Contents:

1. Ship Traffic out of Hormuz & Oil Prices: More Hope Than Realism

2. The Economic Implications: Are Markets Underestimating the Situation?

3. Political Implications: Trump is Wishcasting About Hormuz

4. What Will Happen Next?

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Ship Traffic out of Hormuz & Oil Prices: More Hope Than Realism

When Trump started the war against Iran, the global stock market plummeted. It was only a natural reaction. After all, the closing of the Straight of Hormuz – a vital bottleneck for the shipping of commodities – led oil prices to skyrocket from about $60 a barrel to over $110 a barrel. High oil prices are known to weigh on the economy as they drastically raise gas prices and have trickle-down effects that can lead to long-term inflation. This can lead to higher interest rates and worsening market conditions. So, the S&P 500 falling almost 10% in March seemed rather logical.

Today, however, markets are back to all-time highs, having left the lows of March 2026 in the dust. The reprieve and following rally had a few reasons. These are the continuing boom in sectors unaffected by the supply-chain issues, such as AI & technology, but the Iran situation also played a role. As the US and Iran drew closer to a peace deal – one that has failed spectacularly this month – markets quickly concluded that everything would go back to normal soon. Oil prices receded to levels only slightly above pre-war prices, causing a sigh of relief for the markets and the FED - which sets interest rates. Yet, that fall of oil prices seemed to have largely been built on hope and not realism. Because during the short-lived peace deal in June, which caused oil prices to drop and markets to rise, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remained at a fraction of pre-war levels.

The chart once again outlines how a brief window of hope for peace caused oil prices to plummet, even as shipments only barely picked up. As of this Thursday, the Strait of Hormuz is closed again, the war is back, and it might even widen. Iran-allied Houthi Rebels have started attacking Saudi tankers, threatening to create a 2nd choke point.

Today, oil prices climbed back above $90 a barrel, and it seems like they will only continue to rise. That has immense implications, both politically and economically.

The Economic Implications: Are Markets Underestimating the Situation?

The Federal Reserve had long planned to bring interest rates back to low levels. But in order to do so, inflation needs to fall below the target of 2%. For a while, the US seemed to be perfectly on target. When Biden left office, inflation had fallen back to 2.8%, so the Fed started lowering rates. Trump’s tariffs brought uncertainty and rate pauses, and conflict in Iran is worsening things. The annual inflation rate rose to 4.2% in May, mainly driven by higher oil prices. It fell back to 3.5% in June as the peace deal made oil prices fall, but the window of reprieve has passed. As a result, the FED and its new chairman Kevin Warsh might have to raise rates soon (which the FED kept at 3.75% for about a year now). That’s not something investors want.

While low interest rates help boost the economy and markets, the FED can raise interest rates to slow down the economy and ease inflation. That happened in 2021 & 2022, when post-COVID & Ukraine-war inflation infected the world. Higher Interest rates make stock market investments less attractive as investors can bank on high risk-free interest rates off the markets.

Shipping out of Hormuz has basically been non-existent since March, and yet, the S&P 500 has risen about 8% from pre-war levels. If markets have indeed overestimated Trump’s peacemaking skills and the threat of rising inflation, then the sobering moment might come as a shock to some. A very slow shock. While the Iran War or Trump’s liberation day caused stock crashes that dominated news headlines, high-interest-rate economies damage markets more subtly. In 2022, the last year with rising interest rates, saw a slow but steady decline of almost 20%. Given that many Americans might soon like to cash in their 401k’s, that development could become a political subject.

Political Implications: Trump is Wishcasting About Hormuz

1. Mapping All 865 Campaign Stops

Note: All data comes from FairVote.org and, while accurate, it might not be perfect.

The map above shows all campaign stops by presidential and/or vice-presidential candidates from 2016 to 2024. A larger bubble means more campaign stops in that area. It once more becomes evident that the political campaign circus is heavily concentrated on swing states. The highest density and volume on the map can be found in the states that were swing states across all three cycles: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. Naturally, the population centers in these states set the records: Philadelphia (23), Las Vegas (22), and Detroit (21) saw the most campaign stops from 2016 to 2024. But in these senior swing states, campaign events also stretched to other communities outside the population centers. Almost every town and city in Pennsylvania had at least one visit by a candidate from the presidential ticket. The small swing city of Erie (part of Erie County, a bellwether for Pennsylvania) stacks up nine total campaign stops.

Other states with a decent, but slightly lower, number of campaign events are swing states that have either lost their battleground status or gained it between 2016 and 2024. You can find many dots in Florida, like in Miami, but a large majority of these events took place in 2016 and 2020, when the state was still competitive before it drifted to Republicans. The same can be said about Ohio and Iowa, states that only stand out on the map due to their importance in the 2016 and 2020 elections. On the other side, Georgia didn’t see widespread campaign events until 2020 and 2024, when it became a swing state.

What about population centers? The popular vote is decided by the people, and most people live in larger states, such as California, Texas, or Florida. Apart from Florida, large states saw very little attention, though I suspect that Texas could soon become the target of presidential campaigns, as the state’s vote margins have been narrowing over the past decades.

Looking at 2016 to 2024, there is a clear winner among the 50 states when it comes to campaign events: Pennsylvania (147 campaign events) leads North Carolina (106) and Florida (98). Pennsylvania’s lead is unsurprising, as it has been the biggest electoral prize among the closest swing states. Florida, with its 30 electoral votes, has an even larger population, but suffers from no longer being a swing state.

2. New Hampshire Reigns Supreme: Campaign Visits Per One Million Residents

Raw population can distort the picture. It’s only natural that the nine million registered voters in Pennsylvania require more campaign events than the two million registered voters in Nevada. Therefore, a more comparable way to analyze the past campaign events is to examine which state saw the most campaign events relative to its population.

A quick note: Washington, D.C. is not on this map, but with its 20 campaign events per one million residents, it would quite easily take the crown. (Though most of these are a result of the 2016 election)

Accounting for population differences, the attention shifts to smaller swing states. While Pennsylvania remains a strong third place with 11.26 campaign visits per one million residents, it’s overtaken by Nevada (11.88 visits per million, 6 Electoral Votes) and New Hampshire (16.96, 4 EVs).

Despite delivering the most Electoral Votes, most of the largest population centers are far away from this kind of electoral importance. California (0.30 visits per million, 54 EVs), Illinois (0.31, 19 EVs), Texas (0.41, 40 EVs), and New York (0.95, 28 EVs) all registered less than one campaign event per a million residents over the course of the past three presidential elections. Still, they are not the worst off.

16 states, colored grey on the map, didn’t see a presidential or vice presidential candidate in any of the past three races. These are mostly smaller and highly partisan states, such as Wyoming or Vermont. But also larger states with a softer partisan lean, like Montana, were neglected.

3. What Could Change in the Future?

The two presented maps would change drastically should the push to end the Electoral College be successful. Yes, California or Texas would get most attention, but that’s where the people live. On our 2nd map – the one showing events in proportion to population – we would likely converge towards a balanced picture. One, where every state sees approximately the same number of campaign events per capita.

Should the Electoral College survive, the uneven map will persist, although with some state-specific changes. As mentioned, Texas is becoming more competitive and could demand more attention, while Florida could sink into the depths of electoral unimportance. Alaska and Kansas, smaller states that didn’t register any campaign events as they were firmly Republican, could rise in importance as they have been drifting towards the Democrats.

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Contents

1. How We Got Here

2. Replacing Platner: Mills or Jackson?

3. How Can Democrats Win?

How We Got Here

Maine’s Senate seat is something of a must-win for Democrats this November. It’s the easiest seat on paper, given that Maine is the only target for Democrats that is a likely Democratic state (Kamala Harris won here by 7 points). Still, Democrats knew they were in for a tough battle, as Republican Susan Collins, a longtime Senator with moderate appeal, is running for re-election. In 2020, when Biden carried the state by 9 points, Collins secured re-election despite being down in most polls. Her 8-point victory over Democratic challenger Sarah Gideon is, however, a little inflated. Maine uses ranked-choice voting, but Collins won just over 50% in the first round, so the process never kicked in. Gideon was left behind at 42%. Had the ranked-choice process been used, Gideon would have closed the gap as the third-party candidates favored her.

2026 will likely be a few points bluer than 2020, and Collins is more unpopular than she was back then. It became the prevailing sentiment that Democrats just need to run an ordinary candidate to defeat Collins in a Trump-midterm. Yet, primary voters chose Graham Platner as their candidate, despite already knowing about scandals involving online comments and an accidental Nazi tattoo. Platner had already been losing ground to Collins in the polling averages. He went from being ahead by six points to being tied with Collins. The sexual assault allegations likely bury his campaign, but they are far from a gift for Collins. Because Democrats still have a few weeks to replace Platner on the ballot should he drop out. Their new candidate will have a lower profile and less time to beat Collins, but he or she will also have less baggage and, in one case, very favorable polling.

Replacing Platner: Mills or Jackson?

An obvious, albeit problematic, choice would be Maine Gov. Janet Mills. Why do I say problematic? After all, a Governor running for a Senate seat should be an easy bargain ( just think about Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, who will likely cruise to victory in November). Well, Mills is one of the more unpopular Governors of the nation; she is almost 80 years old, and she has already run. She eyed the nomination but dropped out after it became clear that she would suffer an embarrassing primary defeat to newcomer Platner. The entire saga of events - Mills’ failure to beat Platner - raises questions about her potential electoral performance. Perhaps Democrats need someone with a blank slate.

Another choice would be Troy Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate, who ran for Governor this year but lost the primary to Hannah Pingree. Jackson, an ally of Bernie Sanders, would be more closely aligned with Platner’s popular values and policies. Of course, he lacks Platner’s populist appeal, but that might turn out to be an advantage. Mainers like Platner’s policies, but they obviously dislike the scandals surrounding them. Jackson would be a more experienced candidate who is, quite frankly, more boring. That could shift the attention away from scandals and back to Susan Collins, who will then have to defend her Senate voting record to an electorate that broadly dislikes President Trump.

Jackson’s clean slate appeal is also appearing in a hypothetical Senate poll. In the most recent Wedgewood Senate polls, Susan Collins beats Graham Platner by 4 points and is tied with Gov. Janet Mills. In a match-up against Jackson, however, Susan Collins loses by 5 points. The poll was fielded before the newest scandal broke.

How Can Democrats Win?

As you can see above, Susan Collins ’ electoral performance is not immune to partisan polarization and Maine’s blue trend. A polarization that, in 2024, defeated Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Montana.

Still, Democrats need two things to finally defeat Susan Collins: A very strong midterm environment and a decent, unproblematic candidate. They will likely meet the first requirement come November, but it long seemed like Platner could squander the second. If he drops out, Democrats get another shot at nominating a safer bet. That logic is also the reason why betting odds for Democrats winning in Maine have risen, instead of fallen, after the Platner story broke. Predictors seem to view Platner’s fall as more of a gift to Democrats rather than a liability.

Quite a few candidates may throw their hat in the ring, but voters won’t get to choose the replacement. That is now up to the party. Should they miss this opportunity or should Platner stay on, Republicans will, in all likelihood, hold the Senate.

