Mother Jones Politics

Covid constitutes the largest mass disabling event in the United States since the Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990. It’s hard to measure the scale: Millions of Americans, maybe tens of millions, live with Long Covid. Many, from farmworkers to white-collar executives, are still in the workforce—some by choice, some paying an unsustainable price to support themselves or their families. On the act’s anniversary in 2021, President Joe Biden announced in a White House Rose Garden

Scrolling through X last week, I came across information for a “Get Out The Vote” rally with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and US Sen. Ashley Moody, who is running for reelection next week. The event would be located in Tampa Bay, where I live, and was scheduled for this Monday. Notably, the press was allowed “by invite only.” Moody’s campaign never responded to my multiple messages seeking an invitation to the rally. Other reporters noted the curious press disclosure. “The Moody campaign has oft

Early voting is about to close this Saturday in Virginia’s second congressional district, where Republican incumbent Jennifer Kiggans and Democrat challenger Elaine Luria are facing off in a closely watched House race. The candidate who wins the district, which Cook Political Report recently updated from a “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” could have a significant impact on the 2027 Congressional makeup—as well as for the future of military operations.  For over a decade, the coastal distric

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When millions of voters fill out their ballots in November, they won’t just be choosing elected representatives. Many states are offering the chance to impact conservation and wildlife as well, through ballot measures focused on things like dedicating more money to habitat protection or mitigating the impacts of climate change. One could even reshape wildlife manage

After spending the last month’s run-up to the midterm elections siccing the Department of Justice on his Black, female political opponents, President Donald Trump graciously allowed a Black woman to join his sycophantic entourage at a recent rally in Michigan: rapper Nicki Minaj.  This wasn’t Minaj’s first public appearance in support of Trump; she accepted a White House invitation to speak at the United Nations last year. But it was the first rally where the president made a talki

A little more than three weeks before Election Day, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, sat back in her chair in a small conference room at a community center in the Houston suburb of Cypress. The 52-year-old Democratic state representative had just spoken for 45 minutes and fielded questions from a roomful of educators and their allies on everything from vouchers to data centers to traffic. She had been criss-crossing the state for months, while beaming into podcasts an

This morning, one of my colleagues came across photos of celebrities who attended Airbnb.org’s inaugural gala in Los Angeles on Wednesday night.  There was Serena Williams, Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Jimmy Kimmel, and even a closing set from my fave Charli XCX , including her song “Apple,” which she introduced to the crowd as a song “about generational trauma.”  View this post on Instagram Besides the concept that celebrities

Immigration officers don’t normally focus on elections, but lately they’ve been showing up at houses, armed and in uniform, to see if people are illegally registered to vote. They’ve been doing this in multiple states, including California, where the feds arrested 28 green card holders as part of “Operation Protect the Vote.” The administration is also trying to stop officials in California and Los Angeles County from counting 20,000 mail-in ballots that the adm

Twelve days before the midterm elections, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and former Montana Senator Jon Tester traveled down to Alabama to campaign in one of the country’s most unexpected battleground districts. They trekked to Dothan, Alabama, the “peanut capital of the world,” which sits in Houston County, where Donald Trump won 73 percent of the vote in 2024. It’s now part of the state’s second congressional district, which Republicans redrew to oust first-term Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures

The Fox Theater on East 1st Avenue in Hutchinson, Kansas, is a classic Art Deco movie palace, an icon of the golden age of cinema. Hutchinson, the Reno County seat of 40,000, famous for its underground salt mines, is located 39 miles northwest of Wichita. I was there on October 8 because the US Senate campaign of Democrat Adam Hamilton had rented the venue for a meet-and-greet with attendees. I’ve admired Hamilton since meeting him after he delivered the sermon at former President Barack Oba

The State Department plans to give Flávio Bolsonaro, the defeated right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate and Donald Trump ally, and his family US visas to enter the country. At the same time, Trump’s government continues to implement widespread restrictions on new visas while it suspends and revokes existing ones. As my colleague Isabela Dias noted Tuesday, Bolsonaro is defying an order by Brazil’s Supreme Court barring him from leaving and surrendering his passports by Tue

For the first time in nearly 10 years, Alice* didn’t spend her fall welcoming a new class of students. After leaving her role as a high school English teacher last spring, she spent back-to-school season tending to her newly launched small business in the southwestern Ohio town where she lives with her wife. She left, in large part, because of her sexuality. Alice spent most of the last decade teaching at a public school in her area after leaving her previous role at a Catholic school when an

With the midterms less than a week away, the closing stretch of the campaign is full of bad omens for MAGA abroad and peak weirdness at home. In Serbia and Brazil, Trump allies suffered stinging and surprising defeats driven in part by energized voter turnout. An anti-corruption youth movement spearheaded the surge in Serbia, while Brazil saw a dramatic comeback for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated staunch Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro.  “Both of the losing candidates, Bol

Ken Cuccinelli is a long-time fixture of the conservative movement. The former Virginia attorney general and former Trump official is known for his far-right views on immigration, his denial of climate change, and some very conservative positions on social issues like gay rights and same-sex marriage. But more recently he’s become one of the leading figures on the right pushing for a more open and transparent election process as well as voting restrictions that critics say could wind up disenfra

Republican Rep. Mark Amodei says he’s voted Republican in every election since he was 18. Until now. Amodei, who is retiring next month, represents Nevada’s second congressional district. David Flippo is the Trump-backed Republican nominee to replace him. But with questions swirling about Flippo’s campaign finances and allegations that Flippo and his campaign misrepresented his military record, Amodei says he didn’t vote for Flippo, the first time in his life he did

A week before the midterms, voters are worried about corruption. According to a national survey by the Financial Times and Focaldata, a non-partisan research company based in London, about 69 percent of over 1,600 registered voters—and nearly 50 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2024—said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about “corruption, self-dealing or conflicts of interest” in the president’s second term. Nearly half of all registered voters reported that corruption

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Locals in a rural area of California were recently startled to see dazzlingly bright light shining down from nearby mountains at night, illuminating a swathe of the desert below. Unbeknown to them, the strange nocturnal illumination was the latest step in a company’s plan to erect thousands of giant mirrors in space to reflect sunlight on to the Earth du

The black vehicles with tinted windows converged on the bus stop just after 5:30 a.m. It was June 18, 2025, and Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and his co-workers were drinking coffee, waiting for a ride to a construction job in Pasadena, California.  Masked, armed men poured from the vehicles and charged at them. Vasquez Perdomo thought they were probably immigration agents, but he couldn’t be sure. The agents wore plain clothes with no visible badges and didn’t identify themselves. They se

The AI giant Anthropic disclosed its initial public offering filing with the SEC on Monday in what is expected to become one of the largest stock debuts in history.  The offering is set to take place around the middle of November. While the public documents do not disclose the exact valuation of the startup or the price or number of shares, investors estimate somewhere around $1.5 to $2 trillion, close to Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO valuation this past summer at $2.1 trillion.  Anthr

President Donald Trump ramped up his Islamophobic remarks against Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed at a Sunday campaign rally in Michigan, hurling everything from unfounded “jihadist” accusations to suggestions that an El-Sayed victory would mean canceling Christmas.  “He would be the only senator that will have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate,” Trump said. “I want him to have a metal detector.” Trump: El-Sayed would be the only sena