Marc Novicoff

Heading into the midterms, everyone who follows American politics had the same question: Were the polls correct, or would they underestimate Republicans once again? The answer turned out to be neither. This time around, the polls undercounted a different kind of voter: Democrats.
According to the Silver Bulletin polling averages, Democrats were on track to win the U.S. House popular vote by nine points and narrowly flip a few Senate seats in states that Donald Trump had won by double digits.

It’s happening again. In a big American city, a young Indian American democratic socialist is trying to unseat an unpopular Black incumbent on a platform of housing affordability. This time, the arena is not New York City but Los Angeles. Nithya Raman, the insurgent, has fashioned herself as a Zohran Mamdani of the West. Karen Bass, the embattled incumbent, is fighting to stay in office and make sure that lightning doesn’t strike on opposite coasts.
But the similarities mostly end there.

On Friday night at a bar in Park City, Utah, a man approached Representative Maxwell Frost and said to him, “We are going to deport you and your kind.” The 28-year-old man then yelled a racial slur and punched Frost in the face before running away, according to court documents reported by KUTV and a social-media post by Frost.

President Trump prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants, including some here legally, to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat.
Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a “BIG Congressional WIN,” but the margin of victory in a deep-red district is ominous for Republicans.

Americans who want to bet on sports have many options. There’s DraftKings, FanDuel, ESPN Bet, Caesars, and BetMGM. There’s also BetRivers, Hard Rock, bet365, Fanatics, and Bally Bet. But none of those platforms are available in the 17 states where online sports betting remains illegal, including California and Texas.  
Kalshi, a prediction market, doesn’t have that limitation. Gamblers can use it to wager on the outcome of sporting events in all 50 states.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
My facial hair arrived without warning. The real kind, not the middle-school variety, greeted me when I was 21 and returning to college after a year off. I found this development annoying: My face had suddenly assigned me the chore of having to shave it very often.
I should’ve read my Charles Dawson Shanly.

Cade Haskins averaged just 0.9 points a game this season for one of the worst teams in all of Division I college basketball. And yet he may turn out to be responsible for triggering one of the biggest changes in the sport’s history.
Last month, in a small HR office above the only sports bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, Haskins and his teammates on the Dartmouth College basketball squad voted to form the first-ever NCAA players’ union.