With fewer than 70 days remaining until the midterm elections, one of the biggest voter registration organizations is expanding its efforts to make sure people are prepared to cast a ballot this fall.
And if you attend a sporting event or concert, there’s a decent chance you will interact with someone from the nonprofit, nonpartisan group HeadCount.
Last month, HeadCount announced a new partnership with Monumental Sports, which owns the Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics as well as the the Capital One Arena, to provide voter registration services at NBA, NHL and WNBA games in Washington, D.C., as well as concerts and other events at the venue.
HeadCount already works with some of the biggest music stars and corporate brands, and Director of Partnerships and Events Whitt Bell hinted there are more sports-oriented partnerships in the works.
“We’re basically taking our model that we use for concerts, festivals and community events and templatizing it, and putting it in literally a new arena,” Bell said.
Founded in 2004, HeadCount has helped more than 1 million people register to vote by partnering with performers like Beyoncé, Harry Styles, Dead and Co., supporting music festivals including Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and brands such as Ben & Jerry’s and Spotify and running online campaigns.
In advance of National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 20, HeadCount has been working to expand its partnerships, with Monumental Sports serving as the next big professional athletics deal, following an event accompanying last winter’s NHL all-star game in Las Vegas.
“Monumental wanted to start us as big as they could, which was not with one team but with three,” Bell said.
The partnership began in July, with HeadCount setting up voter registration tables at the Mystics’ final games of the WNBA season, played at Capital One and the Entertainment & Sports Arena in D.C. With the Mystics now eliminated from postseason play, the sports segment of the partnership will resume this fall when the NHL’s Capitals and NBA’s Wizards begin preseason games and then continue through their entire 2022-23 seasons.
“We see a lot of value in the season partnerships,” Bell said, explaining that regularly participating in events has a far bigger impact than a single occurrence. “Like with artists – we don’t ask to do a single concert, we want to do the whole tour.”
HeadCount will also run tables during every Capital One Arena concert leading up to Election Day (Nov. 8). Scheduled artists include Kid Cudi, Mary J. Blog, Lizzo, Post Malone, The Killers and Smashing Pumpkins and Iron Maiden.
“We have guaranteed staffing at every event, with local volunteers supporting that,” Bell said, explaining that standard staffing includes four to six people but those numbers can be scaled up.
When staffers engage with event attendees, their first question is always whether they are registered to vote. If not, the staffers will help people fill out the paperwork. For those who have registered, staffers will move to a secondary set of actions that include checking registration status, encouraging people to register as volunteers or signing up for absentee ballots.
At least one Grammy-winning global star is helping with voter registration efforts despite not even performing in the United States in the run-up to Election Day.
In July, HeadCount and Billie Eilish announced a contest in which those who register to vote or check their registration status could win a trip to see Eilish perform in Australia and New Zealand in September. In addition to being stops on her world tour, those two nations have much higher voter participation rates than the United States.
“I’m working with HeadCount to encourage everyone to show up at the polls and use their voice during these midterm elections,” Eilish said. With what is going on in our country, we need to get out to the polls and vote for what we believe in. Not showing up is not an option.”
HeadCount isn’t the only organization leading voter engagement efforts. More Than a Vote, the group founded by NBA star LeBron James, has worked with sports teams and arenas to turn those facilities into voting centers. It has also provided funding for election workers in majority-Black districts.
Other artists and celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, used social media to encourage their fans to vote in 2020.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.