Halloween is almost here, which makes it a perfect time for an election. Halloween is when people put on costumes, knock on your door and ask for candy. Midterm elections aren't all that different. Politicians put on costumes too. They dress themselves up as moderates, populists, conservatives, champions of the working class, defenders of democracy, outsiders, reformers and whatever else the polling tells them voters want to hear. Then they knock on your door and ask for the candy a.k.a Your vote.
Trick or treat. Give us the treat, or you might get the trick. The trick can take a lot of forms. It can be refusing to accept an election result. It can be trying to change election rules when the current rules become inconvenient. It can be months of litigation. It can be mass demonstrations that turn violent. It can be politicians telling their supporters that the system itself is illegitimate whenever they lose. We've seen versions of all of it, from January 6 in Washington, ANTIFA and BLM riots, to political street violence in Europe. France has repeatedly shown how quickly political anger can spill into the streets. America isn't immune.
But before anybody starts screaming that I'm talking about their party, relax. I'm talking about all of them. There are Republican candidates in competitive races trying to put some daylight between themselves and Donald Trump. Reuters recently reviewed 62 competitive House and Senate races and found that candidates in 41 of them had either broken with Trump on policy or downplayed their connection to him. Some removed his name or endorsement from campaign websites. Others disagreed with him on the Iran war or other issues. That's Halloween.
There are Democrat candidates doing the same thing from the other direction. Some have spent years supporting policies that played well in progressive primaries, then discovered that the general electorate is less enthusiastic. So the costume changes.
Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is a good example. As a state legislator, he opposed Republican restrictions on transgender athletes in girls' sports and once said that some things were more important than perfectly fair competition. In 2026, running statewide, he said he opposed transgender athletes competing in girls' sports when safety or fairness is at risk. He also walked back an earlier statement about multiple sexes and said plainly that there are two.
People are allowed to change their minds. In fact, we should want politicians to change their minds when evidence changes. But voters are also allowed to ask whether they're witnessing an honest evolution or a costume change designed for November.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed offers a different example. Despite his disavowal of the Muslim Brotherhood, a US-designated terrorist group at the heart of Islamic radicalism across the middle east, his sister wrote in 2012 that her family had long been connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and referred to their biological mother's activism in the organization during the 1970s. El-Sayed says he was raised by his father after his parents divorced and that the allegations are hearsay.
But El-Sayed also chose to campaign with Hasan Piker, one of the most prominent socialist political screamers in the country. Piker appeared with El-Sayed at campaign events during the Democratic primary and used his enormous online audience to promote his candidacy. Piker openly identifies with socialist politics, routinely attacks capitalism and what he calls the American empire, and has made statements about Israel and American Jews that prominent Democrats have condemned as antisemitic. In August, Piker warned that if American Jews continued presenting themselves as closely aligned with Israel, eventually someone would “take action” against American Jews. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries called the remark “dangerous and antisemitic.” El-Sayed subsequently distanced himself from the statement and said Piker didn't speak for his campaign. Piker denies being antisemitic, but voters are entitled to consider why a candidate seeking statewide office chose such a controversial socialist activist as a campaign surrogate in the first place, particularly when Piker's broader political message calls for fundamental changes to the capitalist and political system that has defined the United States.
Then there are candidates who barely bother with the costume. Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, is the kid who walks up to the door with no mask or costume and holds out the bag and says, “Just give me the candy.” She is member of the Democrat Socialists of America and embraces their policy platform that are mostly incompatible with our constitutional republic. Here’s a sample:
Public ownership of major corporations and essential industries.
Medicare for All. Universal healthcare with no individual cost at the point of service, including abortion and sex change treatment.
Universal rent control and public housing.
Police and prison abolition.
Abolish ICE and greatly liberalize immigration.
Green New Deal and public energy
Free public education through college and student-debt cancellation. DSA also supports paid family leave, a 32-hour workweek with full pay, and a living minimum wage.
Reparations and race-conscious public investment.
Abolishing the Electoral College and Senate, and making the executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress.
Defunding the Defense Department, closing overseas bases, ending foreign wars, ending military and economic aid to Israel, and removing sanctions on countries including Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.
I respect that Angie Nixon isn’t hiding her views. Donald Trump is in the same category in that you know exactly who and what he is. Put all of it on the table. Let voters decide. That should be the standard for everybody.
