The Final Countdown: MAGA’s Racist Blitz and Trump’s Next Big Lie

“Let’s start off by saying, Garrison, this is all lies. It’s ludicrous. I mean, they’re saying things that are just not true.”

That’s Stress Test host David Corn, describing to his co-host Garrison Hayes the barrage of Islamophobic attacks from Republicans desperate to hold on to Congress. As this episode shows, the GOP—from Donald Trump to JD Vance to Cabinet secretaries to senators and representatives—has made hateful bigotry a central element of its final midterms push.

Those assaults have primarily targeted Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, with Vance calling him a “cancer” with “zero attachment” to America’s land or history; Sen. Ted Cruz falsely labeling El-Sayed a “theocratic zealot” and lifelong Muslim Brotherhood supporter; and Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno declaring El-Sayed doesn’t belong in Washington, DC, because he doesn’t believe “Jesus came here for our salvation”. Pointing out that Moreno appeared to be establishing a religious test for service in Congress, David says, “That’s not what the Constitution says. That is what Christian nationalists say.” The race-baiting doesn’t stop there: Donald Trump warned that El-Sayed and Democrats will invite “hordes of jihadists” until Americans “cannot even have a Christmas.”

Noting that Vance mocked the names of Middle Eastern countries as unpronounceable, Garrison observes that the veep—a member of the elite with a Yale Law pedigree and financial backing from Peter Thiel—has been shamelessly code-switching: “I mean, he’s G-dropping: ‘When I was waitin’ at the gas—‘ Like, brother, we hear you speak. We know you don’t speak like that all the time.”

What does all this bode for Tuesday? That’s one of the themes of this episode, as David points out that this divide-and-conquer racism and white nationalism has been building within the GOP for years: “They really have been heading toward—I should say, maybe galloping toward—this view that there are different types of Americans, and white Christians are the only true Americans out there. “But this election is gonna tell us whether motivating the far-right base is enough for Republicans to win, even in red states.”

To that end, Garrison and David bring in Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman, who has been on the ground in Alabama reporting on the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican legislatures across the South to gerrymander to dismantle majority-Black congressional districts. “This Callais decision has really resonated,” Ari reports. “This is the Dobbs decision of 2026,” referring to the 2022  ruling that abolished the constitutional right to an abortion. “It has motivated Black voters like the Dobbs decision motivated women voters in the last midterm election.”

Black voters are acutely aware of why their rights are being targeted, Ari says: “They kept saying to me, ‘If our votes didn’t matter, why are they trying so hard to dilute our power, to gerrymander us out of representation?’”

The resulting surge in early voting may be one reason why Trump appears to be on the defensive, forced to spend critical campaign days shoring up deep-red strongholds like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Still, another threat looms after the votes are cast, when Trump’s election-interference schemes might kick into gear. The good news, according to Ari, “is that you can’t nullify an election through Truth Social, okay?” Even so, Republican legal challenges are already underway, and “what I worry about,” Ari says, “is what happens after the legal process has played out, ’cause I think that’s where things went crazy in 2020.”

The MAGA playbook at this point is clear: suppress the vote, stoke the base, then cry foul. Whether that strategy prevails will be determined by voters on Tuesday.

The following transcript is generated using automated tools and may contain errors.

David Corn: A campaign of hatred and bigotry.

Garrison Hayes: Trump is scheming to screw the election.

DC: This is Stress Test for Mother Jones. I’m David Corn.

GH: And I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome back to the show, my friends. We are four days away from the election, David.

DC: It’s the final countdown. Cue the music. [Laughs.]

GH: I don’t think we can actually cue the music. [Laughs.] But we do have plenty of things to talk about. It’s getting spooky out there, of course.

DC: Halloween.

GH: And—naturally. And Republicans are emphasizing a few things as we reach the kind of end of this stressful, maybe even exhausting, but very important midterm election season. Explicit bigotry, I think, is how you could describe it—Islamophobia specifically. That’s where we’re at right now.

