by Erum Salam | Nov 10, 2026 | elections, News
A new group is seeking to capitalize on Democrats’ overwhelming victories in the midterm elections to drum up support for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president in 2028.
Ready for AOC, a volunteer-led progressive group that launched Monday, is working to secure 1 million pledges from people who would support an Ocasio-Cortez presidential bid, hoping the show of support will persuade her to run.
The group is not affiliated with Ocasio-Cortez, who has not announced whether she will run for president — at least not yet. Organizers hope that, with their efforts, she will make a decision by spring 2027, at which point the group plans to dissolve.
“While there have been so many reasons to feel disenchanted, and voters have been disenfranchised in so many different ways in our political system, there is reason to have hope, and we saw that last week,” Hannah Kessel, the group’s field director, told MS NOW. “And so, we’re looking to engage people in that vision.”
Ocasio-Cortez is widely viewed as a potential successor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as leader of the progressive movement his 2016 presidential campaign helped build. But she has largely kept her political ambitions a mystery. In recent months, however, she has offered hints about what she might do next. Asked at a political event in Chicago in May whether she would run for president, Ocasio-Cortez declined to give a definitive answer. “What’s funny is they assume my ambition is a title or a seat,” she said. “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go.”
In July, she told Politico: “I
by Jacques Berlinerblau | Nov 9, 2026 | culture, elections, Opinion
Given the prominence of religious Christian Democrats who rode the blue wave to victory this midterm election, one might be forgiven for questioning whether lawmakers who often ground their politics in their deeply held Christian faith will continue to weaken the crumbing wall of separation between church and state.
But the truth of the matter is much more complicated.
Newly elected senators like James Talarico and Adam Hamilton have a major opportunity — and challenge — when it comes to defending church-state separation. Their task is fraught; they are not only mounting a defense against red state conservatives, not only against the John Roberts Supreme Court, which has worked to dismantle the wall brick by brick, but against Obama-era orthodoxies as well.
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Democrats catch ‘white whale of Texas politics’ with Talarico, Hinojosa wins
November 3, 2026 / 10:07
That Democrats fielded religious candidates isn’t all that new. After all, Black Democrats have historically used their Christian faith to guide their politics. But what’s new here is the emergence in red states of a small cluster of white Democrats who are deeply committed to mainline Protestant traditions and who link their theological convictions to liberal policies — often to remarkable effect. Their views on church and state issues, while still evolving, may mark a break with Democrats’ recent approach to this issue.
Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, trounced Republican Ken Paxton as Texas turned blue. In Kansas, Methodist megachurch pastor Hamilton defeated GOP incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall. Two ministers in Iowa, one Lutheran (Sarah Trone Garriott) and one Presbyterian (Lindsay James), are now House members-elect. (The Hawkeye State’s incoming governor, Rob Sand, is a Bible-quoting Lutheran layperson.)
Not every
by Ryan Johnson | Nov 9, 2026 | elections, Fascism, Israel, midterms, Palestine, Politics and Movements: International, Politics and Movements: US, video
On November 3, Democrats secured a historic landslide victory over the Republican Party, securing 54 Senate seats and over 250 House seats. Five governor’s seats were also flipped, including in historically red states like Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Georgia.
According to a New York Times estimate, Americans aged 18-29 voted overwhelmingly Democrat during the Midterms. 70% of voters in the 18-29 age group voted for Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, a 33-point increase from 2024.
Americans aged 18-29 also came out in droves to support Democratic Senate nominees in 2024, with over 30-point differences in every competitive Senate race, including 44-point increases in Mississippi and North Carolina and a whopping 49-point increase in Texas.
Social Reporter Ryan Johnson sat down with Jason Stanley, the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, to talk through the issues that swayed young people to vote for Democrats, the global anti-fascist wave, and a lasting change in American public opinion on Israel.
Related Links:
Jason Stanley at University of Toronto
Jason Stanley on Amazon
Credits:
Production: Ryan Johnson
Post-production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Ryan Johnson:
On November 3rd, Democrats secured a historic landslide victory over the Republican Party, securing 54 Senate seats and over 250 House seats. Five governor seats were also flipped, including in historically red states like Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Georgia. According to a New York Times estimate, Americans aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly Democrat during the midterms. 70% of
by Hope Davis | Nov 9, 2026 | Anti-Trans Bills, Ballot Measures, elections, Gender-Affirming Care, LGBTQ Rights, Missouri, News
Missouri lawmakers tried — and failed — to enshrine constitutional bans on abortion and gender-affirming care for minors in the form of Amendment 3 in Tuesday’s midterm elections. The day after the election, headlines focused on voters’ rejection of the abortion ban and less on the “ballot candy” part of the measure: the permanent ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Source
by Austin Sarat | Nov 9, 2026 | Civil Rights, elections, Opinion
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on Nov. 5 of a universal clemency for the 548 people awaiting execution in his state marks an important turning point in American politics. It signals the end of law-and-order politics as a determining factor in the calculations of likely presidential contenders.
Newsom, an ambitious politician who is almost certain to run for president in 2028, reportedly weighed the impact that commuting hundreds of death sentences — including those of some notorious killers — would have on his political prospects.
That Newsom went ahead with the mass clemency tells us a lot about the salience of tough-on-crime positions in the present political moment. Opposition to capital punishment is no longer the death knell for people aspiring to be president.
This is not to say that Newsom won’t face backlash, either in California or elsewhere in the country, for his clemency decision. As the New York Times notes, “Those against Mr. Newsom’s move are expected to file a challenge arguing that he violated the law with a blanket commutation and that each case must be considered on individual merits.”
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The Bulwark: Some 2028 Democrat hopefuls are ‘quietly courting campaign staffers’
September 1, 2026 / 07:34
The Times reports that “Marc Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, whose kidnapping and murder prompted an era of tough-on-crime policies in California, is livid at the idea of Mr. Newsom granting mercy to his daughter’s killer, or anyone else sentenced to death.” Klaas told the Times that he was aghast at Newsom “putting his energy” into commuting the death sentences of “serial killers, spree killers, cop killers, baby killers. We’re talking about absolutely the worst people
by Erum Salam | Nov 8, 2026 | Congress, elections, News, White House
Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested Sunday that Democratic lawmakers who are planning to launch oversight investigations into the Trump administration could be criminally prosecuted.
“What we‘ve seen over the past several days and even over the past several weeks are outright threats,” Blanche said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Asked if he considered those threats to be a crime, Blanche said, “It depends on what’s said. So yes, there could be.”
Blanche himself is a potential target of impeachment, Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is poised to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told MS NOW a day after Election Day.
The attorney general’s stark warning came a day after President Donald Trump railed against the incoming congressional majority on social media, saying, “These SLEAZEBAGS should go to jail for what they are doing.”
“You have free speech in this country. You are allowed to be critical of President Trump, of me, of this administration,” Blanche said. “But when the threats become so vile and so dangerous that you are telling people in college that they better be careful if they want to work in the Trump administration because somebody will come after them, at some point, you have to draw the line.”
The attorney general was referring to Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s “deterrence message” last month to students at the University of Chicago. Slotkin was among a group of Democratic lawmakers investigated by the Department of Justice last year after urging U.S. military service members to “refused illegal orders” by Trump administration officials.
Even before winning both chambers of Congress five days ago by strikingly large numbers, Democrats said they planned to hold
