Mother Jones
Just a few days before the November midterms, Rep. Mayra Flores (R-Texas) exuded confidence. “If you believe the Dems will hold the House and Senate on Election Tuesday,” tweeted the 34th District incumbent, who won a special election in the summer, “then I got some oceanfront property in Arizona.” Hispanic conservatives, she announced with conviction, “are […]
Mother JonesThe Supreme Court on Wednesday heard an under-covered but very important case about the the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a law that helps to keep Native children who are put up for adoption close to their families and tribes after decades of forced separation and trauma in Native communities. During oral arguments, the majority […]
Mother JonesWith four of the country’s most extreme Trump-backed election deniers on the ballot in Arizona Tuesday, Democrats headed to the polls worried that the future of democracy in their state was on the line. At campaign stops and, later, at Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly’s election night watch party, voters told me that the issue of […]
Mother JonesIn a close race State Attorney General Keith Ellison, a former six-term congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has narrowly won re-election as the top legal officer in Minnesota, defeating Republican challenger Jim Schultz. Ellison was the first Black person elected to statewide office in the state’s history and the first Muslim elected […]
Mother JonesIt was a mixed night for the fight against climate change on Tuesday. Voters in two of the country’s largest states, California and New York, considered climate-related ballot measures that would have freed up billions in funding to protect the environment and electrify the economy. New York resoundingly passed its measure. California did not. First […]
Mother JonesDemocracy was on the ballot in key swing states on Tuesday—and in two states the results are still too close to call. Three election-denying Republicans seeking to run their states elections in 2024 lost to Democrats: Kristina Karamo in Michigan, Audrey Trujillo in New Mexico, and Kim Crockett in Minnesota. But in Arizona and Nevada, […]
Mother JonesIn state after state on Election Day, voters sent a resounding message: “Abortion rights matter to us.” They didn’t only matter in California and Vermont, where voters chose to guarantee abortion rights in their state constitutions. They mattered in deep-red Kentucky, where voters shot down a “no right to abortion” amendment that would have blocked the […]
Mother JonesGov. Glenn Youngkin, in a rare show of contrition in an increasingly shameless Republican Party, has decided to apologize. The Virginia governor sent a handwritten letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after cracking a joke about the brutal assault against her husband. According to her spokesperson, the top Democrat accepted Youngkin’s apology. In a statement […]
Mother JonesThe full impact of Tuesday’s midterm elections won’t be clear for days, if not weeks. But the results in the East and Midwest were nowhere near as bad for Democrats as they could have been, in part because of a familiar dynamic: Donald Trump is a really bad judge of competence and character. During this year’s Republican […]
Mother JonesGeorgia’s election results are in, and the winner of the race that could determine control of the US Senate is…nobody. Not yet, anyway. The polls are closed. Only four other Senate races have not yet been called. But multiple media outlets are projecting that neither incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock nor GOP nominee Herschel Walker […]
Mother JonesBefore Tuesday’s election, the prognosis for democracy seemed bleak to outright apocalyptic. Republican election deniers were running up and down the ballot in key battleground states, threatening the future of free and fair elections. Armed vigilantes were guarding ballot drop boxes in places like Arizona, leading to fears of voter intimidation. Thousands of “Stop the […]
Mother JonesA political force propelled by irrationality and a dangerous lie, led by a man who tried to overturn a national election, who incited violence to block the peaceful transfer of power, and who has promoted the lunatic QAnon conspiracy theory and engaged in antisemitism, is poised to take control of the House of Representatives. Though Republicans […]
Mother JonesRon Johnson has done it again. Despite a low approval rating, a litany of baseless assertions about Covid-19, and allegedly aiding in the failed coup attempt of January 6, the wealthy senator has won a third consecutive term to represent Wisconsin. He defeated Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, a 35-year-old would-be rising star in the […]
Mother JonesNew York City approved three ballot measures to codify racial justice in the city charter. As I reported earlier this week, the Racial Justice Commission and proposed ballot measures were a response to the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020 over police brutality and to a pandemic that disproportionately impacted Black and brown New […]
Mother JonesAn idea: Let’s not have politicians do Borscht Belt cadenced jokes about an attempt to kidnap House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, an incident that nearly left her husband dead last week after an intruder broke into the couple’s home and brutally assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer fracturing his skull. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ): “[Speaker Nancy Pelosi] is […]