DC: I mean, the Republican Party and the conservative movement have been drifting this way for years and years. Islamophobia is nothing new, but they really are turning it up to 11 as we get into the final days here. And it’s being targeted primarily at Abdul El-Sayed, but they also are making this a general push against the entire Democratic Party.

GH: Yeah, we have a video that I want to play here, and then we can talk about it on the other side.

[Clip plays.]

JD Vance: We have to understand what happens when our nation gives in to these kinds of people, to young men with zero attachment to its land or to its history. Because what we saw in France—the hatred, the ingratitude, the desire to destroy rather than the desire to build—that exact same cancer is what has corrupted Abdul El-Sayed writ large.

[Clip plays.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields Prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature.

[Clip plays.]

Ted Cruz: Abdul El-Sayed is a theocratic zealot and an ideologue. The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that Abdul El-Sayed is a strong and lifelong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

[Clip plays.]

Greg Abbott: We must not allow a candidate like my opponent, who supports Sharia law, to ever have control over the levers of government in the state of Texas.

[Clip plays.]

Donald Trump: If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.

DC: Let’s start off by saying, Garrison, this is all lies. It’s ludicrous. I mean, they’re saying things that are just not true. I mean, Robert F. Kennedy, his father would be aghast to see him engage in such outright bigotry and racial hatred.

GH: The other thing I want to say about this, David, is this kind of Islamophobia, in my perspective, really harkens back to a kind of “Great Replacement” theory. You know, this language of folks who are infiltrators, they aren’t from this land, they are more or less supplanters. You know, that language has been deeply effective in scaring people into electoral submission, if you will. A lot of this harkens back to a kind of post-9/11 Islamophobia, that there is this threat knocking at the door, and if we don’t beat it back, then it is going to take over. And they are using that, they’re playing on that in a really deep and disgusting way in this election.

DC: I mean, do you remember after 9/11, when George W. Bush came out and said his party should not do that, that Americans should not do that? We shouldn’t let this pull us into bigotry and hatred and Islamophobia. And we should mention here, too, we just played Ted Cruz, the least-liked senator perhaps in the history of the US Senate, you know, claiming that El-Sayed is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. There is no evidence for that. He’s disavowed it. It’s just one of these bullshit lies they keep telling over and over again to scare people. And for good measure, they’re even throwing in a touch of Christian nationalism. Let’s turn to Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio.

[Clip plays.]

Bernie Moreno: This character, Abdul El-Sayed, can be nowhere near Washington, DC. Do you think he understands that concept that our rights come from God Almighty? That Jesus came here for our salvation? He should be nowhere near Washington, DC.

DC: So he seems to be saying, if you don’t believe that Jesus came here for your salvation, you have no business serving in the United States Congress. I mean, that’s not what the Constitution says. That is what Christian nationalists say. And there’s just so much to unpack here, but one interesting fact is that his daughter recently converted to Judaism. So does she not qualify to serve in the US Senate, in the US House? She happens also to have been married to Max Miller, a fellow who we’ve reported on tremendously here at Mother Jones on all the allegations of misconduct that came out of his contentious divorce proceedings with Bernie Moreno’s daughter, Emily.

But taking a step back, JD Vance is married to a woman who comes from a family that is not Christian. It’s quite stunning that Bernie Moreno can get away with saying this, and I don’t think it’s gonna be on the front page of The New York Times or be covered extensively in the media.

GH: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about statements like this, which are—you can hear this. I mean, you just turn on a conservative radio program or maybe even Fox News, and you can hear some of these things being said, obviously, in this midterm election. The interesting thing is that I think it presents a very specific kind of ideological vulnerability for the right going forward. I mean, if we’re looking toward 2028 and beyond, there, Christian nationalism has presented a real tension, I think, in the Republican Party around this, like, very fundamentalist view of who is—who does and does not belong in power in America, and also this kind of Christian Zionism that is deeply kind of connected, I think, to Israel and, you know, all of that.

