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Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) first heard about Scott Colom through her former campaign adviser Gerard Henderson, who would become Colom’s campaign manager.

“He said, ‘You know what? I’m having a little trouble attracting attention to Mississippi,’” and I promised him I was coming,” Alsobrooks told The Political Spectrum.

The freshman senator’s leadership political action committee would also send Colom $2,500 in September 2025 and give him $7,500 more throughout the campaign. She would also be the first Democratic senator to campaign for him in Jackson.

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“And so I was the first senator to actually go campaign with him, and to host co-host events with him, discover what an amazing person he was, what an incredible candidate he was,” she said. “But also discovered that the people of Mississippi just had a belief problem.”

Colom’s campaign would ultimately prove the doubt was unwarranted on Wednesday when he pulled off a miracle and became the first Black senator from Mississippi since Blanche K. Bruce during Reconstruction.

Democrats flipped three other Senate seats in the former Confederacy this cycle, including North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. In addition, Sen. Jon Ossoff won re-election in Georgia.

And Black Democrats want Colom’s send a message to their party’s leaders: Invest in the South and in Black candidates.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J) campaigned with Colom in Gulfport in October in the final weeks of the campaign. His leadership PAC, Purpose PAC, also sent $5,000 to him in September of last year for the primary and $5,000 for the general election in March.

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“Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. These are southern states that have made sense for a long time,” Booker told The Political Spectrum. “I think the Democratic Party has made a mistake by not investing in them. Scott is an epic candidate and somebody I saw the talent and the promise of early on.”

Booker called the overwhelming victories or near-misses in Southern states a rebuke against the Southern Strategy, the infamous plan by Richard Nixon to persuade white southern voters who historically voted Democratic, to vote for the Republican Party.

Specifically, Booker said Colom’s victory “really announces the end of the cynical, bigoted Southern strategy of Richard Nixon, this is finally, I think, the final end to that.”

And it was not just the places where Democrats won. In Alabama, Everett Wess, who is Black, only lost to Sen.-elect Barry Moore. by 9.4 points in a state that Donald Trump won by 30 points in 2024. In Florida, Angie Nixon, a Black female member of the Democratic Socialists of America, got within three points of Republican Sen. Ashley Moody. In Louisiana, Jamie Davis, who is also Black, got within two points of Sen.-elect Julia Letlow, Trump’s preferred candidate.

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“I’ll say what I’ve said from day one that I was elected in the House, but I’m here to represent every single person from my district and now the state, and I want them to have a voice,” Letlow told The Political Spectrum this week.

Black voter turnout surged after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that significantly weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But some Democrats feel frustrated that Black candidates were not adequately supported. Colom posted on X as votes trickled in after the election that political prognosticators like the Cook Political Report.

“They made it much more difficult to fundraise and are part of the reason the South has been neglected for so long,” he said. “They’re only a reflection of the past and mysteriously avoid any accountability when they’re wrong.”

Many Democrats of all stripes have criticized the lack of support for Nixon, given the fact she got so close. But Alsobrooks and Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s leadership PACs sent money to Nixon.

“I thought every seat was important,” she said. “Angie Nixon was obviously also a really amazing candidate, ran a terrific race. As you saw, she got close to four million votes. So I gave money. I went to Florida to try to help her as well.”

Alsobrooks praised Nixon, and many progressives criticized Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for not supporting her.

“I think that they both did exceptionally well,” Alsobrooks said of Colom and Nixon. “And I think Angie can do it in the future.”

In 2028, Democrats will have a chance to invest in the South again as Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) runs for re-election. Budd previously beat Cheri Beasley, a former North Carolina Supreme Court chief justice and a Black woman. Moody, whom Gov. Ron DeSantis nominated to replace Sen. Marco Rubio, will also be running for full term. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) will also be up for re-election.

And Democrats need only look at Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), a Black minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King. Jr. preached, to see what a long-term investment in the South could create.

Like Alsobrooks, Warnock’s leadership PAC also sent money to Colom’s campaign in September of last year. Warnock compared Colom’s victory to his own win in 2021.

“I looked at what was happening in Mississippi, and it reminded me of Georgia,” Warnock told The Political Spectrum. “I’ve been frustrated that our party hasn’t leaned in enough, in my view, in the South. I supported him because I thought he could win. Turns out I was right about it.”

Warnock said the win in Mississippi should send a message to his party.

“Not just the South, but absolutely the road to a sustainable democratic majority runs right through the South,” he said.

To borrow from another famous Black Georgian: “The South got something to say.”

What I’m reading: Arvin Alaigh on Richard John Neuhaus in Commonweal Magazine. Our good friend Jonathan Martin at Politico Magazine talked to Scott Colom before his win. Amir Tibon in The Atlantic on how Benjamin Netanyahu’s embracing the language of January 6. Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times, not surprisingly, has a better analysis of the new Democratic South than I do. Our friend rightly says to ignore the 2028 noise and pay attention to the South Carolina primary.

Your regular Bam Bam post:

That’s it for The Political Spectrum. If you like what you read, subscribe down below. If you want to support a travel budget, you can also send money to Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia.

Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! Wow! We witnessed an absolute earthquake down in Mississippi. Scott Colom will be the first Black senator from the Magnolia State since the end of Reconstruction. It is easy to say now that Colom’s win was inevitable and in hindsight, some will say a poor Republican opponent and a national environment pushed him over the line. But for now, it’s a massive deal in a state that produced Medgar Evers, Blanche K. Bruce and Fannie Lou Hamer. And it’s largely due to the tireless work of Colom and his community.

There’s also no denying that Colom’s victory is also a massive victory for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is trying to prove that he deserves another term when many Democrats believe otherwise.

I know, because on Wednesday, Schumer’s team emailed me after I tweeted about campaign contributions to Colom. On Monday evening, as it became abundantly clear that Colom would beat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith, I decided to go through some of my old tweets because I vaguely remembered that some Democrats had given to the campaign when it was still considered a longshot.

Sure enough, I was right and decided to post some of them. As I had recalled, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) had contributed in October, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, the resident billionaire in the Democratic Party, used his political action committee to spend more than $1 million in independent expenditures. Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s leadership PAC (D-Mich.) sent money in August. I also noticed Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-Ga.) leadership PAC sent $10,000.

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All five names have been floated as 2028 contenders, some more credibly than others. Kelly was an early adopter, giving $5,000 to Colom on Sept. 30, 2025 for the primary, before sending another $5,000 for the general election in February.

“There were indications, I saw like seven, eight months ago, that seemed like he had a real, real shot of winning,” Kelly, who has become a prolific fundraiser and who gives to candidates liberally, told The Political Spectrum. “He was a great candidate.”

Before I hit “send,” I decided to check through the Federal Election Commission’s website to see if any of the other Black Democratic senators had given relatively early. It turned out that Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland’s leadership PAC had given as early as September 29, 2025, as did Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester’s. The more I punched in names on the FEC website, I noticed that Juliana Stratton, the incoming senator from Illinois, set up a joint victory fund that raised $30,300.00. The leadership PAC for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also sent money to him.

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I fired off the tweet at 1:48 AM on Tuesday morning, posted the same thing on Bluesky and threads, went to bed and forgot about it. But throughout Tuesday, numerous Democratic advisers were eager to message. First, Warnock’s team messaged me to flag that the senator had raised $750,000 for Colom. Shortly around that time, I got a message from Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s (D-Nev.) team saying how Cortez Masto’s leadership PAC contributed $5,000 to his campaign, $5,000 to his legal fund and later hosted a $25,000 fundraiser for Colom. Sen. Ruben Gallego’s (D-Ariz.) team would follow suit.

Shortly thereafter House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s team messaged that Jeffries had sent $5,000. Shortly thereafter, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (D-N.Y.) people messaged me that she held a fundraiser for him and maxed out to Colom in June. They also flagged the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, did a $500,000 ad buy.

Now what was the point of all of this? Of course, this all came on the eve of Colom pulling off an impossible victory. Moreover, having a hand in electing a Black man who will occupy the Senate seat held by James Eastland, the segregationist racist Democrat, is having played an accompanying role in history.

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But there’s also the raw politics of it. Both Jeffries and Schumer are fighting for their political futures at the moment. Despite the fact that Democrats will have around 250 House seats once the final votes are counted and at least 55 Senate seats depending on when the votes are counted, both men are facing rebellions within their caucuses.

On one end, it makes some sort of sense. Before last Tuesday, most Democratic voters were furious with their leaders. Some have accused both Jeffries and Schumer of being too supportive of Israel when the base of the party has soured on the country’s government under Benjamin Netanyahu. Dissatisfied Democrats say they are too beholden to the Democratic donor class.

But nobody hard to dispute the election results. Democrats in both chambers won massive majorities. Even setting aside Mississippi, they flipped districts and states that Donald Trump won by double digits. Schumer, Jeffries, and truly everyone, will want to say their dollars pushed Colom over the line.

Both men need to claim the biggest victories came because of their labor. And as I’ve written before, they are likely to ascend to the top of their chambers because nobody else is a viable option. Taking credit for the biggest upset for Democrats in ages helps with that.

That being said, they can always reach me on Signal at EMGarcia.85.

Your regular Bam Bam content:

That does it for The Political Spectrum! If you like this newsletter, please consider a paid subscription.

Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! A quick update: after our announcement about the next steps for this newsletter, we gained 20 new free subscribers and nine paid subscribers. I am in awe. So once again, thank you. This is the ultimate vote of faith. And as I said in the announcement, I want this newsletter to offer comprehensive disability policy alongside regular political coverage. With that, let’s get to work.

Some other updates: As a part of my hustle to make additional money, I will contribute video clips to Raw America and occasional posts on their Substack. Will keep you posted.

Freshman orientation is already underway in Washington. Newly-elected Senators came to Capitol Hill this week learn the job. The Political Spectrum is working on getting facetime with each of them in hopes of building a relationship.

A handful of races have yet to be called, most notably the Mississippi race between Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith and Democrat Scott Colom and the race between Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska and former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola. Yes, I’m also a sicko waiting on all of the ballot drops like the rest of you.

With more than 250 seats in the House and currently 54 seats in the Senate, Democrats have spoken heavily about accountability. This includes disability policy.

In July, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel released a memo saying that the 1999 Olmstead v. LC ruling by the Supreme Court did not “require states to treat mentally disabled patients in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs.”

This is not the only area where the Trump administration has rolled back protections for people with disabilities. In July of last year, the Trump administration withdrew a notice on proposed rulemaking the Biden administration issued during its final days that would phase out 14(c) certificates, which allow businesses to pay people with disabilities below the minimum wage. In August, the Department of Labor withdrew a 2013 rule that required that 7 percent of workers at companies that have contracts with the federal government.

But a host of the freshmen Democratic senators have at least a passing understanding on disability rights. Here are some of the Democratic freshmen who have focused on disability rights in the past.

James Talarico (D-Texas)

No Senate candidate received more attention this cycle than James Talarico, the first Democrat elected to be Senate from Texas since 1988. Prior to his election, Talarico served in the Texas House of Representatives. There, he voted for legislation that would require community rehabilitation programs that participate in the state’s Purchasing from People with Disabilities to pay at least the minimum wage. Gov. Greg Abbott, who is his himself disabled, signed the bill.

A former sixth-grade school teacher in San Antonio, Talarico criticized Abbott’s school voucher plan, saying how private schools do not have to provide transportation or special education services.

Josh Turek (D-Iowa)

Sen.-elect Josh Turek is perhaps the most known disability rights advocate of any of the new senators. Turek was born with spina bifida after his father was exposed to Agent Orange during his military service the Vietnam War. A two-time Paralympian gold medalist, Turek made his disability a major part of his campaign. He earned the endorsement of Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa’s most Democratic senator and one of the authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Turek served in the Iowa legislature and represented a district that voted for Trump.

