Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a congressional candidate and high-profile opponent of local data center sprawl, filed suit Thursday against his hometown’s City Council after the council threw him, his brother, his mother, and other locals out of a meeting earlier this month for protesting delays to a vote on a data center moratorium—and then banned them from future city council meetings. Pearson will now be locked out of a particularly important meeting on October 20, when the council will finally hold that data center moratorium vote. He and his five co-plaintiffs, including a high school senior involved in the protest, argue that the two-month ban from city council violates their first amendment rights to free expression. “Every person, whether you disagree with them or not, is entitled to speak their opinion and give their ideas in public forms,” Pearson wrote in a press release October 15. “There is no right that gives a City Council chairwoman or anyone else the ability to go beyond the bounds of Tennessee law and the United States Constitution to discriminate or retaliate against those who do not agree with their actions.” Pearson, elected in 2023 to the Tennessee House of Representatives, became known nationally in 2023 as one of the “Tennessee Three,” when he was removed from office for violating “decorum rules” after co-leading a personal protest for gun reform on the statehouse floor. He later won back his seat in a special election. Now Pearson is running for Congress in a freshly-gerrymandered congressional district, seeking to woo a district where Republicans now have an estimated nine-point advantage, according to the Cook Political Report. Pearson has made opposition to Elon Musk’s Memphis-area xAI data centers and their polluting onsite gas plants a cornerstone of his campaign. xAI has installed 59 gas turbines in Memphis to power its data centers, as Reuters recently found. People living near the site say they’re plagued with poor air quality and constant noise.  On October 6, Pearson attended the city council meeting where the data center moratorium vote was pushed back for the second time this year, and where the scheduled public comment period was cancelled, leading chants of protest as police officers tried to remove people from the chamber, Memphis’ Fox News affiliate reported.  About 200 other people attended the protest. To Pearson, the city council’s actions constitute an “ongoing pattern of intimidation.” With the moratorium vote approaching next week, he told Mother Jones he’s urging them to resolve the issue. “Our right to attend Council meetings should be restored and these bans rescinded,” he said. “I welcome an opportunity to meet to discuss how we move forward with protecting the First Amendment rights of the people as a priority, especially as we stand up against these hyperscale data centers.” The city council policy under which Pearson was banned says that “members of the audience and persons addressing the council will not be permitted to engage in gossip, make defamatory, personal, slanderous, or profane comments or use abusive or vulgar language.” That, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue, is a vague attempt to “suppress disfavored viewpoints, particularly criticism directed at City Council and its officials.” “While they’re working to keep us out of city council meetings, neighbors in Westwood and Boxtown are still dealing with the impacts of having xAI in their community,” said Amber Sherman, a local political organizer who was banned from the meeting alongside Pearson. As I wrote in August, data center backlash isn’t strictly a left-of-center issue. And that matters for Pearson, who—having stayed in the race after a Trump-backed redistricting went into effect in May—is running as an unabashed progressive in a Trump-leaning district some analysts think is Tennessee Democrats’ best shot at a flip. > The backlash draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, > and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries. Opposition > to data center buildout is nearly as high among Republicans as it is among > Democrats. > > That fact could be good news for Pearson. His Memphis-based district had a > Democratic-voting, majority Black population, but the district was splintered > and redrawn by Republican officials this year following a Supreme Court ruling > that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act. > > Pearson’s anti-data-center positions could play well with the rural, white, > Republican-leaning voters who now make up part of his district.  Musk began building data centers in Memphis—and gas turbines to power them—in 2024. “Before data centers were all the news every single day, our community was fighting Elon Musk,” Pearson said at a press conference this summer. People like SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Pearson said, “view these communities as sacrifice zones.”  Garrison Hayes contributed additional reporting.

