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Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro reacts after shooting an arrow during a rally on the Day of Indigenous Resistance, his first public appearance after opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 12, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Venezuela clamps down on dissidents, Democrats celebrate election successes, Leading economist warns of triple bubble
Venezuela’s Maduro turns the screws as Trump ponders regime change
Amid intensifying US attacks on alleged Venezuela-linked drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro is cracking down on dissent at home. The largest US military buildup in the Caribbean in decades has raised concerns that US President Donald Trump may seek to knock Maduro out of power altogether. Maduro — who remains deeply unpopular after evidently rigging last year’s presidential election — has deployed loyalist vigilantes to police dissent and arrested dozens more critics. (For more on this see our latest “Debrief” with Eurasia Group’s Venezuela expert Risa Grais-Targow here.)
Democrats celebrate a good election night
As Democrats plot a path back to power in next year’s midterms, last night’s local election results give them much to chew over. First, voters in California authorized a redistricting that gives Dems a shot to overturn five GOP-held seats. Second, centrist Democrats comfortably won the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, while voters in swing-state Pennsylvania re-elected three liberal state Supreme Court justices. A key factor in VA and NJ was that voters of color who had voted for Trump in 2024 swung back to the Democrats. Lastly, of course, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral race will intensify internal party debates about whether to double down on centrism or populism.
Leading economist warns of three big bubbles
Is the world economy about to take a bubble bath? The head of the World Economic Forum has warned of three potentially crippling financial market bubbles: in crypto, in AI, and in public debt. If any of the three bursts — that is, if a critical mass of investors think they are overvalued and start a mass sell 0ff – we could be in for a world of hurt. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon have both recently warned of a coming market correction. The WEF comments came amid a brief selloff yesterday in tech stocks over concerns about over-investment in AI.
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, votes in the New York City mayoral election at a polling site at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School in Astoria, Queens borough of New York City, USA, on November 4, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Some Americans head to the polls, German U-turn on Syrian asylum policy, Russia may have to find new oil buyers
It’s Election Day in the United States
It’s the first Tuesday after Nov. 1, which means it’s US election day. Key ballots to watch include the mayoral race in New York City – where democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is poised to pull off an upset that will echo into national level politics – as well as state Supreme Court races in Pennsylvania, and ballot initiatives on gerrymandering in California. Don’t forget about the New Jersey governor election either, where GOP nominee Jack Ciattarelli is looking to eke out a victory against Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill. New Jersey was once reliably blue but has been getting more purple in recent years: in 2020 Joe Biden won it by 17 points, but Donald Trump lost by just four last year.
Germany to end asylum for Syrians
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz says Syrians no longer have grounds for political asylum in his country now that the Syrian civil war is over. Merz called for a repatriation program to ease burdens on Germany and accelerate the rebuilding of Syria, though the United Nations warns Syria still isn’t ready to absorb a large population of returnees. It was exactly ten years ago that Chancellor Angela Merkel declared “Wir schaffen das” (we can do it), establishing a generous asylum policy that welcomed in more than a million Syrians fleeing their country’s horrific civil war. A decade later, with the war over and the far right surging on anti-immigrant backlash, Merz is now saying, “Wir schaffen das nicht.”
Is India buying less Russian oil?
Last month, Trump announced sanctions on Russia’s top two oil companies, in a bid to squeeze the Kremlin’s war effort by scaring off major crude buyers like India and China. Is it working? Preliminary data show India’s imports of Russian oil actually increased slightly in October compared to September. But wait, there’s more: India’s purchases in the second half of October plummeted compared to the first half. That may have something to do with the fact that Trump announced the sanctions on Oct. 23. They don’t take effect until later this month, so we’ll be watching to see what the November data tell us. With Chinese firms now also reportedly exploring alternative sources of oil, Russia may in fact start feeling the effects of US sanctions (for more on this, and whether it would change his approach to Ukraine, read here).
A member of the M23 rebel group walks on the outskirts of Matanda in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, March 22, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Civilian killings in the DRC, Musk scraps plans for third party, Swedish church moves to altar-nate site, & More
140: Rwanda-backed rebels killed at least 140 civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in July, per Human Rights Watch, and the number could rise to 300. The two sides had seemed on the path to peace after signing a peace deal in the White House in June, but the killings suggest the conflict is far from settled.
30: Eemeli Peltonen, a 30-year-old Finnish Member of Parliament, passed away in the parliament building yesterday. It appears he died by suicide. The death of Peltonen, who was a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, has shocked the country. He was one of the youngest politicians in the Finnish government.