I interviewed Turek in February for The Independent, where he said he wanted to eliminate subminimum wage labor for people with disabilities.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)

Sen. Sherrod Brown’s defeat, along with the defeat of Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, in 2024 meant the Senate lost two of its biggest advocates for people with disabilities. But last week, Brown won a special elected where he defeated Republican Sen. Jon Husted to finish out the remainder of Vice President JD Vance’s unexpired term in the Senate.

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Brown had a clear record on disability when he served from 2007 to 2025. As the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on Social Security, Pensions, and Family Policy, he convened the first hearing on Supplemental Security since 1998. Under SSI, people with disabilities cannot have more than $2,000 in their bank account and risk losing their benefits if they get married. Married couples can only have $3,000 in their account. Brown introduced legislation in 2023 to raise the asset limit to $10,000 and $20,000 for married couples.

Roy Cooper (D-N.C.)

By virtue of being a two-term governor, Roy Cooper is somewhat easier to grade.

Cooper’s signature accomplishment was expanding Medicaid in 2023 with help from Republicans in the legislature. That extended health care coverage to more than 737,000 people living in North Carolina, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.

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Cooper also signed Executive Order 92, which prioritized making North Carolina an “Employment First” state, meaning it would prioritize people with disabilities entering the workforce and as the preferred choice. The order also pushed for “competitive integrated employment,” which is work performed in a setting integrated between disabled and non-disabled employees at a fair wage.

In 2018, Cooper also launched Linking North Carolina with Innovative Talent (LiNC-IT) with the North Carolina Business Committee for Education (NCBCE) to hire autistic employees. By 2023, it had hired 100 autistic employees.

Troy Jackson (D-Maine)

Alongside Cooper and Brown, Troy Jackson has the most extensive political record. He served in the Maine House of Representatives from 2002 to 2008 and the Maine Senate from 2008 to 2024, ascending all the way to Senate President. Jackson knocked off 30-year incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

As Senate president, he ushered through the passage of legislation ending subminimum wage labor in Maine. Ironically, Gov. Janet Mills, whom Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer drafted to run for Senate but who suspended her campaign, signed the bill into law.

The Political Spectrum asked Jackson about passing something nationally.

“Anything to help working-class people out, I’m 100 percent interested in working on it,” he said.

Who to watch: Annie Andrews (D-S.C.) and Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.)

The two senators who are the most to-be-determined are the two doctors elected to the Senate: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Annie Andrews of South Carolina.

On the campaign trail, El-Sayed talked about the fact that people with disabilities have to file lawsuits to protect their rights. A supporter for single-payer health care, he spoke about preventing disabilities through expanding health coverage. Lastly, during a questionnaire with the Michigan Education Association, he advocated for fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The federal government is supposed to shoulder 40 percent of the cost, but according to the Congressional Research Service, it only paid about 10.2 percent of the cost.

Andrews is a pediatrician who sharply criticized Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who promotes the link between vaccines and autism. Many people have highlighted Andrews’s past X posts where she was much more unabashedly liberal. But in one post, she criticized Kennedy for offering poor solutions for autistic children. She also lambasted the Trump administration for gutting the Department of Education.

She is replacing Darline Graham Nordone, the little sister of the late Lindsey Graham who worked in vocational rehabilitation helping people with disabilities find work.

Writing hither and yonder: I write in The Assembly about how the Democrats who flipped seats in North Carolina don’t fit the typical profile of a winning candidate, and why that might help.

What I’m reading: Hannah Nathanson in The Washington Post about how the Trump administration fired government workers focused on DEI initiatives and then the Heritage Foundation put them on a blacklist. Danielle Paquette in The Washington Post on the Statue of Liberty tour guide who had enough. Albert Samaha in The New Yorker on French basketball players, including my GOAT Victor Wembanyama, taking over the NBA.

Your Bam Bam post:

Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! We are officially one month in since I was laid off from The Independent and decided to start off this newsletter.

Setting out on my own was in many ways the scariest thing I’ve done. Losing my job less than a month before the election punched me in the gut as a total newshound. In truth, it might have been the best blessing to happen to me.

I was burning myself out while working at The Independent and was not able to travel as much for reporting trips despite the inklings of a massive blue wave.

But at probably one of the most terrifying and depressing moments in my life, you stepped up. And I have to especially thank Andrew Donaldson for helping edit some of the first pieces.

With only a month in of starting this newsletter, here are some statistics:

• We now have $8,126 of gross annualized revenue. While that’s not enough to make a living and I’ve had to supplement my income with freelancing, this is an incredible amount of money for being one month in.

• Of our 458 total subscribers, 135 of them are paid subscribers. That’s a little less than a third. If you are ready to make a commitment to sustain this, please hit the subscribe button below.

• We have also had 37 people contribute to the Ko-Fi.

So once again, I am truly grateful for you. I pinch pennies, make sure I find the best travel deals and wisely spend the resources I receive from you. As I said when I started, the readers of this newsletter are my shareholders. This means finding cheap hotels, taking Amtraks or Greyhound buses when need be and only flying when it is cheaper than the alternative.

Thanks to you, the readers, I made trips to the Greensboro, N.C. to cover students at North Carolina A&T State University who cast their ballot early despite being no early voting polling place at their campus. I was able to head to Georgia to cover Barack Obama’s rally with Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms. And I spent Election Day at North Carolina Central University, another HBCU to cover young Black voters angry about the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights Act.

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All of this reporting turned out to be incredibly important since Black youth voter turnout surged, Georgia ran the table on every statewide race.

And thanks to your contributions, I was able to report out a story about Virginia voters passing a constitutional amendment to restore the right to vote for people with disabilities who are under guardianship as well as formerly incarcerated people. And on Election Night, as the results poured in, we chatted with Mike Madrid about the Latino vote as Democrats cleaned house in Texas, Arizona, Nevada and elsewhere. You, our readers and viewers got to see the live reaction we had when James Talarico had his race called.

So now comes the next step.

In the name of transparency, I will admit I am still applying for other jobs to have a stable source of income. I will continue doing work on the side for freelance gigs. But for now, this will be my main base.

And as a new Congress begins today, I see this as a chance to step up genuine independent reporting accountable only to my readers.

One of the most encouraging moments of this new venture was how many people shared our piece on Virginia’s amendment. It’s a sign that people want to read original disability policy.

But with the exception of my good friend Sara Luterman at The 19th News, there are not that many people covering disability policy as a beat. Joe Shapiro, the author of the seminal book No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, recently took a buyout from NPR. As fewer reporters cover the ongoing developments of disability policy as they are being legislated and discussed, I want to ramp up (no pun intended) disability policy.

Frequently, during my past jobs, I had to put disability policy on the backburner. Under The Political Spectrum, I plan to make it a staple of this newsletter. And the only way to cover it properly is on Capitol Hill, especially as numerous champions of disability rights or candidates who have worked on the policy come to Washington.

That does not mean that I will be scaling back coverage of politics. Far from it. I am a Congress nerd. Rather, this will be an opportunity to cover the topics that others might miss. I still plan to do the same type of observational reporting and analysis on the Hill while also breaking news.

And, with the 2028 presidential campaign beginning soon, I plan to continue traveling around the country and resume the coverage along the lines of what you have read so far. At its core, it will be about talking to voters about what matters most to them in hopes of lawmakers and leaders reading.

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In addition, I plan to make some additional goodies for paid subscribers, such as Substack Live chats like we did with Madrid. We will continue doing subscriber mailbags on Friday as well. And hopefully, we can move up to doing live chats with elected officials using the same relationships we’ve built here.

If any of this interests you and you have not already become a paid subscriber, I am humbly asking for you to take that leap to become a paid subscriber. Subscribers will continue to receive these emails so people can know what we do with your attention and your cash.

With that, let’s get to work. I hope you join me in this next chapter.

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Your Morning Bam Bam post:

That does it for The Political Spectrum. Thanks for reading. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe below.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! Apologies for not doing a proper write-up of the midterms. I have been on deadline for a few other pieces elsewhere and wanted to write some other pieces in this space. Second of all, plenty of times, the immediate reactions to election results are not the most accurate ones. I wanted to accurately gather my thoughts. Still, if you like this post and are a free subscriber, please consider a paid subscription.

The midterm elections are almost done. The only major results that have yet to be called at this point are Republican incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith versus Scott Colom in Mississippi and Alaska Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan versus Democrat Mary Peltola.

But even without those two races, Democrats blasted through all expectations. Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper defeated Michael Whatley by 19.5 points and dragged a bunch of Democratic candidates for Congress and the state legislature.

In neighboring South Carolina, which Donald Trump won by almost 18 points in 2024, Sen. Darline Graham, whom Trump picked to replace the late Lindsey Graham, lost to Democrat Annie Andrews. In Georgia, not only did Sen. Jon Ossoff won re-election by more than 18 points; the entire state slate flipped. Democrats won Senate seats in Kansas and Iowa, states previously off the map. And, of course, Texas.

But the scene might be even more brutal for Republicans on the local level. Democrats held the governorship in Kansas, once considered a difficult task, and defeated Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, a popular governor. The latter meant Nevada will now have a trifecta alongside Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Arizona, the latter of which has not had a trifecta in six years.

This was not a Blue Wave, it’s not a Blue Tsunami. It’s a Blue Bloodbath. And there it is a full repudiation of Trump and the MAGA movement on a level the president has never experienced. It also means Democrats will have the ability to not only reshape policy on the state level, but have a whole new crop of Democratic talent.

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s election results.

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Trump finally faces accountability

Trump is not a man used to the consequences of his actions. He called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists only to eventually improve his margins with Hispanic voters in his 2024 presidential campaign. His supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and a majority of Republicans refused to impeach or convict him. Even after a jury in Manhattan found him guilty on 34 felony counts, he never went to prison.

And politically, he paid even fewer consequences. In 2018, his first midterm, Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives, but Democrats only flipped two Senate seats–Nevada and Arizona–but lost four Senate seats in North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri and Florida. He lost his 2020 re-election campaign, but they actually lost 13 House seats. Then in 2024, despite winning a narrow majority, his victory initially looked bigger than it was considering he swept every major swing state, held the House of Representatives and flipped the Senate.

During his second term in the White House, he bent the rambunctious House and the stodgy Senate GOP to his will. That majority passed massively unpopular legislation slashing Medicaid to pay for tax cuts and Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials who shoot American citizens in the head, blocked attempts to have a vote on tariffs, and, perhaps most salient to voters, refused attempts to rein in the war in Iran.

Trump said he would lower costs on his first day in office. Instead, the president’s two signature policies–his tariffs and the war in Iran–directly caused prices to rise. All the while, Trump focused heavily on his ballroom, his arch and other renovations around Washington, D.C.

Black voters were furious about the death of the Voting Rights Act

Those who followed my work at The Independent and here, you’d know I’ve been talking about Black voter anger about the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Louisiana v. Callais decision. It’s why I went down to Greensboro to talk with young people at North Carolina A&T State University, where the Woolworth sit-ins began; Clayton County Georgia to talk to Black voters ahead of Barack Obama’s rally with Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic nominee for governor Keisha Lance Bottoms; and North Carolina Central University in Durham, another HBCU, on Election Day.

And it looks like young Black voters turned out in earnest. In 2022, 3,626 people cast one-stop ballots for Democratic Senate nominee Cheri Beasley at the NCCU precinct. This year, 6,038 voted for Cooper, a 66 percent increase.

In Clayton County, where about 71 percent of the population is Black, 73,412 voters cast their ballots for Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) in the initial general election. But in 2026, 87,689 voters in Clayton voted for Ossoff, a 19.4 percent increase for the Democratic candidate for Senate.

