With 33 days left to go until the midterm elections and Donald Trump’s approval ratings at historic lows, Yr Wonkette dares to hope for good news coming out of the November 3 vote. Since Great Leader’s scheme to ratfuck voting by mail was blocked by the Supreme Court, we’re even hoping it might be a free and fair election, though there’s still plenty of time for new fuckery. Multiple forecasters predict Democrats will take control of the House, where the Cook Political Report recently shifted 15 races to “likely Democratic” wins, and predicts Democrats will gain between 5 and 15 seats to take the majority. (Yes, you still gotta go vote and canvass and volunteer if you can!)
The Senate, Cook says, is still a toss-up, with Dems likely to gain one to five seats. To actually take the majority, Dems would need to hold on to all the seats they have now and flip four currently held by the GOP — though it would be best to flip five, because yikes that Fetterman guy shouldn’t ever be in the position of being the tie-breaker.
There’s lots of attention on the big battleground Senate races in Alaska, Michigan, Texas, Maine, and Ohio, where Sherrod Brown just dropped this terrific ad against the Republican incumbent, John Husted, using Husted’s own condescension toward working people against him. Class war is awesome. Watch it to the end, and smile.
The video shows people from key voting demographics “watching” a clip of Husted blathering about how people living in poverty are “not very experienced at navigating the real world,” claiming that they can’t possibly understand budgeting because they’re so dependent on food stamps. You know, because folks on SNAP never have to make the really limited benefit stretch through the month. At the end, a woman exclaims, “Fuck THAT,” which is followed immediately by the standard voiceover, “I'm Sherrod Brown and I approve this message.”
It’s a thing of beauty.
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Several of those big races are likely to set new records for campaign spending, but they aren’t the only states where Democrats could make gains this year. This week, we’ll be looking at several of ‘em.
Nebraska: Yes, Nebraska!
Republican incumbent Pete Ricketts, the third-richest member of the Senate, is in a very tight race with independent Dan Osborn, a steamfitter and union leader who has the backing of Nebraska Democrats, who aren’t running a candidate this year. Osborn finished surprisingly close to Republican Lisa Fischer in 2024, losing by just six percentage points in a state Donald Trump won by 20. Ricketts served two terms as governor before winning a special election to the Senate in 2024, but voters in 2026 aren’t sure they want to let Ricketts win a full term.
Popular though Trump was two years ago, his approval rating among many rural voters has crashed and burned thanks to his stupid tariffs and his stupid Iran war, which has driven prices for diesel and fertilizer so high that many farmers are unsure they can keep making a go of it.
Osborn is doing well enough that Republicans are worried in a state that’s usually a sure thing for them, so the party is throwing huge amounts of money into the race. Dear Leader is even traveling to Nebraska next week to hold a rally for Ricketts, where he may or may not remember to mention the man’s name.
In addition, a pro-Osborn superPAC has released one of the hardest-hitting ads we can remember in any recent campaign, reminding voters that in 2022, then-Gov. Ricketts voted to grant a pardon to John Arias, who was convicted of a violent rape in the 1990s and finished his sentence in 2008. As the New York Times notes (gift link), the ad correctly notes that the pardon allowed Arias to own guns again, and removed him from the state’s sex offender registry.
The ad is devastating, and narrated by the victim, who’s identified only as “Jody S.” It carries a content warning to let viewers know it discusses sexual assault, as well as the phone number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Here’s the ad, but we’ll repeat the caution: It’s not an easy watch, so feel free to skip down to where we resume our text.
The Times adds a detail: “Weeks after granting the pardon, Mr. Ricketts issued a statement defending his decision, saying that Mr. Arias ‘has shown to be remorseful.’” Yikes.
The victim, who was never notified that Arias was up for parole, later testified in favor of a state law requiring victim notification.
As far as we can tell, Ricketts has yet to respond to the ad. Maybe Trump will help him out by calling the victim a nasty woman and a communist? Dan Osborn would appreciate that, just as he’d appreciate a donation.
Texas: Yes, Texas! Not Just The Senate, The Governor’s Race Too!
We have a Texas Twofer for you today. Evan already told you how Ken Paxton stepped in deep shit when he said Great Leader is hurting his numbers. And while Paxton sputters and flops around, the Texas governor’s race is also much closer than anyone expected. A new Marist poll finds Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa three percentage points ahead of incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, which is very encouraging, while another poll out today shows Abbott leading Hinojosa by four points. Both results are within the margin of error, which is terrific news for Hinojosa at this point.
