Back on the bayou it is clear how much has been lost since the glory days of American shrimping. Years ago fishermen would fill the pool hall after a hard day’s work and there were dances in a community ballroom every weekend. Now abandoned packing sheds dot the coastline. Some residents have taken to meth and the Family Dollar store closed a few months ago. Mr Buras reckons things are getting worse. Before this trip, his crew asked for a little extra money upfront to buy clothes for their children for the new school year. In the boat’s cramped air-conditioned quarters, as shrimp are vacuumed out from its underbelly, the men explain why they keep at it. “It’s an addiction,” says Mr Buras’s son-in-law. They like the freedom, they say, and the sunsets. In four days they go back out to sea.■ 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/2026/08/27/shrimpers-are-the-latest-group- seeking-protection-from-washington
The state that could shape the winning Democratic message Democrats are suddenly competitive again in Ohio, once the nation’s bellwether Aug 27th 2026 In these waning summer days of waxing Democratic optimism, of rising hope within the party that it will regain some power in Washington and start to overcome a national reputation for elitism and ineptitude, no state seems more pregnant with possibility than Ohio. Once a bellwether for national politics, Ohio has trended solidly Republican this century as the party gained ground with working-class voters. But polls suggest the Democrats have a chance at not only a Senate seat but also the governorship, which they have managed to hold only once, for one term, since 1991. They could even pick up a House seat or two.
High fuel prices, tariffs and the sheer unpopularity of Donald Trump are improving Democrats’ odds across the Midwest. In Ohio, the sharp public turn against data centres is a particular problem for Republicans, given their dominance in the state. Senator Jon Husted, confronting a former Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, has scrambled to introduce a bill to spare consumers from electricity-rate increases due to data centres. But he previously celebrated their construction. The National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote this month to AI firms seeking help fending off attacks from Mr Brown and others, warning that data centres had become “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck”. David Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron, compares Republicans trying to evade complicity for data centres to bank robbers who open their loot only to have telltale dye explode in their faces. “That dye is not going anywhere,” he says. He thinks Democrats might sweep statewide offices and win the Senate seat. “I mean, you can feel it,” he says. “There’s a political earthquake about to happen.” Democrats in Ohio have avoided the progressive-on-moderate bloodletting in midwestern states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. Ohio’s Democrats can seem like throwbacks to a different party: rather than fight over cultural issues and Israel, they are running on bread-and-butter economic themes, on curbing health-care costs, increasing wages, shoring up public education and protecting consumers and organised labour. “It’s as mainstream as you get in Ohio,” says John Kulewicz, who is running to become the first Democrat to serve as state attorney-general in 16 years. For that reason, if these Democratic messages pass their field-testing, they may supply a broadly appealing formula for a national candidate in 2028. It is intra-Republican feuding in Ohio, of a particularly awful sort, that is making headlines. Max Miller, the two-term congressman representing the seventh district, has been accused by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, of abusing her and their two-year-old daughter. He has denied the accusations and blamed her for hurting their child. A months-long investigation by police and a child-welfare agency found that abuse was “indicated” but identified no perpetrator. The parents continue to share custody.
