The Bulwark

Trump’s Justice Department is deploying 1,000 election monitors across all 50 states, while MAGA influencers are already pushing claims of voter fraud and the DOJ is targeting Democrats in an extraordinary Election Day investigation. Andrew Egger and Will Sommer break down the latest developments, the parallels to Trump’s 2020 election playbook, and what could happen if key races are close.

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If the repudiation of our corrupt president comes through tonight, Democrats are promising to hold everyone to account who helped him turn our government into a playground for profit and vengeance. In addition to exposing the First Crime Family, Rep. Raskin tells Tim that Dems will also focus on impeaching Hegseth and reclaiming public lands that were given away to plunder. In Texas, Ryan says the Trump era has induced people to behave horribly and lean into what's wrong. Plus: Haley Stevens's betrayal seems to have backfired, Trump made nearly a million dollars an hour in 2025, and Tim uttered the nicest words about Ivanka that have ever been said on any Bulwark podcast.

Rep. Jamie Raskin and Ryan Holiday join Tim Miller.

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show notes:

• The Bulwark’s election night coverage on YouTube and Substack starts at 7pm ET

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It’s Election Day, and Donald Trump is making some surprising last-minute moves, including an announcement that he’s cutting off military aid to Israel. Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol break down Trump’s increasingly desperate closing message, the possibility of renewed strikes on Iran, and the decisions that have put Republicans in such a precarious position, from the Minneapolis ICE crackdown to the war in Iran and a seemingly endless parade of corruption scandals.

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WHEN WILL WE KNOW the outcome of the midterm elections? If your answer is ‘when all the ballots are counted,’ think again. Republicans are trying to institutionalize two later stages at which they could overturn the results.

The first stage is certification: If a Democratic nominee comes out ahead, Republican governors and state legislatures could decide whether to reject the numbers. The second stage is seating: If a state certifies a Democrat’s victory, Republicans in Congress could refuse to let her take office. Ordinarily, certification and seating have been formalities. Donald Trump and his party are trying to convert them into routine forums for dispute.

Republicans didn’t invent post-election challenges. Democrats have challenged elections themselves, most notably after the Bush-Gore contest of 2000. But in 2020, Republicans raised the game to a new level, filing dozens of lawsuits to challenge presidential election results in multiple states. They tried to use state legislatures to overturn their losses. And on January 6th, they turned the congressional certification of electors into a political and literal combat zone. Trump went on to claim that if Democrats hadn’t rigged the election, he “probably would have won all fifty” states.

The latest battleground is Alaska, where Democrats allegedly conspired to put a man named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. on the ballot alongside the state’s incumbent Republican senator, Dan S. Sullivan. Alaskan election officials tried to solve the problem by identifying Sen. Sullivan on the ballot as the incumbent. And since Alaska has ranked-choice voting, anyone who’s confused could vote for both Dan Sullivans—one as a first choice, the other as a second—so that if the other Sullivan is eliminated while the incumbent remains in contention, their vote transfers to the incumbent.

Nevertheless, if Sen. Sullivan loses, Republicans are threatening to reject the results.

Two weeks ago, Trump’s Department of Justice filed suit to block Alaska “from certifying any result that may be impacted by voter confusion.” DOJ defined this confusion scenario as Sen. Sullivan losing the election by a margin smaller than the number of votes cast for the other Sullivan.

The next day, Trump affirmed that he had told DOJ to file the suit. “I’m the one that said, ‘Do it,’” he told the press.

DOJ’s rationale for federal intervention was flimsy, and on Sunday, a federal court rejected it. DOJ appealed the same day. But the administration’s underlying goal, according to Attorney General Todd Blanche, is to get Alaska itself to withhold certification. “If a court ultimately determines that [the election] was decided because of confusion and not the will of the voters, then we do not think the states should certify,” Blanche explained on Face the Nation a week ago. He said DOJ’s aim was “to allow a process for Alaska to decide who should be certified as a winner.”

Whatever Election Day brings, we’ll need independent journalism to hold the powerful accountable, to challenge falsehoods and hypocrisy, and to help figure out what comes next.