Mother JonesAn anti-abortion crusader in Kentucky lost a critical race for a state Supreme Court seat that could impact the future of abortion rights in the state. Joseph Fischer, a lawyer and longtime Republican state representative, was vying for an eight-year term in Kentucky’s highest court against incumbent Michelle Keller, a registered independent. When the race […]
Mother JonesFor most of the past year, Sen. Mike Lee’s approval ratings never cracked 50 percent. He was surprisingly unpopular for a Republican in Utah. He offended LDS voters in 2020 by comparing President Donald Trump to Captain Moroni, one of the most revered figures in the Book of Mormon. His fealty to Trump wasn’t always appreciated […]
Mother JonesJohn Fetterman—who won his first election in 2005 by a single provisional ballot in a race in which fewer than 1,000 people voted—has just won one of the most important Senate races in the nation, media outlets are projecting. He beat out GOP challenger Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon best known for hosting a medical […]
Mother JonesDemocratic Rep. Tim Ryan ran a good campaign for US Senate. J.D. Vance ran a middling one. But Vance will be Ohio’s next senator for the simple reason that Ohio is now unquestionably a red state. With more than 90 percent of votes in, Vance leads by 7 points, and national outlets have called the […]
Mother JonesIt’s still early and the anxiety over a likely red wave crashing down over national, state, and local races remains intact. But a handful of notable firsts regarding race, gender, and sexual orientation have already emerged. Here are a few worth highlighting: Wes Moore Wes Moore, the author and non-profit executive, made history by becoming […]
Mother JonesFlorida, a state once so closely divided that a 0.009 percent vote differential dictated a presidential election, is a swing state no longer. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection against—who was his opponent again? Oh, that’s right—Charlie Crist by nearly 20 percentage points. Sen. Marco Rubio beat Democrat Val Demings by more than 16 points. […]
Mother JonesThe next top prosecutor for Minneapolis and greater Hennepin County will be the former public defender Mary Moriarty, who was elected Tuesday according to local reports over former prosecutor and judge Martha Holton Dimick. She’ll take over for outgoing County Attorney Mike Freeman, who came under fire for his handling of high-profile cases of police violence […]
Mother JonesAs control of the United States government hangs by a thread, our attention turns to the de facto leader of the nation’s ascendant minority party for political insights. But that man, Donald J. Trump, is proving once again that he is—physically, emotionally, intellectually—incapable of such an ordinary task of election night punditry. Instead, when asked […]
Mother JonesJoe O’Dea, the self-described moderate Republican running for Senate in Colorado, has lost his bid to unseat incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet, multiple outlets are reporting. O’Dea stands out from other Republican midterm candidates by adhering to the bare minimum of human reasoning and decency: He accepts that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election; he […]
Mother JonesI got an email yesterday from Mike Pompeo. He was writing on behalf of the NRCC—the House Republican campaign arm—with some troubling news. “I’ll level with you,” the former secretary of state told me. “This isn’t going well, we didn’t get any donations last night.” But all was not lost! Pompeo said that after some […]
Mother JonesIn the final days of the election, the Republican candidates in Arizona have been traveling the state together on bus tour. The first stop, on Sunday, was a meet and greet with local GOP activists and volunteers in Tucson. Kari Lake, the nominee for governor, was expected to be there. Pamela, 71, said she had […]
Mother JonesTwo days after a 42-year-old man broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and viciously assaulted her husband with a hammer, Donald Trump conveyed no regret or sense of responsibility for the politically motivated attack, whose alleged perpetrator confessed to police that he was driven by a loathing for Pelosi and […]
Mother JonesYesterday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) sent out a campaign with a solemn, all-caps heading: PARTICIPATING IN OUR CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC. The email hails voting as a part of our “national identity” which has enabled “the American experiment in representative government to continue for almost 250 years.” As I read the email, I noticed that Boebert’s campaign uses a lot […]
Mother JonesFor the past two months, Irving Zavaleta, 36, has been staying at an Airbnb in the central area of east Las Vegas, but he hardly spends any time there. Instead, for 14 hours a day, every day, he is most likely to be found at Mi Familia Vota, a national nonprofit promoting voter participation among Latinos. […]
Mother JonesGlenn Youngkin is a busy man. In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, he attended events for Republican hopefuls in battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. On its own, this isn’t out of the ordinary—politicians endorse kindred candidates all the time. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis embarked on a high-profile tour of his own, even […]