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The woman behind the Virginia special election to effectively eliminate 4 GOP U.S. House seats is now under FBI investigation. Virginia’s State Senator L. Louise Lucas saw her offices raided, along with other businesses connected to her.
So far, only anonymous sources are cited as claiming this is connected to a corruption investigation directly linked to her. She is considered the main driver of the Virginia gerrymander election plan that is currently under legal scrutiny.
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Just days after a recent Supreme Court ruling against unconstitutional race-based gerrymandering, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that it will enforce the decision nationwide.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon told Just the News, “This is the law of the land now, and eventually every jurisdiction in the United States is going to have to comply with race-free line-drawing.”
Last week, Supreme Court justices ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s newly redrawn congressional map relied “too heavily on race” in creating a second majority-black district in the state.
That decision is expected to affect states with maps drawn to heavily favor Democrats, including California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Virginia.
Many of these states have enacted their own Voting Rights Acts, which explicitly use race as a predominant factor in determining districts.
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Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) revealed to a local media outlet that she has benign tremor that sometimes causes trembling in her hands, head or voice and is taking medication for the condition but said it “has absolutely no impact on my ability to do my job.” Collins, who is 73, shared the details about her…
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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was not pleased with the Louisiana v. Callais decision. She filed a dissenting judgment, which enforced the ruling with immediate effect because it relates to the upcoming elections. Ms. Jackson’s dissent was ripped apart by Justice Samuel Alito, who academically called her a moron—this is becoming a common occurrence. Even liberal justices have sought to steer clear of attaching their names to her opinions.
Alito called her dissent on the judgment utterly irresponsible. And now, after all that bellyaching from Ms. Jackson, she denied a motion to recall the Callais judgment. No justices dissented.
The Supreme Court has denied this motion. No justice noted a dissent. https://t.co/dlMLv4VHyh pic.twitter.com/ajQ6cDYgb2
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 6, 2026
This case is settled. It involved Louisiana creating a majority-black congressional district after the initial map was invalidated under VRA. Now, this map was struck down as unconstitutional, with the court limiting its interpretation of Section II of the Voting Rights Act, which allows congressional apportionment based on racial quotas.
🚨 The Supreme Court has immediately issued its judgment striking down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander. pic.twitter.com/AQJjA5Sw2P
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 4, 2026
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a sweeping new congressional map into law on May 4 that could increase Republicans’ advantage in Florida’s House delegation from 20-8 to 24-4.
Louisiana delayed its congressional primaries while lawmakers begin work on a new map. Tennessee Republicans have released a proposal that could eliminate the state’s only Democratic-held congressional district, while Alabama and other Southern states are weighing how far the Callais ruling allows them to go. But this is by no means just a red-state story.
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Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have worked very hard to claim they don’t give taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal immigrants. Or, any taxpayer-funded benefits, really. They do a lot of arguing semantics and nitpicking over rhetoric, and doing both in bad faith. AKA “independent” “fact” checking. Well, California gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter just treated the op as if it were her ex-husband and she was holding a pot of mashed potatoes.
There was a debate this week with Porter and the other candidates running for California governor. The question of giving free healthcare (aka, paid for by taxpayers) to illegal immigrants came up. Porter, like the other Democrats on stage, was all about it.
Yes. And that’s what I think Californians deserve as answers to these questions.
She has a point. If I were a Californian, I would want to know a clear “yes” so I knew not to vote for that person.
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The Trump White House is in panic mode, treating a likely blue wave like an alien invasion. The votes aren’t even cast, and they’re preparing their team for gridlock and the likelihood of being subpoenaed into oblivion.
According to The Washington Post, the White House Counsel’s Office has been quietly holding internal briefings for political appointees, walking them through how congressional oversight functions and how to handle it effectively. The sessions reportedly last around half an hour and include a presentation covering the basics of oversight and recommended best practices.
According to two anonymous sources familiar with the meetings, staff have been advised to be mindful of written communications and to respond promptly to any inquiries from Congress. All of this comes as the administration appears to be quietly acknowledging the real possibility of major Democratic gains in this fall’s midterm elections.
“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely,” said one of the two officials, who attended a private briefing, the outlet reports. “It was a sober-eyed conversation.”
While one official insisted that “This is nothing new,” some of the meetings during the past month have had “a strong overtone” of the midterms, two people said.
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As Republicans destroy historic Black-majority House districts in the South, they are being compared with segregationists George Wallace and Bull Connor.
In the last speech of his life, delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the legacy of the student civil rights activists of the early 1960s: “I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
The next day, King was assassinated just blocks away, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel—hallowed ground which now serves as the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Few cities are so closely associated with the civil rights movement of the 1960s as Memphis. And fewer still have so rich a history of struggle and success in making real the promise of representative democracy.
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President Donald Trump has made the SAVE America Act a central GOP priority ahead of the midterms. Voters still don’t know how to feel about it.
