A rare humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine’s front-line Kherson region that allowed civilians to evacuate the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky ended on Sunday night.
The localised ceasefire was due to end at 22:59 Ukrainian time (21:00 GMT). While the truce had held since it was implemented last week, fighting had continued elsewhere.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had struck energy infrastructure in four regions overnight on Saturday, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power. Some connections were restored on Sunday.
Another overnight strike killed two people, including a 13-year-old girl, in the Vinnytsia region, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine hit a major missile fuel producer in Russia’s Rostov region, which caused a fire and damaged four production facilities, Zelensky said.
In Ukraine, repair works to restore power continued throughout the day. Most customers in the Dnipropetrovsk region had their connections restored by early evening, but more than 60,000 were still without power, the governor said.
Because of regular attacks on energy infrastructure, emergency power cuts have been introduced across the country. Even in the capital Kyiv, electricity is cut off for most of the day, and water supplies are also disrupted.
Zelensky said in a social media post that the intensity of Russian strikes has been “extremely high” over the past week, adding that Russia was “trying to take maximum advantage of the shortage of ballistic missile interceptors”.
He added that “every day” Ukraine communicated its need for Patriot missiles – the only effective weapon for downing Russia’s deadly ballistic missiles – to the US, Europe and other partners. He thanked countries for their support so far and longer-term commitments, but called again for more immediate aid.
The limited pause in hostilities, which started on Tuesday, was brokered with the help of US First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo.
It was originally confined to the city of Oleshky, which has been occupied by Russia since the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and was expanded across the wider region of Kherson.
Oleshky had been trapped on one side by the Dnipro river and the other by Russian forces, with routes out mined and subject to drone attack.
Residents trapped there were suffering severe shortages of food, water and electricity, with many resorting to cooking garden weeds to survive.
The truce allowed for Oleskhy residents to evacuate if they wanted, and there were emotional scenes on Saturday of reunions between loved ones who hadn’t seen eachother for years.
There are Ukrainian military positions just 5km (3.1 miles) from Oleshky, but evacuees had to travel through Russian-occupied territory to southern Russia, where they flew to Belarus, before finally being driven across Ukraine’s northern border.

The Michigan race has become a source of discomfort for Democrats in the final days of a campaign season that has otherwise put Republicans on defense, trying to stave off Democratic advances in deeply conservative corners of the country. President Trump was scheduled to travel on Sunday to Iowa and Kansas, two conservative states that have turned into Senate battlegrounds.
Nationally, the Senate battle is a tossup, but strategists in both parties say Democrats are in a strong position to reclaim the House. The party that holds the White House typically loses seats in Congress in midterm elections.
Republicans have been weighed down by high prices and Mr. Trump’s unpopularity but are trying to exploit the Democratic infighting to flip the Senate seat in Michigan.
Dr. El-Sayed was attending a church service in Detroit that was intended to be a unity gathering with Ms. Stevens, whom he narrowly defeated in the primary in August, in an effort to move past her recent criticisms of him. But that plan fell apart this weekend, with Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed publicly feuding over U.S. policy on Israel.
On Saturday, Dr. El-Sayed urged Ms. Stevens to stay away from the event, while an adviser to Representative James E. Clyburn — a South Carolina Democrat who was taking part in the event — said Ms. Stevens was still welcome.
Just before Dr. El-Sayed took the stage, Ms. Stevens showed up at Perfecting Church in Detroit with Mr. Rogers.
The messy fight between Democrats escalated hours before Mr. Trump was scheduled to speak in Dubuque, Iowa, in the afternoon, before a rally in Salina, Kan. He won both states by double digits in 2024, but elevated gasoline, diesel and fertilizer prices, which were driven up by the Iran war, have rattled their agriculture-heavy economies.
Democrats believe they have a chance to ride voters’ economic discontent to Senate victories in both states. In Iowa, Representative Ashley Hinson, a Republican, faces Josh Turek, a Democratic state lawmaker. In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican, is trying to fend off the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a centrist Democrat.
Mr. Trump, who spent Saturday holding tele-rallies in Florida, shrugged off the political headwinds facing his party, telling reporters that “the country has never done better.”
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Wealth tax: California voters are considering a proposition that would charge a one-time, 5 percent tax on the wealth of residents worth more than $1.1 billion. At stake is a potential revolution in U.S. taxation. Read more ›
TV ads: Almost half the political spending in the midterm elections has been directed toward local television. Though broadcast TV may not be what it once was, some consultants still see it as a key to reaching voters. The election may show whether that calculus is shifting. Read more ›
New England power broker: Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, is facing a difficult path to re-election. Her political career has been a lesson in the accrual and use of power. Read more ›
He’ll stand with them
Paxton only looks at his ambition
The hero of this corrido, a traditional Mexican narrative ballad, was James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. The song was an ad commissioned by Lone Star Rising, a super PAC backing Mr. Talarico, and it was performed by Latin Grammy winner Salvador “Chava” Chavez.
In the race for Senate, Texas culture has become its own battleground.
From cowboy boots to a “Friday Night Lights”-inspired bus tour and an appearance at a Kacey Musgraves concert, Mr. Talarico has embraced familiar Texas touchstones on the campaign trail. His Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, has drawn on the oil industry, conservative values and cowboy mythology.
Mr. Paxton has leaned heavily on traditional imagery of Texas.
One advertisement celebrates the state’s oil and beef industries, accompanied by images of pump jacks and cowboys on horseback. Other ads have attacked Mr. Talarico over his past comments about reducing meat consumption and his positions on gender identity, presenting him as a candidate whose values are fundamentally at odds with those of Texas.
The cultural shorthand is clear. Mr. Paxton’s Texas is a place of oil fields, cattle ranches and traditional values, a state whose identity is something to be defended against change.
Both he and Mr. Talarico are making a case not just for how Texas should be governed, but for what it means to be Texan.
“James Talarico belongs in California, not Texas,” Mr. Paxton wrote on X earlier this month, echoing attacks on the campaign trail that have cast the eighth-generation Texan as out of step with his home state.
But it was Mr. Paxton who spent part of his childhood in California, where his father was stationed with the United States Air Force, a point that Mr. Talarico has seized upon.
“I believe anyone can be a Texan,” Mr. Talarico said at an October rally in Plano. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an eighth-generation Texan like me, or a California transplant like Ken Paxton.”
He added, “What makes a Texan is not in the boots or in the truck; it is deep in the heart.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Talarico has made a point of flexing his Texas bona fides: He is rarely seen without his Lucchese cowboy boots and drives a Chevrolet Colorado pickup with a bumper sticker that says “Less Honkin’ More Tonkin.’”
His campaign tour, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts” is a reference to the beloved TV series “Friday Night Lights,” which immortalized small-town Texas football. And after a nearly 10-day absence last month that he attributed to the flu, he made his first public reappearance at Austin City Limits, the city’s signature music festival.
“Texas is a very proud state,” said Sharon Jarvis, a political communication researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “You can see just how proud they are, how important these symbols are, and the rhetorical work that these symbols do.”
