Flyers across the United States are facing massive disruptions to their travel plans on Monday after equipment outages stopped flights at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey and Philadelphia International Airport in Pennsylvania, with no estimated time for resuming service.More than 900 flights have been canceled nationwide and over 5,000 are delayed on Monday, with Newark and Philadelphia hit the hardest.The issues began when a circuit blew at a Philadelphia air traffic control facility Monday morning, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said. When the backup system went into place, officials discovered the backup line in New Jersey had been cut, Bedford said.NJ Transit – PHOTO: At approximately 9:45 a.m. a construction crew working for NJ Transit on the Delco Lead project between New Brunswick and North Brunswick accidentally severed a fiber-optic cable while working at the site, September 21, 2026.Helicopter fighting Yosemite National Park fire crashes, killing 2: OfficialsIn order to change the circuit in Philadelphia, Bedford said the airspace in the Northeast would be closing for at least 30 minutes, and ground stops were expanded to include New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport as part of the work.Airspace has since reopened at JFK and LaGuardia, but officials said the fix to replace the circuit in Philadelphia has not worked, leaving operations still halted at Philadelphia and Newark’s airports, with no time estimate for when they’ll resume.Smith Collection/gado/Gado via Getty Images – PHOTO: Multiple United Airlines jets are visible on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR), Newark, New Jersey, June 6, 2026.1 killed after 2 glider planes collide in upstate New York, police sayThe outage caused a ripple effect across the Northeast and the U.S., diverting some flights and canceling and delaying others.United Airlines, which has one of its hubs at Newark Airport, said Monday afternoon that it’s “canceling the rest of the day’s planned domestic mainline and United Express flights to and from Newark.” United said it will “prioritize remaining international departures.”This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.ABC News’ Jason Volack contributed to this report.This article originally appeared on ABC News at https://abcnews.com/US/northeast-airspace-closing-30-minutes-due-equipment-outage/story?id=136626017

Three news organizations whose journalists were banned from the White House last week are suing President Trump and three of his top advisers in federal court, demanding that access for their reporters be immediately restored.“This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” CNN, MS NOW and Politico said in a joint statement on Monday. “Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”CNN had been scheduled to serve as the television pool on Monday. According to Politico, the four other major TV networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News — are declining to participate in White House pool duties moving forward in response to the ban.According to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., the news outlets allege that Trump and the White House are retaliating against them for coverage they dislike. “President Trump has said in no uncertain terms that he would prefer only to be covered by news organizations and reporters who praise his administration,” the complaint states. “But the Constitution does not allow a president or any other government official to deprive the press of their First Amendment rights and liberty and property interests with no notice or process based solely on his dislike of the content of their reporting.” The organizations argue that their reporters were not afforded due process and are asking a federal judge to quickly rule that Trump’s ban is unconstitutional. The filing cites a 1977 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the White House cannot arbitrarily deny a journalist a press pass without due process. “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the filing states.Trump appeared to respond to the lawsuit in a social media post early Monday.”The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”The White House released a statement on Monday afternoon, saying that access for journalists is “a privilege — not a right.””The First Amendment protects their right to publish; it does not entitle them to a hard pass, briefing room seat, or place in the press pool,” the statement read. “No President is required to host a hostile operation on the grounds. Access has always been a privilege — and President Trump is applying that rule.”How the ban unfoldedA view of the White House Briefing Room on Sept. 19.Graeme Sloan/Getty ImagesOn Friday afternoon, Trump announced the ban in a Truth Social post, saying it was not prompted by any particular stories but was “a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!””It’s really just cumulative stories over the last few years. You get sick of it,” Trump said at an Oval Office event an hour later while explaining his decision to enact “the ban on the free press.”