Nothing like a lock, but Abbott is enduring a backlash from voters for his enthusiastic support of data centers everywhere. In August, Abbott said it was time to pause new data center development, and blamed the very companies he’d been luring to Texas for moving too fast, darn them. In an interview with Wonkette alumnus Jim Newell, Hinojosa said that Abbott may have been hoping his success in bringing in big corporations would translate into votes, but instead the gasping economy has voters wondering what Abbot’s doing for them.
“The exact thing that he brags about is now an indictment on him,” Hinojosa told Newell. “People do not think corporations should be getting tax breaks to come here to hire people from outside the state.”
“Nobody had called him out on that stuff before,” she added.
Abbott also devoted much of his energy in recent years to passing a school voucher law to throw $1 billion in taxpayer money at private schools, and while rightwing fundamentalists love that, lots of families with kids in public schools are righteously pissed off. They’re ready to listen to Hinojosa, who got into politics when she ran for school board in Austin to fight the closure of her son’s school. She’s made education a central focus of her time in the state Lege, and in her campaign for governor.
Dear reader, read this story in The 19th about former Paxton supporters who are looking to Hinojosa to fix the mess in Texas’s schools, including Maria Colmenero, a mother of three kids who’s homeschooling them not because she’s a crazy who hates “government schools,” but because Texas government isn’t adequately funding local schools:
“That’s the major thing for us, and I truly believe that if you pay the teachers more, if you have a better education curriculum, that it could be so much better for the kids and for everybody,” Colmenero said.
“We told them that if she wins, ‘Y’all can actually go back to school, a public school,’ and they’re excited. They want her to win. We all want her to win.”
Texans are also very aware of Abbott’s presidential ambitions, Hinojosa told Newell, and they’d really prefer a governor whose attention isn’t focused outside the state.
Even so, Republicans have had a stranglehold on power for decades, and that won’t change easily. Abbott isn’t as completely alienating and offputting as Ken Paxton, and it’s been 32 years since Texas last elected a Democratic governor, the wonderful Ann Richards. If you want to improve Gina Hinojosa’s chances, you could send her some money, even.
Mississippi: Yes, Mississippi!
Mississippi hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 40 years, either, but a lot of Democrats are excited about the candidacy of District Attorney Scott Colom, who’s running strongly enough against incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, whose top issue is her devotion to Donald Trump. Trump endorsed her early in the race and called her “100 percent MAGA,” which may no longer be the golden ticket to reelection it used to be.
If elected, Colom would become Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, and its first non-shameful Democratic Senator ever, since the last Dem Mississippi sent to the Senate was John Stennis, a Dixiecrat and supporter of “massive resistance” to integration who just kept on being reelected until he finally retired in 1988. (Late in his career he finally renounced segregation, and voted in 1982 to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, which he’d been around to vehemently oppose in 1965.)
Colom remains a long shot, but the Wall Street Journal this week ran a somewhat astonished piece (gift link) trying to explain why Colom is getting so much attention. The Journal story notes that Republican dominance of Mississippi has been so total that some residents don’t recall actually seeing TV ads for political candidates before this year. For a measure of rightwing unease about Colom’s chances, you might also consider that the Journal reporters found it necessary to point out — twice! — that Colom has received support from a PAC funded by the scariest boogeyman in the world, George Soros, boooooo.
Colom is a canny campaigner, very much aware that he’s a Democrat in a very red state. He emphasizes his law-and-order bona fides as a prosecutor, and hopes to reach moderates from both parties, especially disenchanted Trump voters who might be skittish about supporting a more progressive Dem. In a recent speech, Colom said — bringing back a favorite line from Democrats of old — that he is “personally pro-life” but that for his own daughters and all women, abortion is a matter of choice for women and their doctors.
A lot of stars would need to align — especially turnout among Black voters, who make up 40 percent of the electorate — for Colom to win. But with Trump continuing to make himself more and more despised, that just might happen. Send some Ameros to Scott Colum’s campaign if you’d like to make it more likely!
[WLUK / NBC News / NYT (gift link) / The 19th / Slate / WSJ (gift link) Dan Osborn / Gina Hinojosa / Scott Colum]
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I do like that some Democrats are finally saying FUCK THAT. Tammy Duckworth said that in an interview I saw last week about "civility". Also, relying on "lifetime republican" Fetterman is DEFINITELY a bad idea.