Commentary Culture Investigations

Texas Democrat James Talarico, the 37-year-old state lawmaker who shares his only disclosed checking account with his mother, defeated Republican attorney general Ken Paxton, breaking his party’s long losing streak in the Lone Star State.
Talarico led Paxton by a 20-point margin when the race was called at 11:15 p.m., flipping the seat held by Paxton’s primary opponent, Republican incumbent John Cornyn, and marking the first time Texas elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988.
The victory came eight years after a similarly high-profile Democratic Senate run in Texas fell short. In that race, Beto O’Rourke raised more than $80 million and became a national media darling while running against Ted Cruz. O’Rourke, however, embraced left-wing positions like an assault weapons ban in a bid to turn out Democratic voters rather than appeal to independents.
Talarico matched O’Rourke’s fundraising prowess—his campaign raised at least $160 million—but took a different approach to strategy.
He presented himself as a man of the cloth willing to moderate on issues, particularly those central to Texas’s economy. Early on in his campaign, Talarico scrubbed his website of statements supporting “trans kids” and “bold, progressive ideas,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. He went on to present himself as a supporter of Texas’s oil and gas industry and an opponent of sex-change surgeries for minors, though as a state lawmaker, Talarico introduced “Green New Deal”-style legislation calling for sweeping greenhouse gas reductions and voted against a bill banning those surgeries.
Talarico also backed away from some of his craziest statements, declaring that “God is non-binary” and that there are six genders. He told CBS News that the “cringey” statements “missed the mark” and suggested he had moderated in recent years.
“Well, you know, I think I was being intentionally provocative with that statement, but what it means is that God can’t be defined by human categories,” Talarico said about his “God is non-binary” remark. “What I meant is that there are two sexes, and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities,” he said of his six genders claim.
Talarico is unmarried, but he may still need extra space when picking out a place to live in Washington, D.C. The minister of his Presbyterian church, Babs Miller, said in an undercover video that Talarico’s mother could move with her son to the nation’s capital should he win.
“She’ll be right there,” Miller said. “She’ll move to D.C. if she has to.”
The post Momma, We Made It: James Talarico Wins Texas Senate Race appeared first on .

We are probably going to look back on this as a generational shift.

Colorado Democrat Manny Rutinel, a former anti-meat and anti-oil crusader who went great lengths to distance himself from his activist past, successfully unseated the Republican incumbent, Gabe Evans, in the state’s competitive Eighth Congressional District.
Rutinel was up 15.4 points with 81 percent of the vote counted when the race was called shortly before 11 p.m. The race was expected to be one of the closest in the nation, though Rutinel ran away with it. Evans flipped the seat in 2024 by roughly 2,500 votes.
Rutinel’s efforts to recast himself as a moderate appear to have paid off. The Democrat spent years condemning the ranching and oil industries, attacks that continued until just months before launching his congressional bid, and pushed left-wing legislation while serving in the state legislature.
In October 2024, Rutinel spoke at a convention hosted by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a group that aims to give animals equal rights as humans and once filed a negligence lawsuit on behalf of an American quarter horse. He told the audience his “whole job” working for the far-left environmental group Earthjustice “was to take on large meat corporations and sue them for all they’re worth.”
He also coauthored an article advocating for a “farm transition climate policy” through which meat producers would be paid to farm plants rather than raise livestock due to “animal agriculture’s climate impact.”
While vying to represent the eighth district, where ranches and other animal-based agriculture generated roughly $1.2 billion in 2022, Rutinel began describing himself as a “friend” to ranchers and said he hasn’t “been a vegan for several years.”
That wasn’t the only time Rutinel rewrote the past. Between 2013 and 2014, the Yale Law School graduate published blog posts with headlines like “What Would Jesus Do? Socialism” and “Why a More Socialistic Society Is Superior.” When the Washington Free Beacon exposed the blog, a campaign spokesman said, “Manny is not a vegan or a socialist.”
Evans flipped the eighth district in 2024, making him the first Republican to win the seat after it was drawn in 2021. The former police officer and Army helicopter pilot regularly denounced Rutinel’s left-wing résumé and touted his own solidly Republican voting record, such as backing tax cuts and stricter Medicaid work requirements included in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
The post Colorado Dem Manny Rutinel Flip Flops on Meat and Oil, Then Flips House Seat appeared first on .

COLUMBUS, Ohio — On a recent afternoon, April Polk was driving to a doctor’s appointment when her assistant flagged something in her business inbox: a grant application, the kind of funding opportunity a small retailer cannot afford to miss.
The assistant offered to fill it out while she drove.