The anger and fury is palpable among Black voters as they have lost a right they believed guaranteed to them under the 14th amendment.

Candidate quality ≠ white and male (but it’s still real)

In 2022, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that Republicans would not win back control of the Senate despite President Joe Biden’s negative approval ratings because, “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.” It’s become one of the buzzwords people throw around like “electability.” Some Democrats fear that “electability” and “candidate quality” might mean simply electing white men, especially given that Trump lost to Biden, a white man, but beat Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, both women.

Turns out, that’s not the case. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat three-term incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott for governor, becoming the first Democrat to win the governorship in Texas since 1990. And she did it by winning over some Trump voters on issues that mattered to them: data centers, Abbott going all-in on school vouchers and dislike of Flock cameras. By focusing heavily on a quality-of-life message, she was able to sidestep some of the culture war issues.

The same can be said for Bobby Pulido, the former Tejano singer that beat Republican incumbent Rep. Monica De La Cruz, by almost 25 points. The majority-Hispanic district located right in Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley was ground zero for Trump’s improvement with Latino voters. But Pulido and Hinojosa, who is from McAllen, both performed well there.

In Georgia, Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, defeated Republican Rick Jackson by about 8.7 points. Jackson, a self-funded political neophyte, made a series of errors and bear-hugged Trump in a time when the president is not popular. Bottoms, by contrast, had an existing relationship with Atlanta area, where much of the population is already located.

The inverse of this is also true. Plenty of the worst-performing candidates this cycle were white men. Ken Paxton, the Trump-endorsed attorney general of Texas, lost his Senate race to James Talarico partially because of his numerous scandals. And yes, Cooper is a popular former governor of North Carolina, but his thorough shellacking of Michael Whatley came because Whatley had almost no experience as a candidate.

Trump blew up his entire coalition

When Trump won in 2024, he made inroads with almost every major demographic. While much of the focus came on the rightward shift of Hispanic men, according to The New York Times, Hispanic women moved 18 points to the right in 2024. They boomeranged back to Democrats this cycle, according to The New York Times, and moved 29 points to the left.

In 2024, Trump openly appealed to young men, appearing on podcasts for “manosphere” influencers like Joe Rogan and Theo Von. It paid off and men between the ages of 18 and 44 shifted 15 points to the Republicans. But many of them rebelled against Trump because of the Iran war and the high cost of living. Many of the same podcasters criticized his approach to the Epstein files. So this midterm, men in that same age group moved 32 points to the left.

And Trump also bled with the most important demographic for Republicans: non-college-educated voters. In 2024, non-college-educated whites moved five points to the right, but that’s partially because they are already a solid bloc for Republicans and the party doesn’t have much room to grow. But in 2026, non-college-educated whites moved 14 points towards the Democrats. Democrats will likely never win a majority of non-college-educated white voters. But if they cut into the margins, they will likely compete in states with high rural populations like Kansas, North Carolina, Georgia and possibly even Mississippi.

This leads us to our last takeaway.

Hakeem Jeffries’s job just got easier–and Chuck Schumer’s job just got harder

Last night, Saturday Night Live parodied Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. And it’s somewhat easy to make them the two punching bags given how Democratic voters are furious at their party ever since Trump’s re-election.

But in a way, the election could not have gone better for Jeffries. In his home state of New York, Jeffries had to contend with an insurgent left-wing after Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York and left-wing candidate Brad Lander defeated Rep. Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th district and Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th district. Democratic Socialist of America-backed Claire Valdez also won an open seat in New York’s 7th district.

Had Democrats won only a narrow majority, he would have been in the same position as Kevin McCarthy, who ultimately faced a revolt in his own party that led to his ouster, or House Speaker Mike Johnson, who always barely kept his conference together and had to rely heavily on Trump to enforce party discipline.

Instead, Democrats will gain 250 seats in Congress. And while yes, there will be some socialist elected officials, there will be far more moderate candidates, including many that he backed like Cait Conley in New York’s 17th district. He campaigned with Bob Brooks, the Bernie Sanders-backed moderate (a conundrum, I know), who flipped a seat in Pennsylvania’s 7th district. All of these swing district candidates will give him political cache. It will also give him leverage to say that progressives either work with him or he can rely on the Blue Dogs or other mainstream Democrats.

As I said in the mailbag on Saturday, it’s highly unlikely that Schumer does not become majority leader. He recruited most of the winning swing-state candidates and funded them well. There’s also just the fact that majority leaders need only a majority of their caucus.

That being said, getting the job is harder than actually doing the job. With progressives like Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, Troy Jackson of Maine, Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota and Juliana Stratton of Illinois all criticizing Schumer and saying they would oppose him as majority leader, they could form a concentrated bloc within the Democratic caucus not unlike the one Republicans had with Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Mike Lee after the Tea Party wave. That means Schumer would need to hold the rest of his caucus together or even rely on Republicans to pass funding bills and the National Defense Authorization Act. And one move that angers the base means Democrats will call for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to replace him.

What I’m reading: Hannah Nathanson writes in The Washington Post about how the Trump administration fired government workers focused on DEI initiatives and then the Heritage Foundation put them on a blacklist. Danielle Paquette in The Washington Post on the Statue of Liberty tour guide who had enough. Albert Samaha in The New Yorker on French basketball players, including my GOAT Victor Wembanyama, taking over the NBA.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! Happy weekend. I’m still trying to process everything that happened this weekend. I want to eventually write something about what it was like to cover this independently. But for now, it’s the Midterm Media Offender Mailbag, where paid subscribers get to send notes and I try to respond. If you are not a paid subscriber, what are you waiting for? Sign up for a paid subscription.

at asks:

Will Schumer be Majority Leader? If not, who?

This is the biggest question everyone asks and sorry to be anticlimactic, but yes, Schumer will be Senate majority leader. He will ascend for three reasons.

First, he recruited most of the winning candidates. He got Roy Cooper to come out of retirement and massacre the North Carolina Republican Party. He convinced Sherrod Brown of Ohio to run again after he lost in 2024. Mary Peltola put Alaska in play. It looks like his massive gamble to support Scott Colom in Mississippi might pay off. This is to say nothing of Adam Hamilton winning in Kansas and Schumer not-so-secretly backing Josh Turek in Iowa in the Senate primary. That gives you the leadership spot.

Second, simply nobody else can raise the levels of money Schumer can. Being based in New York and his time leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee gave him ties to major donors that others have. The majority leader has to raise dollars and count votes. Schumer does both incredibly well, even if he is not the best messenger.

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His biggest failure is backing Gov. Janet Mills of Maine to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, which opened the door to Graham Platner channeling the anti-Washington anger, and then subsequently earnestly backing Platner before it all went to hell. Schumer deserves heat for that. But Troy Jackson beating Collins has a way of erasing people’s memory.

Schumer’s decision to back Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan looks terrible now. But it made a sort of sense at the time. Stevens flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018 and Michigan has a record of even-keeled Democratic women (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, former Sen. Debbie Stabenow and current incoming Gov. Jocelyn Benson come to mind). If anything, he should lose some points for not supporting Mallory McMorrow, who would have been a “goldilocks” candidate. But again, once the primary ended, he poured money into Michigan to elect Abdul El-Sayed.

Now to the question of Angie Nixon. On one end, he deserves some blame for not getting behind her. Republican Sen. Ashley Moody only won by 2.9 percentage points. Schumer’s best argument there is that Florida had dramatically shifted to the right since Donald Trump won in 2022 and he likely did not think that a democratic socialist could not win given Miami’s Cuban-American population.

But that is a weak argument given the nation-wide Hispanic shift. And unfortunately Nixon’s best strength is that she seemed to come out of nowhere, so Republicans didn’t really plan to take her out. If she runs again, they’ll be cocked and loaded.

The more pressing question is what does Schumer do with his majority and what does he promise left-wing insurgents. But more importantly, Schumer might face a Joe Biden-style dilemma. Biden read the 2022 midterm not turning into a Democratic apocalypse as a license to run again in 2024. Schumer might misread a Democratic victory as a reason to run for re-election, only to lose a primary.

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from Australia writes:

Given this is Trump and therefore not your average lame duck president, what do you think are the things we need to pay close attention to now for both sides? Loving your work from Australia.

Love you too, Danielle.

We sorta got an idea of what he’d do on Friday when he named Stephen Miller to be his White House chief of staff.

Historically, presidents reshuffle their cabinets after a midterm. Think George W. Bush firing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after 2006. After the 2014 midterm thrashing, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel resigned from the Obama administration.

But Miller’s ascent shows that Trump and company learned nothing from Latino voters overwhelmingly revolting against the administration and voting for Democrats.

did a Substack Live reacting to the results from South Texas and Hispanic voters offered the clearest middle finger of any voting group this week. But he shows no signs of backpedaling on his immigration policy.

I would not expect an “Only Nixon can go to China” moment on immigration reform. Trump sees his loss as a time to double down. I also expect that the deeper investigations go, Trump will try to tire our Democrats in the House and Senate so they can’t go after everything. This was what Steve Bannon meant when he said “flood the zone with shit.”

writes:

In a campaign ad, Josh Turek claimed to support a ban on federal funding for hormone replacement therapy. Could such a measure realistically make it onto the President’s desk even with a Democratic majority in both houses?

Toward the end of the campaign, now Sen.-elect Josh Turek (D-Iowa), who is a retired Paralympian released an ad talking where he said “I oppose males competing in female sports” and “I’m against taxpayers paying for sex changes too.”

About 152,000 transgender people are on Medicaid, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of law. This would also mean that federal employees would be prohibited from receiving gender-affirming care. Transgender U.S. military servicemembers woukd also not be able to use TriCare when, before the Trump administration attempted to ban trans service members, is the largest employer of transgender people, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

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Any possible standalone legislation probably dies before it goes to the Senate. But if he is on a committee like the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he likely could vote for it. But given how big the majority is–Democrats as of publication have at least 54 Senate seats–it is likely that these types of bills die in committee. The only way it likely passes is if they go through an Appropriations spending bill, but Democrats have killed many of these amendments in the appropriations process in the past.

asks:

If Peltola wins her senate bid, and Schumer is no longer leader, do you think there’s a chance we get an independent Murkowski caucusing with dems?

A week ago, I would have said “yes.” I assumed that Democrats would win 52 or 53 Senate seats. Ever since Sen. Lisa Murkowski won a write-in campaign in 2010 after losing to a Tea Party challenger, she’s relied on a fragile coalition of Democrats who cross over to support her, old-line Republicans and independents. Her vote for the One Big, Beautiful Bill cost plenty of goodwill from parts of her coalition, as Ivan Moore at Alaska Survey Research revealed last year.

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A party switch or becoming an independent who caucuses with the Democrats could possibly help, especially if she joined Democrats on rolling back Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid cuts.

I’m not so convinced now. For one, Democrats will now be have least 54 seats. Democrats have less of a reason to persuade her. Collins leaving the top spot gives an opening for her to become the top Republican on Appropriations. As a Republican from a rural state, this is a very enticing offer.

Third, it’s not clear her numbers would improve if she caucuses with the Democrats. There’s also the simple fact that she would likely not want to work under Schumer or be associated with a Democratic president. So for now? I doubt it even if Peltola loses.

What I’m reading: Adam Reiner in New York Magazine asks Steve Kornacki, the patron saint of this newsletter, about his caffeine intake. Devin Gordon in The Atlantic on LeBron James vs. Philadelphia. Grace Panetta in The 19th News on the role masculinity played in the midterms.

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Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) had a one-word reaction to news that President Donald Trump named Stephen Miller to be his White House Chief of Staff.

“FAFO,” which is short for “Fuck around and find out,” McBride told The Political Spectrum over text message.