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While Democrats are favored to win the House even in the face of Republican redistricting, their Senate battle looks much more difficult. They have to flip four seats to win control of the chamber. Apart from holding battlegrounds in Michigan and Georgia, they have to flip Maine and North Carolina, as well as two out of four states that voted for Trump by over 10 points (Alaska, Ohio, Texas, and Iowa). As of today, the Senate is a toss-up, with VoteHub giving Republicans a 56% chance of winning control.

So what do the new polls say, and what might they have missed?

Latest NYT/Siena Polls Might Skew Republican

The polls are a mixed bag for Democrats. They are the clear favorites to flip North Carolina, where former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper leads his challenger by 7 pts. Maine, the most Democratic state on paper, is turning into a close race, as populist Democratic candidate Graham Platner leads Susan Collins (R) by just three points. Democrats in Ohio, Alaska, and Iowa are 2-3 pts behind, while the race between James Talarico (D) and Ken Paxton (R) is tied in Texas. This is troublesome for Democrats as they need to win at least two of the states where they are behind and carry all where they are leading or tied.

But these results also seem strange at first glance. Ohio should be a prime target for Democrats, with former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who is well-known in the state, trying to reclaim his seat in the Senate. Yet, he is doing one point worse than the Democratic Candidate in Iowa, Josh Turek, a race long considered a stretch for Democrats. There is a simple reason for that divergence: Poll sampling.

Sienna/New York Times has recently started to weight their polls not just by party ID, but by recall vote, meaning they ask respondents whom they voted for in 2024. Since most midterms voters are higher-propensity voters who also vote in presidential races, this provides us with some useful data (In presidential elections, more non-voters turn out compared to the previous midterms and vice-versa). Election results, after all, don’t just change because people change their minds, but because some people don’t turn out. In 2024, Kamala Harris suffered from plummeting turnout among 2020 Biden voters. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats profited from the strong turnout of young voters.

In 2026, low-information Trump voters might stay home, and newly motivated, younger voters will likely vote Democratic. Most analysts expect the electorate to be much more Democratic as a result. The New York Times/Sienna polls do not. At least not by much.

The column on the right is the important one. It shows the difference between the sample electorate of the state poll and the state’s 2024 electorate. As you can see, the swing in the electorate of the samples varies slightly but decisively. The state with the unexpectedly good results for Democrats, Iowa, has a sample that’s 5.2 pts bluer (more Harris voters) than the 2024 results. Ohio, the negative surprise for Dems, only has a sample that’s 2.2 bluer than the state’s 2024 electorate.

Yes, states have different profiles and different economies, so different swings towards the Democrats are to be expected. Iowa is a farming state that has been suffering, but, in the data we have, this different election environment doesn’t show up.

Forecasters Predict Blue Electorate

According to The Argument, Democrats will do 8 pts better in Iowa in 2026 than they did in 2024, but they’ll do 11 pts better in Ohio. This does not align with the NYT’s sampled electorate.

Generally, Democrats are favored to outperform their 2024 results by 8 to 10 points, which would put the generic ballot at D+6 to D+8. A D+8 result (the same result as 2018) would likely require not just persuasion, but a bluer electorate. An electorate, the NYT/Siena polls are not working with in most of their polls. This leads me to believe that the NYT’s newest polls might be underestimating Democratic turnout and overestimating Republican turnout (except for Iowa, perhaps). If the electorate will be just 2-3 points bluer than the NYT/Siena polls suggest, Democrats could flip all six Senate seats and end up at 53 seats.

An indicator for better-than-expected results is the Democrats’ sizable advantage with highly motivated voters. In a recent Fox News poll of Maine, Graham Platner lost to Susan Collins by 3 points among registered voters. But among those “extremely motivated” to vote, he leads Collins by 9 pts.

We still have to keep in mind that turnout gaps are smaller in states that have high-profile races, as more voters will be aware of the election. A state with no big race will see lower turnout, with mostly motivated voters making their way to the ballot box. Democrats might therefore benefit if some races do not get nationalized too much and stay “under the radar”. Iowa or Nebraska, where Independent Dan Osborn is running, might be examples for that.

Can We Trust the Polls?

You should, however, also keep in mind that NYT/Siena is an “A” rated pollster, with outstanding methodology and transparency. It might just be that Democrats do unexpectedly well in Iowa while underperforming in Ohio. The best thing to do is throw these polls in the average and wait for Election Day. But can we trust the polls? Yes, but you should be aware of recent polling misses.

While polls famously overestimated Democrats whenever Trump was on the ballot, they didn’t in midterm years.1 In 2018, most polls were spot on, and in 2022, they even underestimated Senate Democrats in some key races. In 2025, they heavily underestimated Democrats: Mikie Sherrill was forecasted to narrowly win the governor’s race in New Jersey by about three points. She ended up winning by over 14 points. A ridiculous polling miss. I expect midterm polls to be more accurate, but, given recent history, it appears more likely that they will underestimate Democrats rather than Republicans.

You can make both points by cherrypicking certain topics, but that is not what I want to do here, because even for this question, the answer lies in publicly available data.

Contents

1. How the median ideology of Democrats and Republicans shifted

2. Divergence

3. Conclusions

Republicans Moved Far to The Right In Past 40 Years

VoteView tracks the ideological score of every single US House member and Senator on a scale from liberal (-1) to conservative (+1), using roll call voting data and the NOMINATE system created by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal (the system, in part, analysis roll call votes). Compiling all scores of House members of one party together leaves you with a median ideological score for that party at a particular point in time. The great part is that VoteView has tracked this data for each US Congress dating back to formation of the two party system over 100 years ago, so we can get a timeline of how the major parties shifted ideologically. Before we take a look at historic shifts, let’s answer our leading question: Which party has drifted away from the center the most in the past 40 years? The answer: Republicans.

The median ideological score of Democrats has only slightly moved left, from -0.32 in 1977 to -0.40 in 2025. At the same time, the Republican Party has moved far to the right. Their ideological score has more than doubled from 0.26 to 0.53. The result is the polarization gap - the ideological difference between the two major parties - jumping from 0.58 in 1977 to 0.93 in 2025. Republicans are responsible for about three-quarters of that increase. While Republicans in 1977 could argue that they were narrowly closer to the center than Democrats, they are today 0.13 points further away from it than their opponents.

In historical terms, the Democrats are just as liberal as they were in the 1920s. There was a period in time when the average House Democrat became much more centrist, but this was mainly due to Southern Democrats clinging to segregation (many of these Democrats abandoned the party after the civil rights movement, and white southerners are now the backbone of the Republican Party). Republicans also had a period of moderation during the civil rights era. But starting with Nixon’s presidency, who famously resorted to racist sentiments to win over the South, Republicans moved away from the center at an astoundingly steady pace.

That reality has not made its way to the voters. In a recent CBS/YouGov survey, 58% of Americans said that the Republican Party was too extreme, and 49% said the same about the Democratic Party. That comes despite the fact that the House Democrats have barely moved ideologically in the past 100 years, while Republicans have.

But what about the progressive Democrats calling for unprecedented ideas that even many of their colleagues view as too liberal? It is correct that there are a lot of differences among Democrats, but the party is closer together on the NOMINATE ideology scale than Republicans. In the 119th Congress (the current one), Republicans are stretched out on the x-axis, which measures ideology: Some members are moderates like their Democratic counterparts, but the dots on the grid you can find below stretch out to the conservative edge.

Democrats, on the other hand, are not stretched out horizontally, but vertically. The vertical axis “2nd dimension” measures not ideology, but divergence on secondary issues, such as social issues like Civil Rights. In polarized times, the gaps here have dwindled, as cross-party voting became rare. You can explore this timeline vizualisation to see how extensively members of congress used to stretch out on the y-axis as they frequently voted with the other party. While the y-axis does not measure loyalty, it still presents us with an informative picture.

Republicans unwavering bind and loyalty to Trump as well as their fear of his primary powers might explain the lack of fluctuation they have on the y-axis. The outlier is Thomas Massie, a conservative who was not afraid to buck Trump on many secondary issues like the Epstein Files. Massie just lost his primary to a Trump backed challenger.

On the Democratic side, there is still some eagerness to break with party expectations. Unsurprisingly, progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are at the bottom of that group, often breaking with their party, even as their ideologies broadly align. If you are into the math of this method, which I tried to understand and explain to my best abilities here, you can read up on detailed methodology and data analysis at VoteView.

Conclusion

The first conclusion is that the US has become incredibly polarized. 40 years or even 30 years ago, members in the scatter plot you see above used to overlap with the other party and were stretched out vertically, as cross-party voting was still the norm. Now, the parties are strictly separated, with very few moderates left. Here are all my conclusions about the current congress:

1. House Democrats are morde moderate than House Republicans.

2. Seven Democrats and five Republicans are within the very centrist -0.2 to 0.2 range. Three of these 12 representatives might lose re-election in 2026. A fourth, Jared Golden (D-ME) is retiring.

3. Republicans have 12 “hardliners” while Democrats have zero. This means 12 Republicans have a score of >0.8 while no Democrat exceeds -0.8 pts on the ideological scale

4. Democratic voting behavior, particularly among progressives, is less bound to the party than Republican voting behavior.

If you should even run into someone trying to argue about extremism or a leftward shift within the Democratic party, this is the data to prove them wrong.

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Granted, the joy is somewhat subdued, even for a die-hard football (yes, it’s called football) fan like me. The Trump administration’s attacks on democracy and civil rights, the barring of fans, and even a referee from Africa are certainly one issue. The other problem: Horrendous prices and a FIFA President who cozies up to Trump and couldn’t care less about those who make this sport so great: the Fans.

We will likely get a mixed World Cup, with a lack of fans present from multiple nations. Nevertheless, everyone I know is busy trying to guess who will win the trophy this time. I want to show you what the data says about each of the 48 teams, with a focus on the offensive and defensive tilt of each nation.

Offense vs Defense: How is Each Nation’s Squad Structured?

There is extensive material out there from data analysts predicting the World Cup, and they all come to a similar conclusion (more on that later). I didn’t want to put you through the same ordeal to tell you the favorites are favored to win. Instead, I tried something new. I collected data on the market valuation of each World Cup squad and grouped it by defensive and offensive players. Doing so would allow me to detect which squads have a more valuable - meaning better - offense and which have a more valuable defense.

You can interact with this chart to reveal details of each nation. The note at the bottom is important because if this weren’t a logarithmic graph but one where the scales are proportional, most smaller nations would be cramped in the bottom-left corner, as the distance in absolute value is much greater between the top nations than between smaller nations. While this visualization does not show an accurate scale of total market value, it does give an accurate representation of each nation’s defensive/offensive tilt. Here are some takeaways:

1. On average, the offense is more valuable: Because offensive players usually enjoy a better market value, most teams have a more valuable offense. The trend line, therefore, represents the average among our 48 squads. Mexico, which lies right on the trend line and represents the perfectly balanced nation among the 48 teams, has an offense that is 1.4x more valuable than its defense.

2. Most smaller teams rely on a good defense: Many immense underdogs like New Zealand, Curacao, and Uzbekistan have a much more defensive team than the average participant. Cape Verde is perhaps the best example, with a total squad valuation of €54.5 million. €41.4 million of that comes from the defense.

