Lumberman Dean Angstadt tells one of the more dramatic stories about the impact of the Affordable Care Act. A loyal Republican and Fox Viewer who once said, “I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” Angstadt found himself self-employed, uninsured and in urgent need of heart-valve replacement surgery. He’d drunk the Fox News Kool-Aid, however, and at first adamantly refused to sign up through the ACA exchange.
Of U.S. registered voters say they are less enthusiastic about voting than in previous elections, while 35% are more enthusiastic, according to Gallup. “This 18-percentage-point enthusiasm deficit is larger than what Gallup has measured in prior midterm election years, particularly in 2010 when there was record midterm enthusiasm.”
You know what’s at stake. Only six wins this fall for Republicans leaves them to rule the Senate. If that happens, House-passed bills outlawing contraception and abortion, promoting guns, and cutting food stamps even for children will be the law of the land. And those 50 votes to defund and rescind Obamacare? Done deal.
That’s why states where Democratic senators seem at risk are drowning in dollars from those who profit if Republicans are in charge. Can you blame the Koch brothers for spending millions through their front group, Americans for Prosperity, on ads to tip these races? They’ll earn back billions if their legislation — like a bill to charge people for using solar panels instead of burning the fossil fuels that are heating our planet but lining the Kochs’ pockets — passes.
Pundits, at first stunned by a Democrat not playing by the GOP rules, are realizing the brilliance of Hagan’s move.
North Carolina, where Sen. Kay Hagan (D) is up for re-election, could be drawing the most outside money.
Voters in North Carolina have already been bombarded with 15,000 television political advertisements thanks to the U.S. Senate race…
The cost of those ads is a whopping $6.3 million, and nearly all of them have been paid for by outside groups, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project.
Many of the ads criticize Hagan’s vote for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a strategy chosen by Republican consultant Karl Rove and the Kochs after the healthcare.gov website’s rocky launch last October. But the overall success of Obamacare’s first enrollment period leaves fewer one-issue voters who will go to the polls just to get rid of the ACA’s supporters.
Amount the Koch brothers’ main political arm intends to spend on an aggressive ground, air and data operation benefiting conservatives in the midterm elections. “The projected budget for Americans for Prosperity would be unprecedented for a private political group in a midterm, and would likely rival even the spending of the Republican and Democratic parties’ congressional campaign arms,” according to Politico.
We’ve got to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime. And I don’t believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.
— Hillary Clinton, delivering harsh criticism of gun culture in America and denouncing the idea that “anybody can have a gun, anywhere, at any time,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they are supporters of the Tea Party, while 11% are opponents and 48% are neither, a new Gallup poll finds. That is a significant drop from the Tea Party’s high-water mark in November 2010, when 61% of Republicans were supporters.
Despite what you read, N.C. Assembly Speaker Thom Tillis, who won the primary race in the U.S. Senate election yesterday, is not a Republican “establishment” candidate. Tillis is, in fact, a tea bagger of the first order, per PM Carpenter:
Tillis takes a second, reactionary pew to no man: he opposes a federally mandated minimum wage; he denies the science of climate change; he supported a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and further restrictions on a woman’s right to abortion; and of course as a NC prophet of national Republican totalitarianism, he just can’t get enough of voter suppression.
As Tillis kicks off his campaign to unseat Sen. Kay Hagan, a conservative Democrat, he already finds himself mired in controversy after being caught on tape suggesting that, in order to advance its war on the poor, the GOP must turn sick and invalided people who receive disability payments against poor people who rely on government assistance:
Remember during the last presidential campaign when Mitt Romney was reaching out for the Hispanic vote and the Republican National Committee jumped in to help out with a Latino-oriented website that featured a stock photo of Asians instead of Latinos?
Well, it’s happened again. To Fox News.
Figuring one sad Asian is as good as another, Fox ran video of a grief-stricken woman mourning the Sherpas who died on Mount Everest in a story about the Sewol Korean ferry disaster. Koreans living in the United States could tell the difference, even if the bright lights at Fox couldn’t, and spoke up.
Elon throttled Starlink because Ukranians were killing Russians,
But by throttling it, Elon enabled Russians to kill Ukranians.
So the world’s richest, weirdest guy,
Gets to decide who lives and who dies?
That’s too much power in the hands of a dude who wants to be a Martian.
“Stephen Miller is a stone-cold racist. His track record speaks for itself, and I’ve got zero interest in working with that kind of individual.”
— “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller a ‘stone-cold racist’ and said he can’t work with him,” Punchbowl News reports.
“Take, for example, the French Revolution. Remember when Marie Antoinette said, ‘Let them eat cake’? Now, is that a problem of accountability and tyranny, a corrupt government? Or is it a problem of affordability and standard of living? It’s both! Authoritarianism and tyranny are extremely expensive for the people. And it’s the exact same thing when you go down the line with Donald Trump. So, are we going to go after the corruption? Yeah, you’re damn right. And are we going to go after affordability and making people’s lives easier? Yeah, you’re damn right. We’re going to do both of them.”
“Here’s the problem with the red meat: It becomes an addiction. Once you go there and you put that out there, then you’re forced to defend it. So what do they do? They double down. They triple down again.”
— Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D), quoted by the Washington Post, on Republicans relying on anti-Muslim attacks in the Michigan U.S. Senate race.
<2>U.S. inflation was higher than expected last month as the rising prices that powered sweeping Democratic victories in last week’s midterm elections appear likely to pose ongoing challenges for the White House and the Federal Reserve, the Associated Press reported. The consumer price index rose 0.4% from September to October, the Labor Department said Tuesday, down from 0.6% the previous month. The government did not report a yearly inflation rate because last year’s government shutdown meant no data was released for October 2025. But excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 0.3%, the same as the preceding month. Both figures were a tenth of a point higher than forecast, and at an annual rate would be well above the Fed’s 2% target.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating held near the lowest level of his political career, depressed by national concerns over rising prices that tanked his Republican Party in last week’s midterm elections, according to ?a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday. Some 32% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance ?in the White House, unchanged from two prior Reuters/Ipsos polls conducted between late ?October and early November. It was one percentage point higher than his 31% rating ?in a Reuters/Ipsos poll in mid-October, the lowest of his career in politics, reported Reuters.
A record number of women are running for state legislative seats this November, more than two-thirds of whom are Democrats, reports Florida Phoenix. Across the 46 states with legislative seats on the ballot, a total of 3,824 women are running — up from 2022’s previous record of 3,621 women candidates, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Women make up 35.5% of all state legislative candidates this cycle. Currently, women hold about one-third of state legislative seats across the country — a record level of representation but nowhere near parity.
“Prediction markets about the 2026 midterm elections have surpassed $1.4 billion in trading volume as Election Day fast approaches,” CNN reports. “This year has seen massive growth in the prediction industry, where people can bet on real-world events like sports, entertainment and the weather. While small-scale election markets have been around for a while, they gained traction before the 2024 presidential election and have seen huge numbers for the 2026 midterms.”
G. Elliot Morris: “Low-knowledge 2024 voters say they backed Trump by 8 points, according to our poll. Today they give him a net job approval of ?27, a 35-point shift. Compare that to Trump’s approval rating among voters who got both questions right: These voters backed Harris by 1 point and now give Trump a net ?24 approval, a 23-point shift. … Low-information voters have moved against Trump at a higher rate than high-information voters, by 12 points.”
