A new poll conducted from Sept. 14-16 by Quantus Insights shows the Georgia Senate race tightening, with Rep. Mike Collins gaining ground on incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff. The poll shows Ossoff leading Collins 48.2% to 44.4%, putting Collins within the margin of error. “Jon Ossoff’s toxic far-left record is being exposed, and this race is tightening every day,” Collins campaign spokesperson Meyer Siegfried said in a press release. “Georgians are rejecting Jon Ossoff for standing with the radical fringes of his party, and they’re backing Mike Collins’ commonsense businessman approach to cutting taxes, lowering costs, and delivering results in the U.S. Senate.” The poll found that 6.5% of voters surveyed were undecided. Ossoff is leading among women at 54%, and Collins leads among men at 52.3%. Ossoff is leading among independents, at 41.8%. While there was, seemingly, a high number of voters that remained undecided if they were “forced [to] lean” one way or another, the Collins campaign argued that the race was tightening. One reason cited is that Republicans have ramped up spending with the midterms fast approaching. A couple of months back, Ossoff’s campaign spent $9 million compared to $1.3 million from Collins’ campaign, a Collins campaign polling memo said. However, more recently, Ossoff spent about $35 million, compared to Collins’ $26 million. In the polling memo, the Collins campaign emphasized that Ossoff has narrowed in on his “national profile,” as opposed to tackling the everyday challenges that Georgians face, like affordability and safety. Moreover, the poll also showed demographic differences among voters. The survey found that Ossoff led Collins among minorities, while Collins led among white voters. Despite the differences among different demographics, the variation by metro type was a toss-up. Ossoff led in the suburbs at 48%, compared with Collins’ 44%, a margin of only 4 percentage points. The poll surveyed 645 likely voters through “SMS invitations” and had a margin of error of approximately 4.3 percentage points. The Ossoff campaign did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.  Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We’re about five weeks from the midterms, and maybe we should have another update. Both sides seem to be increasingly confident, although I think the mood on the Democrats is that they’re about to achieve a historic capture of both the Senate and the House and put an end to Donald Trump’s counter-revolution.  The Republicans is a little bit more tentative. They feel that very slowly there’s a turnaround, and the momentum may be going their way, but they’re not sure they have enough time yet. They’re worried about two issues: the price of gas and the unpopularity of the Iran war. If you look at the polls though, there’s some things to remember about if we go through these known unknowns of the election.  The polls are very confident that the Democrats are gonna take the House and get very close, if not take the Senate. But we remember in the primaries, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan was supposed to defeat his opponent by nine to 10 points and only won by a point and a half. The polls were way off in the Francesca Hong, Wisconsin Senate race.  And they were off in many. They were overvaluing or they were too optimistic as they were during the Trump-Harris [election]. As a general rule, most pollsters are: A, Democratic. Most polls tend to exaggerate the strength of a Democratic candidate for most of the race. And C, as the race gets down to the Election Day deadline, many of the pollsters will be more realistic so that they can save their reputations after the balloting is conducted.  In addition to the polls, there’s uncertainty. We don’t know the effect. We don’t hear much about it. We had these great red-state redistricting wars, and we had the controversial Supreme Court racial gerrymandering case that said you could not artificially craft congressional districts for seven hundred and fifty or so thousand constituents on the basis of race to ensure an election of a person of a particular race.  But we don’t know. We haven’t had really any analyses of how that’s going to translate in favor of the Republicans. Another known unknown is that in these individual key races in the swing states, states like Michigan and Texas especially, and Minnesota, it’s not really a swing state, but it is this time, we see that the Democratic candidates are outraising the Republicans.  However, on the national level, when we look at political action committee money and private donors like Elon Musk, you can make the argument that the Republicans have a greater war chest. So it’s hard to adjudicate exactly how the money’s going to be used, where it’s going to come from, and who has the advantage.  