What Will The Midterms Do To 2028 Hopefuls?

Handicapping the field

Sep 21, 2026

The latest edition of The District Club is here, featuring guests Reagan Reese and Ameshia Cross talking GOP midterm stresses, Democratic hopes, and the early stakes for would-be 2028 candidates. Please watch!

What Voters Want From The Midterms: Cheaper Gas

And Republicans are getting the blame. WSJ:

Republican lawmakers are running out of time to assuage voters angry about soaring fuel costs, setting off a last-minute scramble on an issue many see as the GOP’s biggest political liability in the midterm elections.
Record-high prices for diesel fuel used by trucks and farm machinery are hitting especially hard in rural and red states, where Republicans are now locked in tougher-than-expected battles to hold on to their seats in places such as Iowa and Nebraska. If voters take out their anger on GOP candidates, the results could be catastrophic for the party, some strategists and lawmakers fear.
“Voters aren’t happy, and we’re in charge,” warned Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.).
Lawmakers have floated ideas including a federal gas-tax holiday or a ban on diesel exports, while acknowledging the Iran war is the critical driver of prices. The fighting, which started in February, has become a vulnerability for President Trump and his party, after he promised no new “forever wars” and pledged to bring down prices.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) said last week that he was open to exploring a diesel-export ban. But later he said it was up to the Trump administration to get shipping flowing again through the Strait of Hormuz. “That’ll take the pressure off,” Thune said.
Over the weekend, GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa urged Trump to impose an export ban, similar to agriculture export bans in the 1970s. “High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME,” he said on X. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R., Iowa), who is running for the open Senate seat in the state, said Monday she too would support pausing diesel exports, arguing Iowans “shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran.”
The Senate has scheduled only two more weeks in session ahead of the election, and there are no plans to vote on a suspension of the gas tax or another measure designed to lower fuel prices. Even if senators did pass a bill, the measure wouldn’t make it to the president’s desk soon, as the GOP-led House recessed last week.
Some Republicans would rather not talk about it.
“See you later,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Senate Republican, told a reporter who asked what Congress or the administration could do about high diesel prices. Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday if he would support an export ban, Barrasso replied: “Well, the president is considering a number of different things that he can do.”
Others say there is little chance of action.
“I don’t think there’s gonna be a discernible decrease over the next 48 days before the election,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), who is retiring after this term, when asked about the possibility of lowering fuel prices. Asked if there would be consequences for Republicans at the ballot box, Tillis said, “Elections are always pocketbook issues, right?”

Who Is An American?

Anang Mittal in Daily Wire:

American nationalism was civic, voluntary, and universal in aspiration, if not always in practice. Being American means holding dear the principles of individual liberty, equality before the law, constitutional government, and republican self-rule. Civic nationalism is the only framework that can sustain a diverse republic. A nation can restrict immigration and still promote the idea that citizenship and assimilation confer equal membership on a newcomer. The debate over immigration has no connection to singling out non-white students at a football game as “foreigners.”
Civic nationalism asks newcomers to accept responsibility for the country they now share. Much of that responsibility is learned through institutions rather than abstract principles. Football is one of them: people acquire loyalties to a school, a team, or a city by showing up, sharing rituals and passing them on. Immigrants do this when they build institutions of their own. Catholics built parish schools and charities; Jewish congregations organized lay boards and federations; Hindu Americans incorporated temples as nonprofits, established schools and organized acts of charity. Faith remains distinct, but their institutions operate according to American customs of voluntary association and self-government. Assimilation is not erasure. It means translating one’s culture into the civic framework of the country one has joined.
The Anglo-American culture newcomers assimilate into is itself a composite. In “Albion’s Seed,” David Hackett Fischer traces regional traditions that crossed the Atlantic: Puritans to Massachusetts, Quakers to the Delaware Valley, Royalists and indentured servants to Virginia and British border peoples to Appalachia. They shared a language and British legal traditions, but differed over religion, social rank, and the meaning of freedom. Later immigrants, Fischer argues, adopted the customs of the regions where they settled while retaining their own ethnic identities. He encountered the combination among his own Brandeis students, including “backslapping Texas Jews in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats.” As Fischer puts it, “in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been.”
Today’s far-right nativists claim to defend American identity, but they’re importing the European blood-and-soil politics that America has rejected. When they speak of “heritage Americans” defined by ancestry, they’re channeling the Know-Nothings of the 1850s and the immigration restrictionists of the 1920s. An 1854 Know-Nothing document required members to support only native-born officeholders and exclude Roman Catholics. For the nativists, naturalization could not overcome a foreign birthplace, and American birth could not overcome being Catholic.
A May 1, 1939, Life profile of Joe DiMaggio praised the Yankees player’s adaptation to American habits: “He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.” The article assured the American public that the Italian-American player was Americanized, with his preference for chow mein as reassuring evidence. Much of what we recognize as ordinary American life was once seen as a failure of assimilation. Today an Italian surname or a dish of spaghetti hardly needs a defense. Later generations have little reason to remember how fiercely their ancestors’ membership was disputed.
A nation demands extraordinary commitments from total strangers. Citizens pay taxes for people they will never meet, obey laws written by people they did not elect, and defend the rights of people they vehemently disagree with. A passport alone cannot produce that kind of allegiance. It has to be learned in families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and other institutions that teach people to regard strangers as members of the same political community. Every generation has to shoulder and renew this responsibility.
That kind of civic formation is harder in an age of extraordinary personal autonomy and isolation. You can work from home, order food from an app, watch movies alone, argue about immigration, and develop beliefs about places without meeting the people who live there. Politics becomes entertainment. The fewer occasions we have to encounter fellow citizens directly, the easier it becomes to view them only in political categories: immigrants, activists, socialists, “heritage Americans.” The technology that creates unfettered autonomy also leaves us dependent on intermediaries to explain our country.

