Around the site this week, Dispatch Politics writers are looking at the issues and personalities that could shape next year’s midterm elections. Michael Warren considered how the passage of the GOP’s catchall tax and spending legislation—the One Big Beautiful Bill—will play out in 2026: “The likeliest scenario is somewhere in the middle between the two parties’ fantasies: perhaps a significant repudiation of Trump and the GOP that has something, but not everything, to do with the BBB, or an underwhelming pushback that reflects some limited frustration with Republicans but not enough to hand over much power to Democrats.” I suspect that’s right, and think there’s a good chance the bill could hurt Republicans more in 2028 than in 2026 because the legislation’s most controversial provisions—including cuts to Medicaid—don’t take effect until 2027.
Meanwhile, David Drucker examined how the Democratic nomination of socialist Zohran Mamdani to be mayor of New York City could affect midterm races across the country, and I took a look at the latest controversy to pop up from Mamdani’s past—comments blaming the FBI for the radicalization of a senior al-Qaeda operative.
—John
Top Stories From the Dispatch Politics Team
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are touting the $165 billion in spending on border security and deportation operations in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law last week. But its immigration enforcement provisions appear rife with redundancies, overlaps, and vague wording, and experts are pointing to an absence of accountability measures for how the money will be spent.
Now that Congress has passed, and President Donald Trump has signed, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB), the die has been cast: Democrats desperate to claw back some level of power in Washington will be using this signature legislation against the GOP in next year’s midterms. Some Republicans in Washington, like Rep. Don Bacon and Sen. Thom Tillis, are already heading for the exits while warning that the Big Beautiful Bill is a ticking time bomb for the GOP. Democrats are eating it up.
Just when centrist Democrats, and arguably the Democratic Party, caught a break with the nomination of two mainstream, center-left politicians in marquee races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats in New York went ahead and nominated flamboyant socialist Zohran Mamdani for mayor.
When Coolidge became president, things were not going the right way. The rustic, old-fashioned, penny pincher who was so thrifty that he never even owned his own home was not the man America was looking for to manage a period of booming growth, big social changes, and a federal government that, even after wartime spending had ended, was still twice the size it had been before the war. But, of course, he was the perfect person.
Liberty, rights, dignity, the opportunity to pursue our own happiness and prosperity in our own way—these are not gifts given by one man to another, no matter how powerful the one man or how subordinate the other. The king cannot bestow such gifts on us, because they are not the king’s to give—or to take away. These gifts are given to us by God, not in His role as Judge or Father or Redeemer (and there is no mistaking the Anglo-Protestant sensibility here) but in His capacity as Creator.
From talking about “seizing the means of production” and “defund[ing] the police” to refusing to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, has courted controversy with countless statements. But recently surfaced comments made by Mamdani about a senior al-Qaeda operative could have particular resonance in a city where nearly more than 2,700 people died in al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
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