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Nine days after President Trump took office, in 2017, a headline in Time made a bold claim: “Republicans Begin to Break With President Trump.” The break was over immigration; the president had announced a blanket ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, and it was a step too far for lawmakers. Republicans including Senator Mitch McConnell and Charles and David Koch spoke out.
The perspective afforded by time has shown that such criticisms from Republicans toward the president do not last long, and oftentimes, they do not affect Trump’s stranglehold of his party. But as some Republicans running for office break from the president on issues such as Iran and immigration, they’re hoping that voters believe that this time, they’re serious.
And with less than 40 days until Election Day, the changing electoral maps and shifting court rulings are causing confusion among some voters. On Radio Atlantic this week, my colleagues Toluse Olorunnipa and Madeleine Carlisle join me to unpack the mess of this midterm election.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Adam Harris: There are, of course, valid reasons to redraw district maps. But in an election year, could this not also be seen as a form of cheating?
Madeleine Carlisle: The people I was talking to in Missouri really did feel like their vote was being diluted. It added to the sense that, Why should I cast my ballot? It doesn’t matter; it’s all rigged anyway.
I don’t think it’s going away. And the validity of it as a political tool is something that is certainly being endorsed at this moment by both parties.
Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today, we need to think about the mess of the midterms. With just over a month until election day, one might hope for a bit more certainty. Gerrymandering wars over the last two years have reshaped congressional maps across the country. Election deniers, some who still falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen, are overseeing elections. And every other day, it seems court decisions are changing how people will vote this year. Bottom line, it’s all very confusing and concerning. And one is forced to wonder whether it’s also voter suppression.
My colleagues Toluse Olorunnipa and Madeleine Carlisle have been covering the shifting political and legal environment around the midterm elections, and they join me now to discuss. Let’s get to questions.
Tolu, Maddie, thank you so much for joining me today.
Carlisle: Hi, thanks for having us.
Toluse Olorunnipa: Hey, thanks for having us.
Harris: I want to start by asking you both about something you’ve been reporting on, which is how more Republicans running for office are backpedaling away from President Trump. Tolu, midterms can often be a referendum around a president, the sitting president and their policies. So is this pre-election politics as usual, or is there something else going on? What does your reporting show?
Olorunnipa: It’s a little bit of both. There is the normal backing away from an unpopular president that you tend to see in a midterm election. Midterm elections don’t usually go very well for the party in power, and it’s usually because the president is not as popular as he was when he was first elected. That’s normal.
But what is not normal is how much these Republicans are backing away from the president and the way that they’re doing it, and the fact that President Trump is unlike any previous president in that he does not allow people to back away from him, usually, without paying a price. He’s kept his party in line over the last several years by essentially going against anyone who speaks out against him—primarying them, showing them that he’s willing to tank their political careers.
And so for that reason, we haven’t seen a lot of people break from the president. But now, his poll numbers are so low; he’s so unpopular—the most unpopular that he’s ever been over the course of his two different terms—and people are realizing that things are not getting better. They are not going to be successful if they stay with him. And so a number of these Republicans are realizing that. They’re seeing the polling, and they’re starting to make some clear breaks with him, over the war in Iran, over the affordability crisis, over things like AI and data centers.
And the president has taken some unpopular positions on those issues, and so they are reading the room, they’re looking at their constituencies, they’re realizing that their own political careers could end if they stay with the president. And so we’re seeing this jailbreak of a number of Republicans speak out against the president, take different positions than he has taken. We’re seeing it in a way that we haven’t seen it in the past when it comes to President Trump.
Harris: Yeah. And Maddie, as Tolu mentioned, this isn’t something that the president typically takes sitting down, right? He’s not one to take criticism lightly. And even beyond that, right? Those who don’t fully support him, he often doesn’t take too kindly to that. Why is his response more muted this time around?
Carlisle: I think, as Toluse said, he sees the writing on the wall, in a way. He also has a much smarter political group around him this time around—I’ve been told that by various sources. But I think, given that there are certain issues that are so incredibly unpopular—like the war in Iran, like the price of diesel—that he, as a smart political actor, understands that these candidates need to make a little daylight, and he’s allowing that. But there have been cycles in the past where these candidates needed to do similar things and he was incredibly unforgiving.