“There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” the president said. “If they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my, into the people’s house.”According to CNN, Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp showed him clips of media coverage shortly before he announced the ban.On Saturday, reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were turned away from the White House by members of the Secret Service and had their credentials — so-called hard passes needed for access — confiscated. The journalists — CNN’s Betsy Klein, MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner and Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett — are listed as plaintiffs in the court filing.MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner, CNN’s Betsy Klein and Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett are seen near the White House after all were denied entry on Sept. 19.AP Photo/Jose Luis MaganaThe White House Correspondents’ Association condemned the move, saying it violates the First Amendment.“The American people, through a free and independent press, must be able to scrutinize those elected to power, regardless of whether government officials view it favorably,” Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News senior White House correspondent and WHCA president, said in a statement. “That’s why courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists, it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting.” On Sunday, Trump posted what appeared to be an AI-generated image of trash bags bearing the logos of CNN, MSNBC (MS NOW’s former name) and Politico outside the White House.The three news outlets are longstanding members of the White House press pool that provides rotating coverage of the administration and travels with the president. The daily guidance issued by the White House for Monday listed no primary TV pool, identifying Hearst and Real America’s Voice as the “secondary” TV crews for the president’s events in Washington and his scheduled trip to New York City for the United Nations General Assembly. Trump is scheduled to meet with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday afternoon.The president vs. the pressA White House staff member reaches for the microphone held by CNN’s Jim Acosta as he questions President Trump during a news conference on Nov. 7,, 2018.REUTERS / REUTERSU.S. presidents throughout history have complained about negative coverage of their administrations. In 2009, the Obama administration sought to exclude Fox News from a series of interviews with a Treasury Department official in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but backed down when the other major television networks objected.Trump, however, has continued his adversarial relationship with the media, often referring to the press as the “enemy of the people.”In 2018, Trump administration officials revoked the press pass of then-CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta after they said that he had interrupted the president during a news conference. The network sued, and a federal judge ordered Acosta’s credentials restored.A similar situation played out the following year when the White House revoked Playboy correspondent Brian Karem’s press pass over a verbal argument between Karem and Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide, at a Rose Garden event. A federal judge ordered the White House to restore Karem’s pass.Last year, Trump barred Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office, Air Force One and some official events after the news service declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. The AP filed suit and the case is ongoing.In his first event without a network TV pool on Monday, Trump unveiled the White House’s new helipad before departing for New York. His remarks were nearly inaudible on the White House video feed. Joe Reberkenny, a White House correspondent for the Washington Blade who was serving as the in-town pool reporter, said he couldn’t hear Trump “over the sound of the helicopter.”This article originally appeared on Yahoo News at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/cnn-ms-now-and-politico-are-suing-trump-over-white-house-ban-155420637.html

Tyler Hassen’s initiation into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, started as a series of tests. The Houston oil executive says he was given vague instructions to show up at an unfamiliar D.C. address. He hastily packed three suitcases and flew east, taking an Uber to a building that he soon learned belonged to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He was whisked to a private office, acutely aware that his tailored suit stood out among the hoodie-clad engineers “too locked in” to their laptops to look up. He was ordered to go through the website of the Department of Commerce and, within days, find two to five ideas to present to Musk. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. He checked into a nearby J.W. Marriott and told his wife he didn’t know how long he would be gone. Thus began an 11-month stint at the center of a national firestorm – an exhilarating, chaotic and sometimes scary experience, Hassen told The Washington Post, in his first major interview detailing his forthcoming memoir and plans. The memoir, “Inside DOGE: The Real Story From a Senior Insider,” which recounts his time working for the secretive cost-cutting group, is the first tell-all to emerge from one of the most controversial periods of President Donald Trump’s time in office – a moment Hassen said he would gladly live through again. “There’s this misconception that we all just went in there and didn’t really think about what we were doing,” Hassen said, speaking virtually from a hotel room in San Diego. “I spent 24/7 thinking about it, waking up at 3 in the morning thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ … And I know I did.” At the heart of the book is a split screen: For many Americans, Musk’s project was a callous showcase of bending government to a billionaire’s will, associated with tens of thousands of federal layoffs, reams of lawsuits, an AI-enabled effort to kill off wasteful contracts and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But Hassen’s memoir enters a different vision into the historical record: He portrays a period marked by a clash in worldviews, in which hardcore capitalists are granted unprecedented power to change a system that they argue operates under completely different incentives, logic and norms. To Hassen, whose pre-government career involved turning around distressed companies, “DOGE was not radical,” he writes in the book. It was “not a wrecking ball, but a catalyst.” In conversation, Hassen comes across as mild-mannered, a distant temperament from Musk, who famously brandished a red metallic chainsaw as a metaphor for cutting government waste. A 43-year-old dad with Boy Scout energy, he doesn’t cut the image of the nerd-engineer DOGE bro. He spent his entire adult life “hiring, firing, reorganizing and rescuing failing businesses” in industrial manufacturing and the energy sectors – a skill set that appealed to Musk, his longtime deputy, Steve Davis, and Baris Akis, a venture capitalist who served as a volunteer recruiter. But for years, Hassen seethed with rage over the national debt, now at $40 trillion. He felt angry that the amount the U.S. spends annually just to service that debt is more than the government spends on national defense and many other public benefits. So he raised his hand – making a cold outreach to Musk through a network of business world connections, he said in the interview, and pressed the point. “I’m staring at my daughter, who is 5, and thinking about her at 25 with $100 trillion of debt. And I know if we don’t do something about it now, we’re going to be there,” he said. “We’ve got to fix it now.” By its own accounting, DOGE fell far short of the $2 trillion Musk claimed he would save, and an independent report from the Government Accountability Office has found DOGE’s own savings figures to be flawed. But Hassen told The Post he believes the effort was a success. “Did we eliminate the deficit? No. Of course not,” he said. “But we made it on the top of everyone’s minds, albeit briefly, for a few months, that this deficit is something that we need to fix.” In the book, he argues that “DOGE fit squarely” within a tradition practiced by some Democratic presidents, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, who also sought to shrink bloated government. DOGE was different, he goes on to concede, because of its speed, “faster than Washington was ready for and faster than its defenses could absorb.” But Hassen insists that DOGE was not cruel, a word that appears six times in the memoir, often in relation to laying off federal workers. The refrain can read as a plea for reconsideration of an effort he argues was poorly understood. “In the private sector, there’s an understood bargain,” he writes. “You’re hired to create value. If the value disappears, so does the job. It isn’t personal. It isn’t cruel. It’s the operating system of capitalism.” Government, he argues in the book, runs on a different logic. Value is “presumed,” “permanence is the default,” and “the moral burden of proofs falls on anyone who questions headcount – no matter how bloated the system becomes.” After the screening process, Musk and Davis deployed Hassen to the U.S. Department of the Interior, a sprawling agency that manages roughly 500 million acres of federal land and property, national parks, and tribal territories. He took the assignment, he wrote, because he knew “very little” about the agency and the challenge was appealing. Hassen was eventually promoted by Doug Burgum, the wealthy businessman who heads the agency, whom Hassen described as something of a kindred spirit. He became acting assistant secretary of policy, management and budget and stayed on until November – months after Musk himself had left Washington. During his tenure at DOGE, Hassen says, he put in 14-hour days, working nights and weekends. During the chaotic period he saw his then-4-year-old daughter only a handful of times. He said he relished the minutiae of the job: poring over grants written in what appeared to him to be bureaucratese, dissembling bloated org charts and consolidating departments. He says he encountered a bureaucracy more labyrinthine and redundant than he could have ever imagined. He caught spelling errors in a project description written by a vendor charging hundreds of millions of dollars, which he saw as proof of a systemic malaise. The contract, he writes, “stopped