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Can the president cancel the midterms? Is mail voting riddled with fraud? Five persistent midterm myths, checked against the law and the record. (144 characters) URL slug: midterm-election-myths

The Netherlands' most recent national election sent 15 parties to parliament. Germany's sent seven. In the United States, every one of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives went to a Democrat or a Republican in 2024. The difference is often attributed to political culture, as if Europeans were more divided or Americans held a narrower range of views. The more accurate explanation is institutional. The number of parties a country sustains depends largely on one rule: w

The Twenty-Second Amendment is commonly understood to limit American presidents to two terms. Its text is narrower: it provides that no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice. That wording has encouraged speculation about routes to a third term that avoid a third election. Examined closely, each proposed route runs into another part of the Constitution or federal law, and the one legitimate path, a constitutional amendment, faces thresholds no part

On September 16, in her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Canada become the Union's first "associate member." Prime Minister Mark Carney, present in the chamber, rose to applaud. The status does not yet exist in EU law, and its content remains to be negotiated. The proposal nonetheless marks a significant turn: the closest ally of the United States is formalizing an alternative partnership acros

Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor of New York City, describes himself as a democratic socialist. So did Michael Harrington, an American writer and activist working in the 1960s who never held elected office. Both used the same label across a sixty-year span, and the gap between what each of them meant by it is a useful way into a term that causes more confusion in American political discourse than almost any other.

A president can leave the White House six ways: voted out, term-limited, dies in office, resigns, or removed through one of two constitutional mechanisms built for entirely different failures. One of those mechanisms has been attempted four times in 237 years and has never succeeded. The other has never been attempted at all. Despite frequently being treated as interchangeable in public debate, they were designed by different generations of American lawmakers to solve differe

Iceland spent over a decade in accession limbo, an applicant frozen mid-process, and on August 29 the country chose to stay there. Voters rejected a government proposal to restart membership talks with the European Union, 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent. The vote changes little at the structural level. EU accession runs on a system built for slowness, and this result left that pace exactly where it was. Iceland applied for membership in 2009, days after its banking system collap