So, maybe it’s that he’s this deep into his political career now; he understands how things work. It could be that he’s got these new folks he’s working with this time, who weren’t with him back in 2018 when he was last in this position. But he is allowing folks to back away in a way that he has not before. And, from conversations I’ve had, that makes candidates more comfortable to do so: They won’t be targeted as they were in 2018.
I mean, I’m not one to predict the president’s actions. Maybe he will target them, but as of right now, he’s been very muted in his response, and that could be giving people a bit more confidence to do what they think they need to do to win over the critical independent voter who will decide this midterm cycle.
Harris: It makes me think: It’s not that these are just arbitrary issues. This is a war that is affecting people. It is driving up the price of diesel; it’s driving up the price of gas. These are concerns that voters have. If he sees his party backing away from these unpopular issues, why isn’t the president himself reading the room and backing away from some of these issues as well? Wouldn’t that help the party more than, say, this individual person backing away?
Olorunnipa: It probably would help the party, but President Trump has run his last election and he’s thinking much less about the fate of his party, or even the popularity of his policies, in part because he’s not going to have to go before voters again, and he’s thinking of his presidency in this broad, legacy-defining way that sometimes second-term presidents think about their time in office. And so he is, in his mind, taking positions that are maybe politically unpopular, but will be better for the overall trajectory of the country and better for his legacy.
He thinks he’s solving the long-running issue of relations with Iran and the potential for Iran getting a nuclear weapon. There’s a lot of debate over whether going to war was effective in preventing that. But, in his mind, and how he’s talking to his advisers and how they’re talking to him, that is what he’s doing here.
And so he’s said it publicly that he doesn’t care about the midterm elections. He doesn’t care about the potential impact of the price of gas on people’s vote if he’s able to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And he’s done the same thing in defending other unpopular positions. When it comes to data centers—which are very unpopular in a number of the states where there are vulnerable Republican Senate candidates—the president has said that people and communities that don’t want these data centers are at risk of being backward and poor. Instead of saying, I feel your pain, or having a more nuanced argument, he basically has said that anyone who disagrees with him is really not worthy of being part of his movement.
So it’s pretty clear that the president feels that he doesn’t have to bow to the political wind of the moment. He is focusing on his legacy and thinking that he’s doing the right thing for the long term, and he’s willing to pay a short-term price.
Harris: How are voters feeling about this? The vast majority of Republicans have supported Trump through thick and thin over the last two years, thinking even back to the first term. I wonder if voters are sort of seeing this as cynical, where Republicans are starting to try to back away. Will it work, even if they do try to back away from the president’s policies?
Carlisle: I think that’s a great question. Certainly, Democrats who are running against the Republicans that are making this daylight now between themselves and the White House are doing exactly what you’re saying. And they’re pointing out: You’ve been with the president this whole time. Now you’re stepping away; don’t buy this.
However, there are some voters—all politics is local, right? And it’s all about your candidate. And if you have a candidate—for example, Mike Rogers in Michigan—calling for the war in Iran to end, calling for relations with Canada to improve, that can go very far with Michigan voters. Specifically that state, given their relationship with Canada, given how much the state is dependent on diesel. And so I believe that will work with voters in a way, particularly voters who maybe don’t want to vote for a progressive Democrat who’s running in that Senate race as his Democratic opponent. And so, I do see this helping certain Republican candidates, but not always. And I do think the price of diesel, the relationship with other countries, tariffs—these are things that people, particularly when we’re talking the Midwest, Michigan, Wisconsin, those places where those policy issues really do impact people. And I think making that daylight will help those Republican candidates advance.
Harris: Tolu, last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can use an expensive voter-eligibility database that contains sensitive voter information ahead of this election. What are the implications of this decision?
