northwest Wisconsin, where viewers mainly saw political ads from neighbouring Minnesota rather than Mr Crowley’s. The polls may also have exaggerated how much ground Mr Crowley had to make up. For the second time in a week surveys vastly overestimated the lead of a left-wing candidate. On August 4th Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive seeking the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan, won by just one point, despite polling averages putting him 13 points ahead. There is an intuitive explanation for such errors. Supporters of socialist- aligned candidates are unusually likely to be white, educated and highly engaged in politics—all characteristics associated with a propensity to take surveys. Just as pollsters have struggled to account fully for swathes of Donald Trump’s support in national elections, working-class “normie” Democrats may be underrepresented in primary samples. Yet the theory only goes so far. On the same day as Wisconsin’s election, a progressive, rather than a moderate, outperformed the polls in neighbouring Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary. And surveys of other Democratic primaries with clear ideological divides have proved highly accurate. The safer conclusion is that primaries, in which electorates are smaller and preferences more fluid than in general elections, are devilishly hard to poll. Whatever explains his comeback, Mr Crowley now has a chance to become the state’s first black governor. First he must defeat Tom Tiffany, a Republican congressman endorsed by Mr Trump. Mr Tiffany voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. That makes Democrats nervous about 2028: Wisconsin’s governor has a formal role in certifying the state’s presidential electors. Mr Crowley should probably have the edge given Democrats’ nationwide tailwind, but there has been little polling so far to test that expectation. Mr Tiffany is already portraying his opponent as indistinguishable from Ms Hong. A day after the primary he reposted an interview in which Mr Crowley acknowledged that there was little difference between their policies. Still, there is relief among mainstream Democrats, who feared Ms Hong stood no chance against Mr Tiffany. After a sleepless night waiting for ballots to be counted, Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state, was effusive about Mr Crowley’s comeback. For decades to come, he
says, “campaigns will sing the songs of David Crowley and his comeback for the ages.” ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/12/democratic-moderates-get-a- surprising-reprieve-in-wisconsin
Donald Trump’s attack on mail-in voting looks doomed A federal judge issues another blow to the president’s elections agenda Aug 13th 2026 ABOUT A THIRD of Americans voted by mail in 2024, including roughly a quarter of Republicans (see chart). Yet nine months later Donald Trump vowed to “get rid of mail-in ballots”. The president falsely claims that fraudulent postal voting contributed to his loss in 2020. His efforts in Congress and the courts to secure new limits on this popular way of casting a ballot have, thus far, come up short. His executive order on March 31st directing the United States Postal Service (USPS) to serve as ballot gatekeeper is fizzling, too. On August 11th a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the main provision of Mr Trump’s order, with nationwide effect. Judge Indira Talwani noted
that the president’s “unprecedented directive” is “causing confusion” among voters less than three months before the midterm elections. All 50 states offer mail-in voting, with eight conducting elections entirely by post. Despite Mr Trump’s efforts, the rules for such ballots during this election cycle are now unlikely to change. Mr Trump’s order attempts to subject mail and absentee ballots to federal control through a complex series of lists and new postal rules. It instructs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create “state citizenship lists” identifying all citizens aged 18 or over and send them to each state. States must then provide the postal service with rosters of voters eligible for those ballots, presumably after consulting the DHS lists—though the order does not specify that. Finally, states must use new, USPS-designed envelopes with special markings and bar codes. The postal service is barred from delivering ballots posted in unauthorised envelopes or by voters missing from the relevant lists. The jumble of lists confuses even election-law experts like Derek Muller of the University of Notre Dame. “It is quite unclear to me how the various lists are supposed to interact with one another,” he says. Part of the confusion regards timing. The deadlines for the federal government sending lists to the states and the states sending lists to the USPS are both 60 days