Again, another known unknown. Something that came up with the Graham Platner candidacy that failed in Maine is that no one really knew how radical these socialists were. Let me give you a little context. Mayor [Zohran] Mamdani won New York, which is a very, very blue left-wing constituency, and he was pretty much not shy of saying that he was a socialist.  The same thing was true of other candidates in the Democratic primaries in overwhelmingly blue areas in New York, in Los Angeles, in Denver. However, we really had not seen socialist, avowed socialist or Democrats whose records are indistinguishable or their advocacy is indistinguishable from socialists.  We’ve never really seen them in statewide races. So we wanted to know how they would react, and it’s been quite amazing. Mr. [James] Talarico in Texas has disowned all of his prior record of talking about a multi-gendered God who’s nonbinary and that there were several genders, in his commentary about his favorite drag queen person, his desire to fight his whiteness, etc.  These have dripped out. The same thing is true of Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed in Michigan, Ms. [Peggy] Flanagan in Minnesota. And so what’s happening is now that these hard-left candidates are in statewide races, they have the enthusiasm of that youthful, and I’ll be candid, overpolled group. But as the race wears on, they are desperately scrambling to hide, cleanse their social media accounts or mask their true socialist belief.  And what’s happening is that causes a reaction from conservatives that are desperate to uncover all the things they’ve said in the past, and they’re pretty embarrassing, to tell you the truth. That’s another known unknown.   In other words, how much information can the right get out to the public and disseminate it that shows that the candidates on the Democratic side are trying to hide who they are, so that they can get elected and then reveal their true selves only after the balloting is finished.  How does that translate into what the races themselves look like? I would say Mr. El-Sayed is ahead in the polls, but given his increasingly revealed radical record and the overpolling that he enjoyed in the primary, I’d say his opponent, Mike Rogers, has a good chance.   Troy Jackson is very close in most polls, if not in the lead, although Susan Collins in Maine is ahead in, I think, one poll.  Traditionally, she on Election Day is anywhere from three to eight points behind in her past record, in her past two successful senatorial elections, and she wins. So I would say that she has a good chance of winning over Troy Jackson. Peggy Flanagan should have been a shoo-in. She is the Minnesota lieutenant governor.  She’s very left-wing. Minnesota’s a left-wing state. But Michelle Tafoya is neck and neck. She was a sideline sports commentator. She has all this name recognition. She’s very smart, well-versed, attractive, well-funded. And in contrast, Ms. Flanagan is dealing with this Somali multibillion-dollar fraud scandal, which as lieutenant governor she didn’t seem to be worried about or at least didn’t move to act against it, and she’s tarred by her association with the very unpopular Tim Walz.  That’s an odd race, but nobody expected that. James Talarico has been ahead in the polls because the conventional wisdom was Mr. [Ken] Paxton was a very weak candidate. John Cornyn, who was sort of a RINO Republican, sober, judicious, well-liked, but not necessarily a MAGA adherent, maybe he was an apostate on 10% of his voting, lost that primary, lost it handily, but he would have been a stronger candidate in the general election.  Democrats always say they’re going to flip Texas because of the changing demography. The so-called white population is either no larger than any other group or a minority in Texas. The largest constituency seems to be Hispanic and a growing number of immigrants from India. Put that all together, and the Democrats always get ecstatic that they can flip Texas.  They may do it, but I would be surprised if Texans are going to vote for someone who rejects the use of beef, said he was a vegetarian, commented on his favorite drag queen dancer, and apparently is ashamed of being white, and he has various views about the genders of divinities, and he’s also said that Christian. He’s spoken in negative terms about his own religion.  Iowa. We don’t really know who’s going to win that race, but it is, Josh Turek was a very strong Democratic candidate, and it looks like maybe now he might not win. If you look at Kansas, the incumbent Roger Marshall has been behind. He’s almost tied now with the challenger Adam Hamilton.  Just to close out, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire were all considered surprising because they are either blue states or purple states. Excuse me, red states or purple states. They thought that they would be sure Republican wins, and then the Democrats have done very well in polling, but it’s not over yet.  