Olorunnipa: That remains to be seen. It seems like it may, at least in the short term, have a limited impact, in part because we are in this ninety-day quiet period, where you’re not supposed to kick people off the voter rolls en masse, because it’s seen as disruptive to do that so close to an election. So a number of the election officials that we’ve heard from since this ruling came out said that there’s nothing that they’re gonna be able to do differently, because it’s too late to start purging people from the voter rolls.
But if this ruling stands, if it’s upheld over the long term, you could see a much more aggressive attempt, especially by red states, to kick people off the voter rolls using this federal database. This database has been known to have flaws. It has not typically been used for voter issues. It’s been used for other things, like benefits and federal support that people get. And they’ve tried to change it and make it something that can be used to determine whether somebody is eligible to vote or not.
Now, whether or not some states decide to do it on a case-by-case basis—use this database to start plucking people off the voter rolls in the last weeks before the election—that remains to be seen. And it also gives the federal government another tool if they want to challenge the legitimacy of the election. They can say, We have this database; it’s been rubber stamped by the Supreme Court, and we believe that a number of voters from X state or Y state are not eligible. And they could use that to try to challenge the results of the election after.
So I think we haven’t heard the last of what is going to be the implication of this ruling. But for the first take, we’ve heard from local officials that they’re not gonna do much with it.
Harris: And even just to back up a little bit, because this isn’t just an isolated thing. It’s a part of the administration’s broader efforts to reshape the way that we are are voting, including the president’s attempts to pass the Save America Act and voter-ID changes that we’ve seen over the last several years.
In July, Trump made a primetime address to the nation alleging that China had interfered with the 2020 election. Is there any truth, Tolu, to that claim, that allegation about China? And is election interference something that we should be worried about here, in the 2026 midterms?
Olorunnipa: Well you would not know it based on the meeting that President Trump had with President Xi of China just a few days ago. He rolled out the red carpet. He met him and greeted him as he got off of the plane as he arrived in the United States. He showed him a wonderful welcome—not the kind of welcome you would expect from someone who had meddled in your elections just a few years ago.
But that is the most significant form of evidence that this federal government has been able to find in their hunt for evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. And when we look more deeply into what the president was saying back then, we found that even that evidence was pretty thin. China basically got access to state databases that anyone can access. A lot of these states have made public or make it available, the voter roll data that different political campaigns and political operatives use to target voters or to mail mailers to voters. And China essentially got access to a number of those things. There’s no evidence that they use that to manipulate people’s vote, or manipulate the voter rolls in any way. They went in and they looked. And President Trump himself has downplayed China’s cyber actions in the past, saying, They do things to us; we do things to them. But because he has been so fixated on the voter issues, the China story was one that he could take a hold of and try to present and package as evidence that he’s been looking for that the 2020 election was compromised.
But there’s no real evidence that China or any other actor did anything that precipitated President Trump’s loss. He lost because he got fewer votes. He lost because he did not get the requisite number of electoral votes. And nothing has changed that, even though he’s used the full force of the federal government to try to investigate voter fraud from six years ago. And what they were able to come up with was this China story. But even that story is a little thin. And based on the president’s meeting with President Xi, even he doesn’t really believe that there was a giant fraud committed on the American people when it comes to the 2020 election.
Harris: When we come back, we talk about court decisions and redistricting efforts could complicate the election.
[Music]
Harris: Maddie, I was just thinking, when your route changes when you’re going somewhere—you’re in the car, and you see the signs, and it’s like, This road is closed, and your GPS is trying to take you a different direction. Sometimes it’s like, I have no idea where I’m going, and things can get a little bit more confusing. I was thinking about that in relation to the amount of changes that we’ve seen in our elections over the last couple of years. From Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in ballots to redistricting maps being tangled up in courts, many Americans are sort of losing faith in elections because it can be so confusing, such a web.
A July Gallup poll found that two in three Americans are worried about election interference in this upcoming election. How do these new maps affect Congress and the 2026 election?
Carlisle: So I think the redistricting arms race, as some people have called it, is really the theme of this midterm-election cycle because it’s in line with what you pointed out, Adam—how much the rules of our elections have been changing so close up to election day. This is incredibly confusing for voters. And one of those main things is these maps have been redrawn. This unusual mid-cycle redistricting.