In late September, a Los Angeles Times poll of that city’s mayoral race showed the upstart candidate, LA city councilmember Nithya Raman, up 11 points over incumbent mayor Karen Bass. It was a shocker. But what was really interesting was Bass’ response. Asked about the poll, Bass touted the more than 10,000 units of affordable housing built during her administration. “And we’re not slowing down,” Bass said. “I’ll continue accelerating housing production across LA to build the housing people can afford.” Funny, that. Raman’s an MIT-educated urban planner who has built her campaign around building more housing and attacked Bass for not building enough. Though Bass started her tenure as mayor with an executive directive that sped up new home construction, she faced huge backlash—mostly from the city’s wealthier and whiter west side—and ultimately softened the policy. Observers say that Raman’s entry into the race made housing into its central issue, so much so that Bass is now campaigning on it, too. Meanwhile! Up the coast in San Francisco—where rents have gone up about 25 percent this year, a one-bedroom apartment rents for about $4,000 a month, and the median single-family home sells for $1.9 million—state Sen. Scott Wiener is running against city Supervisor Connie Chan for a congressional seat that iconic Rep. Nancy Pelosi has held since Ronald Reagan was president. Like Pelosi, Wiener has a reputation as an effective legislator, in part built on his ability to get big laws passed requiring California communities to build more homes and making it much harder for local opposition to nix them. > A third of California renters—1.5 million households—pay more than half their > income in rent. Chan, on the other hand, has a history of voting against housing and transit-related laws in San Francisco in defense of local control and for all kinds of other stated reasons, like averting displacement of poorer folks (even from low-income homes to be built on a former Nordstrom’s valet parking lot), protecting buildings with historical significance, or just making sure new buildings don’t cast big shadows. It’s a record that the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board called “abysmal” and “a case study in why San Francisco has the nation’s worst housing crisis” in a full-throated endorsement of Wiener.  So of course they’re all talking about housing. Experts disagree on the exact size of California’s housing deficit—estimates have ranged from a shortage as small as tens of thousands of units to upwards of 3 million, but the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development says that California builds an average of 80,000 new homes a year when it should be building 180,000, especially in attractive coastal cities with jobs. A third of California renters, 1.5 million households, pay more than half their income in rent. The state has 12 percent of the US population (itself remarkable) and 22 percent of the nation’s unhoused people. It’s a disaster wrapped in a tragedy, and a grim look at the future of places similarly resistant to new construction. Housing is a totalizing issue—if you care about homelessness, affordability, taxes, public transit, public school funding, social justice, sprawl, and the environment, a good answer is “build more homes in cities.” Yet every local elected, in every state, who wants any of those things must also dodge flak from their own constituents who don’t want new buildings in their neighborhoods. Ladling more irony over the top: In these California races, all the candidates are Democrats. (The state’s furshlugginer “jungle primary” system sends the top two to the general.) Their point of divergence—semantic yet crucial—is whether the solution is to build more homes, and what the word “affordable” really means. The past couple decades have seen a lot of surprising questions break along partisan lines—but housing policy actually defies ideology and identification. In poli-sci speak, it’s a “cross-cutting cleavage,” and the fault line runs right through Los Angeles and San Francisco. Wiener’s an unabashed YIMBY—that’s “Yes in My Backyard,” the obverse of NIMBY. Alongside a couple other Northern California pols, he waged an epic, decade-long fight to pass laws that forced communities to accept lots of kinds of housing “by-right,” with no lawsuits or meetings to delay them to death, as I wrote about last year. The peak was last year’s SB79, which made big new buildings near public transit largely invulnerable to challenges from self-appointed defenders of neighborhood character. In San Francisco, that marks him as a “moderate.” “There are some Democrats who consider themselves, like Connie Chan, very progressive, who are progressive on some issues but are conservative on others,” Wiener told me in June. “I’ve said for a long time that being pro-housing is the progressive position, and opposing or making it harder to build housing is the conservative position.” Wiener name-checked leaders of the Democrats’ progressive wing who’ve also gotten more YIMBY-pilled—Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Zohran Mamdani…and Nithya Raman.  > Earlier generations of progressives kept the Bay Area from turning into > Shanghai. On the other hand, they kept the Bay Area from becoming Shanghai. In a debate in early October, moderators asked Chan about her district’s poor record of building new homes; she answered that new homes needed to be built citywide, and they had to be affordable. That’s a linguistic signifier in this fight. For-profit developers won’t build entire projects to sell or rent below market-rate, Californians regularly decline to fund bonds to cover affordable housing construction, and nothing brings people together like the prospect of fighting a new apartment building. So calling for 100 percent affordable housing combines progressive purity in defense of poor people with the conservative fear of having to live near one. Wiener pushed Chan on her opposition to new construction, and Chan accused him of being in the pocket of billionaires and real estate interests. And it’s true he (and the YIMBY movement) get support, financial and otherwise, from tech-aligned machers in San Francisco. Chan said that while the city needed more housing, it also needed tenant protections—housing couldn’t be “winner-take-all.” Chan’s campaign director Rudy Gonzalez, also the treasurer for the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades union, tells me that Chan has, in fact, championed a pipeline for new housing in other parts of the city—on Treasure Island, at a former power plant in the Dogpatch neighborhood, near the Stonestown Galleria mall. “If she was so against housing, wouldn’t there be evidence to support that? It’s that she doesn’t fit neatly into their curated narrative of what it means to be pro-housing, which is build at all costs and any costs,” Gonzalez says. “If you’re ‘yes-and,’ it’s like you’re an obstructionist.” That “and,” he says, is paying attention to things like infrastructure funding, streetscaping, and unionized construction labor.  