3. Ecuador is the biggest outlier among competitive nations: Ecuador is favored to make it to the knock-out stage. Nations with a similar market value live close to our trend line, but Ecuador doesn’t. Their defense is almost four times more valuable than their offense, powered by two center-backs, William Pacho of Paris St. German and Piero Hincapié of Arsenal FC. Both played in this year's Champions League final.

4. The favorites are close together, but differences emerge: Brazil has the biggest spread in valuation in favor of their offense, while Portugal has a slight defensive tilt. France has a slight offensive tilt, driven, of course, by their start attacking trio: Kylian Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé, and Michael Olisé. Germany has the most balanced squad out of the broader favorites, followed by Spain and England.

5. Star Players can distort the picture: Having one star player with a stellar market value can create a disbalance in the valuation between defense and offense. Norway is a good example of this. Their offense is 4.5x more valuable than their defense, but if you strip away their star striker, Erling Haaland, that factor plummets to 1.9x, which would be close to average.

One note about my method: Defensive players include the goalkeeper, all defenders, and defensive midfielders. Offensive players include center midfielders, offensive midfielders, wingers, and strikers. Some players, most often midfielders, can be used both in offensive and defensive positions. Here’s the data as a searchable table, with the defense and offense valuations as a share of the total valuation:

Who Will Win (According to Data)?

Predicting a World Cup winner like predicting an Election with statistical data is a widely used practice. I can point you to Nate Silver’s extensive World Cup predictions, which are based on countless data points. Long story short: Most models and experts expect the best squad to win, which would be France and Spain. Other favorites are Argentina, England, Portugal, or maybe even Germany.

I will watch as many matches of the World Cup as I can, even as the circumstances under which the greatest event in the world is held get more terrible by the day. FIFA and the US as a host may have lost their ways, but the beautiful game, as they call it, will always bring people together, no matter the circumstances.

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I was recently going through topics and data I could write about, and during that process, I flipped through what other data journalists are writing about. Between elections, the World Cup (I might write about this one tomorrow), and Trump, I realized that almost no one is talking about the climate crisis anymore. So here we go with some reasons why we shouldn’t forget the climate crisis, including a map of where America has gotten hotter in the past 45 years.

Contents

1. Everybody Forgot the Climate Crisis

2. The United States has gotten a lot hotter: Interactive Map

3. How can the Climate Crisis become a Number One Issue again?

1. Everybody Forgot the Climate Crisis

The gut feeling that a large portion of the media and the public don’t really care about the climate crisis anymore is also evident in data.

The Economist/YouGov polls don’t just track Trump’s approval, which just hit an all-time low, but also which issue voters name as the most important issue facing America. Naturally, inflation/prices (30% say it’s the number one issue) leads, followed by jobs & the economy (15%), and Healthcare (10%).

“Climate change and the environment” is only ranked 7th out of 11 issues. A meager 5% of voters say it’s the most important issue facing America - that’s 8% of Democrats and only 1% of Republicans. The drastic party split has a history. While the importance of the issue fluctuated over the past years as Democrats and Independents changed their priorities, Republican voters had always assigned low importance to climate change or the environment. Given that almost half of Republicans, including their President, don’t even believe in man-made climate change or refuse to acknowledge rising temperatures, that is not exactly surprising.

To keep it very brief: Yes, man-made climate change is real. Virtually every scientist on the planet agrees on that.

You can also observe the low importance of the climate crisis on the campaign trail. The issue wasn’t part of any debate in 2024, and likely won’t matter in 2026 either. Compare that with 2018 and 2020, when climate protection was an issue that Democrats publicly stressed over and over again, as the climate movement around Fridays For Future peaked.

The fact that Democrats don’t talk about climate change doesn’t mean they won’t tackle it. Biden famously made the largest investment in renewable energies in the United States’ history. On the other side, Trump - driven by the ideology that windmills cause cancer - is actively shutting down green power plans.

Biden’s investment was long overdue, but it may be too late. Researchers already agree that the utterly important 1,5 degree mark, which global warming must not exceed in this century, will most likely be exceeded anyway. Humanity has already inflicted enough damage, despite knowing of science’s warnings.

View this post in your browser to experience all visualizations in the best way possible.

Global warming is affecting the US, and thanks to the CDC, which records temperatures and heat days for each US county, it can be visualized.

2. The United States Is Heating Up: Interactive Map

(This is an animated map, you can find the interactive map below)

The map above shows the time-lapse change from two different eras. To get more meaningful results, I looked at two groups of five years. Displayed are heat days (days when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32,2 degrees Celsius) from 1979 to 1983 and from 2019 to 2023.

You can spot right away that, while the five-year period from the late 70s to early 80s already had intense heat in some areas, the occurrence of heat days expanded across the US.

For a more accurate comparison of how many more heat days each US county experienced in the early 2020s compared to the early 1980s, you can interact with the map below.

As you can see, there are even some counties that “cooled down”, but most of the US saw an increase in heat days. You can hover over the map to reveal details. We can make detailed comparisons using this data. For example, central Florida and parts of East Texas bordering the Gulf of Mexico have seen the sharpest increase in heat days. Most of these dark purple counties recorded between 250 and 300 additional heat days between 2019 and 2023. That’s an additional 8 to 10 months of days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit within five years.

Most of the bible belt - states like Alabama or Georgia - saw an additional 100-200 heat days (roughly 3 to 6 months) within five years.

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3. Can the Climate Crisis Become a Number One Issue Again?

There’s a rather simple and obvious answer to the question of why voters don’t name climate change as an important issue: the media.

A prominent theory in communication and political sciences is the “Agenda Setting” theory. It has been proven empirically over decades. It states that the topics news outlets choose to report on are the topics that the public views as important. The media is setting the agenda for the public debate. If the media talks about crime non-stop, so will voters; if they talk about immigration non-stop, so will voters. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, the climate protests around Fridays for Future dominated news coverage in Europe, including Germany. Voters subsequently named it as one of the most important issues, and the Green Party of Germany celebrated record polling results. In the 2025 election, migration - which had not been a big topic for a while but suddenly got built up ahead of the election - dominated news coverage and election debates. The far-right AFD finished second with a record result of almost 21%.

A direct connection between news agenda setting and vote preference is disputed and difficult to prove, but we do know that the media sets the agenda for public debates. Can we influence that?

On one side, journalists can try to find a balanced approach in the stories they choose to report. Politicians can also exert influence by addressing issues, as media outlets tend to report on that, and, by doing so, they give an issue airtime (Think about all the crazy conspiracies that have gotten substantial coverage because they have been put out by the President and not some random Facebook user).

Lastly, the public has the power to influence media coverage. The Fridays for Future protests are a great example of that. The key to their success was disruption. If the rallies had been held on Sundays, few people would have cared, but since they were on Fridays and encouraged the youth to skip school, they raised national attention. Even if it’s negative attention, like politicians raging about kids missing school, it’s still attention to the issue of climate change.

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1. US Population Growth: Interactive Map

2. How Movers are Reshaping Elections in Florida & Georgia

3. The 2030 Census Might Hurt Democrats

4. Did Population Growth Help Kamala Harris in Ohio?

There are certain trends in American politics that are reshaping the Electoral Map. Some of them are profound and long-lasting, like the party switch among white southerners after Democrats aligned themselves with the civil rights movement in the 1960s or Trump’s gain among white working-class workers. Other trends are more isolated and less stable, such as Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters in 2024 (he is now historically unpopular with the group).

These shifts have all, to some extent, changed America’s electoral map. White working-class voters have turned Ohio from a swing state to a Trump +11 state; educated suburban voters have turned Virginia into a solidly Democratic state.

Some state trends, however, are not driven by political realignment but by something else: People moving. Millions of Americans have moved from one state to another in recent years, and there are a few reasons why their decisions to move can reshape America’s electoral maps.

Florida & Georgia: Movers are Reshaping Elections

One of my all-time favorite NYT data pieces analyzed where Americans moved at the county level to map polarization in the US. They looked at people leaving swing counties - counties that voted for Biden or Trump by less than five points - and their destination.

They found a clear pattern: Republican voters were much more likely to choose a heavily Republican county, and Democrats were much more likely to choose a more Democratic county. The idea is simple: in a polarized society, people want to live near neighbors who share their views. The NYT observed the same development on the state level, with blue states getting even bluer and red states even redder.

While Vermont becming bluer or Wyoming becoming redder because of US-migration would not change any election results, an uneven influx of voters might tip elections in swing states. The most drastic example of this is Florida.

Trump won Florida by just around 3 points in 2020, yet the voters who moved there between 2020 and 2024 were more Republican than Democratic by a margin of 40 points. On the raw numbers level, around 100,000 more Republicans than Democrats moved to Florida. Trump went on to win the state by 13.1 points in 2024, and the state has moved away from being considered a swing state (contrary to Ohio or even Texas, it’s not a target for Democrats in 2026).

An opposite, although smaller, trend can be observed in Georgia. Democrats have made inroads in the state, which was considered reliably Republican during the Obama Era. Now it has two Democratic Senators. Biden won it by 0.2 pts in 2020, and while Harris lost it in 2024, the state moved left relative to the national popular vote.

According to the NYT analysis, Democrats led Republicans by 12 points among newcomers to the state. Additionally, more Republicans than Democrats left the state, and a third of those moved to - you’ve guessed it - Florida.

What about other swing states? Arizona has seen an influx of more Republicans by 26 points, while new movers in the Blue Wall (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) favored Democrats by about ten points. We have to keep in mind that the net migration to these states is lower, so we might just be talking about a difference of a few thousand people.

Who do these moves favor? That’s hard to say, but I am more inclined to give Democrats the edge (except for one caveat, the 2030 census, which I will discuss in the next section). Florida is continuing to see a broad influx of conservative voters, but that doesn’t change the electoral map much. Even before 2020, Florida had voted for Trump and had two Republican Senators. Going from three-point victories to 13-point victories might feel better, but it doesn’t change control of Congress or the presidency - for now. Republicans might be in danger of creating a vote sink - an already Republican state where conservatives from Swing States move to, creating an advantage for Democrats in these states.

Something similar is already happening in Georgia, where the metro Atlanta area is growing rapidly, making the state rocket to the left.

This type of suburban growth seems to be favoring Democrats, and it’s also present in Texas, where suburbs of Houston and Dallas have grown and trended Democratic, putting the state on the map for Democrats in the future.

Still, there is one caveat for Democrats, and it’s the 2030 census

Democratic states might lose electoral votes

Conservatives flocking to Florida might not change control of Congress, but it changes the state’s population, which can create a problem for democrats. The Electoral Votes a state has in the Electoral College, as well as its number of seats in the House of Representatives, are determined by the population. At the start of every decade, a new census determines the population and re-attributes Electoral Votes. Booming growth in Texas, Florida, and even Idaho is expected to net Republicans new Electoral Votes in the Electoral College. At the same time, Democratic states like California and New York, which have been struggling with housing and have been losing citizens, could lose Electoral Votes.

That could change everything. In 2024, Harris could have won 270 EVs by simply carrying three swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (as well as Nebraska’s 2nd district). Under current projections, that would no longer be possible, and Democrats would need to win an additional state.

Many in the Democratic Party are aware of the problem and are urging their state parties to tackle housing. There is still some time to turn the trend around, and some developments, like the mass exodus from California during the COVID pandemic, have slowed or stopped entirely.