New results from The POLITICO Poll show that while many Americans support some core provisions of the SAVE America Act — such as requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote — that support is not overwhelming. And they are far less certain about the sweeping elections bill overall, even as Trump has for months pressured Republican lawmakers to pass it.
Democrats in particular oppose much of the SAVE Act, and many of them are unenthusiastic even about the voter ID provisions that generate the broadest support — a sign that Trump is prioritizing legislation that has little crossover appeal.
A 42 percent plurality of voters who supported former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 back requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote, including when registering by mail. But that number is dwarfed by the three-quarters of Trump 2024 voters who support such a measure, according to the survey conducted by Public First.
Five of the seven republican Indiana state senators that voted against the redistricting measure that would eliminate Democrat seats in the U.S. House lost decisively to Trump-endorsed candidates in the GOP Primary. Four other Trump-endorsed candidates won their primaries decisively as well.
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Indiana’s May 5 primary election tested President Donald Trump’s influence after he endorsed several state Senate candidates seeking to unseat Republican incumbents who had previously broken ranks with him by opposing a redistricting map.
At least six out of the eight Indiana Senate challengers endorsed by Trump won their respective primary elections on Tuesday, most with significant leads.
A ‘big night for MAGA in Indiana.’
Twenty-one GOP state senators voted with their Democrat colleagues in December to block a new congressional map that would have created two more Republican-leaning districts and potentially strengthened the GOP’s control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The effort failed in a 31-19 vote, despite Trump’s warnings that he would target Republicans in the upcoming primary election who voted against it.
Republicans who voted against the redistricting effort and who were seeking re-election in the May primary included:
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The biotech entrepreneur secured a comfortable victory over small business owner Casey Putsch in Tuesday’s primary, advancing to the general election in the key Rust Belt state of Ohio.Ramaswamy will now face Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Public Health, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. The race is expected to be closely watched nationally.
In his victory speech, Ramaswamy thanked voters, saying, “for getting us to this point,” and added that, “the real destination is in November.”US President Donald Trump earlier endorsed Ramaswamy and praised him in a post, calling him “something special. he is young, strong, and smart!”
In a longer message, Trump said, “Vivek Ramaswamy is running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio… I know Vivek well, competed against him, and he is something special. He is Young, Strong, and Smart! Vivek is also a very good person, who truly loves our Country… Vivek Ramaswamy will be a great governor of Ohio, and has my complete and total endorsement – he will never let you down!”
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In Texas, Pearland’s new mayor, Quentin Wiltz, won a close election on Saturday, but his victory has sparked heated debate on social media.
Wiltz said he knows there is a divide in Pearland, but added it’s a chasm he hopes to bridge when he becomes the city’s next mayor.
He recognized the historic nature of his win: he will be Pearland’s first Black mayor and the first Democrat in decades.
“This election was important because the mayor’s race is at large. So every person who showed up mattered,” Wiltz told ABC13. “My message hasn’t changed. It’s always, will, and continues to be about the people. The people that I serve, the people that I know, the people that I meet. Because that’s what I think public office is about.”
Wiltz won the election by 263 votes out of 11,743 cast. He is hopeful about the growing city’s future despite its infrastructure and budget challenges, and he wants to hear from residents.
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Virginia Democrats are clearly panicking. Rachael Bade, co-host of The Huddle, elaborated on what former Democratic Party operative and fellow co-host Dan Turrentine mentioned this week about the fate of the Old Dominion’s new congressional map. It grants Democrats a 10-1 advantage, but the state Supreme Court refused to dismiss the challenge to the map, setting the stage for serious intra-party battles.
The legal warnings were reportedly repeated endlessly, but to no effect. Now, Democratic leaders at both the Virginia and national levels could face a heavy setback if the maps are invalidated. Bade outlined the criteria the court could use to strike down the maps. Sure, the map might get approved, but if the Virginia Supreme Court sides with just one of these points, the map is cooked:
AND THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR SOME BIG NAMES. Per Dan’s reporting, Governor ABIGAIL SPANBERGER’s staff is quietly sniping at state Senate majority leader SCOTT SUROVELL and state Senate kingmaker LOUISE LUCAS — two lawmakers who pushed back hardest on the legal warnings last fall.
[…]
If this effort goes down, those quotes won’t age well. “People are lining up behind the scenes to go public, I think, very quickly if this does not go through,” Dan foreshadowed.
BUT HERE’S THE THING — Pointing fingers won’t let Spanberger off the hook, which we discussed at length on the show. Yes, she may have privately raised concerns about the effort early on. But she’s the one in the ads. She’s the face of this thing. As our other co-host SEAN SPICER put it bluntly: “She ate the political cookie on this one.”
The other name in the crosshairs if this goes down? House Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES. Dan is already hearing from some Virginia Dems who say the Democratic leader pushed too hard despite legal concerns. (Though, let’s be fair to Jeffries — he would have been slammed by the party if he hadn’t leaned in, and his team would likely wear such criticism as a badge of honor.)
