Our Best Stuff From the Last Week Before the Midterms. Finally.

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. And happy Halloween! If you’re taking little Minions and Marios and Minecrafters around your neighborhood tonight, enjoy every moment and don’t forget to collect your candy tax for your hard work. And when you get home and the kids are inspecting their hauls, here’s a pro tip from my husband: Separate the chocolate from the fruity candy. Reese’s Cups just aren’t as good the next day when accompanied by notes of Skittle and undertones of Twizzler. The last day of October means, of course, that the first Tuesday of November can’t be far away. We’ve almost made it! It would be easy (and nice) to sit back and laugh about some of the weirder things we’ve seen this election cycle—President Donald Trump’s fascination with Ohio Senate nominee Jon Husted’s physique, AI slop ads, Vivek Ramaswamy’s baseball swing. But there are some very serious concerns surrounding the election. For starters, history tells us that Trump doesn’t exactly respond well to his team losing. And Republican losses are definitely in the forecast for Tuesday: Election prognosticators pretty much unanimously predict that Democrats will take the House, and a Senate map that initially favored Republicans has veered into, at best, toss-up territory. Will Trump take any steps to meddle if Democrats sweep on Tuesday? Frankly, Nick Catoggio is a little surprised the president hasn’t done more to intervene preemptively. In Boiling Frogs, he runs through some potential reasons why Trump hasn’t sought to postpone the election, and he settles on the notion that it’s important to Trump that any action have a sheen of legality. He writes: A movement founded on reempowering The People by ridding Washington of its rotten elites would struggle to rationalize denying The People their usual say at the polls. Better to hold the vote and then contrive some nonsense after the fact that the results were tainted by foreign interlopers. Likewise, a movement that revels in victimhood will find reversing a “rigged” defeat more palatable than intervening to prevent that defeat from happening. In one case, they’re merely righting a wrong that’s been done to them; in the other, they’re engaged in the wrongdoing. Kevin D. Williamson has seen enough from what the Trump administration has done—a preemptive lawsuit challenging the outcome of the Alaska Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses, badgering states to hand over their voter rolls, etc.—that he’s expecting a replay of the legal challenges we saw when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He writes: It isn’t a crime—in the narrow legal sense of that word—for the administration to file pretextual lawsuits or to attempt to use the DOJ in unconstitutional ways. But what is under way—right here, in public, under our noses, not in the shadows or in secret—is immoral, illegitimate, and a crime in the profounder sense of that word. We’ll see what happens next week. But in the meantime, Dispatch reporters have been out on the trail covering the campaign’s final days. Grayson Logue traveled to Michigan to check in on one of the highest-profile Senate races, between MAGA Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive aligned with (though not a member of) the Democratic Socialists of America whose criticisms of Israel have prompted critics to describe him as antisemitic. Grayson found a few Republicans who were planning to vote for Rogers, though not enthusiastically: Nick Myer, one of the few middle-aged attendees, told The Dispatch, “I don’t know a ton about Rogers, but what I hear about the other side, there’s no competition.” Other supporters The Dispatch spoke with echoed the lack of enthusiasm. “Mike Rogers, I’m sure he’s gonna be good, but he’s not a good candidate as far as his excitement level,” Sue Simonson, a Grosse Pointe resident and local Republican precinct delegate, told The Dispatch at a Rogers tailgate for the Senate debate last week. “He can probably manage the job, but I don’t think people are excited about him. I’m not even excited about him.” John McCormack traveled to Kansas, which typically doesn’t get a lot of attention during election season because the state is so red. But incumbent GOP Sen. Roger Marshall is in trouble, enough that Trump has made one appearance there and will be back Sunday. He spoke to Faith Paxton, a two-time Trump voter who told him she’s embarrassed by Trump and voting “Democrat across the board, except for one person on the board of education.” He writes: Faith Paxton is one type of Kansas Republican who could cost Republicans a Senate seat in a state that has not sent a Democrat to the upper chamber of Congress in nearly a century. Another troubling type of voter for Republicans is Tom Hefner, a retired maintenance worker in Atchison. In 2024, Trump won Kansas by 16 points but took Atchison by 37. Hefner, sporting a long beard and a worn Kansas City Chiefs cap, told The Dispatch he still considers himself a Trump supporter but won’t vote for Marshall this year. “I voted for [Marshall] a long time ago when he ran, but he did not do what he said he was going to do when he got in, and he’s voted more like a Democrat than a stand-up