San Francisco is a strange town, socioculturally liberal in the extreme but small and resistant to change. Politics there is local, personal, and grudge-filled—a knife fight in a phone booth, as the cliché goes. (In its endorsement of Weiner, the Chronicle flicked at the local gossip that Pelosi is supporting Chan over Wiener because Pelosi wanted her seat to someday go to her own daughter, and that Wiener angered Pelosi by announcing his candidacy before she announced her retirement. The relationship has been fraught.) More relevant here, the electeds most likely to resist changes to the built environment are still likely to be called progressive, possibly because they follow the tradition of midcentury tree huggers who—to their credit—saved redwood forests and staved off a 1950s plan to dam the Bay and fill it with concrete. They kept the Bay Area from turning into Shanghai, but on the other hand, they kept the Bay Area from becoming Shanghai. So while the spiciest parts of that Chan-Wiener debate were about AI policy and Gaza, housing policy may decide the race. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is pushing his mildly YIMBYish plans to increase housing production; in a Chronicle poll of voters during the primary, just 48 percent of Chan’s supporters approved of those plans, while 85 percent of Wiener’s voters did—as did 73 percent of those who voted for the third-place finisher, a tech millionaire and former Ocasio-Cortez staffer named Saikat Chakrabarti, who now backs Chan. They also tended to be younger and newer to the city—typical markers of YIMBYism. Los Angeles is different. The Bay Area has its alliance between YIMBYs and technocratic-moderate Democrats, but “that’s less of the case down here,” says Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing LA, a nonprofit housing advocacy group that endorsed Bass in her first term and is now supporting Raman. “Most of the moderate Democrats are not particularly pro-housing, and I think that most of the pro-housing energy comes from the progressive side of the political spectrum in Los Angeles.” The Democratic coalition that undergirds LA politics is largely funded by rich white people who live on tree-lined streets in single-family homes, their property taxes held artificially low by Proposition 13 restrictions. San Francisco has them, too, but they’re counterweighted by move-fast-and-break-things disruptovating tech guys. Raman is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, popular with the progressive wing of the party that has typically aligned itself with leftist opposition to housing construction. In fact, Raman’s advocacy for homebuilding put her at odds with the DSA for a while; the group didn’t endorse Raman over Bass until September. Bass still sides with councilmembers trying to fight Wiener’s SB79. Her spokesperson touted the work Bass did on streamlining affordable housing, and told me that the mayor is “just as frustrated as everyone else is” at how hard it is to build in LA—and said that Raman’s district had been among the worst at building new affordable housing. > The places building the most new housing are also the reddest, politically, > which means they thrive while Democrats lose ground on a national issue. In 2022, in her first week in office, Bass announced Executive Directive 1, a greasing of permitting wheels that made possible those 10,000 homes. She also presided over a much-needed citywide rezoning effort. “It was more broad than anything her predecessor did,” says David Garcia, deputy director of policy at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. “The difference between her and Nithya Raman is that Mayor Bass faced pretty strong backlash over Executive Directive 1 and the fear that there would be multifamily buildings in traditionally single-family neighborhoods.” In 2024 Bass softened the provisions of ED1 so it didn’t apply to “historic” (read: wealthier) neighborhoods. “At the same moment the mayor was moving to walk back that program, Councilmember Raman stood up for several projects proposed in her district that received a lot of intense pushback, and made sure they got built,” says Jesse Zwick, Southern California Director for the advocacy group Housing Action Coalition and a surrogate for the Raman Campaign. That gave Raman a political opening. By saying she was a yes on all of Bass’ homebuilding policies plus homebuilding in every neighborhood, at every price point, she cast herself as a change candidate. It’s a bet on what Angelenos care about: In that same poll showing Raman 11 points up, 26 percent of people said “building more affordable housing” was a top priority for the next mayor and 32 percent said “moving homeless people indoors” should be, too. Not everyone sees homelessness as a direct consequence of a housing shortage, but for what it’s worth, most of California’s unhoused folks are from California and from the county where they’re living. LA’s latest count showed more than 45,000 homeless people in the city, up 3.4 percent over 2025. That’s not a statistically significant increase, but still not good. Mayor Bass’ response to those new numbers was to fire the chair of the city’s housing and homelessness committee: Nithya Raman. California cities have a long history of land use policies explicitly designed to exclude nonwhite and poorer people. Proposition 13, the 1978 law that limits state property tax increases, dramatically favors current residents. So LA and San Francisco are pretty weird. “You have rich individuals, longtime homeowners who have accumulated significant amounts of wealth in their properties, in both places. And in both places they are apprehensive about embracing these kinds of zoning and land use changes,” Garcia says. “But then it gets tricky—and this is the funny thing about housing in general. You have business interests who understand that a housing crisis is bad for business, bad for their employees, and makes it harder for them to secure a workforce. And in many cases those groups are not always aligned with traditional Democratic values.” So greedy corporate types want to liberalize housing, and liberal homeowners are little-c conservative about it. Meanwhile, younger voters who do align with those traditional Democratic values can’t afford places to live, no matter how they label themselves politically. They tend to go YIMBY—until they get older and become homeowners or renters themselves, at which point they are more likely to oppose new home construction in their neighborhoods. It’s the circle of life.  If you ask people whether they believe people have a right to housing—as a team of political scientists did in 2024—a strong majority say yes. If you ask them about specific policies to make that happen, they lose their minds. They love rent control. They also love down payment assistance and home mortgage tax deductions—what an economist would call demand-side subsidies. The policy idea people are most tepid on? Making it easier to build new housing. “Ask people, ‘do you support a federal guarantee of housing for all?’ About half the public says yes. Those are the liberals,” says Clayton Nall, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of the paper. But there’s a catch, Nall adds. If you then ask those liberals if they support building apartments in their own community, just half of them say yes. > “Angelenos want housing to be affordable. That’s actually different than > wanting ‘affordable housing.’” Incontrovertibly, all that means less housing that costs more. But often, all those NIMBY-coded ideas are what politicians mean when they say they support “affordable housing.” “They don’t mean making more supply,” Nall says. “They instead mean building deed-restricted affordable housing, or public housing, or social housing with income or means-testing restrictions.” The language, in other words, gets confusing. “Angelenos want housing to be affordable. That’s actually different than wanting ‘affordable housing,’” Zwick says—if “affordable housing” means the kind you have to be below a certain income level to get. “A lot of Angelenos wouldn’t qualify, in the deed-restricted sense, for that housing. What they’re actually saying is, they want their housing to be affordable.” That’s the real trick. A left-YIMBY-type person might blame housing’s scarcity and cost on historically racist zoning, or a hijacking of California’s landmark environmental quality laws. A left-leaning NIMBY, on the other hand, might call out private equity ownership of homes, or say that homes are sitting unoccupied as the owners await rising rents. (This is a common conspiracy theory, by the way; California’s rental vacancy rate has been below 5 percent since 2013, and the statewide ownership vacancy rate is 1 percent. San Francisco’s apartment vacancy rate is 2.2 percent; LA’s is 5.4 percent. And even those low numbers are optimistic—you need a certain level of vacancy to account for people moving and to alleviate overcrowding.) “Shockingly, not everyone is in the weeds of housing policy like some of us are, so it’s actually not that obvious that these candidates differ significantly on their approach,” Garcia says. “While each of them can acknowledge housing as a top issue, where they place blame and what they say the resolutions are will resonate with different people.” LA and SF are indigo-blue, politically. Liberals may broadly value a socioeconomically dynamic and polyglot city, want the unhoused to get housed, want to fight climate change and support public transit, and want to pay less for housing. Those are all things that building more homes in denser urban areas accomplish. But they also want to protect their home’s value and the look of the neighborhood, and they’ll line up to speak at city council meetings opposing construction of a new five-over-one at the end of their block. Nall and his co-authors have described this inconsistent approach as “folk economics.”  Still, the mayoral race in LA and the congressional race in San Francisco suggest that may be changing. Years ago, Nall and colleagues hypothesized that because national Democratic leaders simply weren’t saying much about housing, partisans had no “elite signals” on what to believe, and defaulted to defending their single-family homes and zucchini gardens. But now the housing crisis is more evident, and progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Warren and Mamdani are cuing those cues. Big-deal Democratic candidates are running for office on pro-housing platforms—even if their messaging is a bit muddled. They have to—right now, the places building the most new housing are also the reddest, politically, which means they thrive while Democrats lose ground on a national issue. That’s the thing about fault lines: Eventually, they cause an earthquake.

During the Republican Party’s “midterm convention” last month, GOP leaders argued that a Democratic victory in November would cause a Marxist takeover of America. “It’s going to be a communist country if they win,” President Donald Trump said from the stage—one of more than 60 reported references to the red menace made by speakers at the Dallas event. But backstage, top Republicans were feting an actual ex-communist. Sali Berisha, an octogenarian leader of Albania’s opposition party, posted pictures of himself with Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward; former DOJ pardon attorney Ed Martin; Medicare and Medicaid administrator Mehmet Oz; Republican National Committee chair Joe Gruters; Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford; Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers; and conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, among others. Berisha—who began his career as a member of the Balkan state’s communist party under the regime of repressive Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha—wasn’t alone. He posed with the GOP dignitaries alongside Fatmir Mediu, a former Albanian defense minister who has built close ties to Republicans including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who Berisha also posed with in Dallas. > Me Ken Paxton, Prokurorin e Përgjithshëm të Texasit dhe kandidatin republikan > për Senatin e Shteteve të Bashkuara. pic.twitter.com/E4uK94SDuc > > — Sali Berisha (@saliberisha_) September 10, 2026 These interactions were notable in part because the US State Department, during the Biden presidency in 2021, designated Berisha a “persona non grata” due to “his involvement in significant corruption.” Berisha faces criminal charges in Albania over those allegations. At the time, the department had barred Berisha from entering the United States. But a few months ago, the Trump administration reversed course, granting him a visa waiver that allowed him to travel to the convention. In posts on X, Berisha characterized his backstage confabs in Dallas as important meetings in which he alleged that his chief political foe, Albania Prime Minister Edi Rama, is a corrupt beneficiary of Albanian drug smuggling. Rama denies those allegations. “We presented to the senior officials of President Trump’s administration and Congress the truth about the narcostate in Albania,” Berisha posted in Albanian. “The consequences for the economy and the demographic blow from Rama’s regime must come to an end.” Berisha asserted that his interaction with Blanche and Woodward was no mere photo op, but “an important meeting for Albania-US relations.” > Në Konventën Republikane në Dallas, së bashku me z. Fatmir Mediu, pata nderin > të takoja Prokurorin e Përgjithshëm të SHBA, Todd Blanche, dhe Zv. Prokurorin > e Përgjithshëm, Stanley Woodward Jr. Një takim i rëndësishëm për marrëdhëniet > Shqipëri–SHBA. pic.twitter.com/f7S5tpLZsk > > — Sali Berisha (@saliberisha_) September 11, 2026 It remains unclear what exactly Berisha was doing in Dallas. The Justice Department did not respond to questions about his meeting with Blanche. Spokespersons for the Republican National Committee and for Berisha’s political party, the Democratic Party of Albania, didn’t respond to questions either. And Republicans involved in organizing the event did not respond to questions about how Berisha’s attendance was arranged. The midterm convention was, in effect, a Republican fundraiser, with attendees asked to pony up thousands of dollars just to get in the door. Prices