Earlier this year, during a surprise appearance with Barack Obama, Mr. Talarico’s seemingly innocuous taco order — potato, egg, and cheese — sent the internet into a tailspin. Mr. Talarico has also made appearances at a Whataburger, the state’s most loved fast-food chain.
Mr. Paxton’s supporters, meanwhile, have drawn upon a different set of cultural references, invoking the Alamo and the state’s frontier mythology to challenge Mr. Talarico’s Texas credentials.
At one October rally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick recited lyrics from a Marty Robbins song about the Alamo, summoning one of the state’s most enduring symbols of sacrifice and independence. Mayes Middleton, a Republican state senator, took aim at Mr. Talarico’s cowboy boots, accused him of wearing a zip-up pair. They were not.
In Texas, where the distinctions between Wranglers and Levi’s jeans, or the amount of dirt on one’s boots (Mr. Paxton also wears Luccheses), function as subtle cues of cultural legitimacy, even the smallest decisions can become politically fraught.
Take “The Great Tamale Incident.”
In 1976, President Gerald Ford, campaigning for re-election, stopped at the Alamo in San Antonio, where he was offered a plate of tamales. He proceeded to bite into it without removing the corn husk, a culinary faux pas that would come to haunt him.
Mr. Talarico, by contrast, has sought to make room for a more expansive definition of Texas identity.
“We’re this big mash-up of all these different people, all these different cultures, all these different friends,” he said during his stump speech in Plano earlier this month. “Think about Tejano music. If you’re listening to a Selena song, you’re hearing Spanish vocal styles from Northern Mexico, but you’re also hearing polka dance rhythms from Czech and German immigrants.”
In a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in nearly four decades, these cultural touchstones may serve yet another function: to make the prospect of Democratic representation feel a little more familiar.
Jesus Jiménez and Lauren McGaughy contributed reporting.
There have been similar attempts to fool the electorate with same-name candidates under other election systems in Alaska and elsewhere.
“I mean, there it is,” said Judy Eledge, a longtime conservative activist in Alaska and chairwoman of the campaign for Ballot Measure 2, the effort to repeal Alaska’s current electoral system that voters will decide next week alongside the race for U.S. Senate. “They’ve done our work for us.”
A similar referendum two years ago lost by 737 votes. Backers of the system still say it encourages bipartisanship and gives voters an extra layer of protection against dirty tricks and bogus candidates by offering multiple choices.
“This situation is actually an object lesson in why you need ranked choice voting: You can’t have a spoiler when voters have multiple options,” said Joelle Hall, a longtime labor leader working against Ballot Measure 2.
But that argument got much more difficult to make after The New York Times reported a successful effort by Democrats to recruit a candidate named Dan Sullivan to appear on the ballot alongside Senator Dan Sullivan, the incumbent Republican whom Ms. Peltola, a former Democratic House member, hopes to defeat.
Besides Ms. Peltola and the two Sullivans, another name is on the ballot, Gerald Heikes, a conservative Republican and frequent candidate who said he too was recruited to run for the Senate by an outsider. A liberal political action committee is promoting Mr. Heikes in hopes of siphoning still more votes from the incumbent.
So two of the four choices may be on the ballot because of skulduggery.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, a conservative Republican leaving office in December, told Fox News this week that “we wouldn’t be having this conversation if we didn’t have ranked choice voting.”
Under current law, candidates for state and federal office in Alaska compete in one open, nonpartisan primary, with the top four advancing to November. Voters rank them in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place finisher is eliminated and those votes are redistributed according to voters’ next choices. The process repeats until someone wins a majority of the remaining votes.
Ballot Measure 2 would return Alaska to primaries open only to voters registered to a particular party. That would be followed by a traditional general election where voters choose just one candidate. The initiative would also repeal campaign-finance disclosure requirements adopted with the current system. Proponents of the current system have made the loss of that transparency the heart of their argument to voters.
Even before the controversy over the two Dan Sullivans, the ballot measure was emerging as a proxy fight in a broader national battle over how America votes. Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, and Jeff Yass, a billionaire, donated heavily to the repeal effort, while Michael Bloomberg, Marc Merrill and Kathryn Murdoch, themselves deep-pocketed donors, backed the campaign to keep the system.
The Times investigation has put proponents for the ranked-choice system in the awkward position of arguing that this kind of attempt to mislead could happen under any voting system because it’s comparatively easy for people to file to run in Alaska.
“This has nothing to do with ranked-choice voting,” said Scott Kendall, an Anchorage lawyer who designed the system. “It’s just a dirty trick.”
Ms. Peltola’s effort to unseat Senator Sullivan is critical to Democratic hopes of retaking the chamber. In response to the allegations of chicanery, Vice President JD Vance told reporters Thursday, “It seems to me that you have an election, the person who wins the most votes should win.”
President Trump said on a Kansas City radio broadcast, “You need about a 190 I.Q.” to understand the system,” though each ballot has fairly simple instructions and the state elections division, overseen by a Republican lieutenant governor, took pains to differentiate the candidates: Dan S. Sullivan is identified on the ballot as the incumbent and a registered Republican, while Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. has no identification next to his name.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting say it just gives voters more than one chance to decide who they support — and a simple solution, supporters note, to any confusion about which Dan is which: Rank them both.
Alaskans who rank Daniel J. Sullivan or Mr. Heikes first could still help Senator Dan S. Sullivan win, provided they also rank him ahead of Ms. Peltola. Only if they rank Ms. Peltola higher, or leave the incumbent off their ballots entirely, could the maneuver deprive him of votes he might otherwise receive.
Alaska Republicans have a history of refusing to rank their choices, and the senator’s latest radio ad features a catchy jingle encouraging people to rank “Dan S., Daniel, Gerry, just don’t rank Mary.”
“Republicans can be very stubborn,” Ms. Eledge said. “Some of them don’t like the system, so they don’t use it.”
That approach could be even more consequential in the race for governor, also on this year’s ballot.
A Democrat hasn’t won the job since 1998, but Democratic candidates finished first and second in the top-four August primary, which featured 17 candidates — 12 of them Republicans.
The second-place Democrat dropped out to clear a path for the other, a former state legislator, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. The top Republican finisher, Bernadette Wilson, urged the other two Republicans on the November ballot to do the same, but they refused. Earlier this month, President Trump backed Ms. Wilson and called on the other two Republicans to leave the race.
It all has some conservatives worried their voters will ignore repeated party instructions to “rank the red” and instead list only one candidate.
A similar approach helped Ms. Peltola defeat two Republicans, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, in a 2022 U.S. House race. The combined first-choice vote share for the two Republicans exceeded Ms. Peltola’s. But about a fifth of Mr. Begich’s voters only ranked him. When he fell out of the race, Ms. Peltola expanded her lead to win.
Polls have shown Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins leading the governors race, and he has promised to build a politically balanced cabinet and work closely with Republicans and independents in the legislature, which has been governed by a bipartisan coalition.
Proponents of the current system say its repeal could make such cooperation more difficult, by bringing back partisan primaries, which favor the extremes in both parties and gives Republican and Democratic leaders far more power to keep members focused on the party line.
That’s exactly what Ms. Eledge and other opponents of the current system want.
