President Donald Trump’s tumbling approval ratings are raising the odds that the 2026 midterm elections will extend one of the most powerful trends in 21st-century American politics.

As campaigns across the country kick into gear, Dan Pfeiffer — a co-host of Pod Save America, author of the newsletter Message Box and a former senior adviser to Barack Obama — assessed the candidates and races in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.

As the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center approaches and renderings of a future Donald Trump presidential library circulate, presidential libraries are back in the news — raising a broader question about what they reveal about our politics today.

Donald Trump didn’t just win an election - he rewrote the rules of American politics. This video explores how his rise transformed campaigning, media, and even public discourse itself. From fiery rallies to social media dominance,

Novelist John Dos Passos, a great student of American life, wrote in 1939 that political “means are more important than ends, because means mold institutions which frame ways of behaving,

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority has handed Republicans their biggest victory yet in the battle to control the House of Representatives and statehouses across the country.

In recent months, a strain of political rhetoric has crossed a line that democracies ignore at their peril. What began as familiar arguments about immigration levels and visa programs has, in some corners of the American right, hardened into particularly ...

This past summer, a man I’ll call G. helped train Grok, the A.I. chatbot on X, to praise Adolf Hitler. Elon Musk, who owns the company, had asked users to post divisive facts—information that was “politically incorrect but nonetheless factually true ...

Politicians, no longer content to leave elections to chance, are working to choose their voters as often as every two years.