Many people are viewing Tuesday’s election results as a rejection of the administration’s policies, a view that’s hard to argue with. Still, whether the Republican Party quickly moves away—or moves at all—from the populist policies that appear to have brought electoral ruin remains an open question. 

One small litmus test that’s quickly coming up is a ban on stock buybacks that a group of populist senators squeezed into the “must-pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Members of the House were able to keep it out of their version of the NDAA, but the legislation is moving, and the two chambers will soon have to reconcile (possibly by Thanksgiving). 

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While you were busy attending to the earthquake at the national politics level, voters around the states were addressing civic matters on their initiative and referendum ballots. Some results on issues I previewed last month, plus a few others:

• California voters rejected Proposition 40, which would have imposed a retroactive wealth tax, and instead approved Proposition 42, which bans both wealth taxes and retroactive taxes. Unfortunately, voters in Colorado narrowly approved a graduated income tax. Measures to limit income tax succeeded in North Carolina and Iowa but failed in Washington. 
• Efforts to build things in California will continue to be hobbled by the objector-friendly provisions of the notorious California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, after a partial rollback of the law failed.
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According to Census Bureau and United Nations data, the immigrant share of the US population (14.8 percent) ranked 54th worldwide among 206 countries in 2024. Among the 51 wealthiest countries—nations with a GDP per capita PPP greater than $50,000—its ranking has fallen from the 43rd percentile in 2000 to the 24th percentile in 2024. Its ranking for per capita growth in its immigrant population since 2015 was similarly low: the 29th percentile. The US accounted for most of the net increase in the worldwide immigrant population in the 1990s but accounted for only 17 percent of it since 2020.

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In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.

“I think I always was looking to create a more flexible model,” says former public school teacher Jill Perez. “In my mind, I was always thinking, ’ How do we get this model to evolve?” 

Jill didn’t start out in education. She studied anthropology and nonprofit management in college and began working on fundraising at the YMCA. When she discovered how much she enjoyed children’s programming, she went back to school to become a teacher. Throughout her career, she taught middle school math and social studies in public schools, taught at Rutgers and Seton Hall, and supervised student teachers. Throughout it all, she kept thinking there should be a more flexible approach. 

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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.