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
by Derek Seidman | Sep 16, 2026 | 2026 election, 2026 Elections, 2026 midterms, Abdul El-Sayed, AIPAC, BDS, BDS movement, Billionaires, California, Colorado, Donald Trump, elections, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Gaza, Israel, Michigan, Midterm election, midterm elections, midterms, New York, News Analysis, PACs, Palestine, Paul Singer, super PAC spending, Super PACs, United Democracy Project, Wall Street, Zohran Mamdani
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has been spending tens of millions of dollars on political races during the current election cycle, aiming to defeat progressive candidates who are critical of Israel and who express support for Palestinians. Many voters might not even be aware of this, because AIPAC-funded ads and mailers often omit any mention of Israel…
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by Chris Jansing | Sep 15, 2026 | elections, News
PALMER, Alaska — Jean Oldham had just put $6-a-gallon gas into a small sedan, and she was doing the math out loud.
“It was, like, a lot of money,” Oldham said. “And I’m like, this is just a little car, you know? What happens if you’re driving one of those monster trucks?”
Those big rigs run on diesel, which costs more still — driving up the price of pretty much everything they haul into Alaska.
Statewide, gas averages $5.07 a gallon, according to AAA — 74 cents higher than the national average and $1.15 higher than a year ago. With seven weeks until Election Day, that number has helped turn a reliably Republican Senate seat into a toss-up and put Democrats within reach of a majority.
And Palmer is on the road system; 82% of Alaska communities are not. In those remote places, boats or small planes bring in food and supplies. Electricity comes from generators that run on diesel. Gas for cars and trucks is expensive: In late August, in the northwestern village of Shungnak, a gallon of gas cost $26.82.
All of it helps explain why the cost of fuel dominated a recent high-stakes debate between Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and former Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, that had been billed as a debate about fisheries. That’s because fuel is the fishing industry’s problem too. Alaska’s $5 billion-a-year fishery is the state’s largest private sector employer, and expenses are climbing while profitability falls.
“This is the No. 1 cost for all fishermen. This war in Iran is driving up our gas and diesel prices,” Peltola said, noting repeatedly that Sullivan had voted for the
by Steve Benen | Sep 15, 2026 | elections, Maddowblog, Science, White House
As this week got underway, Donald Trump responded to growing concerns about the threats posed by artificial intelligence by staking a position that even many in the industry see as indefensibly extreme: He rejected the idea of AI guardrails altogether, telling the public that the only necessary safeguard is having an American president with a “high IQ.”
The White House policy, in other words, is to simply do nothing except hope for the best.
In the hours that followed, Trump published a half-dozen related items to his social media platform, calling AI fears a “hoax,” including his Monday afternoon online rant:
AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct.
He went on to argue in subsequent items to compare AI concerns to the climate crisis, which he also dismissed as a “hoax,” adding, “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened?”
The answer, incidentally, is that the climate crisis has intensified, putting the world at great risk, as a sitting American president really ought to know and understand.
To be sure, Trump’s tiresome rhetoric was familiar. After all, he effectively uses the word “hoax” to mean “stuff I don’t like,” having applied it to everything from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to
by Steve Benen | Sep 15, 2026 | 2026 election, elections, Maddowblog
As a rule, the backgrounds of first-time state legislative candidates tend not to generate national headlines, but once in a while, there are important exceptions. Talking Points Memo reported this week:
The Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives marched alongside neo-Nazis at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new Talking Points Memo investigation can reveal.
Marshall Rawson — who won an upset victory in Florida’s District 10 Republican primary last month — attended the infamous Charlottesville rally, considered the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation, marching with the League of the South, a racist and antisemitic neo-Confederate group that advocates for the secession of southern states from the U.S.
The same TPM report noted that the Florida Republican had received campaign donations from “dozens of people with either established ties to white nationalist organizations or well-documented histories of extremist, racist activism,” and used to operate a pseudonymous social media account “that he used to advocate public lynchings.”
By way of an explanation, Rawson made no effort to contest the reporting. Rather, he described himself to TPM as having been “very active defending historical monuments,” adding that he doesn’t screen his campaign donors.
His written statement did not address his role at the Charlottesville rally.
The story comes just days after Republican Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio fired his political director after learning that he had posted a photo of Nazi soldiers as his profile picture on Facebook.
That story came on the heels of Republican Rep. Mike Collins, the GOP’s Senate nominee in Georgia, parting ways with a staffer who shared images via social media earlier