She’s eager, for example, to punish Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, for her recent cross-party endorsement of Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins.
If Ballot Measure 2 passes, Ms. Eledge predicted, “she won’t run again.”
She added, “she knows she wouldn’t make it out of the primary.”
Of course, Ms. Murkowski could do what she did in 2010 when she lost the Republican primary to a hard-line conservative: launch a successful write-in campaign, without ranked-choice.
That vision could still come to at least partial fruition if Proposition 40 passes. But the path through California to a federal wealth tax, a progressive dream for years, now looks like it could be a circuitous one, if not a dead end.
Polls have shown limited support for Proposition 40, which would charge a one-time, 5 percent tax on the wealth of Californians worth more than $1.1 billion. Some recent surveys suggest the ballot measure may even fail. Billionaires have blanketed California’s airwaves with ads claiming that the tax could expand to apply to everyone.
Democrats and labor unions, meanwhile, are divided over the tax. Groups representing teachers, doctors and firefighters warn that Proposition 40 could wind up harming the state budget in the long run if it drives entrepreneurs away from California. Many Democrats across the country have kept their distance from the proposal, as they assess its popularity and the potential problems with a federal version of a wealth tax.
However the Nov. 3 vote turns out, the proponents and opponents of the billionaire tax agree that its importance goes well beyond California. At stake is a potential revolution in U.S. taxation. The once-radical concept of taxing wealth may soon gain a foothold in the nation’s most populous state. Or it may be dealt a surprising setback in a popular vote, puncturing the hope that such a policy would draw broad support.
“The whole country is watching what you are doing here,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, told a crowd of supporters in California last month.
For decades, the United States has relied on taxes on income — largely the wages people earn working — to fund federal and state governments. Money made on stocks, bonds and other holdings is generally only taxed when the assets are sold, and the paper gains become cash income. But as the nation’s richest people have seen the value of their financial portfolios soar, progressive policymakers have sought to tax their assets before they are sold, by creating a wealth tax.
During the last competitive Democratic presidential primary, in 2020, progressive candidates such as Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, made wealth taxes a central part of their platforms. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. eventually endorsed a plan, called the billionaire minimum income tax, that would have taxed unrealized gains, a form of wealth taxation. Donors to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign pushed her to drop the Biden plan once she took over the Democratic ticket in 2024.
Passage of Proposition 40 in California, especially by a healthy margin, could make the idea of a wealth tax more palatable to Democrats who run in the party’s next presidential primary. Some progressive candidates are likely to adopt a wealth tax as part of their platform in any case. But a strong showing for the idea in California could convince others to put a version of the idea on their agendas.
A loss or even a narrow victory could have the opposite effect. An internal document from a group opposing the tax said it seeks to “chill wealth tax efforts nationally” by defeating Proposition 40, according to previous reporting by The New York Times.
Some potential Democratic presidential candidates have already taken a stance on Proposition 40, including Representative Ro Khanna of California, who has campaigned in favor of the tax, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who has opposed it. Mr. Newsom has said he supports raising other taxes on billionaires at the federal level.
“If Prop. 40 goes down in California, I think it’s going to make, not all of the candidates, but it’s going to make a few of the 2028 candidates rethink how they slot that into their presidential policy agenda,” said Zach Moller, the senior director of the economic program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If it goes the other way, maybe that makes it seem like it’s a better idea.”
A wealth tax would be a fundamental change in the tax system, raising complicated questions for tax collectors. That includes how to value holdings, like privately owned businesses, that may not have an existing price. Even for billionaires who derive their wealth from the publicly traded stocks of companies they founded, collecting the tax could be complicated if they do not have enough cash to pay it without selling many of their holdings.
The economists and tax lawyers who crafted the California billionaire tax believe that their design has resolved those issues, creating a blueprint for federal and other state policymakers.
“If California enacts a wealth tax, it will begin raising substantial revenues by 2027, and by 2028 we will have actual numbers and data and experience,” said David Gamage, a tax law professor at the University of Missouri who helped draft the tax. “And it will be a lot harder for the opposition to make all these absurd claims, because there will be real experience on the ground we can look to.”
But there are several key differences between the California billionaire tax and what a federal wealth tax could look like. Proposition 40 is a one-time tax, while a federal version would likely be an annual levy. Then there is the fact that much of the revenue from the California billionaire tax would be dedicated to backfilling cuts to the state’s Medicaid program, a consequence of a law President Trump signed last year.
Funneling the receipts from the billionaire tax toward a specific purpose, rather than feeding them into the overall budget like a federal wealth tax likely would, has fractured the idea’s support in California. Some unions have objected to the fact that the tax would not help with the state’s other funding needs. And the head of the health care workers union that sponsored the ballot initiative, Dave Regan, is a polarizing figure in California politics.
As a result, some progressives in Washington appear to be hedging their bets about the outcome of the referendum. Opponents of the tax have also put other initiatives on the ballot that could cancel out Proposition 40 even if it passes, further scrambling the potential meaning of the results next week.
“The unique nature of this tax design, the unique nature of California—I don’t know how much people in other states or at the federal level will glean from the outcome here, either for good or bad,” said Bharat Ramamurti, who worked in Mr. Biden’s White House and is a former aide to Ms. Warren.
The California plan and a potential federal wealth tax also differ in how easy they would be to avoid — and how susceptible they are to legal challenges.
State-level taxes are comparatively easy to escape by moving to another state, while a federal wealth tax could apply to U.S. citizens even if they leave the United States. Several high-profile billionaires, including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, took steps to leave California before the tax’s residency deadline at the start of the year. Those departures could reduce the revenue collected by the tax, as well as leave California without the income taxes that the departed billionaires would have paid the state over time.
Josh Rauh, an economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, has estimated that the billionaire tax could end up costing California more money than it generates. Mr. Rauh, who opposes Proposition 40, said in an interview that he thinks the flight of billionaires, as well as the possible legal challenges to the tax, would ultimately set a bad precedent for wealth taxation, if it passes.
“I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as proponents might think to put in a wealth tax and collect the wealth,” he said.
A federal wealth tax, while not facing the same challenge of potential tax flight, would come with an arguably more serious risk of legal challenges. Progressives and other liberal tax experts worry that the current, conservative-led Supreme Court would rule that a federal wealth tax is an unconstitutional “direct tax.” Those concerns have only grown more acute after several Biden initiatives, including the cancellation of student debt, were thrown out by the Supreme Court. Some, like Mr. Gamage, still believe a wealth tax would be constitutional.
Whether it’s through a wealth tax or another mechanism, Democrats in California and on the presidential campaign trail will keep trying to raise taxes on the rich. Lorena Gonzalez, who leads the California Federation of Labor Unions, said the campaign in California had brought attention to the concentration of wealth and power among billionaires, setting the stage for more proposals to address the stratification of the economy.
“I mean, shoot, put a bigger tax on yachts,” she said. “The point is: Should we tax billionaires? Should we do some massive taxes on billionaires to unrig the economy? Ultimately that’s not going to stop with this vote.”