varied by state, but an invitation sent by the California GOP showed a price tag of $5,000 just for a balcony seat, with a tiered system in which the top level, “Golden VIP Access,” cost $250,000. A person who attended the convention told Mother Jones that the Florida GOP initially asked for a minimum contribution of $20,000 for tickets to the event before reducing the price tag to around $2,000 amid a lack of demand. California and Florida Republicans did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Berisha traveled to Dallas at the invitation of the International Democracy Union, an alliance of right-leaning political parties. In a letter, which Albanian news outlets reported on, the group described Berisha as part of a delegation. But it’s not clear if anyone besides the Albanian officials traveled to the US as part of the group. The International Democracy Union did not respond to inquiries. Berisha’s photographs with Republican officials suggest a high level of access, according to the person who attended the event. It is illegal for foreign nationals to donate to US political campaigns. And the visit has raised questions from Berisha critics, including among Albanian Americans, about who helped Berisha gain entree to the officials. “How’d Berisha get in there?” asked Gary Kokalari, president of Albanians for a Democratic Albania, an American group that advocates against corruption in the Balkan state, in an interview with Mother Jones. Ahead of last year’s May parliamentary election in Albania, Berisha’s party hired Chris LaCivita, co-manager of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Berisha’s party also hired Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster, and Paul Manafort—who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign and was later convicted of violating foreign lobbying laws—as electoral advisers. In public appearances in Tirana, Albania’s capital, though, LaCivita worked to link Berisha to Trump. “We want to help elect a prime minister who is a true friend of the United States and who will successfully work with President Trump and the United States,” he said in one appearance. The Democratic Party of Albania reported paying LaCivita’s firm, Advancing Strategies, more than $1.6 million for his work there. LaCivita, who helped organize the Dallas event, has said that his work for Berisha was limited to electoral advice in Albanian domestic politics and that he has not lobbied the US government on behalf of Berisha. LaCivita told Mother Jones this week that he had “no involvement” in Berisha’s presence at the midterm convention, adding that he is “no longer involved” with Berisha’s Democratic Party of Albania. LaCivita declined to say whether he met with Berisha during the event. LaCivita is already under scrutiny over his work for another Balkan politician. Early this month, LaCivita and James Blair, both of whom work for the Trump-controlled super PAC MAGA Inc., traveled to a semi-autonomous Serbian enclave in Bosnia and Herzegovina to advise the Bosnia Serb party of Milorad Dodik ahead of an election there, the New York Times reported. Dodik is a nationalist who has denied international findings that Serbs engaged in genocide against Bosnians during that country’s civil war. He has also faced US sanctions over his push for the Republika Srpska to secede from Bosnia, in defiance of the US-brokered Dayton Accords of 1995 that created Bosnia’s complex government. LaCivita and Blair faced criticism from Republicans because their work for Dodik appeared to interrupt their work supporting GOP candidates ahead of the US midterms. Trump last week threatened to “terminate” LaCivita and Blair if their outside work created a “conflict.” Dodik’s government has employed an array of Trump-linked lobbyists, who last year succeeded in winning removal of sanctions on the Bosnian Serb leader. Berisha has pursued a similar plan. The Democratic Party of Albania employs Continental Strategy LLP, a firm that includes a former top aide to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the daughter of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, to lobby for the removal of Berisha’s State Department designation. Continental’s Justice Department filings have noted extensive contacts with the State Department, including with Dan Holler, a longtime Rubio aide who works as counselor in the department. Berisha denies corruption charges, and Continental has asserted that the Albanian leader was a victim of a politicized sanction process that constituted the kind of “weaponization” Trump himself claims to have faced. Continental said it has been paid $750,000 for this work. The payments came through a murky arrangement involving an organization called the “Make Albania Great Again Foundation”—which was established by a New Jersey contractor at a suburban residential address last year around the time the lobbying contract began, picked up the tab. A spokesperson for Continental did not answer questions this week about the origin of funds but said that the firm had “filed all appropriate paperwork and complied with all requirements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.” The spokesperson said that Continental “played no role” in Berisha’s visit to Dallas. Continental’s lobbying appeared to bear fruit this summer when the State Department issued the waiver that allowed Berisha to travel to the United States for the GOP convention. While Berisha has said the waiver resolved his US designation, the State Department has not confirmed that. The department has not taken down its 2021 designation of Berisha, which said he was designated due “corrupt acts, such as misappropriation of public funds and interfering with public processes, including using his power for his own benefit and to enrich his political allies and his family members at the expense of the Albanian public’s confidence in their government institutions and public officials.” The State Department did not answer questions about the status of Berisha’s persona non grata designation. These allegations continue to complicate Berisha’s political plans. He still faces charges in Albania alleging that he corruptly helped his son-in-law privatize public land to build apartment complexes in Tirana, Albania’s capital. Berisha, who denies those charges, also faces a ban on traveling to the United Kingdom. The new US Ambassador to Albania, Eric Wendt, recently declined to meet with Berisha, in what Albanian media outlets have described as a pointed snub. Berisha is a political survivor who has staved off challenges to his control of Albania’s opposition and still hopes replace Rama, who appears politically weakened by widespread protests in Tirana—demonstrations prompted in part by Rama’s approval of a luxury resort being developed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner on Albania’s coast. While the Tirana protests against Rama have been characterized as anti-Trump, Berisha continues to tout his own ties to the US president. And he clearly regards his Dallas visit—and his photos with high-level Trump administration officials—as a valuable assets in the effort.

