October 23, 2026

Photo credit: Aaron J. Thornton / Stringer / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

Earlier this month, Manhattan Institute convened three focus groups of Detroit voters. They represented a range of ages, races, and political backgrounds. They disagreed about many things, but almost all raised concerns about grocery bills, health-care costs, and gas prices.

Some Democrat respondents expressed frustration with President Trump but also criticized their own party, which they said was “chaotic” and “disjointed.” Some were skeptical of Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, with one participant referring to him as “anti-American.” Others worried about his appearances alongside streamer Hasan Piker.

Enthusiasm for Republican Mike Rogers wasn’t exactly strong, either. “Participants described him as self-serving, questioned his ties to pharmaceutical interests, and worried that he was too closely aligned with Trump,” Jesse Arm, Matthew Shor, and Karl Abramson write. “For some, that last concern was sufficient reason to support El-Sayed despite reservations about him.”

When asked to make their final selection, ten participants chose Rogers, six chose El-Sayed, and four were undecided.

Read more about how Michigan voters are feeling about the midterms.

This year, health insurance premiums will rise by 20 percent in some U.S. states. Some plans refuse to pay for services that physicians recommend, while others saddle families with enormous deductibles before coverage kicks in. It’s no wonder Americans feel frustrated with private health insurance.

For all the problems with the American health-insurance system, though, making government the sole purchaser of health care would present major obstacles of its own. The proposed Medicare for All Act, for instance, would cap total revenues at each hospital as a core financing mechanism. That, in turn, would reduce the number of patients hospitals can treat while making care more expensive for those who are treated.

“Medicare for All may be a popular slogan, but the policies that would be necessary to make it work would not be,” Chris Pope writes. Expanding it “to all Americans would mostly raise taxes to cover the costs of wealthier Americans who are already well-insured. It would also force Americans off their current private health-care plans and reduce their access to care.”

Read more.

Earlier this month, New York published a not-so-positive feature about Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. Built around the Gowanus Canal, an EPA-designated Superfund site, the area has cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up. New buildings there include some affordable housing, but most apartments are market-rate.

Even so, residents love the neighborhood. Mark Gimein is one of them. He moved into a new development there in June and pays $6,990 a month for a two-bedroom. His building has a gym, office spaces, and a roof deck, and his apartment has floor-to-ceiling windows with lots of natural light.

To be sure, he writes, “the professional housing lobby will dismiss our apartment as ‘luxury’—a basic marketing term that solicits sneers in the upside-down world where any improvement in housing stock is seen as delaying the revolution.” But older apartments there are barely much cheaper. Blue cities like New York should be pushing for thousands of new apartment units in such areas, he argues.

“In the backwards logic that permeates discussions of development, I am supposed to feel guilty that I have chosen to live in a place built by a greedy developer, instead of a wreck filled with old Brooklyn character,” Gimein writes. “In fact, I feel hopeful that, out of New York’s decades-long housing nightmare, a new, more livable city can still rise.”

Read more.