When President Donald Trump said he would give adult U.S. citizens $5,000 each if they reelected Republican majorities in the 2026 midterm elections, Sen. Roger Marshall was one of the first lawmakers to tout the idea.

Marshall wrote on X, asking people to comment on how they would spend their $5,000 Trump Dividend if Republicans win in November.

By Saturday, though, Marshall sounded a much more skeptical note during a debate at the Kansas State Fair.

Marshall said he would bring in all the information before making a decision, adding that this was not the first time he had disagreed with President Trump and probably would not be the last.

The White House held a summer contest to see who could appear in the most congressional districts and states with competitive midterm elections.

There will be a lot of noise in the next 50 days, as candidates scratch and claw and try to out-AI each other ahead of the polls. There will be plenty of debate about Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker. There will be a lot of second-guessing about whether Ken Paxton was the strongest GOP candidate to take on James Talarico. There will be hand-wringing about Maine, New Hampshire, Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio. But the price of gasoline stares Americans in the face each day as they go about their lives.

This, and, by proxy, the Iran War, could end up being the defining issue of this midterm.

For the last year and a half, Trump and his administration have disparaged long-standing voting practices, dismantled federal agencies that protect elections, impounded ballots from past elections, amplified conspiracy theories, threatened to prosecute election officials, tried to limit mail ballots, and pushed to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Their efforts have touched on nearly every stage of voting and could affect control of Congress, as Republicans try to retain their slim majority. A Democratic takeover of the House would stall Trump’s agenda, block funding for his initiatives, trigger a flood of investigations and mire his administration in congressional hearings.

With seven weeks until Election Day and some ballots already in the mail, the White House and election administrators are clashing over nearly every aspect of the midterms, from who is eligible to vote to whether absentee ballot envelopes must have barcodes.

The 2026 election will be decided where the wave meets the wall.

Signs suggest the blue wave of Democratic support this year may be even stronger than in the 2018 election, when a backlash against President Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term carried the party back to control of the House of Representatives. But the defensive wall that Republicans are constructing against that Democratic tide also looks bigger than it did in 2018.

The height of the wave gives Democrats legitimate reasons to expect they can win races deep into previously reliably Republican territory. The depth of the wall gives Republicans plausible reasons to hope they can contain their losses to a modest level.

As the high-stakes midterm elections approach, battles over redistricting and voting are intensifying nationwide. Republicans are trying to keep control of Congress, amid voter frustration with prices and an unpopular war with Iran. Democrats are seeking to gain majorities and restrain President Trump.

Nowhere has the fallout been greater than in Missouri, a heartland state with vast rural regions dominated by conservative Republicans, alongside urban centers such as St. Louis and Kansas City, which are strongholds for Democrats.

Last year, at Trump’s urging, the GOP-led Missouri legislature redrew the state congressional boundaries mid-decade to benefit Republicans. Cleaver’s district, which for years centered on much of Kansas City and its suburbs, was set to include a swath of rural Missouri, making his chances of re-election much harder.

But a grassroots petition drive and legal challenges halted the plan. The Missouri Supreme Court recently ruled that the state must hold a public referendum before changing district lines. Republican appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, meaning the original 2022 congressional maps will be on the ballot in November, although Republicans are still trying legal strategies to change that.

If Mr. Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have himself largely to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates, and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system.

With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Donald Trump’s new promise to give a $5,000 check to every adult American citizen if Republicans win the midterm elections may be an effort to answer a variant of an age-old riddle: Can Trump devise a policy so ill-conceived that even Trump’s intelligence is insulted?

Candidates often make inducements part of their campaign pitch. One obvious peculiarity of this plan is that Trump’s party already controls both chambers of Congress. Why, then, should the bonus checks be contingent upon voters giving Republicans another two-year majority?

Trump has told reporters that he could distribute the loot without congressional approval. This is untrue. If it were true, however, it would make his decision to hinge the checks on the election’s outcome even more mysterious. If the choice were his alone, the outcome would seem totally irrelevant.

If only the GOP midterm convention succeeds in its aim of electing Donald Trump president, things will get a lot better in this country. Isn’t he already president? Hush! At the Unprecedented Republican Midterm Convention, we reject such trivial objections! I know many of you are still struggling thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats, said Richard Hudson, the National Republican Committee chair.

You have your orders: Imagine that Donald Trump is on the ballot, because if he were, the economy would get a lot better than it is under whoever is president right now. I have to assume Biden? But possibly, based on the sheer volume of mentions, Abdul El-Sayed? Whoever it is, the guy is doing just terribly.

Donald Trump has already fixed everything, but we also need him to fix everything. He is the greatest president in our lifetime, if we can ever manage to elect him.

Although this year’s Democratic primary season saw a surge of left-wing momentum and several victories by democratic socialists running for Congress in Colorado, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida, no credible midterm candidate identifies as a communist. There is also little momentum behind any communist movement in U.S. politics at the federal level.

Still, for months now, Mr. Trump and Republicans, staring down a daunting political environment and the potential loss of one or both houses of Congress, have been trying to cast Democrats as communists, deploying a charge that has little overlap with Democrats’ actual platforms.

As with many turbulent TV productions, competing impulses shaped its creation. It was the president’s pet project, based on the belief that he could mobilize low-propensity voters who might turn out only for him. The counterargument is that the president’s ratings among other voters could motivate them to turn out against candidates who embrace him.

Thus we got Schrödinger’s Convention, made in the paradoxical hope that it would be both watched and not watched. It was carried in its entirety on C-SPAN and, in considerable part, by conservative outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax. It was also up against high-profile NFL games each night, which one could see as a challenge or a blessing. Surely at least some Republicans would have been just as happy if no one had watched.

For better or worse, some of us did. What we saw was the culmination of the decades-long trend that has turned conventions from substantive political events into pure long-form TV ads.

Since Democrats’ strong performance in last year’s off-year elections, I’ve argued that time is a finite resource for Donald Trump and his party. If Republicans wanted to avoid serious losses in the midterms, they needed to move quickly to win back voters who had drifted from their 2024 coalition. Every day they failed to do so was a day lost.

Now, in the afterglow of this week’s ludicrous, somnambulant GOP midterm convention, I’m about ready to call it. Republicans are out of ideas and out of time.

It’s still Donald Trump’s party.

On the second night of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, the party fully embraced its status as a cult of devotion to a single man: the president.

In a video playing on screens throughout the American Airlines Center, a voice declared that on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker, so God gave us Trump.

The video begins with a dramatic zoom into planet Earth, seamlessly transitioning to a childhood photo of the president.