And so these ideas are really in tension in the party. And I think, as you point out, Bernie Moreno is almost, like, [laughs] kind of in a weird way, an embodiment of that tension and incoherence. And the thing that I’m kind of really curious about, David, is how voters will respond to this. I mean, genuinely, I think the American people are often smarter than we give them credit for, than politicians give them credit for. And so I’m wondering if voters are able to decipher and look through all of the kind of craziness and incoherent beliefs that make up conservatism today.

DC: Well, they really have been heading toward—I should say, maybe galloping toward—this view that there are different types of Americans, and white Christian are the only true Americans out there. And they’re obviously doing that because they think it motivates their base. But this election is gonna tell us whether motivating the far-right base is enough for Republicans to win, even in red states like Mississippi and Texas and Ohio and Iowa and Kansas. So it’s really a good test case.

And while we’re talking about testing, it seems like JD Vance is testing the waters. He’s out there, you know, obviously trying to position himself for 2028, taking point on some of these more extreme positions of the Republican Party, but also being a bit of a dunderhead. [Laughs.] And, you know, sort of—this is a guy who went to Yale Law School, but he’s acting like he’s just the average—well, perhaps even dumb—Joe Schmo, and sort of leaning into that, maybe thinking that makes him look like he’s more of a populist. Let’s look at this thing that he had to say while on the campaign trail.

[Clip plays.]

JDV: And I also remember goin’ to a gas station and waitin’ in line for hours for gasoline that, of course, had shot up in price because of a region of the world made up of countries whose name I couldn’t even pronounce.

DC: Oman, Syria, Jordan, United Arab Emirates. None of these names are hard to pronounce. Yes, you may not know all the -stans that came out of the Soviet Union, but there’s not a single name of a country, of an Arab country, a country in the Middle East—Algeria, Egypt—that is hard to pronounce. So what is—what’s going on here, Garrison, with him claiming it’s just too hard to pronounce the names of these pesky Middle Eastern countries?

GH: This is the—you know, people look at Democrats and they often say, like, Democrats are pandering. They’re pandering to the queer people and the Black people and the immigrant people, they’re pan—this is actual, real pandering. I mean, this is real, [laughs] like, hardcore, capital-P pandering. I mean, he’s G-dropping: When I was waitin’ at the gas—like, brother, we hear you speak. We know you don’t speak like that all the time, at the very least. To your point, David, this is an elite. Can we be very clear that JD Vance is a member of the elite? He’s bought and paid for by Peter Thiel. He went to Yale Law School. He’s a Silicon Valley, you know, acolyte.

And so in many ways, this person has nothing in common, despite whatever Appalachian, [laughs] you know, Hillbilly Elegy roots he can probably—he can legitimately lay claim to. At the end of the day, his trajectory has certainly not been that of the average American. I think in some ways people may see him as an aspirational figure because of that, but there is a lack of authenticity that I think is often just on full display, and I think this is one of those times where that kind of, like—what do you think about the voters in that room at that rally, that they would not be able to say a word like Syria or Iran or Oman, as you point out?

DC: Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen. Not a single one of these is hard to pronounce. But he’s like, I don’t know, these, those—you know, he’s basically being, you know, pejorative about a whole region, and I think it feeds into the elements of prejudice that we talked about earlier.

The other kind of, you know, nutty thing—I mean, a bunch of nutty things that he did, he’s done recently—but he defended the Ramaswamy ad. And of course, that’s the ad in which they took Amy Acton’s mother, who she’s been estranged from. She is the Democratic candidate, Amy Acton, running for governor in Ohio, and Vivek Ramaswamy is the Republican running against her. And the ad was the mother accusing Amy Acton of being a liar. And of course, we all know now that Amy Acton said she was raped when she was 12 by her stepfather, who was arrested, he fled the state, and the mother took the stepfather’s side. And we’ve even learned more recently that she was basically a homeless person, unhoused person, living in a car in a church parking lot. And somehow operatives for Ramaswamy got her out of the car and convinced her to go on camera and say her daughter was a liar.