The Republicans tend to be closing a little bit. So put it all together, the polls are, we really don’t know the effect of these polls, the reliability of them. We don’t know exactly who’s gonna get how much money and from where. We really don’t know how well the Republicans are gonna be able to expose the socialist background of their opponents.  But the big known unknowns, again, what’s gonna happen in Iran in the next five weeks? Is the regime going to get stronger? Is it gonna close the Strait? Is gas gonna skyrocket, or is there going to be a coalition, a new coalition of Gulf states, Israel, and the United States? Will gas stabilize or go down?  Will the Iranian regime fall? Nobody really knows. I would say I will finish on one piece of advice. I think the Republican ticket in each state needs to emphasize that besides, other than gas prices, there’s a lot of good news. Lowest poverty rate we’ve learned this week in history, highest per capita income at $87,000 per person, record stock market, inflation, even with the price of gas is not, it’s only half of what it averaged during the Joe Biden administration.  I could go on, but there’s a lot of good news that they could campaign on. And, I would say that the chances that the Republicans are gonna hold on to the Senate have gone up 60/40. The chances that the Democrats will take the House have declined probably from 70/30 to 60/40 in their favor.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Canada’s mutually assisted aid in dying, or MAID, program continues to produce the grotesque results that its detractors warned about. The latest MAID horror north of the border was first reported in a Substack post by Kelsi Sheren titled “The Last Ten Days of Brigitte ‘GG’ Stegemann.” Sheren reported how an 83-year-old Belleville, Ontario resident with cancer who had previously “declined medical assistance in dying” because she said it conflicted with her Christian faith, was killed under Canada’s medical assistance in dying program. The details are horrific. According to Sheren, two months after Brigitte Stegemann refused assisted suicide “she died by lethal injection without, her family says, speaking a word of final consent.” The details of the lead-up and the execution are disturbing. The report noted that Stegemann had been placed in a care home due to her physical and mental decline triggered by stomach cancer. Her granddaughter, Brigitte Kranendonk, had the power of attorney. Stegemann appeared to be in good spirits despite her bad prognosis and occasional mental confusion. She was not suicidal according to the family. But when Stegemann’s granddaughter was away on a 10-day trip, the care facility called her to inform her that a MAID assessment had been planned for Stegemann. The family said that the home pressured Brigette, who had been disoriented and distressed, to accept MAID with the promise that her death would be peaceful. The family said that the home intentionally kept the family away while the decision to administer the suicide drugs was made. According to the granddaughter, Brigitte at one point broke down and said she had “made a mistake” days before the procedure. The care home reportedly insisted on going forward anyway. When the lethal injection was completed, the family said that the process seemed unprofessional and that there was an alarming amount of blood that they had not seen with previous uses of IVs. The granddaughter condemned what had happened in a statement to Fox News Digital: “My grandmother was a vulnerable senior who was let down when the doctors and home bypassed every safeguard put in place to protect her—from assessing her mental capacity, to getting her clear, final consent before acting and the home filling out paperwork and having her sign when we were not there, and giving us copies. I will not stop until there is a full investigation into how this was allowed to happen behind closed doors.” The care home has not commented on the matter, but the incident is reportedly now under investigation by Belleville Police. This case has received national and international attention, as it should. Canada’s Conservative Party leader wrote on X that what happened was “disgusting” and called for immediate action to protect those who most vulnerable. The family of an 83-year-old grandmother battling cancer says she was given MAID against her will.This is disgusting. We have a sworn duty to protect the most vulnerable.This story demands action. The Liberal government must strengthen and enforce safeguards to protect… https://t.co/P1RgSlKfgU— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) September 22, 2026 I find it somewhat ironic