by Steve Benen | Sep 17, 2026 | Congress, Economy, elections, Maddowblog
During the Bush/Cheney administration’s war in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had a bad habit. When anyone would point to areas in Iraq that were on fire as the disastrous war continued to unfold, the Pentagon chief would effectively argue, “You’re focused on the bad news. But what about the Iraqi communities that aren’t on fire?”
Two decades later, as Americans struggle with an affordability crisis and inflation that has gotten worse, Republicans have adopted a similar posture. Pressed on increased consumer costs, GOP officials tend to argue, “You’re focused on the bad news. But what about the items that aren’t more expensive?”
Take House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, for example.
Emmer says Republicans need to talk more about grocery prices that aren’t expensive: “Eggs are at pre-pandemic prices. Ah, beef is at, ah, less than $2 a pound for ground beef … I think we have a lot to run on.”— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-16T11:59:03.186Z
The Minnesota Republican appeared on Fox Business this week and was asked about voters who believe their grocery bills are still too high. Pressed on his message, Emmer replied, “We still have work to do — there’s no question. But eggs are at pre-pandemic prices. Beef is at less than $2 a pound for ground beef.”
Even if we put aside the flaws in this Rumsfeldian pitch, it’s hard not to wonder when, exactly, Emmer last visited a grocery store.
Eggs, for example, are not at pre-pandemic prices. It’s not a matter of opinion: The Trump administration’s own data shows that egg prices spiked last year and still have not returned to where they were.
As for ground beef, the idea
by James Downie | Sep 17, 2026 | elections, Opinion
Political conventions are supposed to give the party holding them a polling bounce, but President Donald Trump’s midterm convention has come and gone as if it never happened. From Michigan to Ohio to Texas, Democratic Senate candidates are holding or even growing their leads. And the GOP’s average deficit in the generic congressional ballot has deepened to over seven percentage points.
Perhaps the most visible of these strong polls was the New York Times/Siena poll released Tuesday.
“Likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by close to 9 percentage points,” the Times reported. “Voters see Republicans broadly as more extreme, more elitist and more corrupt than Democrats, according to the poll.” Remarkably, more voters trusted Democrats not just on the party’s traditional strengths (such as health care) but on “on the two issues that powered Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory: immigration and the economy.”
This bleak vision of a nation besieged by foreigners and infidels works better on the campaign trail and social media than when a movement is in power.
In the latter case, the president has simply failed to deliver on his promise to bring prices down “on Day One” — and in some ways made matters worse. But the Trump White House has largely done what it said it would do on immigration. So why are voters unhappy? Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book, “End Times Fascism,” offers an answer to that question.
After Trump returned to the Oval Office, the administration and the GOP Congress gave billions of dollars to immigration enforcement while slashing the rest of the government. They built new detention centers with names like “Alligator Alcatraz.” To meet
by Jill Lawrence | Sep 17, 2026 | elections, Opinion
When Democratic Sen. John Fetterman endorsed his Republican colleague Doug McCormick at the GOP midterm convention, I could only roll my eyes. But now former Sen. Joe Manchin has endorsed Sen. Susan Collins, and that’s infuriating.
Let me explain. I have a long record of defending Manchin — even when he attacked Democrats and voted with Republicans against former President Joe Biden’s nominees. But that was while he was representing ruby-red West Virginia in the Senate, possibly running for re-election and open to negotiations when Democrats desperately needed his vote.
Has the former senator missed the last couple of years? The import of the last few elections?
Manchin, now 79, did not run for re-election. And while Democrats don’t need his vote, they do need him to keep quiet if he can’t say anything nice about them. But the former senator, who registered as an independent two years ago, took a different path. He endorsed a woman known best for her expressions of concern and her furrowed brow even as she is almost always on Team Donald Trump — voting with the president 90% of the time in his first term and 95% in his second.
Collins voted yes last year on former Attorney General Pam Bondi. Yes on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, former National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Yes on Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025. Yes on Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanagh and Neil Gorsuch, who have voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and legal abortion access, gut the
by Peggy Helman | Sep 17, 2026 | elections, News
Republicans turned out at the Gastonia Municipal Airport on Wednesday evening to see President Donald Trump speak six weeks before the midterm elections. They were less enthusiastic, however, about hearing from the man set to appear onstage with him: North Carolina Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley.