Republicans and conservatives throughout the land have decried this ad, justifiably. It’s one of the few signs that there’s still some decency within the GOP. They wouldn’t go this far. But not JD Vance. Let’s hear what he had to say.

[Clip plays.]

JDV: And now the media and the Democrats of the state of Ohio are obsessed, because guess what? Vivek Ramaswamy had the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.

GH: Yeah, [laughs] yeah. It’s just—it’s not the hill that I’d expect a sitting vice president to kind of go fight on. I really am shocked that this has become a point of rally. And really what it comes down to, David, is that the president sided with Vivek. And a person like JD Vance, who is simply trying to kind of align himself with power, is simply trying to do whatever it is that the boss says to do—like, that kind of person, it’s not surprising that if President Donald Trump has said, okay, this is good, we should all rally behind, you know, Ramaswamy and his, you know, disgusting ad, then he’s just gonna fall in line. And that’s the kind of person he’s proven himself to be.

DC: Well, that brings us up to speed on the state of the race, which is pretty grim.

GH: It’s a little grim. It’s a little grim. It’s a little grim. Okay, we should probably do a little bit of a—let’s change tones here, right? We’ve been looking at ads and videos and people on the campaign trail.

DC: Shift gears. Shift gears.

GH: And now I want to turn to voting rights and what’s happening, especially in the South. And to join us for that conversation is none other than national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Great to see you guys again. Thanks for having me back.

GH: We actually have a video that I think it may be helpful to play here at the top, and then on the other side, we can talk a little bit about what you saw when you were down in Alabama.

[Clip plays.]

Shomari Figures: I think there are a lot of things backfiring on the GOP this cycle. I think they had a serious sort of, you know, misreading of the room, thinking that apathy equated to agreement with their policies. The Callais decision essentially says in a nutshell that it is not okay to discriminate against Black Democrats, but it’s okay to discriminate against Democrats who are Black, right? That is problematic.

[Clip plays.]

Cory Booker: So I’ve campaigned in Alabama a lot, but I’ve never seen energy and enthusiasm like we’re seeing across the state right now. Folks know they’re hurting.

[Clip plays.]

Letitia Daniels-Jackson: I was born and raised in Dothan, Alabama. I have never seen a rally with this much excitement and this kind of crowd, ever. Ever. This was historic for Dothan, Alabama. This has fired people up. People understand what this—what’s at stake in this election, and they will show out. They will show up and they will show out.

GH: Tell us about your time in Alabama.

AB: I went down to Alabama recently with our colleague Anna to do some reporting and video. And I wanted to go down to Alabama because that was one of the places where Republicans redrew maps after the Supreme Court effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act. And they took a district that elected the second Black member of Congress in Alabama, Shomari Figures, and they tried to turn it red. And they tried to turn it red by taking Black voters out of his district and putting white voters in more conservative rural areas in the district. And so we went to those places, and what was fascinating was that there were a really large, energized crowd, even in these very red areas.

We went down to Dothan, Alabama, in the southeast part of the state. It’s the peanut capital of the world, and it’s in a county that Trump won by 73 percent of the vote. And we went for a midday rally on a Thursday, so you don’t expect these things to be very well attended. But New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker flew down; Montana—former Montana Sen. Jon Tester flew down [laughs] from 2,000 miles away to campaign for Shomari Figures, and also for the Democratic candidate for governor, Doug Jones. And it was—there was a ton of people there. There was, like, 400 or 500 people there, which I was shocked about, and they were basically saying, this was the largest turnout for a rally we’ve ever seen in a place like this.