me cold.” (To drive home the point, a photo of the paperwork with the spelling error is published in the book.) He told The Post he was exhilarated to get deep into the bowels of the bureaucracy and deploy his corporate-honed skill sets to attack a problem that had long troubled him. During his first week at DOGE, the team met in a sparse conference room on the top floor of the SpaceX offices – empty except for a giant American flag on the wall, “because it reminded us why we are here,” he told The Post. “We had billionaires to 22-year-olds who had dropped out of Harvard, all sitting there on our laptops working with public information – trying to figure out how we can help solve this deficit, this crisis that we’re in.” As the group grew, the meetings moved to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. There, he told The Post that he would present to Musk on a weekly basis, receiving the world’s richest man’s undivided attention. “He has this ability to grasp so many things, from California water to certain contracts,” he said. “We would talk about certain departments for 45 minutes – and how can we fix this – and we’d stay until 2 in the morning.” One time, after a particularly grueling session, Hassen said, he had to sneak out of the White House grounds to sleep. “I was so tired,” he said. During his time at Interior, Hassen was almost like a Where’s Waldo character, popping up at key moments that caught the country’s attention. When wildfires struck California, Hassen made an unusual decision to fly to the state to grill local officials about why the state’s largest water plant wasn’t running at full capacity. The image of him at the Jones Pumping Plant in California became one of the first posts from the DOGE X account identifying its members – prompting a flood of hateful messages and threats to Hassen and his family, he said. When Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico, it fell to Hassen to officially register the rechristened Gulf of America in the Interior Department’s Geographic Names Information System – a move that then triggered a broader recognition of the name change on Google Maps and other online directories. Hassen says he felt the difference in mindset between the public and the private sector every day. “It showed up in the way career staff spoke about ‘the workforce’ as something apart – almost sacred,” he writes. “Until we can say out loud that government is a workforce like any other – noble in purpose, human in composition, and subject to reality like everything else – reform will look like cruelty before it looks like competence.” There is a clear cognitive dissonance between DOGE insiders like Hassen, who saw himself taking on a deeply patriotic project, and many Americans, who according to polls viewed DOGE disapprovingly. Not surprisingly, Hassen believes the media is one culprit – treating “every reduction as a moral offense” and framing DOGE leaders’ demands for accountability as a “cruelty experiment,” he writes. But in the book, Hassen also reflects on how DOGE’s failure to communicate hurt its reputation. Though DOGE was announced with great fanfare – and its website broadcast tallied savings – in practice the project was highly secretive, with DOGE members often showing up in agencies wielding great power before ever appearing on an org chart. In the six months before the ill-fated cost-cutting effort imploded, its staff gave just a handful of interviews. Two, including one with Hassen, were on Fox News, and he told The Post that he almost backed out. They were done, Hassen writes, only in response to prodding from then-White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the political operative and podcaster who acted as a communications liaison for Musk’s effort. DOGE members were private citizens, fearful of being personally targeted and unfamiliar with the media apparatus that is part of Washington culture, he says. But fundamentally, the DOGE crew wanted to stay completely focused on the mission itself, he writes. The team was well aware that they needed to move with speed, as they might soon be slowed down by lawsuits, Congress or other bureaucratic forces. “We were there to work. We weren’t there to be public figures,” he said in the interview. In the book, Hassen implies that this was, to some degree, a miscalculation. “Once we stepped back, others were happy to define the work for us.” Ultimately, DOGE did lose control of the narrative, leading to a dramatic split between Trump and Musk five months after DOGE began and leaving the project in the lurch. The night of that split, Hassen said, he paced around the Interior Department like a ghost. The next morning, he went to the agency gift shop and bought his daughter a T-shirt that said “Future Secretary of the Interior.” He thought it might be his last night in D.C. Hassen’s experience working with AI for the first time at DOGE led him to take a new job leading Zone Frontier, a former cleaning supply firm with a new mission to provide infrastructure and permitting to the data center industry. Musk’s longtime lawyer, Alex Spiro, has also joined the board of directors, something Hassen said was a pure coincidence. He says he hopes the legacy of DOGE will be that the country’s most gifted citizens will seek to serve their government. Instead of draining the swamp, he says, he wants to flood it with talent and energy. “These are some of the best and brightest we have in America,” he said of the DOGE team. “I’m honored to be even a part of them.” Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report. Related ContentThis article originally appeared on Washington Post at https://washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/21/he-spent-11-months-inside-doge-now-he-wants-set-record-straight/

