The Midterms Are Here

Join us tonight after 7 p.m. ET

The day is finally here. Whether it brings triumph or disappointment, we will at least know.

Join us, as we find out. Liberal Currents Live will start streaming tonight at 7 p.m. ET and go late into the night.

In addition to the Liberal Currents crew ourselves, we will be joined by a list of guests you will not want to miss. Mark Jacob, Nicholas Grossman, Melissa Deckman, Mary Harris, Allyson Shortle, Don Moynihan, and Marisa Kabas are some of those who intend to join us for part of the stream tonight.

You can watch from the YouTube page above. Please join us!

Democrats rally to El-Sayed's side after Stevens' mad MAGA moment

Sunday was a very strange day in politics. Haley Stevens, who was defeated months ago by Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, set her political career on fire for what appear to be entirely petty interpersonal reasons. The day began with her showing up at a Black church in Detroit with Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate.

She quickly discarded any ambiguity by filming a video on her phone in her car endorsing Rogers.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo said “I can’t remember a spectacle quite like this, or any defeated Democratic primary candidate crashing out like this, in 30-plus years of observing Democratic politics very, very closely.”

Reid J. Epstein and Tim Balk in the New York Times offer a fairly detailed breakdown of the timeline of events and what is known. No one in Stevens’ professional circle, from her Democratic allies to her own staff, expected this move. Nor does it appear likely to accomplish much other than end her career in politics.

The short version of all of this, for those who have not followed the Michigan race closely, is that Stevens is a strongly pro-Israel politician, and El-Sayed is very critical of Israel and indeed that is a core part of his campaign. After Cenk Uygur’s PAC put out an admittedly quite gross ad on El-Sayed’s behalf, Stevens began making public demands that El-Sayed issue some kind of statement on the matter, a rather strange thing for a defeated primary opponent and fellow Democrat to do mere days before a consequential election. While Democrats involved in trying to broker a peace expected she might continue to be critical, everyone was blindsided by outright flipping to endorsing a MAGA candidate. As Marshall says, it’s essentially unprecedented, never mind at a moment when an attempted authoritarian consolidation is underway.

The good news is that aside from one traitor in the ranks, Democrats were immediately in array. Everyone from every wing of the party immediately showed up to stand beside El-Sayed, metaphorically or even literally.

As Sharon Zhang reports in Truthout:

“A growing number of House Democrats are calling for Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Michigan) to be expelled from their caucus after she seemingly broke rules in her surprise endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers in the tight Senate race in Michigan on Sunday, marked by some as a ‘despicable betrayal.’ …

“Stevens has already faced some retribution. As of Sunday, Stevens was removed from the House Democrats’ text chains. Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel Jr. also said that Stevens ‘is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.’ And a huge proportion of her staff have resigned, including her former communications director, expressing disgust with the lawmaker.”

The punchline to this entire incident is that, that very day, the latest New York Times/Siena poll showed El-Sayed with an 11-point lead over Rogers.

Forgive me, but I cannot believe that is right. I can, however, have a good long laugh about it all. Here’s hoping we’re still laughing after tonight.

Not for lack of trying, election interference efforts largely stall

Scott Dworkin reports:

“Cassidy Hutchinson was serving as a White House aide to Trump’s chief of staff on January 6, 2021. In 2022, Hutchinson testified in front of Congress and told them what Trump did that day. She told the committee her loyalty was 'with the truth.' Trump called her a 'total phony.'

"Republican Reps. Jim Jordan and Barry Loudermilk sent a criminal referral about her to the DOJ. This month, Trump’s prosecutors took her case to a grand jury.

"On Tuesday, a DOJ lawyer stood in front of Judge Zia Faruqui in Washington and said the jurors had refused to indict.”

Grand juries have found their integrity in remarkable numbers over the course of the second Trump term. Dworkin also had another one that warmed my heart:

“At a rally in Wasilla, Alaska, on October 13, Trump endorsed Bernadette Wilson for governor. He asked the other two Republicans in the race to drop out so they wouldn’t split the vote. One of them is former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, the other is former state Attorney General Treg Taylor.

"Neither of them listened. Bronson kept campaigning, and Taylor refused to bow out.”