Did Harris Profit From Movers in 2024?

While both Trump and Harris will have profited from an uneven influx of newcomers in some states, there are many other factors that make a statistical analysis of the effects of movers on the 2024 presidential election difficult. Vote swings are also driven by persuasion or turnout.

As a fun exercise, there is one state I wanted to look at: Ohio. If you look at our map, you’ll see that population growth has stagnated in much of Ohio, except for two counties: Union County and Delaware County, which you can easily spot as the two green spots in central Ohio. Harris lost ground in Ohio compared to Biden, but in these two counties, she did not.

The analysis of all counties shows that, in Ohio, there was at least some correlation between population growth and the 2020 to 2024 swing. Harris only gained ground in three counties. Two of these were the two counties - Union and Delaware - that saw the strongest population growth from 2020 to 2024. The third, Clermont County, also saw decent population growth of around 3%. The statewide average was 0.5%.

Again, many other factors contribute to vote swings. Some Counties that are more likely to see growth are suburban counties, but these are shifting left even without Democratic voters moving there, simply due to persuasion effects (Trump has lost a lot of ground in the suburbs). The R² value of 0.31 isn’t great, but it’s not horrible either.

The correlation is much weaker in other states I looked at, like Georgia. Ohio seems to be a unique example where population growth was geographically concentrated, and other trends may have been more muted.

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These two numbers are the results of a project that estimated the human cost of the first year of the USAID Shutdown. The tracking ended this February, so the most recent number may be higher, but it is safe to say that Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s disemboweling of USAID has cost the lives of close to a million people, most of whom are children.

While national or international attention to the scenes playing out in some affected countries that depend on USAID is practically nonexistent, there are still people who fight against the suffering.

The Dramatic End of USAID

Debbie Kaliel and Maury Mendenhall both spent years working for USAID. They were part of the agency’s anti-HIV program PEPFAR, which enjoyed bipartisan support over decades, even during Trump’s first term.

“It was my dream to work for USAID”, says Kaliel. She joined the agency in 2007 and spent 18 years working on the administrative structures of the PEPFAR program. Mendenhall joined the program two years later, in 2009, and worked primarily on protecting minors from HIV. Both were gearwheels in a huge system of international aid. On January 20th, 2025, everything changed.

“At first, we didn’t think there was any direct danger,” says Kaliel. She looks back on Trump’s first term, during which USAID was able to continue its work without interference. But this time, the executive orders arrived, along with initial reports of cutbacks under the leadership of Elon Musk. Shortly thereafter, the shock hit. USAID employees were placed on administrative leave within days. They were given ten minutes to vacate their offices. Mendenhall had to leave her desk two days before Kaliel had to, for a reason that dominated the early months of Trump’s second presidency: diversity. Her job description contained a gender-specific term that was deemed unacceptable by the new administration. Neither Mendenhall nor Kaliel was permitted to communicate with their local counterparts anymore; the use of work emails was prohibited. However, they were not willing to simply let down partners and co-workers abroad. They quickly set up private chat groups, allowing the employees to exchange information among themselves.

“I reached out to our USAID partners abroad,” reports Mendenhall, noting that many organizations were willing to remain in contact with her privately.

The memories of their final days at USAID weigh heavily on Kaliel and Mendenhall. The two speak of a sense of despair, of stunned colleagues, and of a cleaner—someone who had personally benefited from USAID’s assistance—who had to clear out the offices in tears. It was absurd, so Kaliel, that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was “cutting off food supplies and medicine to the world’s poorest people.”

In the end, that is exactly what happened. While USAID technically still exists, as only Congress has the authority to dissolve the agency, approximately 85% of its projects have been discontinued. Researchers at Boston University published the model measuring the global impact of these cuts over the course of a year. 365 days after the effective end of USAID, this model estimated nearly 800,000 preventable deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. Nearly 200,000 of these fatalities, and a large majority of the deaths among adults, resulted from the termination of the HIV program, PEPFAR.

The Fight to Save Lives

Kaliel and Mendenhall immediately realized that the end of USAID and PEPFAR would cost lives, as their local partner organizations lacked the resources they so desperately needed. “Many of the local staff continued working despite being laid off,” says Mendenhall. This, she noted, easily refutes Elon Musk’s accusations that USAID was a fraudulent money-laundering organization.

However, it was clear that local resources would not be sufficient, no matter the hard work put in by workers. So, Mendenhall and Kaliel decided to take matters into their own hands and started to raise funds for those partners that had been hit the hardest. Partners they trusted most after years of collaboration. Within months of their own dismissal, they established Crisis in Care.

Crisis in Care has already funded thousands of HIV tests and medications in affected countries. The money was mostly raised among former employees of USAID. While it is merely a small bandage on the gaping wound torn open by USAID’s withdrawal, it’s a start. For Lisa Jamu, it has been a lifeline.

Jamu is the founder and director of Stepping Stones International, an organization offering support and education in Botswana to strengthen children and young adults and prevent the spread of diseases like HIV. The organization has been hit hard by the shutdown of USAID and has had to cut back on services. Jamu tells the story of a young woman in Botswana who was in a troubling relationship. She was depending on Stepping Stones, who were planning to get her out of danger and provide shelter for her. When USAID collapsed at the hands of Elon Musk, they could no longer manage to stay in touch with her. She was killed shortly after. A tragedy that, according to Jamu, could have been prevented had USAID still existed.

The young woman’s death is not among the 800,000 estimated by researchers, whose methodology focused on deaths due to illness and starvation. Cases like hers lead experts to believe that the real impact may be even higher.

Crisis in Care

For what benefit did Trump and Musk do this? USAID had a budget of around $35 billion in 2024. Considering the immense effect it had around the world, that is an astonishingly low amount of money. One might even say that Elon Musk’s fictional Department of Government Efficiency has shut down the one US agency that was truly efficient. Speaking of efficiency, Donald Trump only needed a few weeks to spend the yearly expenses of USAID on the war against Iran.

If you are interested in more about the fallout in some of the affected countries, I can highly recommend this short-form Documentary by The New Yorker. For more free articles like this one, subscribe to FrontlineDemocracy.

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For those who don’t know, states usually only draw their congressional districts at the start of every decade, when the new census comes in. When President Trump grew worried that Republicans might lose control of the US House in the 2026 midterm elections, he pressured Texas to redraw their congressional map in such a manner that five Democrats would lose their seats. Drawing district lines to get a partisan advantage, so-called gerrymandering, is a long-used tool in US politics. You can read about it in my article covering the situation in Texas.

Democrats Could Win the 2026 Redistricting Fight

Once Texas Republicans bowed to Trump's demands, a chain reaction started with Gov. Newsom of California being the first Democrat to respond, calling a referendum to draw out five Republicans in response to Texas’s new gerrymander. In the following months, more Republican states followed suit, but Democrats managed to press another gerrymander of their own in Virginia. Here’s an overview of all states that have redistricted so far and which party is ahead.

Republicans went into this fight with a head start, especially since they were more inclined to gerrymander in the past. Democrats had given away redistricting power to independent commissions and had to ask the voters to get it back. After redistricting amendments passed in Virginia and California, Democrats are now favored to win the redistricting fight for 2026. Their +4 seat gain from redistricting for 2026 stands in contrast to the -3 loss to Republicans in left column, which looks at the districts’ 2024 presidential lean. Why is that?

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The foremost reason is that 2026 will likely be a good year for Democrats. Additionally, Texas Republicans made some ill-founded assumptions when drawing their new map. They counted on the historic Hispanic shift towards Trump in 2024 to stay permanent. However, recent polls and election results indicate that the voter group is souring on Trump. As a result, I currently project Republicans will only gain 2-3 of the 5 seats that seemed certain for the GOP if we look at the 2024 presidential results. Something similar could happen in Florida, where Hispanics play a big role as well. My forecast predicts that Democrats hold on to 3 of the 4 seats that have been redrawn so that Trump would have won there by ten points or more in 2024. Ohio’s new map moves two swing districts slightly to the right, and the democratic representatives there have been historic over-performers who could well hold on in a blue wave year. At the same time, Democrats will likely win all their new gerrymandering targets in Virginia and California. (Republicans might gain one or two additional seats in Louisiana, which the table above does not account for as that process is still ongoing).

The End of the VRA: A Road to Hell

I was pretty certain of my assessment that Democrats won the redistricting fight for 2026, but then came the Supreme Court chaos. The ruling weakening the VRA comes late, but some Republican-controlled states like Louisiana have indicated that they’ll try to redraw their maps ahead of the midterms. Nevertheless, most Republican states in the deep south will take up redistricting after the midterms, ahead of the 2028 election. Then, we might see a race to hell, because Democrats can counter with brutal gerrymanders of their own. As the table below shows, Republicans drawing out majority black districts in the south can be easily met by Democratic Gerrymanders, ending in a scenario where neither party gains anything. Neither party wins nor loses a single net seat. The only losers are the American people and their Democracy.

Is there an End in Sight?

Whether it comes this far or not will depend on a few things. First, there’s confusion as to how much the SC actually weakened the VRA and if compact majority-minority seats might still be protected. We will get clarity on this question because Tennessee republicans are trying to split up the compact congressional district in Memphis to net themselves yet another seat. Should the Supreme Court strike down such an extreme map, it would mean that the Voting Rights Act is weakened, but not dead. Republican gains from redistricting efforts in the South could then be seriously impacted. If the Tennessee map is allowed to stay in place, then all bets are off and we’re on a road to hell.

Another issue for redistricting after is 2026 Trump’s influence. The president has been the driving force behind this redistricting war, even going after state senators who refused to bow to his demands. If his influence should fade after the 2026 midterms, redistricting efforts might stall.

At last, there’s the most important and perhaps most pressing solution to his senseless fight: A nationwide gerrymandering ban. Democrats pursued a similar piece of legislation before, but it failed due to Republican opposition. With both parties feeling the pain of gerrymandering, a ban might be more likely, especially in a scenario where Democrats win a trifecta in 2028. If such a simple law were to be implemented, all the redistricting drama at the cost of democracy may end, and all US states would get fair maps with more competitive and engaging races. After all, a healthy democracy offers contests that engage citizens.

But for now, we are still focused on the ugly reality of redistricting. Here’s where the Florida & Virginia maps stand.

• Florida: The latest state to draw out four Democratic seats (which, as explained, might not all flip). Florida’s state constitution prohibits partisan gerrymandering, which should easily disqualify the new map. But the Florida Supreme Court is packed with Republican Judges and, if we have learned anything in the past, it’s that the law doesn’t seem to apply to everyone equally. Voting rights groups are still hopeful that even a biased court sees through this blatantly unconstitutional map.

• Virginia: The new, voter-approved 10-1 democratic gerrymander is currently being challenged before the Virginia Supreme Court because of procedures Democrats took to get the redistricting amendment on the ballot ahead of the midterms. The process is taking longer than some Democrats had hoped, as the justices refused to simply block a lower court's order and will instead hear the case at length.

Let’s indulge the worst-case scenario for Democrats: Florida’s new map is allowed to stay in place while Virginia’s new map gets struck down. In that scenario, Republicans keep four seats on paper that they’d otherwise lose easily. They would, however, lose one of these four districts in 2026, even with the old map. No matter how this turns out, the Republican Party will lose the House of Representatives this November, and it won’t be particularly close. If they also lose the Senate on the same night, some Republicans might begin to wonder if all of this scorched-earth-redistricting was ever worth it.

