Our Best Stuff on the Coming Midterm Elections

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. It’s official: Primary season is (almost) over. Florida, Alaska, and Wyoming had their elections on Tuesday, leaving only a few states that wait until September. In Florida, democratic socialist Angie Nixon won the Democratic nomination for Senate despite raising only $1.2 million. Nixon’s victory highlights the party’s internal divisions between its establishment and progressive wings. Democratic socialists also won primaries in New York, Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. But it's time for us to turn our attention to the general election. As we do, we’ll be watching to see how Democrats are grappling with that division, but also how they are campaigning against Republicans. In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio highlighted Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, who currently leads his opponent, GOP Rep. Mike Collins, by 7 points and who has been touted as a possible presidential contender in 2028. Noting that Ossoff has been leaning into calling President Donald Trump a crook and calling attention to GOP scandals, Nick lays out what he calls the “Ossoff theory”: The Ossoff theory, as I perceive it, is that corruption is an essential element this cycle in a broader attack on Republicans for failing to prioritize the people’s welfare. It may be true … that voters will overlook a politician’s corruption if they believe he’ll deliver more for them than the other guy on the ballot will. (That’s the lesson of 2024.) But it’s also true that if a corrupt politician isn’t delivering, the public will be primed to consider that his corruption is part of the reason why. Meanwhile, David Drucker followed a candidate who’s doing things a little differently. Rob Sand, the auditor of Iowa, is the only Democrat holding statewide office there. The Hawkeye State hasn’t had a Democratic governor since 2011, and it hasn’t had a Democratic senator since 2014. But Sand thinks he can take back the governor’s mansion with an appeal to Republicans who are weary of Trump, Drucker writes: Sand is running on cooperation, not confrontation, with Iowa’s GOP-controlled Legislature. He vows that “every culture war bill” would be met with his veto pen, whether pushed by Democrats or Republicans; he has repeatedly reaffirmed his opposition to transgender girls participating in female sports (although he has described the GOP’s approach to this issue as bigoted); and he is proposing to disperse government regulatory power and decision-making from Des Moines to the state’s 99 counties and their communities. Sand’s open hands to conservatives don’t end there. He begins campaign events by leading audiences in singing America the Beautiful and asks Republicans in attendance to raise their hands so that he can personally welcome them. He also tips his cap to the right with this riff on his decision to join the Democratic Party after initially voting as an independent: “I also remember [President] Bill Clinton balancing the budget, using the surplus to pay down the debt, and thinking, as a teenager, thank you,” Sand recalled. Don’t worry—we won’t only cover the Democrats. We’re also going to pay plenty of attention to the Republicans. In fact, we’ve debuted a whole new newsletter by Michael Warren just for that purpose. Next Right will explore the future of the party—from the midterms to 2028 and beyond. In his introduction, Mike explains that Trump is approaching lame-duck status and the race to replace him is already underway. For the first edition—he’ll be writing every Wednesday—Mike talked to outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a great way to kick things off as Kemp is a traditional, pre-MAGA conservative who has figured out how to navigate the Trump era and is well positioned to shape the party going forward. Mike writes: In the burgeoning discourse about potential Republican candidates, Kemp undoubtedly takes a back seat to Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, if for no other reason than that the conversation seems to be driven by the question of who will receive the all-important endorsement of Donald Trump. Strip away the current GOP incentive structure, and on paper, Kemp looks exactly like the kind of person who would consider a White House run. He’s a successful two-term governor of a large swing state. He has gained a big national profile, not just for his fights with Trump over the 2020 election but because of controversial bills he signed into law, such as a six-week abortion restriction that sparked some brief boycotts from Hollywood and a voting law that prompted Major League Baseball to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta. (Kemp can feel vindicated, since Georgia’s entertainment production industry remains robust and MLB brought the game back to Atlanta in 2025.) He leaves office in January, freeing him up to campaign in the early primary states. Kemp has survived and thrived during the Trump era, carving out his own identity, governing as an old-school conservative and being a good partisan soldier for the GOP. What’s for Republican primary voters not to like? You can watch Mike’s entire interview with Kemp here. Make sure you’re signed up to receive the newsletter in your inbox here. Thank you so much for reading, and have a great weekend. None of the four institutions involved in the academic facet of the Jason Arday scandal—Cambridge, Liverpool John Moores University, and the two journals notified of apparently plagiarized material—responded in a sufficient manner. Rather, all four seemed to prefer to cover for Arday—in July Cambridge sent me and other inquiring journalists a statement describing the accusations as a “vile campaign” to undermine him. But Arday had no meaningful track record in academia; he hadn’t produced anything of note and openly stated that due to his autism, when he was at work, “90% of the time I don’t know what is going on but I am having to pretend I know what is going on.” Despite that, he had been appointed to an “established chair at Cambridge,” as the New York Times later explained, which is “a permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support [and] is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.” The scrutiny mounted shortly before the release date of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a major title published by Simon & Schuster on August 11 for which Arday claimed to have received a 1.4 million advance, according to the Guardian, though he didn’t specify whether he meant dollars or pounds. Eventually Cambridge folded, announcing an investigation last week. Arday announced his resignation just hours later. Then, this past Friday, he was found dead in London’s Battersea neighborhood after an apparent suicide. In late 18th- and early 19th-century Philadelphia, public markets were a vital source of commerce. But they were heavily regulated. Prosperous customers were allowed first dibs on the wares and produce. Then, two hours after opening, another bell would ring, and “hucksters” were allowed to buy stuff and hawk it on the street. “Huckster” back then was still a bit of a pejorative, in a snobby class sense, not the more “grifter” connotation it has today. American hucksters were poor, disproportionately female, and black, and bought stuff and then resold it at a profit, sort of like the free-range umbrella sellers in New York City ($2 when the sky is clear, $20 when it rains). The restrictions on hucksters led to a satirical updating of the War of 1812 slogan “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” to “Free Trade and Hucksters’ Rights.” This sort of huckstering, buying goods only to resell them at a profit, was disparaged and despised by elites for millennia. In medieval Europe, the guilds wanted to protect their monopolies, and hucksters and entrepreneurial middlemen screwed up their business plans. The powers that be kept such things at bay until the liberal reforms of the Enlightenment started to kick in. As Pastor Jason Min begins a sermon inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, no one seems fazed by the faux foliage set that remains on stage from a recent production of Into the Woods. That’s just part of holding two services each Sunday at a downtown Los Angeles arts high school conveniently perched at a freeway exit and just blocks away from the vaunted Walt Disney Concert Hall. The venue is fitting: Many of Min’s congregants are part of the arts and entertainment industry that put their city on the map—as is Min himself, albeit inadvertently. The pastor’s own on-camera moment came a few years back when his best friend from college, producer/director Lee Sung Jin, cast Min’s brother Justin to play the insecure worship leader for a Korean American evangelical church in the 2023 first season of Netflix hit Beef. Min was to serve briefly as a consultant to ensure the authenticity of the praise scenes. But the pastor’s role grew when Lee, worried that using actors alone would make the Korean churchgoing experience into a caricature, called on Min and his church’s band to simply perform songs as they would on any Sunday morning. Members of Min’s flock filled the church set as extras. The effect of bringing a real congregation to the small screen was undeniable. Best of the Rest Honor at Crappy’s The story of a bar fight, the Air Force, and one still-not-quite-straight nose. Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.