Regular readers of Liberal Currents know that I believe Trump is a would-be dictator in the personalist mode, that he has more or less converted the Republican Party into a personality cult, and the entire point of Project 2025 is to personalize the federal government. When members of the personalist’s own party ignore his requests, that’s a very good thing.

Meanwhile, Ali Mustafa and Leena Fraihat report in Al Jazeera that “The US Supreme Court has rejected Trump’s bid to block the counting of more than 20,000 mail-in ballots in California”

Anna Griffin reports in the New York Times:

“A federal judge in Alaska has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit that pre-emptively challenged the results in a U.S. Senate race featuring two candidates with the same name — a Republican incumbent and another man who could be a spoiler.

"The ruling is the latest in a series of court defeats for the Trump administration, which has been seeking to intervene in state-administered elections.

"On Friday, the U.S. District Court in California blocked the administration from threatening to prosecute state and local election officials who do not comply with the department’s directives on handling ballots.”

Chris Geidner reports:

“A Justice Department lawyer on Monday admitted in court that it was 'fair' to say that the Trump administration’s list of 'likely noncitizen' voters has a high error rate.

“The shocking admission from Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kao came in a hearing in a lawsuit brought last week by unions representing election workers and civil rights organizations over the Trump administration’s threatened prosecution of those election workers and other related conduct.

“U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson had issued a temporary restraining order in the case on October 30, before hearing from the Justice Department and based on the significant allegations raised by the SEIU-led plaintiffs.”

Not the most buttoned up operation, the Trump DOJ.

Matt Naham reports in Law & Crime:

“Attorneys for the NAACP got an emergency opportunity to air their voter intimidation claims on the eve of the midterm elections, but the judge in the case did not appear convinced that he can—or should—restrain the Trump administration. …

“The NAACP said the administration seems to have 'arbitrarily' decided to expand the number of monitors by several hundred to 'for the first time' include federal law enforcement officials.

“During the hearing, the plaintiffs' attorneys said the increase from roughly 600 monitors in 2024 to around 900 in 2026 has only been supported by the government's claimed 'need' for those monitors.”

It is on-its-face alarming that they’re expanding the number, but 900 is still quite a small number for a country as vast and populous as ours. I am cautiously optimistic that this will also amount to nothing, as their other efforts have so far.

ooooohhh scary. *puts hand to ear* I'm getting word that this covers roughly 1% of voting locations. *DOJ TO DEPLOY ~1,000 ELECTION MONITORS & OBSERVERS IN 50 STATES
— George Pearkes (@peark.es) 2026-11-03T11:29:29.732Z

A great communicator

"You have that picture with the algae?" -- President Trump's closing midterms message
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-11-02T19:14:31.589Z

Why we fight

Around Liberal Currents

I am once again asking you to join us and our great roster of guests tonight at 7 PM ET for Liberal Currents Live.
Midterms Madness 2026: Who's Winning the Senate? (Half the Answer #111, with Ryan Cooper, Marisa Kabas, and Jonathan M. Katz): U.S. voters seem poised to turn some historically red states purple and blue.
Vote Democratic to Fight Socialism, by Cameron Cummins-Smith: A spectre is haunting America, and we must exorcise it.
In Search of an FDR Consensus: The Future of an American Foreign and Defense Policy, by Secretary of Defense Rock: Chapter 18 (pp. 140–153) from The Reconstruction Papers.
How the Wheels Came Off: China's Economic Malaise (Neon Liberalism #97, with Logan Wright): The conventional wisdom on China is wrong—and time is not on China's side.
Rebuilding International Law, by Y. L. Al-Sheikh: Chapter 19 (pp. 154–161) from The Reconstruction Papers.
Are You Tired of Winning Yet? By Kiran Pfitzner: The Trump administration has chosen to forget that airpower provides no way to force a favorable peace.
What Will Trump Try This Time? (Half the Answer #112, with Adam Hochschild): How will or won't states be able to protect their voters and officials from interference?

I'm especially excited about and wish to draw your attention to this last one: Announcing Our Weekly Books Newsletter, by Guillaume A. W. Attia: A new series for paid subscribers with book reviews, author interviews, news analysis, and deep dive into the world of ideas.