conservative Republican,” Hefner said. For better or worse, the conclusion of the midterms is also the unofficial kickoff to the 2028 presidential campaign. And Michael Warren noticed while following J.D. Vance around that the vice president has been working on his messaging for that race while out stumping for midterm candidates: Instead of pledging to build upon the overflowing successes of Trump’s two nonconsecutive terms, Vance reaches back to the pre-Trump political status quo, painting a picture of a bipartisan, globalist establishment that sucked Middle America dry to serve its investments and wars overseas. In 2016, Trump successfully ran in a Republican primary against the presidency and legacy of George W. Bush, and it seems Vance wants to return to that well. On that note, have a great weekend. Don’t forget that we all get an extra hour of sleep this weekend—we can use it. Thank you for reading. Data centers are different from other heavy industries for obvious reasons. But one reason, perhaps less obvious, is that they feel different. Put another way: They materially and functionally have nothing whatsoever to do with the places where they are built. For 150 years, coal was one of Kentucky’s primary exports because, well, it’s here. You dig it up from the ground, and Kentuckians were employed in the business of doing just that. Communities were built in service to it. Even miners who contract black lung, identify, on a primal level, with the work; it’s handed down from father to son, it lives in the blood. Hyperscale data centers, on the other hand, could be, and are, anywhere. … In July, on my way back to New York, I detoured to Lebanon, Ohio, to drive around the perimeter of a data center there, to get a feel for the thing, to try to imagine it on Steele Road, next to the Bright’s antique mall. I don’t have much to say. What is it? It’s nothing. Flat, faceless blocks as far as the eye can see. It’s no-place. It’s placelessness personified. When looking at a data center, it is curiously easy to imagine the sci-fi fantasy that Elon Musk recently proposed—orbital data centers encircling the Earth—because you feel, in proximity to one, as estranged from your surroundings as a man on Mars. I got back on the highway. 1927. It was a quiet spring night in the alpine village of Borgo Valsugana when a knock came at the door. It was an officer of the carabinieri, the state police force. Alcide De Gasperi, a former member of the Italian parliament, opened the door and was told that, for his safety, he would need to follow the officer into a waiting car. De Gasperi knew better. Giovanni Amendola, another opposition politician, had recently been told the same thing before being beaten to death by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s thugs. “You are taking on a grave responsibility,” he said to the policeman, and got into the vehicle. Some way down the road, the policeman left and was replaced by two Fascist Blackshirts. De Gasperi was driven to an isolated building and taken into a large oval room where he was surrounded by Mussolini’s street fighters. They asked him if he was a real Italian; he said that he was and always had been. They pressed him on why he wouldn’t get behind fascism. With calm resolution, he explained his reasons, without hedging, “It’s the entire concept of the fascist state that I cannot accept. There are natural rights upon which the state cannot tread. I cannot accept the excessive centralization, the current disciplinary state, as they call it now, of liberty.” J.D. Vance would very much like you to know that he is a Christian. “Christian” is the first word in his most prominent social media bio. He recently published a ghastly, stupid, profoundly dishonest book about his supposed Christian faith and his supposed conversion to it, a preposterous pile of nonsense on theological stilts that is every bit as transparently and imbecilically dishonest as his story about his other notable conversion, to Trumpism. There is, of course, a longstanding debate within Christianity as to when deceit is allowable, which proceeds along a fairly straightforward line regarding the prevention of a greater evil, e.g., just as the biblical midwives deceived Pharaoh to save the lives of Jewish children, those who deceived the German authorities to save other Jewish children (and adults) from the Holocaust—at great personal risk—were engaged in virtuous acts of charity and courage rather than in vicious acts of deceit. But virtuous acts of charity and courage are entirely unknown to the vice president of these United States, who has waged a campaign of vicious deceit against some of the most vulnerable people in our society, from the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, slandered by the vice president and his coterie as pet-eating savages, to victims of horrifying childhood abuse—the indictment at the center of the current controversy involving Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy was, let us recall, for the rape of a 12-year-old girl by her stepfather, who had been charged with incest in a separate case. Best of the Rest Want to see more of The Dispatch in Google search? Add Us as a Preferred Source Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.