New attack ads from candidates in the race for Texas’ Senate seat, along with recent polling, have brought the race to a boiling point. Republican Candidates Get Vicious On Wednesday, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, released an ad against his primary opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, for “cheating on his wife” and “now sleeping around with a married mother of seven.” The ad then states Paxton’s net worth increased by 7,000% while in office, and that his actions in office are “even more troubling.” Paxton was then accused of “giving money to left-wing orgs,” which include those who “perform gender affirming surgeries to children as young as seven.” Paxton did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. On Tuesday, the Star Liberty PAC, a repeated contributor to Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s campaign, aired an advertisement attacking his primary opponent, Rep. Wesley Hunt, for his voting record. “Hunt has missed 85% of the vote this year,” the ad said. “Hunt has one of the worst voting records in the House.” Hunt has repeatedly missed votes in the House of Representatives to be with voters in Texas ahead of the election. Most notably, Hunt missed a key appropriations vote in January. The ad then said Hunt has gone “AWOL,” and accused him of stalling President Donald Trump’s agenda. “By going AWOL, Wesley Hunt has stalled President Trump’s agenda, but Hunt has made time for luxurious island trips and made taxpayers reimburse him for $65,000.” Hunt and Cornyn did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. Another ad released by Texans for a Conservative Majority, a PAC that has contributed to Cornyn in the past, called Hunt “woke,” after it was reported in December that he served on a private school’s board of trustees while it made diversity, equity, and inclusion “foundation” to the school’s principles. Another ad against Hunt called him “fake MAGA.” In response, Hunt said on social media that “when it mattered most, John Cornyn didn’t fight. He folded. He compromised. He surrendered to the Left.” Recent polling of likely voters shows Paxton leading Cornyn by a point with Hunt in a distant third. Nearly 30% of Emerson College’s poll said they were “undecided,” however. Trump has yet to endorse a candidate. NEW: TEXAS POLL Democratic Senate PrimaryJames Talarico 47%Jasmine Crockett 38%15% undecidedRepublican Senate PrimaryKen Paxton 27%John Cornyn 26%Wesley Hunt 16%29% undecided@PPowerRanker analysis: https://t.co/5bJUNDp6hAFull results: https://t.co/wxpd9dIOdU pic.twitter.com/uTAqmRbZs3— Emerson College Polling (@EmersonPolling) January 15, 2026 Democrats’ Senate Fiasco On the Democrat side, the race between Texas State Rep. James Talarico and Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Senate nomination is a “coin flip,” according to Luke Warford of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, a group supporting Democrats in the Lone Star State. Warford recently told NOTUS that “this is the most competitive Democratic primary we’ve had in a long time.” Victory will likely be determined by non-white voters, as a majority of the Democrat base in Texas is non-white, NOTUS noted, citing a study by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs. “We’ve seen in the polling that Jasmine Crockett is clearly winning among Black voters, and Talarico probably has a not as big magnitude, but a slight lead among … white voters and Latino voters, depending on what poll you look at,” Warford told NOTUS. A recent Emerson poll showed Crockett in the lead by double digits over Talarico, with 56% of respondents choosing Crockett and 44% choosing Talarico. Talarico, however, might be able to make a final push for victory given Crockett’s recent comments about Hispanic Republican voters. Crockett claimed Hispanic Republicans have a “slave mentality.” “It’s almost like a slave mentality that they have,” Crockett said. “It is wild to me when I hear how anti-immigrant they are, as immigrants, many of them. I’m talking about people that literally just got here and can barely vote that are having this kind of attitude.” Crockett and Talarico have not responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The post Texas Primaries Reach Boiling Point With Help of Vicious Attack Ads appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Tuesday night, President Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union address of his second term. He touted his accomplishments: securing the border, negotiating better trade deals, restoring American prosperity. But in all the post-speech analysis, one fight got almost no attention—and it’s the one that could determine whether everything else he accomplished will last. Federal employee unions have spent decades protecting incompetent workers, blocking reforms, and making government bloated and unaccountable. They don’t serve the American people. Rather, they serve themselves, and taxpayers pay the price. Every president complained. Trump acted. Last year, he eliminated collective bargaining rights for over one million federal workers—including the unions that prioritized protecting bad Department of Veterans Affairs employees over caring for our veterans. Federal unions sued immediately. They promised crushing political consequences. This president didn’t blink.  