The countdown

Midterm elections35days to go

Last general: Nov 5, 2024November 3, 2026

Presidential election770days to go

Midterm election · Nov 3, 2026
New Congress sworn in · Jan 3, 2027

Last general: Nov 5, 2024November 7, 2028

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Senate composition

53 Republican
45 Democrat
2 Independent
0 Open

U.S. Senate · 119th Congress · 51 for a majority · source

Senate Elections

House composition

218 Republican
213 Democrat
1 Independent
3 Open

U.S. House · 119th Congress · 218 for a majority · source

Hot Topics

The following are a summary of the topics that people are talking about and concerned about. What is written in each section tries to be as factual as possible with a brief overview. If you want more details, please follow the resource links attached in each page.

Money

The National Debt

What the U.S. government owes, who holds it, and how big that really is — plainly, with sources, updated occasionally from the U.S. Treasury.

Price Gouging

What price gouging law actually restricts, what just got enforced after the LA wildfires, and why economists and the public disagree about it almost completely — plainly, with sources.

Citizens United

What the 2010 Supreme Court ruling actually decided, and what disclosed spending data shows about who's funded U.S. elections since — plainly, with sources.

Gas Prices and the Iran War

What's driving gas and diesel prices up, how much traces to the Iran war versus other causes, what oil companies have earned, and how it's reaching the price of everything else — plainly, with sources.

Tariffs

How Trump's tariffs were imposed, why the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA ones illegal in Feb. 2026, who actually paid for them, and why the refunds are going to companies, not consumers — plainly, with sources.

The Cost of Housing

Why housing keeps getting less affordable, how many U.S. homes are actually vacant, which corporations own a meaningful slice of the single-family rental market, what Congress and the White House just did about it, and how short-term rentals are pricing out workers and emptying a school — plainly, with sources.

DEI in the Workplace

When corporate and federal DEI programs actually started, the real research on whether they worked, why the current administration says they're economically harmful, and what's actually happened to jobs and specific groups of workers since the 2025 rollback began, plainly, with sources.

Healthcare

Medicare for All

Which senators and representatives cosponsor the federal Medicare for All Act, where House Democratic leadership actually stands, and which candidates on the November 2026 ballot — for Senate and House — have gone on record for or against single-payer healthcare, plainly, with sources.

AI

Is “AI” the Right Word?

What large language models actually do mechanically, the researchers who argue “stochastic parrot” fits better than “AI,” and why the term isn't going anywhere regardless — plainly, with sources.

When AI Won't Follow a Shutdown Command

What Palisade Research, Anthropic, and a 100,000-trial 2025 study actually found about AI models resisting shutdown, and the two competing explanations researchers give for why — plainly, with sources.

AI Extinction Warnings

What Jacob Coxon, Evan Hubinger, and Geoffrey Hinton actually said about the odds AI causes human extinction, who disagrees, and who'd be responsible if it happened — plainly, with sources.

AI Regulation

OpenAI and Anthropic are investigating tens of thousands of AI agent security incidents, including a real government breach in Australia — what's actually been reported, and where the fight over federal vs. state AI regulation stands in Washington, plainly, with sources.

Data Centers

Data Centers

How fast U.S. data center electricity use has actually grown, how much capacity is already under construction, and where local opposition is pushing back — plainly, with sources.

Data Center Cooling Systems

Air, liquid, immersion, evaporative, free, and hybrid cooling — what share of U.S. data centers actually use each one, and why the numbers don't add up to a clean 100% — plainly, with sources.

How Data Centers Use Water

How much water U.S. data centers actually consume for cooling, why AI workloads specifically are driving the recent jump, and what individual companies have disclosed — plainly, with sources.

Closed-Loop Water Cooling

How closed-loop data center cooling actually works, how often the water really gets replaced, what Oracle claims about its AI data centers, and why a New Mexico congresswoman's own water-rights figures don't match Oracle's — plainly, with sources.

Data Center Evaporative Cooling

How much water evaporative cooling actually uses, what's really behind the claim that data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 16 degrees, and what the evidence does and doesn't say about a link to extreme weather and flooding, plainly, with sources.

Data Center Noise Pollution

How loud data centers actually run, why residents' lawsuits keep hinging on noise standard measuring tools don't detect, and what the research says about the effect on nearby wildlife and ecosystems, plainly, with sources.

Data Center Moratoriums

Which senators and representatives support a federal data center moratorium, and which candidates on the November 2026 ballot — for Congress and governor, in both parties — have gone on record for or against one, plainly, with sources.

Data Centers and the Clean Air Act

How xAI's Colossus data center in Memphis ran dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, what the Clean Air Act requires, and where the resulting legal fight stands — plainly, with sources.

Nitrogen Oxides & Formaldehyde: Health Effects

What EPA and ATSDR have found about how nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde — both released by gas turbines — affect the human body, plainly, with sources.

Climate

Climate Change

800,000 years of Antarctic ice-core temperature data, and 145 years of direct measurement, plainly — how isotopes reveal past climate, and how today compares.

Nitrogen Oxides & Formaldehyde: Health Effects

What EPA and ATSDR have found about how nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde — both released by gas turbines — affect the human body, plainly, with sources.

Elections

Citizens United

What the 2010 Supreme Court ruling actually decided, and what disclosed spending data shows about who's funded U.S. elections since — plainly, with sources.

AIPAC

How AIPAC's PAC and super PAC actually spend on elections, how much, and on which races — with the sourced, continuously-updated lists of recipients linked, plainly.

Project 2025

What the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership actually proposes, who wrote it, what critics and its own authors say about it, and how much has been implemented — plainly, with sources.

Foreign Policy

America First

Polling shows real, cross-partisan fatigue with military spending and interventionist wars, and real support for investing at home instead — but “stop funding Israel” isn't a simple bipartisan consensus, it's a generational divide, including inside the coalition that coined “America First.” Plainly, with sources.

Immigration

ICE Enforcement

How many U.S. citizens have actually been wrongfully detained, deported, or killed by immigration enforcement since 2025, how many legal workers in farming, food processing, and construction have lost status, and what it's doing to food and housing costs, plainly, with sources.

Epstein Files

The Epstein Files

What the Epstein Files Transparency Act requires, why DOJ's claim the files are all released is disputed by survivors' lawyers, the Blanche-Maxwell interview and prison transfer senators are still asking about, and how to search the records yourself — plainly, with sources.

Education

DEI, College Admissions, and Who It Actually Affects

Ending race-conscious admissions has sharply cut Black enrollment at elite colleges — but a separate, decades-old practice that favors male applicants is now also at risk from anti-DEI enforcement. Both are real, plainly, with sources.