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On the surface, Democrats in Virginia passed a bill, HB965, and their Governor, Abigail Spanberger, signed it into law. It’s the contents and effects of that bill that are far-reaching, because it enters Virginia into the National Popular Vote Compact. With that move, the United States is one step closer to the end of the Electoral College.

Everyone knows that American Presidents get elected by the Electoral College. Whoever wins the most votes in a state gets all its electoral votes (larger states have more EVs), and the candidate to reach 270 Electoral Votes (a majority) wins the presidency. That Electoral system is enshrined in the American Constitution, which makes it close to impossible to replace - a 2/3 majority would be necessary - but states have discovered that they can bypass the electoral college, without actually ending it.

The current Electoral College system has led to some undemocratic results over the past decade that have changed not just America, but the entire world.

Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes, or 2.1% nationally, yet he won over 300 Electoral Votes, and therefore, the presidency. To put this into perspective: Trump won against Kamala Harris with a smaller popular vote margin (1.5%) than Clinton won against Trump. Still, Clinton lost because she performed best in California and New York, and gained much ground in Texas. These millions of voters who decided the popular vote didn’t matter. It is very safe to say that without the Electoral College, the world would have long forgotten Donald Trump. Without the Electoral College, no Republican would have won a presidential election in the 21st century on their first try. In 2020, this unjust bias was most striking: Joe Biden only won the Electoral College by 0.8% (his margin in Wisconsin, the tipping-point state) while winning the popular vote by 4.5%, meaning the Electoral College favored Republicans by almost four points.

If this reality infuriates you, you should know that you are not alone, because a large majority of Americans (63%) support abolishing the Electoral College for the popular vote. There was only a brief moment after the 2016 election - when most Republican voters favored the Electoral College as they realized Trump would have lost without it - where support for the popular vote dropped to the low 50s.

The winner-takes-it-all system (in which states give all their EVs to the winner) is to blame for the current dysfunction of the Electoral College. The interesting part is that said system is not enshrined in the US Constitution. It’s an old rule that simply has never been touched. States can award the electoral votes in any fashion they like. That is evident in two states, Maine and Nebraska. Neither of these states has followed the winner-takes-it-all system for years. They award their EVs separately: Candidates get one Electoral Vote for every congressional district they win, and the remaining two statewide Electoral Votes go to the winner of the state.

About two decades ago, some states took this loophole as a motivation to push for nationwide reform themselves. They devised a plan to topple the Electoral College and make the popular vote decide the presidency without violating the Constitution. The idea is simple: The states simply award all their Electoral Votes not to the winner of the state, but to the winner of the popular vote. The National Popular Vote Compact aims to do exactly that, and it might go into effect in the coming years. Because once the Electoral votes of all states that have passed bills to enter the compact surpass 270, the compact becomes active, and the Electoral College will be gone. It won’t matter what other states do, because the popular vote winner will have 270 EVs or more and, with that, the presidency. And, recently, the movement has been picking up steam.

In 2024, Governor Tim Walz signed a bill that entered Minnesota and their 10 EVs into the compact, and now Virginia joined in with its 13 EVs, putting the total tally to 222. Just 48 more Electoral Votes, and the popular vote compact goes into effect. Where could these votes come from?

I’ve tried to map the status of the passage of the National Popular Vote Bill per state and highlighted prime targets. The National Popular Vote initiative provides a map with details on the state, but in some states, efforts have stalled.

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The obstacles per state are clear: the bill has to pass both legislative chambers (state house and state senate) and be signed into law by the Governor. Since Republicans are trying to keep the, for them, favorable Electoral College in place, Democrats need to control both chambers and the Governorship in a state, a so-called trifecta, to pass the bill. In Virginia, they have now been able to do that because Abigail Spanberger flipped the Governor’s mansion back into Democratic hands in 2025.

In the 2026 midterms, most eyes will be fixed on the U.S. House and Senate, and while mine will be too, the popular vote compact gives us good reason to keep an eye on state legislature and Governor races that will take place on the same ballot next November.

On the map above, I marked Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as possible targets. All three states are swing states, meaning they should be in reach for Democrats in a good year. All three states also have Democratic governors, and Democrats are favored to hold these seats this November. With Democrats’ success in ending Wisconsin’s gerrymandered state legislature maps, control of these chambers is now in reach.

According to Theo, a fantastic data-analyst who outdoes all of us election enthusiasts, Democrats are favored to win the state house as well as the state senate in all of these three states. The state houses should be a bit easier, since all seats are up for re-election, while the state senate chambers only re-elects a third of its members every two years (similar to how the United States House and Senate work).

If Democrats really do flip all four chambers, hold the two they already control (Michigan & Pennsylvania House), and hold their governor seats, then MI, WI, and PA could theoretically pass the national vote compact as soon as 2027. The Electoral Vote tally would then stand at 266, just four shy of 270.

New Hampshire has exactly four Electoral Votes.

On paper, you’d think Democrats should have it much easier here than in the rust-belt, since NH has not voted for a Republican President since 2000, when George W. Bush narrowly carried the state. Unfortunately for Democrats, voters in New Hampshire like to elect Republicans on the state level. Republicans hold large majorities in both the House and the Senate, and they control the Governorship. Nonetheless, Democrats won majorities in both chambers in 2018, a feat they could very well achieve again. The tougher challenge will be unseating the incumbent Republican governor, Kelly Ayotte. If that were to happen, Democrats would have the votes to abolish the Electoral College through the National Popular Vote Compact, though only just so with 270 EVs. I’m curious to discover how the 2030 census, which will likely hurt Democratic states, influences that count and whether that could matter.

There are a few other states that could bring the popular vote compact above 270. There’s Nevada, where the bill was only stopped by a veto from the Democratic Governor in 2019, who cited the importance Nevada gains from the Electoral College (it’s a small swing state) as the reason for his veto. Since 2022, Republicans control the governorship in Nevada, but if Democrats win here again, they could give it another go. Given that Nevada would get much less attention without the electoral college, passage of the bill could remain difficult no matter who wins in 2026.

Then there’s Arizona. Democrats are favored to hold the Governor’s seat with incumbent Katie Hobbs and are eying possible flips in the State House and Senate. Should Democrats win a trifecta, the scenario would be similar to Nevada’s, because Arizona is another Swing State that could see its importance being diminished without the Electoral College.

I have to note that, in my opinion, those concerns stand on weak ground. If the popular vote compact prevails, voters in Nevada and Arizona won’t suddenly be less important than their counterparts; they would be equally important to every other American voter. After all, the popular vote follows the most basic democratic rule: One person, one vote.

Over the past eight years, I regularly checked in with the state of the National Popular Vote Compact, only to be disappointed by the lack of progress. After this analysis, I’m starting to get the feeling that everyone is underestimating the compact. If Democrats win big in 2026 and seize their chance, the electoral college as we know it may be dead by 2030. It may even be dead before the 2028 election.

Attention will increase if the popular vote compact gets close to 270, and one should expect lawsuits. The law, however, is quite clear. The Constitution gives every state the right to decide how they want to allocate its Electoral Votes, but with the current Supreme Court abiding by most of Trump’s wishes, one has to at least keep the possibility of legal challenges in mind.

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In the midst of the increasing terror that engulfs our world, between wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and the threats to democracy in the western hemisphere, there was one thing that gave me unexpected comfort and hope in the past week: The Artemis II.

Apparently, I am not alone. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 80% of Americans have favorable views regarding the first crewed mission to the moon since the 1970s. This comes at a time when most Americans, and Europeans for that matter, feel good about very little in this world. So why is this international effort of mankind to return to our moon appealing to so many people in these times of geopolitical uncertainty, and what benefits could the story of Artemis II have for our political world?

The Best of Us

Anyone who did not closely follow the news of the Artemis program might ask themselves why we are going back to the moon in the first place. After all, it’s been more than 50 years since Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind”. Subsequent Apollo missions have landed on the moon five more times until the program was scrapped as the space race with the Soviets ended. This time, however, mankind is going back to the moon for a different reason: To stay.

After Artemis II’s successful moon orbit, NASA aims to land Astronauts on the moon in 2028. These missions have a purpose that goes beyond returning to a place we’ve been before. The Artemis Astronauts will be tasked with building a base, effectively colonizing the moon. While the space race of the 60s may be over, there is some competition, as China is eying their own base on the lunar surface. In the long run, a primary goal of the Artemis program is to get to a point where we can land on Mars. A planet no human has ever walked on.

That goalpost is still far away, but Artemis II’s mission is bringing it a bit closer. There are a few reasons I can think of that might explain why the new moon mission is finding so many admirers, not only in America, but around the globe.

While the four Astronauts of Artemis II didn’t land on the moon, they set a historic record last Monday. With a maximum distance of 406,770.34 km (252,756 miles) to Earth, they traveled further into space and away from home than any other human being before them, breaking a record set by Apollo 13 55 years ago. So far, the 2020s have been seen by many as a decade that has taken humanity not forward, but backwards. After years that saw the first African American US President and unprecedented international cooperation to solve the climate crisis, progress in the 2020s stalled and even reversed. The COVID-19 crisis happened, the war in Ukraine brought Western relations with Russia to a historic low point, and the far-right in Europe has risen to heights not seen since the era of fascism in the 1930s. In America, Trump is reverting years of civil rights progress and attacking the sciences and diversity. The bright minds of our Earth are so occupied with putting out the fires that are spreading around the world that there is no more time left for progress. And now, six years into this challenging decade, humanity is pushing the bounds of what’s possible again.

A Crew from a Better Time

The other major reason why this mission gives me hope in these times is the crew.

Our current state of global affairs is as tense as ever before in this century, and the world order is being torn out of balance by Mr. Trump. The friendship and cooperation between European Nations, Canada, and the US, and their aim to build a better world, was baked into my consciousness growing up in the early 2010s. In 2026, all that has changed: opinions of European countries and Canada towards the US have dropped sharply as the Trump government goes after its allies with unprecedented rhetoric. And not only is our understanding of international cooperation struggling under Trump, but the president has undone years of progress intended to promote equal treatment of women and minority groups. In a way, the Artemis mission is the antidote to Trump (which is funny for a different reason, but more on that later).

With Artemis II, the first woman, mission specialist Christina Koch, the first African American, pilot Victor Glover, and the first Canadian, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, have orbited the moon. The fourth Astronaut is American commander Reid Wiseman. Canada’s inclusion in the mission is no accident, because the Artemis Program is not purely an American program. It’s a collaboration between numerous countries that includes NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). I particularly look forward to the upcoming missions, when the first German might fly to the moon. At the same time, Europeans are growing wary of the US as a partner, with the large majority of Germans classifying the US as untrustworthy. So while our worldview of collaboration is deteriorating here on Earth, it seems to be doing well in space. While Trump rails against Canada, Europe, science, and diversity, these issues seem to be unaffected in space. Now comes the funny part: The Artemis Program was initiated by Mr. Trump during his first term. His executive order directed NASA to return to the moon and aim for Mars. Apart from that, Trump, of course, had little involvement in the planning of the program, but it’s a good reminder of how different Trump’s second term is from his first.

