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Elon Musk is reusing Trump’s anti-trans strategy. It’s unlikely to work.
The world’s richest man is spending at least $100 million on the midterm elections to support the Republican Party and his far-right agenda. But it looks like Elon Musk’s focus won’t be the economy, or the war in Iran or artificial intelligence. It won’t be his repellent ideas about race and his advocacy for “white solidarity.” Instead, Musk has come out of the gate with a barrage of ads targeting Democrats for not being sufficiently supportive of discrimination against transgender Americans.
It’s ugly and hateful, but Musk’s efforts, and those of other Republicans who are sending the same message, will probably fail.
If the anti-trans ads were brilliantly effective, they should have made a difference in the places where they were run most frequently. But they didn’t.
Two months ago, one Republican operative described the party’s strategy this way: “It’s going to be a hate election.” In fact, that’s a fair description of every Republican campaign going back decades. As Richard Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, the architect of the “Southern Strategy,” said in 1968, “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” Republicans always have a group they want people to hate. Sometimes it’s immigrants, sometimes it’s Muslims, sometimes it’s uppity women, but there’s always a target.
This year, like the last two years, the GOP has decided the hatred should be directed at trans people, a small and vulnerable group of Americans who already face extraordinary discrimination.
Musk’s transphobia carries a personal motivation: One of his children, a trans woman, has publicly rejected him, and he says she was “killed by the woke mind virus.” And he likely believes that using the anti-trans playbook Donald Trump ran against Kamala Harris in 2024 is the path to success. It’s a common myth, one that never had any empirical support.
That year Republicans spent $215 million on advertising attacking trans people. After Trump won by 1.5% of the popular vote, the inference that the anti-trans ads made the difference became conventional wisdom. Even now, both inside and outside the GOP, many treat the argument as so self-evidently true it requires no investigation (“Republicans remember how lethal the Trump campaign’s ‘Kamala is for they/them’ ads were to Kamala Harris’ campaign in 2024,” Axios recently wrote).
But the assertion that those ads were terribly effective, let alone “lethal” to Harris, has no evidence to support it. No quantitative studies, no analysis of voting patterns showing that places where the ads aired went stronger for Trump, nothing.
When Democrats say, “I support trans rights but I also have concerns” — as too many of them do — they earn no credit.
There has been little research at all investigating this question. But a randomized trial at the end of the campaign found that while showing voters Trump’s ad produced a small negative effect on sympathy for trans people, “the Trump ad yielded no statistically significant shift in voter choice, mobilization or likelihood to vote.”
That’s not definitive, given that testing ads in a controlled trial doesn’t mirror the way people receive them in the real world. But in that real world, Harris performed better in places where the campaign was most intense on the ground and in the air. If the anti-trans ads were brilliantly effective, they should have made a difference in the places where they were run most frequently. But they didn’t.
In 2025, Republicans tried the anti-trans attacks again, including in the gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey. Democrats won both contests easily and anti-trans candidates lost local races across the country.
Nevertheless, Musk and his GOP allies are reopening this spigot of hate.
How should Democrats respond? Frightened hedging won’t work. When Democrats say, “I support trans rights but I also have concerns” — as too many of them do — they earn no credit. It only reinforcing the idea that they’re weak and unprincipled., which is the single biggest image problem the Democratic Party faces.
Bans on trans athletes would have to be enforced somehow, such as through invasive (and expensive) DNA testing or gential inspections.
Another answer is to just ignore it, and turn the conversation back what voters actually care about. Poll after poll shows economic concerns swamping every other issue in the campaign.
Or Democrats could choose an approach they seldom take on this issue: Attack. Turn the issue back on their GOP opponents. Let’s consider the issue of trans athletes in sports. A ballot initiative pushed by Republicans in Washington state, for example, requires doctors to verify the sex assigned at birth of every girl who wants play sports. Other GOP-backed bans lack provisions for verifying school athletes’ sex, admitting by omission that any such mechanisms would be unpopular. Before passing a ban in 2021, for example, Florida Republicans removed at the last moment language that would have required transgender athletes in high schools undergo a physical exam and testosterone and genetic testing.
But these bans would have to be enforced somehow, such as through invasive (and expensive) DNA testing or genital inspections. If Democrats were as ruthless as Republicans, they’d be saying things like “I’m worried about how to make life more affordable, but my opponent wants to require genital inspections for little girls. We need to leave kids alone, and tell my opponent to stay out of our kids’ locker rooms.”
