2026-10-28 18:00:00
Ken Cuccinelli is a long-time fixture of the conservative movement. The former Virginia attorney general and former Trump official is known for his far-right views on immigration, his denial of climate change, and some very conservative positions on social issues like gay rights and same-sex marriage. But more recently he’s become one of the leading figures on the right pushing for a more open and transparent election process as well as voting restrictions that critics say could wind up disenfranchising legal voters.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.“We could have a lot more confidence in our elections if our election officials would be ready to and willing to admit mistakes and to just fix them,” Cuccinelli says. “Instead, they oftentimes try to deny that they even exist.”
As the midterms approach, More To The Story host Al Letson talks with Cuccinelli about why he believes beefed-up voting restrictions are necessary, whether he believes the lies about the 2020 election, and why he doesn’t support President Trump’s proposal that Republicans “take over” the elections.
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2026-10-28 05:01:14
“Michigan is the most important election in the United States of America,” Vice President JD Vance said at a rally in Howell, Michigan, on Tuesday afternoon.
In a town known as the “KKK capital of Michigan,” Vance delivered a bigoted midterms sales pitch. His words echoed Donald Trump’s Islamophobia from the day prior, when Trump called Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a “jihadist” and argued that electing him would mean so much terrorism “you cannot even have Christmas.”
Vance, in his followup, claimed at a pre-rally press gaggle that El-Sayed traffics in “anti-white racial hate,” and argued that if El-Sayed is elected, American cities will see protests on the scale of those in France this month.
“The scenes of destruction in Paris may be an ocean away, but ask yourselves: are they really so hard to imagine here in the United States of America?” Vance said.
“And I guarantee you, if those rioters were burning down New York or Detroit, the Hasan Pikers and the El-Sayeds would be right there leading them and cheering them on. Because what we saw in France—the hatred, the ingratitude, the desire to destroy rather than the desire to build…that exact same cancer is what has corrupted Abdul El-Sayed writ large.”
By contrast, he said, Republican candidate Mike Rogers—a man who has engaged in his own Islamophobic rhetoric against El-Sayed—would “further build upon the great momentum of the last 18 months.”
Michigan voters have been inundated with increasingly aggressive messaging from an anxious Republican Party over the past month. It’s easy to see why: two years after Trump carried the state by 1.4 percentage points, the party faces a serious risk of losing both Senate and House seats in the state in next Tuesday’s midterms.
One of those battlegrounds is Michigan’s seventh congressional district, where Vance stumped for Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett on Tuesday. Barrett, who won office in 2024, faces a strong challenge from progressive Democrat Will Lawrence. But Vance barely mentioned the local race, saying the candidate’s name exactly thrice—once describing him simply as “a patriot” who would secure the border, and twice not describing him at all. He said almost nothing about Barrett’s record. And though he spoke at length about Hasan Piker, who is not running for any elected office, he did not name Lawrence, Barrett’s actual opponent, once.
Instead, Vance free-associated about his peewee football days, “backing the blue and waging war on criminals,” fuel extraction and manufacturing under Trump, and how “one of the things I’m proudest of is that we ended the tyranny of DEI and racial discrimination in jobs and universities.”
While Vance’s rhetoric around the Michigan campaign trail barely addresses the races in question, or the candidates he’s ostensibly supporting, Republican money is pouring into Barrett’s district. Total ad spending in the seventh district has topped $47 million in the general election according to the analytics firm AdImpact. That makes this race one of the three most expensive midterm contests this cycle, alongside North Carolina’s first district and Florida’s 25th district.
Trump’s own PACs are leading the blitz. The president’s “Safety and Affordability PAC,” launched in September, has reserved $6.3 million in local airtime through election day to help keep Barrett afloat against Lawrence, who has leveraged a populist, anti-data-center platform to lead by as much as eight points in recent polling.
2026-10-28 04:20:25
Republican Rep. Mark Amodei says he’s voted Republican in every election since he was 18. Until now.
Amodei, who is retiring next month, represents Nevada’s second congressional district. David Flippo is the Trump-backed Republican nominee to replace him.
But with questions swirling about Flippo’s campaign finances and allegations that Flippo and his campaign misrepresented his military record, Amodei says he didn’t vote for Flippo, the first time in his life he didn’t vote Republican.
He invited reporter Noah Lanard and producer Sam Van Pykeren to his Nevada home this week, days ahead of the midterm elections, to explain why.
“I don’t want to sit here after the fact and go, ‘well, I was a loyal troop,'” Amodei said of not voting for a nominee from his own party. “You know who will care about that after the fact? Nobody.” Instead, Amodei said, he voted for Lynn Chapman, an independent candidate.
Nevada’s second congressional district has only had four representatives since its creation in the ’80s—and they’ve all been Republicans. But that could change next week. As Noah previously reported:
Flippo is locked in an unusually competitive race against Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson in a sprawling district encompassing Reno. Flippo’s hard-right candidacy and status as a recent transplant to Reno have divided Nevada Republicans. Mark Amodei, who is retiring from the seat Flippo hopes to win, called him a “fraud” in an article about the Bronze Star claims and refused to back him in both the primary and general election. Due to his vulnerabilities, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently added this deep red district to its “Red to Blue” program, identifying it as a possible flip opportunity.