The president nominated Miller, his deputy chief of staff and longtime adviser, to be his White House chief of staff.

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Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass deportation policy, previously served as deputy White House chief of staff. He will replace Susie Wiles, who managed Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign alongside Chris LaCivita.

“I am pleased to announce that Mr. Stephen Miller, the current Deputy Chief of Staff of the Trump Administration, and one of my most trusted advisors, will become the Chief of Staff starting Monday, November 9, 2026,” Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday.

Trump’s announcement came just days after Democrats won overwhelming majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Miller served as a senior adviser to the president in the first Trump administration. But his power significantly increased in the second administration, having been the driving force behind Trump’s mass deportation policies.

In 2024, Miller laid out the plans for a future Trump administration at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“You would establish large scale staging grounds for removal flights,” Miller said. “So you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging grounds, and that’s what the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to remove those illegals home.”

After Custom and Border Protection officials shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Miller defended the officers.

“A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists,” he tweeted in January of this year.

McBride, the first openly transgender woman elected to Congress, won her second term in Congress on Tuesday.

During her first term in Congress, McBride faced considerable discrimination, with Republican colleagues misgendering her. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced legislation to prevent McBride and other transgender people from using the women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill.

Mace will leave Congress after she placed fifth in the Republican primary for governor and Trump endorsed one of her opponents.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum. I’m still catching up on sleep. But before we start, I just want to say “thank you.”

We are a little less than a month into this experiment with the newsletter. So far I have made it into something that generates $7,520 in annualized revenue. As of Friday, we now have 126 paid subscribers. And countless people have sent money to Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia.

That paid for my reporting trips in Georgia and North Carolina. We also have 438 free subscribers. (Hopefully we get that to 538 before the 2027-2028 presidential primary kicks off). I’m also grateful I have been able to write for publications I admire so far, like Zeteo, MS NOW, The Washington Examiner.

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As you can imagine, the next few weeks, I will be focusing heavily on the Lame Duck session in Congress, getting to know some of the freshly-elected members and reporting out the agenda on the Hill as it comes. I have a few disability-relaed pieces in the hopper now.

Then it will be off to the races as the 2028 presidential primary campaign begins. Also, my next book, Manly While Stimming: Autism and the Myth of the Masculine Ideal, comes out March 30, and I will be actively promoting that soon. Pre-order here.

But in between, I see this as a chance to build and grow this outlet. I want to make it my most consistent form of revenue and an outlet that is directly accountable to the people who pay for it: the readers.

So with that in mind, I am once again asking for your financial support with a special edition of the Media Offender Mailbag for the midterms. Paid subscribers can send direct messages or comment below to ask questions below and I’ll try and answer the best I can. Nothing is verboten.

Also, if anyone has any tips, send them to my Signal, emgarcia.85

So for now, ask away.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! Like everyone else, I am still trying to process what exactly happened in the midterms. There will be plenty of stories about this in the coming weeks and probably months. Reminder that paid subscribers will get a chance to ask questions for tomorrow’s special midterm mailbag. So become a paid subscriber, send a message, or comment below. Thanks. But for now, I want to tackle another subject: Polling and why it underestimated Democrats so terribly for the second year in a row.

I figured I would spend the first part of my Election Night in the State Ballroom Center at Marriott City Center in Raleigh, N.C. covering Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign party before decamping to my hotel to write.

I expected networks to call the race for Democratic nominee Roy Cooper fairly early. The most generous polling from AtlasIntel dropped the day before the election showed Cooper with a 15-point lead against Republican nominee Michael Whatley, but I discarded the survey given AtlasIntel’s uneven record.

In the end, Cooper won by 19.5 percent and caused a nearly extinction-level event for the North Carolina Republican Party, giving Democrats the majority in the state House of Representatives. It would be a preview of a bloodbath for Republicans.

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Ironically, I had said publicly here and on social media that polling outlets were being overly cautious so as not to overstate Democrats and repeat their mistakes. The first piece I wrote in this space examined how people should read the polls this cycle and whether there would be a polling miss. I took a step further on Bluesky when I said last month that “I don’t do copium and I don’t Democratmaxxing. I am a journalist. But I will say this looking at the samples: polling is going to have a big miss and will underestimate Democrats. Pollsters are being skittish and weighting for 2024.”

It turns out that I was right, and if anything, I was more generous than others. The X account Politics and Poll Tracker showed how big the polling miss was. As election results poured in, VoteHub said that the national environment was shaping up to favor the Democrats by about 13 points, four points better for the Democrats than the national generic ballot polling average.

The trend repeated itself in Georgia, most polls showed incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff polling in high single digits, only to steamroll Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) by 18 points. In Texas, The New York Times/Siena University released two days before the election showed Democrat James Talarico beating Ken Paxton by only 7 points. When the ballots were in, Talarico would add about 5.1 points to that lead, beating Republican Ken Paxton by 13.1 percentage points.

So why was I so skeptical of the polls? The easiest answer is that pollsters feared another miss on the levels of 2016, 2020 and 2024, when pollsters underestimated both Trump and Republicans because they missed Trump’s pull with low-propensity and non-college-educated voters.

And Trump has proven to be litigious. In the days before the 2024 election, Ann Selzer, the most prominent pollster in Iowa, and The Des Moines Register dropped a survey showing Kamala Harris had a three-point lead in the Hawkeye State.

That turned out not to be the case and Trump would win Iowa by 13.5 points. Afterward, Trump attempted to sue Selzer and The Des Moines Register. That alone creates a chilling effect. That alone makes pollsters cautious.

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There’s also just the credibility factor. Pollsters need to have a record of accuracy for people to continue speaking to them. But many of the polls in states with competitive races like in Texas used samples that assumed that the electorate would remain the same as it was in 2024.

Let’s take the final YouGov poll for Texas’s Senate race. That survey showed that 50 percent of likely voters supported Talarico and 44 percent supported Paxton. One reason why they missed? Look no further than the partisan breakdown in the sample, which was 41 percent Republican, 26 percent Democratic and 28 percent independent.

The survey also asked respondents how they voted in 2024 and 52 percent said they voted for Trump and 40 percent said they supported Harris.

But that simply did not match the national environment. The same survey showed 55 percent of likely voters disapproved of Trump’s performance as president. Even more, 17 percent of Trump 2024 voters said they disapproved of Trump’s performance. That strong anti-Trump sentiment will not produce a Republican +15 electorate.

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And the Texas YouGov poll is not even the most egregious example. The Marist Poll for the Maine Senate race on Oct. 27 had the worst sample I saw. The survey showed that 49 percent of likely voters preferred Troy Jackson to Sen. Susan Collins, who clocked in at 47 percent. On the surface it seemed plausible given Collins’s advantage as a five-term incumbent and the fact she won in 2020 by eight points when Joe Biden won by nine points.

But the tell that the poll was drunk came in its survey for governor, which had Democrat Hannah Pingree tied with Republican Bobby Charles, each at 44 percent. That did not compute in a state that voted for Harris by almost seven points. And the real smoking gun came when comparing likely voters to registered ones. Jackson beat Collins 53 percent to 44 percent and Pingree beat Charles 51 percent to 40 percent.

But on Election Night, Pingree beat Charles by more than 17 points and Jackson beat Collins by about 6.43 points. It turned out the registered voter survey was more in line with the likely voter poll.

A reason for this? The likely voter sample broke down 31 percent Democrat, 31 percent Republican and 35 percent independent. But the registered voter sample was 36 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican and 35 percent independent.

Democrats will likely not be calling for any pollster’s heads the way Trump’s team did. Still, these polls matter.

As Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said a few weeks ago, the bogus Wedgewood poll all but killed her campaign. Public opinion matters and in between elections, polling is one of the best ways for voters to express their thoughts and hopefully have elected officials respond. Fear of retribution from a self-obsessed president or even a little bit of embarrassment does not warrant this much hedging.

Writing hither and yonder: I wrote for MS NOW about Republicans lost Latinos because they misread their big victory in 2024.

Most eye-popping stat I read: Ben Briscoe for WFMY News 2 in Greensboro broke down how big Roy Cooper’s victory in North Carolina was.

Cooper received about 2.47 million votes, compared with Cunningham’s roughly 2.57 million in 2020: a decrease of about 102,000.

Whatley received about 1.64 million votes, compared with Tillis’ roughly 2.67 million six years ago: a drop of more than 1 million.

The pattern also shows up locally. In Randolph County, votes for the Democratic Senate candidate remained about the same, while votes for the Republican candidate fell from roughly 53,000 in 2020 to about 31,000 this year.

What I’m reading: Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker about Texas had one of the best kickers I have read in a while. Unsurprisingly, has some insights about how Texas flipped. My former colleague Sophia Nguyen writes in The Atlantic about one underrated reason boys are reading less. Nick Miroff, one of the best immigration reporters in the country, and my fellow Tar Heel Matt Viser write in The Atlantic on how Texas flipped. Burgess Everett in Semafor writes about Annie Andrews’s most savage political move.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! I know you are all expecting a big write-up of the midterms and don’t worry, that’s coming. Also, the Midterm Mailbag edition for Thursday still stands. So paid subscribers, send questions and people who want to send questions, become a paid subscriber! But one goal of The Political Spectrum is to highlight stories about disability that have not received as much coverage in national news. Here’s one that most people missed.

Tuesday evening was nothing short of a bloodbath for Republicans. And the Blue Wave first crashed on the shores of Virginia Beach as Rep. Jen Kiggans would be caught in the undertow in her rematch against Democratic former Rep. Elaine Luria. As of early Wednesday morning, incumbent Republican Rep. Rob Wittman is locked in a too-close-to-call race against Democrat Shannon Taylor. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) cruised to a fourth term.

But lower on the ballot, Virginians also made an important decision: voters in the Commonwealth passed an amendment to the state constitution to enshrine the right to vote for formerly incarcerated individuals and for people with disabilities who have been deemed “mentally incompetent,” who are often under guardianship.

As of early Wednesday morning, 56.37 percent of Virginians who cast their ballot supported the amendment.

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Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told The Political Spectrum before the election on Tuesday how important the initiative would be. Town said that many incarcerated people have disabilities.

“We we know that people with disabilities are overrepresented in jails and prisons, and oftentimes, the kind of largest disability institutions in a community, in a state, in fact, in this country, are jails and prisons,” Town said.

According to a 2021 report from the Bureau of Prisons that surveyed inmates in 2016 found that nearly 38 percent of state and federal prisoners had at least one disability. The report also said that the most commonly-reported type of disability was a cognitive disability, with 23 percent of prisoners reporting one. Among all prisoners, the report found that 24 percent reported “that a doctor, psychologist, or teacher had told them at some point in their life that they had an attention deficit disorder.”

In addition, Town said that people with disabilities who are under guardianship deserve to vote.

“There are many, many states that automatically strip the right to vote from anyone who is put under a guardianship or a conservatorship in some states,” Town said.

According to the liberal nonprofit the Center for American Progress, nine states–Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Virginia–bar voting by people under guardianship.

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“But just because someone may need assistance and support making financial decisions, for example, does not mean that they should be stripped of their right to vote,” she said.

This comes despite a 2024 guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division that said that the Americans with Disabilities Act “also prohibits a state from categorically disqualifying individuals who have intellectual or mental health disabilities from registering to vote or from voting because of their disability or guardianship status” and that states “may not subject groups of people with disabilities—including individuals who are under guardianship—to a higher standard than that imposed on other voters for demonstrating the capacity to vote.”

Krina Patel, who has autism and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, said that disenfranchising people under guardianship cuts them out of policies that could affect their lives.

“People with disabilities are already disproportionately economically and socially disenfranchised, and we face increasing barriers to employment, financial independence, healthcare, education, and meaningful participation in our communities, particularly under this Administration,” Patel said. “Restricting our political voice has historically been a way to exclude us from decisions that directly shape our lives.”