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Former ICE official Madison Sheahan lost a GOP primary in a battleground Ohio House district on Tuesday, a relief to Republicans who worried she could sabotage their chances of flipping the seat.
Former state Rep. Derek Merrin won the GOP nomination in the 9th Congressional District for the second cycle in a row, and will face Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in November. He lost to Kaptur by less than one percentage point in 2024.
Republicans see the seat as a prime pickup opportunity after the Ohio legislature redrew the state’s congressional map to make the district more favorable for Republicans.
Merrin’s victory comes with a sigh of relief from Republicans in the state who raised concerns about Sheahan’s background — she served as former deputy ICE director under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — being a soft target for Kaptur in a general election.
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The Associated Press has declared Amy Acton the winner of the Democratic nomination for governor. The wire has also declared Vivek Ramaswamy the winner of Ohio’s Republican primary for governor.
Meanwhile, NBC News has called Sherrod Brown the winner of Ohio’s Democratic Senate race. We’ll be awaiting the Associated Press’s official projections.
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The California primaries are the best thing to happen to Republicans facing a perilous midterms. It’s California, one of only two states the media cares about (the other being New York). The “jungle primary” puts Rs and Ds against each other early on, with the two top vote getters moving to the general. And having Rs on stage with Ds helps expose that, while Trump might not be polling well, Americans hate what the left has been selling. This was clear as Republican Steven Hilton totally pantsed all the Democrats on stage.
Point of information: Democrats have been in total control of California for decades, so anything happening in the state is their fault. This makes it awkward for other Democrats to say that the state isn’t working for Californians. Or, while we’re at it, New Yorkers either.
The safe, consultant-driven thing for Hilton to do would be to avoid the word “Trump” at all costs. Instead, he, as a legal immigrant, says if elected, he’ll work with Trump to enforce the laws dealing with the illegal ones. Then you had when the Democrats on stage tried to blame Donald Trump for California being a su-diddly-ucky place to live.
Donald Trump is the president in ALL the other states of America, where the cost of living is WAY LOWER than in California.
It’s not Donald Trump who’s given us gas prices $2 higher than the REST of the country! It’s Democrat policies, which ALL the Democrats here support.
It’s NOT Donald Trump that’s given us the highest housing costs in the country. It’s Democrat policies that all these Democrats support!
Obviously, it is way past time for change in California and endlessly going on about Donald Trump doesn’t serve the needs of the struggling families and small businesses.
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Health care costs are the top concern among voters who identify with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, according to a new poll — far more than vaccines, pesticides or additives in food. The survey, released Wednesday by KFF, shows how affordability concerns dominate the minds of Americans across the political spectrum. According to the poll,…
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a new U.S. House redistricting plan that will give the GOP 4 more seats. The law was immediately challenged in state courts.
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President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans are quietly exploring whether Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) could be pulled away from the Democrats, as tensions between the Pennsylvania lawmaker and his own party continue to surface.
According to a report, GOP officials believe that even if Republicans were to lose several Senate seats in November, flipping Fetterman could help them maintain control of the chamber.
President Trump has reportedly made a direct pitch, offering his full endorsement along with potential financial backing if Fetterman were to switch sides.
At the same time, several Senate Republicans have begun engaging with Fetterman more informally, testing whether he might be open to distancing himself from Democrats.
Despite the outreach, Fetterman publicly pushed back.
“I’m not changing,” he said.
“I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one.”
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There has been an interesting theory floating around that one of the reasons Donald Trump improved his standing with voters age 18-34 in 2024 was that the youngest among that age group were not old enough to remember how bad the first Trump term was, thus, they were susceptible to Trump’s campaign style of lies and promises that will never come true.
After getting the full Trump treatment for a year plus of his second administration, those voters have come back to Democrats in a big way.
Politico reported on a new poll of young voters from the nonpartisan Generation Lab:
It shows young Americans planning to vote Democratic in November by a margin of 52 percent to 19 percent. Broken down by party, the data indicates that the GOP has a significant base problem: Just 58 percent of young Republicans say they’ll vote GOP — with nearly a third selecting “neither” or “won’t vote.” By contrast, 85 percent of young Democrats intend to show up for their party at the ballot box.
Just as in 2024, deep discontent with the state of the economy is driving anger at the party in power. Now, 81 percent of young Americans rate U.S. economic conditions as bad or terrible — including 68 percent of Republicans. The younger the age bracket, the more optimism diminishes.
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is at it again — anointing preferred candidates in hotly contested 2026 primaries and being accused, by their own party, of openly “putting its thumb on the scale” to protect establishment candidates.
Which is a fancy way of saying they’re being called out for rigging the primaries.
Shocker, I know. The party that feigns being warriors for ‘saving democracy,’ but then installed Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton when their voters chose Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, respectively, is at it again.
In the latest round of “Red to Blue” endorsements, the DCCC jumped into multiple tight Democratic primaries to boost candidates they have unilaterally decided can win in the general elections. Some of those candidates are trailing their opponents in both endorsements and fundraising.
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