The Costumes Aren't Just For Candidates
Political parties wear costumes too. Republicans still like to describe themselves as the party of limited government. I wish that were more consistently true. Limited government means something. It means a government that recognizes boundaries. It means Congress doesn't spend money simply because it can borrow it. It means presidents don't treat executive power as a substitute for legislation. It means federal authority doesn't expand every time Washington discovers another problem it would like to solve.
Today's Republican Party has drifted from that tradition. Some of that drift began long before Trump. Both parties have contributed to a federal government that spends too much, borrows too much and reaches too far.
Trump has also accelerated a personality-driven version of Republican politics that sometimes sits awkwardly beside limited-government principles. His administration has embraced aggressive executive action. He has pursued expensive prestige projects in Washington. His allies have fought over efforts involving the Kennedy Center. He has promoted a monumental arch project in the capital that would bear his name. These might be interesting projects in another context, but at a time when the national debt exceeds $40 trillion, I'm not convinced the federal government needs architectural vanity projects.
There's also the question of the Trump family's business interests. Reuters estimated this year that the family earned roughly $2.3 billion from four cryptocurrency ventures while Trump was back in office. That doesn't establish that any law was broken. It does create the appearance of conflicts that a president should want to avoid. I am sure this will be investigated when the Democrats retake control of the House of Representatives next week.
Trump doesn't help himself when he gives opponents legitimate questions to ask. But none of that means his entire record is bad. Far from it. There are major Trump policies I support, and several are producing visible results. One is the effort to rebuild strategic American manufacturing. For decades, the United States allowed too much critical production to migrate overseas. That's dangerous in pharmaceuticals. It's dangerous in semiconductors. It's dangerous in steel. It's dangerous in shipbuilding. A country that can't manufacture the basic materials needed to defend itself has surrendered an important part of its sovereignty.
The White House is making big investments in these strategic sectors. $191 billion in chips and technology, $63 billion in medicine and medical manufacturing, $48 billion in steel and metals and $30 billion in aerospace, defense and ships. I also support restoring control of the southern border. Whatever label anybody wants to use for the Biden-era policy, the practical result from 2020 through 2024 was an immigration system that lost control of immigrants entering the country. Current CBP data show Southwest border encounters 94-95% below the levels seen during the previous Biden Administration. That was a major Trump campaign promise, and the administration has delivered.
The same is true of DEI policy in the federal workforce and military. Trump promised to dismantle race and sex preferences in federal programs. Executive orders issued in January 2025 directed agencies to terminate DEI programs and ordered the military to abolish DEI offices. I believe hiring, promotion and military advancement should be based on merit rather than racial, sexual or identity preferences. On that issue, he said what he was going to do and then did it. That's worth recognizing even if you dislike him personally.
Trump also deserves credit confronting Iran. For years, Tehran expanded its nuclear program while funding and arming proxy forces across the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and militias in Iraq and Syria. And don’t believe the narrative that Obama’s nuclear deal was working without war. Iran continued it’s nuclear program in stealth mode as it regularly turned away international inspectors as the Obama and Biden administrations looked the other way. After years of sanctions, negotiations and proxy escalation, the decision to impose direct military consequences changed that calculation and made clear that the United States would no longer treat Iran’s nuclear ambitions and proxy warfare as problems that could be managed indefinitely from a distance. I don’t know about you, but my top issue is avoiding nuclear war because nothing else matters in comparison to that.
The Socialist Costume
The Democratic Party has its own identity problem. Not every Democrat is a socialist. Most Democratic voters probably wouldn't describe themselves that way. But it's impossible to ignore the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America on the party's activist base and on Democratic primaries. DSA is not a separate political party as its candidates run as Democrats. Its own constitution says it rejects an economic order based on private profit and favors "popular control of resources and production" along with "economic planning." Those aren't Republican attack lines. Those are DSA's words.
In August, I wrote about the history of Communism and it’s child Socialism, in "Kommie Kids: A Short History," I'm not going to repeat that entire argument here. My view remains simple. Socialism is incompatible with the constitutional structure our Founders created. The Constitution doesn't prohibit socialism by name, and it permits taxes, regulation and government programs. But an economic system that broadly replaces private ownership with government control would collide with constitutional protections for property, due process, federalism and limited delegated powers.
If Americans want to fundamentally change that arrangement, there's a constitutional amendment process. That's the point of having a Constitution.
The Affordability Costume
Then there's the issue everybody is talking about: affordability. Inflation was 3.7% over the twelve months ending in September. Gasoline jumped 9.1% in September alone and accounted for more than half of that month's increase in the Consumer Price Index.