Few if any Democrats will do that, of course. But all of them do need to be ready for the nine-figure tsunami of hate Elon Musk is about to unleash on them. They can start by remembering that this campaign from a deeply unpopular tech oligarch is unlikely to succeed. Perhaps knowing that, they’ll realize that standing up against hate is always the right thing to do.
The post Elon Musk is reusing Trump’s anti-trans strategy. It’s unlikely to work. appeared first on MS NOW.
Trump’s easiest path to saving the GOP’s midterms just disappeared
At 8:30 a.m. Friday morning, President Donald Trump’s best chance at good economic news before the midterm elections went poof.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index rose in August by 0.4% and 3.4% over the past year. The “core CPI” (the less volatile measure that removes food and energy prices) rose 0.3% for the month and 2.4% annually. For the fifth month in a row, inflation-adjusted wages fell on a yearly basis.
Were this September 2025, the BLS’ report would be disappointing for the White House but hardly catastrophic. Inflation isn’t accelerating, and it remains well below its peak back in 2022. There were even bright spots in some areas: Grocery prices were flat for the second straight month, for instance.
Trump and his party are stuck with the same argument that failed Democrats in 2024: a plea for patience.
But this is September 2026, and the president and his party are out of time.
Next week, the Federal Reserve Board will vote on whether to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Trump, who fell out with previous Chairman Jerome Powell over the Fed’s independence, has put enormous pressure on new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh to lower the rates. The president even threatened to stop trade with countries that have a surplus with the United States if the Fed doesn’t cut rates.
But Warsh has suggested he will disappoint the president.
“Inflation is running above our 2% target,” he said in a speech in Jackson Hole last month. “So the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices.”
As of Friday afternoon, investors put the odds of a rate increase at over 85%. As CNBC’s Matt Peterson wrote, “[Warsh’s] choice now is whether to raise interest rates, or look like he isn’t in control of the central bank he leads.”
A rate increase not only means upward pressure on rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans and other expenses many voters have; it is also a definitive sign (if another were needed) that Trump’s promise to bring down prices “on Day One” have failed.
For over a year and a half, the White House and its GOP allies have blamed the Biden administration for economic troubles and assured voters that things are getting better.
For instance, consider the $5,000 “dividend” Trump promised this week if Republicans win the midterms. Others at MS NOW have already noted how this stunt is likely illegal on its face, would need congressional approval even if it is legal and mirrors other Trump promises that were never kept.
But there’s also an irony here: These checks may not even cover the pain Trump has brought to people’s pocketbooks.
As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem wrote, “Trump has not only failed to address the cost-of-living crisis with actual solutions, but he’s also systematically made it worse.” Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab estimated that just at the gas station, the Iran war has cost U.S. households roughly $800 in seven months. And the war has been intensifying again in recent. The Tax Foundation estimated that by the end of 2026, Trump’s tariffs and trade wars will have cost Americans about $1,800 each. Add in higher interest rates and more tax dollars needed to pay for the billions in new military spending and higher debt service costs. Totaled up, as the American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper pointed out, and Trump’s second term “is virtually guaranteed to have cost the average American more than $5,000.”
Even Trump’s promised timing for the checks — after the midterms — is an admission that he and his party are stuck with the same argument that failed Democrats in 2024: a plea for patience. For over a year and a half, the White House and its GOP allies have blamed the Biden administration for economic troubles and assured voters that things are getting better. At times, Trump has even claimed a new golden age is already here.
This month’s inflation report confirms that the GOP’s version of “stick with us” is even harder than it was for Joe Biden in 2022 and later Kamala Harris in 2024. Whereas Democrats could at least say the rate of inflation declined significantly over the latter two years of Biden’s term, that rate has plateaued under Trump — and wages are once again trailing inflation. And to an unusual extent, the president’s actions, most visibly the war with Iran, are to blame, as his polling on the economy shows.
The quickest path to a surprisingly strong midterm for the GOP was through a sharp economic revival. That path is now closed.
The post Trump’s easiest path to saving the GOP’s midterms just disappeared appeared first on MS NOW.
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The 50 races defining the 2026 midterms
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The last time Republicans faced voters with Trump as president without him also being on the ballot, they lost the House in a rout while gaining Senate seats from friendlier terrain.
Eight years, two presidential elections and one mob assault on the Capitol later, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is stronger than it was then. Republicans are so bound to him that they staged a midterm convention built around the president and his record — a wager that leans into the one thing midterm voters most reliably punish: the president and the party in power.
Democrats, meanwhile, are still arguing over how they lost to the man they organized their whole strategy against, and whether the way back is through rebuilding the party’s national brand or running from it.