Burlington, Vt. (AP) — A jury on Monday convicted a Vermont man of attempted murder in the shootings of three Palestinian college students who were walking near his home, rejecting an insanity defense rooted in his claims that he was acting on orders from U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. Jason Eaton faces up to life in prison in the November 2023 attack in Burlington, which paralyzed Hisham Awartani from the waist down and wounded his friends, Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid. The men, all 20 at the time, had been visiting Awartani’s grandmother for Thanksgiving. They were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic as they walked near the University of Vermont campus after dusk. Two of them were wearing traditional Palestinian scarves known as keffiyehs. The jury deliberated for several hours before reaching its verdict after a weeklong trial that saw testimony from the three men, who recounted how their stroll ended in bloodshed, and defense and prosecution psychiatric experts who offered differing views of Eaton’s mental health and criminal culpability. Eaton, 51, stared ahead blankly as the verdict was read, standing alongside his lawyers — public defenders whom he tried to fire last week over his concerns that his defense hadn’t been “adequately presented.” Judge John Pacht, who blocked Eaton’s midtrial bid to act as his own lawyer, ordered him jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled. Awartani and Aliahmad watched from the front row of the courtroom gallery, smiling and hugging people around them. “The verdict cannot undo what happened or erase the trauma our families still carry, but it affirms something fundamental: Jason Eaton is responsible for what he did,” Awartani’s mother, Elizabeth Price, told reporters afterward. Eaton claimed he was acting on orders from the CIA and Mossad Eaton had pleaded not guilty but did not dispute that he was the shooter. He claimed that the CIA and Mossad transmitted their orders via FM radio and that God was commanding him to protect his Jewish neighbors. His lawyers had urged jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity, an outcome that would’ve spared him from prison but could have required that he undergo mental health treatment. Eaton’s lawyers, Margaret Jansch and Joshua O’Hara, said he had struggled with mental health issues his whole life, including diagnoses of attention deficit, post-traumatic stress, bipolar, depression and borderline personality disorders, culminating in a psychotic break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting. Prosecutor Sarah George countered that Eaton was a narcissist but not legally insane. He had a grandiose sense of self-importance and lacked empathy but was fully aware of the criminality of his conduct, George said in a closing argument. He appeared nervous when police arrived at his door, repeatedly asked for a lawyer and hasn’t claimed to have received any other messages directing his actions, she said. Eaton told officers that he had a shotgun in his apartment, but didn’t disclose that he had other weapons, including a Ruger .380-caliber handgun that was found in a bedroom dresser and that crime lab testing concluded was used in the shooting, said George, the Chittenden County state’s attorney. Victim’s mother says Eaton should’ve been charged with hate crimes The shooting, weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, shook Burlington, and reverberated in the West Bank, where the three wounded men grew up and became friends as schoolmates in Ramallah before moving to the U.S. for college. It spawned calls for a hate crime investigation. But no hate crime charges were filed as questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire. After the verdict, Awartani’s mother said Eaton’s hateful rhetoric, aired at the trial, had made it clear why he targeted her son. Days after the shooting, George said in her closing argument, Eaton had told his lawyers that he wished Awartani’s grandmother had warned him that the men were “going to dress up like terrorists” and trek through his neighborhood. “Or see, if grandma had said to them, you know, maybe now’s not a great time to wear that thing on your head,” George said, paraphrasing Eaton’s remarks. “You know, things are a little tense when you’ve got American hostages over in Palestine, and we’re trying to get them back.” “They were not the words of a man confused about who he shot or why,” Elizabeth Price said. “They were the words a man who saw three young men speaking the language of their childhood and wearing what made them feel closer to their far away families and homes and decided to kill them because of his own prejudices.” Victims recounted how a peaceful