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Democrats’ wary optimism about the midterms gave way to growing confidence this week.

The party has seen strong post-Labor Day polls in key battlegrounds — and even in traditionally red areas. Recent escalations in the war in Iran, including an attack on a major pipeline in Saudi Arabia, mean the rising gas prices bedeviling Republicans will not be going down anytime soon. Republicans have not been able to bring prices under control more generally. And President Donald Trump’s unpopularity is at near-record levels.

Considering all this, Democrats now think conditions are right for the party to retake control of the House and possibly the Senate later this year.

“If the election were held today, we would win the majority,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Schumer said he felt “considerably more bullish” about Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate than he did a few months ago. He described the environment as uncannily similar to 2006, when discontent with the war in Iraq helped Democrats recapture the Senate and the House.

House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts) said Democrats’ recent momentum is driven by their focus on the economy, with voters believing that the party understands the financial pain they’ve felt in the years since Republicans swept into unified control.

“That is what is driving these polls,” Clark told The Post on Thursday.

Still, Democratic fears remain.

Democrats need at least four more seats to take the Senate majority and would have to win at least two in states Trump carried by double-digit margins in 2024. Republicans are seeking to blunt any Democratic gains by flipping Democratic-held open seats in Michigan and New Hampshire, where polls show competitive races. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the Senate contest in New Hampshire from “Lean Democrat” to “Toss Up” this week.

Republicans focused on keeping control of the House argue that they have a more favorable map, partly because a GOP redistricting effort has limited the number of battleground districts, and partly because they believe that Democratic primary voters nominated weak candidates in a handful of key races.

Then there is the incoming flood of GOP money.

Republicans are set to spend nearly $140 million more on ads than Democrats are in the nine most competitive races in the final weeks of the campaign, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. The disparity is especially yawning in the Senate contest in Texas, where Republicans have reserved $39.6 million in ads and Democrats have reserved just $5.1 million.

On the House side, the National Republican Congressional Committee plans to run coordinated ads in 39 districts, with more than $24 million in ads reserved.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has plans for coordinated ads in 14 districts.

“The Republican campaign engines are firing on all cylinders, and we are burying House Democrats in battleground districts across the country,” said Mike Marinella, spokesperson for House Republicans’ campaign arm. “Republicans have the historic fundraising advantage, a more favorable map, stronger candidates, and the firepower to defy history and grow our House majority.”

Schumer acknowledged Republicans’ financial advantage but said it would not stop Democrats from retaking the Senate.

“We don’t need as much money as them given the political climate, given the terrain,” he said. “All we need is enough to stay in the ballpark and be able to answer them.”

Republicans have begun to openly acknowledge electoral concerns in recent weeks, particularly with polls showing that Democrats are far more eager to vote than Republicans are.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) told reporters Thursday that he was going to Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa to raise money for GOP Senate candidates.

“If you told me six months ago I was going to be having to spend my time in those three states, I wouldn’t have believed you. Those ought to be fat guy layups for us,” he said, though he predicted Republicans would hold those seats.

“The far left, they’re angry,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said this week on the “Pod Force One” podcast, describing this as a “challenging environment” for his party. “They hate President Trump with a burning passion. And they’re going to crawl over broken glass to vote.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) acknowledged Wednesday that Republicans are facing “headwinds” but said the Senate races that will decide control of the chamber remain competitive.

“It’s not a great environment for us,” Thune said. “But we’ve got really quality candidates in all the competitive races, and the polling that we’re seeing in those races shows that these races are tight.”

Republicans have been debating how to increase enthusiasm beyond spending more money. Some, largely those closely tied to the president and his political operation, argue that the path to victory is to re-create the electorate Trump built in 2024. Other Republicans — primarily those in battleground districts where private and public polls show that voters are deeply upset with the president — believe the way to win is to distance themselves from the administration and its policies, a difficult task following a decade of Trump remaking the party in his own image.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Trump said during one of two speeches he gave at the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas recently. “Just one more time.”

Trump has made it difficult for many candidates, especially those in tight races, to embrace this tactic. In large part, that’s because he has repeatedly dismissed the issue that voters say is their main stressor: prices. His trade war has raised prices on goods across the country. And gas prices, which have shot up because of the president’s war against Iran, are nearing $4.50 per gallon on average.