So, for context, redistricting is normally done at the start of the decade after the U.S. Census. But last year, President Trump called upon Texas to redraw their maps to better benefit Republicans going to this cycle. Texas responded, and then we were in this downward spiral, in which blue states and red states all have been redrawing their maps to try to get some sort of partisan advantage for their candidates.
It’s been incredibly confusing for voters. Particularly, I covered what has happened in Missouri, which is that the map has been changing up, back and forth, back and forth, up until truly last week. Only last week do we now know which map was going to be used for the election cycle, which is so incredibly difficult for Missourians, for election officials, for anyone who’s just trying to get their bearings on, Who’s on my ballot? Who are the candidates I’m weighing in on? Basic things like that, that we should know.
Harris: And had the ballots already started going out in Missouri?
Carlisle: Yes, yes, absolutely. So it is incredibly complicated and I don’t wanna bog you down in the court battles that were both federal and state, but it only was settled last week in the U.S. Supreme Court, which map it was going to be. And at that point, I was talking to election officials in Missouri, and they had to start mailing on September, I believe it was 19th, to overseas voters, those ballots. So truly making things incredibly difficult for the people who run our elections, for the people who want to weigh in and get involved with our elections.
How it will impact the midterms, I think it’s a really interesting question because the Republicans on paper have a clear advantage. They were able to redraw far more districts. And going into this project last year, they were aiming to get as much as 13 seats out of this process.
However, what has happened is a lot of those districts that they redrew have been surprisingly competitive, or much more competitive than you might think, given that they were carved up specifically to flip that seat and make it a Republican seat. So Don Davis, in North Carolina’s first district, is holding on, even though North Carolina redid its map just to get him out. There are candidates in Florida—Kathy Castor in Florida’s 14th, Jared Moskowitz—these Democrats who are doing much better than anyone anticipated.
So it’s likely that Republicans will be able to flip four, five seats, or six, even. But that’s less than half of what they were aiming, when they started this process. Because, I think, for several things: The headwinds for Democrats are just so strong this cycle, given what we’ve been discussing. And also from voters I’ve been talking to; voters are pissed about this redistricting.
In North Carolina, for example—I was talking to organizers on the ground there. They’ve seen a surge in people registering to vote because they’re so—and at least, this is what the people I was talking to were saying: Voters are angry that these maps were redrawn. And so, in a way, it could be a backlash. Also in red states or blue states that redrew their maps to get Republicans out, like in California, we’ll see how that impacts the race. Are those voters also frustrated?
And so, I will say, the broader theme of confusion—and to your point: I’m driving on the road; I don’t know where I’m going—this mid-decade redistricting, I think, is the perfect example of that, and also exemplifies this trend of this midterm cycle of really last-minute chaos. That the people it’s hurting are the voters themselves and the election administrators who are nonpartisan actors usually, and are just trying to get the ballots out. And I also don’t think it’s gonna stop. I would keep an eye on this theme going into 2028.
Harris: To that point, the president is highly supportive of redistricting, right? And as you mentioned, Maddie, you wouldn’t expect some of these races to be as close as they are, given that they were redrawn for these specific purposes. Last week, the Cook Political Report moved fifteen races over towards Democrats, saying that they could pick up somewhere between five and fifteen seats there.
There are of course valid reasons to redraw district maps. But in an election year, could this not also be seen as a form of cheating, in its own way? With all of the talk of election interference and foreign interference, could this not be seen as a form of domestic interference in our own elections?
Carlisle: I think a lot of voters do feel that way. So on the Missouri example I was talking about, Kansas City has been represented for years and years and years by Democrat Emmanuel Cleaver. And then, under the map that was drawn and passed by the Republican legislature, that city—what was done to it is the term “cracking,” in the study of gerrymandering, the term is called cracking. And so basically, I found a church that I think really exemplifies this process. So it used to be and still is a center of the community in northeast Kansas City, this church. But under the map that was drawn by the Republican legislature, the church building itself would be in one district, the parking lot would be another district, and across the street, at the market that they go to, would be a third district. And so that shows this cracking effect, which is when a historically blue or historically red—whatever sort of area the gerrymandering is targeting—is drawn up into these other areas, and to dilute, in a way, the voting power of those areas. And people in Missouri that I was talking to very much felt that way—that they were being disenfranchised by this.
