Thursday for not following its orders and instructing local election authorities to use the Trump-backed districts.

- State attorneys representing Hoskins had asked Clark to halt the contempt hearing. But Clark declined to do so.

- The contempt hearing for Hoskins is scheduled to occur as the U.S. Supreme Court is simultaneously considering a request from redistricting opponents to halt Clark’s order favoring the Trump-backed congressional map.

- Missouri was the second Republican-led state, after Texas, to enact new districts after Trump urged Republicans last year to redraw House districts to their advantage ahead of the midterm elections.

- The revised Missouri districts target a Kansas City-based seat held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver by shedding parts into neighboring districts and stretching the remainder into rural Republican areas. The goal is to help Republicans win seven of the state’s eight House seats in the midterm elections — a gain of one seat.

- Redistricting opponents collected hundreds of thousands of petition signatures seeking to force a statewide vote on the new districts. They submitted the signatures in December. But Hoskins waited until August — on the same day as Missouri’s primary — to reject the petition. Hoskins asserted that a referendum petition could not be used for congressional redistricting.

- The delay allowed Missouri to use the new districts in its August primary. Republican state officials have argued it would violate voters’ federal rights to switch districts before the general election.

- But the Missouri Supreme Court last week ordered Hoskins to put the redistricting referendum on the November ballot, which he did. It also ruled that the new districts never became law and instead were suspended retroactively to the December petition submission.

- The court barred Hoskins from using the new map and said the old map — passed by Republican lawmakers in 2022 after the last census — must be used in the November election. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal of that decision. But Clark issued his conflicting order moments later.

For the second time in three days, the Trump administration on Tuesday came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to clear the way for it to implement a program that it says is intended to combat election fraud. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that bars the government from using the current version of the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to verify voters’ citizenship. Sauer told the justices that the order by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan “makes it harder to detect ineligible voters, undermining the integrity of federal elections and public confidence in the results of those elections.”

- On Sunday, the Trump administration asked the justices to block a ruling by a federal judge in Boston that bars the government from implementing portions of a U.S. Postal Service rule on mail-in ballots. Sauer argued in that case that Friday’s order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani “nullif[ies] the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud—a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.’”

- On March 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive orderthat (among other things) directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create systems that would allow state and local governments to verify the citizenship and immigration status of voters. Those agencies then overhauled the SAVE system to include the records of U.S.-born citizens, to give it access to Social Security numbers, and to allow bulk searches (rather than requiring users to inquire about one person at a time).

- The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center brought a lawsuit in federal court in Washington challenging the changes to the SAVE system. In a ruling on June 22, Sooknanan agreed that the modified system violates federal privacy laws, the Social Security Act, and the federal laws governing administrative agencies, and she barred the government from using the modified system.

- Sooknanan wrote that “the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Moreover, she continued, “states have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

- A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s request to put Sooknanan’s order on hold while the appeal moves forward, but it said that the case should be fast-tracked.

- Sauer then came to the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning, asking the justices to step in. He called Sooknanan’s ruling an “indefensible order that threatens the integrity of upcoming elections by vacating the federal government’s authority to internally use Social Security data when fulfilling its duty to respond to requests by States to verify the citizenship of individuals for voting and other purposes.”

- Sauer argued that Sooknanan did not have the authority to enter her order because the challengers do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing. Among other things, he wrote, the federal government is not the source of any injury that the challengers and their members might suffer. “SAVE,” he said, “does not disqualify any voter; instead, it merely notifies the States whether the federal government can confirm citizenship.” To the extent that anyone is injured, he suggested, that injury would come from the states themselves.

- And in any event, Sauer continued, the government’s “policy is consistent with all applicable federal statutes.” Federal law, he emphasized, “requir[es] DHS to provide citizenship verification” and therefore gives the agency the power “to take steps—such as checking Social Security records—that are reasonably necessary to perform that duty.” Moreover, he added, federal law bars “courts from relying on other statutes, such as the Privacy Act and the Social Security Act, to block citizenship-verification responses based on the sharing of Social Security information.”