“She’s like, ‘Hey, I can go on there and I can apply, and if I have any questions about what they’re asking, I’ll be sure to ping you. But other than that, I got it. Go ahead and head to the doctor,’” said Polk, the founder of JaeLuxe Shoetique. “I would’ve never been able to do that.”
The assistant is named Chase. Chase is not a person. It is Polk’s version of Muse, the artificial intelligence agent that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released to consumers on Sept. 8 and expanded for small businesses on Sept. 29. Each owner gives the agent a name at setup. Polk chose “Chase.” (RELATED: Inside Meta’s Bet on the Dignity of Work)
More than 600 miles west, in Malvern, Iowa, a town of about 1,000 people, Tom Mulholland calls his agent Wally. Muse suggested the name. Mulholland, 66, later asked whether it had picked Wally because his middle name is Walter. It had no idea. He changed its onscreen avatar to a genie, after “I Dream of Jeannie,” “because of all the magical things it does.”
Polk is a marketer with an MBA whose women’s fashion brand does much of its business online and on social media. Mulholland is a fourth-generation grocer whose living comes from the meat counter. They have almost nothing in common except the problem Meta says it built Muse to solve. Small-business owners, the company wrote in its launch announcement, told Meta “they’re short on hours, not ideas.”
The timing is notable. Muse for Small Business arrives as public opinion about AI is souring. In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June, 52 percent of people said AI’s expanding role in everyday life left them more concerned than excited, up from 37 percent in 2021. A CNN poll in September found that 75 percent described their feelings about AI as closer to “fear and concern” than “hope and excitement.” Only 27 percent told Gallup they trust businesses “a lot” or “some” to use AI responsibly.
Polk and Mulholland are not arguing with those numbers. What they describe is narrower and more practical: a month of getting back hours they had been losing to the paperwork, schedules, inboxes and deadlines that bury the owners of very small businesses.
Polk was born and raised in Chicago and came to Columbus to attend Ohio State University. “I’m a big Buckeye and I just never left,” she said. She graduated in 2006 with a degree in marketing communications, later earned a master’s in business from Ohio Dominican University, and lives in the Gahanna-New Albany area in the city’s northeast suburbs.
She started JaeLuxe about 12 years ago, while pregnant with her first daughter, Jae, for whom the business is named. It sells shoes, clothing, and accessories “for the everyday trendsetter,” with a heavy dose of motivational, women-in-charge messaging. She also teaches as an adjunct professor and runs a property management company with her husband.
Before Muse, she said, a typical day meant scheduling marketing emails, checking which pieces needed reordering, making sure orders went out, and remembering to create and post content, “on top of the motherly and wifely duties that I have, and that is on a good day.”
After her second daughter was born, Polk stepped back and closed her retail location. When she relaunched the brand, she hired outside help for email marketing and advertising rather than burning herself out again. It did not go well.
“I spent thousands of dollars and things are not done correctly,” she said. She went through one set of contractors, then another agency. “They’re just missing the mark.”
Polk was among the business owners Meta brought to its Los Angeles campus in early September to test Muse before its public release. Her first move was to upload her two-page brand guide: fonts, voice, customer base. Muse reviewed her social media accounts and returned a 12-page version.
“She knows how to talk to my audience,” Polk said. “She knows what I would not say. She knows what opportunities in my email that come in for my business that we would not partake in.”
In Meta’s launch materials, Polk said that before the holiday rush, Muse audited her email automations, shut down duplicate flows that had been double-emailing customers, rebuilt her templates, and turned on tracking “so I can finally see which emails actually drive sales.” She said it rebuilt her website in about half an hour.
The smaller things matter just as much to her. On that same busy day, Chase sent her a notification: “Hey, by the way, you got something else coming up at 4 o’clock, so just a heads up.”
Polk describes the relationship in boardroom terms. She said she told Chase at the start that she did not want to simply give orders. “We are in a partnership,” she said. The two have mapped out a plan for the fourth quarter and for 2027. “I’m looking at her as a C-level type of partner,” she said.
She also works from home, which means her 3-year-old has not had to go to day care.
Mulholland’s store sits on Main Street in Malvern, about 30 miles southeast of Omaha. Fred E. Mulholland founded it in 1875 as a dry goods store. Tom’s grandfather added groceries. The business left the family for 17 years before Tom, who had built a reputation running a meat counter in Omaha, bought it back in 2008.
On Dec. 13, 2021, a fire destroyed the building. Mulholland could not start clearing the site for six months, he told the Mills County Opinion-Tribune, because no one was sure the wall of the building next door would hold. The store did not reopen until Dec. 20, 2024, three years and a week after the fire. To rebuild, he told Iowa PBS, he took on about $750,000 in debt.