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In the past few days, Alaska’s Republican governor, Mike Dunleavy, has hinted in several interviews that the state might overturn a victory by the Democratic nominee, former Rep. Mary Peltola. On Friday, Dunleavy was asked on NewsNation whether he would certify a Peltola win. “If we find out there’s wrongdoing, and if that means that the certification then is stopped or changed, then that’s what happens,” he replied.

Dunleavy also suggested that even if Peltola were certified as the winner, the state might play a subsequent role in blocking her from taking office. “If we conclude that . . . there were things that should not have happened—let me put it that way—that are illegal, we will act on that,” he said. “And that may in fact impact whether somebody is seated in the U.S. Senate. That’ll be a discussion with obviously the head of the U.S. Senate as well.”

On Fox News, anchors and pundits are chattering with excitement at the prospect of defying a Peltola victory. On Thursday, Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary to President George W. Bush, said that if Peltola were to win by a small margin, “I don’t know that the Senate is going to seat her. There is so much corruption and so much wrongdoing.” On Saturday, Jason Chaffetz, a Fox contributor and former chairman of the House Oversight Committee, suggested that DOJ’s investigation of the election could “take it to the point that she doesn’t get seated.” On Monday, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former political adviser, told Fox & Friends that if Peltola were to win, “I don’t think they should seat her.”

It’s not just the talking heads: Republican senators, who could actually move to stop Peltola from being seated, seem open to the idea. On Saturday, Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) tweeted, “This was a fraud perpetrated against the people of Alaska. Under no circumstances should Mary Peltola be seated if she wins an election in a fraudulent manner.” On Sunday, in an interview on Meet the Press, Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) repeatedly refused to say whether he would accept the results if Peltola were certified as the victor. He claimed, absurdly, that it was “a federal offense to confuse voters. That’s the law.” Meanwhile, on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) declined to say whether Peltola should be certified as the winner or seated in the Senate if she got the most votes. “We’ll have to see how it all plays out,” he hedged.

Trump is likewise reserving his options. On Thursday, a reporter asked him, “If Mary Peltola wins, should Republicans refuse to seat her?” The president replied, “Well, you’re going to have to see what happens. It’s hard to believe that she could even be allowed to run.”

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PELTOLA ISN’T THE GOP’S ONLY post-election target. Trump says Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) “will not be legally allowed to be a member” of the House because she’s under investigation for possible immigration violations. Fox News is abuzz about refusing to seat her, too. And three weeks ago, DOJ filed a suit to stop California “from tabulating in federal elections vote-by-mail ballots received from individuals identified by the Federal Government as likely noncitizens,” at least “until those individuals’ citizenship status can be verified.”

Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have rejected DOJ’s requests for emergency orders that would block California from counting those ballots. As to Omar and Peltola, the president himself has no legal authority to stop them from taking office. But even if Republicans lose these fights, as Trump did after the 2020 election, they’re laying the groundwork for an era of routine post-election challenges—not just in courtrooms, but in legislatures and Congress. In the Trump era, achieving a victory at the ballot box is just the beginning. Then you have to fight to defend it.

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It’s Election Day, and boy, do we have election coverage for you: Tim, Sarah, and JVL will kick off our election night broadcast at 7:00 p.m. EST on Substack, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. Sam and the rest of the Bulwark team will carry us through the night as results come in across the country. Everyone is welcome. See you tonight! Happy Tuesday and happy Election Day.

by Andrew Egger

So here we are at last. After two years of Donald Trump’s Washington—the idiocy, the cruelty, the malice, the bullying, the bigotry, the hubris, the state violence, the monomania, the cowardice—it’s finally time for the president to make the first payment on the bill. Barring a catastrophic polling error (and when has that ever happened?), Americans seem set to deliver a colossal rebuke to Trump, who stormed into office last year ready to crack heads and is now doddering out the last days of his trifecta ranking asses.

The big political killer was Iran. Trump’s disastrous Middle East war fractured his coalition and doomed the country to a year (or more!) of terrible economic vibes. A week into the war, Trump’s approval rating was sitting north of 42 percent; it’s been slumping lower ever since. Nothing makes price-conscious Americans reach for their pitchforks like spiking energy prices.

