Our Best Stuff on a Very Blue Forecast

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. After a hot and rainy summer in the Ohio bureau, I was finally able to open some windows this week and break out my sweatshirts. But the pleasant weather isn’t the only sign of fall: Football season is in full swing, Starbucks is assaulting us with its pumpkin spice lineup, and campaign ads are hitting back-to-back-to-back whenever the television is on. As annoying and repetitive as those ads can be, I have noticed one interesting trend: Very few that I’ve seen from Republicans mention President Donald Trump. And it makes sense: Gas and diesel prices remain high because of the Iran war, inflation is stubborn, and the president has been arguing against a slowdown in AI research at a time when opposition to data centers and concerns about the technology’s safety are both rising. None of that is redounding to the benefit of the GOP. Cook Political Report shifted 15 races toward Democrats this week, RealClearPolitics has the Democrats with an 8.7 point lead on the generic congressional ballot, and DecisionDeskHQ gives the Democrats even odds to take both the House and the Senate. Michael Warren reported Wednesday in Next Right that some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from Trump and his 39 percent approval rating. Here are just a few of the examples he cited: Last Friday, Iowa’s Republican Senate nominee, Rep. Ashley Hinson, stayed far away from Council Bluffs when Vice President J.D. Vance rolled in for a midterm rally. (“I know she couldn’t be here today, but are we going to elect Ashley Hinson the next United States senator from the great state of Iowa?” Vance asked the crowd. Couldn’t? More like wouldn’t.) Then, on Monday, Hinson went for broke, issuing a statement calling for the “successful and immediate end” to the Iran war. “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” she said. Over in Michigan, former Rep. Mike Rogers, the GOP Senate nominee, had the same message in a new ad. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life. Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down,” says Rogers as he stands in a grocery store produce section. “The war with Iran needs to end and end quickly.” Wedged in between Michigan and Iowa is Wisconsin, where Rep. Tom Tiffany, the GOP’s nominee for governor, told reporters on Tuesday, “I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it’s time to move on.” And Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, in his own tough race, echoed the call to end the Iran war. If the Democrats win the House as projected, it would render pointless Trump’s effort to have red states redraw their congressional maps to help the Republicans keep their majorities in both the House and the Senate. In Thursday’s Morning Dispatch, we reviewed which states had been able to enact new maps but focused on Missouri to show how the process has been not only controversial but confusing and inconvenient for voters. Missouri’s Legislature drew a new map in August 2025 and Gov. Mike Kehoe signed it into law the next month. Then the legal challenges began—and they are still going, even though the election is just weeks away. In fact, Missouri voters may find themselves voting in November based on a map drawn in 2022 rather than the 2025 map that was used in the primaries. As David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, told TMD, “This is the most chaotic situation we’ve ever seen with a map with less than two months to go before an election.” In Boiling Frogs on Wednesday, Nick Catoggio took a look at how we got here: Like Ronald Reagan in 1980, Trump’s victory in 2024 rested on a “three-legged stool” of policy. Reagan offered fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, and Cold War hawkery; Trump offered a lower cost of living, an end to “forever wars,” and hostility to immigration of all stripes. The coalition his platform produced was diverse and unusual, uniting ardent right-wing nativists with middle-class Hispanics disgruntled by Biden-era inflation. Toss in populist independents who resent business-as-usual Washington interventionism and you had a winning margin (barely) in swing states. That coalition has now been obliterated, shattered by Trump betraying his electoral mandate so completely that I’m stumped to think of a historical precedent. The first two legs of the stool have collapsed and the third, immigration, has been handled so poorly that it’s become a net liability for the White House. Read the polls and you can see the constituent parts of his 2024 base melting away in real time in anger at the foolish war he started and the oil crisis it’s caused. Trump did have some other things on his mind this week, including his address to the U.N. General Assembly and a state visit from Chinese leader Xi Jinping. But Kevin D. Williamson noticed that his U.N. speech seemed to be more about the upcoming elections and not international diplomacy: Trump’s speech was intended for domestic rather than international consumption, and