“I’ve pretty much gambled my entire retirement on being able to provide for my community,” he said.
When he was young, Malvern had four grocery stores. Today, he said, the nearest other supermarket is 11 miles away, a hard drive in an Iowa winter for older residents, some of whom walk to his store because they have no other way to get there. The specialty sausages draw customers from hours away, and those customers buy gas, eat at the local restaurants, and stop at the coffee shop. A hot-lunch service, the idea of an employee named Cheryl, can account for a quarter of a day’s business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently named Mulholland Grocery to its 2026 CO — 100 list of the country’s top small businesses as one of its “Champions of Adaptability” for coming back from the fire.
All of it runs through one man who works 65 hours a week. He does the ordering. He writes the ads. He does paperwork before the doors open.
“I make my money by making these sausages, by cutting steaks, by things like that,” he said. “So I need to have as much time out there as I can.”
Mulholland describes himself as the opposite of an early adopter. Meta, which funded a 2023 short documentary about his store, “They Came From All Over,” had invited him to Washington and to its Los Angeles offices earlier this year. He tried AI tools “very sparingly.”
“It’s a whole big ocean of AI, and for someone who knows nothing about it, where do I dip my toe in first?” he said.
That changed in September, when he joined the group of owners Meta introduced to Muse in Los Angeles. Mulholland’s first use was the weekly ad. His wholesaler sends a catalog of featured items. He used to highlight the ones he wanted, then spend a couple of hours typing them into an ad. Now he photographs the highlighted pages and sends them to Muse. The job takes about 15 minutes.
He did the same with the employee schedule he rewrites every two weeks for his staff of 10 or 11, sending a photo and asking Muse to change the dates so he could make the final tweaks himself. In Meta’s launch announcement, he said photographing employee timecards and letting Muse add them up cut “at least 15 minutes from payroll.”
Muse has written some of his Facebook posts, and he has it post to Instagram as well, a platform he admits he “never remembered to use.” It knows Thursday is taco day and offers to post about it. It sends him reminders. He has connected it to QuickBooks, though he has not yet used that feature. He hopes it can eventually help reconcile the store’s overnight sales reports.
“I’m very good at what I do,” he said in the same announcement, “but that doesn’t mean I’m good at all of the different roles a small-business owner has to play, and Muse is taking over a few of them.”
Muse is what the industry calls an agent: Rather than simply answering questions, it can carry out tasks in the apps an owner connects to it, working in the background while the owner does something else. The small-business version links to Facebook Pages, Instagram professional analytics, and Meta ad accounts, along with outside software including Shopify, QuickBooks, Stripe, Canva, Klaviyo, Slack and Zoom.
Meta promotes it for analyzing sales and building growth plans, triaging email and calendars, drafting ads and customer messages, and managing cash flow and inventory. The company promises that “nothing publishes, sends, or spends without your approval.” Basic use is free up to a limit, and subscriptions of $20 or $100 a month cover heavier use.
The consumer app caught on quickly. TechTarget reported that it was downloaded 5 million times in North America in its first three weeks and overtook ChatGPT as the No. 1 app in Apple’s U.S. store.
For a small business, the key question is how much access an owner hands over. “Agentic AI is ultimately a governance challenge,” Wayne Hankins, an analyst at Gartner, told TechTarget, urging owners to limit what an agent can reach and to require human approval for sensitive actions.
Customers may have their own reservations. Asked about companies using AI to make their ads, 49 percent of people in a Bentley University-Gallup survey disapproved, and 19 percent approved.
Both Polk and Mulholland have close ties to Meta. Each has worked with the company’s small-business programs, and Polk said her involvement goes back more than a decade. Both were among the owners Meta brought in to test Muse before launch, and both are quoted in the company’s announcement. Neither described a mistake by the tool in their interviews. Both said they still review and adjust its work, and their agents do not make changes without their approval.
Mulholland started out among the hesitant.
Of the roughly two dozen owners in his Los Angeles group, he said, “I was by far the oldest and by far the least technical. So considering that it’s doing all of these things for me, just think what it could do for somebody that really knows what they’re doing.”
Polk puts it more bluntly. She believes the tool levels a playing field she shares with “million- and billion-dollar brands,” and she thinks hesitant owners will pay for waiting.
“Technology is growing, it’s changing,” she said, “and you are going to either hop on the wave or you’re going to get left behind.”