The Trump administration has desperately searched for evidence that Rep. Ilhan Omar committed fraud, alleging she or her late father are liars for changing her age from 18 to 17 years old on her citizenship application. According to what US officials and other people with knowledge of the federal government’s investigation told the Wall Street Journal, the goal is to construct a case to strip the Minnesota congresswoman of her American citizenship and deport her from the US. Omar became a US citizen in 2000, five years after arriving from a refugee camp in Kenya after she and her family fled the Somali Civil War. Early Monday morning, the Journal reported, Homeland Security agents took Omar’s phone, notebooks, personal computers, and her passport during the raid on her DC home. Authorities have also reportedly handed out more than a dozen subpoenas, which the New York Times wrote Wednesday include Sahra Noor, Omar’s sister, and “at least one other member of her family circle.  On Monday evening, the crowd at an Ohio Republican rally chanted “deport” as President Donald Trump yet again hurled racist rhetoric at Omar, people from Somalia living in Minnesota—whom he called “Somali bandits”—and Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed (Trump called him “a jihadist”).  On Tuesday, the president suggested on Truth Social that Omar had also committed financial fraud: “Could it be that her highly paid accountant actually reported the money that was stolen from her fraudulent account activities in Minnesota?” The same day, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in Washington, said she is looking into Omar’s financial disclosures.  “There are several investigations going on,” she said Tuesday on Fox News. “If there was a crime that was committed, it will be prosecuted.” The US attorney also asserted it “doesn’t matter” that a nonpartisan, independent body found Omar blameless of wrongdoing and recommended the House Ethics Committee withdraw misconduct allegations when she substantially overstated her wealth in documents she submitted to Congress. All of this is happening just three weeks before the November midterms, in which Omar is favored to win reelection.

Throughout his campaign for Florida governor, Rep. Byron Donalds has been unapologetically enthusiastic about data centers. The Republican candidate vying to replace Gov. Ron DeSantis told a group of Miami businesses last spring that Florida was “wide open” for development. “We have actual land in our state that is still pristine, available to use,” he said at the time. Amid growing evidence of the unpopularity of data centers among voters, he nonetheless dug in, bashing other candidates, like David Jolly, now the Democratic nominee, who had proposed moratoriums. “There ain’t no bans coming,” Donalds said at a campaign event in August. “But it sounds good on TV. Or it sounds good on social media.” His wife, Erika Donalds, a charter school executive and education chair for the conservative think tank, America First Policy Institute, is also a supporter of the technology. At a Washington, DC, meeting with educators last month, she said that teachers are often the biggest obstacle to implementing AI in schools. During a roundtable discussion at the Ronald Reagan Institute, she made the case that AI education models could be more effective than some current teaching methods. “The biggest challenge I see with adopting these new technologies and the desire to ban them, ” she said, according to the Miami Herald, “is great teachers who have been teaching the same way for a long time and getting great results, and who have to change their pedagogy if we adopt these technologies.” The couple also include the burgeoning AI industry in their stock portfolio. According to Byron Donalds’ most recent Congressional financial disclosure report, which was released in August and includes financial information for 2025, he and his wife own up to $390,000 in stocks connected to a myriad of companies involved with the development of data centers, including tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon. Other investments include contractors that specialize in data center construction and materials, such as Monolithic Power Systems, which is headquartered in Florida.  The 2025 disclosure report also notes that Erika Donalds earned income from X Corp., owned by tech trillionaire Elon Musk, who endorsed her husband in November. The specific amount of her income is unknown, because she is not required to report it. Erika Donalds told the Tampa Bay Times last month that “X pays creators like her a share of ad revenue based on engagement with their content.” The content in question is unknown. There was no evidence that Musk himself, who has funneled millions into Republican campaigns in the midterms, has contributed to Donalds as well.  As with many investors, and according to the disclosure reports, their stocks are not managed by the individuals directly but by an investment firm—in this case, Moran Wealth Management, in Naples, Florida. So it’s likely that Donalds is not choosing the specific stocks to include in his portfolio. He said as much in July, when asked about his investments at a meeting with faith leaders in Doral, Florida Politics reported. “My broker does it on my behalf because I gave him that authority and that authorization when I opened up the accounts,” Donalds replied. “I don’t tell him what to trade or what not to trade because, quite frankly, it’s highly unethical. And I would never do that.” (His campaign did not respond to my multiple messages seeking comment.) > “A claim that an official is not involved in the day-to-day trading of their > stocks does not in any way remove the conflict of interest or the ethical > issues.” Even if