A funny thing happened, though, as Mr. Sununu took questions about health care, housing and transportation policy from Chamber of Commerce types as they picked at caprese sandwiches. Ms. Smith found herself impressed as Mr. Sununu wove facts and experience into his answers, lifting the energy of the room.
“He’s very substantial,” she said.
But before Mr. Sununu left the function room at the Atlantic Grill in Rye, N.H., Ms. Smith, an independent voter, told him she still couldn’t vote for him.
“Because of Trump, I can’t,” she said. “I told him I can’t take the risk.”
Mr. Sununu, 62, has turned his comeback Senate campaign into a test of a tricky premise: that in 2026, it is possible to be both a Republican and independent of President Trump. Selling this idea is critical for any hope of success in a purple state that has never really warmed to the president. And as he trails Representative Chris Pappas, a Democrat, in the polls, he’s running out of time to convince the Debra Smiths of the world to buy it, particularly in a race that is considered critical to determining the balance of power in the Senate.
He is trying. He once wrote an opinion essay that carried the headline “Trump is a loser.” He has insisted in a television ad that he has never even met the president. He rattles off a laundry list of their policy differences to anyone who will listen. And, perhaps more than any other Republican running for Senate right now, he has asked voters to do something that strains the American political imagination: Consider what happens after Mr. Trump.
“In two years, the president will leave office,” he said on a debate stage last month. “And my question is, where do we go next?”
The unsaid part of his bet is that, deep down, voters want a political future that looks like the past.
A New Hampshire dynasty
New Hampshire Republicans have lost every race for the House and the Senate since the dawn of the Trump era, often by quite a lot, even as they have won office at the state level. But the party saw a ray of hope in the Sununu name, which is synonymous with the flinty, establishment Republicanism that used to be a lot more common in New England. Mr. Sununu’s father, John H. Sununu, served as governor for three two-year terms in the 1980s before serving as chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush.
National Republicans had tried unsuccessfully to convince Chris Sununu, Mr. Sununu’s charismatic younger brother and a former governor, to run for the Senate in 2022 against the incumbent Democrat, Maggie Hassan. By early 2025, they were seeking to lure John E. Sununu into the 2026 race. But when Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the longtime Democratic incumbent, announced she would retire, Chris Sununu coyly hinted he might run for the Senate after all. A person familiar with the recruiting efforts said that national Republicans checked in to gauge how serious he was — nobody wanted two Sununus on the ballot, after all — but Chris ultimately demurred.
Today, the campaign signs dotting the state’s landscape read, simply, “Sununu Senator,” without specifying which one is actually running. Democrats have conducted private polling to see if voters know which family member is on the ballot. They say confusion abounds.
One reporter’s text message meant for John E. Sununu recently made it, instead, to his father.
“You have reached the old ancient former Gov. of New Hampshire,” came the reply, which concluded, “not the young dynamic Sen.”
The current candidate says there is no confusion. “Voters absolutely know who I am,” he said.
Mr. Sununu first ran for Congress 30 years ago and held the seat currently occupied by Mr. Pappas for three terms. He won his Senate seat in 2002, in a strong year for Republicans in the wake of Sept. 11, and lost it to Ms. Shaheen in the wave that accompanied the election of Barack Obama in 2008. (He then pursued a lucrative career working at a lobbying firm and sitting on corporate boards.)
On the campaign trail, he tells war stories from another era. He can be trusted to stand up to Mr. Trump, he says, because he stood up to President George W. Bush, insisting that the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, include more protections for civil liberties. He can be trusted to be bipartisan, he says, because he cosponsored legislation with Hillary Clinton. He was the first Republican to call for the firing of Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general for Mr. Bush. (Mr. Gonzales resigned in 2007 after a standoff with congressional critics over the Justice Department’s handling of terrorism investigations and the firing of U.S. attorneys.)
“I think all of those things reinforce a reputation for independence and for directness and honesty,” he said in an interview.
And did his family name help?
“Sure,” he said, quickly changing the subject to how, in 2024, he endorsed former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina for president over Mr. Trump.
Endorsed by the president
In February, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Sununu, saying he would work “tirelessly to advance our America first agenda.”
It was a signal to the party to ignore Mr. Sununu’s primary opponent, another former Republican senator named Scott Brown. But it gave Mr. Pappas his biggest attack line: that, for all his claims of independence, Mr. Sununu is as beholden to Mr. Trump as anyone in a Republican Party that has shown total fealty to the president. Mr. Pappas has also depicted him as squishy on Mr. Trump, saying that Mr. Sununu’s opposition to the war in Iran, for instance, has bloomed only alongside its unpopularity.
Mr. Sununu has tried to keep his focus on his state.
“My focus has been on New Hampshire, on the economy, jobs, affordability, and that message has resonated, and that’s why this is a race that a year ago people didn’t think would be competitive,” Mr. Sununu said.
A New York Times/Siena University poll released in late September found Mr. Pappas with a five-point lead — a sign that Mr. Sununu is running significantly more competitively than the state’s last two Republican Senate nominees. One of them, Corky Messner, lost to Ms. Shaheen by nearly 16 percentage points in 2020; the other, Don Bolduc, lost to Senator Maggie Hassan by 9 points. (In a twist, Mr. Bolduc has endorsed Mr. Pappas.)
In that poll, Mr. Sununu’s favorability rating was slightly higher than Mr. Pappas’s, at 45 percent to 43 percent. And 48 percent of voters said Mr. Sununu would better handle issues related to the cost of living; 46 percent said that about Mr. Pappas.
But 60 percent of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump, and 54 percent said they wanted a candidate who would provide a check on him.
‘Existential threat’
As he spoke to the Seacoast Chamber Alliance late last month, Mr. Sununu seemed, at times, to be inhabiting a kind of Brigadoon where there was no President Trump.
He called for term limits in Congress, lamented the unbalanced state of the federal budget and eagerly parried questions about Social Security, going deep into the weeds.
Mr. Pappas had addressed the group first. When he finished, Jimmy Dykes, an independent voter from the coastal town of Hampton, asked why the congressman had not been more visible in that community. But Mr. Dykes said he was planning to vote for Mr. Pappas, anyway.
He associated Mr. Sununu with the wars that began during his tenure in Congress, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said he simply couldn’t trust him to deal with Mr. Trump, who he believes is an “existential threat.”
Mr. Dykes was, however, considering voting for Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican who has also stayed well away from Mr. Trump. She used to have the job Mr. Sununu wants but narrowly lost re-election to the Senate the night Mr. Trump was elected in 2016. Now, she appears to be cruising to re-election as governor — becoming one of her party’s bright spots in a difficult year.
Mr. Sununu, for his part, declined to say what he thought the Republican Party should look like after Mr. Trump is gone. But does he want to help shape it?
“Absolutely.”
Bayliss Wagner contributed reporting.
Advertisers, following the changing viewing habits of Americans, have increasingly shifted their marketing dollars to social platforms, streaming channels and other digital media. Yet when it comes to federal and state races, politicians and PACs are brushing aside concerns that TV ads are costlier to produce and less efficient in targeting prospective voters — and are showering local stations with billions of dollars.
This election will show how much that calculus still holds in a transformed media environment.
