Canada Played Trade Hardball with the Midterm

 Many posts have analyzed how foreign governments try to influence American politics and policy.

 Liz Crampton, Zi-Ann Lum and Daniel Desrochers at POLITICO:

A trade deal was imminent. Top negotiators from the United States and Canada were holed up in a dreary building in southwest D.C., working on the details of an agreement to finally end hostilities that had wreaked havoc on both countries’ economies and a once close diplomatic and military relationship. But then, two hours before the Aug. 22 tariff deadline, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed his negotiators to walk away. That night, the U.S. responded, imposing a 50% tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods like wood pulp, hockey equipment and industrial machinery.

Carney’s government had been watching the trade negotiation deadline with an eye to a different clock ticking down: two months until Trump’s constituents went to the polls. For Canadian leaders who had spent a decade testing strategies to confront an increasingly adversarial neighbor, the electoral calendar was a new source of bargaining power to explore.

For months, embassy officials in Washington had been working with analysts from the federal finance department and foreign ministry in Ottawa to scour the country’s tariff schedules to understand where changes would be felt on the midterm electoral map. Experiencing a localized hit in their states and districts, Canadian officials knew, might be the only thing that would inspire Republicans to reconsider their acceptance of Trump’s trade policies. That leverage would only intensify as Election Day approached with affordability concerns atop voters’ minds.

“We’re also targeting products that will target states in the U.S.,” Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said at a press conference in Ottawa four days after the talks collapsed. “We’re being wise and strategic to put political pressure.”

Scott Colom and Mississippi

Many posts have discussed civil rights.

From MLK's I Have a Dream speech, which mentioned Mississippi eight times: "I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice."

 Ari Berman at Mother Jones:

For the closing ad of his US Senate campaign, Democrat Scott Colom stood in the driveway of the house that once belonged to Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963 while holding T-shirts that said “Jim Crow Must Go.”

“He was killed for helping Mississippians vote,” said Colom. “On Tuesday, use your vote and honor everyone who died for that right.”

Now Colom, in a fitting tribute to Evers, has made history as the first Black US senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. The longtime district attorney is also the first Black candidate to win any statewide office in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

His shocking upset victory in a state where Donald Trump won by 23 points in 2024 is even more remarkable considering Mississippi’s history.

This was the state where Jim Crow was the most violent and repressive. It was where Emmett Till was lynched, Evers was assassinated, and the young civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. There were 581 documented lynchings during the Jim Crow era, more than any other state.

“Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” the late congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis once said. “It seemed like when you just drove over the state line, something happened to the air, to the environment. It was a psychological thing… Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”

Mississippians rewrote the history books with Colom’s election.Video produced by Anna Yeo

Veterans Day 2026

 Many posts have discussed veterans.

From the Census:

Veterans Day originated as “Armistice Day” on Nov. 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the end of World War I. Congress passed a resolution in 1926 making it an annual observance, and it became a national holiday in 1938. Sixteen years later, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation changing the name to Veterans Day to honor all those who served their country during war or peacetime. On this day, the nation honors military veterans — living and dead — with parades and other observances across the country and a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

The following facts are made possible by the invaluable responses to U.S. Census Bureau surveys. We appreciate the public’s cooperation as we continuously measure America’s people, places and economy.

Veteran Population

15.7 million

The number of military veterans in the United States in 2025, representing 5.9% of the total civilian population age 18 and over. 

0.3%

The share of veterans in 2025 who served during World War II. Additionally, 2.3% of veterans served during the Korean War, 30.9% during the Vietnam War, 25.6% during the Persian Gulf War, and 31.4% during the Post-9/11 period (September 2001 to present).

30.5%

The share of veterans age 75 and older in 2025. At the other end of the spectrum, 8.4% of veterans were under age 35.

Death Penalty Support

A number of posts have discussed the death penalty.

Support for it varies by survey.

 Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

Forty-nine percent of U.S. adults are in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, and 45% are opposed. While statistically similar to last year’s 52%, the latest update marks the first time support has been below the majority level since 1971, when it was also at 49%. The last time support was lower than now was in 1966, when a record-low 42% favored the death penalty. The high point for support was 80% in 1994.

Second Thoughts About the NPV

Previous posts have looked at the National Popular Vote proposal.

Andrew Prokop at Vox:

Back in 2001, Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar co-wrote an article about instituting a national popular vote that laid out much of the basic logic later adopted in the compact. Because of that, he told me, he considered the idea “my baby — maybe not mine uniquely, but my baby.”

Then he used some different analogies: “This is like Doctor Strangelove. I created this doomsday machine, like Edward Teller. Well done, Amar — you just destroyed the universe!”

Amar is a staunch critic of Trump and the MAGA GOP, and he continues to believe the Electoral College is a deeply flawed system — “80 percent of the arguments made for it today are stupid,” he told me. Even so, he’s developed some grave doubts about the compact.

Start with the reality that the compact, as written, does not provide for a national popular vote. Rather, elections will continue to be administered and certified separately in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The “national popular vote” will just be the sum of the vote totals reported by the states.

That, Amar fears, could lead to a host of problems. No organization or body will exist to administer, oversee, or adjudicate the national popular vote, in the case of a close and disputed national vote count — there’s no national standard, for instance, on forcing a recount.

Furthermore, he worried, the promise of “one person, one vote” won’t be realized so long as states can set vastly different rules for how voting happens — or who gets to vote. States could play partisan games to inflate their vote totals and their impact on the national outcome.

Because the Constitution sets no minimum age for voting, blue states could lower their age limit to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote. Red states could respond by letting parents cast votes for their children — an idea that some on the right, including Vice President JD Vance, have mused about.

“The thing won’t really work without an overarching national federal framework,” Amar said. His 2001 article had suggested the national popular vote be administered by “a nongovernmental election commission — made up, say, of a panel of respected political scientists and journalists,” with disputes “decided by, say, [PBS journalist] Jim Lehrer.”
That seems far harder to imagine today. “How naive I was,” Amar told me. “I was imagining, 25 years ago, there might be institutions that had credibility and trust on both sides. It was a different world.”

Which gets to the other major problem — the support for the compact overwhelmingly comes from just the Democratic Party, with Republicans predisposed to view it suspiciously, or as an outright plot to prevent someone like Trump from winning again. “I wasn’t envisioning that it would only be one party supporting the reform,” Amar said.
“The Republicans who have supported it are often either paid lobbyists or some idiosyncratic Republicans who have their own reasons for opposing the Electoral College — I don’t want to dismiss those, if they’re sincere — but the support is overwhelmingly Democratic,” said Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller.

Imagine the national popular vote goes into effect for 2028 and Democrats win the White House — and the GOP wins the 2030 midterms in a red wave soon afterward. New GOP majorities in swing states could back out of the compact — but they could also come up with worse reprisals. From their perspective, Democrats will have set a new norm that the party controlling swing state governments can completely rewrite the presidential election rules before the election for partisan gain.

The norm that electors should go to the winner of each state was helpful to have in place when Trump tried to steal the 2020 election — Republicans in positions of power in swing states relied on it to certify Joe Biden’s win. We may miss that norm when it’s gone.

Midterm Pollling

Many posts have discussed pollsters' challenges, including the plunge in response rates.  This year, the challenges are even greater. 

Scott Keeter at Pew:

The most common question pollsters hear around election time is “Who’s going to win?” A close second this year was “Are the polls going to be wrong again?”

Votes are still being counted, but two conclusions seem clear: Preelection polls captured the direction of this year’s election while generally understating the size of Democrats’ advantage.

Polls consistently documented the electorate’s dark mood this year, including deep dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump, even among some of his 2024 voters. That frustration was particularly focused on his economic policies.

Polls also consistently identified a wide enthusiasm gap, with Democratic supporters more interested, engaged and likely to show up to vote than Republican supporters. Indeed, Democratic supporters were also more likely to take preelection surveys, as a number of our colleagues reported.