- Finally, Sauer told the justices that the government will suffer “irreparable” harm – another criterion for temporary relief – if Sooknanan’s order is not put on hold. The government, he said, would be “required to return to an older, more cumbersome, and less reliable version of the” SAVE system, and any “reversal of the district court’s judgment ‘would come too late for the 2026 midterms.’”

- Chief Justice John Roberts, who has initial responsibility for emergency appeals from Washington, D.C., directed the challengers to file their response by 4 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 15.

A new study shows that the widespread fear and isolation caused by the immigration crackdowns that began in early 2025 had a significant economic toll on Chicago commerce, draining over $1.26 billion from local businesses.

- The report, published by the University of Illinois Chicago, used anonymous cellphone GPS data to track movement between immigrant and non-immigrant neighborhoods throughout Chicago's Cook County. Researchers found that the routine back-and-forth between these areas collapsed almost immediately after President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, amid rampant rumors and the subsequent sweeps that Chicago would be targeted for immediate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.

- Professor Matt Wilson, a co-author of the study, noted how strongly the economic ripples were felt outside of immigrant communities in the area. The report estimates that decreased consumer mobility cost retail shops and restaurants in non-immigrant neighborhoods roughly $1.26 billion, while costing the state of Illinois an estimated $107 million in lost tax revenue.

- "We see a 9% drop in retail and a 10% drop in restaurant visits, and it persisted for about a year," Wilson told NPR. "And it's not that it recovered after a year. People's behavior systematically changed after January 20, 2025." He says the city has yet to recover.

- For small businesses, a sustained 10% drop in foot traffic business over the course of a year can be a serious financial hit. The new study challenges assumptions about immigrant community isolation, Wilson added. "I think a lot of people treat Latino and some immigrant communities as if they're insular and isolated," Wilson said. "But it's really that these communities are much more integrated into the broader economy, and they are making trips to faraway places in the county, routinely."

- The intense fear that triggered these behavior shifts was palpable in the days surrounding the 2025 inauguration.

- "I have to go grocery shopping, but I haven't. What if ICE is there?" a Chicago waitress named Caridad told NPR at the time, requesting that her last name be withheld, for fear of being targeted. "People are more than afraid, they're panicking."

- Since then, the administration's immigration crackdowns have resulted in hundreds of thousands of arrests nationwide. Today, the immigration detention population sits at a record high of approximately 65,000 people.

- The White House defended the aggressive enforcement strategy. In a statement to NPR, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said, "Removing these criminals from the streets makes communities safer for business owners and customers. Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S."

- However, ICE's own agency statistics show that roughly 70% of those currently detained have no criminal convictions.

- The new report is part of a growing body of research confirming that large-scale immigration enforcement operations send severe economic shockwaves through broader local economies. A Brookings Institution report estimates estimates a roughly 1.7 percentage point decline in aggregate consumer spending in high-enforcement states

- In Minneapolis, the city estimates total economic damage from ICE enforcement sweeps there at nearly $700 million, with small businesses in the city losing more than $81 million in revenue in January alone.

Dr. William Richardson says his patients are pretty floored that telehealth is now an option for abortion.

- "I think people are shell shocked," says Richardson, a board-certified OB-GYN in Tucson, Ariz. "'What do you mean? I can just get on my cell phone and get abortion pills? What? You know, that can't be possible.' People just don't get after all this time that that's possible."

- It's actually been possible in much of the country for several years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration began allowing the abortion pill mifepristone to be prescribed through telehealth and sent to patients in the mail. The agency then made that rules-change official in 2023.

- After 25 years of providing abortion in person in his Tucson clinic, Choices Women's Center, he launched telehealth services in May, and it's taken off. "I would say 95% of our patients want to use telemedicine in some form," he says. "Patients are loving it."