and morally confused to put it charitably that Canada has long outlawed capital punishment but now fully endorses MAID. Is “choice” really the only value to be upheld in modern, “liberal” countries? Even that’s a mirage. As we’ve seen, even the sacred idea of choice becomes somewhat muddled when state authorities have an incentive to cut costs and bureaucracies take over the decision-making process. This is hardly the first time MAID seemed to be used to push someone into state-sanctioned suicide. I wrote in May about how an Ontario man with suicidal thoughts was allegedly pushed into suicide by an overeager doctor whom he met at a Tim Hortons coffee shop. It was pretty much the most modern Canadian story ever. It highlighted how a state-sanctioned suicide system sold as something that would be humane, safe, and rare can quickly become cruel, unsafe, and mortifyingly mundane. It’s clear that even beyond the horror stories, MAID is becoming increasingly common in Canada as it’s now becoming one of the leading causes of death in the country. “A total of 16,499 people received MAID in Canada in 2024, according to Health Canada’s Sixth Annual Report on MAID, the latest report available,” the Post Millennial reported Monday. “In the US, 15,364 people were killed by a gun in 2024, per a report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. The MAID total is 1,135 higher.” The toxic mix of state-assisted suicide and government-funded healthcare only serves to supercharge the rate of use and abuse. It seems like the Canadian healthcare system is more eager to offer euthanasia than potentially life-saving cancer medicine. CANADA vs. AMERICA: “I was DYING… I’m still here.”Kristin Logan: “At the time that I left Canada… I was dying.”“The medical care I’ve gotten has been outstanding.”“They told me three years ago that I wouldn’t make it two years. I’m still here.” pic.twitter.com/gjtCfhnMov— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 22, 2026 That’s grotesque. Canada has been at the forefront of state-assisted suicide, but other Western countries appear just as eager to adopt it. It’s hardly a limited phenomenon. Fortunately, it seems the U.K. has seen the light for now, as Parliament rejected assisted suicide after a year-long debate on the issue. It was a rare, good decision by the current British government But when are they going to wake up in the Great White North? And are we here in the United States going to watch the MAID experiment, ignore the dangers, and go forward anyway? Last year, my friend Dovie Eisner wrote a passionate denunciation of what was then New York’s soon-to-be-passed bill to launch a program that would allow doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients. Though the law at least stopped short of allowing doctors administer the drug, unlike under MAID in Canada. Dovie was born with severe disabilities, but pleaded with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to veto the bill, and prevent the state from giving families a reason to “abandon the frail.” He wrote that he was one of the “lucky ones” but feared a world where “life is cheap.” Shortly thereafter, Dovie fell into a coma after his breathing equipment failed. He was cared for by family until he died on Sept. 11. Even though his body was crippled, Dovie made the most of his life-long situation. There is hardly a conservative writer in New York who didn’t know him and wasn’t influenced by him in some way. His life was certainly worth living. We should consider that as stories like Stegemann’s become the norm and Western people become numb to the idea of mass state-sponsored death.

On Sept. 20, the Daily Wire (DW) released its new movie, “Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels.” DW, a conservative media company based in Nashville, produces a variety of podcasts, television series, and full-length motion pictures. Without a Hollywood budget, DW ventures into waters no other filmmaker dares.   DW podcast host Matt Walsh has made two documentaries, “What is a Woman” in 2022, which revealed the contradictions of gender ideology, and “Am I a Racist” in 2024, where with his signature irony and wit, Walsh gives woke “antiracists” enough rope to hang themselves.   DW also made the film “Lady Ballers,” in which a group of men decide to identify as women for the purposes of winning basketball games—a ridiculous premise now playing out in real life as former NBA players Enis Kanter Freedom and Royce White declare for the WNBA draft.   DW’s first “Run, Hide, Fight,” released in 2020, was about a mass killing in a high school. The 2026 sequel, “Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels,” is about a mass terrorist attack at a fictional college in Virginia. The state is a fitting choice, as the home of an ultra-woke governor, Abigail Spanberger, and prosecutor, Steve Descano, who releases criminals without bail and has dropped charges against illegal immigrants—at least one of whom later allegedly committed murder.  