Most of the viciousness is happening in Trump’s second term. In fact, most of his actions that affect our world happened in the past 15 months. While Trump 1.0 - often ranked by scholars as one of the worst presidents in U.S. history - backed NASA, Trump 2.0 is suggesting deep budget cuts that could imperil the Artemis program he himself initiated. A move he might consider unwise, should he remember that he initiated it.

Among all of this chaos, there was something deeply inspiring and hopeful about following the journey of the Artemis crew. After their successful splashdown, Astronaut Jeremy Hansen stood arm in arm with his fellow space-travelers and said that they were merely a mirror of our world. Indeed, they are a mirror of our world, but they also are, and very much so, the polar opposite of its leader. Four Astronauts, diverse as our world is, in international cooperation, and backed by an equally diverse team of dedicated scientists, show us that humans are capable of doing great things if we set our minds to it. Right now, our minds and our capital are set on seeking progress in a different area: Building machines for war. As Trump proposes budget cuts, he pours billions into rockets for his war with Iran. While some defense spending may be inevitable for Western nations, like Ukrainian defenses against an aggressor that threatens their democracy, the war in Iran is a war of choice.

Perhaps, one day, when voters and leaders come to their senses, we will spend this money on science that improves our world and takes us to new heights. To places we have never been before. To make future generations doubt the limits of what humanity can do. Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, and the international team behind them have certainly shown us one thing: Yes, we can.

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You’ll probably also remember the media frenzy that followed these events: hours of media coverage, hundreds of articles, and countless interviews. Attacks quickly became political, with the far-right seeking to take advantage with anti-muslim rhetoric. In a world so polarized by tragedies, it makes sense to take a step back and look at the actual data.

The Global Terrorism Database (GTD)1 kept record of every - yes, every - single known terrorist attack from 1970-2020. The immense dataset of over 200,000 attacks tells many stories. For this article, I want to focus on the data on terrorist attacks in Europe over the last two decades, from 2000 to 2020. When creating the visualization you see below, I was a bit stunned myself, because the large majority of terrorist attacks took place in areas I did not guess from my subjective experience over the years. Once one thinks about the most affected regions in the map, the data quickly makes sense.

A quick disclaimer: This map only depicts attacks were at least one person was killed. 80% of terrorist attacks in Europe/Russia (2000-2020) actually had no deaths.

The two most affected areas in this map are almost impossible to miss. First, there’s the Donbas region, which became the center of geopolitical conflict in Europe as the war against Russian-backed Separatists started in 2014 (You can hover over the map to reveal details for each attack). The second region is the Chechen Republic, which remains a part of Russia after a series of wars. It is also in that region, where the deadliest terrorist attack on our map took place: In 2004, in Beslan, Chechen separatists took an entire school hostage, resulting in the death of 344 people. In both these regions, geopolitical conflict spurred unparalleled periods of terrorism. Another region in the eastern half of Europe where geopolitical conflict fed terrorism is Kosovo. Taken together, about 85% of attacks in Europe happened in Eastern Europe (which includes Russia, according to the Global Terrorism Database).

While Western Europe represents a much smaller slice of total attacks, it is worth looking at the patterns there, because they have been different, and yet also similar to Eastern Europe. According to the data, Terrorism in Western Europe had two causes over the past two decades: Geopolitical conflict and ideological radicalism.

The terrorist attacks resulting from geopolitical conflict in Western Europe are less visible on the map, as they often resulted in fewer casualties. The two primary regions where geopolitical terrorism thrived are northern Spain (the Basques) and the UK (Northern Ireland). In both cases, separatists carried out numerous, but often targeted, attacks. While attacks in the Basques primarily happened in the early 2000s, attacks in Northern Ireland were more spread out across the two decades. The conflict in Northern Ireland, and the attacks there, reached their peak before the turn of the century and are therefore not included in our dataset.

The largest spikes in the western half of our map are the results of ideological extremism. The blue spikes (also quite present in Russia) represent Islamic terrorism, which mostly occurred as ISIS reached the peak of its power between 2014 and 2016. These include the infamous attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016). As ISIS was diminished in the Middle East, the number of attacks declined sharply. Separately, there was another spike of Islamic terrorism in Spain in 2004, which was triggered by Al-Qaida.

While far-right parties tend to blame mass migration for this kind of ideological extremism in Europe, geopolitical reasons make more sense when trying to explain the attacks. France was hit the hardest by ISIS and other jihadist-inspired attacks, yet its refugee intake in 2015 and 2016 was similar to that of other countries in Europe that weren’t hit nearly as hard, or not at all. France was one of the most active Western military forces in the Middle East, making the country a target for ISIS. Additionally, ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups had the goal of provoking backlash against muslims in their target countries, so they could better spread their extremism.

Germany, the country that had the largest intake of refugees in all of Western Europe in the 2010s, has seen a comparatively small number of attacks. The country also serves as a good case to show the mix of Islamic terrorism with the other major ideological kind of terrorism we saw, and still see, in Western Europe: Far-right terrorism.

Far-right terrorism has been a consistent factor throughout the two decades. Although the number of attacks remains at a lower level than other forms of terrorism, the victim count leads to large red-colored spikes on our map. Norway, which has seen almost no terrorist attacks from 2000 to 2020, suffered a string of horrific acts of terrorism by neo-nazi Anders Breivik, who bombed government quarters in Oslo, killing eight, and proceeded to kill 69 children and teenagers attending a social-democratic youth camp on the island of Utøya. In Germany, far-right attacks in Hanau and Munich, as well as the targeted assassination of Walter Luebke, upset the nation. In all these cases, in Norway and in Germany, the attackers either directly attacked migrants or were motivated by a hatred of migrants and/or minority groups.

Unfortunately, the data ends in 2020. We can only hope that we get more well-structured data in the coming years. If you enjoyed this story, feel free to subscribe to receive new posts in your email inbox. It’s completely free!

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All Data was provided by the Global Terrorism Database

NOTE: Just before the publication of this post, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon is asking for $200 Billion dollars to fund the war. Since this money has not been approved by congress yet, we are sticking with the $24 billion already spent.

The most striking and most hypocritical revelation is that, in just 19 days, Trump managed to spend more in Iran than USAID spent across the world in an entire year. Why is that hypocritical? Because we all remember Elon Musk and his promise to slash unnecessary government spending as a driving force behind Trump’s 2024 campaign. In the end, Musk didn’t reduce spending meaningfully. What he managed to do was shutter USAID, an organization fighting starvation and diseases across the world. Over 800,000 people have died as a result of Musk’s shutdown of USAID, many of them children. All to save the roughly $20 billion in expenditures the institution had listed for 2024. Not even a year later, Trump has found a way to spend that sum and more within weeks, making one wonder if it was really ever about the money.

SNAP benefits have also been in the spotlight in 2025, as Trump threatened to cut them during the shutdown fight with Democrats. The food stamp benefits cost the US $102 Billion Dollars a year. That is a lot of money, but it’s also just 1.4% of the total US budget. 19 days of Trump’s war with Iran could have paid the United States’ entire SNAP program for three months.

The National School Lunch Program, which provides low-cost or free lunches to children in American schools and child care institutions, costs the American taxpayer $17.7 Billion every year. Had Trump not attacked Iran, the US would have had enough money to fund the program for one year and four months.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, costs the US $130 Billion per year. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the ACA actually saves the US money, and repealing it would increase the deficit. Republicans have nevertheless been persistent in their attempts to gut and repeal the ACA, but 19 days of Trump’s war could have funded it for 2,2 months. In the end, providing more Americans with better healthcare coverage is cheaper than bombing the Middle East.

Perhaps the most stunning example in this little project is Mayor Mamdani’s proposal to make NYC’s buses free for everyone. The project was often criticized for being too costly to be attainable. Well, with the money that Trump has spent in Iran, a sum growing by at least $1 Billion each day, Mamdani could make NYC’s buses free for over three decades (34 years and 3 months, to be precise).

With the midterms and the 2028 presidential campaigns approaching, it is important to remember those facts. Because it is an absolute certainty that Republicans (& and their friends on Fox News) will call a lot of proposals for healthcare, social security, or transport “too expensive” while gladly pouring the money into a war of choice.

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I’m skeptical that you can explain Trump’s rise to power just by pointing to America’s education system, because countless factors contributed to his rise: A broken media landscape dominated by Fox News, a celebrity cult, the Republican Party’s missing spine, and so on. I do, however, believe that education and literacy are important factors, but what does the data say. There are two sides to this. We can look at the people who actually voted for Trump, and we can look at those who stayed home. We will start with the latter.

Half of Americans never voted for Trump. He only managed to get between 45-50% in his three presidential elections. But considering turnout, his performance becomes even less impressive. In 2024, only 31% of adult American citizens voted for Donald Trump. Who are the people who didn’t vote? For a long time, less reliable voters were considered more Democratic (young voters, minority voters). This changed with Trump’s appeal to less-informed and spontaneous voters, and in 2024, those who stayed home might even have broken for Trump on Election Day, because they belonged to the one decisive group that backed Trump by a large margin (more on this later).

America’s election turnout is low compared to most European nations and it fluctuates drastically depending on which US state or county we are talking about. There are a few reasons that collide and accumulate to create “turnout deserts” in America and literacy is one of them. A look at county-level data from 2024 shows a clear picture: US counties with a higher adult literacy score had higher turnout rates.

The R² value of 0.34 shows that literacy played an important role in determining turnout in 2024. Literacy explains about a third of the variance in county-level turnout. A decent result, considering that other variables like education or race likely also affected turnout. (Counties from Alaska and Connecticut are missing due to data collection problems).

Researchers have found that these turnout deserts are most prominent in southern areas with a large African American population, like parts of the deep south - a result of decades of structural racism that has led literacy rates in these counties to be among the lowest in the nation. To increase turnout in these turnout deserts, the states would first have to overcome these decades-old structures so that literacy rates and political education can catch up.

I did not run the same analysis for the 2016 and 2020 elections, but my educated guess is that the effect was even more prominent in 2016, a low-turnout presidential election. 2024 was a high-turnout presidential election, though turnout slightly underperformed the 2020 record-breaking race. So now we know that turnout deserts are linked to literacy rates. In presidential races with record turnout rates and a candidate like Trump who brings low-propensity voters to the polls, another question comes to mind: What about the people who did vote?

First of all, I couldn’t find any meaningful correlation between Trump’s vote share in a county and that county’s literacy rate, at least not on the national level. The reason is pretty simple: While Trump did perform better in rural counties and states with low literacy, Harris performed better in low-literacy, majority-black counties in the deep south that, as mentioned before, have been suffering from decades of structural racism. So, in the end, we get a pretty even picture.

But if we extend our horizon and look at political literacy, a striking difference emerges. G Elliot Morris found that voters who were unable to identify which party controls Congress voted for Trump by a margin of 11 pts. Those who correctly identified the parties voted for Harris by a slim margin. Similarly, polls found that those who do not follow political news “at all” voted for Trump by an overwhelming margin.