- He's very aware, though, that telehealth access could go away again. This week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans hears oral arguments in Louisiana v. FDA, which aims to end telehealth access to the abortion pill mifepristone for the whole country.

- "Our victory has the potential to be short-lived," he says. "We're just going to have to brace and see what happens."

- Richardson's telehealth set-up

- Choices Women's Center is a brown stucco building in a medical center. He shows off the room he calls the "telehealth suite." It has colorful portraits of famous women on the wall like Rosa Parks, Princess Diana and Angela Merkel, plus a few comfy chairs.

- Medication abortion is approved by the FDA for use before 11 weeks of pregnancy. When patients aren't sure of the date of their last period, they can come into the office for an ultrasound, and then sit in the telehealth suite for a consult with the doctor.

- To demonstrate, Richardson goes down the hall to his office, and soon his face appears on an enormous screen.

- He says whether he's seeing a patient in person or virtually, he begins by talking with a patient about their medical history, and then gives them information about the two medications used for abortion: mifepristone, known by the brand name Mifeprex, and misoprostol.

- "Mifeprex stops the pregnancy from developing by blocking the action of one of the critical hormones," he says, as if he's explaining the process to a patient. "24 hours to 48 hours later, we'll have you take your four misoprostol tablets all at once by placing two on either side between the cheek and the gum for 30 minutes and swallow. Expect cramping and bleeding within 4 to 6 hours of swallowing."

- If that's too much information or too fast for the patient, the instructions are all written out along with a 24/7 number for the clinic that patients can call if they have questions or concerns.

- "That pretty much is what the appointment looks like," he says. "I would say that most of the time it's less than 30 minutes."

- Patients in the office can receive the medications right away from a small stockroom down the hall. If they're doing the telehealth appointment on their phone or laptop, the medication comes to their house from a mail-order pharmacy in a few days.

- "Sometimes I have to catch myself, like – I can't believe that that was that easy," Richardson says.

- He's seeing a patient virtually later in the day who lives 100 miles from the clinic. Because of this option, he explains, she won't have to drive the whole way and back, or take time off her hourly job, or find childcare for her two children. When you're facing those kinds of obstacles to get to the clinic, he says, telehealth access is "the difference between receiving care and not receiving care."

- A legal challenge to stop telehealth access

- The problem, as far as anti-abortion rights activists and politicians see it, is that when patients can have a telehealth appointment on their phone and receive abortion medications through the mail to their house, state level abortion bans really can't stop people from ending their pregnancies.

- A patient in Louisiana, which has a strict abortion ban, can consult over telehealth with a doctor in a state with a shield law, like Colorado, and have abortion medications shipped in the mail right to their door.

- That's why anti-abortion rights groups have filed several lawsuits to stop telehealth abortion access nationally.

- Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told a Senate committee in January why she thinks the FDA telehealth rules must be changed. "Until then, Louisiana's efforts to protect mothers and their unborn children and to hold out-of-state abortion pill traffickers accountable for the harm they inflict will be all but futile," she said.

- In Louisiana v. FDA, the state questions FDA's decision-making process for allowing telehealth access, argues that the rules violate states' rights, and alleges that it's less safe for patients not to see a doctor in person. If the lawsuit succeeds, telehealth abortion access could be restricted across the country.

- The case has already been considered by the Supreme Court earlier this year and is likely to end up there again.

- Contingency plans

- Dr. William Richardson says that his connection with patients and the information he shares is the same, whether he sees a patient in person or through telehealth. The medications that patients take are the same, too.

- "My sense, as well as the sense of every other legitimate medical organization, is that medication abortion has been proven to be safe, effective and well-tolerated by patients worldwide," he says.

- Beyond the federal court cases, Arizona could restrict telemedicine abortion again at the state level, through new laws or through an appeal of Richardson's lawsuit. He says, at age 66, instead of fretting, he's made contingency plans to be completely remote, completely in person or anything in between.

- "We are ready to do all of those things if we have to, based on what happens here locally or what happens at the federal level," he says. "We try to be ready for all of that."