And then we went up to Montgomery, which is sort of the more Democratic part of the district—was also standing room only. And so Alabama doesn’t have early voting, so we don’t have the same indicators from Alabama that we have in Louisiana and South Carolina and Georgia and North Carolina and these other states where Black voter turnout is surging during early voting. But just from the size of the rallies alone and the turnout in these traditionally red areas, it seemed like people were really motivated to vote in this election, and particularly they were motivated to vote because of anger over the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

DC: Well, let’s talk about the bigger picture that you just mentioned, because in some states we do have early voting, and because of polling and other issues, you can see—get a sense of who’s coming out early. And in a lot of places, there seems to be a Democratic edge to that. Doesn’t mean anything until we see the full vote count on Election Day, but tell us about what’s happening in these other states with the Black vote.

AB: Well, it’s pretty extraordinary. The biggest jump in the Black vote is in Louisiana, where the Callais decision originated from. So that seems like a pretty direct straight line in terms of the impact. And the Black share of the early vote is up nine points in Louisiana, which is totally unseen since 2008, when Obama ran for president the first time. You’re also seeing big increases—six-point increases in South Carolina, big increases in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee. And so it seems like throughout the South, this is a trend now, that the Black vote, at least during early voting, is increasing.

And when I talk to political analysts, they basically say, if a lot of people vote during early voting, a lot of people tend to vote through the election. Like, this is not just a sense of people voting earlier. They are comparing early voting turnout in 2026 to early voting turnout in 2024 and 2022, and they’re seeing that Black voters are turning out in higher numbers here. That means that races that we didn’t think could be competitive, like the Senate race in Louisiana, for example, or the Senate race in Mississippi—Mississippi, like Alabama, doesn’t have early voting, but you’d expect to see similar trends—that—

DC: Well, we have an interesting data point on all this, Ari, and that is that Donald Trump is holding a tele-rally in Louisiana. He’s not gonna get there, but the fact that, you know, they’re using the president—the most valuable resource that they think they have at this time, I think they’re wrong, on the Republican side, is the president’s time, where he gets to travel, where he gets to campaign to get out Republican votes—and they’re taking some of that time to have him shore up Republicans in the great state of Louisiana. They must be seeing what you’re just talking about.

AB: Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you see where Trump has gone already. He was in Alabama. He was in Mississippi. He was in South Carolina. Now he’s not going to Louisiana, but he’s virtually going. And that tells me that they are nervous about all of these races. And if these deeply red places are this competitive, you can imagine what it’s like in the battleground states.

And so the fact that the South is competitive in and of itself is important, because in the wake of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, we’re gonna need a lot more investment in the South. But if the South is competitive, that means that the Midwest and the East Coast and the West Coast are certainly competitive, ’cause all those places are bluer than the South. And I think that it’s just fascinating that Republicans are on the defensive even in the Trumpiest parts of the country.

DC: Well, one short point, because I know Garrison has a larger theme here to get to, and that is if Black voting in these states forces Trump and the Republicans to spend time and money on these states, that means they’re not spending it in other places where it could be more competitive. So even if they don’t win some of these races, pulling the Republicans into these Senate and House races helps the Democratic Party across the nation.

AB: Yeah, for sure. And there’s also, you know, competitive elections in these places, like, for example, in Alabama. Doug Jones is running for governor. He’s probably not gonna win, but if he keeps the election close, that means that Shomari Figures in Alabama 2 can win. And so there’s downballot races that matter, even in places like Louisiana, even in places like Alabama. It’s not just necessarily about the top of the ticket. There’s a lot of things that matter on the bottom of the ticket, too. They could, for example, break up Republican supermajorities in these state legislatures. There’s lots of interesting things that could happen here. But yeah, you’re right, if they’re spending time in these deep-red places, it probably means the Republican Party is losing pretty badly.