However, speaking at a campaign rally Wednesday in North Carolina, a state he has won in three straight presidential elections, Trump said high fuel prices were “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we have done” in Iran.

A Republican operative working on House races, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, responded to Trump’s comments with an animated image of actor Bryan Cranston screaming, “F—!”

The president has promised to get out the vote for Republican candidates, including those in trouble deep in Trump country. Some have taken him up on his offer, but not every candidate wants him around, and administration officials’ visits to red states have been seen as warning signs for Republicans.

Vice President JD Vance traveled to Kansas this week to stump for Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, who is in a tighter-than-expected race against Democrat Adam Hamilton. Trump and Vance won Kansas by 16 percentage points in 2024.

Vance is also set to campaign in Iowa on Friday. But the state’s Republican Senate nominee, Rep. Ashley Hinson, will not appear next to the vice president. A Hinson spokesperson cited previously scheduled events, but the absence comes as the candidate seeks to tout her bipartisan record in a state Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2024. Hinson is locked in a tight race against Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek.

And in South Florida, an area Trump dominated in 2024, Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar openly broke with the president Thursday.

“Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far,” Salazar says directly to the camera in a new campaign ad. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Democrats say they began to see a change during what was supposed to be Republicans’ hallmark 2026 event: the party’s unorthodox midterm convention. The gathering was billed as a way for the GOP to showcase its front-line candidates, but instead it featured Trump defending his record and pledging to give each American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans hold Congress this year, a proposal many Democrats saw as a sign of desperation.

“We’re not measuring the drapes, but the ground has shifted,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a longtime Democratic operative and top spokesperson at the Democratic National Committee after the 2016 election.

Some Democratic operatives running campaigns said they had been waiting to see whether Republicans would coalesce around a clear affordability message during the Texas event. But when it became obvious that the event would be a Trump-centric celebration that offered no direct case for why Republicans deserved unified control for two more years, their confidence grew.

“Turns out breaking all your campaign promises and doing everything possible to make life more expensive for everyone is bad politics,” said Viet Shelton, spokesperson for House Democrats’ campaign arm. “Shocker.”

The last time Democrats experienced a wave election was in 2018, when the party swept into control of the House two years after Trump’s first presidential win.

Meredith Kelly, a Democratic operative who was the top spokesperson at House Democrats’ campaign arm at the time, said that there are plenty of similarities between that year and this one — primarily around Trump’s unpopularity — but that the biggest difference is how Republicans’ worries are coming from voters who helped them win in 2024, such as rural voters and Black and Latino men.

“Their coalition’s floor is falling out from underneath them,” said Kelly.

The prospect of a wave election has Democratic candidates in districts once thought entirely unreachable for the party feeling like they may have a shot to do the unexpected in November.

Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy veteran running against GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert in a district that spans eastern Colorado, knows that her odds of winning have always been long. Trump won the district less than two years ago by 18 percentage points. But powered almost entirely by anger at Washington and voters’ fears about their personal finances, Laubacher thinks she has an opportunity to take down her outspoken Republican opponent.

“People vote frequently about their pocketbooks and their wallets, but I think the situation is growing ever more fraught for people,” said Laubacher. “Every aspect of their life has become more expensive, and they do not feel that the government is doing anything about any of it.”

Jarrell Dillard contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The top official at the U.S. Postal Service said Thursday that the agency has stopped work on developing a controversial computer system that was central to President Donald Trump’s effort to limit mail voting after the Supreme Court rejected his executive order this week.

“There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything,” postmaster general David Steiner told The Associated Press in an interview.

Steiner, a onetime chief executive of Waste Management, has spent most of the past year atop the postal service navigating political and financial challenges. He’s pressing Congress for changes that would help him resolve what he has called a “liquidity crisis.”

And Trump’s efforts to largely eradicate mail voting turned the postal service into an unlikely arbiter of who is eligible to vote just months before this year’s critical midterm elections, a role Steiner seemingly had little interest in playing. Unlike Trump, who was sharply critical of the Supreme Court decision and ridiculed some of the justices, Steiner offered no assessment of the court’s action.

Steiner also declined to take a position on Trump’s policy, presenting himself as the leader of an “independent agency of the executive branch” whose influence over the president’s order was limited to operational concerns.

“I don’t get to decide what rules that are put on us that I decide to accept or not accept,” he said. “I looked at it more from the execution side.”