Trump’s victory was powered by people who consumed no political news at all and had little knowledge about political matters. That is why higher turnout might even have benefited him, or at least it might not have hurt him, because non-voters tend to be low-information voters as well and therefore would have been more likely to vote for Trump. This is also where basic literacy skills come into play again. I often hear the phrase that regretful Trump voters failed an open-book test, as it was fairly easy to demask Trump’s lies. For example, it would have taken just one quick Google search to learn that Trump is lying about tariffs. So, yes, it was an open-book test, but it’s difficult to pass an open-book test if you can’t read properly. That may sound harsh, but with one-fifth of American adults unable to read and comprehend basic political information, it sadly is the reality we all live in.

So what drives low-information voters’ choices at the ballot box? Popularity could be one factor, but in 2024, high prices are the one thing that almost all Americans felt in their everyday lives, so they punished the incumbent party. With prices remaining high, it is exactly this group of low-information voters who have soured on Trump. Skyrocketing oil prices in the wake of Trump’s war against Iran certainly won’t be helping the President.

For the future, raising literacy levels might give American Democracy a quality boost. Turnout deserts would become increasingly rare, and the outcome of elections would be more information- than vibes-based. After all, consuming news only becomes possible when one can comprehend it. And, as of today, every fifth American adult can’t.

This article was updated on March 12th to fix two errors.

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I’ve so far avoided writing about the heated Democratic Senate race in Texas. With the primary date on March 2nd approaching, I want to offer my thoughts on a battle that centers around one big question: What kind of Democratic campaign can win Texas : One that energizes the core base, or one that works on a broad appeal and persuasion?

For a while, the race stayed civil. Crockett was a presumed favorite for the primary, given that she has a national profile, but as Talarico gained traction through his viral campaign, the debate around the race is becoming increasingly heated. There is a simple reason for that: Electability. Most Democrats in the US want Democrats to nominate the candidate who has the best odds of winning in November. It’s an argument often brought forth by Talarico supporters as they seem certain that Talarico is more electable than Crockett, upsetting supporters on her side. But before we look at who is actually more electable (both have their own arguments), let’s consider why electability matters so much in this race.

Electability matters because both Democrats represent somewhat similar values and have few policy differences. They are both the polar opposite of Paxton. They could also tip the Senate balance. So Democrats care about choosing a winner, even if that winner doesn’t align with them on all issues. It’s what propelled Biden to victory over Sanders in 2020. Exit polls show that voters who chose a candidate based on issues supported Sanders, voters who wanted to defeat Trump chose Biden, even if he didn’t represent their issues as well as Sanders did. No matter who Democrats support, a debate about electability is rarely a distraction, especially with candidates who have so few policy differences.

What the Polls are saying

Any general election polls for November should be taken with a grain of salt this early in the cycle. Nevertheless, it’s a decent starting point to look at the candidates’ head-to-head performance.

Both candidates do equally well against Paxton, who underperforms Cornyn. Where Talarico outshines Crockett, at least according to these way-too-early polls, is against the incumbent Senator Cornyn.

The Electability Argument for Both Candidates

Both candidates have talked about electability and why they think they can win in Texas. Their approach is starkly different, but it can be categorized. A helpful tool is the debate between the two candidates. I went through the transcript to get better insights.

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Talarico - Winning through broad appeal

According to TIME, Talarico is “a head-down pragmatist who speaks about his Christian faith fluently, and has drawn an impressive national following of his own”.

Talarico has built a national profile from scratch in a very short time. He was initially propelled into national politics by the fight against Texas’s new Gerrymander and has since appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The 36-year-old is a progressive by most standards, and his populist anti-billionaire message is reminiscent of Bernie Sanders, but he communicates it with an appeal to Texas’s Christian voter base. In the debate, Talarico focused on Billionaires and Texas, as he had done in his entire campaign. He also mentioned the word “win” in all its altercation more often than Crockett, at times highlighting his ability to win in Trump country. Talarico, using the electability argument in his presentation to Democratic primary voters, puts the focus on Crockett. The congresswoman has her own view of electability.

Crockett - Winning through record Democratic Turnout

Crockett entered the race as a well-known candidate. She delivered a speech at the 2024 DNC and is a frequent target of Trump’s attacks. Unsurprisingly, she mentioned Trump more often than Talarico did and used variations of the word “fight” eleven times. This goes hand in hand with her campaign, in which she presents herself as a fighter against Trump: Her announcement video showed her silently staring at the camera to the sound of Trump’s insults.

Talarico supporters were quick to criticize her approach, arguing that it’s difficult to win in a Trump +14 state that way. How could Crockett persuade swing voters and moderate Republicans, when the core of your campaign is fighting Trump? Crockett has an answer for that. She doesn’t intend to win through persuasion and broad appeal, but through turnout.

Texas has had comparatively low turnout in past elections (57% of adult citizens voted in 2024), so Crockett sees a lot of room for growth. She even hinted at the idea that she could win without persuading any Trump voters. While the 2026 electorate will be much bluer than the 2024 electorate, winning Texas without persuasion seems like a steep task.

What both candidates need to win

Crockett’s chances in the primary and the general rely on turnout and support from one of the most crucial Democratic voter groups: African Americans. Her strength with that group might win her the primary, but it gets more difficult in the general, where she will need the support of white Texans and also Latinos, who might feel insulted by her comments about Latino “slave mentality”.

For Talarico, turnout plays a significant role in the primary. He has to hope for strong turnout rates in rural areas and needs to persuade a decent share of African American Democrats to defeat Crockett. In the general elections, things could look better for him. African Americans, if they turn out, historically support the Democratic nominee. Talarico could then try to use his broad appeal approach to get across the finish line.

To sum it up, Crockett’s fighter campaign that counts on energizing the base is a decent strategy to win a primary, because that’s where the base decides. Talarico’s approach is much more suited for a general election battle in Texas. He will have to overcome the obstacle of his low name ID in the primary, but if he does, he might be in a pristine position against Paxton. After all, 2024 has taught us that being a “generic Democrat” without baggage can have its advantages.

Who will it be?

The result next week will be relatively close. While polls show a slight lead for Crockett, prediction markets are betting on Talarico. Whoever wins will have to look ahead to November and face the truth: Electability matters.

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While the national environment in US politics is polarized to a point where large swings in elections are incredibly rare, a handful of states are seeing sustained shifts in their political alignment that could upend Senate maps and the Electoral College in the near future.

In recent years, this discussion has been dominated by Florida. The growing state was considered the biggest prize among the Swing States in 2016 and 2020, but its rightward shift - Republicans won here by over 10 pts in 2022 and 2024 - has made it a long shot for Democrats. The driving force behind this shift: Conservatives moved to Florida in droves after the 2020 pandemic, and Hispanics in Miami swung to the right in extraordinary numbers during the past 8 years.

On the other side, Democrats have been shining in Georgia. The new swing state has been moving towards the Democrats as the Atlanta metro area keeps getting bluer at an astonishing pace. Overall, Democratic gains are more evenly spread out across the map and are often overlooked because they are happening in states that aren’t on many people’s radars. One of these states is Alaska.

Alaska was long considered deep-reed territory. The state has not voted for a Democratic President since Lyndon B. Johnson carried it in his 1964 landslide victory. The state has had a Republican Governor since the 2000s and has only voted for a Democratic Senator once in the past 45 years (Democrat Mark Begich won it in 2008).

But in recent years, Democrats have been making gains in the state that relies heavily on oil production. First, let’s take a look at how the state shifted on the presidential level in the 21st century.

Democrats hit rock bottom in Alaska in 2000, when George W. Bush carried the state by a margin of 30.9 points. Since then, Alaska has trended towards the Democrats, particularly when compared to the national environment. When Trump won it in 2024, Alaska was just 11 points to the right of the national popular vote. So, unless Alaska shifts further left or right, Democrats would need a +11-point victory nationally to win in Alaska. That puts the state into the likely Republican column. It’s a long shot for Democrats, but you can win states within that reach if you run a phenomenal candidate.

That’s what happened in 2022, when Mary Peltola narrowly won Alaska’s single House seat in a difficult environment for Democrats. Peltola, the first native American representative from Alaska, became the first Democrat to win the seat since 1973. Despite her narrow re-election loss in 2024, she put on an impressive performance: While Kamala Harris lost the state by 13.1 points, she only lost it by 2.4 points on the same ballot, making for an impressive 10.7 point overperformance.

As Democrats look to retake the Senate, they need to flip four Republican-held seats. Two pickups in Maine and North Carolina seem likely, but the remaining two wins must come from states that Trump won by over 10 points. When Mary Peltola announced her candidacy for the Senate, Democrats’ odds for flipping the Senate improved significantly. Early polls suggest a tied race in Alaska, and prediction markets seem to agree with calling the race a dead heat.

Check Out Our 2026 Election Forecast

Peltola’s strong favourability rating and popularity among Alaska’s electorate are certainly a big factor in the race, but there are signs that Alaska is moving even further towards becoming a swing state.

Alaska: Approval of Alaska Republicans & Trump Plummets

Recent polls have shown a drop in approval for Republicans in Alaska. The approval rating of Peltola’s senate opponent, incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan, has plummeted eleven points to 39% (47% disapprove) and turned net-negative for the first time since 2020.

Perhaps even more interesting is the shift in approval of Alaska’s Republican Governor. For those who don’t know: American Governors are notoriously popular with their state’s electorate. Only two out of America’s 50 Governors have net-negative approval ratings. One is Governor Reynolds in Iowa (-6, not running for re-election). The other is Gov. Dunleavy of Alaska with a net-negative approval rating of -11 points, making him the most unpopular Governor of the entire nation.

What’s even more astonishing is that Dunleavy used to be a popular incumbent. His net-approval rating remained positive since he became Governor in 2018. Just last year, Dunleavy approval rating fluctuated between +10 and +20. While some candidate-level issues can explain his recent dip in popularity, like Dunleavy’s failed fiscal plan, it does link to the broader dynamics in the state.

And what about President Trump? According to G. Elliot Morris’ incredibly detailed map of Trump’s approval rating, the President is underwater in Alaska after winning the state by 13.1 points just 15 months ago. His approval rating sits at just 44.3% with registered voters. There is only one other state he carried with +10 points that gives him a worse approval rating (Iowa). Yes, the entire nation is souring on Trump as his nationwide approval rating is hitting record lows, but why might Alaska turn into favorable territory for Democrats in 2026 and perhaps even 2028?

70% of Alaska’s economic revenue comes from the oil industry. The state is therefore heavily dependent on oil prices. In 2025, crude oil prices hit the lowest point since 2021, straining an already struggling economy in Alaska. In fact, CNBC ranked Alaska’s economy as “America’s worst state economy”.

With the persistence of high prices, Alaska’s economic troubles could boost Democrats in 2026. If Democrats enjoy a generic ballot advantage similar to their 8-point victory in 2018, Republicans’ Senate seat and their hold on the Governor’s mansion might be in serious trouble.

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Two weeks ago, we analyzed the Gender divide in political giving to United States Senators. Today, let’s take a look at the perhaps most important revelation that one can find in fundraising data: The divide between small contributions and PAC money.

Recent elections have seen fundraising records for both Democrats and Republicans. The question is: are these records fueled by scores of donations from regular voters, or are they propelled by big interest groups, so-called Political Action Committees (PACs)?