Neither of them talks about AI as a revolution. They talk about a grant application started during a drive to the doctor, an ad finished in 15 minutes instead of two hours, a 4 o’clock reminder, a taco-day post that would otherwise have gone unwritten. For a grocer who has staked his retirement on keeping a town fed and a mother who wants to keep her toddler home, the hours they are getting back are what matter.
“It’s just little things like that that can add up,” Mulholland said.
READ MORE from Salena Zito:
The House Is Restless. It Has Been Before.
Martha MacCallum’s and the Stories That Define Us
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Salena Zito is a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

Midterm elections are like a first date with a girl you like, the very day before she leaves to study in Europe for an extended stay, where she’ll get to spend 20 out of every 24 hours, seven days a week, completely drunk. You can compliment her eyes or her dress, hold her hand, raise a glass with her, promise her an apartment, and, if you’re lucky, maybe even steal a kiss. But just as things start getting fun, she has to rush home to pack her bags. Life is long, my friend. You might as well know now that Europe is full of guys.
One of the few advantages of democracy (H. L. Mencken, please, get your hands off my keyboard!) is that it saves us from having to choose a government by shooting at one another. A civil war might seem more entertaining than an election campaign at first glance, but the truth is that replacing street furniture is terribly expensive. And given the West’s birthrate crisis, the last thing we need is more casualties in our own ranks. So my support for the democratic system is essentially pragmatic.
That said, midterm elections have their own particular advantages. When you have an idiot in government, you can send him a warning by kicking the backsides of his fellow party members with the good old punishment vote. But here’s where the trouble begins: how do you kick the opposition’s ass when they’re the ones with an idiot?
[W]hatever the final outcome, something is going terribly wrong if we have so many doubts when faced with a contemporary Left that is so profoundly empty, useless, and despicable.
I’m following the election campaign in real time, and I’ve heard some Michigan voters on Fox News explain why they’ve decided to cast their ballots for El-Sayed as a way of punishing Donald Trump. They may, however, end up punishing Mike Rogers, the Founding Fathers, and the Statue of Liberty instead. El-Sayed is a Muslim. There is no such thing as moderate Islamism. But El-Sayed is also a socialist, if not a communist. He is a friend and supporter of Hasan Piker, a Marxist millionaire who, like all Marxist millionaires, has appointed himself the leading voice of the poor against the wealthy. Don’t try this at home: it’s a skill that only left-wing celebrities manage to master.
Like his friend Piker, El-Sayed wants to put an end to Israel (though he hasn’t dared say so on the campaign trail). He accuses the country of genocide, dislikes the police, wants you to pay for universal healthcare (I assume that includes Martians, too), claims to know how to redistribute wealth, wants to abolish ICE, and dreams of a United States soon filled with bearded men who don’t eat ham and have a habit of sticking their asses up in the air in public places. In my view, if you’re a Republican and you voted for El-Sayed, you’re not much of a Republican. And perhaps your right to vote is more dangerous than El-Sayed himself. This is so obvious that even The New York Times has published a rather intelligent column by Bret Stephens explaining to readers what “A Vote for Abdul El-Sayed Means.” In short: a tragedy. (RELATED: Abdul El-Sayed: A Muslim Brotherhood Puppet and a Grave National Security Threat))
Of course, El-Sayed isn’t all that important. He’s simply an example that allows us to take in the bigger picture of the current political landscape. For some time now, the Democratic Party has been choosing its candidates according to the moral standards of people like Kamala Harris. In other words, no standards at all. And if there are any, they are always the most pernicious kind: the most damaging to democracy and the most destructive to the United States. I’m sorry to report that I know this downward spiral all too well. I live in Europe, and I’ve watched the Left’s accelerating descent into destruction, from France to Spain and pretty much everywhere you care to look in the European Parliament.
As I write this column, Democrats are quite pleased with the early vote counts. But election nights are long. My prediction is that I make no predictions. So I have only one thing to say to Republicans, once again: whatever the final outcome, something is going terribly wrong if we have so many doubts when faced with a contemporary Left that is so profoundly empty, useless, and despicable.
We’ll have time in the coming days to discuss what these results mean for the Republican Party, and for Donald Trump in particular. But today I need to call out the infinite stupidity a voter can reach when driven by irrational hatred of a politician. If you vote for someone like El-Sayed to punish Trump, perhaps you deserve to start wearing slippers and living on a diet of dates. Not as punishment. As a reward. Good luck with pro-Palestinian immigration. I know a guy who once ate a kebab and didn’t throw up afterward. Anything is possible.