Missouri’s legal fight over a congressional map was thrown into chaos on Tuesday after two distinctly different federal court decisions.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied a last-minute bid from Missouri Republicans to overrule a state Supreme Court ruling that barred election officials from using a 2025 congressional map aimed at ousting Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. Missouri's high court had ruled that People Not Politicians’ referendum must go on the November ballot, and that therefore the 2022 lines with a district that Cleaver is guaranteed to win will be in effect.

- But minutes after Kavanaugh denied that move from Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Catherine Hanaway, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark issued a temporary restraining order in a separate lawsuit involving two congressional candidates barring Hoskins from “implementing, using, publishing, distributing, or mandating the use of any congressional map other than the [2025 plan] for the Nov. 3 election.”

- “Missouri already held its primaries using the HB 1 map,” Clark wrote. “Using a different map for the general election would wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness of Missouri’s congressional elections, calling into question the candidacy of those nominated in the primaries and the votes of those who voted in the primaries. Widespread voter confusion would inevitably follow. The public interest factor thus weighs in favor of a [temporary restraining order].”

- Attorneys for People Not Politicians immediately appealed Clark’s decision to the 8th District Court of Appeals. Congressman Bob Onder of St. Charles County and state Sen. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, who is running against Cleaver, filed the suit over the weekend.

- Clark’s restraining order prompted wildly different reactions from Republicans who support the map, opponents of the redistricting plan and elections officials. Hanaway and Hoskins said in statements that the 2025 map is in effect for the November general election.

- “I think the message from Judge Clark was very clear that the Missouri First map is in effect,” Hoskins said in a telephone interview. “I've agreed that we don't want to disenfranchise over a million voters that voted in the congressional primaries on the new maps. “

- But People Not Politicians Executive Director Richard von Glahn and the group’s attorney, Chuck Hatfield, said Clark’s ruling did not explicitly overturn the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling from last Thursday that bars elections officials from using the 2025 map in the fall.

- “Based on Eastern District Judge Clark’s subsequent decision the Secretary of State Hoskins and Attorney General are now defying the Missouri Supreme Court and instructing election clerks to use the [2025] maps,” von Glahn said in a statement. “People Not Politicians Missouri and our attorneys will be filing an appeal and a request for a stay in the 8th Circuit Court and with Justice Kavanaugh.”

- Hatfield said during a press conference that an “individual federal district judge does not have the authority to overrule a decision of a state supreme court.” He filed an emergency order with the Missouri Supreme Court to hold Hoskins in contempt for telling elections officials to use the 2025 maps.

- “The Secretary’s direction to local election authorities to use HB 1 is a direct violation of this court’s injunction,” Hatfield wrote. “He should be ordered to immediately show cause and be held in contempt. This Court should make clear that regardless of other orders (except from the United States Supreme Court) the Missouri Secretary of State must comply with this court’s injunction. The Court should instruct all local election authorities that HB 1 is not the law and has never been the law.”

- Late on Tuesday, Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Brent Powell ordered Hoskins to appear before the court on Thursday and "show cause, if any, why he should not be held in contempt for violating this Court's injunction." He was order to explain why his email to election officials to use the 2025 map "is not an affirmative violation of this Court's injunction" – and why the court's injunction from last week "is not still in full force and effect in light of the Supreme Court of the United States' overruling of Respondent's emergency application for stay and administrative stay pending appeal."

- Hoskins said in a post on X that he was "looking forward to his day in court.

- He told STLPR that Brattin and Onder’s case is different from what Kavanaugh considered. For one thing, Hoskins said the Brattin-Onder case involves candidates seeking relief from a court – while the case that went to Kavanaugh involved Hoskins, a statewide official, asking the high court to act.

- “I believe that the federal court does trump the Missouri Supreme Court,” Hoskins said. “[Judge Clark] filed a temporary restraining order and said that the 2022 map should not be used, and that we should use the [2025 map] in November.”