Trump's tariffs don't help. Tariffs are taxes on imports, and some of those costs get passed on to consumers and businesses. I understand the strategic argument for using tariffs to rebuild domestic capacity. I support that objective. But pretending tariffs have no cost is silly.
The Iran war doesn't help either. The Pentagon now estimates that the U.S. military has spent more than $40 billion on the conflict. More important to most families, the war has disrupted energy markets and contributed to higher fuel costs. Trump initially expected a short conflict. It hasn't worked out that way. So Republicans don't get to blame every price increase on Joe Biden.
But Democrats don't get to erase the previous four years either. Washington injected extraordinary amounts of money into the economy during and after COVID. That began under Trump and expanded under Biden. The Federal Reserve kept monetary conditions exceptionally loose. Biden then signed another series of major spending initiatives. The question is whether Washington poured too much money into an economy that already had massive fiscal and monetary stimulus. We can debate how much that contributed to inflation. What isn't debatable is that federal spending expanded enormously.
It's also fair to ask how carefully taxpayers' money was protected. Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future scandal became one of the largest pandemic-era fraud cases in the country, with federal prosecutors saying more than $240 million in child-nutrition funds was fraudulently obtained through fake meal sites, shell companies, kickbacks and money laundering. Many of the defendants were members of Minnesota’s Somali community who used the money to finance lavish lifestyles. I am confident the amount of fraud that consumes our federal tax dollars runs into hundreds of billions if auditors were allowed to really take a look. Incredibly, prosecuting or tolerating fraud has become a politically divisive issue.
I’m confident inflation will abate somewhat with an end to the Iran War which hopefully ends soon, but the roots of inflation come from government money printing which has gone on unsustainably for a long time. Next to nuclear war, the carnage resulting from runaway hyper-inflation that takes hold when governments spend recklessly, it the second most important thing that keeps me up at night.
Take Off The Costumes
So how should anybody vote? Here's my suggestion. Forget Donald Trump for a moment. Forget Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, JD Vance and every other political personality who makes you cheer or causes your blood pressure to spike. Take the party labels off the ballot in your head. Then write down what you actually believe.
Start by deciding what you believe about war. Do you support the Ukraine War, the Iran War? If you do, what objective justifies continuing either? If you don't, what alternative do you want? Immigration deserves the same treatment. Decide how much illegal immigration the country should tolerate, what should happen to people already here illegally and what legal immigration should look like.
Public safety, affordability and merit should be approached the same way. Decide what level of police funding you support and where criminal justice reform should stop and enforcement should begin. Think through what caused the inflation of the past several years and how much responsibility belongs to pandemic spending, Biden-era fiscal policy, the Federal Reserve, Trump's tariffs and the Iran war. Ask yourself whether government should ever favor one person over another because of race, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, and if you believe preferences are justified, define the circumstances.
The same discipline should apply to women's sports, parental rights and the national debt. Decide whether biological males who identify as transgender women should compete in female athletic categories and whether your answer changes by age, sport or level of competition. Decide what role parents should have in decisions involving their kid’s gender identity, and what they are taught in school. Then look at the debt. With the national debt above $40 trillion, what are you willing to change? Do you think these things don’t affect you? Taxes, spending, entitlements and defense all have consequences, and doing nothing has consequences too.
Finally, decide how much constitutional power you want concentrated in Washington. How much authority should a president have? How much should Congress delegate? What should remain with the states? You don't have to agree with me. That's the point. Rank these issues according to what matters most to you, then look at each candidate's actual record rather than the costume, the commercial, the yard sign or the endorsement.
Happy Halloween
Politics has become too personal. People vote against politicians they hate and excuse politicians they like. They forgive conduct from their own side that would send them into a rage if the other side did exactly the same thing. That's how parties stop serving voters and voters start serving parties. I'm not interested in doing that.
I think Republicans have lost some of their limited-government bearings. I think Trump has made unnecessary mistakes and created legitimate concerns about executive power, spending priorities, personal business interests and the Iran war. I also think he's been right on several major issues. Rebuilding strategic manufacturing is important. Controlling the border is essential. Restoring merit in the federal government, education, the military and our critical institutions is long overdue.
I think the growing socialist influence inside Democratic politics deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. I don't believe centralized economic planning and broad government control of production are compatible with the constitutional system that helped produce one of the freest and most prosperous societies in human history.
Those are my opinions. You should develop your own. But whatever you decide, don't let the costume make the decision for you. Halloween comes once a year. Political Halloween comes every election. The candidates are at the door. They've got their costumes on. They're holding out the bag and they want your candy.
Before you hand it over, make sure you know who's underneath the mask.