READ MORE from Itxu Díaz:
The Individual’s Choice: Everything I Reject in the Collective Swamp
A Republican Guide to Losing the Midterms
Psychology Gone Mad: When Every Quirk Becomes a Disorder

Arkansas voters put Democrat Hallie Shoffner out to pasture in Tuesday’s Senate race in favor of incumbent Republican Tom Cotton, a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year who was elected to a third term in the upper chamber.
Shoffner, the “prairie populist” who billed herself as a working-class farmer but is worth more than $3 million, trailed Cotton by nearly 10 points when the election was called two hours after the polls closed. Shoffner’s defeat stands in contrast to other Democratic gains this election cycle.
Shoffner built her campaign around her identity as a “lifelong” farmer in a state full of them. But the Free Beacon reported that she hired a marketing firm in 2016 to build her “brand” as “FarmHerHallie.” While Shoffner did grow up on her family’s farm, she spent much of her life as a left-wing activist, including working for the George Soros-funded social justice nonprofit “PROMSEX” in Peru. Back in the United States, Shoffner worked as the executive director of Seis Puentes, an Arkansas nonprofit for undocumented Hispanics meant to “engage them in the process” of navigating U.S. government systems.
On the campaign trail, Shoffner and Cotton clashed on immigration issues.
The Democrat generated headlines when she said she would “trade five Americans for just one” illegal immigrant “because of how hard they work.” She also conceded that “every farmer” employs illegal aliens. Pressed on the claim, Shoffner said she was speaking generally and did not employ illegal immigrants on her family farm. But a former senior employee of Shoffner’s told the Free Beacon Shoffner did in fact employ at least three illegal immigrants at the farm and used the names and Social Security numbers of their children on tax forms.
Cotton said Shoffner “broke the law and lied about it” and had “no business being in the U.S. Senate” as a result.
Shoffner was not shy in advocating for left-wing positions before running against Cotton in a state that backed President Donald Trump by a 30-point margin in 2024. Last year, Shoffner testified before Arkansas’s House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee in favor of race-based hiring and admissions practices. In the summer of 2020, Shoffner donated to and fundraised for a “racial and social justice” bail fund. That fund’s founder was later convicted for her role in firebombing police vehicles in Little Rock.
More recently, Shoffner vowed to “redirect” taxpayer dollars away from “punishment” for criminals and instead toward “treatment and compassion.” She also said she would vote to defund ICE, saying that it “is not making us safer.”
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Angie Nixon, the anti-Israel dues-paying Democratic Socialist and owner of Jacksonville’s black power-themed Cafe Resistance bookstore, lost her longshot Senate bid to incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody (R., Fla.) on Tuesday.
Moody led Nixon by 2.5 points when the Associated Press called the race Tuesday evening. Nixon, who made a name for herself in 2023 when she took a lonely stand against Israel in the Florida legislature one month after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, shocked the political world in August when she defeated establishment Democrat Alex Vindman in one of the most stunning primary upsets of the 2026 elections. Nixon racked up endorsements from anti-Israel groups including Emgage Action as well as from prominent Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.), and former president Barack Obama, but they weren’t enough to push her over the finish line with Florida’s increasingly conservative electorate.
Nixon’s decision to join the Democratic Socialists of America in June, about two months before her shock primary upset victory, haunted her throughout her general election campaign as predicted by Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried, who warned Nixon in a heated post-primary conversation that her socialist ties would open her up to GOP attacks.
Nixon’s attempts to distance herself from the DSA’s far-left agenda landed flat amid the avalanche of GOP ads attacking her for her socialist ties. Nixon said in August she isn’t really a socialist and only joined the organization to tap into its grassroots network. Later, in October, Nixon told CNN she didn’t support the DSA’s efforts to abolish prisons and defund the police because she wanted to see Moody “locked up and punished in jail.”
Nixon’s defeat Tuesday comes as legal trouble brews at her Cafe Resistance bookstore in Jacksonville, which features a shrine to black power militants, including several convicted of murdering police officers. Nixon’s former charity, the Moxie Group, raised $270,000 in 2024 ostensibly to support her café-bookstore, but the charity never reported to the IRS what it did with the funds despite the reporting deadline expiring nearly a year ago.
The Florida Department of Agriculture, which regulates charities in the state, launched an investigation in September into whether Nixon’s charity raised charitable funds throughout 2026 with an expired solicitation license. And in October, a conservative watchdog group filed a complaint with six federal and state agencies alleging Nixon violated federal wire fraud laws through her charity’s fundraising solicitations.
Amid those developments, Nixon claimed she can’t be held accountable for any laws her charity may have violated because she secretly resigned from the nonprofit nearly a year ago, just before the charity secretly disbanded itself, moves that weren’t reported to state authorities until October.
