With less than a week remaining for all ballots to be cast, one of the nation’s premier voter engagement organizations is in the final stages of its efforts to maintain the record turnout from the two previous elections.
Vote.org, which runs voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts, has seen tremendous use of its services even after Americans broke a 100-year-old midterm turnout record in 2018, said CEO Andrea Hailey.
“In key states like Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania ... we’ve seen over 100 percent growth compared to 2018,” Hailey said. “It’s about 91 percent of the traffic that we saw in 2018, but in key states we’re seeing these huge increases.”
Those states and others such as Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Ohio are home to hard-fought races for Senate and governor that will decide the direction of federal and state policymaking for years to come.
The final days of election season will feature a focus on voter education, as well as a continuation of ongoing outreach efforts.
“Now that we’re touching one in five Americans, we need to make sure we remain a trusted source of information,” Hailey said, specifically noting the confusing nature of provisional ballots. “On election night we’ll be there to ensure people understand what’s happening.”
With states changing their election laws in the wake of the 2020 presidential contest, which was the subject of false allegations of fraud by supporters of Donald Trump, Vote.org has had to adjust its plans accordingly.
“It was frustrating. On the heels of the highest turnout we’ve seen in 100 years, it was sad. We should have been celebrating but we saw hundreds of voter bills circulating,” Hailey said.
She referred to such bills as “death by a thousand cuts,” claiming they are a collection of efforts to limit who votes.
Hailey pointed to the “wet signature” laws passed in Texas and Georgia that require people to print, sign with ink (hence the wet signature) and mail voter registration forms rather than completing an online form.
“When we have the technology and know it’s working, to say digital signature is no longer valid is preposterous,” she said. “That directly affected our users. We could no longer provide the tool.”
Some of the group’s resources in the coming days will be applied to combating misinformation even though Hailey believes that problem isn’t as intense now as it was in 2020 when voting by mail was the subject of harmful disinformation.
“I’m concerned when people say preemptively that they’re going to contest elections if they don’t win,” Hailey said, noting her organization has a partnership with Twitter to provide nonpartisan information. “We’ll be ready to respond with the facts and the actual truth.”
Up until these final days of the campaign, the focus has been on registering voters and encouraging them to cast ballots. Hailey said Vote.org had more users than all previous years combined in 2020, and while it may not match those numbers, there are other areas of growth.
“Our get-out-the-vote program this election is much larger,” she said, explaining the organization has focused on engaging young voters and communities of color – reaching 60 million people through its radio program alone.
Vote.org has created a multipronged approach to reaching those communities: advertising (digital, streaming services, student newspapers) and partnerships (WhatsApp, Pinterest, the NAACP’s Youth & College program, the College Board, and universities). There has been an 11 percent increase in the use of the Vote.org platform by members of Generation Z and millennials, according to the group’s representatives.
The group has also recruited influencers who have helped spread the word about voting, including Taylor Swift and Josh Gad.
“There are only 20 midnights until the 2022 United States Midterm Elections on November 8,” Swift wrote in an Instagram story last month that linked to Vote.org. (Her newly released album is titled “Midnights.”) She also used the post to encourage early voting.
Gad has also used his social media platforms to encourage voting in the final days before Nov. 8.
A secondary level of outreach includes a series of partnerships with micro influencers supporting efforts on a state-by-state basis as well as YouTube gamers who agreed to use portions of their videos to encourage voting.
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.