In light of a laundry list of controversies Flippo faces, Amodei has repeatedly called the retired Air Force officer and licensed financial adviser a “fraud.”
Since 2023, Flippo repeatedly failed to file required financial disclosures that would illuminate his financial position. Then there’s the case of Flippo’s military record. For years, Flippo wore a hat that suggested he earned the Bronze Star with valor—the rare award he admits he does not have. When pressed on the V-shaped hat accessories, which are used by the US military to show when awards are earned for valor, Flippo claimed his grandchildren had attached the emblems.
“Yeah, right.” Amodei told Mother Jones. “You put those on there. Sorry! Speculation on my part.”
Flippo also has close ties to a dubious company run by an businessman who has been accused of fraud in court records. Flippo has benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations from the company, Arizona Land Reserve, and people in the company’s orbit. And previously unreported records obtained by Mother Jones show Flippo was fired as a financial adviser in 2024 after being accused of “willful misrepresentations and/or omissions of material fact”—a firing Flippo has previously downplayed.
“Nowhere in those oaths does it say ignore the candidate who appears to have some material defects and just, you know, be a good Republican,” Amodei said.
2026-10-28 03:55:58
In December 2022, two days before the end of his tenure and after losing his reelection bid, Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro flew to the United States. Skipping the traditional transfer of power ceremony at President-Elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s inauguration, Bolsonaro settled in Florida and eventually enjoyed a retiree‘s lifestyle at the home of an MMA fighter in Kissimmee. Meanwhile, his supporters back home emulated the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, ransacking federal government buildings. The elder Bolsonaro returned to Brazil after three months and was later convicted of a failed coup attempt that included a plot to assassinate Lula. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison, time he is serving at home due to health issues.
Now, days after Lula’s surprise victory in the 2026 presidential elections, another member of the Bolsonaro family is reportedly seeking refuge in America. According to media reports, Flávio Bolsonaro has left Brazil headed to the United States, where he’s rumored to be asking the friendly government of President Donald Trump for asylum. Much like his father, Flávio refused to concede defeat and initially said he would seek to annul the results. (His own party later recognized Lula’s win.) For the first time in 24 years, since he was first elected a state lawmaker in 2022, the aspiring Bolsonaro successor and senator faced the prospect of being out of public office, and with it, losing the special immunity officeholders enjoy.
Flávio’s departure defies an order by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes prohibiting the defeated candidate from leaving the country and instructing him to surrender his passports. The ruling is connected to an investigation into Flávio’s alleged participation in a money-laundering scheme. (He’s also being investigated as part of a probe into the financing of a biopic of his father.) By Tuesday morning, the younger Bolsonaro had missed the deadline to hand over his travel documents, and the Brazilian federal police were looking into whether he had left the country via Argentina.
That Flávio would make a getaway to the United States doesn’t come as a surprise, and not only because of his father’s stint in the Sunshine State. America has become the default destination for several Bolsonaro or Bolsonaro-adjacent figures on the radar of Brazilian authorities, including the grandson of a former military dictator and a far-right influencer once described as “the fake-news kingpin of Brazil” who is considered to be a fugitive from justice.
Chiefly among them is Flávio’s brother, Eduardo, a key go-between of the Brazilian far right and Trump’s circle who’s been “self-exiled” in the United States since early 2025. Earlier this month, Justice Moraes issued an arrest warrant for Eduardo, who was sentenced to four years and two months in prison for “coercion” in his efforts to interfere in his father’s criminal trial by lobbying the Trump administration. Eduardo, a Texas-based MAGA darling who was stripped of his congressional seat in Brazil, has pushed for the US government to impose tariffs on Brazilian goods and sanctions against authorities like Moraes, and to designate two criminal groups—Comando Vermelho and PCC—as terrorist organizations. Ahead of Sunday’s runoff, Eduardo said on a US podcast that his brother should leave the country if he lost the election.
A US official reportedly told CNN that Flávio was flying to Florida, but his actual whereabouts remain unknown—much like the political future of the Bolsonaro family and their grip on the Brazilian right.
2026-10-28 02:53:31
At a crowded rally in Dayton, Ohio Monday night, celebrity singer John Legend characterized Vivek Ramaswamy as “desperate” and morally depraved. “He will stoop lower than you thought possible,” Legend said of Ramaswamy, the billionaire biotech entrepreneur and Ohio’s Republican candidate for governor.
Legend was, of course, referencing Ramaswamy’s controversial advertisement against Democratic opponent Dr. Amy Acton. It features Acton’s 82-year-old mother, who lost custody of her children after her husband was indicted in 1978 for raping Acton at the age of 12. Despite warrants for his arrest, the stepfather and Acton’s mother fled Ohio together and Acton never saw them again.
But in Ramaswamy’s ad, Acton’s mom, Donna Arthur, calls her estranged daughter a “liar” who isn’t fit to be governor.