GH: Yeah, I mean, it seems to me, when I was reporting during 2024, I was talking to a lot of Black voters who honestly felt a certain degree of apathy toward the electoral process. There’s always this debate about whether or not voting even matters. And I think what we’re seeing in this moment is a return, I think, to an awareness that folks in previous generations had quite acutely, that there wouldn’t be this great effort to undermine one’s vote, or to limit one’s access to the ballot, or even beyond that, to the kind of redistricting effort which dilutes voting power. I think people are realizing that they wouldn’t really be trying to do all of this, particularly to Black communities, if that stuff didn’t matter. When you were talking to voters themselves, did that theme ever come up for some of the people that you were talking to, Ari?

AB: Absolutely. That’s a really good point, Garrison. They kept saying to me, if our votes didn’t matter, why are they trying so hard to dilute our power, to gerrymander us out of representation? And it’s sparking a backlash, ’cause this Callais decision has really resonated. This is the Dobbs decision of 2026. It has motivated Black voters like the Dobbs decision motivated women voters in the last midterm election. And it’s really crystallized this larger existential threat that the Black community feels, which you know very well, Garrison, that rights that have long been protected are being taken away, and now they have something to point to.

And the polling is remarkable. The fact that Black voters now say the Supreme Court is the greatest threat to the Black community, that they’ve never said that in decades. The fact that 80 percent of Black voters are saying they’re more motivated to vote because of the Callais decision. And then the numbers themselves in terms of turnout: People are not just saying this to pollsters, they are getting out and voting, even in places where people told them, you have nothing to vote for.

So this is really extraordinary, and to me, this is bigger than one election, ’cause, yeah, it’s gonna have a big impact on the midterms, but it’s also gonna send a signal after the election, when all of these Southern states try to gerrymander again to dilute Black votes even more, that this kind of gerrymandering can be defeated. And so maybe the hopeful scenario here is maybe they’ll at least think twice about doing this if there’s a political backlash for it being done.

DC: Well, it would be delicious to see this become a be-careful-what-you-wish-for type of situation for the Republicans, if it backfires on them in the way that seems possible.

So let’s pivot here. You are our voting rights expert at Mother Jones, Ari Berman. So people are still worried about Trump somehow intervening and screwing up the election, or messing with it on Election Day or in the days afterward. And we see him already calling for the prosecution of the Democratic candidate in Alaska because she’s been implicated in a controversy in which a second candidate named Dan Sullivan—the Senate Republican incumbent is named Dan Sullivan, but a second Dan Sullivan got put on the ballot. Her campaign, Mary Peltola, said they had nothing to do with it. Seems that was not true, and they did. So this is the type of campaign chicanery that often happens. It’s not a crime, but yet Trump’s calling for her to be prosecuted and talking about nullifying those election results if they don’t go the Republicans’ way. What else is happening out there in these final days that we should be keeping an eye on?

AB: Well, the good news, David, is that you can’t nullify an election through Truth Social, okay?

DC: [Laughs.]

GH: [Laughs.]

AB: That doesn’t actually work that way, and they’re not gonna be successful in doing this through the courts, either. Now, what I worry about is what happens after the legal process has played out, ’cause I think that’s where things went crazy in 2020. And so they could use these lawsuits, not just in Alaska, but in California, to try—I mean, they’re already preemptively challenging the legitimacy of the election, but they certainly are gonna go into overdrive after. And that’s when you could see, for example, the seizure of ballots, the effort to take voting machines, the effort to pressure election officials not to certify the results, which I would expect would be much more intense in Alaska than in California, right? Because in California, you have Democrats in charge of those elections, they’re gonna certify them. In Alaska, you have Republicans in charge of the election that might think twice about doing so, and that then goes back to the courts.

