Today, I’m going to send you a roundup of stories I’ve been gathering for a few weeks, some of which are follow-ups on stories I’ve covered before, which are being confirmed by new events.
And yes, you’re going to have to read to the end to find out about the “hidden crisis.” And if you’re not already a subscriber, this give you a reason to sign up.
“Iran, Prices, ICE, and Epstein”
I wrote recently about the collapse in Donald Trump’s poll numbers and how this is dragging down Republicans across the country, even in “red state” strongholds like Texas.
Shortly afterward, we got confirmation from Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, when someone released recordings from a private meetings with donors where he discussed the impact of Trump’s so-called midterm convention.
Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for Senate in Texas, told a group of conservative donors and lobbyists last week that President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas had hurt Mr. Paxton politically, according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times.
The recording, which is muffled at times, captures Mr. Paxton being asked, “Do you feel like he’s a little bit of a drag?” It is not clear from the audio whom the questioner is referring to.
Mr. Paxton responds: “So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”
Take this with a grain of salt, because Ken Paxton may just be shifting the blame to avoid admitting how much his campaign is being dragged down by Ken Paxton. The New York Times report adds: “It remains unclear whether the Republican convention was in fact politically harmful to the party’s midterm candidates; the event did not appear to have a significant impact on public surveys of the Texas Senate race.”
That analysis is largely backed up by G. Elliot Morris, who uses an automated sampling of headlines to get an overall idea of what is driving news coverage in this election, and he concludes that it’s “Iran, Prices, ICE, and Epstein.”
According to my analysis, the Dallas gathering [i.e., the midterm convention] accounts for a small number of front-page stories the political press produced since the convention was held, and coverage completely faded within a week. Compared to press attention to past conventions, the first-ever midterm convention was a failure. And it failed to displace other stories that are more problematic for the president and his party….
To put some numbers behind this: With 2,481 front-page stories and 9.9% of everything the political press linked to in 2026, Iran is the story of the year. ICE and immigration are second at 2,113 stories and 8.5%. The Justice Department, the FBI, and Epstein come third at 1,447….
Across June, July and August 2026, cost-of-living headlines accounted for an average of 1.8 stories per day at memeorandum.com. Through Sept. 25 they’re running at 3.4 a day, an 88% jump. September has carried at least one front-page story about prices for 25 of the past 28 days.
In short, it is their objective failure on the big issues of the day that is driving down approval for Trump and Republicans, and no last-minute PR blitz is going to be able to counteract that.
By the way, I also mentioned that you should look not just at federal elections but at local races, including elections for sheriff, which are a peculiar quirk of our Anglo-American legacy. So I was pleased to see Bolts, one of the newsletters I follow that tracks political races below the federal level, provide a guide to local sheriff and prosecutor races in which local law enforcement’s ability to push back against ICE has become a major issue.
“I Am the Code”
If you want to know why things tend to go wrong for Trump, and for the Republicans who enable him, here’s a little vignette about how the architect for Trump’s ballroom reportedly fled the project when Trump started overruling him on basic safety measures.