“When Vivek Ramaswamy hears of an indicted child abuser who fled the state rather than face charges, instead of siding with the victim, he takes the side of the abuser. Dayton, do we want Vivek Ramaswamy to be in charge of protecting Ohio’s children? Do we want a man with this sort of depraved moral compass to lead our state?” asked Legend, an Ohio native.
A few Ohio Republicans have offered tepid criticism of Ramaswamy. Outgoing Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said the media spot was “deeply, deeply troubling.” And incumbent Sen. Jon Husted, who faces a tight Senate race against Democrat Sherrod Brown next week, said he “would not have run that ad.” But nationally, party leaders doubled down: Vice President JD Vance told Republicans to “stop whining” about the ad. President Donald Trump rebuked DeWine, accusing him of being, “as usual, disloyal to the Republican Party.”
“He probably wants a Dumocrat to win,” Trump wrote on social media about DeWine.
Waiting in line for Monday’s rally, several Democratic voters said they believe Ramaswamy’s advertisement indeed may have that effect, helping Ohio Democrats like Acton best their Republican opponents in already-tight races.
A Dayton-area history teacher (who asked me not to publish her name because it could get her in trouble with her school) said the advertisement was “slimy.” But in a way, she was also grateful that Ramaswamy was airing it publicly.
“It’s making people pull away seeing that half the Republican Party is like that. You have a president who was found liable for sexual crimes, and Vivek, who is exploiting victims of sexual crimes,” she said. “Vivek, thank you.”
“I hate that she had to relive that, but there’s no better way for them to show people who they really are,” added Jennifer Voudris, another rally-goer.
Democrats at the rally told me about anecdotal signs giving them hope that Ohio may elect its first Democrat to statewide office since 2018: One man told me he saw a longtime Republican neighbor post on Facebook that he could no longer vote for Ramaswamy in good conscience after seeing the advertisement. Multiple people flagged that there had been strong turnout this week for early voting, which statistically favors Democrats.
Theresa Gasper, a former Republican turned Democrat precinct captain for Beaver Creek, Ohio, said that after the ad came out she quickly ran out of her anti-Ramaswamy yard signs. She had been offering them for a suggested donation of $15, with all proceeds going to her local Democratic Party. When the 250 signs she made weren’t selling, she instead listed them for free.
“They became really popular when I offered them for free, but after THE ad last week, the rest went really fast,” Gasper explained. She emailed me later to let me know she didn’t ultimately make it inside the event. The venue—a former industrial coal depot that is now a popular spot for concerts and weddings—had exceeded its fire capacity.
Perhaps slightly more scientific than yard sign litmus tests and one-off Facebook posts, recent polls have also shown Acton ahead. A large-sample Marist survey conducted from October 15 to 18 showed Acton ahead of Ramaswamy by seven points. An October 15 to 19 poll by Fox showed Acton ahead by two. Those were both before the advertisement, which began circulating October 20. But a Redbox Research poll conducted October 20 to 23 saw Acton up by four points.
David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati, said he thinks Ramaswamy’s attack advertisement may drag him down even more. He also mentioned Husted could be collateral damage amid the GOP fallout.
“There is a reason so many Republican candidates distanced themselves from this ad—which is an extraordinary step to take in a party that for years has perfected the right to remain silent and look away from the outrageous,” said Niven.
When Acton took the stage toward the end of the rally, she didn’t want anyone to “look away.”
“You probably have been hearing by now that I had a pretty rough childhood growing up. My brother and I experienced a lot of abuse and neglect,” she said, before pointing out that she likely wasn’t the only person in the room who had experienced something similar.
“Everyone here knows that we all see a thing or two in our lives, if not in our childhood. None of us gets out of this unscathed,” said Acton.
Just before the rally officially started, I had spoken to a man named Justin who said he also experienced childhood sexual abuse. Now in his 40s, Justin said he was 6 when his pastor raped him. He said the Ramaswamy advertisement filled him with rage—and yet another reason to vote.
“I just want to hug Amy.”
2026-10-27 23:41:35
A week before the midterms, voters are worried about corruption.
According to a national survey by the Financial Times and Focaldata, a non-partisan research company based in London, about 69 percent of over 1,600 registered voters—and nearly 50 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2024—said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about “corruption, self-dealing or conflicts of interest” in the president’s second term. Nearly half of all registered voters reported that corruption has become increasingly concerning during Trump’s second term compared with previous administrations.
“When a family reads a story about presidential crypto profits at the same time as they are deciding whether they should put off their expensive doctor’s appointment, they see that the system is working for someone—just not for them,” Jeremy Ney, a Columbia Business School professor, told FT.
According to Trump’s financial disclosures, Trump made more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency business deals, including income from his $TRUMP meme coin and World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm where he and his sons are among the co-founders.
Campaigns have picked up on it, too. According to the Washington Post’s October analysis of $1.6 billion in midterm campaign ads, corruption and ethics reform ads ($306 million among Democrats and $187 million among Republicans) ranked second in total spending behind affordability ($418 million among Democrats and $483 million among Republicans).
The issue may prove to be a deciding factor in many races, as Democrats would need to flip four seats each in both the US House and Senate to build a simple majority.