“I think the Democrats and Republicans are both spending a disproportionate amount of their budgets on broadcast TV at this point,” said Danielle Butterfield, a Democratic strategist and the executive director of Priorities USA. “Because you can see so clearly what’s happening on the other side, there’s this muscle memory needing to chase and match.”
Political consultants and television executives argue that while broadcast TV may not be what it once was, those ads can reach a larger swath of the population more quickly than through other media. And that audience watching their nightly news programs, not to mention their favorite sitcoms, dramas and football games, is a devoted one.
“Local anchors and reporters are trusted, familiar voices,” said Gregg Siegel, senior vice president of national sales at Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country’s largest owners of local TV stations. “They don’t just cover the communities they serve. They live there, raise their families there and are part of the fabric of those communities. That connection creates a level of credibility that is difficult to replicate on other platforms.”
The amount of money being spent on political advertising this election cycle is staggering, helping to boost the bottom lines of the biggest local broadcasting companies like Sinclair, Nexstar Media Group, Gray Media, Tegna and the E.W. Scripps Company.
The research firm S&P Global projects broadcast television advertising this year to be 15 percent higher than the last nonpresidential election year in 2022. And political ad revenue alone is expected to account for 16.3 percent of total broadcast revenue for the year, which would be a record for a nonpresidential election year.
During this election cycle, total political advertising is expected to reach $11.6 billion by Election Day, according to AdImpact; $5.6 billion (48 percent) is flowing to broadcast. That dollar figure is even higher than the one during the 2024 presidential race, when $5.3 billion was spent on broadcast advertising, still 48 percent of the total.
That growth is an outlier in the overall advertising market, where TV’s share continues to shrink as do the overall dollars. In 2024, for example, TV made up 15 percent of all ad spending in the United States, according to the research firm eMarketer. This year, projections envision that figure to be 10 percent.
Nowhere is the broadcast TV blitz more evident than in Texas, where more than half a billion dollars will be spent in the Senate runoff, primaries and general election campaigns.
Oscar Rodriguez, the president of the Texas Association of Broadcasters, said stations in all 20 media markets across the state were seeing ad buys, rather than just a few individual markets. “This is an election where clearly every single vote is going to matter,” he said.
In the tight Senate race between Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate, and James Talarico, his Democratic opponent, $220 million had been spent on broadcast ads through Oct. 28, more than half of the total spending, according to AdImpact. The Paxton campaign and its Republican allies account for most of the broadcast TV outlays, and much of that has been supported by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man with deep business ties to Texas.
Nick Maddux, a senior adviser to Mr. Paxton, said that it was most efficient for the campaign to spend money on linear television because of federal rules that ensure candidates (and at least for now, political parties and joint fund-raising committees) get low-cost TV ad rates.
The campaign’s statewide ad onslaught in October resulted in some ad breaks airing three Paxton spots for every one Talarico ad.
“You go big and fast,” Mr. Maddux said.
Luke Warford, a Democratic political consultant in Texas and chairman of the Travis County Democratic Party, said the Talarico campaign had focused more on building Mr. Talarico’s brand on social media. But the campaign and its Democratic allies have still spent heftily on broadcast TV, devoting 45 percent of their budgets to the medium through Oct. 28, according to AdImpact. (Republicans are at 60 percent.)
Advertising on television can be a blunt force approach to reaching prospective voters, particularly in House races where viewers are often bombarded with ads for candidates in districts not their own. Danilo Yanich, a University of Delaware professor who runs the school’s Local Television News Project, said that’s a trade-off campaigns and PACs will take. “They’ll tolerate those inefficiencies because they’re not sure which voters they will not reach if they try to do those directed kinds of advertising campaigns.”
“Local television viewers are very serious voters,” he added.
And the people who watch broadcast television are often those who vote.
“The kinds of people who tend to be very likely to vote in midterm elections tend to lean older,” Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, said. “And those people still watch a whole bunch of broadcast TV.”
There’s another incentive driving this advertising strategy: money. Consultants and media buying firms typically take up to a 15 percent commission on their ad buys, which, given some of the multimillion dollar spends, can quickly add up.
Aaron Evans, a Republican campaign consultant, said that while broadcast had historically “been the beast that moves the numbers,” it was getting less effective every election cycle.
“The thing that is making that industry really outlast its effectiveness is the fact it’s been a cash cow for these consulting firms for decades,” he said.
Some political operatives bemoan what they see as an outdated approach to advertising. During this year’s primaries, several candidates who were vastly outspent on TV ads still prevailed, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who triumphed over his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, in Michigan.
Ms. Butterfield, the Democratic strategist, pointed to internal research from Priorities USA that found that 83 percent of registered voters reported in using YouTube and 82 percent used streaming services in a single week in September, while just 61 percent said they watched linear TV. She said that ads on digital platforms, which were much cheaper than TV ads, could see a higher reach and have a more targeted impact.
“The biggest difference between a broadcast television strategy and a digital strategy is how much the campaign actually uses the internet to not just broadcast and shout at a voter, but understand where that voter is, what they care about,” she said.
Mr. Warford, the Democratic political consultant, said Tuesday’s vote would help answer a question about the broadcast television-heavy ad strategy in support of Mr. Paxton. “Is there an amount of money that can save an incredibly weak candidate in a tough environment at the end?”

President Donald Trump is not running in this year’s midterm elections, but he’d like voters to act as if he is.
“Just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump told a crowd in Mobile, Alabama.
Trump’s argument is simple: When he’s on the ballot, Republicans running for election do well. When he’s not, they don’t. Historically, that’s often − but not always − been true. However, if Americans are judging the GOP based on the economy, their top issue in poll after poll, he may not like how some of them vote.
An AP-NORC poll found 25% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, and a Reuters/Ipsos poll revealed 36% of voters thought Democrats were better poised to tackle the cost of living, compared to 28% who chose Republicans.
Presidents typically have less influence over the economy than some Americans think. The Federal Reserve controls monetary policy. Congress controls the federal budget. External shocks, like the pandemic, are out of their control.
But in his second term, some argue Trump has impacted voters’ wallets in ways his recent predecessors did not. Sweeping tariffs and the Iran war have both driven prices up. Meanwhile, “Trump Accounts” and promised checks aim to give Americans money directly.
Here’s a midterms check-in on the U.S. economy in Trump’s second term:
Consumer sentiment
Trump says the United States has the best economy anywhere in the world.
“There’s no economy like this economy,” Trump told reporters in September. “The only thing we don’t have is good public relations. We don’t seem to be able to get the word across.”
According to the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, which tracks household views on personal finances and broader economic conditions, Americans aren’t feeling it. The index stood at 48 in October. It was little changed from September and still near the record low of 44.8 set in May. The index is down 31.9% from 70.5 in October 2024.
A separate measure of how Americans feel about the economy, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index, rose to 91.7 in October from a revised 84.2 in September, but it remained below its revised October 2024 reading of 109.6.
Inflation
On the presidential campaign trail, Trump routinely promised to lower the cost of living.
“Prices will come down,” Trump told a crowd in Asheville, North Carolina, Aug. 14, 2024. “You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.”