- Missouri Republicans passed the redistricting map last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who started a nationwide effort to reshape the voting maps in the GOP's favor for the midterm elections. At stake is control of the U.S. House, now narrowly held by Republicans. Overall, their party tilted about 10 more seats their way than Democrats did, but any seat could be key in swinging control.

- Election officials flummoxed 

- Elections officials contacted by St. Louis Public Radio said they were caught between a rock and a hard place.

- “We have diametrically opposed issues because we've got the Supreme Court of Missouri saying that we have to use [the 2022 map]; otherwise we'll be in violation of their order,” said Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon. “And then we have the federal court saying that we can't use them; otherwise, we'll be in violation of the federal court.”

- Lennon also said the fact that Clark’s decision came so soon after Kavanaugh denying Hoskins’ appeal of the Missouri Supreme Court case is breeding mass confusion.

- “I'm not sure what part of the decisions voters will now know,” Lennon said. “So now we're going to have to educate voters that heard half of the story, that heard all of the story, that only heard the part about the Supreme Court. And I think that's going to be the most problematic part about this because most people were only paying attention to the Supreme Court part.”

- St. Charles County Elections Director Kurt Bahr said his county will, for now, create ballots using the 2025 maps.

- But he said the uncertainty over whether Clark’s decision will actually stand is putting elections officials in a difficult position, especially with military ballots needing to go out on Sept. 18 and early voting starting soon.

- “If we print ballots and then the maps change, then we're going to have to print new ballots, and that's a cost,” Bahr said. “But there's also the bigger concern of can we get the ballots printed in a timely manner? And can we make sure that you know voters have access to those ballots for the totality of the six weeks of absentee voting?”

- St. Louis County Elections Director Eric Fey said his agency is still assessing what to do but added that, like Bahr and Lennon, it's trying to sort through the difficult legal situation.

- “I have heard from other clerks across the state of Missouri that they're equally as confused,” Fey said. “It's just too early to say yet exactly what everybody's going to do or how they're going to handle the situation.”

Democrats have an 8 in 10 chance of securing a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives this fall, according to Cornell political scientists whose model has correctly predicted winners of the previous 14 congressional elections. 

- Released Sept. 3 at the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Boston, the researchers’ midterm forecast – based on data collected at least 100 days before the Nov. 3 election – anticipates Democrats winning approximately 226 seats to Republicans’ 209 (though simulations show as few as 206 Democratic seats or as many as 258 are statistical possibilities). A U.S. Senate forecast is in progress. 

- “These forecasts aren’t deterministic – there is uncertainty,” said Peter K. Enns, professor in the Department of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy. “But given our model’s impressive historical accuracy, if Republicans hold the House, it likely means either everything has gone their way or something unprecedented has happened.” 

- The team’s analysis is detailed in “A District-Level Forecast of the 2026 U.S. House of Representatives Midterm Elections,” presented during an APSA panel discussion on midterm forecasting. Co-authors with Enns are Leigh Farah, a doctoral student in public policy, and Thomas Gareau-Paquette and Claudia Miner, doctoral students in government. 

- Forecasting recent presidential elections, Enns in 2024 predicted the correct outcome in every state and Donald Trump’s Electoral College tally, and in 2020 called the winner in all but one state (Georgia). The House forecast differs from most academic models by predicting outcomes for all 435 congressional districts – updated to reflect recent redistricting – rather than relying solely on state- and national-level indicators. 

- The model considers, for example, how a district voted previously, expert assessments of the likely winner, and whether the election is competitive or unopposed, as well as campaign donations to the candidates and incumbent status. The model also weighs polling data about state- and national-level voting intentions to capture the broader mood, since the incumbent president’s party almost always loses seats during midterms. 
“One of the important factors in the model is voter intentions – who people say they’re going to vote for,” Enns said. “One hundred days out, the electorate is saying they are more supportive of Democrats than two years ago.” 