Ms Moreno is the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, the Republican who defeated Mr Brown in 2024. Mr Moreno said this month that Mr Miller “should not be free to continue endangering others” until he gets “serious psychological help”. Mr Miller previously accused Mr Moreno of joining in “his daughter’s malicious campaign to ruin my life”. He has sued Ms Moreno for defamation. The legal struggle has opened a window into the race: in court filings Mr Miller has said that Ms Moreno’s accusations cost him endorsements and donations, and may double the cost of his campaign. As he fights for his seat, he is casting his persistence as proof of grit akin to that of Mr Trump, whom he served as an aide during the president’s first term. Yet in a sign of how voters’ concerns may favour the right kind of Democrat, Mr Miller is also extolling his “voting to protect Obamacare”. Among the startling aspects of the race, the least remarked-upon is that it took this uproar for the national Democratic party to show much interest in Mr Miller’s opponent, Brian Poindexter. While the district leans Republican, it is scored by the Cook Political Report as doing so by five points, a surmountable barrier if a blue wave is building. More perplexing, Mr Poindexter is a poster-candidate for the image the party is desperate to project: the son and grandson of union members, he went to work in a machine shop at 15 and has been an ironworker for 19 years. In an interview before he addressed striking county workers in Elyria on August 25th, Mr Poindexter insists Democrats have “always supported working families”. But, he says, they lost working-class support because they “took the bait” from Republicans and began emphasising cultural issues. Though Bernie Sanders endorsed him, Mr Poindexter balks at the full leftist agenda. He does not want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is in no hurry to implement Medicare for All. Beyond pro- union positions his agenda is vague. With his unrefined speechifying, faded blue jeans and mobile phone invariably clipped horizontally to his belt, he is relying on his biography and its contrast with that of Mr Miller, who descends from one of Cleveland’s wealthiest families. “I am what people have been craving in politics for so long—somebody who is just like them,” Mr Poindexter says. His background equips him more for class politics than for fierce partisan politics, also like Ohio Democrats of old. Mr Poindexter voted for Senator
John McCain, a Republican, for president in 2008, before voting for Barack Obama in 2012, and he speaks with great admiration of both men. On the stump he talks about his father’s support for Mr Trump, and of how much he reveres his father. “Somewhere in between our differences is the right answer, folks,” he told voters in Medina on August 15th. That may be the most radical message to emerge from Ohio this year. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/27/the-state-that-could-shape-the- winning-democratic-message
The costs of defying Donald Trump are mounting for Canada Donald Trump’s military expansion in Panama makes little sense The problem with the world’s oldest mummies
The costs of defying Donald Trump are mounting for Canada But the waiting game is Mark Carney’s only move Aug 27th 2026 Mark Carney is governing through paradox. Canada’s largest trading partner, the United States, is led by an unreliable man who uses trade barriers as a weapon. For Canada, the diversification of trade partners is wise, but takes time. Building infrastructure needed to serve new markets requires significant investment. And yet little would do more to get that investment flowing than a trade deal with the United States. The pursuit of such a deal has pushed both countries to the brink of a full- blown trade war. Minutes before midnight on August 21st, two days after Donald Trump said that “a very good deal for both parties” was all but done, Canada’s prime minister abandoned the talks, allowing fresh tariffs of up to
50% to come into force on 5% of Canadian exports to the United States, worth $20bn. Mr Trump’s price for normal trade relations was too high. “Our goal has been to secure the best deal for Canadians,” Mr Carney said on August 22nd. “Never a deal at any price.” And so on August 25th Canada matched the new American tariffs with levies of its own on some $20bn of American exports, with implementation delayed until September 8th. Support for Mr Carney’s decision to walk away is widespread in Canada. A survey by the Angus Reid Institute, a pollster, suggests that 76% of Canadians back the move. The political risk that comes with signing a trade deal Canadians cannot stomach is far higher than that from Mr Trump’s tariffs. But however bad Mr Trump’s deal might have been for Canada in the long run, declining it and letting new tariffs come into force will start to hurt soon. The Canadian economy grew by 0.8% between the first and second quarters of this year, having grown by just 1.7% in 2025 after the first round of tariffs came into force in March that year. Unemployment hit a two-year low of 6.4% in July, but inflation is creeping up. David Colletto, the boss of Abacus Data, a pollster, points out that almost two-thirds of Canadian voters cite the cost of living as their most important issue. Nothing else comes close. “The threat”, says Mr Colletto, “is not that Canadians tire of the fight. It is that the fight collides with the cost of living.” That seems unavoidable. Trevor Tombe, an economist at the University of Calgary, estimates that Mr Trump’s new tariffs will push inflation to 4%. Some 90,000 Canadians could lose their jobs, bringing the unemployment rate up to 7%. And that does not account for damage that will be caused by the retaliatory tariffs. If Mr Carney follows through on September 8th, retaliation will come with domestic political risks as much as economic ones. Some provincial premiers, such as Doug Ford in Ontario, are gung-ho; in July Mr Ford said that Canada could “dismantle the US if we wanted to” by cutting off energy supplies. But others, particularly Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, are much quieter. Alberta provides the United States with about half of its imported oil and has been almost entirely spared from Mr Trump’s duties so far.