Elections

To my fellow Americans: I am not writing to tell you how to vote. I have opinions, and I have set a great many of them down in this space across the past year, and none of them is the subject here. The subject is the act itself, which belongs to neither party, cannot be done on your behalf, and takes about as long as a haircut. There will be an election on November 3. That part is statute rather than forecast. The Federal Election Commission calls it “the next regularly scheduled federal General Election date,” and it will arrive whether or not either of us is ready. Everything else about the day is open: who wins the House, who holds the Senate, how long the counting takes, whether the side that loses behaves as though losing is survivable. ...

The midterms come Tuesday, November 3, and the single most consequential fact about them is not a candidate, a poll, or a map. It is that most eligible Americans will not vote. In 2022, the closest thing the country has seen to a high-turnout midterm in generations, 52.2 percent of the citizen voting-age population cast a ballot.1 By the stricter measure that counts only the voting-eligible population, turnout was 46 percent.2 Either way, the majority stayed home. In 2014 the number was worse: 41.9 percent by the census count, and just 36.4 percent of eligible voters by the elections-project measure, the lowest since 1942, a year when a large share of the country’s eligible voters were overseas fighting a world war.13 The largest bloc in American politics is not a party and not a movement. It is the empty seat. ...

On November 3, Missourians will answer five statewide questions. Four are constitutional amendments referred by the legislature; one is a referendum the people forced onto the ballot themselves. Two of them are about the machinery of voting rather than about any policy a vote would produce, and that is the quiet feature of this ballot. Before the state decides who governs, it is being asked to decide how much of the deciding the people get to keep. ...

On November 3 the country votes, and the most probable outcome, on the current arithmetic, is that one chamber changes hands and the other does not. That is the forecast this site published when the midterms were ten weeks out, and if it holds, the next two years will be conducted under divided government. So the question worth asking now is not who wins. It is what divided government actually accomplishes. ...

If you read the news about the 2026 election long enough, you come away with the impression that something enormous is about to happen to it. Two executive orders, a Postal Service rule, a citizenship database, a hundred lawsuits, agents at polling places, a Supreme Court case about mail ballots. It reads like an election under siege. Here is the strangest fact about all of it: as of the end of September, almost nothing has actually changed for voters. The executive orders are blocked. The Postal Service rule was denied by the Supreme Court nine days before the deadline to mail overseas ballots. The citizenship database is under challenge in Maryland. The Justice Department has lost every voter-roll case that has been decided, twenty-four of them in a row. The SAVE Act never passed. The Election Assistance Commission cannot adopt new standards because it has no commissioners left to vote.1 ...

On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the congressional map Republicans drew in 2025 and used in Missouri’s August primary “is not the law and has never been the law.” The map, House Bill 1, was suspended before it ever took effect because a referendum petition against it was filed in time. The November election will run on the 2022 districts instead, and the referendum sits on the ballot as Proposition A.1 ...

Three times in the last sixteen months, the country has answered a single question in the streets.1 In June 2025, millions turned out on the same day the president staged a military parade for his own birthday. In October 2025, they returned for a second day of action across more than 2,600 locations. On March 28, 2026, they came back a third time, in what organizers described to the press as the largest single-day demonstration in American history, with events in all fifty states and every congressional district.12 I have written about each of these days on this site, because the question they answer matters more than the crowds: does the United States have a king? ...

Sixty-one days from now, on November 3, Americans will vote in a midterm election: all 435 seats of the House of Representatives, 35 seats of the Senate, and thousands of state and local offices. Most of us will vote without ever asking a question the Constitution answers in surprising and incomplete ways: what does the document actually say about federal elections? The answer is less than most people assume, and more. The original Constitution never mentions a right to vote for president, and barely mentions elections at all. What it does contain is a carefully engineered division of power over election machinery, a method for choosing a president that has been amended four times, and a counting procedure whose ambiguities were tested on January 6, 2021 and rewritten by statute a year later. This article walks through the text, clause by clause, because sixty-one days before a midterm is a good time to know exactly what is written down and what is not. ...

The 2026 midterms come Tuesday, November 3, with both chambers of Congress in play and an outcome that has become genuinely uncertain as the campaign enters its final stretch.1 Republicans control the Senate 53 to 47 and the House 219 to 212, with four seats vacant.2 Democrats enter the fall with the national wind at their back, roughly six points ahead on the generic ballot, and a plausible arithmetic for taking both chambers.3 The question is whether they survive contact with the map. ...

The 2026 Senate Map: A Race-by-Race Guide The setup: Republicans currently hold the Senate 53–47. Thirty-five seats are on the November 2026 ballot: 33 regular contests plus two special elections to fill vacancies. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the majority; Republicans can afford to lose only two and still hold it outright (a loss of three produces a 50–50 tie, broken by the vice president). ...