The plot of “Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels” is simple: Islamic terrorists invade a college campus, kill dozens, and take hostages to obtain the release of their leader. He had been captured in Somalia years earlier by a former Delta Force captain, who happens to be speaking on campus that very day about the threat of Islam to the West. The captain, a few plucky students, and a chunky wit of a security guard arm up, form a ragtag A-Team, and save the day.   The film is a sort of 1980s mash-up of a college dorm movie like “Revenge of the Nerds” with a straight-to-video Van Damme action flick. Remember those quotable ’80s lines? “I’ll be back.” “Welcome to the party, pal.” “I ain’t got time to bleed.” The movie’s script is a bit stilted at times, but it has a few of those. When one of the good guys shoots a terrorist in the gym, he says: “Never skip leg day.” When a bystander asks what the mayhem on campus is about, the security guard says: “We have a very active shooter.”   The movie’s characters are cliché but accurate. The blue haired, nose-ring-sporting student activists are much as you would see on any campus today. They wear keffiyehs, put tents on the quad, and snap their fingers instead of applauding. The apparently nonbinary person says it went “no contact” with its parents. Et cetera.   The faculty lounge scene is spot on too, with an assembly of leftist academics, only one of whom, a pregnant woman of color, advocates to shut down the protests on campus so people can get back to teaching and study.  As you would expect, the film has been getting attention for reasons nothing to do with its qualities as a film. Legacy media critics have savaged it. The movie’s Wikipedia page reads like it was written by the Oberlin chapter of Students for Justice for Palestine.   In truth, “Run, Hide Fight: Infidels” is not a fantastic film, but nor is it a terrible one. It’s an entertaining two hours in the shoot-em-up tradition of “The Dirty Dozen” and “Rambo.” Shut down your brain, open a few beers, and enjoy some mayhem.   As you’d expect, there are no major stars, the most famous actors being cancelled Marvel actor Jonathan Majors as the hero soldier and Jason Gray-Stanford from the TV show “Monk” as the spineless dean. A few standout lesser-known actors were Stephen Hailo as the terrorist leader and David Lucas as the security guard.   Overall, the movie cries out for the kinds of production value, writing, and cast that the mainstream U.S. movie industry simply won’t give a project like this. Why is that?   We have tens of thousands of disaster movies, hundreds of movies about the Vietnam War, and thousands about World War II. But there are almost none about Islamist terrorist attacks.  Yet mass-casualty, Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks are a potential mine of dramatic material. In Europe, there were bombings or suicide attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005, 2017), Paris (2015), Brussels (2016), Nice (2016), Berlin (2016), and Manchester (2017).  In America, Islamist-inspired terrorists killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, three in Boston in 2013, five in Chattanooga and 14 in San Bernardino in 2015, and 49 in Orlando in 2016. I can’t find a single movie about any of these events.  As for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which killed almost 3,000 people, I can find only one drama that deals with the actual terrorists and their acts, “United 93.” There is no movie about American Airlines Flight 11 or United Airlines Flight 175, the two that hit the Twin Towers, or American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon.   The obvious reason is that no one in Hollywood wants to portray Islamist terrorists saying and doing what they really say and do. They can separate Germans from Nazis, and Vietnamese from Viet Cong, but not Muslims from Islamist terrorists. Perhaps because there are no real Nazis or VC out there threatening Hollywood for its depictions of them.   In many serious World War II movies, from the 1965 blockbuster “Battle of the Bulge” to Steven Speilberg’s 1993 “Schindler’s List,” the Germans are portrayed as saying and doing things Germans did and said. Yet from 1962’s “The Longest Day” to 1998’s “Saving Private Ryan,” many have won Oscars.   The careers of actors playing murderous Nazis have only prospered. In “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket,” the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Minh guerillas are also portrayed as they were; committed to the communist takeover of Vietnam and to killing American soldiers. Yet their producers, directors, and actors suffered no blowback.  