79: A bus carrying Afghans who had been expelled from Iran crashed in western Afghanistan yesterday, killing 79 people. It was on its way from the border to the capital Kabul. Iran has deported hundreds of thousands of Afghans this year, in part over unsubstantiated claims that they were spying for the Israelis.
$290 million: So much for that third-party idea: Tesla owner Elon Musk is quietly shelving his own plan to fund a third party in the United States. Musk donated over $290 million to Republican campaigns ahead of the 2024 election, but had threatened to create a new party – and inject it with some of his cash – when Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. It seems he realized he had a mountain to climb.
672: Talk about a pilgrimage! A 133-year-old church in northern Sweden – all 672 tons of it – completed its two-day relocation today, after shifting three miles down the road in the village of Kiruna. Risk of ground subsidence forced the move – the town’s history of iron ore mining meant the church was no longer on terra firma. To achieve the move, the whole building was placed onto a giant trailer and hauled at a steady pace of roughly 550 yards per hour.US President Donald J. Trump signs executive orders in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 25, 2025.
GZERO Explains: How Trump’s executive order could impact millions of voters
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that aims to secure elections by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The order aims to guard against illegal immigrants voting in elections and would require all ballots to be received by Election Day.
The conundrum: The order has a strict list of ways to prove citizenship. So, while it will guard elections against illegitimate voting, it will also stop a lot of legitimate voters from casting ballots.
How does the executive order affect voter registration? Voters will have to provide proof of citizenship and valid photo identification. For most Americans, this will mean a passport or a combo of a Real ID-compliant license and a birth certificate. It also aims to eliminate online voter registration.
Who might this affect? About 140 million Americans do not have a valid passport. To put that into perspective, 153 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election. And close to 69 million women who have changed their names would have difficulty providing matching documents.
Is this enforceable? One provision of the order grants the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, the authority, with assistance from the Department of Homeland Security, to issue subpoenas to states for reviewing voter rolls to ensure compliance with federal laws. It also says that failure to comply could lead to a loss of federal funding.
But this is unlikely to fly with the courts. The US Constitution is crystal clear that Congress and the states have jurisdiction when it comes to creating election laws. This is likely to be thrown out by the courts. However, legislation called the SAVE Act was passed by the House on April 10 and contains the same provisions as the executive order, and would make them law if it is passed through the Senate.
But requiring proof of citizenship has been a goal for Republicans for a long time. So, even if the executive order is blocked nationwide, it will likely mean many GOP-led states and counties adopt rigid citizenship requirements anyway.
Are non-citizens voting? Despite levels of illegal immigration rising in the US over the last decade, audits by state officials and political scientists have concluded that it is still rare. A 2022 Georgia investigation found that there were 1,634 incidents of noncitizens potentially attempting to register to vote between 1997 and 2022, but 1,319, or 80.7% of them, happened after 2016. But, and this is important, in none of the cases was the person allowed to vote.
Are the payoffs worth it? Kansas implemented similar strict voting rules requiring proof of citizenship in 2013 in response to its Secretary of State saying that it found 129 non-citizens to have voted or tried to vote since 2000. While that accounted for 0.0007 of the state’s voters, the new rules ended up preventing more than 31,000 eligible US citizens from registering to vote after it was enacted – accounting for 12% of all first-time voter registration attempts in Kansas that year.
After voters elected her to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, liberal candidate Judge Susan Crawford celebrates with Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Ann Walsh Bradley at her election night headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 1, 2025.
Republicans expand House majority, but Musk’s man suffers in Wisconsin
What was all the fuss for? Republican Randy Fine cruised to a 14-point victory over Democrat Josh Weil in Tuesday’s special election for Florida’s 6th Congressional District, quashing the quixotic liberal dream of flipping a seat that US President Donald Trump won by 30 points in the 2024 presidential election. Combined with Jimmy Patronis’ Tuesday triumph in Florida’s 1st District, the GOP increased their House majority to 220-213 — heady days for US Speaker Mike Johnson.
The Fine print. Republicans will be relieved that Fine pulled through, but the margin of his victory may worry them. Fine’s supporters outspent pro-Weil groups on ads by a four-to-one ratio, amid concerns that the seat could be in play. Yet the Democrat still cut the victory margin in half, compared to where it was just five months ago. In the 1st District, Patronis also won by just 14 points — a paltry showing in an area that more closely resembles Alabama than parts of Florida.
Musk misfires. Despite plowing $25 million into the race, Elon Musk couldn’t help conservative candidate Brad Schimel over the line in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election yesterday, as liberal candidate Susan Crawford cruised to a 10-point victory. The result ensures that liberals maintain their 4-3 majority on the court with a suite of court hearings upcoming on abortion access, district maps, and collective bargaining.