And so this process could play out for a while, and it could go off the rails like it did in 2020. I think at the end of the day, the result will be similar to 2020, in that all the votes will end up being counted, but there could be some nervy days in between. And I think a lot of it just depends on how close the election is. If the election is not that close, there’s not gonna be a lot of attempts to try to steal it, because they just won’t be able to. But if it comes down to one Senate race, particularly a Senate race in a place like Alaska, which Republicans could control, then that’s where it could get kind of dicey. Even though, I will say, courts have made it very clear: Election certification is not optional. You have to do it. And so at the end of the day, these elections are gonna be certified, but Trump could cause a lot of chaos between now and whenever that certification time actually comes.

GH: Okay. Ari, it’s always so nice to talk to you because you’re deep in the weeds, you know your stuff, you’re doing the reporting, you’re maybe the best in the world at this. So thank you for checking in with us. We’ll be back with you. Don’t leave the country after the election.

DC: [Laughs.]

AB: Probably the furthest I’ll go is Alaska, but yeah, I’ll still be there.

GH: [Laughs.] Okay.

AB: I can see Russia from my window, but don’t worry, David, I won’t go over there.

DC: [Laughs.]

GH: There it is. That’s not bad. Maybe we’ll meet you there. Thank you so much, Ari, for the time.

AB: Thanks a lot, guys. Great to see you again.

DC: Well, that’s all we got for now, but we always end with this: Garrison, what’s stressing you out?

GH: Oh, my goodness, what’s stressing me out? Okay, I’m thinking a lot about the Senate race down in Mississippi. I’ve mentioned this a little bit before, we talked about this a little bit earlier. Scott Colom is down there doing his thing, running for Senate, and it’s tight, but there’s a third-party candidate. I mean, we know that Mississippi is the Blackest state in the country by way of voting percentage, and so the Black vote really matters. It’s shocking that people are even watching a Senate race in Mississippi.

And so the Black vote, as we’ve been talking about, will be incredibly important for the outcome of that election. And as it stands, there are two Black candidates on the ballot. And so [laughs] that’s a real tricky kind of moment when, you know, we’re looking at a 52–48 kind of split that favors the Republican, which a lot of people see as an opportunity for the Democrat to kind of be in striking distance, but the independent candidate, the third-party candidate, is also Black. And so there’s some really kind of interesting dynamics there, and I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about what that might mean and how it might affect the outcome of that election.

DC: Well, in these final days, I’m thinking of a great song by the group Dawes that’s called A Little Bit of Everything. There are so many moving pieces in this election. One piece of ratfuckery, you know, in one Senate race could decide whether the Senate goes one way or the other. And we just talked a little bit about Alaska. That could end up being a bit of a mess. Certainly, that’s where Donald Trump has put his energies now in terms of screwing the results and trying to retain power for the Republicans.

So, you know, in 2020, we were focused on what Trump was doing, and it was more self-contained. We’re gonna have to be looking at Senate races and House races across this great country of ours, and making sure that none of them are being hijacked or undermined by what we are expecting or what we haven’t yet even thought about. So that’s what’s stressing me out: a little bit of everything.

GH: A little bit of everything, that makes sense to me.

DC: And that’s all we have in today’s episode. If you missed earlier episodes of Stress Test, you can go watch them, listen to them. Go to our YouTube channel. That’s youtube.com/MotherJones.

GH: Yes, indeed. You can also listen in your favorite podcasting app. In fact, you are probably watching or listening to this on your phone, or maybe your laptop, or maybe even your TV. So this is a great time for you to press subscribe, press the plus. Make sure you like this video if you’re watching on YouTube. Our great journalism—the work of Ari Berman and David Corn and me and many others—it’s all supported by you. Your views and subscriptions keep us going, so don’t forget to like, don’t forget to share, don’t forget to subscribe, especially over on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/MotherJones.

If you have any questions or suggestions, make sure you drop them down in the comments, or even just thoughts on what’s happening right now as we are in the final days of the midterms. Feel free to leave us a comment down below. We’re reading them all. We will be back in just a couple of days in this final countdown of the midterms. Until then, we’ll see you, and thanks for joining us for another edition of Stress Test.