Come January, Democrats will control both chambers of Congress. The final margins will not be known until the remaining House and Senate races are called, but Democrats won overwhelmingly. Several issues moved voters, but trade and tariffs were a major animating force. In the NBC News exit poll, which surveyed nearly 80,000 voters, 65 percent said President Trump’s tariff policies hurt the national economy, while a mere 22 percent believed they helped. 

The warning signs were there well before Election Day. An August Cato Institute/​Morning Consult survey of more than 4,100 registered voters found that 75 percent said tariffs would matter in their midterm vote, and those voters preferred Democratic congressional candidates by 19 percentage points, 55 percent to 36 percent. Meanwhile, 74 percent said the president’s tariffs had raised prices at the checkout counter, including two-thirds of Republicans. Democratic House campaigns spent more than $58 million on ads attacking tariffs, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis; Republicans spent nothing defending them. President Trump once called “tariff” the most beautiful word in the dictionary, but as the Journal’s Greg Ip recently observed, he “has somehow made it one of the most hated words in politics.” 

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This fall, the Cato Institute launched Your Verdict Counts, a nonpartisan civic education campaign. It is meant to educate the public about how the jury is the most direct form of democratic power ordinary people hold. This power arises from the often overlooked, and sometimes controversial, prerogative of jurors to acquit defendants in criminal cases based on concerns about injustice. The Constitution guarantees trial by jury as a way of preventing oppression. Juries can only serve that role if they ameliorate unjust laws by acquitting those accused of violating them—a task jurors have done at crucial points in American history, including the struggles against slavery and Prohibition.

Some critics have expressed concern that Your Verdict Counts urges jurors to violate the oaths they swear when they begin to serve. This is simply not true. First, and most importantly, nothing in any of our materials—which include a dedicated website, a documentary video, and public communications—in any way urges or suggests to prospective jurors that they should violate any oath they may be required to take as a condition of jury service or that they should take such an oath in bad faith, with their fingers figuratively (or literally) crossed behind their backs.

President Trump, who often campaigned on the slogan “too big to rig,” has told reporters he will accept rather than try to overturn the midterm election results. That would be welcome. If so, he might want to offer a token of seriousness by asking the Department of Justice to drop the meritless litigation it is still pursuing, seeking to overrule the state of Alaska’s authority to certify a winner in its Senate race. 

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is already suggesting that there was no need for “all the hyperventilating about what Mr. Trump might do” to meddle with the midterms—after all, they went forward without incident. The “wildly speculative nightmares about mass election theft,” it avers, were “another partisan panic attack, promoted to gin up interest and enthusiasm”—that is, were promoted insincerely.

The editorial’s chosen narrative requires a great forgetfulness about the actual record. It is clear that for the past 18 months, Trump has indeed been intent on messing with the midterms. 

Republicans repeatedly tried to buy votes this election cycle. It doesn’t seem to have worked. But the wide margins for Democrats in the House and Senate also didn’t come with strong support for new and significantly higher taxes. If anything, the lesson is the opposite. 

The most memorable recent example of attempted vote buying was President Trump’s promise to send every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans kept Congress. This $1.2 trillion promise was never a serious gambit, but it illustrates how Trump and some in his Republican Party think about policymaking. 

Using the fiscal system to reward political constituencies is a losing strategy, particularly for Republicans. One problem is that Democrats can always outbid them. For example, Republicans touted the $200 increase to the child tax credit in the 2025 tax and spending reconciliation bill; however, $200 seems paltry compared to the more than $1,600 increase many Democrats want to restore from the one-year 2021 COVID-19 expansion. 

In addition to expanding existing tax programs, Trump ran his 2024 campaign on adding new deductions for tips, overtime, car loan interest, and seniors. The massive 2025 reconciliation bill delivered all four. There is little evidence any of these helped his party in the election. 

We should have learned by now that good politics depends not so much on good institutions as on the moral sentiments supporting them. If bad or unwise people take over your country by coup or by vote, you can’t rely on your institutions to save you. “Add institutions and stir” has never been a consistent recipe for success; good and wise people are.

It is ethics, good or bad, that guides pretty much all human relationships, from a marriage or a small circle of friends to a sports team, a business, or a nation-state. A meaningful conversation depends on what philosophers call Gricean maxims. A good marriage depends on love and mutual respect. A winning sports team depends on team spirit. A lasting business depends on intrinsic motivations. A successful gang of thieves depends on a code of silence.

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Dr. Frank Parasmo is an 80-year-old physician who practiced in New York for decades. A federal jury convicted him of unlawfully distributing controlled substances based on his prescription of opioids to patients experiencing chronic pain. The case was close. Unlike in many other cases, Dr. Parasmo was able to put forward extensive evidence that his practice was not a so-called “pill mill.” As a dissenting judge later noted, Dr. Parasmo “ordered numerous tests, referred his patients to a wide variety of specialists to treat their pain inducing conditions, tried to wean them off the controlled substances, and looked for alternative treatments to control his patients’ pain, including prescribing medications other than a controlled substance—all behaviors suggestive of a good faith effort to help his patients.” But over Dr. Parasmo’s objection, the jury was instructed that his intent turned on whether he “was (objectively) ‘acting reasonably’” rather than whether he subjectively intended to overprescribe. Applying that objective standard, the jury issued a split verdict, convicting him on some counts while acquitting him on others.

Following the trial, the Supreme Court held in another case that a conviction requires proof that the defendant subjectively knew he was acting in an unauthorized manner. On appeal, the Second Circuit acknowledged that the district court’s intent instruction was wrong but, in a divided decision, deemed the error harmless. It reached that conclusion by reviewing the government’s evidence presented at trial and determining that it “overwhelmingly” supported a finding of subjective intent. But as Judge Robinson explained in her dissent, that was not the appropriate inquiry. The panel should have instead looked to the “ample evidence” the defense put forward and asked whether a “jury could have concluded” that Dr. Parasmo lacked the requisite intent.

As AI capabilities increase, calls for know-your-customer (KYC) requirements to be imposed on actors across the AI tech stack will become more frequent due to concerns about bad actors leveraging AI for nefarious ends. Such proposals ought to be met with a significant degree of skepticism. 

Though KYC mandates may make sense in limited domains, such as granting an actor early access to state-of-the-art systems for deployment in critical areas, broader obligations will introduce a bevy of potential negative outcomes, including hindering speech, quashing innovation, and introducing privacy risks.

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