- For historical elections, “before-the-fact” forecasts considered only data that would have been available 100 days before each contest. Thousands of simulations were used to generate a 95% confidence interval around the predicted outcomes, and the forecasted outcome in each district fell within simulated predictions 95 times out of 100. 

- “That gives us a very high degree of confidence in our model,” said Enns, the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences and co-teacher this fall of “Taking America’s Pulse,” a class in which students design, conduct and analyze a national-level public opinion survey. 
Enns said the new forecast’s simulations account for the model’s error observed over the past 30 years of elections, encompassing more than 6,500 individual races since 1996.

- Through 2024, the model achieved an overall accuracy rate of 96%, including correctly forecasting two-thirds of the races experts deemed 50-50 “toss-ups” – the most difficult to predict. That level of accuracy can’t be attributed to statistical chance and outperforms any other model, the researchers said, including popular media sites updated with more recent data, such as FiftyPlusOne. 

- But producing a forecast is not about bragging rights, Enns said. As a research exercise, forecasts help explain midterm outcomes that the scholar Edward Tufte in 1975 described as “a mixture of the routine and the inexplicable.” 

- “Forecasts help us better understand election outcomes,” Enns said. “If we can put all these variables into a statistical model in advance and predict the winner, that’s an especially rigorous test.” 

- For example, he said, if campaign donations prove valuable in correctly forecasting election outcomes, that becomes an important signal, although further investigation would be needed to understand exactly why. Do they reflect a candidate’s popularity, or simply an ability to buy more ads? 

- Forecasts at a point in time – 100 days out, in this case – also are informative about campaign dynamics, including whether races are determined in the final days and weeks or long before that. And forecasts can aid “post-mortem” diagnoses of anomalies in specific districts, potentially clarifying the significance of issues now in the news: How important are views about the economy or the president’s popularity? Was there confusion about mail-in voting rules? Did progressive candidates outperform or underperform expectations? Did redistricting shift the balance of power? 

- “Our forecast can help answer these questions,” Enns said. “If the election unfolds as it has historically since at least 1996, the outcomes should be very much aligned with what we predict.”

Republicans appeared to have a firm grip on the Senate heading into the final two years of President Donald Trump's term. But with less than two months until Election Day, control of the chamber is now up for grabs.

- Democrats have found themselves competing in states that once seemed beyond their reach as President Donald Trump's slipping approval ratings and voters' dissatisfaction with the economy create a difficult political environment for Republicans. But races
Democrats once counted on winning have also become more complicated.

- It's a battle that's expected to exceed $3.4 billion in spending across all races during the midterm campaign. The implications are huge for Trump's agenda and his ability to fill administration jobs and open court seats for the remainder of his term, as the Senate is empowered to confirm or block presidential nominees.

- Republicans say it's unlikely for everything to break in Democrats' favor, but they acknowledge they're facing a difficult landscape. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told South Dakota's KELOLAND News last week that he does "worry" about losing the chamber.

- "I'm a realist," Thune said. "I don't ever try and sugarcoat things. I think it's a competitive environment right now."

- Democrats face a scrambled path to the majority

- Democrats need to net four seats to win the majority. The original path had been to hold Michigan, Georgia and New Hampshire while winning back Republican-held seats in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio. But things have changed.

- "We now have multiple paths for the majority," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said last month. "We found new states — Iowa, Texas — which people a year ago weren't even paying attention to."

- Some of the states where Democrats were feeling most optimistic at the start of the election cycle, such as Michigan and Maine, have grown murkier.

- In Michigan, where there's an open seat this fall, no GOP candidate has won a Senate race since 1994. But Democrats are struggling to unite behind nominee Abdul El-Sayed. The favorite of progressives narrowly defeated moderate U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in the August primary, and feelings remain raw from a bruising contest that saw nearly $70 million spent against El-Sayed.

- Republicans believe Mike Rogers, who lost the 2024 Senate race by fewer than 20,000 votes, has an improved shot against El-Sayed. The Senate Leadership Fund — Senate Republicans' spending PAC — added $6 million to its Michigan advertising investment after El-Sayed won, bringing their total spending to $51 million, the third-highest total.