Below are the 50 races that will settle those arguments — starting in a place where Republicans rewrote the rules and may lose anyway.
The southern state shift
North Carolina Republicans are trying to engineer their way into electoral success by making it harder for a Democrat to keep winning a congressional district coveted by conservatives.
Rep. Don Davis (1) is a moderate who votes against his party often enough — and stays out of the national spotlight thoroughly enough — that he has held his seat even as Democrats have struggled in the South.
* = incumbent
North Carolina’s 1st
Congressional District
The new lines that GOP lawmakers in Raleigh forced into law, over the objections of a Democratic governor whose power over the map is essentially nil, have made his district friendlier to Trump.
In an ordinary cycle, a shift like that — part of the mid-decade redistricting fight playing out nationally — would have made Davis an easy opponent this fall, especially with Republican Laurie Buckhout challenging him for a second time. But as with so much in the Trump era, the obvious outcome is not the only one possible.
Davis may yet hold on, helped in part by former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who is running against Trump-backed former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley for the state’s open Senate seat. (2)
North Carolina
U.S. Senate
Progressives wanted a shot to win in purple places. Now they have it.
For years, Democrats have argued among themselves over whether candidates well to the party’s left can win competitive general elections — with progressives insisting that proximity to the center is not the same thing as electability.
In Michigan, that wing of the party is finally getting a chance to see if its appeal can be broad enough to win over voters in a state Trump has carried twice. A loss by progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed (3) would all but end Democrats’ path to flipping control of the Senate. El-Sayed overcame a fortune in outside spending against him in the August primary, and a victory in November could push the party onto a markedly different course.
Michigan
U.S. Senate
Republicans, watching their Senate candidates struggle elsewhere, see former Rep. Mike Rogers as their best chance to take a seat Democrats currently hold. Rogers is two years removed from losing Michigan’s other Senate seat by fewer than 20,000 votes.
The race also runs through some of the country’s rawest divides: over antisemitism and Islamophobia, over U.S. ties to Israel at a moment of deep unease in the Middle East and over whether “America first” should mean pulling back from the world. Whatever Michigan voters intend by their choice, it will be read nationally as a verdict on all of it.
Progressives have also spent years losing crowded primaries for the right to take on House Republicans. In Michigan’s 7th District, home to the state capital of Lansing, William Lawrence (4) won the nomination to challenge Republican Rep. Tom Barrett, beating both a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a former Navy SEAL who split the field. He did it while answering for past podcast comments in which he, a white leftist, described “the older generation of Black political leadership” as a “pillar, frankly, for establishment capitalist imperialist American power” within the Democratic Party — a dynamic that, he said, “really defangs the white left.”
Michigan’s 7th
Congressional District
Lawrence’s general election pitch may prove a hard sell in a seat Democrats badly want back: Barrett flipped it in 2024 as then-Rep. Elissa Slotkin left to run for U.S. Senate.
House Democrats’ campaign arm picked before voters did. It didn’t get its way.
Control of the House could come down to a handful of seats. Against that backdrop, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made its preferences known before primary voters had their say in several races, among them California’s 22nd District, Arizona’s 1st and Maine’s 2nd. (5, 6 and 7)
California’s 22nd
Congressional District
Arizona’s 1st
Congressional District
Maine’s 2nd
Congressional District
In all three, the candidates the DCCC touted lost to rivals — leaving the winners to campaign with the public knowledge that their own party’s campaign operation had picked against them, whatever shows of support Washington has offered since.
Republicans’ redistricting Hail Mary
Beginning last year, Trump and his allies pursued a nationwide effort to redraw Democratic-held districts in red states, all in service of trying to keep at least a narrow House majority.
Starting in Texas and stretching to Missouri, North Carolina and Florida, GOP-led legislatures changed boundaries in their states to try and bring as many as 11 seats from the left to the right this fall. Through that lens, nine races in those states have the potential for outsized impact: Missouri’s 5th District; Florida’s 9th, 14th, 22nd and 25th; and Texas’s 15th, 28th, 34th and 35th. (8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16)
Missouri’s 5th
Congressional District
Florida’s 9th
Congressional District
Florida’s 14th
Congressional District
Florida’s 22nd
Congressional District
Florida’s 25th
Congressional District
Texas’s 15th
Congressional District
Texas’s 28th
Congressional District
Texas’s 34th
Congressional District
Texas’s 35th
Congressional District
That effort got a boost in late April from a Supreme Court ruling described by the Republican Party as “a win for fairness, the rule of law, and anyone who opposes racial gerrymandering.” It opened a path for more Republican governed states to change districts with major minority populations that had been won by Democrats. Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee moved quickly as a result, bringing Republicans another trio of potential seats.