In the end, polls found more than enough opportunities for Democratic pickups in the Senate to win a majority in the chamber, and they indicated a likely Democratic takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives. But the polling understated the size of the eventual Democratic victory in many of the major statewide races (Georgia and Texas, in particular), as well as in the overall House vote.

Madison, Trump, and the 2026 Midterm

Many posts have discussed the Constitution. 

William F. Connelly Jr. at The Richmond Times-Dispatch  [links added]

Before the election, President Donald Trump seemed perplexed by his party’s looming loss in the November elections.

“I don’t understand it, nobody does, nobody’s been able to explain it … Whoever wins the presidency, Republican or Democrat, automatically does poorly in the midterms. I don’t know why…”

Maybe ask James Madison, Mr. President?

Madison, the Father of our Constitution, created a virtual constitutional constant: The party in the White House commonly loses seats in midterm elections. While there are rare exceptions to this rule, November 2026 was not one.

Like a pendulum, this constitutional constant applies especially to the second midterm election of a two-term president, often called the Six-Year-Itch. Political scientist Greg Weiner labels it “Madison’s Metronome,” just one of the many checks and balances in Madison’s complex separation of powers system.

Trump might understand if only he would read Federalist #10 and #51, Madison’s two most famous short essays promoting ratification of the Constitution. In Federalist #10 Madison all but predicted Trump: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Consequently, in Federalist #51 Madison insisted: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place.”

Madison understood that institutions matter. Institutions affect behavior, promoting institutional patriotism and responsibility by redefining the ambition and self-interest of politicians. Where you sit influences what you think. The competing branches, legislative chambers, and levels of government, naturally defend their institutional prerogatives. In this manner, our Madisonian institutions effectively regulate political behavior. Our constitutional system humbles and empowers Presidents and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, majority and minority parties. Constitutional analysis is critical to comprehending contemporary politics.

Why is Trump stunned when Supreme Court Justices with lifetime tenure dare to disagree with him? Why is he shocked that Congressional Republicans jump ship when their ambition demands it? Why is he surprised that states are pushing back? Frequent elections give voters the opportunity to voice their impatience with Washington.

Trump neither understands nor respects our Constitution and the institutions it creates. In 2022 he insisted we should terminate “all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to return him to the White House, so he could be “dictator on Day 1.” Yet our Constitution does not look kindly on would-be dictators. Madison understood the danger of a demagogic politician employing the “vicious arts,” fomenting anger among citizens to advance self-serving ambition.

Trump’s first-term Vice President, Mike Pence, concluded, “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States … President Trump demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution” on Jan. 6. Pence chose the Constitution because he had read it.

Today Trump may wish he was Putin, Xi or Kim Jong Un. But he’s not.

Instead, James Madison rules America, and the Constitution governs.

The Constitution governs in the commonplace sense that ours is a “government of laws not men.” No one person governs. Neither the President nor the Congress alone govern, and certainly neither political party is ever wholly the government. Even majorities do not govern. The separation of powers humbles all three branches, three levels of government, and both political parties. Madison masterfully manages ambition to limit government.

Donald Trump is not the government. But does he know this?

Our republican institutions defined by Madison’s separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism and federalism have successfully governed our politics for over two centuries; limiting and empowering, as needed, our three branches and three levels of government, all for the purpose of promoting ordered liberty. The November elections again advanced this purpose.

Meanwhile, Trump’s narcissism led him to compare himself to our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. Yet the premise for Lincoln’s greatness was his admiration for the Constitution. Lincoln condemned ambitious politicians willing to stoke the “mobocratic spirit,” and “disregard for law.” Instead, Lincoln worked to promote, in his words, “a reverence for the Constitution and laws.” Lincoln grounded his own greatness on his veneration for the Constitution which he understood and perpetuated, thanks to his prudence and moderation.

Madison and Lincoln were great because they served a purpose greater than themselves, namely, founding and perpetuating our constitutional republic. Thanks to Madison and Lincoln, the Constitution governs even Trump.