by Steve Benen | Sep 25, 2026 | 2026 election, elections, Maddowblog, White House
It was about a month ago when The Atlantic reported that Donald Trump had directed his political operation to create a series of election-season television advertisements about how great he is. It was a dubious idea for all sorts of reasons, but it was clear at the time where the money would come from: The president’s focus was on how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest, not public funds.
A month later, however, many Americans are already seeing Trump-centric election ads on TV, except they’re the ones who are footing the bill for those commercials. Politico reported:
The Trump administration launched a new television advertisement featuring President Donald Trump calling out socialism, communism and Marxism, appearing to use government resources to go on air in the weeks before the midterm election.
The ad began airing Wednesday night, according to the ad tracking service AdImpact, and has aired on programs on Fox News and Newsmax along with connected TV platforms.
The ads explicitly tell viewers in a disclaimer that the commercials were “paid for by the U.S. government,” although it did not elaborate on details such as which part of the government.
The degree to which the 30-second ad looks like a campaign commercial is hard to overstate. It’s filled with images and video clips of Trump and his campaign slogans and concludes with a Trump ally praising the president’s “toughness.”
The video serves no purpose other than to celebrate and glorify Trump. (The ad’s soundtrack is the song “Love Me” by JMSN, emphasizing the lyric, “I’ll make them love me,” which is every bit as creepy and on the nose as it
by Steve Benen | Sep 25, 2026 | elections, Maddowblog, White House
The Department of Homeland Security has gone to extraordinary lengths over the past several months to track down noncitizen voters, to the point where hundreds of federal immigration officers have been reassigned from their usual duties to search for potential voter fraud.
The campaign — or as DHS calls it, the “Unlawful Voter Initiative” — has been so aggressive that, according to one recent federal whistleblower, investigators may have broken state laws at the behest of desperate DHS leaders.
At face value, it might seem as if this crusade to address a problem that doesn’t actually exist is profoundly wasteful and counterproductive, but to hear Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin tell it, the efforts have paid dividends: The Cabinet secretary recently claimed that there were as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada.
The specificity of the claim might’ve led some to believe that Mullin’s statistic had some merit. It did not. The New York Times reported:
When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
The Trump administration began with the 15,903 figure, although Trump administration officials later conceded this total was unsubstantiated.
Under pressure from officials in Nevada, who were understandably eager to address the highly controversial claims, a DHS official sent an email that read in part, “We’ve manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens.”
That, in
by Allison Detzel | Sep 25, 2026 | elections, immigration, News
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., is calling on Republicans to stop paying lip service to voters’ concerns about the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement and to back Democratic legislation to curb President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push.
“If you’re genuine, then join our efforts to rein this administration,” he told MS NOW’s Alicia Menendez on Thursday.
In the run-up to the midterms, several Republicans facing competitive elections, including Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, Florida Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar and Texas Rep. Monica De La Cruz, have appeared to shift their tone on immigration, publicly breaking with the president on what was once one of his most popular issues.
In a post on X, Marshall criticized how immigration operations were playing out in his state.
“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe,” he wrote.
“It’s taken far too long for them to come around, because we’ve been screaming it for well more than a year,” Padilla said.
The California Democrat urged his fellow lawmakers to do more than alter their rhetoric.
“If they’re genuine about this change in position, don’t just issue a statement or post on social media,” he said. “Join our legislation.”
Padilla pointed to several Democratic-led measures that Republicans could support, including legislation to require ICE agents to identify themselves during enforcement operations, obtain judicial warrants for detentions and use body cameras.
“Join our legislation that requires ICE agents to identify themselves and not come out of unmarked cars, covered up with masks and no identifying elements of their uniform,” he said. “Join our legislation
by Clarissa-Jan Lim | Sep 24, 2026 | elections, News
The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Republican sheriff unlawfully seized 650,000 ballots while investigating baseless claims of voter fraud in last year’s special election on a redistricting measure.
In a unanimous ruling, the state’s high court found that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco violated the law when he seized ballots from the Proposition 50 special election, in which California voters resoundingly agreed to redraw the state’s congressional districts.
Bianco, a Trump supporter who lost the gubernatorial primary race last year, had launched a criminal investigation based on claims from an activist group, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, that more ballots were counted than the votes cast. Local election officials debunked that claim.
He confiscated hundreds of thousands of ballots as part of the probe in February, and then another 426 boxes of election materials weeks later, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a lawsuit.
“We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful,” Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote in her opinion. “While allegations of election improprieties are a very serious matter, our Elections Code contains numerous established mechanisms for investigating and proving misconduct that do not compromise the integrity of voted ballots — contrary to the means employed here.”
The justices ordered Bianco to return the ballots to the county’s registrar of voters and “to refrain from further handling of the ballots except as necessary to comply with our order.”
Bianco’s attorney did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment on the ruling.
Bonta praised the court’s ruling in a statement, saying it brought “important clarity for our constitutional system in California.”
“Election fraud can and should be investigated.
by Susan Del Percio | Sep 24, 2026 | elections, Opinion, White House
Just like the ever-elusive yet somehow continual sightings of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, it seems that every so often there are fanciful whispers of Republican lawmakers en masse breaking away from President Donald Trump.
When it comes to Trump’s relationship with Republicans, though, the actual explanation is far less sensational than many headlines would have us believe. All you really have to do is look at the poll numbers to understand why certain candidates take certain positions — or, in the case of some Republicans, inch away from Trump.
In the past, and out of fear, most Republicans nibbled around the edges when trying to show their independence from Trump.
With just a couple of weeks to go until early voting starts in many states, a few vulnerable Republicans are taking calculated risks in breaking with Trump on issues they sense their constituents will respond to. In other words, it is better to win and say sorry than to be a loyal foot soldier and lose.
In the past, and out of fear, most Republicans nibbled around the edges when trying to show their independence from Trump, but last week Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., took a big public swipe at Trump, running a television ad in which she addressed the president straight to camera:
“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” she said. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
Play
GOP congresswoman calls out Trump over immigration in new campaign ad
September 18, 2026 / 10:22
In Michigan, Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, distanced himself from Trump on
by Zeeshan Aleem | Sep 24, 2026 | elections, Opinion, White House
President Donald Trump’s approval rating dropped to a record low of 32% this week, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. But that’s not where the bad news stops for the president and his party’s midterm prospects. Just 30% of Republican voters “strongly” approve of the job he’s doing. And another key part of Trump’s base appears to be cooling on him, as well.
Only about 4 in 10 rural voters approve of Trump’s performance on the economy, according to a new poll conducted by The Associated Press in partnership with KFF. The AP and KFF Health News’ write-up of the survey, which surveyed over 2,000 rural American voters over two weeks beginning in mid-August, explained that the poll found that “the costs of groceries, gas and healthcare rank as top pain points for the rural voters,” and that a larger share of rural voters report being more worried about being able to afford groceries or gas than voters overall.
“About half of rural American voters believe the economy is worse off now than when President Donald Trump returned to office,” the report noted. Trump’s overall approval rating came in at 48% with rural voters.
These numbers spell trouble for the GOP as the November elections approach. Nearly 7 in 10 voters from rural communities voted for Trump in the 2024 and 2020 elections. But they’re showing signs of serious disenchantment with the president over the biggest issues of the day — the economy and the cost-of-living crisis. That doesn’t mean they’ll defect to the Democratic Party en masse. But it does significantly increase the likelihood that they will decline to vote at all.
Trump’s