Democrats’ attempts to respond to those redraws have been scattered. California Democrats pushed through an overhaul targeting Republicans to offset the Texas gains, but a large-scale effort in Virginia fell apart.
Not every reshaped seat will change hands on election night. But the maps have already changed the fundamentals of the midterms. And there remains a real possibility that Black voters’ anger at seeing their electoral power curtailed across the South — particularly in Alabama’s 2nd District, where Rep. Shomari Figures is running despite the Republican redraw — shows up in turnout (17)
Alabama’s 2nd
Congressional District
The Senate shift to state capitals.
Seven years ago, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar was running for president.
This fall, she is trying to leave the Senate seat she has held since 2007 to become her state’s governor. (18) The move reflects a clear choice among some politicians: rather than just be one of 100 votes in the Senate they could lead a state — with all the power, risks and responsibilities that come with it.
Minnesota Governor
She is not alone. Republican Sens. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, both of whom disputed the 2020 presidential election results, are also running to lead their states. (19 and 20)
Tennessee Governor
Alabama Governor
The size of their 2026 wins could springboard them to a White House run.
Republicans have a chance this fall to beat Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in a state that proved pivotal to Trump’s return to the White House.
That doesn’t mean they expect to.
Shapiro faces Republican state Treasurer Stacy Garrity in November, and the potential 2028 presidential contender appears to be running far ahead of her. (21) A decisive win would lift Shapiro further in a 2028 conversation expected to be enormously crowded.
Pennsylvania Governor
It could also determine whether his party takes the House.
Pennsylvania has at least three Republican-held congressional seats, and possibly four, where his coattails could matter: Pennsylvania’s 1st, 7th, 8th and 10th districts. (22, 23, 24 and 25) Given how narrow control of the House could end up being, Shapiro’s help could be a force in deciding which party has control of the chamber in Washington this time next year.
Pennsylvania’s 1st
Congressional District
Pennsylvania’s 7th
Congressional District
Pennsylvania’s 8th
Congressional District
Pennsylvania’s 10th
Congressional District
In Georgia, Sen. Jon Ossoff headed into this cycle appearing to be one of the most vulnerable incumbent Democrats in the country. Since then, he’s commanded national attention in a race against a Republican challenger whose flaws have led to worry within the GOP. (26) A standout performance from Ossoff, especially coming from the presidential battleground state of Georgia, would only add to talk about him being a strong presidential contender.
Georgia
U.S. Senate
Hating on the Democratic Party party could help the left outrun ghosts
Democrats have spent years slipping in Iowa. Since the 2020 caucus debacle cost the state its place at the front of the left’s presidential calendar, the party has struggled. Now it has its best opening in years — in statewide races and down the ballot in a series of House contests, from the Iowa Senate race between Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek and Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, and the House races in the 1st and 3rd districts. (27, 28 and 29)
Iowa
U.S. Senate
Iowa’s 1st
Congressional District
Iowa’s 3rd
Congressional District
Key to Democrats’ efforts is the campaign of state Auditor Rob Sand, the only Democrat holding statewide office in Iowa. He is running for governor while relying on an identity deliberately separate from the national party’s — and has shown a willingness to break with it. (30)
Iowa Governor
The Texas-sized question mark
Ken Paxton is among the most controversial candidates on any statewide ballot in the country this fall. The Texas attorney general was impeached, and acquitted, by a Legislature run by his own party over allegations that he misused the office. He was also behind the failed Supreme Court bid to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.
Behind all of that baggage, he still managed to defeat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a primary runoff in which the attorney general had Trump’s endorsement.
Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. Paxton’s record has put that streak — and the seat — in genuine peril as he hurtles toward the finish line in a close-fought senate race against state Rep. James Talarico. (31)
Texas
U.S. Senate
Texas is a state where Hispanic voters, who around the nation helped Trump win the presidency, have the ability for major electoral influence. In both the Senate race and down the ballot in Texas’ 15th District (see 13 above) — where Bobby Pulido, a famous Tejano musician, is running against incumbent GOP Rep. Monica De La Cruz —immigration politics that were an asset for the right not long ago threaten to turn into a liability.
Election deniers’ path to more power
Republicans have largely tried to move past Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election, even as the president’s false claims that he won have become central to his legacy.
Yet a striking number of election deniers are running for governor this year, several of them well positioned to win — a throughline suggesting that siding with Trump on 2020, whatever the falsehoods involved, has carried little political cost.