walk ended in bloodshed Awartani testified last week that he first noticed Eaton standing on a porch as they approached the apartment house where he lived. Within seconds, Awartani said, Eaton was off the porch and walking toward them. His face was expressionless and he didn’t say anything. As Eaton got to about 5 to 10 feet (1.5 to 3 meters) away, “he pulled out a handgun and started shooting at us,” Awartani said. Abdalhamid, a student at Haverford College near Philadelphia, said he fled and hid behind another home after seeing Aliahmad fall to the ground. He said he only realized later when he sat down that he had also been wounded. Awartani, who was studying at Brown University in Rhode Island at the time, was shot in the chest and the bullet ricocheted off his scapula, causing paraplegia in his spinal cord. Aliahmad, who was a student at Trinity College in Connecticut, was struck in the collarbone, and Abdalhamid was shot in the right buttock. Jacob Pyne, who lived in a different apartment in the same house as Eaton, testified that he heard four to six gunshots, followed by footsteps going up the stairs of the apartment house. He said he ran outside and heard two men speaking, one of whom was more vocal and yelling, “I’ve been shot, help me.” He then brought the men blankets and called 911. Eaton didn’t testify. In an opening statement last week, O’Hara told jurors that Eaton claimed he started receiving messages while listening to a local NPR affiliate. At first, the messages were encouraging and validating, the lawyer said, but subsequent messages turned dark, insisting that Eaton “has to go out and shoot somebody.”This article originally appeared on Associated Press at https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/jury-convicts-vermont-man-attempted-173341045.html

The 2026 midterm elections are just 43 days away. All of the key primaries have been decided. With summer officially behind us, the fall campaign is now underway.So where do things stand — nationwide — in the race to control Congress? Which party has a better chance of, you know, winning? To get a sense of that, it helps to zoom out … and geek out over some cold, hard data.The usual caveats apply, of course. Polls aren’t predictions; they’re momentary snapshots of public opinion. Big events can, and often do, change the course of elections. And six weeks can be an eternity in politics. Yet the stakes in November couldn’t be higher, especially for President Trump, who has enjoyed complete Republican control of Congress for the first half of his second term. Flipping the House would give Democrats the power to block the president’s agenda, investigate his administration and even impeach him (again); flipping the Senate would allow them to stymie his Supreme Court nominees too.The state-by-state midterm landscape is finally taking shape — and a few clear polling trends are emerging. Here are the numbers to watch as Election Day nears.The generic congressional ballot Every pollster asks a version of the same question: If an election for U.S. Congress were held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your district? In fact, this particular polling prompt is so pervasive, it’s known as the “generic ballot” (at least among politics nerds).You obviously can’t divine the outcome of an entire midterm election from a single question that flattens 435 House contests into a binary choice between “the Democrat” and “the Republican.” But the generic ballot can suggest which direction voters are heading. History is helpful here, courtesy of the RealClear Politics polling average:At this point in 2022 — after more than a year and a half of Democratic President Joe Biden and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate — Democrats had a narrow lead (1.3 percentage points) on the generic ballot. Six weeks later, the GOP translated its final polling lead of 3 percentage points into nine seats — enough to flip the House.At this point in 2018 — with Trump as president and Republican majorities in the House and Senate — Democrats were leading by an average of 8 points on the generic ballot. Six weeks later, they picked up 41 seats and flipped the House.Polarization wasn’t as extreme in 2014 and 2010, the two midterms under Democratic President Barack Obama; minds weren’t made up quite so early. But six weeks out, voters were starting to break against Democrats. In 2014, a final Republican polling lead of 2.4 points translated into a net gain of 13 seats in the House; in 2010, those numbers were 9.4 points and 63 seats, respectively.So what does that mean for 2026? Historically speaking, a president’s party almost always loses seats when voters return to the polls to judge his first two years in office. Sometimes, the backlash is so pervasive that the president’s party loses pretty much every close-ish contest — a phenomenon known as a “wave” election.Right now, Democrats have a wave-sized lead on the generic ballot — about 8 percentage points, on average — and it has been steadily growing over the last two weeks. Democrats probably won’t reprise 2018 and flip 41 House seats again in November, in part because red-state Republican lawmakers have recently redrawn congressional maps across the South to benefit their party in ways that blue-state Democrats have been unable to keep up with. But they only need to pick up three seats to win back the House.  