But I think that the turning point in Trump 2.0 actually came a little earlier. The thing that convinced Trump he needed to beat a retreat on a core part of his domestic agenda was his fiasco in Minneapolis.

There’s no better time than Election Day to join our pro-democracy community. We’d love to have you.

It’s only been a year, but it’s already easy to forget just how big a part large-scale state violence against Democratic protesters played in Trump’s plans in 2025. Over and over, the White House launched remarkable provocations against blue cities and states, from Los Angeles to Portland to Washington, D.C. These actions weren’t just intended to cow Democratic leaders. They were intended to stoke deliberate conflict between militarized agents of the state and people on the ground—conflict that Trump and MAGA could then repackage as content for their base.

Amid Trump’s many simultaneous assaults on the norms and laws that restrain the presidency, this content served a specific rhetorical purpose. In videos of riots and clashes with protesters, Trump’s government represented the forces of order, while those who opposed him were the forces of chaos. The law, Trump’s violence argued, wasn’t some bunch of buzzkill rules dorks and eggheads used to rein in great men like him. The law was pepper spray in an angry protester’s face.

As I wrote last October:

Trump goes out of his way to start conflicts. He wildly exaggerates the horrors of daily life in blue cities. He sends the National Guard in a shock-and-awe show of force into those same places. In the protests and clashes that result, he tells them the only way they can err is by pulling their punches. You’ve got to teach these criminals, he says, the only way they understand. They spit, you hit. And “criminals” are whoever Trump says they are.

When he ordered ICE into Minneapolis, Trump was just following the natural progression of this plan. But the plan quickly met disaster. ICE’s clownishly brutal occupation of the city spurred ever-increasing organized resistance from locals, who tracked ICE vehicles and made their job consistently irritating and difficult—blowing their cover by following them with blaring horns and shrieking blowing whistles, organizing deliveries of groceries and other materials to terrified immigrants wouldn’t have to risk leaving their homes, and so on. And videos of irritated agents lashing out at annoying but law-abiding and peaceful protesters started to turn public sentiment against the occupiers—even before things went catastrophically wrong.

And then came the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. More than anything else, these two instances of shocking police violence against peaceful protesters turned the tide. Trump and Co. wanted a constant feed of videos of police administering street justice to hooligans; instead, Americans’ social platforms were suddenly full of videos of deadly violence dealt against—in Pretti’s case—a man who had literally tried to peacefully place his body between an agent of the state and the woman he was roughing up.

MAGA’s propaganda machine tried feverishly to smear these two dead Americans as domestic terrorists and would-be cop killers. But no one was buying it, and soon even they had to admit it. Not long after, the White House announced an about-face: They were heading out of Minneapolis. From now on, federal immigration enforcement would focus on the red cities and states that would cooperate with less fuss. The blue-city occupation strategy was at an end.

I don’t mean to oversell this. It isn’t as though Trump et al. have gotten significantly more careful about the violence the state wields: Others have died at the hands of DHS agents this year, including Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine this summer. And, as our Adrian Carrasquillo reported last week, Good and Pretti’s families have never gotten accountability from the officers who killed them.

But Minneapolis’s resistance still achieved something extraordinary: At a time when Trump seemed at his strongest and they seemed at their weakest, they managed to throw him off his violent agenda simply by standing up nobly as individuals and as a community against his designs. Maybe—probably?—voters will put Democrats back in power today, and Trump will never again achieve the level of unilateral state authority that he enjoyed last year. But even if they don’t—even if Republicans beat the odds and give Trump back more or less united control of Washington—Minneapolis still gives us the model: You resist with whatever you’ve got.

by Jim Swift

West Chester Township, Ohio
The prevailing sentiment online is that a blue wave is going to wash Republicans out of the majority in both chambers today. But out here in the Cincinnati exurbs Monday night, prognostications were a bit different.

“It is a Ramaswamy tsunami,” a man at a bar declared. He paused, then added, “and a Husted high tide.”