Two years later, some prices for specific goods like eggs have declined, but the cost of living is up by most measures.
Consumer price inflation was up 2.4% over the year in September 2024. Hourly earnings for private nonfarm workers − which rose 4% on average over the year in the same month − were outpacing the rate of price increases.
Today, workers’ wages, which rose 3% on average over the year this September, are not keeping up. Year-over-year consumer prices were up 3.7% in the same month.
Shelter costs, as measured by the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index, rose 6.9% from September 2024 to September 2026. Food prices rose 5.7% over the same period, according to the department’s data.
Gas prices
Before retaking office, Trump promised to bring gas prices down below $2 a gallon.
“It’ll be an economic revival of our country like no one has ever seen before,” Trump said at the Economic Club of New York on Sept. 5, 2024. “Energy was what caused our problem initially. Energy is going to bring us back. That means we’re going down and getting gasoline below $2 a gallon.”
Americans filling up at the gas pump likely already know that is one promise that the president has not been able to keep. Gas prices surged after the start of the Iran war earlier this year. The Russia-Ukraine war and conflict in the Red Sea are also limiting the global oil supply, driving prices higher.
On Oct. 14, the United States set a record. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline remained over $4 more days of the year than ever before, according to GasBuddy data, surpassing the previous annual record of 157 days set in 2022. By September 2024, it was hovering near $3.22, according to AAA.
Diesel prices are also up, disproportionately impacting truckers, fishers and farmers, but also any business that relies on the fuel to transport goods. According to AAA, they were hovering near $6.33 per gallon as of late October.
Jobs
In 2024, Trump vowed his administration would help create millions of jobs.
“We will put more money into your pockets and create millions and millions of new jobs,” Trump said at a rally in York, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 19, 2024. “We’re going to do it like nobody else.”
So far, that pledge has not panned out, according to Labor Department data posted Oct. 29.
During his first year back in office, U.S. employers added 116,000 jobs. So far in 2026, they have added about 612,000, the department estimates.
In comparison, U.S. employers added about 1.46 million jobs in 2024 and about 2.52 million in 2023.
Job growth has slowed over the past two years as companies reassess their budgets and staffing needs in response to tariffs and as they adopt artificial intelligence. Broad economic uncertainty is contributing to what economists call a “low-hire” labor market. Meanwhile, a modest decline in labor force participation has reduced the number of new jobs needed to keep the unemployment rate low.
The unemployment rate is near where it was before Trump retook office. It was 4.1% in September 2024 and 4.2% in September 2026.
Manufacturing
Trump also specifically promised a manufacturing boom.
“America will be a manufacturing nation once again,” he said during his second inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2025.
Today, manufacturing employment is down from about 12.76 million in September 2024 to about 12.65 million in September 2026, according to Labor Department data.
However, so far in 2026, manufacturing jobs are up 72,000. That increase is primarily due to gains in durable goods manufacturing, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
“This is a reversal of the trend inherited from the previous administration, which lost over 200K jobs in its final two years,” the council said in an October report citing the department’s data.
GDP
The White House website’s home page says under Trump, the United States has “surged into a new era of prosperity, marked by record-setting economic growth.”
Economic activity is expanding at a “strong” pace, according to Federal Reserve policymakers. However, U.S. real gross domestic product growth itself hasn’t broken any records since Trump retook office.
Annualized real GDP growth was 2.3% in 2025, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It estimates GDP grew 2.5% in the first quarter, 2.2% in the second quarter, and 3.4% in the third quarter of 2026.
This year’s third-quarter growth estimate surprised forecasters and surpassed their expectations. The Commerce Department said compared to the second quarter, the gains “primarily reflected an acceleration in investment and an upturn in government spending.”
Federal deficit
A little more than a month after his swearing in, Trump told lawmakers he planned to balance the federal budget − something the government hasn’t managed to accomplish since 2001, according to the Treasury Department.
“In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget,” Trump said in an address to a joint session of Congress March 4, 2025. “We’re going to balance it.”
The federal deficit declined from about $1.82 trillion in fiscal year 2024 to about $1.77 trillion in fiscal year 2025, according to Office of Management and Budget data.
However, according to the office’s monthly budget review released Oct. 8, it estimates the federal budget deficit totaled nearly $2 trillion in fiscal year 2026. This year’s jump was driven by increased outlays for net interest on the debt, major benefit programs, defense and education, the office said.
The national debt has also increased over the last two years. The Treasury estimates it was at $40.17 trillion in September 2026, up from $35.46 trillion in September 2024.
Trade deficit
Tariffs remain a cornerstone of Trump’s economic policy in his second term.
His decision to impose import taxes on most countries around the world appeared, at least in part, an attempt to address his longtime dissatisfaction with the U.S. trade deficit.
“We have deficits with almost every country, not every country, but almost, and we’re going to change it,” Trump told reporters Feb. 2, 2025. “It’s been unfair.”
The U.S. goods and services trade deficit was $117.07 billion in February last year as importers rushed orders before anticipated tariffs took effect.
It was $105.57 billion in August this year, down from February 2025, but up from $71.16 billion in August 2024, according to U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis data.
Taxes
While campaigning in 2024, Trump pledged to lower Americans’ taxes.
By one measure, he succeeded. The average tax refund was $3,276 in 2026, up 11.5% from $2,939 in 2025, according to the IRS.
However, because average tax refunds measure the difference between what Americans prepaid during the year and what they actually owed, rather than their total tax liability, they are often an imperfect reflection of Americans’ overall tax burden.
The president also followed through on his campaign promise to restrict taxes on tips and overtime, though reaping the benefits has been difficult for some.
High-income Americans benefited more than most from Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the sweeping spending and tax legislation Trump signed into law in July 2025.
Stock market
The president took credit for stock market gains even before retaking office, referring to them as a result of “the Trump effect” the day before his inauguration in 2025.
On Oct. 17 this year, Trump posted a photo to Truth Social stating the S&P 500 index surged 30% from 5,881 points in December 2024 to 7,651 points in September 2026.
As of late October, S&P 500 annual returns are up about 13% year-to-date. This follows a 16.39% gain in 2025, according to Macrotrends, an investor research platform. Both of these figures represent a slowdown from the index’s 23.31% return in 2024.
Housing affordability
At a 2024 campaign rally, Trump pledged to bring down mortgage rates.
“We will drive down the rates so you will be able to pay 2% again, and we will be able to finance or refinance your homes drastically at much lower costs,” Trump told a Tuscon, Arizona, crowd Sept. 12, 2024.
Since then, mortgage rates are up. The average fixed rate on a 30-year mortgage was hovering above 6% in October 2024 and higher than 7% in October 2026, according to Freddie Mac data.
The median sales price for new homes has fallen. It stood at $415,300 in the third quarter of 2024 and at $393,300 in the third quarter of 2026, according to federal government data.
Meanwhile, an August Redfin report found that Americans need to earn $109,796 to afford the typical home for sale in the United States, down 0.5% from an all-time high of $110,382 in 2025. Still, the income needed to purchase a home is about $22,000 more than what the typical American household earns, the report said.