The passage of the initiative is also important because just three years ago, Maine voters rejected a constitutional amendment that explicitly said would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting for Governor, Senators and Representatives.”

Other states like Connecticut allow for people under guardianship to file a petition with a probate court. Ohio, on the other hand, allows people under guardianship to cast their ballot. Town said she and other advocates went to the Buckeye State to register voters a few years ago as part of AAPD’s REV UP, which stands for Register, Educate, Vote, Use Your Power, program.

“When we went and registered voters, many of whom had intellectual and developmental disabilities in a group home in Ohio, many of them were under guardianship and had no idea that they could still vote,” she said. “Some of the things that were said to us were, ‘I feel happy today. You made me feel like a whole person.’”

What I want to know about the disabled vote this year: How many people with disabilities cast their ballot this year versus 2022 and 2024?

What I’m reading: Sara Luterman in 19th News on the right to vote for nursing home residents. Brittany R. Collins in Education Week on how to teach disability studies. Emma Green in The New Yorker about Adam Hamilton, the next senator from Kansas.

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DURHAM, N.C.-North Carolina Central University is located right in Durham. While slightly younger than its fellow North Carolina HBCU, N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro, Durham and NCCU are no less important to the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1957, three years before four N.C. A&T students defiantly sat in at the Woolworth’s, Rev. Douglas Moore, a graduate of the college, accompanied six African American students to patronize the Royal Ice Cream Parlor, a white-owned establishment. One of their attorneys was Floyd McKissick Sr., who would speak on behalf of James Farmer during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. A month after King would win the Nobel Peace Prize, he addressed 5,000 students at what was then called North Carolina College.

But I didn’t come to Central to meditate on history. I came here on Election Day because two years ago, I stopped by to talk to students and compare how they felt compared two when I visited two years ago ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the time, I figured since Vice President Kamala Harris was an alumnus of another storied HBCU, Howard University, she might generate some excitement.

While some students were indeed excited to see a fellow HBCU graduate and a Black woman ascend to the top of the Democratic Party, some were not convinced, though. Specifically, Cameron Johnson, then a senior, told me “I think she's getting a lot of love right now, not necessarily because of her policies or anything like that, but because a lot of people can't stand Trump.” Another, Nya Lumsden, from Atlanta, told me that while abortion rights were a top issue for her and she opposed Donald Trump’s policies on abortion, “I don’t think she’s going to keep all the wars away from us like Trump did.”

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But this time is different. Readers of The Political Spectrum know we’ve been tracking how young Black voters are furious about both Trump and the Supreme Court’s rolling back of the 1965 Voting Rights Act earlier this summer with the Louisiana v. Callais decision.

Donald Fuller, a first-year law student at the university, said he was disappointed by the ruling.

“Basically, I voted to hopefully get people in position to help the people in America, the people in North Carolina,” Fuller told The Political Spectrum. “So hopefully, that happens, and everyone in my age group, above me, below me, went out and did their duty today.”

Outside the Albert S. Turner Law School Building, students filed in and out to cast their ballots.

As of Tuesday afternoon around 4:30 PM, about 116,652 registered voters in Durham have cast their ballots, according to the Carolina Forward dashboard. That’s 28 percent higher than the turnout in the 2022 midterm, albeit, it’s 25 percent lower than the 2024 presidential election turnout.

If there is a blue wave, the first signs will be in North Carolina. Democrat Roy Cooper, a popular former governor, running miles ahead of his opponent, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley.

“He seems genuine,” Fuller said. “Doesn’t use underhanded tactics to attack opposing sides. He looks like he’s actually interested in North Carolina policies.”

The most recent poll from High Point University showed that Cooper leads Whatley by double digits. That could have a down ballot effect and help Democrats flip the state House of Representatives, the first time Democrats would have control of either chamber since 2010.

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“I just want to exercise my right,” Quran Walker told The Political Spectrum. He said that his biggest issues were “really, just the increase on the taxes and just really just education in general.”

Fuller said he wanted to see the United States invest more money domestically rather than abroad.

“I’d probably say the most important issue is just getting taxes back into North Carolina or the country’s hands,” he said. “It seems like we, as a country, have steered towards not prioritizing U.S. citizens. So I would love that to be the policy again– is to use our taxes not for our well-being, to help with schooling, to help with food. People who don’t have those things. So that’s probably the most important thing: just giving back to the American people.”

Outside the polling place, the Wesley Campus Ministry congratulated and thanked students for voting. Ahmani Johnson, a junior at Central, told The Political Spectrum that her big issue was one of the three proposed amendments to the state constitution that would reduce the maximum allowed income tax rate from 7 percent to 3.5 percent. Johnson also said it was important to show leaders that voices like hers matter, and that she was much more excited to vote than in the past.

“I was younger then and didn’t really understand much,” she said. Johnson said she did not know much about the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act. But she still expressed some dismay.

“I don’t like that at all. I don’t like that they use that we’re kind of going back in time in terms of like racial profiling and using race to determine things,” she said.

Maurice Rogers, a graduate of Central, said he was disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision.

“That was definitely a blow to just all America as a whole,” he told The Political Spectrum. “It’s just another example of why we need to exercise our right to vote. Because if we’re just going to keep letting these things happen, then we’re just going to live in an economy and in a nation where we are all going to be literally distraught.”

Rogers said all of the elections mattered to him, but he said education mattered the most to him and the Department of Education needed to be revamped.

“But, you know, you can only start from somewhere,” he said. “I’m starting with my vote and just hoping for the most best outcome.”

Like Republicans in other states, the North Carolina GOP has attempted to give themselves an advantage by doing mid-decade redistricting. Last year, the General Assembly approved a new congressional map in an attempt to take out Rep. Don Davis in North Carolina’s 1st district. Davis, a moderate Black Democrat, who represents a district Trump won, wriggled away from Republicans in 2022 when he first ran and again in 2024.

The Cook Political Report rates the 1st as a toss-up, and at my hotel while eating breakfast, nearly every other ad was an attack ad from Republicans attacking Davis.

But if Cooper has big enough coattails, it might be enough to save Davis and even flip some Republican-leaning districts.

Even as I am filing this story from NCCU’s Student University Center, a gaggle of young female Black student were teasing each other about whether they actually voted.

Midterm tools: with some handy charts for tonight. The nerds at VoteHub have one of the best websites for sickos like me.

What I’m reading: Ruby Cramer in The New Yorker on Haley Stevens’s heel turn.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! “One Day More” until the midterm polls close.

Longtime followers know that I have spent a large part of my career following the Latino vote.

During the Obama years, Democrats believed Hispanic voters would be permanently in their column. Donald Trump’s racism galvanized this hope. But even as Trump separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border in his first term and promised mass deportations in his 2024 campaign, he improved with Hispanic voters. In 2024, he won a majority of Latino men, according to exit polls. It was not just “machismo” either; Catalist found an even bigger shift among Latinas between 2012 and 2024.

Latinos voted in droves for Gov. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Gov. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey last year. Poll after poll shows Latino voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats this cycle. And as per usual, the economy is top-of-mind.

I’ve sort of become popular on social media for saying “¡Dios Mio!” when I noticed big Latino voters trends. It means “Oh my God!” in Spanish. But tomorrow will be the biggest one of them all. Here are six counties to watch. Since these are bellwethers, we will mostly be looking at counties that will report early.

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Miami-Dade County, Florida

It’s easy to assume that Miami-Dade is automatically red given that the Cuban-American diaspora that fled Fidel Castro’s regime. But before Trump won Miami-Dade in 2024, Democrats won it in every presidential election going back to 1992. Barack Obama improved on his 2008 margins in Miami-Dade in 2012 and Hillary Clinton built on it when she won about two-thirds of the vote.

Miami-Dade shifted right in 2020 when Trump won about 46 percent of the vote. But Ron DeSantis whittled away at Democrats’ margin there when he ran against left-wing candidate Andrew Gillum for governor before he outright won it in 2022.

But now, the county is going through a shift. In 2025, Miami elected Eileen Higgins, the first Democratic mayor in almost three decades. And recently, Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a former newscaster for Telemundo, ran an ad saying that “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” Plenty of Cuban-Americans feel slighted by Trump ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Cuban refugees. Salazar is running against Eliot Rodriguez, a former CBS newscaster.

Miami-Dade usually reports its election results fairly early. Salazar running behind her 2024 performance or even losing will say plenty about where Latino voters are. If Miami-Dade sees some crossover voting for David Jolly, the Democratic nominee for governor, as opposed to Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, Democrats should be in for a good night. By contrast, watch how the state votes for State Rep. Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), against incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody, who replaced Marco Rubio after Trump nominated him to be secretary of State.

Lehigh County, Pennsylvania

Lehigh County, about an hour outside of Philadelphia, is home, to Allentown, which has about a 55 percent Puerto Rican population.

While it has voted Democratic since 1992, Republicans have cut into their margins. The Lehigh Valley is located in Pennsylvania’s 7th district. In 2024, it deposed incumbent Democratic Rep. Susan Wild for Republican Ryan Mackenzie. Firefighter Bob Brooks, who also has the endorsement of both the Blue Dogs and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), is now running against Mackenzie. In addition, watch how Gov. Josh Shapiro, who won the area in his 2022 race for governor, performs.

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Whitfield County, Georgia

Whitfield County, Georgia came across my radar during the special election for Georgia’s 14th district after Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress. About 39.1 percent of the population is Hispanic. It also includes Dalton, Georgia, which is majority-Hispanic.

Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, flagged at the time of Greene’s resignation that two of the most Hispanic precincts in Dalton had swung from voting for Biden by 38 points to Kamala Harris by 22 points in 2024.

But by special election time in April, Democrat Shawn Harris won these precincts by 73 percent of the vote.

Whitfield County is still overwhelmingly Republican, electing Trump with almost three-quarters of the vote in 2024. But elections are decided on the margins. If Sen. Jon Ossoff or Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms does well in places like Dalton, this will be a good night for Democrats.

Gwinnett County, Georgia

Gwinnett County, Georgia

UPDATE: I accidentally wrote Gwinnett County, Georgia when I meant Whitfield County. But Gwinnett County, Georgia is also important to watch. So let’s pretend I meant to do that.

In 2008, Obama lost Gwinnett County by 10 points. He lost it by about nine in 2012. But in 2016, Gwinnett flipped to vote for Clinton. A big reason for this? An influx of Latino voters.

Located about 30 miles away from Atlanta, it’s part of the suburban sprawl that has turned the state from bright red to purple. A big reason for this? The influx of Latino voters. In 2010, a report from the county found that 54 percent of its residents were racial minorities and its total population rose by 37 percent between 2000 and 2010. During that time, its Hispanic population nearly doubled. Now, Hispanics make up more than a quarter of the population.

In 2020 and in the 2021 runoffs, Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock performed impressively in Gwinnett. And despite many counties with large Hispanic populations shifting hard to the right, Gwinnett barely ticked down. Expect Ossoff to perform well here, but Bottoms must perform well here to stave off Republican Rick Jackson.

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Starr County, Texas

All eyes are on Texas. So this means we are doing two counties there. The Hispanic shift in the 2024 election shocked Democrats to their core and nowhere was it more apparent than in the Rio Grande Valley. Located right on the border with Mexico, this-majority-Hispanic region voted for Democrats for more than a century.

But it shifted right during Trump’s presidency. In 2016, Clinton won about 79 percent of the vote in Starr. But Trump cut into that number by 27 points in 2020, bolstered by his economic message. In 2024, he flipped Starr and won it with more than 57 percent of the vote.