The prognosticator in this case was the Republican candidate for attorney general of the state of Ohio, Keith Faber. He and a small battalion of quarter-zipped Republican pols were taking turns warming up Lori’s Roadhouse for gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was in town to make the closing argument of his beleaguered, often-bizarre campaign.

The spacious music venue had arranged rows of four-tops to seat around 300 people in the dim, red-lit hall. Other early attendees—staff, mostly—adhered rigidly to that GOP quarter-zip aesthetic.

I had barely settled at the open bar when a man with his phone out approached me and demanded to know: Why was I there if The Bulwark hated Vivek so much, huh? And why hadn’t I condemned Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate in the race, as an alcoholic, huh? He briefly gained a head of steam before leaving me to my drink; he had a recording to review and (maybe) post. An Ohio State Highway Patrolman stepped in to fill the spot, and he stayed there through the rest of the program, never saying a word to me.

The candidates arrived about twenty minutes behind schedule. Ramaswamy and his running mate, Senate President Rob McColley, strode past half-empties on the tables as much of the statewide Republican ticket strode behind them. The bus contingent had, you guessed it, their quarter-zips on. The group’s tidy, techy appearance belied the nastiness of the attacks on Acton many of them were about to spout, as when the candidate for treasurer—not exactly a role that requires a dogfighter—smugly told the audience: “Not one of us is going to slur our speech.”

He was referring to a video from Acton’s Thursday appearance in Toledo that her critics have used to claim she is an alcoholic. That’d be quite a secret to keep in today’s world, but plausibility aside, it became a recurring subject throughout the evening. AG candidate Faber brought it up, too, urging supporters to send it to friends and family. It was all done in service of the same basic message: Acton was unfit to lead. She was a complete sot. What’s worse—she’d gotten involved in, like, COVID stuff, man.

Vivek’s running mate attempted to instill the central point through a bit of call-and-response.

[Y]ou gotta ask your friends, family, and neighbors, “Who do you trust? Who do you trust to deliver lower property taxes?” (Audience: Vivek!) “Who do you trust to take out Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse?” (Audience: Vivek!) “Who do you trust to end sanctuary cities in the state of Ohio?” (Audience: Vivek!) “And who do you trust to make it so that you and your family can live, work, raise a family, and prosper here, and your kids and grandkids don’t have to leave for another economic opportunity?” Let’s hear it. Who do we trust? (Audience: Vivek!)

When Ramaswamy took the mic, he promised his next visit to Butler County would be as governor.

“That’s the good news,” he said.

Then came one of the most abrupt unforced pivots I’ve witnessed at a political event: “The bad news is communism is spreading across the West.”

He took the crowd on a quick tour of looming horrors: France was burning, New York was under socialist rule, Los Angeles was soon to follow, and Minnesota was plagued by entitlements fraud and what he called an “illegal immigration infestation.”

Then he invoked Dearborn, Michigan. “Are you gonna let that come to Ohio?” he asked.

“This is not Republican versus Democrat. This is common sense versus communism.”

Common sense, in his view, means lower electric bills, an end to sanctuary cities, and becoming “the most conservative governor this state has ever seen in our history.” It means maybe-sorta abolishing property taxes altogether.

And it means calling and texting everyone in your contact list to tell them to vote for Ramaswamy, even if it requires suspending normal phone etiquette. “Tonight’s an exception. You can do it,” Vivek said.

“This is the last night of this campaign,” he told the crowd. “I’ll remember this for the rest of my life. You will, too, when we get this right tomorrow morning.” And just like that, the quarter-zip brigade retired for the night.

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• Trump Was Right. He Is on the Ballot... But, MONA CHAREN asks, what possible reason is there to vote for him?

• A Warning for Trump’s Project 2025 Mastermind… On Receipts, REP. BRENDAN BOYLE joins CATHERINE RAMPELL to discuss what Democrats plan to do if they take back the House, from reversing Trump’s healthcare cuts and tariffs to confronting the economic fallout from his Iran war. Plus, SAM STEIN joins to break down Trump’s closing economic message and how rising costs and voters’ frustrations over the economy could shape decisions at the polls.

