Courts, Candidates, and a President at 32%: The Midterm Countdown

Six weeks before the November midterms, with President Trump's approval rating at a record-low 32 percent, the domestic political landscape is being shaped by a series of judicial interventions and quiet candidate defections. The Supreme Court unanimously blocked Missouri's Republican-drawn congressional map for the third time — a remarkable rebuke given that absentee voting for the November 3rd elections is already underway. Three separate interventions by the nation's highest court to block the same map constitutes a near-explicit statement that the state legislature is serially violating constitutional standards around fair representation.

The same Supreme Court revived Trump's voter-check database, a tool designed to cross-reference voter rolls against federal databases to identify potentially ineligible registrants. Civil rights organizations have consistently argued these systems generate false positives that disproportionately affect minority voters. The Court's decision to revive the database six weeks before the midterms, while simultaneously blocking a gerrymandered map, illustrates a complex judicial posture that does not simply defer to any single political direction. ProPublica published an analysis this week finding that the Court's shadow docket — emergency rulings issued without full briefing or oral argument — now outpaces its formal, fully-argued rulings, a structural shift that makes the Court's reasoning harder to analyze, predict, or apply consistently.

In California, the state Supreme Court unanimously ordered Sheriff Chad Bianco to return 650,000 ballots his office had seized from a 2025 special election, ruling the seizure unlawful. A county sheriff physically taking custody of hundreds of thousands of ballots weeks before midterm voting begins is an extraordinary event, and the unanimous rebuke from the state's highest court suggests no credible legal theory supported the action. Separately, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore White House press credentials for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, ruling the ban was likely unconstitutional and rejecting the national security justification the administration had offered.

Republican candidates are quietly distancing themselves from Trump as the midterms approach. A president at 32% approval is conventionally understood as a drag on down-ballot races across the board. A departing DOJ prosecutor publicly alleged she was scapegoated in the Broadview Six case, suggesting internal accountability failures within the Justice Department. And the Trump administration is moving to ask the Supreme Court to restore its third-country deportation program — a case likely to produce one of the next major shadow docket interventions, potentially before election day.