Donalds is not directly overseeing his portfolio, there still could be a potential for a conflict of interest if any of his decisions as a government official—and potentially Florida’s new governor—directly benefit some of the companies in which he’s invested, said Kedric Payne, vice president and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington DC, based nonpartisan group that focuses on democratic issues, including the ethical rules for elected officials. “A claim that an official is not involved in the day-to-day trading of their stocks does not in any way remove the conflict of interest or the ethical issues,” he told me. “Even if he is not involved in the trading, he would have the ability to influence the value of the stocks, possibly with his official duties.” One potential example could be if Donalds invests in a company that might have future plans to build data centers in Florida.  In 2024, the nonpartisan group filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics, reporting that Donalds had violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which requires lawmakers to report any stock trading within 45 days or otherwise face fines. He had failed to disclose up to $1.6 million in stock trades. The complaint’s outcome has not been made public, Payne said. The financial disclosure reports are the most recent example of how connected Donalds has been with the AI industry. In Congress, he is a member of the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence. After winning the Republican nomination in the governor’s race in August, he named Republican state senator from Miami-Dade county, Bryan Ávila, as his running mate. This year, Ávila filed a bill to create records exemptions, which would effectively shield developers’ plans from public scrutiny for up to a year. The measure ultimately failed, but his other proposal requiring data centers to cover their own utility costs passed and is now Florida law (Donalds filed a similar measure in Congress).  In July, Politico reported that tech companies had donated millions to Donalds’ campaign, a group that included four developers who were “actively pursuing or had previously proposed data centers in the Sunshine State.” But although these donations may bolster the GOP candidate’s considerable war chest— which now totals $125 million— they might also dissuade voters who oppose data centers from supporting him. Recent polling shows the race will be tight, with some polls finding Donalds ahead by a few points and others pointing to a toss up. In August, I spoke to Floridians in Citrus and Sarasota counties where some of these proposals to build these centers had been filed. Everyone with whom I spoke told me they felt threatened by the expansion of data center development in their areas. Some voters, including Republicans, told me they would support the Democratic nominee, David Jolly, who has called for a moratorium on data centers. “Everything for this election, for me, is based on the data centers at this point,” one Citrus County resident told me, “and I think most everybody that you talk to, everybody on Facebook, everybody that we talk to on the street, it’s all about the data centers.” Reporter Russ Choma contributed reporting.  

A Democrat and union leader won a special election on Saturday to represent a Texas state Senate district that Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024.  GOP Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the result, a 57-43 victory for Taylor Rehmet, “a wake-up call for Republicans across Texas” in an early Sunday post on X. Republicans currently hold every statewide elected office in Texas. “Our voters cannot take anything for granted,” Patrick continued, calling out low voter turnout in special elections.  According to the Texas Tribune, Patrick gave $300,000 to the campaign of Rehmet’s opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, through his PAC, Texas Senate Leadership Fund. Trump also posted multiple get-out-the-vote messages on behalf of Wambsganss on Truth Social in the days leading up to the election.   Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and the leader of his local machinist’s union, spent $242,174—nearly 10 times less than Wambsganss—according to campaign finance reports reviewed by Fort Worth Report.  “It’s clear as day that this disastrous Republican agenda is hurting working families in Texas and across the country, which is why voters in red, blue, and purple districts are putting their faith in candidates like Taylor Rehmet,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “This overperformance is a warning sign to Republicans across the country.” Wambsganss is the chief communications officer for Patriot Mobile, a cell phone company that calls itself “America’s ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider.” Wambsganss and Patriot Mobile have helped Republicans place candidates supporting conservative Christian policies on North Texas school boards. This represents part of the state’s push for book bans and dedicated time for prayer in class.  Last November, Rehmet earned nearly 48 percent of the vote, just three percentage points shy of an outright election win, leading to Saturday’s runoff. In that election, he ran against two Republicans, who together split 52 percent of the vote. Rehmet’s victory in the run-off was that much more significant because he faced only Wambsganns. Rehmet’s win adds to the recent record of Democrat victories in statewide elections—including gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia.  While Democrats have celebrated Rehmet’s win as a harbinger of what’s to come in this year’s midterms, some political observers have cautioned that the result may not signify a broader Republican reckoning.

