Contributing Writers

Pittsburgh community organizer Summer Lee was elected the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress after winning the state’s 12th Congressional District in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Lee, currently a state representative, faced off against Republican Mike Doyle — who happened to share the same name as the outgoing Democratic incumbent.

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich says President Biden must “push back as hard as he can” if Republicans take control of even one chamber in Congress following Tuesday’s midterm elections. He says the administration needs to be clear there is no compromise on the debt ceiling, which he expects a Republican-controlled Congress would challenge, potentially triggering a repeat of the political crisis in 2011 under former President Obama.

Voters supported the right to abortion in at least four of the five states where reproductive rights were on the ballot in Tuesday’s midterm elections. “Abortion rights are deeply popular, and when you put the question before voters, they say yes,” said The Nation’s Amy Littlefield.

Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and his opponent Republican Herschel Walker will likely head to a runoff if neither candidate wins 50% of the vote needed to win the election outright. Warnock was able to capture more white and rural votes than Stacey Abrams, who lost to Georgia’s incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, explains ​​LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund.

The balance of power in Congress is still up in the air after Democratic candidates outperformed expectations in much of the country in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Control of the Senate now rests on four states: Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. We speak with The Nation’s John Nichols, who says Democratic Senate candidate Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes could still close the gap with Republican incumbent Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, who now has the advantage.

We speak to Damon Hewitt, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is spearheading nationwide efforts to protect the vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Republicans at the national and state levels have tried to disqualify thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots in an effort to swing close races in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

We speak with New Yorker staff writer Sue Halpern about the Senate race in New Hampshire, where she says far-right Republican nominee Donald Bolduc is running a “vigorous campaign” against the incumbent Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan and spreading conspiracy theories that some schoolchildren were using litter boxes.

Indigenous voters in Arizona who played a key role in catapulting Joe Biden to victory in 2020 are facing a sweeping rollback of their voting rights that may swing the state back to Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms.

The climate movement warns the midterm elections will either advance or torpedo climate initiatives in the U.S. This comes as climate activists and scientists at the U.N. climate summit in Egypt cautioned that the world is heading toward climate disaster without deeper cuts in planet-heating emissions.

The family of the imprisoned Egyptian dissident Alaa Abd El-Fattah says they no longer know if he is still alive or if he is being force-fed, more than 50 hours after he stopped drinking water in an intensification of a six-month hunger strike. We feature an address by Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif at the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. “The symbolic battle has been won by your show of support,” says Seif. “I just hope his body and he is not sacrificed for it.

Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Department of Homeland Security is working with private tech companies to fight online speech that undermines support for the U.S. government. We speak to one of the co-authors of The Intercept’s report, investigative journalist Lee Fang, who says the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump expanded the government’s power to reshape online discourse.

Alarm is growing over how the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is changing Twitter after he spent $44 billion to buy the influential social media platform. Musk fired nearly half of Twitter’s workforce in a mass layoff Friday that gutted teams dedicated to human rights, artificial intelligence ethics and combating election misinformation, just days before Tuesday’s midterm election.

Across the United States, local voters will decide critical ballot initiatives related to reproductive freedom, voting rights, marijuana and slavery in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Chris Melody Fields Figueredo of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center says the initiatives like abortion could surprise some people, and says the recent Kansas vote to protect abortion shows reproductive health can transcend party lines.

With Democrats at risk of losing both the House and Senate in Tuesday’s midterms, we speak with Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid about the progressives favored to win congressional seats. Texas city councilmember and former labor organizer Greg Casar, Illinois state Representative Delia Ramirez and Pennsylvania community organizer Summer Lee have all been endorsed by Justice Democrats, who are best known for helping catapult members of the Squad to victory in 2018.

Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Department of Homeland Security is working with private tech companies to fight online speech that undermines support for the U.S. government. We speak to one of the co-authors of The Intercept’s report, investigative journalist Lee Fang, who says the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act signed into law in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump expanded the government’s power to reshape online discourse.

As thousands of asylum seekers continue to arrive on buses in New York, we speak with a man from Venezuela about his journey, and two New Yorkers who have been helping since August to welcome them with dignity and ensure they get the housing, food and other assistance they need. “The system here in New York City is not created for this type of community, which is the migrants that are arriving,” says former asylum seeker, Adama Bah.

Benjamin Netanyahu is set to return as Israel’s prime minister, with Tuesday’s election results showing his Likud Party and far-right allies winning enough seats to form a parliamentary majority. This includes far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who openly supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, vows to crack down on the LGBTQ community and was once convicted of racist incitement against Arabs.

The Ethiopian government and forces in Tigray have reached a truce to end two years of brutal civil war. The new peace deal follows a week of peace talks mediated by the African Union in South Africa. The Ethiopian government wants a unified country and Tigrayans want minoritarian rights upheld, says Adebayo Olukoshi, distinguished research professor at the Wits School of Governance who formerly worked on peace efforts in Tigray with the International IDEA.