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Employees of the New York Times, the Federal Reserve, Harvard, and Columbia have poured thousands of dollars in campaign cash into Democratic political campaigns—including some of the most extreme far-left candidates—a Washington Free Beacon review found.
President Trump highlighted the broader issue in an Election Day comment, characterizing the Federal Reserve as preventing a balanced budget with its high interest rates because it is “populated by Obama and Biden people, and they don’t want to do the right thing.”
The Fed is just one example of institutions that congratulate themselves as being elite, meritocratic, and independent, yet in reality—as the campaign finance records indicate—function as part of the Democratic or even farther left political machine.
The New York Times “ethical journalism” handbook states: “Staff members may not give money to, or solicit money for, any political candidate or election cause. Political giving by a staff member would carry a great risk of feeding a false impression that The Times is taking sides.” Yet among the contributions uncovered by the Free Beacon review were a $1,000 contribution to Democratic congressional candidate Beth Macy from Harry Stevens. The Times website describes him as “a New York Times reporter and graphics editor covering climate change” and who says there, “I do not participate in political causes, nor do I make political donations.” Stevens and a New York Times spokesman didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the apparent donation.
New York Times staffers also contributed to the campaign of Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander, who ran a Zohran Mamdani-backed primary challenge against an incumbent Democratic congressman, Dan Goldman, that was almost entirely premised on the attack that Goldman had been insufficiently anti-Israel. Michael Hoffman, a New York Times software engineer, gave Lander’s campaign $500, and Eric Stone, a New York Times data analyst, gave Lander’s campaign $250.
A longtime New York Times obituary editor, Peter Keepnews, who had a byline on an obituary published in the paper in May 2026, has made hundreds of campaign contributions to Democrats. Records for some of them list the New York Times as his employer, while others list him as not employed. He made a $100 contribution to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on March 23, 2025, listing the New York Times as his employer. Keepnews, who reportedly left the paper in October 2025, declined to be quoted on the record about his contributions, several of which appear to have been made before October 2025.
A single Federal Reserve staffer, Irfan Murtuza, gave two contributions, totaling $3,000, to the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. An economist at the New York Fed, Keshav Dogra, gave $1,750 to Claire Valdez’s congressional campaign and $1,750 to the campaign of Darializa Avila Chevalier. Another New York Fed staffer, Dolph Haas, gave $2,000 to the U.S. Senate campaign of Texas Democrat James Talarico.
Rachael L. Ross, who lists her employer as Columbia University, gave $245,000 to the Movement Voter PAC, a left-leaning political action committee that funnels money to affiliates of the far-left Working Families Party.
Irwin Redlener, a senior adviser at Columbia’s Climate School, gave $50,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, federal records show.
An associate professor of practice at Columbia Teachers College, Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, gave $10,000 to the El-Sayed campaign, according to the federal records.
A Harvard public health professor whose center was singled out by the university’s antisemitism task force as a hotbed of anti-Israel activism, Mary Bassett, gave $5,000 to El-Sayed’s campaign, the Federal Election Commission records show. Another Harvard affiliate, Farrah Ezzeddine, gave $3,500 to El-Sayed, the records show. Lander’s campaign got $3,500 from Antonio Weiss, a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.
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MS NOW/SnapStream

In the Tuesday afternoon election pre-game coverage on MS NOW, The Moment host Katy Tur continued her progressive network’s disdain for President Trump and Republicans’ overall messaging against far-left Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and called Trump’s closing message an attempt to go after “voters who are Islamophobic.”Frequent contributor Molly Jong-Fast first said El-Sayed’s campaign in Michigan was “trying to make right” the issues the party had in 2024 in the state, mainly the far-left uncommitted vote as a protest over Israel’s War on Hamas after October 7th, 2023. She described the new election cycle for Democrats with El-Sayed in Michigan as the party “making peace.”MS NOW Political Director Shawna Thomas also joined Tur’s panel and took time to praise the embattled DNC and chair Ken Martin’s funding for Michigan. She then noted the close race in the 2024 Senate between now-Senator Democrat Elissa Stlokin and Republican candidate Mike Rogers, also running in 2026, while Trump won the state in 2024. MS NOW’s Katy Tur claims Trump’s closing message for the midterms at the reflecting pool speech was “calling El-Sayed a terrorist” and “jihadist,” as he was “going after voters who are Islamophobic, trying to drum that up.” pic.twitter.com/R2y1qzlC3d— Nick (@nspin310) November 3, 2026 Tur responded, “And she didn’t win it by much. And so that’s why Republicans are still so focused on Michigan, as you were saying.”