Voters have generally shown that democracy-related issues are not decisive in their choices. And there is a strong chance that from Florida to Ohio to South Carolina, Republicans who undermined Biden’s 2020 win will hold far more powerful offices heading into the next presidential election. (32, 33 and 34)
Florida Governor
Ohio Governor
South Carolina Governor
Even in states with tougher general electorates, election deniers won their primaries. In Arizona, Rep. Andy Biggs is the GOP nominee for governor after backing Trump’s false 2020 claims, and the party’s nominee for attorney general has amplified stolen election rhetoric as well. (35 and 36) Meanwhile, Republican Alexander Kolodin, who played a major part in working to throw out 2020 presidential election results in Arizona and award the state to Trump, is running to become its chief elections official. (37)
Arizona Governor
Arizona
Secretary of State
Arizona
Attorney General
Georgia’s most important race may not be the one you think
A bruising Republican primary for governor ended with wealthy businessman Rick Jackson defeating Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in a June runoff. Jackson has claimed he would be Trump’s “favorite governor.” Jones has declined to endorse him since the primary differences.
No Democrat has won the Georgia governorship since Roy Barnes in the 1998 midterms. If former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ends that drought, the implications will reach well into the next presidential cycle. Bottoms has a chance to shift her party’s story in the South — and to become the first Black woman elected governor of any state. (38)
Georgia Governor
The Democrats’ Senate path runs through red states
Whether Democrats can win the Senate depends on persuading voters in states where the party has lost ground.
The path starts with beating Republicans in Maine and in the presidential battleground of North Carolina. Neither is assured — least of all Maine, where allegations against Democrat Graham Platner prompted him to leave the race and forced a candidate switch this summer to former state Senate president Troy Jackson, and GOP Sen. Susan Collins has a formidable record of wins. (39)
Maine
U.S. Senate
If those flips happen, Democrats likely need to win two more states from the grouping of Ohio, Alaska, Texas and Iowa.
Alaska is a real, if surprising, opportunity. Former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola is challenging GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in a November race, and the state’s ranked-choice ballot could work in her favor. (40)
Alaska
U.S. Senate
Ohio is the sorest spot. A state that once decided presidential elections had become red enough by 2020 that the party effectively wrote it off, and it stayed written off in 2024. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who lost his seat that year, has drawn real concern from Republicans as an opponent to GOP Sen. Jon Husted. (41) But the party’s position in the state is bleak: Kamala Harris lost Ohio by the widest margin of any presidential nominee of either party there since the 1980s.
Ohio
U.S. Senate
House seats are at risk in Ohio, too, especially the one held by longtime Rep. Marcy Kaptur. She has frustrated Republicans for years by hanging on, but a rematch against Republican Derek Merrin — in a district made more winnable for conservatives by last year’s bipartisan redistricting compromise — sets up a tense fall. (42)
Ohio’s 9th
Congressional District
The new Democratic coalition that leadership could face
At least five democratic socialists are expected to win easily this fall and arrive in Congress: Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Donavan McKinney in Michigan, as well as Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York. (43, 44, 45, 46 and 47)
Pennsylvania’s 3rd
Congressional District
Colorado’s 1st
Congressional District
Michigan’s 13th
Congressional District
New York’s 7th
Congressional District
New York’s 13th
Congressional District
If Democrats flip the chamber, that bloc could be a problem for House leadership. Republicans’ narrow majority these past few years has shown how much leverage a handful of members on a party’s flank can wield over its leaders.
The Bernie Sanders Blue Dogs
Democrats’ internal divisions are deep — over policy, over how to use power, over who is to blame for losing. But in a few places, the two forces pulling at the party are centered in the same direction.
Just a few House candidates have managed in these midterms to be both endorsed by progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Blue Dog political outfit synonymous with centrism: Brian Poindexter in Ohio, running against controversial incumbent Republican Rep. Max Miller (48); Sam Forstag, who has worked as a smokejumper and is trying to win in Montana (49); retired firefighter Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania (see 23 above); and Rebecca Cooke, a returning candidate in Wisconsin, where she faces Rep. Derrick Van Orden. (50)
Ohio’s 7th
Congressional District
Montana’s 1st
Congressional District
Wisconsin’s 3rd
Congressional District
Their races run from difficult efforts to frontline contests that control of Washington may turn on. Together, they also suggest how a party fractured by its own arguments can learn from candidates trying to meet the moment for voters who feel Democrats either misled them or did too little when they had the chance.
The post The 50 races defining the 2026 midterms appeared first on MS NOW.
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