before an election, which seems to make it difficult for the former to inform the latter. But the legal infirmity is deeper than the warped logistics. The constitution assigns states the power to set the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections and allows Congress to “make or alter” those regulations. The president gets no mention. In Ms Talwani’s words, “the executive branch has no authority to regulate elections.” Mr Trump’s policy, she argues, runs roughshod over America’s separation of powers. The Supreme Court is mulling a request from the administration, filed on July 27th, to reverse an earlier, narrower decision by Ms Talwani. (On August 12th it filed a supplemental request asking the court to rule expeditiously.) But with election deadlines looming, the justices staying mum for more than a fortnight does not bode well for its plea, says Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St Louis. And even if the Supreme Court overturns her initial ruling, Ms Talwani’s new decision— handed down in a separate case brought by voting-rights groups and Delta Sigma Theta, an African-American sorority that provides election education —would still stand in the administration’s way. Rick Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles, reckons the executive order is “totally unworkable” and has little hope of being implemented this autumn. Mr Trump continues to push other changes to election rules, which look similarly ill-fated. The SAVE America Act, a voter-registration bill, failed to pass the Senate before the August recess and has meagre support. Mr Trump does not rule out more drastic measures, including nationalising elections, but that move has no precedent or constitutional basis. The main achievement of these efforts, as Mr Trump probably knows, may be not a change to the rules of the midterm elections but greater distrust of their outcomes. ■ Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/13/donald-trumps-attack-on-mail-in- voting-looks-doomed
Florida was a swing state. Now it’s MAGA-land Its next governor will have to focus more on costs than culture Aug 13th 2026 He is never the most charming man in a room, but Ron DeSantis is often the most formidable. Speaking at a political club in Naples in February, Florida’s governor reflected on his two terms. “I sat there on the first day as governor, I looked around the empty office and I was just like, listen I don’t know what SOB is going to succeed me but they are not going to have a lot to do because I’m going to get all the meat off the bone that I can,” he said. Seven years into the job, Mr DeSantis reckons he has delivered. “That’s what we’ve done.” On August 18th voters in Florida will choose the Democrat and Republican who will battle to become that SOB. Byron Donalds, a Republican congressman, is expected to win his party’s nomination handily. If elected
governor in November, as pollsters predict, Mr Donalds will inherit a state that looks little like it did a decade ago. What was once America’s quintessential swing state has become a bastion of Republican power. That is in part due to Donald Trump, with whom Mr DeSantis has had a tumultuous relationship. During the 2024 presidential campaign Mr Trump dismissed his then rival as “Ron DeSanctimonious”. The president has since chosen Floridians as some of his top advisers and made his Mar-a-Lago resort the White House’s unofficial southern annex. He has thus stamped Florida as MAGA-land. Mr DeSantis, though, has transformed the state itself. Before the covid-19 pandemic, Democrats outnumbered Republicans and elections in Florida were nail-biters. But that began to change when, in the depths of the pandemic, Mr DeSantis broke with much of the country and declared Florida open for business. In just two years the state gained nearly 1m net residents, at a pace of 1,500 a day. Remaining open, particularly in a state with so many old people, had a cost. During a wave of covid from July to November 2021, Florida’s per-person death rate was more than triple the national average. But Mr DeSantis faced little lasting backlash. Most new residents were registered Republicans. The state’s Democrats, meanwhile, struggled to recruit candidates or attract donors. In 2022 Mr DeSantis was re-elected by 19 points, the biggest margin for a Republican in state history. His party swept every statewide office and won a supermajority in the legislature. One-party rule unleashed a policy blitz. Mr DeSantis enacted a six-week abortion ban, prohibited transgender medical care for children, created the biggest school-voucher programme in America and rewrote curricula at state universities. He also took on Disney over its opposition to a law that prohibited classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, revoking its special tax treatment. The fight became a cautionary tale for outspoken firms across the country. To cement the state’s new political identity, Mr DeSantis rejected the legislature’s congressional map and drew his own, sacked two elected Democratic prosecutors and called special sessions to force lawmakers to act