The postal service has asserted its independence in the past, including during a 2019 standoff when the first Trump administration sought to pressure the agency as the president was in a dispute with Amazon. Steiner said he wouldn’t get into the “nuance” of that.

But the pressure has grown so intense at points that it’s fueled talk of whether Steiner might resign, a notion he denied.

“There’s no truth to that,” he said. “I think I know the motivation behind it. I think it’s somebody that would like to see me out of a job.”

Inserting the Postal Service into elections

The executive order Trump signed in March directed several federal agencies to develop state citizenship lists. Those lists would have been delivered to an online portal at the Postal Service, which would have been allowed to send mail ballots only to voters who were cleared through the process. Steiner said he knew about the order about a month before it was unveiled but said his focus was largely on implementation, not the policy’s merits.

A whistleblower report released earlier this month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., argued the system was hastily built and riddled with errors.

Steiner said he read “portions” of the whistleblower report and acknowledged the obstacles associated with building such a massive platform quickly. Still, he said he had confidence in colleagues working on the project and had planned to unveil it around Sept. 15.

“There’s absolutely no doubt that we worked fast,” he said. “My personal opinion is it was a monumental task and I’m very proud of our IT department for being able to do it that fast.”

In addition to the voter list, Trump’s order would have required states to adopt a uniform envelope style that included barcodes, something states said would have been arduous so close to the election.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, a memo sent to all postal service employees Wednesday and obtained by the AP said the agency will “not be enforcing any of these new rules in the 2026 federal election.”

“First and foremost, for Election Mail it is business as usual,” according to the memo. “We continue to follow established protocols, and we remain entirely focused on our core mission: delivering the mail safely and securely for voters and election officials across the country.”

Though the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s executive order for this year’s election, Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated he might rule in favor of the administration if the issue comes back before the court at a later time.

Steiner encourages voters to cast ballots early

Steiner said the postal service would still encourage the use of envelopes and barcodes in future elections, which it has long recommended. He said such changes wouldn’t be required but those who don’t comply may have to pay more.

“If you use the barcode in the envelope, we’ll charge you a lower price,” he said. “If you don’t, we’re going to charge you a higher price because it’s harder for us to process.”

While the postal service isn’t moving forward on Trump’s order, there are still concerns about postmark delays that could have an impact on this year’s elections. The number of ballots rejected for late postmarks has soared in the vote-by-mail states of Washington and Oregon, according to recently released data highlighting concerns about recent changes in postal service operations.

Steiner said there were no plans to alter those operations and encouraged voters who use mail to get their ballots in early.

“We say seven days,” he said. “Everything is solved if people vote early.”

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Todd Blanche has repeatedly participated in campaign events and spoken in partisan terms about the coming midterm elections since his confirmation last month, despite criticism that he violated a long-standing Justice Department principle of steering clear of electoral politics.

This week, he waded again into those waters — twice.

Since August, Blanche has come under fire for making campaign-tinged public appearances and comments. Last month, at a rally-style event on Long Island, he praised Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor of New York. Last week, Blanche delivered remarks at the Republican Party’s midterm convention.

On Tuesday, he stood at the White House podium and disparaged Democratic lawmakers while invoking the coming election, dismissing their concerns about artificial intelligence as “nothing but an effort to influence the midterms.”

And Wednesday, Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina. Echoing his convention speech, he portrayed crime rates, which continued a long-term downward trend to reach new lows in 2025, as “President Trump and Vice President Vance delivering on a promise.”

Worries about the Justice Department abandoning its long-held commitment to appear apolitical in order to maintain institutional credibility may seem beside the point. Since January 2025, dozens of judges have viewed its representations with suspicion, eroding the traditional bonds of trust, known as the “presumption of regularity,” that the courts typically grant the department.

The second Trump administration has also unabashedly destroyed the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from the White House in investigative decisions. Early on, Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, declared, “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.” Last September, after Trump publicly demanded that she charge several perceived adversaries, the department pushed through short-lived indictments of two of them.

Still, Blanche is dismantling another post-Watergate principle: that Justice Department leaders stay away from partisan politicking.

Joseph Tirrell, the Justice Department’s senior ethics official until the Trump administration dismissed him in July 2025, this week criticized Blanche’s participation in the Republican convention. He called the attorney general’s comments at the White House briefing “borderline” unethical, and his participation in the North Carolina rally “terrible.”