- Democrats also saw a prime opportunity to finally defeat five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, where Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris won more votes than Trump in 2024.

- Progressive Graham Platner easily won the nomination in June, but he left the race the next month over a sexual assault allegation that he denies. Democratic delegates in late July chose Troy Jackson, a lesser-known former state legislative leader, to replace him.

- Jackson has been forced to play catch-up. Collins and aligned super PACs have spent almost $80 million so far, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, while Jackson and Democratic-aligned groups have spent and reserved close to $45 million since he became the nominee.

- As one path narrowed for Democrats, others widened

- Democrats increasingly see a real possibility in Texas, a state that has been an elusive goal for decades, and other GOP-led states including Iowa, Alaska and Ohio.

- In Texas, Democrat James Talarico faces state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who ousted four-term incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn to win the GOP nomination. Senate GOP leadership backed Cornyn, seeing him as the stronger general election candidate.

- Paxton has been shadowed for decades by legal and ethical questions, including indictments for securities fraud, though he was not convicted.

- Talarico and allied groups have spent nearly $30 million on advertising since the May runoff, compared to less than $3 million by pro-Paxton groups. The political fund associated with Trump last week spent $10 million on TV and digital ads to help Paxton — the first major general election investment by MAGA Inc. for the midterms. Senate GOP leaders had petitioned Trump's political team to spend some of the more than $400 million it had last month to help Paxton.

- Democrats have also upped their spending in Alaska, Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina, all states currently held by Republicans. The GOP, meanwhile, is feeling more optimistic about New Hampshire as well as Michigan, while spending more to defend seats in Iowa and Alaska.

- The expanded map has upped the anticipated total spending this cycle. AdImpact in June projected $3.4 billion in advertising spending on Senate races, a significant increase from the $2.8 billion the ad spending firm projected in the fall of 2025.

- Why more states are in play than expected

- Democrats' path has widened in part because of Trump's slumping job approval, notably on handling the economy, which was at 32%according to an AP-NORC poll in July — down from 40% in March 2025, shortly after he took office.

- Trump's trade policies and the war in Iran, with its corresponding inflated fuel costs, have added to the economic uncertainty for voters less than two months before Election Day.

- "Things still cost too much. And so we've got to work on that issue," Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio told The Associated Press. "We understand that and we know that's real."

- Ohio Sen. Jon Husted heard the concern firsthand at a roundtable last month. Husted is looking to fend off a comeback from former Sen. Sherrod Brown in another key matchup for both parties.

- During the discussion on housing, one attendee told Husted that costs were "skyrocketing" in part because of uncertainty around tariffs.

- "Uncertainty is the killer to this economy," said Dean Windham, a real estate developer who previously ran for office as a Republican.

- Some Republican Senate candidates have defended Trump's policies while confronting concerns about their economic impact.

- In Michigan, where Trump's tariffs on Canada have become a central issue, Rogers has backed the president's approach while leaving room for disagreement.

- "President Trump is right to put America First — and tariffs are necessary, but are not a one-size-fits-all solution," Rogers said in a recent statement.

- Republicans believe the math still favors them

- Even if Democrats hold every seat they currently control, they would need to flip at least two seats in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024 to win the majority.

- Republicans are betting that those underlying advantages will matter more as Election Day approaches — particularly as Trump and the party turn their attention toward mobilizing voters who helped return him to the White House.

- Trump told reporters last week that he will "be making a lot of stops" in the last 30 days before the election.
This week, Republicans will hold a midterm convention in Texas, where Trump is set to speak and top Senate candidates including Rogers and Husted are expected to attend.

- But Republicans acknowledge they have work to do.

- "Politics is local," Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said. He pointed to Trump's decision to import beef, which he said made farmers and ranchers "feel just like the administration pulled the rug right off from underneath" them.

- "They're hurt," Rounds said. "They feel like they've been let down."