Paramount Settles With States, Clearing Way for Deal

The Wall Street Journal:

As part of the agreement, the company behind hits like “The Godfather,” “Top Gun,” “South Park” and “Yellowstone” will avoid having to sell cable channels, the people said. The final terms of the deal couldn’t immediately be learned.
Settling the suit effectively removes the most serious remaining hurdle to the deal closing. The question of whether Paramount would be able to close its transaction has hung over the media and entertainment industry since Chief Executive David Ellison won a fraught bidding war against Netflix to buy Warner Bros. in February.
Paramount’s Warner deal would bring two of the movie business’ oldest studios, two major streaming services in Paramount+ and HBO Max and dozens of television networks under one owner. It would also give Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, a vast entertainment empire that includes franchises such as Harry Potter, DC superheroes and “Game of Thrones,” as well as cable networks like CNN and Cartoon Network.
A dozen Democratic-led states including New York and Colorado sued in July to block the deal on antitrust grounds. The attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, argued that the combination of Paramount and Warner would create too much concentration in the markets for theatrical films and television channels.
The Writers Guild of America sued too, saying that the combination of the legacy media companies would kill jobs and career opportunities for Hollywood screenwriters at a time when the film and television production economy is already under pressure.
The looming deal and the legal fight over it has been a source of controversy in Hollywood. Many creatives, including movie stars, signed an April open letter opposing the deal, saying it would further imperil an already diminished media and entertainment industry. Throughout the weekend, opponents of the deal, including actor Mark Ruffalo, voiced concern about a pending settlement, urging Bonta to hold the line.
There was mounting political and industry pressure to settle. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, the major movie theater chains and some Hollywood labor unions urged the parties to resolve their issues.
The coalition of states and Paramount spent the weekend in advanced settlement negotiations discussing a range of concessions including an investment in production, selling cable channels and creating a board to ensure that CNN retains editorial independence, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Settling the suit before it heads to trial could help Paramount avoid racking up costly “ticking fees,” which it offered to win the deal and must begin paying if the deal doesn’t close by Oct. 1. The company was set to pay Warner shareholders roughly $650 million a quarter, or $7 million a day, beginning next month, until the transaction closed.
Still, the combined company is set to emerge with nearly $80 billion in debt—a substantial burden already expected to weigh on its investments in the business.

✍️ Feature

The New Yorker: A Populist Revival in Iowa

🌍 Foreign

🏛️ Domestic

📰 Media

🧬 Health

Daily Wire: The New Yorker’s Dangerous Ambiguity About When Life Begins

✝️ Religion

🏈 Sports

USA Today: Week 2 in the NFL Brings Misery for Jayden Daniels, Caleb Williams

🎭 Culture & Hollywood

🪶 Quote

“Sexual intercourse was taboo on the Lord’s Day. The Puritans believed that children were born on the same day of the week as when they had been conceived. Unlucky infants who entered the world on the Sabbath were sometimes denied baptism because of their parents’ presumed sin in copulating on a Sunday. For many years Sudbury’s minister Israel Loring sternly refused to baptize children born on Sunday, until one terrible Sabbath when his own wife gave birth to twins.”

― David Hackett Fischer

The Transom

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