it contained no good news for Republicans—rather the opposite, in fact: Trump reiterated his insistence that he expects an Iranian peace deal and a rapid decline in gasoline and diesel prices after the midterms, which is Trump’s beef-witted way of saying that he expects no such developments before the midterms. Not unrelatedly, he made a point of reminding the room that he is not going to be on the ballot. Allow me to translate that into English from the original Low Chimpanzee: You Republicans are hosed, nothing is going to be done about the one big issue that most irritates the greater part of your voters, and my main concern here is that this could make me look bad, so I’m just going to pretend that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. On that note, don’t miss our other great stuff from this week, including Mark Sawyer’s report on Russian efforts to kill dissidents on U.S. soil, Kevin’s Wanderland on the future of the GOP, and Hannah Anderson’s essay on educating our children. Russian intelligence services regularly try to kill defectors and dissidents, both within Russia’s borders and abroad. Three months ago, Russian artist and satirist Semyon Skrepetsky was shot outside his home in Poland in an attack authorities said bore the hallmarks of a political assassination. And in a highly publicized 2018 case, two Russian military intelligence agents traveled to the English city of Salisbury under the guise of tourism. While there, they poisoned Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia by applying a deadly nerve agent known as Novichok to the front door handle of Skripal’s home. The Skripals survived after a lengthy hospital stay, but an unrelated British woman died several months later after unknowingly poisoning herself with a discarded perfume bottle filled with Novichok that had been left behind by the Russian agents. Similar murder attempts have been carried out by specialized, trained Russian agents using military-grade poisons or violent attacks in broad daylight that leave little doubt the Russian government is responsible. However, almost all of those attacks have occurred within Russia or countries other than the United States, making a recent plot in Washington, D.C., notable both for its location and for its use of an untrained, hired proxy. In a sane world, we would not be talking about whether the Democrats will impeach Trump if they win congressional majorities in November but why Republicans have not done so already. But in the insane world we actually inhabit, we already know the answer to that question: It is because the Republican Party is dominated on the one hand by bigots and authoritarians who follow Trump because of his high crimes and misdemeanors and not in spite of them and on the other hand by cowards, crackpots, sycophants, nonentities, degenerates, grifters, and hacks who put their own interests—political, financial, celebrity-seeking—above the good of the country and who have left their self-respect so far behind that they could not catch a glimpse of it with the James Webb Space Telescope. Here at The Dispatch, we spend a great deal of time thinking about what a post-Trump American politics will look like and, relatedly, what kind of post-Trump future the Republican Party and the conservative movement will have. Speaking only for myself, I do not see how the Republican Party has a post-Trump future. Over the course of their educational journey, my children have attended public school and private school and have been homeschooled. This means that I’ve made and agonized over more decisions about their education than I care to remember. So, when I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay on the struggle to make educational choices for her daughter in keeping with her values, I immediately empathized. The essay raised universal questions, ones I’ve asked myself multiple times over the years: What responsibility do I have to my child? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with my neighbors? Would removing a child from public school mean I was abandoning those neighbors and betraying my own values of community? Unlike Hannah-Jones, I am a white mother in broader Appalachia who chose to remove my son from our local public school and enroll him in a prep school on financial aid. I made this decision, in part, because I became convinced that fighting for my own child’s education was not a self-serving decision but was, in fact, my moral duty within my community. Still, the decision was not obvious. My son spent his elementary years very happily in a Title I school that was the heartbeat of our rural working-class community. His father and I were both heavily involved, volunteering in different capacities, serving on the PTA, and supporting a program that organized shelf-stable food for kids at risk for hunger. By middle school, however, the kids in our community transitioned to a county school about a 40-minute bus ride away. That’s when the cracks began to show. Best of the Rest 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.