Benefits
A little more than a week after retaking office, Trump said he was going to “love and cherish” Medicaid and Medicare.
“We’re not going to do anything with that, other than if we can find some abuse or waste, we’ll do something, but the people won’t be affected,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2025.
A few months later, he signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. Soon after, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the law’s changes, including cuts and new eligibility requirements impacting Medicaid and other programs, would affect millions of Americans.
According to an August 2025 analysis by Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, which cited CBO estimates, those changes would increase the number of uninsured people by 1.3 million in 2026 and by 10 million by 2034.

Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City on a simple, focused economic platform: fast and free buses, universal childcare, cheaper groceries, and a rent freeze. His supporters envisioned him ushering in a fresh economic order. His critics feared the worst — a cabal of heavy-handed leftists who would plunge the city into fiscal chaos.
A year after Mamdani’s election, New York’s economy doesn’t look like the stuff of socialist dreams — or capitalist nightmares. Zohranomics is unfolding at a piecemeal pace. Unable to unilaterally raise taxes on the rich, the mayor is championing a pied-à-terre tax on wealthy residents who don’t live in the city full-time (or say so on their tax filings). His municipal grocery store endeavor is a modest five-location work in progress.
The city is focused on the “fast” half of the bus plan and has put the “free” part on the back burner. Like his predecessors, Mamdani is dedicating a lot of time and resources to housing. He orchestrated a rent freeze on 1 million rent-stabilized apartments — one of his most controversial and impactful moves so far, though not unique to his administration. Many of the mayor’s policy moves have been administrative measures: cutting red tape for small businesses, rooting out government inefficiencies, pension maneuvering to balance the city budget. And, the administration is trumpeting small-scale wins on filling potholes and making it easier to cancel subscriptions.
The list of accomplishments sounds more like a standard Democratic think-tank wish-list than a Bolshevik manifesto. Mamdani is governing like a leftist populist with the instincts of a city operations nerd — but his biggest economic bets are yet to be made.
New York is an incredibly rich city, with a private wealth pool of over $3 trillion and an annual GDP of roughly $1.3 trillion. It’s also a city with stark economic divides. It has a 25% poverty rate, meaning more than 2 million New Yorkers live below the poverty line. (In comparison, the national poverty rate is 10%.) From 2019 to 2024, almost two-thirds of New York City’s income growth went to the top 1%, according to the city’s comptroller, compared to 39% nationally. The costs of childcare, housing, and basic necessities are increasingly daunting. Those economic dynamics propelled Mamdani to the mayorship.
The list of accomplishments sounds more like a standard Democratic think-tank wish-list than a Bolshevik manifesto.
“A lot of people love this city, but not as many of them can live here,” the mayor said in a recent podcast interview with comedian Theo Von.
But the immutable truth facing any New York City mayor is that there is not much they can do to influence the economy. Much of New York’s financial engine runs on its own. New York’s state government sets most of the city’s taxes. The national and global economies affect New Yorkers’ pocketbooks, too.
Mamdani’s program is to, where possible, wield the city’s influence to lower costs and shift some of New York’s power structures toward the traditionally less powerful. That means pairing rent regulations with initiatives to stimulate more homebuilding and pressuring the state to secure funding for a new free 2-K program. The city is weighing public options where the private markets fail to deliver, such as the grocery store initiative and new government-backed property and liability insurance for landlords. It’s investing $30 million into an NYU quantum computing lab in exchange for a cut of its profits. And, it’s pushing the idea that the wealthy could stand to chip in more and pay higher taxes.
This is a more expansive vision than a standard anti-poverty agenda — and a politically riskier one. New York is a crowded, raucous city where almost everyone sees themselves as an underdog, from billionaires to bodega owners to beleaguered renters. And when everyone feels like the system is stacked against them, any change is bound to make someone feel newly wronged.
To his progressive allies, Mamdani’s approach is an attempt to prove that local government can directly respond to constituents. The hope is that tackling and touting the little things, like snow shoveling and trash pickup, will build trust that they can use to address the big things. It doesn’t sound as radical as socialism, says Elizabeth Wilkins, the president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, but it’s “radical in the degree to which people have lost faith in the idea that the government cares about how they experience the economy or that the government could do anything about it.”
Housing is the arena where the mayor has made the biggest difference to New Yorkers on both material and rhetorical fronts. In June, the mayor-appointed Rent Guidelines Board voted to enact a two-year rent freeze on about 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City, affecting an estimated 2 million residents. Meanwhile, he has advanced the argument that the root of the city’s affordability crisis is a lack of housing and taken big steps to construct more. He’s set out to build 200,000 more affordable homes and preserve another 200,000 over the next decade. His administration has identified city-owned land that could be turned into housing. They’ve created a task force to speed up affordable housing production and eliminate administrative barriers and delays, from tweaking the city’s housing lottery system to reforming environmental review processes. The mayor has even nudged President Donald Trump to allow building on public sites, such as Sunnyside Yards, a rail hub in Queens.
“Each change may be modest, but they are important and collectively can add up to some meaningful changes,” says Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU, of the administrative efforts.
Early in his tenure, Mamdani launched “rental ripoff” hearings, providing a platform for tenants to air their frustrations. It signaled to the city’s renters that he’s on their side and cast bad landlord behavior as both a housing-quality problem and a consumer-protection problem. Mamdani has extended an olive branch to landlords in announcing an initiative to lower their insurance costs, but the shift in priorities is making many of them feel unfairly targeted.
“The tone put us on edge,” says Ann Korchak, the board president of the Small Property Owners of New York.
Rent freezes aren’t a new idea — they were put in place three times under former Mayor Bill de Blasio on a similar number of rent-stabilized apartments. The policy’s proponents point to that as evidence that the sky won’t fall this time around. Its critics note that the freezes haven’t curbed the upward march of the city’s housing costs in the past and argue that this time would be especially detrimental, since landlords’ costs are higher and increasing faster than they were a decade ago.
Then there’s the question of how the funding will come together for Mamdani’s ambitious housing plans, and how much private developers and lenders will play ball. The rent freeze, which guarantees at least two years of flat revenues for rent-stabilized buildings, could lead to higher borrowing costs and financing challenges for builders, says Howard Slatkin, the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council. Broader economic conditions that shape financing — most notably interest rates — are entirely out of the administration’s control. Building and operating housing is expensive, and “we haven’t yet seen what they are thinking will move the needle on those costs,” Slatkin says. Building code reform, for example, could make the math work better. The administration is looking at it, but it’s a slog.
Not all public land is suitable for housing, as parcels may be awkward shapes and sizes or have zoning and legal limitations. The administration has released a tracker that identifies over 100 city-owned sites it says could yield more than 50,000 homes. Some of this space isn’t empty: In Bensonhurst, the city is seeking to redevelop the existing New Utrecht Library as a brand-new library plus 200 apartments.
The pied-à-terre tax is a financial knock to those subject to it, but it’s a minuscule part of New York’s overall fiscal picture. The mayor’s office estimates the tax could bring in $500 million annually, though the comptroller says it could be $340 million-$380 million, given exemptions and the likelihood some homeowners would change their behavior to avoid the tax. For context, the city’s most recent annual tax revenue was $85.4 billion.