• A Political Earthquake in Texas… On election eve, GEORGE CONWAY welcomes veteran Republican strategist MIKE MADRID to Psycho Politics to talk about extraordinary Latino voter turnout, why Trump’s 2024 coalition may be coming apart, and the growing possibility of a Democratic upset in Texas.

• MAGA Preps for the World to End—Literally… With Republicans fearing electoral doom, right-wing pundits send their audience to the bunker, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.

• Final Senate Polls Are So Good, Sarah Can Barely Believe Them… It’s the last Secret Podcast before Election Day!

• Is Trump’s GOP About to Get Wiped Out? BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily to discuss the Iran war and its impacts at home, and why the polls are rosy for Democrats. JVL joins for a bonus segment to break down Haley Stevens’s breakdown.

• Tucker Carlson Says Trump is Considering a Nuclear Attack on Iran… On the latest Command Post, MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER break down Tucker Carlson’s alarming claims that the Trump administration could be preparing a nuclear strike on Iran.

• A Close-Up View of the Wildest 24 Hours of the El-Sayed Campaign… Haley Stevens’s stunning defection, a fundraising surge, and a possible Senate majority in the balance. JONATHAN COHN reports from Michigan in The Breakdown.

BOMBS AWAY?: Will Trump hit Iran again after the midterms? There’s been growing chatter that he’s considering it, and America’s regional allies are glumly bracing for impact, assuming they’ll bear the brunt of Iran’s retaliation if America starts dropping bombs again. But the president hasn’t made up his mind, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The president told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a call Saturday that he wanted to first give continuing diplomatic efforts a chance to succeed, people familiar with the call said.

Netanyahu pressed for strikes immediately after the U.S. midterms, the people said. Israel’s military has prepared attack plans and on high alert, one of the people said. . . .

“The only reason why I’m not finished with Iran is I want to be nice. I want to try and save all those lives if I can,” Trump said Sunday at a rally in Iowa ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. “But at some point we’re going to have to give them the hammer.”

Yesterday, the Journal also reported that the United States had bombed Iran’s Qeshm Island—apparently without any relation to the short, sharp escalation Trump is mulling after the election. This all from the man who said he could win the Vietnam War in a week.

AMERICA’S SMALLEST DONOR: Trump has made a couple billion off the presidency since last year, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested in giving back to the people who helped make it possible. The Washington Sun reports that Trump didn’t contribute a dime of his own money to a single candidate, PAC, or super PAC this cycle, despite plenty of promises to do so: “I’m going to be making contributions to various campaigns and people that I think are good,” he told the Sun in September. “I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try and help us.”

Instead, he’s been treating other people’s money like his own—in open violation of federal law. Trump isn’t supposed to direct the spending of his super PAC, MAGA Inc. But he’s made no secret that the PAC’s hundreds of millions—funded by the likes of Miram Adelson, Jeff Yass, and the Winklevoss twins—are, in his words, “money that I control.”

“For months voters have watched donors to Trump’s roughly $400 million war chest land posts in the administration and receive presidential pardons, among other favorable treatment,” former FEC Chairs Trevor Potter and Ellen Weintraub wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last week. “These results, coupled with Trump’s assertion of control, fly in the face of the basic legal bargain that allows organizations such as MAGA Inc. to raise and spend funds.”

HERE COMES CHUCK: Democrats may be poised to retake power in Washington, but voters still don’t like the party much: Surveys consistently find the Democrats’ national approval rating significantly lower even than the GOP’s. But despite widespread disapproval even among their own voters, Washington Dems aren’t in any big hurry to make leadership changes. In fact, Politico reports, the mood among Senate Democrats is that, should they retake the chamber, Sen. Chuck Schumer will walk back in basically unopposed as majority leader.

If the wave predictions fizzle, things might look different:

“This isn’t last year,” said a Schumer-neutral Senate Democratic aide granted anonymity to speak about internal caucus dynamics, referring back to government funding fights with Trump that had many Democratic senators publicly fuming over how Schumer handled them.