The role of PACs in politics has been a target of frequent criticism. Interest groups, like AIPAC (American-Israel PAC), Beer brewers, realtors, or even AT&T, can donate limited amounts to political candidates. Many Senators, especially from the progressive side of the aisle, have promised not to accept any PAC money for their campaigns to showcase their independence from profit-driven interest groups.

While all U.S. senators need donations to win elections, there are stark differences as to where that money comes from. OpenSecrets collected fundraising data from 2019 to 2024 and differentiated between five fundraising sources: Small individual contributions (less than $200), large individual contributions (>$200), PAC contributions, self-financing, and “Other”.

For the sake of this article, I want to visualize what percentage 1) small individual contributions and 2) PAC contributions make up in each Senator’s total fundraising haul. Below you can find the data on 97 of 100 US Senators. The chart is interactive, so you can hover over the dots to reveal names & details.

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The obvious revelation is that there are Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the chart, meaning that each party has Senators who rely heavily on PAC money and Senators who rely mostly on small contributions. Some Senators rely on large individual contributions, which didn’t fit into the chart.

There is an unsurprising divide between Democrats and Republicans. The highlighted dots “Average Democrat” and “Average Republican” reveal a significant difference. The average Democratic Senator received 12.1% of their funds from PACs and 25.5% from small contributions, while the average Republican received 21.4% from PACs and 17.8% from small contributions. On average, Republicans relied more on PACs for their campaign funds, and Democrats relied more on regular, individual donors.

Looking back at our scattered visualization, which shows Democrats and Republicans being present on both sides of the chart, we should ask ourselves: What other predictor is there for a Senator’s share of PAC and small contributions?

The most apparent predictor would be national profile. Almost all Senators at the top left of the chart (high % of small contributions) are national figures. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) ran for the Democratic presidential nomination before and are icons of the progressive movement. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Tim Scott (R-SC) were more or less promising candidates for the Republican nomination once. Also to be found in the upper left sections are former Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), as well as Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led Trump’s first impeachment trial. The rest of the group almost entirely consists of popular Democratic swing state senators like Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), or Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). Having a national profile or being a swing state senator, who needs every buck to get across the line, arguably puts a candidate into the viewfinder of ordinary voters donating small sums.

This “national-profile” reasoning also works for the other side of the chart. The Senators with the highest share of PAC contributions have names that are unknown to most Americans. Even I have to admit that I had never heard of Mike Rounds (R-SD, 45.8% of funds from PACs) before. These Senators can’t rely on popularity, so they are largely financed by PACs. These PACs include Leadership PACs, which are Committees from other senators that support their colleagues.

Take your time with the visualisation above, look for your Senator and patterns that I have missed. An interesting observation to end this article on: Only three Senators have a small-contributions-share of over 40% while accepting virtually no PAC-money (<1%): Bernie Sanders (0.3% PAC-funded), Elizabeth Warren (0.3%), and Jon Ossoff (0.6%).

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For those who don’t know, the first primary contests are held in a few states on separate dates. In the last cycles, Iowa traditionally kicked off the primary season, but the DNC seems poised to consider an alternative (South Carolina went first in '24). The first state does matter, as the winner of the first contest enjoys momentum and a boost in the polls for the states to come. That’s why choosing the first state of a primary is so delicate. You want to analyze all demographic implications carefully. For example, a state with a high share of Black voters might help Kamala Harris, while a predominantly white state like Iowa could help the chances of Gavin Newsom.  

For 2028, the five applicants are: Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa.

These five states offer a vastly different Democratic primary electorate, which becomes evident in the following charts. To get the full picture, I’m going to compare the states’ Democratic voter profile from 2020 exit poll data regarding race, education, geography (rural/urban), and age. I’m aware that the demographics of these states may have changed a bit since 2020, something I will consider in my analysis.

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Let’s start our analysis with Iowa and New Hampshire. The biggest argument against these two states that started off the 2020 cycle is that they aren’t diverse. Their electorate is around 90% white. Latino and Black Voters, who make up a big chunk of the Democratic electorate, aren’t represented at all. In 2020, Pete Buttigieg got off to a fantastic start in Iowa and New Hampshire, which both had a mostly white electorate, but he fell behind once more diverse states came into play. While New Hampshire has gotten more diverse over the past six years, it still lags behind its competitors.

Looking at density, Iowa provides one of the most rural electorates, but with a nice slice of urban and suburban voters, while 61% of New Hampshire’s 2020 primary electorate lived in the suburbs.

Where they offer a more evenly balanced electorate is education - they have the highest share of college-educated voters among the five, and age. The three other states may be drastically different from each other regarding race, but they all have an older electorate. Iowa and NH both had a decent share of voters ages 17-44 (45%), giving young voters a voice.

Next up is South Carolina. The state was the fourth and last contest before Super Tuesday in 2020, and it gave Biden his first win. South Carolina’s electorate has the largest share of Black Voters amongst the five (57%), who powered Joe Biden to a decisive win that paved the way for him to beat Bernie Sanders. A large part of that success was due to Rep. Clyburn’s late endorsement. The high-ranking congressman still wields a lot of influence over SC’s African-American electorate.

What is easily overlooked is that South Carolina, not Iowa, had the largest share of rural voters (41%) in the 2020 primary. The state is growing in population, so the strong suburban number (39%) and the relatively small urban share (20%) might have grown. Where the state fell out of line with its competitors is in education. 60% of primary voters there didn’t have a college degree, far higher than the Democratic average for a state and the four other applicants. While giving South Carolina the first slot would thereby empower an underrepresented group amongst Democrats (non-college graduates), the state might not be representative of the national electorate come election day. Its 2020 electorate was also the oldest among the five applicants - 71% of voters were over 45 years old.

Now let’s get to the two states that, according to my poll, are the favorites of the American online election community.

Nevada offers a racially diverse electorate. While 65% of its voters in the 2020 Democratic primary were white, the remaining third is somewhat evenly split. Latinos would get a voice at the start of the primary as they made up 17% of the state, but black and asian voters also get to weigh in more strongly than they would in Iowa or New Hampshire. Geographically, the state is very unique. 2020 exit poll data only differentiated between voters from Clark County (Las Vegas), who made up 70% of the electorate, and voters from the rest of the state. Given its swing state nature, the decent geographical balance with urban + rural voters, and a diverse electorate with a high share of Latino voters, Nevada might be a strong pick. But there’s one more.

North Carolina has perhaps the most appealing profile of these five states. Black voters make up a third of the electorate there, a share not as astronomically high as in South Carolina, but strong enough to make an impact. At the same time, other minorities don’t get diluted, as only Nevada was able to post stronger numbers for the Latino and Asian/Other voter groups. Additionally, the growing state had a nice divide of suburban (46%) and urban voters (40%), two absolutely crucial groups for Democrats in recent years. The education divide is pretty balanced, and the electorate is not problematically old. The only caveat is that rural voters, a bleak spot for Democrats, would not be at the center of attention.

North Carolina would be my pick. It’s a growing swing state that has been trending left ever so slightly. It’s diverse, but it doesn’t give one group disproportionate voting power. That seemed to be what most poll respondents thought as well.

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Note: The chart only contains the results from respondents from the United States (n = 113). The complete sample (n = 165) chose Iowa over Nevada for 2nd place. North Carolina remained in first place with both groups. Overall, the sample is young (95% are younger than 45 years old), liberal (78% liberal), and disproportionately male (73% male).

A look at public data from 2019 to 2024, provided by Open Secrets, shows there are drastic differences in each Senator’s fundraising profile, especially between the two major parties. There’s a lot to analyze, and in the following weeks, we will take a closer look at which industries fund who, which Senator takes in the most PAC money, and which Party has the biggest share of small contributors. For today, however, we will analyze one of the most overlooked factors in fundraising: Gender.

There will be an interactive table with all Senators at the end of this article.

The Gender Divide

Anyone who has ever followed US politics is familiar with the gender divide. In 2024, Harris won women by 7 points while losing men by 12 points, a 19-point gap. So it’s not surprising that we see a similar divide in fundraising data:

The divide is most evident when we take a look at the profile of contributors to an average Senator from each party. The average Democratic Senator (including two Independent Senators who caucus with Democrats) has 8% more female contributors, while men outnumber women by 17% when it comes to Republicans. A gap of 25 points.

I chose this approach of analyzing the average Senator, because if we would simply look at the makeup of a party’s total contributors by gender, big fundraisers, like Senators Warren & Sanders, could distort the results, though only slightly. The chart also doesn’t consider how much each contributor spends, because that number is heavily influenced by the fact that men continue to outspend women. Below, you can see how the data changes when we look at the money itself.

You can immediately spot the vast difference from the previous chart. Men drastically outspend women when donating to Republican Senators, but even regarding donations to Democrats, men outspend women by a staggering 16 points. There are only two Senators, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MS), who received a majority of their funds from women.

The question of why men outspend women so drastically in politics has been the subject of past research. In early 2025, Shauna L. Shames and her colleagues concluded that donations are the only form of political participation where the gender gap persists and “in some respects, has grown”. While women may be equally likely to donate money to a candidate, James et al. write, the “super-contributors,” who donate the highest amounts, remain disproportionally male.

Now, let’s get to the most interesting questions and find out: Which Senator has the most male/female contributors? Which Senator has the highest, which one the lowest, share of male donors?

When it comes to the gender divide of total contributors, the picture couldn’t be any clearer. When ranking the Senators by their share of female contributors, Democrats take the first 42 spots. Yes, you heard that right, 42! They are led by Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM). The first Republican to show up is Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) with a share 48% female donors.

While Republicans unsurprisingly dominate the charts regarding the share of male contributors, the picture is less one-sided. In fact, we can find three Democratic challengers in the top 15.

Sanders, Warren, Ossoff: The People’s Senators?

Apart from the world of percentages, there’s some truth to be found in raw numbers. According to data from 2019-2024, one Senator outperformed the pack: Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the progressive icon and candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 2016 and 2020, collected funds from over two million different contributors (1.1M men & 900k women). This also put him at the top of the money list, with a haul of over 200 million US dollars.

Notably, he is joined by two other Senators, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA). Both fell short of Sanders’ impressive performance, but their 1.1 million contributors each still put them well ahead of fourth place.

You can explore the data in the table at the bottom of this article. The table is interactive. You can sort it by the different data groups and search for your Senator.

Why do I mention this trio? Because there’s something interesting to be found there for 2026 and 2028. That Sanders and Warren show up at the top is not really a surprise. Both are national figures of the progressive movement, and both had promising campaigns for President in 2020 - finishing in 2nd and 3rd place behind Joe Biden in the primary. During that campaign, both, but particularly Sanders, impressed with their fundraising totals. Their strong 2019-2024 haul is therefore not a surprise at all. But what about Jon Ossoff?

Ossoff became a Senator only recently, in 2020, after unseating a Republican incumbent in Georgia. As a swing-state Senator, Ossoff is known to all who follow the political circuit, but his national profile remains low, especially compared to the likes of Warren and Sanders. Naturally, it is astonishing to see him hold up with these two when it comes to campaign contributors. His Senate colleague from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, “only” had 330k contributors, and Warnock already had another election cycle to fundraise for in 2022.

Ossoff’s strong financial backing by 1.1 million Americans (55% women / 45% men) might help him in the future. He will likely defend his vulnerable seat in the 2026 midterms, further cementing his status as a potential 2028 candidate.

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