“In my former role, I would have advised the attorney general not to go to the White House and not to make comments about members of Congress within 45 days of an election,” Tirrell said. Referring to a law restricting partisan political activity by government employees, he added, “I’d say, ‘That rally sounds like a Hatch Act violation to me, and I’d advise you not to do it.’ I would want to scare that person straight.”

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, said Blanche’s political statements and activities were protected by the First Amendment and did not violate professional conduct rule, even if they were ill-advised.

“Any attempt to discipline him will fail,” Gillers said. “That’s unfortunate. He has the ability to do what he’s doing, and he’s chosen to do it.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

When the group Public Citizen filed a Hatch Act complaint about Blanche’s comments praising Blakeman, the Justice Department told Government Executive in a statement that it was “baseless” and “a politically motivated complaint designed to weaponize the Hatch Act against the attorney general for his support of law enforcement.”

And in response to criticism last week by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee over Blanche’s convention appearance, the department shot back on social media, “Todd Blanche’s appearance this evening in his personal capacity is legal (and has been approved by ethics).”

Legal questions center on the Hatch Act, which is ambiguous and difficult to enforce when an administration does not want to strictly adhere to it. The law and related regulations allow some political appointees, while off duty, to attend partisan events, like fundraisers and campaign rallies. Some law enforcement officials are restricted from any partisan activity, but the attorney general is not listed among them, and it is disputed whether that part of the legal limits applies to them.

Even for those who can engage in political activity in a personal capacity, the traditional test is not just whether such officials say they are doing so, but whether people would reasonably perceive them as acting in their government roles.

Cynthia Shaw, who ran the Justice Department’s ethics office throughout Trump’s first term, said the notion that high-ranking officials could simply say they are acting in a personal capacity to get around that threshold was a misunderstanding.

“The bigger the job you get, the less personal capacity you have, because when you speak, people are going to see you in your official capacity and representing the agency that you are head of,” she said.

Federal law enforcement needs to not just be fair, she added, but to be seen as fair for the long-term good of the department and society.

For that reason, the Justice Department had long held itself to a higher standard than the Hatch Act and its ambiguities. For decades, its ethics policies went beyond the statute in pushing officials to avoid events like political fundraisers and campaign rallies.

In 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland flatly banned political appointees from participating in partisan activities — even in their personal capacities, and even if their family members were the candidates.

But in March of this year, Bondi rescinded that policy, freeing political appointees to attend such events in their personal capacities subject only to the lower standards of the Hatch Act.

That weakening of ethics rules is one reason the department’s claim that Blanche’s appearance at the Republican Party convention was “approved by ethics” merits scrutiny. Another is that the administration has changed who makes ethics recommendations.

After firing Tirrell, the administration left his position vacant for nearly a year before appointing Kristina Spencer, a former aide to Vice President JD Vance who had no prior department experience.

The office of the deputy attorney general can also overrule the ethics office’s recommendations. For decades, the decision-maker was a career official, but the Trump administration moved that authority to political appointees.

The principle that the Justice Department should strive to appear apolitical took root after Watergate. President Richard Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell — who later went to prison for his role in the scandal — was so deeply partisan that he resigned to run Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign.

The attorney general immediately after established the modern norm of not acting as a political operative while in office: Edward Levi, a University of Chicago legal scholar.

Maintaining a nonpartisan image has proved difficult, partly because of the department’s power and an increasingly polarized political atmosphere. Under both parties, one attorney general after another has been accused by political opponents of politicizing the Justice Department.

In 2013, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called himself President Barack Obama’s “wingman,” clashing with the principle of Justice Department independence. Asked last week about Blanche’s speech at the Republican convention, Holder said, “It’s unprecedented, and it’s disgraceful. Attorneys general don’t talk about political things. He shouldn’t be there.”

Holder, while serving as attorney general, never spoke at the Democratic convention or at campaign rallies. Nor did Republican attorneys general frequently accused by Democrats of politicizing the department, including Attorney General William Barr during Trump’s first term.

Gillers said that shifting standards for the conduct of attorneys general would harm the rule of law, especially if Blanche’s successors followed his example.

“This is new,” he said. “The changing image of what an attorney general should be seen to do, and how officials high in the Justice Department should behave, will not be good. We just don’t know yet how bad it will be.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.