But if Democrats are in the minority, the 75-year-old leader could find himself dealing with members who publicly break with him, questions from colleagues about whether he will retire in 2028 or even an unlikely longshot challenger, according to five people interviewed about Schumer’s standing.

Read the whole thing.

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TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT ONE THING: He is functionally on the ballot. And though some of the MAGA faithful may be motivated to vote because Trump revealed that he was a “freaking genius” for having passed three tests of cognitive decline, or because he was robbed of a Nobel Prize again, or because they believe that he will send them a $5,000 check if and only if the GOP wins, or because they think the Reflecting Pool was sabotaged by Communists, the majority of Americans will be treating his implicit presence on the ballot very differently. They view this election as a referendum on his performance in office.

All midterms are referenda on the sitting president, so Trump needn’t have pleaded with his base. On the other hand, his base is shrinking, which may be why he is reduced to offering bribes

It’s hard to think of an election in which an incumbent party has had less to offer voters. The MAGA Republican party is given to vituperation all the time, but in 2024, they at least had issues they could plausibly hit Democrats on, inflation and the border chief among them. Today, those issues favor the Democrats, so the Republicans have only shrill and juvenile name-calling in their quiver.

The news isn’t slowing down after Election Day. And neither are we. Join us.

There are, I guess, still millions of Americans who thrill to the music of MAGA, but the music has lost its magic for a big chunk of GOP voters. The percentage of Americans who strongly approve of Trump’s performance, the Economist/YouGov polls found, dropped from 34 percent in January 2025 to 18 percent in April 2026. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in August found Trump’s strong approval even lower at 13 percent. Picture MAGA voters slinking off to their man caves, shaking their heads.

Why should Republicans, even die-hard MAGA Republicans, be eager to pull the lever today? According to an April Gallup poll, a whopping 55 percent of Americans said their personal financial situation was getting worse. And that, for better or worse, is what drives voting decisions. It’s not the threats to invade Greenland or to close down hostile media, or taking Putin’s side in the Ukraine war. It’s not the corruption of criminal justice or the illegal attacks on boats in the Caribbean, or plundering Venezuela while leaving its corrupt, dictatorial government in place. No, the thing that sours voters is the price of gas, the cost of ground beef, and the availability of affordable housing. A Financial Times/Focaldata poll released yesterday found that only about 42 percent of Republicans approved of the president’s handling of inflation (just 20 percent of voters overall said the same).

The sense that the economy is suffering because of Trump’s policies is arguably a big part of what’s driving down his support among constituencies in which he made gains in 2024: African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and young people. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 30 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 were very enthusiastic about voting in the midterms, compared with 48 percent of those who voted for Harris. Trump pleads that voters pretend he’s on the ballot, but he has lost support among every major demographic group including “double-digit drops among Hispanics, men, rural and suburban voters, people without college degrees and evangelical Christians.” The survey gives the impression that the only core MAGA constituency that’s more enthusiastic about Trump now is the plutocrats who were only in it for the money.

What about the old reliable MAGA talking points? No new wars? That’s a problem. Not only is the Iran war costing Americans in the pocketbook; not only was it never explained or justified; not only is it dragging out with no discernible end point; not only is it dangerously depleting stocks of missiles and bombs, but the United States seems to be losing. Even among Republicans, approval of Trump’s handling of the war is steeply declining, according to polls by CNN/SSRS, from 73 percent support in March to 60 percent in September. It doesn’t help that while Americans are paying $6 a gallon for diesel, Trump is roaring his exultation at the record profits the oil companies are raking in.

Release the Epstein files? Some MAGA stalwarts considered this a dealbreaker.

Immigration remains Trump’s core strength with his supporters, though the broader public has come to the conclusion that enforcement went way too far, and Hispanic voters who had turned toward Trump in 2024 seem to have shifted away from his party. In February, 62 percent of Americans thought the administration had overstepped by sending ICE into American cities, according to an AP/NORC poll. A November 2 New York Times/Siena poll found that 50 percent of voters trust the Democrats more on immigration, while only 46 percent trust the GOP. Just before the 2024 election, voters trusted Trump more than Kamala Harris on immigration by 11 points. That’s a helluva reversal in just two years. Besides, once the border is closed, it becomes less pressing even for those who considered immigration a priority.