For Democratic Senate candidate and seminarian James Talarico to even have a prayer’s chance, he not only needs to flip Starr; he must run up the scoreboard. As Bobby Pulido, the Democratic nominee for Congress in the nearby 15th District, told me in May, many Hispanic business owners can no longer field a workforce because of the Trump administration’s deportations.

One reason for Democrats to feel optimism? Starr County blew the doors off in early voter turnout. In 2022, 11,117 people in Starr cast their ballots altogether. In 2026, 11,866 voted early. As readers of this newsletter know, it is impossible to extrapolate from election results, especially in Texas which does not register by party. But unless Democratic votes are cannibalizing Election Day votes, Talarico should feel good.

Hidalgo County, Texas

This one is the grand daddy of Rio Grande Valley counties. While Starr County has a population of about 66,319 people, Hidalgo has a population of about 921,549. In 2012, Barack Obama won about 70 percent of the vote. In 2024, Trump narrowly won a majority of the vote.

Not only is this a must-win for Talarico. Democratic nominee for governor Gina Hinojosa is a native of McAllen, which is in Hidalgo. Hinojosa must overperform here to have a chance at defeating Greg Abbott.

Again, reading too much into early voting is a fool’s errand, but there are signs Latino voters are mobilized. In 2022, 141,196 people in Hidalgo voted altogether. In this year’s early voting period, 165,899 cast their ballot. There are no promises in American politics. But this is about as good a result as any Democrat could want in the Valley.

That about does it. Of course, this is not a comprehensive list of all bellwether Hispanic counties. Just some of the most interesting ones that might paint a picture of what the 2026 midterms will look like.

As always, here is your regular Bam Bam post, because why discuss the Latino vote without a churro?

That about does it for The Political Spectrum. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing below if you have not already. We’ll see you on the flipside where we will be reporting from Raleigh.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! First and foremost, I want to say “Thank you” for supporting the Substack. Without you, I could not have reported in North Carolina or Georgia. Now I am once again asking for your support: I would love to go to Mississippi for Election Day to cover the Senate race. If you appreciate this coverage and are a free subscriber, please consider becoming a paid one, or supporting this page on Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia.

On Saturday, I wrote about how Georgia Democrats have a real shot at gaining a foothold in the state government this midterm.

But both states love having close election results. Here’s five observations from being on the road in North Carolina and Georgia.

Young Black voters are turning out

Throughout speaking to young voters in both Greensboro, N.C. and Morrow, Ga., plenty of them emphasized the need to turn out.

“I just pretty much decided it was time instead of just scrolling and just constantly seeing people vote,” Jaylun Griffin told The Political Spectrum. “I was just like, ‘let me go ahead and do it.’”

Many young Black voters in Georgia also cited the Civil Rights Movement and the fact that the Supreme Court significantly weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the Louisiana v. Callais ruling earlier this year.

“I think it’s deplorable because, as a Black American, my ancestors and my grandparents and great grandparents who marched for this right, who fought for this right to vote, it is deplorable,” Angelica Ewing said. “ I feel like we need to do all that we can to make sure that this does not happen.”

Early voting data seems to bear this out. According to Djsokespeaking, a great X account tracking early voting, 106,739 Black voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast their ballots early in Georgia which is 170.5 percent of their early voter turnout in 2022. It’s difficult to know how many young voters cast their ballot for Democrats because Georgia does not have party registration. But given the way voters are polarized by race in Southern states, it does feel like a positive sign for Democrats.

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The same proved true in Greensboro, where younger voters specifically expressed frustration at the fact the Guilford County Board of Elections denied a request to have an in-person early voting site on campus.

“Them taking away our poll is like okay, they’re not gonna go out and like do what they do to go vote, have their voice, and but obviously we proved them wrong,” Kyra Brice told The Political Spectrum in Greensboro. Specifically, she cited the price of gas and groceries as reasons to vote.

Democrats also have good reason to feel optimistic in North Carolina, where 126,103 registered Democratic voters between ages of 18 and 29 voted early in person compared to only 62,577 in 2022.

The Senate races are just the appetizer

Much of the focus in both states has been on the marquee Senate races. And with good reason. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) looks ready to stomp Rep. Mike Collins and cruise to re-election, while former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina is all but guaranteed to win his race against Michael Whatley.

But the real prize this cycle is state-level control. In addition, North Carolina Democrats have the opportunity to not only win a Senate seat, but also hold a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court and potentially even flip at least one chamber in the General Assembly after Democrats had been locked out of both chambers since 2010. has a great breakdown here. It also tees Democrats up to potentially flip the court in 2028.

In Georgia, Democrats are not only vying for the governorship in Keisha Lance Bottoms’s race against Rick Jackson: they have a shot at winning the state legislature for the first time in more than two decades.

Most voters I spoke to seemed excited about the governor’s race, even as they said the entire ballot is important.

Darlene Joseph said when it came to the governor’s race, she was most excited about “ just putting a Democratic representation in place.”

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Data Centers dominate campaign talk

By now, anyone knows that 2026 is the year of the anti-data center candidate. Whether it’s Will Lawrence running for Congress in Michigan’s 7th district or Gina Hinojosa running as the Democratic nominee for governor in Texas, candidates who are running against data centers have made it a winning issue.

This also proved true in Georgia. But for the most part, it’s been coded as an issue that affects mostly white rural voters. At the rally in Morrow, however, I saw two older Black women wearing shirts opposing data centers. During her speech, Bottoms specifically said she would pause construction of data centers and hit Jackson for his support of them.

“Trump-supported data centers? Slick Rick owns not one, not two, not three, but four companies that are investing and building data centers as we speak,” she said.

This likely will not be the last time that AI and data centers will come up. With fear of AI running amok, expect potential Democratic trifectas to try and put some guardrails in place.

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Barack Obama is still ‘the best closer we have’ for Democrats–and it’s a problem

As I wrote in Zeteo this week about Ossoff, at one point when he began to introduce Obama, Ossoff borrowed Obama’s old line and asked the crowd “are you fired up? Are you ready to go?” It was a reminder that almost a decade after he left office and fourteen years after his last presidential campaign, it’s still Obama’s party.

Back in 2022, Malcolm Kenyatta, now a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told me that Obama was “the best closer we have.” Later that month, I went down to Pittsburgh for Obama’s rally with then-Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman. At the time, Democrats were ringing their hands about Fetterman’s difficulty communicating after he suffered a stroke. But Obama made the case he was the right candidate. It seemed to make the case for voters.

Obama is still the guy Democrats want on the wall when they need help. His rally with Abdul El-Sayed last month was the stamp of approval El-Sayed needed when many Democrats remained leery of him. He’s still the guy to make clutch plays.

This became abundantly clear when Obama shot back after Republicans had spent the week saying he was elitist for saying “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory.”

During the rally in Morrow, Obama shot back at them.

“They didn’t say anything about that. The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison,” he said. “That part didn’t bother him, but he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory.”

But so far, there has yet to be a generational talent on the level of Obama to stand into the void for Democrats. Even some of the most charismatic figures like Zohran Mamdani, Ossoff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or El-Sayed have limited appeal or are simply reworking his best lines. It’s unclear they will be able to create something new that will strike lightning with a new generation the way Obama did with millennials.

2026 is a chance to diversify the Democratic bench

In 2018, Democrats elected a record number of women and many of them have gone on to become senators and governors. Shortly thereafer, former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said “When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America. When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America.”

But in 2026, many of the Senate candidates are white men. Ossoff, of course, is a white man, as is Cooper in North Carolina. In Iowa, Democrats nominated Josh Turek to run for Senate. In Maine, Democrats nominated Troy Jackson, a white man, to replace Graham Platner, another white man, as their nominee to run against Sen. Susan Collins. And in Texas, they nominated James Talarico to run against Ken Paxton.

This is a longstanding problem for Democrats. In 2024, I wrote about how Democrats have long relied on the labor of Black women but they have not done a great job of elevating Black female talent. Part of this is also trauma after Harris and Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, despite the fact that during those same years, Democratic women did quite well electorally, even in states Trump won.

But a bit lower on the ballot, Democrats have a chance to diversify their benches. Ossoff has the chance to not just make Bottoms the first Black female governor, but also make Tanya Miller, another Black woman, attorney general of Georgia and Penny Brown Reynolds, another Black woman, to be secretary of state. Cooper’s victory in North Carolina can help carry Anita Earls, the only Black woman on the supreme court, to victory.

All of this can help diversify the bench for when future elections come. And this is to say nothing of rising state legislators in swing states who can ascend to the future.

Writing hither and yonder: The aforementioned Zeteo piece on whether Jon Ossoff can make a run for the White House. Much thanks to for edits and for letting me write for them

What I’m reading: In Politico Magazine, my former Daily Tar Heel colleague and UNC classmate Liz Crampton on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott being in the fight of his life. on why 2028 won’t be an ideas primary. I ran into Jonathan Martin at the Ossoff-Obama-Bottoms rally and his Politico column delves into the “Blacklash” about the Voting Rights Act I discussed above. Rivka Galchen in The New Yorker on how A.I. is changing math.

Your regular Bam Bam post:

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum. We’ve got four days until polls close. You may have seen this week that I was in Atlanta this week. I have a piece coming out this weekend that chronicles that. But for now, here’s another dispatch from Georgia. Remider, I can’t do this without your support, so subscribe or contribute at Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia.

MORROW, GA.–On Wednesday, Democrats in Georgia from across the Peach State packed The Arena at Southlake with just six days until election day.

Ostensibly, former president Barack Obama came here to rally his party around Sen. Jon Ossoff’s re-election campaign and to lift up Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta and the Democratic nominee for governor.

Jennifer Copeland, who drove more than three hours from Valdosta with a handful of other Lowndes County Democrats to the rally, told The Political Spectrum that she and her colleagues wanted to be with other Democrats and “that we’re looking forward to turning this state blue, from top of the ballot to the bottom of the ballot.”

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“We also wanted to hear our policies from not only Keisha Lance Bottoms, Jon Ossoff, but getting to hear and be motivated by President Barack Obama,” she added.

Located just 16 miles outside of Atlanta, Morrow is located in Clayton County, which is about 71 percent Black. In 2004, about 70.5 percent of Clayton voted for Sen. John Kerry. In 2008, almost 83 percent of voters there voted for Obama. That tilled the field so that Joe Biden could reap the harvest of Joe Biden winning the state as well as Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s victories in 2021.

But while Democrats broke through in 2020 and Warnock would win a full Senate term in 2022, Georgia has remained stubbornly red on the state level. In 2022, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp handily beat Stacey Abrams and the legislature remained under GOP control for most of the decade.

To be blunt, Democrats need another vote bank. As Republicans have become more competitive in states with large numbers of white non-college-educated working-class voters like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan–once called “the Blue Wall”–under Donald Trump, they need to win in states.

And Southern states like Georgia and North Carolina feel ripe for the picking. With their large ethnically-diverse populations and large amounts of college-educated liberals moving to their cities, they increasingly have the coalitions needed for Democrats to compete.

“We are showing America that the wave we saw in Georgia that sent Sen. Jon Ossoff and Sen. Warnock to the United States Senate was not a fluke, it was just the beginning,” Bottoms said.

And this might be the time when Democrats can turn he tide. With Trump’s approval ratings reaching their nadir, this might be the best time for Georgia Democrats to win not just the governorship, but also possibly win the state legislature. Last year, Democrats flipped two seats on the state’s Public Service Commission.

There’s also the fact that many Black voters remain livid after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which significantly weakened Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since then, southern states including Alabama and Florida have redrawn their congressional maps to give Republicans advantages and dilute the power of Black voters.