In fact, many of those Republicans did not even know who Whatley was.
“Who is that?” a group of women asked upon Whatley’s arrival at Wednesday’s event.
Many voters throughout the day told MS NOW they had never heard of Michael Whatley despite Gastonia being Whatley’s hometown and current place of residence. And most of the people who did know Whatley’s name said they didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion on whether they would vote for him.
“I don’t know him or the other person, so I’ve got to do a little bit of homework,” Republican and ardent Trump supporter Becky Hood told MS NOW. “I’m going to look at both guys and then decide.”
Whatley’s name-recognition problem comes at a difficult moment in his race against former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, with Republicans defending both their Senate majority and the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis. Democrats landed a star recruit in Cooper in the Tar Heel State, and recent polling has shown him leading Whatley in the contest for a seat Republicans currently hold.
The contest is also unfolding amid persistent inflation and the ongoing war with Iran — issues that voters at Wednesday’s event raised with MS NOW. Even in states like North Carolina, where GOP candidates should be more competitive, Republicans face other headwinds, including Trump’s sagging approval ratings and
by Nnamdi Egwuonwu | Sep 16, 2026 | elections, News
District Attorney Scott Colom believes he can become Mississippi’s first Democratic senator in nearly 45 years. His confidence, he told MS NOW, comes down to math.
In 2023, Democrat Brandon Presley came within 27,000 votes — less than three percentage points — of unseating Gov. Tate Reeves. Two years later, Democrats broke a supermajority in the state Senate by flipping two seats in newly drawn, majority-Black districts following court-ordered special elections. Then came Colom’s own primary in March, when Democratic turnout rose by 70% — an increase of more than 62,000 raw votes — compared to 2018, the last time a Senate seat was up during a midterm year.
In March, “the gap between Republican and Democratic voters in Mississippi was only 8,000,” Colom told MS NOW. “That’s a historic turnout, and that shows that we had the momentum. We’ve been putting cracks in the glass.”
Taken together, he argued, the trend lines point to an energetic Democratic base slowly waking up after being dormant for decades when it had largely resigned itself to Republican control of every statewide and federal office. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Mississippi since Attorney General Jim Hood in 2015.
The history Colom is running against is steeper still: No incumbent senator has lost re-election in the state since 1942, and no Democrat has won a Senate race here since 1982.
His opponent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, is the same Republican who single-handedly blocked his appointment to the federal bench. Trying to unseat her has required an aggressive campaign strategy. Colom has held more than 50 town halls. He has appeared at conservative gatherings like the Neshoba County
by Steve Benen | Sep 16, 2026 | 2026 election, elections, Maddowblog
Several months ago, Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine observed of the looming 2026 midterm elections, “The GOP campaign this fall will depend entirely on misremembering recent history.”
The observation was persuasive when Horton presented it in April, and now, five months later, its relevance lingers for a reason.
With just seven weeks before Election Day 2026, Republicans aren’t just trying to sell Americans on the idea that transgender Muslim immigrants are desperate to destroy the United States from within, they’re also scrambling to impose outlandish counternarratives about recent events on American voters.
President Donald Trump and his allies are taking steps to rewrite what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. And what happened during the pandemic. And what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. And what happened in the 2020 presidential election.
“Mr. Trump is not so much a student of history as a rewriter of it,” a New York Times analysis noted last month.
Perhaps most important of all is the GOP’s emphasis on the economy, given its overriding importance to most voters. House Speaker Mike Johnson explained the pitch he and his allies intend to bring to the electorate as voters start to make up their minds.
Mike Johnson: “We reminded voters of the disastrous effects of the years under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, what we inherited when we took this over last January. We had a country on the brink of ruin.” — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-15T14:38:29.112Z
When Republicans took control of the levers of federal power early last year, the Louisiana congressman declared Tuesday, “we had a country on the brink of ruin.”
This again?
In the last full month of his presidency, Joe
