by Kabir Khanna | Nov 14, 2026 | Congress, elections, News
Democrat Mary Peltola’s lead has grown significantly in the Alaska Senate race, with MS NOW shifting its characterization of the contest as “likely Democratic.”
With 20,000 more votes added to the statewide tally early on Saturday, Peltola is poised to likely triumph over Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan when votes are expected to be finalized next week.
The Associated Press has not yet called the race and there is no official winner.
Peltola remains under 50% of the vote — at 49.8% — and a ranked choice vote tabulation is still possible next week. Alaska has until Nov. 18 to finalize its election results after all ballots are processed, including those sent from overseas.
Peltola is doing better among ballots cast early, or absentee, and the trend since election night has been positive for her, as later-arriving ballots have been added to the count. Her vote share has increased from under 49% of the vote on election night, to just over 49% after updates earlier this week, to nearly 50% early Saturday.
At this point, she may win an outright majority on the first ballot and avoid ranked choice votes coming into play. Even if ranked choice voting comes into play, Peltola remains in strong position.
Alaska released its cast vote record, which are anonymized files breaking down how voters ranked each candidate. As of Saturday morning, the cast vote record included nearly everyone’s rankings. Since Peltola was already hovering around the 50% threshold, even if she were to fall short of a majority in the final count, the data so far indicated she would win once voters were reallocated based on their second choices.
The
by Amanda Marcotte | Nov 14, 2026 | Congress, culture, Opinion
In the recent midterm election, the Democratic triumphs are so numerous that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them all. Still, the party’s faithful have taken special delight in the defeat of Rep. Lauren Boebert, who lost what was supposed to be a ruby-red district in Colorado to her Democratic challenger, retired Rear Adm. Eileen Laubacher. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even got a little saucy, posting “Bye, Felicia” on social media, a reference to a famous line dismissing an annoying character in the 1995 movie “Friday.”
Clinton’s special animosity to Boebert is fitting. The former first lady has long angered conservatives for rejecting the limits of traditional femininity. Since Boebert was first elected to Congress in 2020, she has implicitly sold herself to the MAGA base as the anti-Clinton. She titillated the right and annoyed the left with her over-the-top performance of a MAGA man’s contradictory fantasy of a woman who is both sexually liberated and a demure wife and mother.
Boebert’s story reveals why the sexed-up version of MAGA womanhood was always doomed to fail: The facade did not last long.
When she first reached Congress at age 35, Boebert drew heavy media attention for her departure from the way conservative Christian women typically present themselves. The congresswoman favored tight jeans (complete with a gun holster), short skirts and so much makeup it was hard to recognize her without it. She also portrayed her gun-loving family life as wholesome and chaste, despite meeting her husband when she was 16 and he was 22, and dropping out of high school to have the first of her four children with him.
by Blanca Missé | Nov 14, 2026 | California, data centers, Farmworkers, Flock, ICE, immigration jails, labor, News, Surveillance
South of San Jose, California, residents of the city of Gilroy are fighting a proposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility and an Amazon data center. Organizers with ICE Out of Gilroy, a coalition that launched in May of this year, have linked the two fights in a united struggle against detention and Big Tech surveillance. The coalitionincludes Community Agency for Resources…
Source
by Petala Ironcloud | Nov 14, 2026 | California, health care, Mental Health, Native Americans, Native youth, News, Oakland, Washington D.C.
Growing up in Eureka, a small city in Northern California, provided Roger “Chapreges” Jones an anchor in his Yurok culture. He took public K-12 Yurok language classes and Indian Ed covered school supplies. But when his parents divorced and he moved to Redding at 13, those resources vanished — and so did his appetite. Chapreges got his first job at a Native American mental health clinic while…
Source
by Hunter Woodall | Nov 14, 2026 | elections, News, Politics
DENVER — Happiness risks being a fleeting feeling for Democrats in Donald Trump’s America.
After years of struggling to find a way to defeat and counter the past and present president, the wide-blue wave of last week’s midterms has given Democrats a sense of elation that has long eluded them.
As party faithful gathered in Colorado for a post-midterm “What’s Next” event, the question quickly became what voters were really saying, and whether the results were a sign of Democratic strength, or primarily of the struggles of Trump and his allies.
“Not only did we win, we cleaned their clock, and so as a consequence, people think that we’re not weak, woke and losers anymore,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who is eying a Democratic run for the White House. “Now, it doesn’t mean that they believe in us and they trust us. They just believe ‘I’m going to give you another chance’ and now we have to demonstrate that we deserve what it is that they gave us.”
Recent history gives Democrats reason for caution. Trump’s first victory in 2016 gave Republicans unified control of Washington. The midterms two years later easily handed Democrats the House, but Republicans added to their Senate majority. And when Democrats won back the White House and full control of Washington in 2020, the pandemic and the fallout from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol shadowed the news of victory.
Now the party is at a turning point it hasn’t seen in decades. It has a chance to change how people see a party that was toxic in parts of the country