The legislation has special significance in Georgia considering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made Atlanta and the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock now preaches, his home base. John Lewis, then a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, would have his skull fractured by authorities on Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. Lewis would go on to serve as the congressman for large swaths of the Black population in the Atlanta metro area.

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Voters around Morrow told The Political Spectrum that the killing of the bill motivated them to vote.

“And a lot of our precincts, they either move far away, or they minimize them,” Valerie Austin, who lives in Fulton County, said. “It’s 1,000 houses in my subdivision. There’s no way we’re gonna go to a trailer parked at a fire station.”

Plenty of Black voters in the area invoked the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

“My ancestors and my grandparents and great grandparents who marched for this right, who fought for this right to vote, it is deplorable, and I feel like we need to do all that we can to make sure that this does not happen,” Angelica Ewing said.

But it’s clear that Democrats still have a massive challenge. For one, Bottoms is still in a neck-and-neck race against Rick Jackson, a self-funded health care executive and billionaire whom The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported has spent $220 million in his campaign for governor.

Polling averages show that Bottoms has a slight lead, though still within the margin of error. Jackson and her Democratic primary opponents criticized her for choosing not to run for re-election in 2021 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and when Atlanta had seen crime increase.

As the rally continued, it became apparent that Democrats called in Obama to shore up Bottoms, given that Ossoff is handily leading his Republican far-right opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, in polling. As the sounds of 2000s Atlanta hip-hop like Ludacris and Lil’ Jon and R&B singers like Usher pumped through the speakers before the rally started, the DJ regularly called on supporters to wave signs for the candidate.

And Bottoms is not as compelling as even other members of the statewide slate. Tanya Miller, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, and Penny Brown Reynolds, the Democratic nominee for secretary of State, both gave far more compelling speeches with massive applause lines.

It’s clear that many of Ossoff’s voters will likely crossover and vote for Jackson, something that rapper Killer Mike, one half of Run the Jewels, warned against.

“If you understand that she and Ossoff are a team to be sent into office for us, then you’ll vote for that team, and you’ll know that we have the right people,” he said.

And truthfully, there might not be another moment for Democrats to gain a foothold in Georgia on the federal level.

But even if Bottoms wins this race and flips only a handful of state legislative seats, it could signal the beginning of Democratic power in the state. And waves are the best opportunity to do this. Even as Georgia began to vote Republican on the presidential level in the 1964, the GOP only won the governorship in Georgia in 2002, during the post-9/11 Republican midterm wave. Subsequent party switches gave them control of the state Senate later that year and only in 2004 did the party win a trifecta in Georgia.

The same proved true in Virginia for Democrats. In 2005, Tim Kaine won the governorship in Virginia and Jim Webb would win a Senate seat, priming the pump for Obama’s victory in 2008 as more people moved into the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. But Democrats in the Old Dominion State would only win a trifecta in 2019 after a quarter-century lockout.

Tuesday is the perfect opportunity for Georgia Democrats to have a Virginia moment. But everything has to go right.

What I’m Reading: The New York Times’s profile on Keisha Lance Bottoms’s struggle to win voters after not running for re-elction as mayor of Atlanta explains the current political moment in Georgia. Eliza Griswold’s has a profile of Abdul El-Sayed in The New Yorker. Katie Rose Pryal’s piece on neurodivergent storytelling. Friend of the newsletter Natalie Fertig’s profile of Rep. Marcy Katpur of Ohio. Christopher Hooks’s profile of Ken Paxton in New York Magazine. Eva Hartog in Politico Magazine about why there will not be another Lula in Brazil. Center for NC Politics has satisfied my political sicko with its dashboard. My friend Rebecca Ching, MFT, PCC on cynicism. Madeleine Carlisle in The Atlantic on why Republicans’ redistricting efforts are going to hell.

Your regular Bam Bam post.

That’s it for The Political Spectrum. If you like what you read, hit subscribe below.

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Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! I’m excited for our first ever Media Offender Mailbag. Every Friday, paid subscribers will be able to send questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

With the midterms just four days away, let’s get cracking.

asks:

How do you and your colleagues look at polling? Which polls hold more weight with you?

Answer: I can only speak for myself. The first piece I wrote for The Political Spectrum focused on this specific subject. It holds special weight after the scandals with SoCal Strategies and Wedgewood literally making up their polls, which may have tanked races like Mallory McMorrow’s Senate race in Michigan.

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But, to borrow from G. Elliott Morris, as imperfect as polling may be, polling is still the best gauge of public opinion. gets a bad rap, but he’s still the GOAT, and his criteria for weighting polls is a good North Star.

As a reporter, I also try to be conscientious about how I talk about polls since if I overhype them, it might have a real impact on an election.

Typically, I give more weight to non-partisan polls, polls that have been accurate in the past and ones that use live phone calls. After Labor Day, I focus more on polls with likely voters than registered voters. But even then, I try to see if the polling reflects the electorate. Some of you saw me go on a tirade on Bluesky about Marist’s poll about Maine and the fact that its survey of likely voters showed a dead-heat race not for Senate, but for governor. It looked if to me because judging by previous elections in Maine, the national environment and how Kamala Harris won the state easily in 2024, this didn’t reflect the makeup of the state’s politics.

Long short of it, to borrow from Churchill, polling might be the worst form of measuring elections, except for all others have been tried.

Here’s a two-fer: asks:

Hopefully this works! What Senate race, way off everyone’s radar, like Montana, Idaho, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi etc. should we keep an eye on for a mega upset on Election night

While asks:

eric - what is the one plausible race out there that if the Democrat pulls it out will absolutely blow your mind. Like, what race is the data point that will make you lose it.

Answer: I always love a good wildcard race. There are always races that tell you whether an election will be a blow-out or just a normal-sized midterm backlash. In 2010, Sen. Russ Feingold losing in Wisconsin showed Democrats were about to get battered. In 2018, Kendra Horn winning in Oklahoma’s 5th district showed Democrats were about to have a pretty good night, but Republicans flipped four Senate seats, giving them a net of two Senate seats.

I am mostly keeping my eyes on the South on Election Night. As I wrote in The Independent right after Angie Nixon won her primary, Black voters are furious after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act and Black voter turnout spiked afterward. Votehub showed a significant spike in Black voter turnout in Southern primaries after the decision.

To answer John, the Senate race that would make me fall out of my chair and know Democrats pulled off a wave would be if Annie Andrews somehow flips South Carolina’s Senate seat. Yes, Darline Graham is a weak candidate who many conservatives don’t trust. Yes, Black voters are furious. But still, it’s South Carolina, a state nobody expected to flip. If somehow Andrews pulls it off, that means Republicans are in for a bloodbath.

I am also focused on the South because it’s not just about who wins or loses. It’s about the margins of those victories. If Jamie Davis gets within single digits of the Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow in Louisiana’s Senate race, then it’s a sign of a bad night, especially since Sen. Bill Cassidy won re-election in 2020 with 59.3 percent of the vote.

asks:

How do you cover politics and cope with the fact that depending on the outcomes of elections communities or issues you deeply care about may be either positively or negatively impacted? Thinking about RFK and all the HHS stuff

Answer: The hand-on-Bible answer is Donald Trump nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Health and Human Services secretary gave me a ton of purpose. After Trump won re-election, I genuinely wondered if I wanted to cover his second presidency since covering Trump 1.0 was a slog.

But when Trump nominated Kennedy, I knew I needed to stay. Not because I wanted to provide a biased opinion or “take him down.” Rather, I knew Kennedy would throw out tons of disinformation about autism. It almost felt like a moral imperative. Not only had I spent the last decade writing about autism and writing books about it, but I had been interviwing autistic people for years specifically about how bad ideas about autism hurt autistic people.

To me, it was not just enough to say that Kennedy is spreading dangerous information about public health. Plenty of journalists do a better job than I do. It was a matter of writing how his actions would hurt autistic people. To me, I felt almost like a duty for me to be in those rooms and ask those questions.

What gave me joy this week: I went to my friend’s wedding in Greensboro and it felt so refreshing to spend time with some of my oldest friends. Tim Duncan standing in line to vote. I went to see Rush with my friend Kris Guin. If you want to know why Rush means so much to me, here’s an essay I wrote in The Washington Post about Neil Peart and my dad.

What I’m reading: I grew up listening to Raffi, so this Associated Press interview was a delight. and ’s coverage of Vivek Ramaswamy and the fallout from his ad featuring Amy Acton’s mom in Zeteo has been excellent. (I have a piece in Zeteo coming out this weekend). Trump’s politics

Finally, a note from the late Sir Patrick Stewart, who spoke out bravely against domestic abuse.

Godspeed, Sir.

And Chuck, Kenny and Shaq’s tribute to the one and only Ernie Johnson on Inside The NBA made my eyes well.

That’s it for The Political Spectrum. If you like what you read, subscribe down below. If you want to support a travel budget, you can also send money to Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia.

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Correction: A previous version of this piece said that Cal Matters conducted fake polls. The name of the firm was SoCal Strategies.

Edits by

Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! I’m still recovering from the trip to Georgia. Will post some stray thoughts later today. Reminder that tomorrow is the first Media Offender Mailbag for paid subscribers.

With less than a week to go until the midterms, almost everyone is losing their patience and looking for any potential indication of how the election will go.

As voters are casting their ballots in-person in numerous swing states before election day, politics junkies are following almost every state that has early voting religiously to find any sign of how the winds will blow.

“We’re getting close to election day, and then people really want to glean anything they can,” Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, who breaks down early voting data, told The Political Spectrum. “We’ve been seeing polls for five or six months. Now we’re actually seeing actual votes cast, and it’s a different type of data.”

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All of this is understandable. Democrats hope that heavy early voting numbers mean their base is excited to vote for their candidates and kick out Republicans. President Donald Trump has criticized early voting, Still, early voting does not offer a definitive answer about how the election will turn out.

“What can’t we learn is how the final election is going to break out,” Armin Thomas, a co-founder of Split Ticket, said. Thomas regularly posts summaries on X breaking down early voting data from Texas ahead of the high-profile race for Senate between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton.

But not all early voting data is created equal and sometimes, people vote for both a Democrat and a Republican, as was the case in 2024 when North Carolina voted for Trump for president but elected Democrat Josh Stein to be governor.

“You cannot predict that in advance just from looking at who is turning out,” Thomas said. He pointed to Donnini. “It doesn’t tell you prescriptively that something will happen. It’ll tell you that something definitely won’t happen.”

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States like North Carolina, Florida and California have voters’ party affiliation in their voter files. But other southern states like Texas and Georgia do not show a voter’s party registration.

“That’s why I’ve been so meticulous and diligent about only speaking about what I can directly confirm myself,” he said.

The same goes for Donnini, who pointed to the fact that early voting can track turnout among voters’ bases, but not necessarily persuasion. He used Georgia as an example, saying that the current electorate turning out would likely back Kamala Harris. But that does not mean Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor, will lose.

“It just makes it a little bit harder for him, he just needs to get more people to split their tickets for Jon Ossoff and Rick Jackson,” he said.

The same is true in a place like the heavily Hispanic South Texas. Despite Texas not registering by party, Texas voting data shows whether someone cast their ballot in a Democratic or Republican primary. But plenty of voters cast their primary ballots in the Democratic primary, but do not vote for Democrats in the general. Thomas said that he has used Claude, an AI model from Anthropic, to create an algorithm to examine at the last three election primary and general election cycles.

“We are trying to model the 2024 recall of people that voted,” he said. “Because we can’t directly measure the persuasion today.”

And lest Republicans cry foul about early voting, Donnini said that Republicans have shown they can succeed in early voting.

“Republicans proved right that ‘we can do this too, we can get our voters out, and we can lead on that,” he said.

And even in Republican-held states, early voting is here to stay. This means that people will pore over and analyze the data for decades to come.

