Rural America has moved toward strong Republican voting even though Republican governance helps explain worse health outcomes in rural areas, from hospital closures to opioid policies. Michael Shepherd finds that rural areas disproportionately suffer from Republican policies but Republicans successfully blame Democrats for worse health outcomes, especially when Democratic policies can be framed as helping immigrants or racial minorities. There’s no obvious way out for Democrats, who own health policy and its outcomes.

Polarized politics is not leaving much room for agreement on economic regulation, even as inequality and business power grow. But Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee find that corporate scandals can often mobilize the public and wider interests to overcome big business power, including after the financial crisis. They argue that this kind of populism can be a useful form of backlash to break through in our calcified political system.

Donald Trump has not been a favorite of university professors or public intellectuals, but he does have a base in some elements of political theory. What are their ideas and did they help bring us Trumpism? Laura Field tracks the intellectual parts of the movement and their relationship to mainstream political figures and activists. From the Claremont Institute to national conservatism, they were born of a deficit in defenses of liberal democracy. But there are many disagreements and odd theoretical turns. It took some opportunistic moments to unite the disparate strands. But these theorists have had a real impact in Republican politics and may shape the future of American government.

The 2026 election will decide who controls the House and Senate for the duration of Trump’s presidency. Trump’s approval is low and public opinion is moving against his policy ideas. The historical pattern suggests Democrats are on the way to big congressional gains. Carlos Algara studies 80 years of high-frequency data on generic ballot polls and election results. Presidential approval and the ideological direction of public opinion consistently predict congressional vote choices. Like this year, both usually move against the president in midterms. Neither economic statistics and perceptions nor the degree of partisan competition matters independently of those patterns. Generic ballot polls reliably predict seat gains, though a lot more for the House than the Senate.

Legislators spend considerable time dialing for dollars to support their party, even if they themselves are not in electoral danger. That helps them move up the party leadership ladder, but does not help them achieve their policy goals. Michael Kistner finds that when legislators spend a lot of time raising money, they spend less making policy. By rewarding fundraising, parties miss out on both diverse leaders and effective legislators. But states that reform their campaign finance system are able to make more landmark policies. 

AI tool improvement is compounding fast enough for researchers to start using tools like Claude Code for real social science tasks. What are the early lessons from using AI to conduct research? Will it just mean more slop papers and slop reviewers? Or will it lower barriers to exploration, replication, and robustness, with findings accumulating and spreading faster? Andy Hall designed and executed an extension of his research paper with AI in an hour. He’s now compared his results to an extension by hand and created a tool to allow readers to make their own design choices. We discuss the early evidence on how AI has changed research output and quality. The future of research is coming fast.

Some Americans prefer obedient, respectful, and well-mannered children and others prefer independent, curious, and self-reliant kids. And that divide is a surprisingly broad window into contemporary political views and partisan choices. How did we become increasingly divided by our preferences for order over independence? Christopher Federico and Christopher Weber find that authoritarian values, measured by these parenting preferences, increasingly structure Americans’ attitudes toward social and cultural issues and their political predispositions. Now that the parties divide on cultural concerns, especially in the Trump era, these attitudes increasingly drive White Americans’ partisanship and vote choices.