\But she then turned to attack Trump’s closing message, first by mocking the reflecting pool speech: “And, Jon, we heard the president yesterday in his closing message ahead of the midterms to about 60 people on the reflecting pool, 20 minutes of which he spent talking about the reflecting pool and the algae and the disrepair that he says he fixed.”In Tur’s own closing message, she returned to the discussion over El-Sayed and claimed there was “Islamophobia” at play, pointing at voters in the process:When he got to the election cycle, he focused in on Michigan and not on, you know, the policies or the, you know, the affordability crisis, or any of the things that people have said they are worried about on the top of the polling. Instead, he called El Sayed a terrorist, a jihadist, going after voters who are Islamophobic, trying to drum that up.No mention was made of El-Sayed’s alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which he freaks out at any slight mention of in questions from reporters, including tense interviews with NBC’s Tom Llamas and Fox News’s Bret Baier.Furthermore, Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire chimed in, also mocking the reflecting pool speech, before first claiming the claims of El-Sayed’s connection to the DSA were false, since he was not a dues-paying member: Mornings Joe’s Jonathan Lemrie then echoed disdain for what he called “anti-Islamic rhetoric” and claimed the Stevens’ endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers insulted Black voters and could help El-Sayed. pic.twitter.com/neVopzdnva— Nick (@nspin310) November 3, 2026 But you’re correct that the lead has become in many ways the symbol of the Democratic Party this cycle. At least Republicans are trying to make him that, you know, because of his affiliations with the DSA, though he himself, not a member.Lemire then decided “anti-Islamic rhetoric”:“But of course, we’re seeing this now, this sort of recycled, reheated, I mean, let’s call it for what it is, anti-Islamic rhetoric from President Trump and a number of his fellow Republicans. He’s trying to make El Sayed the boogeyman here.Lemire then coped that Democrat Haley Stevens’ endorsement for Rogers actually helped El-Sayed, and claimed it insulted Black voters:  We’ll see what impact, if any, the Haley Stevens switch here, that her reverse endorsement will have, quite likely not much. And frankly, it might even backfire to what she intended. Certainly, we’ve heard stories in the last 24 hours or so, 48 hours in Michigan, that it’s actually fired up voters there, Democrats there, including some black voters who feel like they’ve been, you know, were used as a pawn at the Black church where Rogers and Stevens appeared together to make that endorsement official and the like.He concluded, “But, you know, this is certainly one of the most closely watched Senate races of the cycle, but it’s not clear that Trump’s attacks have really landed.”The transcript is below. Click “expand”:MS NOW’s The Moment with Katy TurNovember 3, 20262:13:52 PM Eastern(…)MOLLY JONG-FAST: Also, I do think there’s a feeling – What Abdul is doing in Michigan, after – it’s a sort of trying to make right in a way that Democrats, you know, felt – I think there were a lot of Democrats that felt they were not listened to about certain things in the ‘24 cycle. And so in some ways, I think there’s been a sort of like making peace and a sort of kumbaya- ish, like part parts of the party getting together in Michigan.SHAWNA THOMAS: And also trying to rebuild in Michigan. I think if you talked to Curtis Hotel, who is the Michigan Democratic Party chair, you know, I talked to him earlier this year and he said despite the fact that the DNC has taken a lot of BS for not having as much money at the end of this election as the Republicans did, he gave Ken Martin credit for sending money to Michigan early on so that they could build some of that, so that they could act on the fact that Elissa Slotkin won her Senate race. But President Trump won the state.KATY TUR: And she didn’t win it by much. And so that’s why Republicans are still so focused on Michigan, as you were saying. And, Jon, we heard the president yesterday in his closing message ahead of the midterms to about 60 people on the reflecting pool, 20 minutes of which he spent talking about the reflecting pool and the algae and the disrepair that he says he fixed. When he got to the election cycle, he focused in on Michigan and not on, you know, the policies or the, you know, the affordability crisis, or any of the things that people have said they are worried about on the top of the polling. Instead, he called El Sayed a terrorist, a jihadist, going after voters who are Islamophobic, trying to drum that up.JONATHAN LEMIRE: Well, we’ve levied criticisms at President Trump all year long for being out of touch. But to be fair, algae is an 80/20 issue, so he’s right on that one. But you’re correct that the lead has become in many ways the symbol of the Democratic Party this cycle. At least Republicans are trying to make him that, you know, because of his affiliations with the DSA, though he himself not a member. But of course, we’re seeing this now, this sort of recycled, reheated, I mean, let’s call it for what it is, anti-Islamic rhetoric from President Trump and a number of his fellow Republicans. He’s trying to make El Sayed the boogeyman here. We’ll see if it works. Polls certainly suggest that El Sayed has a lead, although I agree, I wouldn’t say it’s plus 11. We’ll see what impact, if any, the Haley Stevens switch here, that her reverse endorsement will have, quite likely not much. And frankly, it might even backfire to what she intended. Certainly, we’ve heard stories in the last 24 hours or so, 48 hours in Michigan, that it’s actually fired up voters there, Democrats there, including some black voters who feel like they’ve been, you know, were used as a pawn at the Black church where Rogers and Stevens appeared together to make that endorsement official and the like. But, you know, this is certainly one of the most closely watched Senate races of the cycle, but it’s not clear that Trump’s attacks have really landed.(…)

Screenshot via CNN/Snapstream

Ahead of showing off its brand-new Washington bureau studio, CNN opened Election Night in America with a movie trailer-style opening that echoed the farcical, biased productions that ABC News has become known to churn out (going back through 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, and beyond), framing Democrats as inevitable and noble while Republicans are fringe and weak.The narrator boomed from the get-go: “Election day is here. The polls are open, and control of Congress is up for grabs.” After a clip of Abdul el-Sayed saying he “we won’t back down” and Mike Rogers telling a crowd “we have a state to save,” the narrator returned with his first thumb on the scale: “Voters across America have a chance to upend the political order in Washington.”