What I’m listening to: Ezra Klein’s interview with Nate Silver in The New York Times. Silver goes into some of the things I’ve been feeling about polling this cycle.

What I’m reading: Western Carolina University Professor Anatomy of a Purple State Substack has a great breakdown of what is a dummymander and whether North Carolina Republicans did one. Jake Lahut’s profile of Lauren Boebert in New York magazine. I’ve long believed Boebert is vulnerable, and this profile delves into why while debunking some of the most tawdry allegations. Nick Miroff in The Atlantic on how Republicans lost the “big-ass truck” Latino male vote.

That does it for this edition of The Political Spectrum. Hit subscribe below.

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Your regular Bam Bam photo.

Welcome a special edition of The Political Spectrum. Tonight I’ll be heading to Atlanta to cover Barack Obama’s rally with Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Some accounting. I figured out that in order to make it to some engagements before the rally, I will need to fly to Atlanta, but still plan, as promised to take the train back to Washington. I don’t take your subscriptions or financial support lightly and want to show I am a good steward of your money. You are my shareholders.

But with that in mind, since I have plenty of time to kill, it seems like a good time to have our first Media Offenders Mailbag. For those who don’t know, last year, the Trump administration put me and my former Independent colleague Andrew Feinberg on their list of media offenders. So from now on, paid subscribers of this newsletter will be known as Media Offenders.

With that in mind, given we are in the final stretch of the campaign, this is your time to ask whatever questions you have or give your thoughts. Also, your notes need not just be questions nor do they have to be limited to politics. Send anything that’s on your mind.

If you want to be in on the action, hit the subscribe button. I’ll publish the responses on Friday.

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What I’m reading: Kathy Gilsinan’s profile of Tyson Brody, the oppo research extraordinaire working for Adam Hamilton, in Politico Magazine. My friend recently moved to Brazil and witnessed how Lula pulled off an improbable win. The New York Times roundup of the midterms is informative. Barton Gellman in The New Yorker on local officials trying to stop Trump’s interventions in the midterms.

What’s annoying me about sports: The WNBA Finals happening at 12:30 PM. The NBA making a deal with prediction markets.

Edited by Andrew Donaldson

Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! We are eight days out from polls closing! Reminder that I will be in Atlanta this week covering Barack Obama’s rally for Democrats in Georgia. Your financial support through subscriptions or direct contributions goes a long way.

The Union Square campus that hosts nursing students at North Carolina A&T State University and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro is fully aware of the history of the city’’s role in the civil rights movement.

The campus features an image of the four N.C. A&T students who, in 1960, sat at the Woolworth lunch counter demanding to be served. Across the street from the polling place, Common Grounds, a coffee shop, has a sign in its window saying “Vote Today: Black Voters Matter.”

“Ancestors have fought for this right, and so it’s my duty to do it,” Nicole Watlington, an alumna of N.C. A&T, told The Political Spectrum.

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Sunday was the last day of the “Souls to the Polls,” when Black voters typically go to cast their ballot after church. But earlier this year, the Guilford County Board of Elections denied an early voting location at either UNCG or N.C. A&T.

“Well, given that we are the biggest HBCU in the country, I think that it is a shame that they close it,” Watlington said. “However, Aggies do, yeah, and we will make a way as we always have and get the vote done.”

In the same respect, Keris Blackmon, a freshman at N.C. A&T, said Sunday was her first time voting.

“Upperclassmen really did express how it was super convenient and just to have that removed, I think they’re attempting to disenfranchise us, and that’s not right,” Blackmon told The Political Spectrum.

North Carolina has received massive amounts of media attention given that former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is running against Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman, for the state’s open Senate seat. But North Carolina also has an election for its supreme court, with incumbent Democratic Justice Anita Earls running against Republican Sarah Stevens.

In addition, three proposed constitutional amendments will appear on the ballot: one to reduce the maximum-allowed income tax rate from 7 percent to 3.5 percent; another to require photo ID to all methods to all forms of voting; and another to limit property tax increases by local governments.

But national issues are also weighing on voters.

“ICE is really upsetting,” Blackmon said, in reference to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that has come under intense scrutiny after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

As a student, she was frustrated by provisions for student loans in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The law set a lifetime limit of $257,500 for federal student loans and removed numerous repayment plans.

Throughout the day, there was a trickle in of younger voters, largely Black women, but some younger Black men.

Kyra Brice, another student at N.C. A&T, said that she was most concerned about the cost of living, specifically with groceries and gas prices. She also highlighted that many of her classmates marched to Union Square to cast their ballots.

“I’m pretty sure they’ll do it even more because our voices deserve to be heard,” Brice told The Political Spectrum.

And it looks like Brice is not the only one who feels this way.

According to the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation’s early vote tracker, voters between the ages of 18 and 25 are voting at 2.1 times the pace they did in 2022 and Black voters are voting at 1.6 times the pace they did in 2022.

So far, we’ve seen that a potential blue wave has been especially localized in red states. If these demographics vote as Democratic as the trends may show, it might crash right on the shores of the Tar Heel State.

What I’m reading: Benjamin S. Weiss’s dispatch from Sugar Land, Texas, in HuffPost about how Republicans’ anti-Indian rhetoric might cost them the state. Lena Sun’s profile of Demetre Daskalakis in The Washington Post. A fascinating profile by Benjamin Oreskes in The New York Times of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and how her family’s time in a trailer park shaped her politics.

What made me laugh: Like everybody, I couldn’t breathe when watching Charles Barkley fabulously fail at this segment of “Who he Play for?” on Inside the NBA.

That does it for this edition of The Political Spectrum. If you like what you read, please consider subscribing. And we’ll see you in Georgia.

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Edited by Andrew Donaldson

Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! We have 11 days left until midterms polls close. Reminder, I’ll be in Greensboro, North Carolina this weekend to cover early voting and Atlanta next week. Message tips and food recs.

The National Autistic Society, the major autism charity in the United Kingdom, released a survey on Thursday on autism and disinformation. The poll surveyed autistic people, parents and caregivers of autistic people.

The results were incredibly telling. Here’s a direct quote from the press release:

• A staggering 98% expressed concern about misinformation.

• 84% said they believed the volume of misinformation about autism had increased in the past two years.

• Eight in 10 autistic people believe autism is inaccurately represented – both in the media and online.

• In the last year, the top three places to hear misinformation was in the mainstream media 1,484 (84%), on social media 1,362 (77%), from politicians or other public figures 1,272 (72%).

The organization’s Instagram page also said that 77 percent of autistic respondents “felt too scared to tell others they’re autistic.”

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Autistic people and their loved ones also have good reason to believe that misinformation about autism comes from mainstream media, social media and politicians or public figures. I wrote a piece published in The Boston Globe opinion section this week about the growing backlash against neurodiversity in response to the government in the U.K. releasing its report on mental health conditions, autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), quoted here:

Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform Party, has said that when an 18-year-old is put “on a disability register, unemployed, with a high level of benefits, you’re telling people aged 18 that they’re victims.” Even Dame Uta Frith, the German British psychologist responsible for much of the public understanding around autism, spoke earlier this year about how she no longer believes autism is a spectrum.

The latest report was met with a headline from the BBC saying, “ADHD and autism at risk of over-diagnosis, says government review.” But the report was more nuanced. While it said current trends might show risks changing from underdiagnosis “towards an increased risk of misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis,” it could not conclude “that overdiagnosis is occurring at scale.” As a result, the report suggested that the UK health care system move from a diagnosis-based system to a more needs-based system.

Obviously, the risks of overdiagnosis or misdiagnosis have to always be weighed. A misdiagnosis or wrong diagnosis can be just as disorienting as getting an autism diagnosis can be clarifying. Just this week, actress Christina Applegate said she had been misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis and is now “back at square one.”

Still, fears of misdiagnosis should not discount that people who need a diagnosis both to access services and reorient their lives around their disability should have access to a diagnosis.

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The United States seems to have another problem described in the National Autistic Society survey: the synthesis of disinformation from politicians and social media. In September 2025, President Donald Trump, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Food and Drug Administration made a major announcement linking the use of acetaminophen, commonly known as Tylenol in the United States, during pregnancy to children developing autism. The announcement came despite no evidence that Tylenol causes autism.

The lack of truth didn’t deter influencers online. Researchers at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School analyzed 53 videos on TikTok posted from the day of the announcement to November 2025 about the subject and found that only 52.8 percent of videos contained information consistent with scientific evidence. By contrast, 28.3 percent of videos contained misinformation and 18.9 percent of videos contained mixed or uncertain information. But the researchers also found that posts with misinformation accounted for 52.4 percent of 28.1 million total views.

It’s clear that the administration has not only the biggest bully pulpit, but an entire army of content creators who can amplify misinformation. A second study found that of 65 health organizations, only 14 institutions posted Instagram about the White House’s remarks.

This kind of disinformation does not happen in a vacuum. Much of my first book about how when politicians receive bad information, it leads to bad policy. But the reverse is also true that politicians can affect individual decisions. In the U.K., this might discourage autistic people from seeking a diagnosis. In the U.S., it can mean expectant parents not taking Tylenol to provide relief for a fever.

Unfortunately, the disinformation factory will not stop. And even once Farage, Trump, Kennedy and others exit, their pronouncements will permanently alter the information landscape.

Writing hither and yonder: I wrote for MS NOW about how Trump hollowed out state parties. The aforementioned Globe op-ed. In The Washington Examiner, I break down Maryland Democrats’ proposed constitutional amendment for redistricting.

What accounts I’m following: Like everyone else, I’m following early voting, but I am not smart enough to interpret the data. I’d suggest following the X accounts @ZacharyDonnini, the entire @VoteHub team, @DjsokeSpeaking, @theoelections and @FatUglyRat.

What I’m reading: Natalie Fertig’s dispatch for New York Magazine about how Vivek Ramaswamy has failed to win over voters in Ohio even before his ad featuring his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s mom. Also in New York, April Lockhart’s essay about her marriage failing is a gut-wrenching read. A good essay in The Atlantic about why men are not looking for work.

That’s it for today’s edition of The Political Spectrum. If you like what you read, subscribe below and we’ll see you in Greensboro.

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Happy first day of early voting in Texas! We have some great news and developments.

We are now a little over a week into The Political Spectrum! So first and foremost, I just want to say “thank you.” Losing a job is always scary and deciding to start a new project in your 30s is even scarier.

But thanks to your support, we have some great news: As of Monday, The Political Spectrum has hit 100 paid subscribers! For a fledgling newsletter, this is a big deal. So, of course, I want to say thank you. In total, we now have a gross annualized revenue stream of $5,566.

To boot, we have 345 free subscribers! I’m really humbled that you would consider following this new project. For those who are still weighing whether to join in this project, hit subscribe below.

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I said from the start that the joy of being independent would be that I would be accountable only to you. That means accountable about how I spend your money.

In that vein, I have some news: I’m hitting the road to do some campaign reporting. As fate would have it, I will be in Greensboro this weekend for a friend’s wedding. So, considering that North Carolina has a marquee Senate and state supreme court race, I figure I might as well do some reporting the next day before my plane leaves.

In addition, I made the snap decision to head to Atlanta next week to cover early voting in Georgia as well as President Barack Obama’s rally for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Keisha Lance Bottoms. To save money, I’ll be taking the Amtrak. This could only be possible with your financial support.

In the coming days, I’ll be focusing on some freelance piece I have in the hopper, but will continue writing in this space. In addition, Friday will feature our first ever mailbag for paid subscribers. So paid subscribers, send questions here and I’ll answer.

Lastly, if you have any suggestions on what to cover, feel free to message me here. Also, if you have any tips for any political or policy subject, my signal is emgarcia.85. And if you want to support the travel budget, visit Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia. Thank you again!

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