As for the matter no one saw coming in 2024, data centers, Trump has positioned himself on the wrong side of a new grassroots movement. Fewer than one in four Americans believe that Trump is handling the question of artificial intelligence (ahem, “super intelligence”) well.

And finally there is the issue of self-enrichment. Once upon a time, Trump’s shamelessness was a superpower. How could there be a scandal if he did all the disgraceful things in full view? He seems to have followed that logic in the blatant, flamboyant corruption of his second term, making no secret of the nauseating graft he is heaping onto his and his family’s plates. But the GOP is not entirely along for the ride anymore. As recently as 2024, one would be hard-pressed to find a poll in which Americans listed government corruption as one of their top issues. Now the Financial Times/Focaldata finds that it ranks among the top three priorities for 57 percent of voters, behind only “lower prices and a stronger economy.” Several polls show corruption as the top issue. An October Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll found that 34 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners think Trump is enriching himself, a 12-point jump in thirteen months.

What’s left? The charm of the man himself. He’s on the ballot all right, and the public—even those he conned in the past—will have its say.

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Rep. Brendan Boyle joins Catherine Rampell to discuss what Democrats plan to do if they take back the House, from reversing Trump’s healthcare cuts and tariffs to confronting the economic fallout from his Iran war. Plus Sam Stein and Catherine look ahead to Election Day, Trump's closing economic message, and how rising costs and voters' frustrations over the economy could shape decisions at the polls.

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A quick note: One of the things we want Receipts to do is give conversations like this the room they deserve: go deep with people who know their industries inside and out, and trace government policy all the way from Washington to its effects on businesses, workers, and communities. Your support for The Bulwark gives us the freedom to do more of that kind of work.

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Mike Madrid has spent 35 years studying Latino voters, and he’s seeing things in the data he’s never seen before. That’s the kind of experience and perspective we want to bring you at The Bulwark—not just who’s ahead in the polls, but what’s actually changing in American politics and why.

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With Election Day just hours away, George Conway talks with veteran Republican strategist Mike Madrid about extraordinary Latino voter turnout, why Trump’s 2024 coalition may be coming apart, and the growing possibility of a Democratic upset in Texas. They also examine how Trump’s gerrymandering scheme could hand Democrats more House seats, the prospect of a sweeping Republican defeat, and the fallout from Haley Stevens’s shocking endorsement of Mike Rogers in Michigan.

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ROUGHLY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS FROM NOW, the Republican party could be looking at a set of catastrophic results in the midterm elections. If polls are to be believed, the party’s defeat could be severe enough to represent a repudiation of the party’s entire direction over the past decade.

Yet pro-Trump media figures are urging their audiences to focus their attention on an even more dire possibility: a total global apocalypse. Whether it’s the prospect of a world-ending war, a debilitating cyberattack, or some other kind of catastrophe, luminaries on the right increasingly feel the end may be nigh.

Much of these media figures’ focus for the past week has been on the idea that Western governments are hiding the fact that an unnamed apocalyptic event unrelated to the midterms is imminent.

“I want to tell you to prepare for impact,” podcaster Glenn Beck warned his audience on Wednesday.

The apocalypse fever sweeping the right has been embraced by pundits like Beck and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and has prompted one Republican congressman to try to allay those fears by insisting that no sort of “shit hitting the fan” scenario is about to occur.

Still, the pervasive idea of coming civilizational collapse has prompted a wave of prepping advice on the conservative internet.

The disaster watch began in late October after

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger give their takes on Trump’s bizarre closing pitch ahead of the midterms: a trip to the Reflecting Pool to brag about algae removal, vandalism that never happened, and his plans to renovate a DC golf course. Instead of making a final appeal to voters, Trump spent his time talking about monuments, promenades, statues and a proposed triumphal arch. Sam and Andrew discuss how Trump’s obsession with beautifying Washington DC has become a fitting symbol of a presidency increasingly consumed by personal passion projects as his broader agenda stalls.

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