Islamism is different. It’s a no-go zone for the American film industry. I looked up which actors had played Osama bin Laden in films and found only four. Two were Hindi-language movies, one was a 2012 TV movie. The fourth, and the only American feature film, was Katherine Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty.” In it, British-Indian actor Ricky Sekhon played bin Laden. You don’t remember him? Maybe it’s because Sekhon had not one word of dialogue and “gets only a few seconds of screen time, most of it dead on the floor.” Also, as “a creative decision” by the director and writer, “his face is never shown” to the audience.   Many movies show Nazis discussing exterminating Jews and methodically killing Allied soldiers and civilians, although these views are reprehensible to their audience. Yet no movie takes even a few minutes to give bin Laden a chance to expound on his worldview, which led him and al-Qaeda to bomb two U.S. embassies and a U.S. Navy warship and to carry out the 9-11 attacks.   In 2023, some historically illiterate young people seized on bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and found it “eye opening.” Today, our campuses teem with students who believe America is the oppressor and terrorists are victims. Perhaps some more accurate and daring portrayals on our screens of what Islamists actually believe, say, and do in real life would help dispel that myth.   “Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels” may not be “Ben Hur,” but it has the courage to take on that challenge. Let’s hope Hollywood is brave enough to follow one day.  

Since late 2025, federal law enforcement has made 160 election fraud arrests and has 10 times as many investigations in motion, senior Trump administration officials said. “We are investigating several hundred cases that are very much active right now. We are bringing several cases each week,” a Justice Department official told the Daily Signal Tuesday. “But I will say that we have thousands of cases that are in their infancy, where we are receiving public voter files.” The Daily Signal reported Monday that the Justice Department has brought about two dozen voter fraud cases in September so far. Previously, the Daily Signal reported that, as of late August, the second-term Trump Justice Department charged 50 noncitizens for voter fraud in its first one and a half years, compared to 13 such cases brought in the entirety of the Biden administration. The Justice Department is combining its own internal database and tools, and distributing that information to U.S. attorneys’ offices, Homeland Security Investigations field offices, and the FBI. “What you are seeing right now is stuff that has been in the hopper, and we have been working for a while now,” the Justice Department official said. “We think as the weeks progress, we will see those tranches, just in their infancy, start to really build and come to fruition as well.” The administration also plans to release numbers on nonprosecutable cases, noting that more than 100,000 people have illegally registered to vote or voted, but the statute of limitations has expired for prosecution. The uptick in arrests shows federal prosecutors are not just looking the other way on voter fraud, said Chad Ennis, vice president of the Honest Elections Project. “The DOJ is finally putting the manpower into this. A lot of times all you have to do is look,” Ennis told thec Daily Signal. “Most of these prosecutions have been for in-person voting. In years past, most scattered prosecutions were for mail voting, or ballot harvesting operations.” A Public Interest Legal Foundation database shows 1,376 elections ended in a tie since 1992, while another 533 were decided by a single vote in that time. “Are thousands of fraudulent votes happening in one place? No,” Ennis said. “But local elections are more prone to fraud. It’s hard to steal a million votes. It’s not hard to steal 10 votes. Then someone has a city council to steer contracts their way, and it’s a good return on investment.” A Homeland Security Investigations official said the agency is getting leads from across the country, with 1,600 cases in place, and 160 arrests for illegal voting or illegal voter registration. “These are time-consuming cases. They take a lot of agent time, doing interviews, finding people, running down the official records, and determining if they voted and whether they voted in elections,” the HSI official said. The HSI official said the agency works with other agencies, including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, and the FBI to collect large amounts of registered voters, filter out noncitizens, determine if they voted, and then turn over that information to federal prosecutors. Prosecutors decide if a case can reach a conviction.