WATH: CNN’s movie trailer-style open to ‘Election Night in America’ was as absurd and biased as you thought it would…. pic.twitter.com/LC3TdXSvXE— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 3, 2026

WATH: CNN’s movie trailer-style open to ‘Election Night in America’ was as absurd and biased as you thought it would…. pic.twitter.com/LC3TdXSvXE— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 3, 2026

Of course, the insinuation here was that the “upend[ing]” is glorious thing.And, what do you know, it played right into a clip from Texas socialist James Talarico saying, “we are going to shock the nation.”The video grew infinitely more gleeful for the party most of CNN likely voted for, gushing over Democrats delivering Trump “a potentially crippling roadblock.” Also, take notice of how some of the Republican soundbites in the rest of the video are framed as cultural, while Democrat soundbites are pinned as on-message:CNN NARRATOR: Will President Trump’s second term get a green light, or hit a potentially crippling roadblock?PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m going to be impeached. [SCREEN WIPE] They’re going to impeach me.CNN NARRATOR: From coast to coast, candidates are delivering their closing pitches to voters who are frustrated with both parties and the direction of the country.STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL KEN PAXTON (R-TX): Everything costs more. Everything’s up except your paycheck.SENATOR JON OSSOFF (D-GA): It’s the most corrupt administration of all time.FORMER GOVERNOR ROY COOPER (D-NC): We need to end this war in Iran.MICHAEL WHATLEY: I will stand up to the woke mob.In between a clip of former President Obama swooning over “change…in the air,” the CNN narrator must have suffered a thrill up his leg in framing the Democrats as noble: “Tonight, Democrats are chasing a political comeback, with an energized electorate and history on their side…aiming to take back the House and put a check on the White House.”When it came to the Senate, the CNN narrator briefly fretted: “It’s tougher map in the Senate with must-win seats for Democrats in razor-thin races, and any state could decide at all.”Following another set of el-Sayed and Rogers soundbites and then one each for Maine Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and cousin-kissing Democrat Troy Jackson, the voice of God quickly restored the hope of the liberal base tuning in:CNN NARRATOR: But the battlefield is full of deep-red states that Republicans are scrambling to keep in their column.TALARICO: Texas is not for sale.PAXTON: If we lose Texas, we lose America.SENATOR ROGER MARSHALL (R-KS): It’s time that modern-day patriots stand up.ADAM HAMILTON: I’m going to fight for the people of Kansas.The ad footnoted the woefully undercovered races: “Outside Washington, both parties clashing for control in governors races across the country.”There was one exception in terms of national coverage of governorships, though.Sure enough, the Ohio race was the only contest to receive mention in the form of a soundbite from Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.It closed with a liberal flourish (click “expand”):CNN NARRATOR: And, at the center of it all, a President with everything on the line.TRUMP: Please pretend I’m on the frickin’ ballot, will ya?CNN NARRATOR: This is CNN’s coverage of Election Night in America. The fight for control of Congress, the contests for governor, and the direction of the country at stake.CONGRESSMAN MIKE COLLINS (R-GA): Get out there! Get out there and vote.OSSOFF: Are you ready to win?CNN NARRATOR: It’s democracy in action. Voters are choosing. The world is watching, and anything is possible.To see the relevant CNN transcript from November 3, click here.