While the country was still reeling on Wednesday from the killing of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the Trump administration undertook one of its most blatantly authoritarian actions yet, deploying the FBI to seize ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily blue area in metro Atlanta that has been an epicenter of the president’s conspiracy theories about the election he lost. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump vowed in Davos last week. Fulton County appears to be the newest victim of Trump’s long-running retribution campaign. The raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago. The capture of ballots in a large urban county in a key swing state is exactly what Trump contemplated when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—federalizing the National Guard to seize voting machines, something he now says he regrets not doing—and sets a chilling precedent for how his administration might interfere in the midterms should Republicans lose the House, Senate, or key state races. > “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get > groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to > vote.” “The administration is using Fulton County as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a pro-democracy group. “If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose?” In the past week, the different tactics the administration could use to interfere in the midterms have come into sharp focus. The Fulton County raid came just days after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota hand over its full, unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice as a way to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” which Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon denounced as “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.” On the multiple fronts, the administration is weaponizing the power of law enforcement, from the FBI to ICE to the DOJ, to target blue states and counties and coerce them into taking actions that benefit the administration and punish those who don’t comply. “To make release of the voter rolls a condition for ICE withdrawing from the state in Minnesota demonstrates this is really about power and control,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me on Thursday. “The federal government is trying to impose its will on the states. It signals what they’ve already indicated, which is they want more control over the 2026 election.” Bellows has experienced the administration’s strong-arm tactics firsthand. Maine was one of the first states the DOJ sued to demand access to its full, unredacted voter roll, which Bellows has strenuously refused to turn over. More recently, ICE launched a large-scale operation in the state last week, which led to more than 200 arrests. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who faces a tough re-election this year, claimed on Thursday that ICE had “ceased its enhanced operations” in the state. “A cynical view of why they’ve exited Maine is concerns that the backlash might topple Susan Collins and cost them a majority in the US Senate,” Bellows responded. She described the ICE raids in the state as “violent and chaotic” and said she worried that ICE operations targeting blue states could depress voter turnout in November. “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote,” Bellows said. She noted that Maine has a special election for the state House of Representatives underway right now in Lewiston, which has a sizeable Somali community that has been targeted by ICE, and has been urging people that are afraid to go to the polls to cast absentee ballots instead. Bellows sees a connection between the DOJ’s demands for state voter rolls, ICE operations in Minnesota and Maine, and the seizure of ballots in Fulton County. “They seem intent on trying to influence the outcome of 2026,” she says, “because they fear accountability by the voters.”

Democrats’ resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races got most of the headlines, but the most dramatic results in last month’s elections were downballot. In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.  How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri. > “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform > legislative power.” By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.  “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.” That year, powered by fallout from the Great Recession and the tea party wave, and assisted by tens of millions of dollars in spending down the stretch, Republicans picked up nearly 700 seats and flipped 22 state legislative chambers. Because those legislatures would go on to control the decennial redistricting process, Republicans were able to not just seize power, but hold onto it for a decade—or longer. The stakes for redistricting this time around are not as clear-cut, but still very much real. For the time being, thanks to Texas’ decision to redraw its maps at President Donald Trump’s request, and California’s own retaliatory effort, every legislative session is a potential redistricting session. In response to Republican efforts earlier this year, the DLCC pushed for Democrats to “go on offense” on redistricting in states they control. “At the end of the day, it is state legislators who are drawing these maps,” Williams says. “This mid-cycle process has both put a spotlight on that, but it’s also sort of clarified the fact that the way that you prevent this from happening in the future—or the way that you get Democrats in this room to have this conversation—is you elect them first.” When I last spoke with Williams, in 2024, the DLCC’s map looked quite a bit different. That year, facing the same headwinds that doomed Democrats at all levels, the organization went into the fall hoping to flip five legislative chambers but ultimately picked up none and—with the exception of an unsuccessful effort to break a Republican supermajority in Kansas—largely confined its efforts to presidential battleground states. This time around, it’s aiming to compete in 41 chambers in 27 states. That includes efforts to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida and Missouri legislatures; the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, and South Carolina houses; and the North Carolina senate (where Republicans have been able to override some of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes). In November, Democrats already succeeded in breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi Senate, after a court struck down the existing legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act. The goal, Williams says, is to get more state parties out of the “superminority” status and “into a place where you are at least in the negotiating room.” “Democrats in the states lost a lot of ground in 2010 and in the couple of elections after that, and in that rebuild process, the map changed a lot,” Williams says. “What we are saying in this update to the target map—and frankly, our broader strategy—is that we must show up in these red states. When you think about the long term trajectory of Democrats and our success as a party, we need to recognize these moments of power, and these states where Republicans have been competing, and we need to show up for voters.” But there are also a lot of chambers up for grabs. Part of what makes the map so encouraging for Democrats, Williams argues, is how thin the line currently is between conservative governance and Democratic rule. “Flipping just 19 seats on this map could establish four new Democratic trifectas and six new Democratic majorities,” she said. “The path there is not complicated—it’s really crystal clear.” The DLCC has its eyes on potential governing trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And the group sees potential for new Democratic supermajorities in 10 chambers across eight states—both chambers of the legislature in Colorado and Vermont; the lower levels of the legislature in Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington; and the senate in New York; Oregon; and Washington. In at least one way, though, this will be nothing like the tea party wave. This year, the DLCC is aiming to spend $50 million on its national effort in 2026—which the group is billing as the its largest-ever single-year sum. When Republicans swept the table in 2010, the DLCC spent just $10 million.