Advantage? Democrats.10 specific Senate racesNational dynamics tend to define the composition of the incoming House. But Senate contests are quirkier — more state-specific and personality-driven. Democrats currently hold 47 Senate seats; they’d need 51 to control the chamber. (A 50-50 split would give Vice President JD Vance the tiebreaking vote). Polls suggest that flipping four Republican seats is possible — but Dems are also playing defense in places like Michigan, Georgia and New Hampshire. Here are the 10 races to follow:Maine (Republican seat)Republican Susan Collins (incumbent)Democrat Troy JacksonWhat the latest polls say: Jackson, who replaced Graham Platner, the Democrats’ previous scandal-plagued nominee, tends to lead Collins by anywhere from 2 to 8 percentage points. One recent poll shows a tie. Michigan (Democratic seat)Republican Mike Rogers (former member of Congress)Democrat Abdul El-Sayed (public-health epidemiologist and former Wayne County, Mich. health director)What the latest polls say: Eight polls have been conducted over the last month. Seven of them showed El-Sayed in the lead, by anywhere from 2 to 5 percentage points. Ohio (Republican seat)Republican Jon Husted (incumbent)Democrat Sherrod Brown (former senator)What the latest polls say: Every poll conducted since July shows Brown leading Husted, with margins ranging from 4 to 8 percentage points.Georgia (Democratic seat)Democrat Jon Ossoff (incumbent)Republican Mike Collins (member of Congress)What the latest polls say: Ossoff holds a solid lead over Collins, with the two most recent polls putting him ahead by 4 to 7 percentage points.North Carolina (Republican seat)Republican Michael Whatley (former Republican National Committee chairman)Democrat Roy Cooper (former governor)What the latest polls say: Cooper leads by more than 8 points, on average. One poll conducted in Septemeber showed him ahead by 15. New Hampshire (Democratic seat)Republican John E. Sununu (former U.S. senator)Democrat Chris Pappas (four-term U.S. representative) What the latest polls say: Pappas and Sununu, who both won their Sept. 8 primaries, have traded leads in recent polls in the race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. But the most recent survey, conducted from Sept. 16 to 17, showed Pappas ahead by 8. Alaska (Republican seat)Republican Dan Sullivan (incumbent)Democrat Mary Peltola (former member of Congress)What the latest polls say: Most surveys conducted since Alaska’s Aug. 18 primary have given Peltola a slim lead; a mid-September AARP poll showed her ahead by 7. But the most recent sounding suggests this could be a photo finish. Iowa (Republican seat)Republican Ashley Hinson (member of Congress)Democrat Josh Turek (state legislator and former Paralympic athlete)What the latest polls say: Hinson and Turek have traded small leads in surveys released since Iowa’s June 2 primaries. Texas (Republican seat)Republican Ken Paxton (state attorney general)Democrat James Talarico (state legislator)What the latest polls say: Nearly every poll conducted over the summer has shown Talarico leading Paxton, though the margins are small — between 1 and 6 points.Nebraska (Republican seat)Republican Pete Ricketts (incumbent and former governor)Independent Dan Osborn (veteran and former union leader with Democratic support)What the latest polls say: Surveys are few and far between. But the most recent results suggest Osborn could be competitive.Advantage? Too close to call — though Democrats seem to have gained ground over the last two weeks. Trump’s approval rating — especially on affordabilityTo one degree or another, midterm elections are always referendums on how the president is performing. So Trump is the final piece of the puzzle.At the moment, that’s unfortunate news for Republicans on Capitol Hill and those looking to join them.According to the data journalists at Silver Bulletin, 59% of Americans, on average, currently disapprove of how Trump is handling his job vs. 39% who approve. That puts the president’s net disapproval rating at 20%. An American Research Group poll released on Monday measured Trump’s approval rating at 29% — his lowest mark ever. The same survey showed the president’s disapproval rating at 68%. Again, history can provide perspective. In mid-September 2018, Trump was about 12 points “underwater”; Republicans went on to lose 41 seats that November. Trump is earning even lower marks on voters’ top 2026 issue: the cost of living. Shortly after he returned to office, roughly equal numbers of Americans approved and disapproved of how the president was handling inflation. But today, 71% disapprove and 26% approve. That’s a 45-point gap.In comparison, Biden’s approval rating on inflation was rarely underwater by more than 30 points during his presidency  — a period that coincided with the economic shocks of COVID-19 and ended with him choosing not to stand for reelection.  Advantage? Democrats.This article originally appeared on Yahoo News at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/the-2026-midterms-are-6-weeks-away-which-party-has-a-better-chance-of-winning-heres-what-the-latest-polls-say-154536831.html