This wasn’t about punishing workers. It was about breaking political machines that protect incompetence, punish excellence, and stick American taxpayers with the bill. Sure enough, federal appeals courts sided with Trump. The unions lost. But here’s what conservatives need to understand: federal unions represent roughly one million workers. State and local government unions? Over seven million. And while Trump tenaciously battles federal unions in Washington, public employee unions are winning in the states—right now—because conservatives aren’t fighting back. And state and local unions are even better at the game than their federal counterparts. In “The Political Vise,” my forthcoming book, I describe how this works in  Illinois. A single union lobbyist has 35,000 active members behind him. Every legislator knows it. That lobbyist doesn’t negotiate. He tells them what he wants, and the legislators obediently deliver. The numbers tell the story. The average state government worker in Illinois earns $66,000. The average private sector worker earns just over half that: $34,196. Public sector unions didn’t just negotiate better deals for their members. They’ve literally bankrupted cities, states, and school districts across the nation while enriching their members at the expense of taxpayers. If federal unions are powerful, state and local unions believe themselves unstoppable. They operate in every state capitol, every city hall, every school board. They fund the campaigns of the very people they then sit across from at the negotiating table. Government union contributions go 91% to Democrats, 9% to Republicans. How do they wield this power? Massive campaign donations. Reliable votes. And in close elections, a small army of dedicated foot soldiers eager to ensure they don’t lose their generous benefits. While Trump fights in Washington, here’s what’s happening in the states: In Chicago, 48% of retired teachers collect over $72,000 a year in pension benefits. The average Illinois private sector worker makes $70,000—while still working. Chicago teachers can retire at 55 with 75% of their final salary for life, with 3% annual increases compounded forever. A private sector worker grinds until nearly 70 years old for Social Security that replaces (at best) 40% of their income. That’s not a pension gap. That’s a different universe. Illinois has $139 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. The system is 44% funded. Financial experts say healthy pensions should be at least 80% funded. But the unions keep demanding more. This is the pattern everywhere conservatives aren’t fighting. Unions pressure. Governors cave. Ordinary, middle-class families get crushed. Trump dared to challenge federal unions with executive action. State and local unions operate under state laws and constitutional protections that no president can touch. The president proved these unions can be challenged. He’s winning in court. The power everyone said was untouchable is cracking. But if conservatives declare victory and ignore the far larger threat in every state capitol and city hall, we’ll celebrate one battle while the Left wins the war. Republican governors must follow Trump’s lead. Republicans control more than half the states in this country. That’s 26 governors with the power to act. How many are using it? A handful at most. The rest talk fiscal responsibility while signing contracts that lock in unsustainable, budget-busting compensation. State legislators must reform collective bargaining laws. Wisconsin did it under former Gov. Scott Walker. Florida did it under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Though the unions tried to recall Walker, and they tried to destroy DeSantis politically, both governors stood firm. Both states saved billions. Trump is now doing at the federal level what Walker and DeSantis proved could work at the state level. More must follow them. Conservatives must run for school boards, city councils, and county commissions with the explicit goal of pushing back on union demands. This is where the real money gets spent—and where nobody’s watching. The fight can’t stop after one election cycle. Unions are patient. They outlast governors. They wait out reforms. They come back stronger unless the institutional changes are permanent. As bold as they were, Trump’s executive orders can be reversed by the next president. That’s why state-level reforms—actual changes to collective bargaining laws–matter more than any single executive action. Public sector unions are masters at operating a machine too few conservatives understand. They pressure politicians through campaign contributions, coordinate with friendly media, and fund radical left-wing activists. In The Political Vise(RealClear Publishing, March 3), I explain how they inverted the Founders’ system—and what it will take to reclaim it. Tuesday night’s applause was earned, and it was deserved. But the battle Trump started against federal unions—and the fight conservatives must finish in every state—will determine whether the prosperity and security the president is fighting to restore will endure. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Trump Took on Federal Unions. Now States Must Act. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A brutal cold snap has gripped New York City and much of the East Coast, freezing streets, sidewalks—and, it seems, any remaining sense of civic restraint. In Washington Square Park, a group of adults began hurling snowballs and other objects at responding officers from the New York City Police Department. This was not playful roughhousing in a winter storm. Video shows grown men and women—some masked, some standing brazenly in the open, all apparently confident that consequences would be minimal—pelting officers as they arrived on scene. That confidence is the problem. Assaulting police officers is not a prank. It is not political theater. It is a crime. Every individual captured on video throwing objects at officers should be identified, arrested, and charged accordingly. “Attack a cop, go to jail” is not a radical slogan. It is the bare minimum required to maintain a functioning city. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch responded swiftly, calling the conduct “disgraceful” and “criminal” and confirming that detectives are investigating. The city’s largest police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, issued a sharper warning: Officers were treated for injuries, but the matter cannot end there. Those responsible must be identified and charged, and city leaders must condemn the attack unequivocally. That last point is key. Public attitudes toward law enforcement do not form in a vacuum. They are shaped, in no small part, by the rhetoric of elected officials. When political figures spend years portraying police as inherently suspect or malign, it should surprise no one when segments of the public begin treating officers as legitimate targets. Consider New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Long before taking office, he built a reputation as a sharp critic of policing practices. Words matter. Tone matters. The cumulative effect of constant denunciation is cultural erosion—an environment in which hostility toward police feels permissible, even fashionable. We have seen versions of this before. After the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, national rhetoric around policing shifted dramatically. The 2020 wave of anti-police protests accelerated that shift. In many major cities, calls to “reimagine” or defund police departments moved from activist slogans into policy debates—and, in some cases, into actual governance. The result in too many places has been confusion about first principles. Law is only as effective as its enforcement. Order is not automatic; it is maintained. When elected leaders send mixed signals about whether officers deserve institutional backing, the public receives the message. And disorder follows. The current cold emergency adds another layer to the debate. As temperatures plunged, the administration touted the deployment of more than 500 outreach workers across the five boroughs to connect homeless residents with services. The mayor suggested that several recent deaths appear to be related to overdoses rather than the direct result of exposure. But the distinction raises its own question: Why are so many people still sleeping on the streets at all? In extreme weather, cities have both the authority and, many would argue, the obligation to compel vulnerable individuals into shelter. Allowing people to remain outdoors—whether they ultimately succumb to cold or drugs—reflects policy choices. Governance has consequences. So does rhetoric. A city that tolerates mobs throwing projectiles at police officers during a blizzard is a city flirting with something darker than rowdy misbehavior. It is a city testing the limits of order itself. New Yorkers pride themselves on resilience. But resilience requires rules. And rules require enforcement—consistently, unapologetically, and from the top down. If leaders will not draw that line clearly, the public will continue to test it. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Mamdani’s NYC Flirts With Chaos appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering an executive order to secure American elections without relying on Congress passing legislation. Trump has directed his counsel’s office to explore if he could develop an executive order requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo identification at polling locations across the country, MS NOW first reported. The Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing a 17-page executive order to declare a national emergency over elections and ban mail-in ballots and voting machines, on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief white house strategist, told The Daily Signal the president should declare an emergency to secure elections ahead of the 2026 midterms. “It’s the president’s duty as commander-in-chief to declare a national security emergency and take all necessary precautions today to ensure the safety of the November elections—I just pray we are not already too late,” Bannon said. It is unclear if the president can use an executive order in this way, as the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives the state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch, the power to regulate elections. But Cleta Mitchell, chairwoman of the Trump-friendly Election Integrity Network, told The Daily Signal the president is not going to do anything that is not fully based in law. “I’ve had no conversations with anyone that would suggest in any way that the president is going to issue some kind of illegal order that’s not based in law,” Mitchell said. “He hasn’t done that yet.” Democrats and the corporate media like to portray the president as being willing to issue orders without legal footing, but that’s not what he does, Mitchell said. Mitchell cited Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias, who responded to reports of the executive order saying, “My team and I have been anticipating this for months. It is unconstitutional and illegal.” “The media should note: Last time he issued an EO about voting, we sued and won,” Elias said. “If Trump issues such an order we will sue again, and we will win again.” Though a judge earlier this year blocked Trump’s Executive Order 14248 strengthening voter citizenship verification, Mitchell is confident the order was legal, and the judge’s ruling will be overturned. “Something is not going to be issued by President Trump and coming from his White House that is not fully grounded,” according to Mitchell. “He hasn’t done that previously, and he’s not going to do it now.” No matter what’s in the executive order, Executive Director of the Honest Elections Project Jason Snead expects to see litigation. “Almost no matter what is ultimately in the order, it will be challenged in court,” he said. Snead thinks an executive order could legally encourage states to pass voter ID laws. “There’s a lot that could be done to nudge states towards enacting voter identification laws,” Snead said. “The states have primary regulatory authority in this space and then Congress, as far as congressional elections are concerned, as there’s a certain amount of leeway under the Elections Clause to make or alter state regulations.” “I don’t think that we should discount the role of states here,” he added. The president’s turn to executive authority to secure elections comes after Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., seemed to rule out using the talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act. The SAVE America Act would institute national requirements of proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as photo identification to vote in federal elections. The act doesn’t have the 60 votes to pass the Senate unless Thune invokes the talking filibuster, a procedural maneuver that would only require 50 votes for the bill’s passage. “If we were to go down that path, it’s very hard to pivot and get back to open up the government,” Thune said of the talking filibuster Wednesday. “There just isn’t the support for doing that at this point,” he added. Trump asked lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act in his Tuesday State of the Union. “The cheating is rampant in our elections. … We have to stop it, John,” he said. “We have to stop it.” The post Can Trump Use Executive Authority to Require Voter ID? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Colorado Democrats have filed a bill that could make it the first state to decriminalize prostitution, and critics warn that the bill would make the Centennial State the “Wild West” for purchasing sex and lead to an increase in human trafficking. “We have a billion-dollar budget shortfall here in Colorado, and so there’s a lot of talk about budget and affordability and cost of living,” Jarvis Caldwell, the Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “This isn’t the Republicans’ idea of making things more affordable, by making it easier to sell yourself for sex,” he quipped. While some rural areas have legalized prostitution in Nevada, the entire state has not done so. Similarly, Maine decriminalized the selling of sex, but not the buying. Caldwell noted that Colorado had the tenth highest rate of human trafficking in the United States (both in the raw number of cases and as a per capita rate) in 2023, according to the Colorado-based Common Sense Institute. He also cited a 2012 study from the London School of Economics finding that foreign countries that legalized or decriminalized prostitution had higher rates of human trafficking. Caldwell argued that legalization involves setting “rules and guidelines” to regulate a practice, while a “full-on decriminalization” like this bill offers, “just makes it really the Wild West.” “It’s a no-holds-barred, no one has to worry about it whatsoever, which is obviously going to drive up demand on the buyer side, and … if you don’t have enough ‘sex workers’ for the demand side, that’s where you get your human trafficking increase,” Caldwell said. Decriminalizing Prostitution The bill, SB26-097, requires the statewide decriminalization of “commercial sexual activity among consenting adults.” It decriminalizes both the selling and the purchasing of sex statewide, and preempts cities and localities from criminalizing the world’s oldest profession. The bill repeals state laws imposing criminal penalties for prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, patronizing a prostitute, and a prostitute displaying herself in public. It preserves two criminal penalties: those for using intimidation or menacing to convince someone to become a prostitute and for pimping. The American Civil Liberties Union has called for the decriminalization of prostitution, which it calls “sex work,” claiming that criminalizing prostitution makes it harder for prostitutes to access health care and other services and “feeds an out of control mass incarceration system.” The Daily Signal reached out to the bill’s Democrat sponsors in the Senate—Nick Hinrichsen and Lisa Cutter—and the House—Lorena Garcia and Rebekah Stewart—for comment, and they did not respond by publication time. Concern for the Children Erin Lee, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, agreed with Caldwell’s concerns. Lee sued her daughter’s Fort Collins school for allegedly violating her parental rights by encouraging her daughter to transition behind her back. “I’ve been working really hard to fight child sex trafficking because my girl got put on the conveyor belt of gender trafficking and then it opened my eyes to how many child victims there are in this state,” Lee told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. The bill would decriminalize “holding a place of prostitution and window displays, so talk about normalizing this practice on Main Street for children,” she said. “It just becomes a normal facet of life for children walking down main street to see a place of prostitution, Amsterdam-style.” (Amsterdam, the capital city of the Netherlands, is known for its red light district.) “Given OnlyFans culture—these kids are already being brought up to think that it’s normal to sell yourself and everything is highly sexualized for teenagers—I believe it’s a step on the run towards pedophilia,” Lee warned. Macy Petty, a legislative strategist with Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal that Colorado legislators seek to “normalize the buying and selling of humans.” She warned the legislation “places prostituted women in dangerous situations, increases the risk of violence and exploitation, and reduces women to commodities for sexual purchase.” Colorado a ‘Testing Ground’ for Radical Bills Caldwell, the minority leader, noted that Reps. Garcia and Stewart previously sponsored HB25-1312, a bill that would have removed kids from parents’ custody if the parents refused to honor the children’s transgender identities. While the bill ultimately passed, Democrats substantially amended it following national outrage. Chase Davis, lead pastor at The Well Church in Boulder and leader of the Christ Over Colorado movement, told The Daily Signal that the Centennial State has “become their testing ground for bills like this.” Davis recalled the HB25-1312 debate last year, in which Colorado Democrats compared concerned parents who opposed transgender ideology with the Ku Klux Klan. Davis warned that many Colorado Democrats “just want to punish Christians.” He recalled the saga of Jack Phillips, the Colorado Christian baker who faced discrimination claims when he refused to craft a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding. “Last year, they compared anyone who doesn’t believe in radical gender ideology as equivalent to the KKK,” he noted. “They have no interest in partnering with evangelicals—they have nothing but contempt for them.” When asked if he would describe the bill as groundbreaking, Davis said, “It is groundbreaking only in the sense it’s going to open portals to hell … letting out demons in our state.” The post Colorado’s First-in-the-Nation Bill to Decriminalize Prostitution Would Increase Human Trafficking, Critics Claim appeared first on The Daily Signal.