What's Going To Happen in the Midterms?

Plus: Anthropic's Claude constitution, Letitia James to handle Cornell rape case, and more...

Bloodbath? "Democrats are heading into the last month of the midterm elections campaign with ambitions going deeper and deeper into red territory, while Republicans are grim about their hopes of holding on to either chamber of Congress," reports The Washington Post. This is not a shock: The party in the White House tends to have a hard time holding onto congressional seats, and the president is not especially nationally liked at this moment.

Democratic voter turnout in the primaries was strong, and Democratic strategists are forecasting that midterm voter turnout will be similarly strong. Some projections for how this could all go, from the Post: "In the House, Republicans hold the slimmest of majorities, with 218 seats (and one independent who caucuses with them) to the Democrats' 214. The GOP is on defense in 16 seats rated toss-ups by the Cook Political Report, compared with six Democrats. On Sept. 25, Cook shifted 15 races toward the Democrats and projected them to take over the House….If Democrats win the popular vote by 10 points this year—their current average lead in polls—they would pick up a projected 33 seats, according to Mindset, a Washington advisory firm."

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump claimed, at a weekend rally in Ohio, that if Republicans just get out and vote "we're gonna win and we're gonna win big and we're gonna shove it up their asses."

The shoving-it approach doesn't seem likely to work. One possibility is that redrawn district maps will play a larger role than currently anticipated, or that Republicans have forecast certain districts to be more solidly red than they will actually be in reality. "Republicans hoped to move 16 districts to the right with new maps in Texas (five districts), Florida (four), Ohio (two), Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee (one each)," notes the Post. "Democrats responded with five districts in California, and courts overturned the Missouri map and added a Democratic-leaning seat in Utah, cutting the Republicans' theoretical edge to nine."

That said, Republicans are outspending Democrats in many races, and Democratic primaries have in some places resulted in more radical candidates—think of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan going up against Republican Mike Rogers for a totally open U.S. Senate seat—whose success or failure is a bit harder to anticipate.

Speaking of the Senate: Republicans hold 53 seats to Democrats' 47 (counting two independents who caucus with the Democratic Party), so Democrats need to flip four. The prospects for Democratic dominance in the Senate are slimmer than in the House, as 23 of the 35 seats up for grabs this year are in states Trump won in 2024. Ones to watch include Texas, where Democrat James Talarico (who has tried to carve out a religious, appealing-to-normies, moderate vibe) is up against scandal-plagued Republican Ken Paxton, and Maine, where Democrat Troy Jackson inherited the Platnermentum and looks possibly able to unseat Susan Collins.

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Scenes from New York: "At the tip of Lower Manhattan, dozens of vendors approach wandering tourists hawking tickets for boat rides to the Statue of Liberty. But those purchases often come with a catch: The ticket buyers cannot step onto Liberty Island," reports The New York Times. "Unbeknown to many visitors, only one vendor—Statue City Cruises—is sanctioned by the National Park Service to dock at the home of Lady Liberty. Statue City Cruises sells tickets online and out of Castle Clinton National Monument, a historical fort in the Battery near the water. The peddlers whom sightseers first encounter outside the park can sell tickets only for boat tours that cruise past one of the country's most recognized monuments. A new City Council bill, backed by some local leaders, could curb what they call deceptive tactics used to dupe unsuspecting visitors. The legislation would create revocable licenses for the tour operators who employ the vendors and would give the city the authority to impose hefty fines against companies whose sellers mislead customers."

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QUICK HITS

• "In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a 'moral patient', and that as such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its 'model welfare,'" writes Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. "If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It's easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it's hard to imagine how we could control such an entity." Suleyman rightly notes the circular reasoning present in how Anthropic is training Claude, having fed the model their constitution about its welfare before "teach[ing] it to incorporate these ideas about its own moral status as desirable and intended behaviors" which "Claude then reflects these ideas back to its developers and users" which those developers and users might plausibly "take as indications that it may therefore be a moral patient with an 'inner self.'" Claude's constitution, marked up by Suleyman, can be found here.
• Interesting:

98% of US households aren't paying for AI yet

More charts in State of Markets II: https://t.co/MTaxKUxa2w https://t.co/vM9ycHFuVD pic.twitter.com/wzeMP93S3a

— a16z (@a16z) October 1, 2026

• "The euro fell to its weakest level since May 2025, as France's deepening fiscal crisis and the prospect of fresh political upheaval in the region rattled European markets," reports Bloomberg.
• New York Governor Kathy Hochul has appointed the state's attorney general, Letitia James, to be special prosecutor in the Cornell rape case. "In a lawsuit filed last month, the woman, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, accused several men of rape while coercing her to take drugs," reports The New York Times. "None of the seven men named in the suit have been charged with a crime, and all have denied wrongdoing. Four said that they had consensual sexual contact at the fraternity house with the woman, and the others have denied participating." It's not clear what exactly James intends to do. The alleged victim, called Jane Doe, changed her account, having initially presented the sexual encounter as consensual before weeks later requesting a rape kit and speaking with the police. And the fact that Doe voluntarily consumed alcohol and ketamine that night, as opposed to being covertly drugged, makes the case even harder to prosecute.