Kansas City, arguably, is a cohesive community that had a single Democratic representative for many, many years. And then now these folks that I was talking to, who attend this church, were going to be in a district that was shared with rural Missourian farmers, who have very little of the same interests in, and don’t share a lot of the same concerns that one would bring to a lawmaker. And so that’s all to say, the people I was talking to in Missouri really did feel like their vote was being diluted. It added to the sense that, Why should I cast my ballot? It doesn’t matter; it’s all rigged anyway. These are things that I was hearing from people given the chaos over the drawing of maps in Missouri.
I think whether or not it actually is something that is disenfranchising, the Supreme Court has very much proved it in recent Supreme Court decisions. I don’t think it’s going away. And the validity of it as a political tool is something that is certainly being endorsed at this moment by both parties.
But the voters, themselves, I do think are feeling that they are losing their ability to further engage in the electoral process because of this fear that, Where I live, will that just be carved up more? So I don’t have an answer for you, but certainly people feel the way you’re describing.
Harris: I’m gonna ask both of you to open your notebooks. We’re a little under forty days until the election. What are some of the things that you will be thinking about as we get closer to election day? Tolu, I’ll start with you.
Olorunnipa: I’ll be really interested to see how how much the bottom falls out of the president’s political standing and of his allies as they approach November. And when I say that, I mean we have heard and seen that some pollsters and some strategists on the Republican side have said that people who won their races by 15 points now should be considered as toss-ups. And that gets you pretty far and pretty deep into people that have shown full support for President Trump, who have felt that they have no concern that once they win their primary, they’re a shoe-in for winning their re-elections.
If we start to see some of those folks start to panic even more, and start to distance themselves from the president even more, I think that’ll be a good sense for how much the bottom is falling out and what that means for not only the next forty-odd days, but as we enter into this new phase of President Trump becoming a lame duck. Having no more elections that he can really influence in from the position of power, other than trying to determine his successor, what does that transition look like? What does he do differently, especially if he loses the House and or the Senate, and his power is diminished? How does that change his presidency? How does that change his outlook on power? How much does that change the way he tries to shape his last two years in office? And I think we’ll start seeing it pretty soon after November.
Harris: Maddie, same question to you.
Carlisle: I am very interested to see how the relationship with the federal government and the states over election administration changes after the November election. I think there has been a lot of concern that the antagonistic relationship the federal government has taken with states when it comes to how they should run their elections, how they should keep their voter rolls. There’s been a lot of concern about how that could change after the election. Is the federal government going to challenge some results? Or is a local candidate going to challenge a result? And is the federal government going to come in and support that candidate? And so I will be watching very closely to see how that relationship between the Justice Department and various states changes, because that’s been something people have been very concerned about.
The federal government has not gotten the changes to election administration it broadly wanted. The Supreme Court struck down the changes to mail-in ballots that the president wanted. To Tolu’s point, the save system that they have been seeking to use—DHS’s save system—to purge voter rolls or check voter rolls, the Supreme Court said in its opinion they can’t do that in this 90-day period. But I’d be very interested to see if maybe that system is invoked if some election results are challenged, like Tolu said. So I think it’s definitely going to be important to watch what happens coming out of those federal offices once the ballots are in, because up until now, everyone’s just been speculating. We have no idea what’s going to happen. And the courts have been weighing in, but that’s been it. And so I’m very interested to see actually how those actors behave—those federal and state actors behave—once we know who won.
Harris: Yeah, absolutely. Well, there is a ton to keep our eyes on and we will be following you all’s reporting as we move closer to election day. Thank you so much for joining and sharing your reporting.
Carlisle: Thanks for having me.
Harris: That’s all for today’s show.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson.
It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.
Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
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Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.