Success depends on how many units are built, and their size, location, and cost. It also matters how fast construction moves, since delays are expensive. By the city’s own estimate, New York needs 700,000 new homes over the next 10 years to address its housing shortage, meaning 70,000 homes a year, well above the net increase of 43,800 new units the city had in 2025. The Mamdani administration itself has acknowledged that it can take eight years for an affordable housing project to be conceived to a family actually being able to move in. It’s seeking to cut eight months from the process and shrink the timeline from endeavors requiring zoning changes by two years.
“To make a serious dent in our housing crisis, we need to build more quickly and efficiently,” Gould Ellen, the professor, says.
Mamdani has recast the deputy mayor for economic development role as deputy mayor for economic justice, a move meant to signal an administration focused on fairness, not only growth. He put in place a tenacious regulator at the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which has tried to convey that the city is willing to use its weight to address relatively mundane headaches by cracking down on bad actors in food delivery, self-storage, and even dentistry. Emily Eisner, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, says she sees much of the DCWP’s actions as “small potatoes” in terms of actual affordability, but there’s something “symbolically important” about people seeing the government stand up for them.
On small business, the administration has released 50 proposed reforms meant to cut red tape. They’ve also put forth ballot proposals to speed up processes for building ramps and sidewalk cafes in public spaces and reduce paperwork for city contractors. On big business, as much as Mamdani’s rhetoric and political affiliation as a democratic socialist spooked some leaders, his mayoralty hasn’t caused a corporate exodus. Anthropic, Fanatics, and Deloitte decided to expand in Manhattan this year. His bet is that corporations will stay and thrive in New York without City Hall bending over backward for them.
The best economic policy may be for the Knicks to win the NBA championship every year, jokes Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance.
“People oftentimes, even more than getting what they want, they want to feel seen and heard,” Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist, political strategist, and Andrew Cuomo ally, says. For CEOs and big business, that’s not happening as it did with other administrations, Tusk says. A City Hall spokesperson points out that the mayor has put together a Business Advisory Council, hosted an international business roundtable during the United Nations General Assembly, and has held multiple meetings with prominent business leaders, including JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon.
New Yorkers may enjoy small financial reprieves, but the bigger challenge is bringing down the cost of bigger-ticket items. Mamdani’s plan to open five city-run grocery stores is unlikely to move grocery prices significantly in a city of over 1,000 grocery stores and 10,000 bodegas and corner stores. The administration says it’s chosen densely populated neighborhoods for the grocery store sites in hope of making a large direct and indirect impact on New Yorkers in those areas.
Julie Samuels, the president and CEO of trade group Tech: NYC, says that Mamdani has moderated in City Hall, though he hasn’t yet focused as much on job growth and economic development as administrations past. One place he has succeeded: the vibes.
“Economic policy is also dictated by whether or not their employees want to be somewhere,” she says. “And if employees want to be in New York, then the tech companies will be here, then the banks will be here.”
Reflected in the nature of Mamdani’s policy proposals is a belief that the city’s livability and affordability problems aren’t reserved for the poor. In turn, his programs are universal instead of means tested, so that any New Yorker can access them, regardless of income. Many middle- and upper-middle-class will be able to put their kids in free 2-K programs and live in rent-stabilized apartments that now won’t get more expensive for a couple of years. If the buses ever do become free, that will apply to everyone who rides them.
The best economic policy may be for the Knicks to win the NBA championship every year, jokes Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance. But that’s in Jalen Brunson’s hands, not Mamdani’s.
Many of Mamdani’s biggest promises can’t be fulfilled in Manhattan but instead up in Albany, where the state legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul have the reins. Any plans to raise taxes or increase the minimum wage depend on a statehouse three hours away.
James Parrott, a labor economist at The New School and the city’s chief economist for two years under former Mayor David Dinkins, says the city has “never had a mayor who has made such a concerted drive to get Albany to do more to help.” Mamdani has campaigned aggressively for Hochul, deploying his armament of clever viral videos to help get her reelected.
Closer to home, a major collision is brewing with city labor. Large public-sector union contracts are coming up for renegotiation, including District Council 37 and the United Federation of Teachers, which each have tens of thousands of members. The city itself is New York’s largest employer. Soon, the mayor will find himself seated across the negotiating table from the labor he pledged to champion on the campaign trail. Because New York City generally relies on pattern bargaining — where one major union’s agreement sets the standard for others — the stakes are high for all of the city’s employees. They’re also high for a mayor who wants to signal that he values the city’s municipal workforce while keeping the city’s finances on a solid footing.
Mamdani will, like every mayor, have to make a number of hard choices, including ones that don’t grab headlines. He sued the New York City Council to block a bill that would grant a one-time $10,000 bonus to public school paraprofessionals because it falls outside collective bargaining. He was able to close the city’s budget gap by restructuring the city’s municipal pension payments, but accounting maneuvers can’t replace structural shortfalls. If tax revenues flatten or state aid from Albany stalls, the administration will have to choose between scaling back on core goals or making painful spending cuts. This isn’t the kind of stuff that goes in a press release or a TikTok video.
“The administration has been really, really focused on getting short-term, press-friendly wins,” says Michael Kinnucan, health policy director at the Fiscal Policy Institute and a longtime progressive activist. “It sends a message about where its concerns are.”
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

A federal judge has rejected McDonald’s request to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging the fast-food giant has defrauded customers about the meat used in its McRib sandwich.
U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed some claims but said, in an opinion issued Oct. 30, that it was premature to to accept the company’s argument that no reasonable consumer could expect the McRib to contain rib meat.
Four plaintiffs in the case, filed in U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois, argue the McRib’s name, its shape, marketing, limited availability, “and premium price causes reasonable consumers to mistakenly believe the sandwich contains the more expensive rib meat,” according to the opinion.
The lawsuit alleges McDonald’s uses lower-grade pork products ​including shoulder, heart, tripe or stomach – and as a result, consumers overpay for the sandwich.
McDonald’s maintained that it does not use hearts, tripe or stomach in the McRib, and ​has always been transparent about its ingredients, in a statement to Reuters. “This lawsuit distorts the ​facts and ⁠the claims are meritless,” the statement said.
McDonald’s has sold the McRib periodically since 1981 and the sandwich is currently available in select U.S. markets. The company contended distinctive product names do not fool reasonable consumers, and the plaintiffs’ preference for a certain cut ​of pork “doesn’t turn McDonald’s ​truthful marketing into ⁠consumer fraud.”
McDonald’s website describes the sandwich only as containing pork, Perry said in the opinion, but “the Court cannot conclude that it would be unreasonable for a consumer to believe that the McRib contains rib meat.”
The judge also said ​ads highlighting the meat’s rib-like shape could support a claim of intent to defraud, though ‌further ⁠proof was needed. “Plaintiffs’ proffered understanding of ‘McRib’ is not unreasonable or fanciful,” Perry wrote.
Thiago Coelho, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said his clients will continue seeking accountability for deceptive marketing.
Contributing: Saleen Martin, USA TODAY, and Reuters.