“There is an unelected billionaire who should not and will not have a greater voice than the working people of Wisconsin,” former Vice President Kamala Harris said last night, a pointed remark against Musk.
The Tesla CEO wasn’t the only one who spent big on the race, as Crawford’s campaign committee raised $17 million as of March 17 and helped to make it the most expensive judicial election in US history. The greater concern for Musk isn’t the loss of cash — he has plenty left in the bank — but rather the political repercussions. Crawford and her supporters relentlessly attacked Trump’s right-hand man in their ads, and the bet paid off. Republicans’ private grumblings about the tech entrepreneur might just start to get louder.National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the then-nominee for US ambassador to the UN, during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025.
Chain reaction: Why Trump pulled Stefanik’s UN nomination
Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) hopes of moving to the Big Apple have been dashed after US President Donald Trump asked her to withdraw her candidacy for ambassador to the United Nations.
“As we advance our America First Agenda, it is essential that we maintain EVERY Republican Seat in Congress,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday, admitting the political nature of his decision. When asked about her withdrawal, Stefanik told Fox News, “I have been proud to be a team player.”
Margin call: With four vacancies in the House, Republicans only have a 218-213 majority in the lower chamber, meaning they can only afford to lose three votes anytime they want to pass legislation. Trump fears that, if Stefanik moved to the UN, Republicans could lose the special election to fill her seat.
Bad signal: It’s not Stefanik’s seat that Trump is worried about right now, but rather Florida’s 6th Congressional District, formerly represented by none other than National Security Adviser and Signal-chat-scandal creator Michael Waltz. There’s a special election there on Tuesday, and the president’s team is concerned that the well-funded Democratic candidate, Josh Weil, could defeat the underfunded Republican candidate, Randy Fine, even though Trump won the Daytona Beach district by 30 percentage points in the 2024 presidential election.
Eye on the poll: An internal Republican poll from March has Weil leading Fine 44% to 41%, according to a source familiar with the race, with 10% undecided. The poll was conducted by Fabrizio Ward, the same firm that worked for Trump’s campaign, and isn’t yet public. The February iteration of this poll found Weil trailing Fine by 12 points.
How Biden’s presidency will be remembered
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
This is what we're watching in US Politics this week: One question that's going to be debated for a long time in the coming years is what is President Biden's legacy? I think there are a couple of things that he's going to be remembered for.
The first is the extraordinarily chaotic global environment over which he presided. Republicans will tie this back to the shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan that President Biden presided over. But following that, you had the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the events of October 7th in the Middle East that led to the ongoing war there that is just now starting to look like it's settling down. But this is clearly going to be one of the background themes of any assessments of President Biden's legacy.
Biden's now one of four one-term presidents in the last 50 years, and one of the reasons that he lost was of course inflation. And inflation, you could argue was fueled by the pandemic or you could argue it was fueled by early actions taken by the Biden administration to spend a lot of money, perhaps more money than was necessary. But either way, the inflationary story of 2021 and 2022 is going to be remembered as one of his key legacies and one of the reasons that he lost reelection. Now that loss to Donald Trump, allowing probably one of the more controversial presidents in certainly recent American history, to come back into office and mount an unprecedented political comeback is also going to be part of Biden's legacy. Because of the fact that he decided that he was able to run even at his advanced age, that blocked out the Democrats from having an opportunity to hold a primary and then forced the Democrats to change horses midstream and move over to Kamala Harris in the middle of the election cycle, who of course lost to Trump. That is also going to be part of his legacy.
And it's unclear. Biden thinks, says it publicly, he could have won election if he just stayed in. He's 82 years old. He'd be the oldest president ever if he did, and there's obvious decline in his faculties over the course of the year. But more importantly, the American people really started to lose confidence in Biden as time went on this year. So not at all clear that he would've won that election or that any other Democrat could have won that election if there were a primary process. But his sticking around and the White House staff and other Democratic operatives that covered for the age-related decline that he was experiencing is also going to be a part of President Biden's election.
Probably one of the more consequential things I think he's going to end up having done over the longer term is increasing the US confrontation with China, particularly over technology policy. The world is at a critical juncture when it comes to the advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence. And the wall that the Biden administration has been trying to erect around Chinese access to US advanced technologies is going to have ripple effects and repercussions for years to come. The Trump administration's likely to continue a lot of that, and this could potentially be an inflection point in 10 years time as we look back and look at the two different tech ecosystems that are being built out. A lot of that legacy is going to trace back to the Biden administration.
So that's a pretty complex, mixed legacy. The US doesn't have lot of one-term presidents in recent history. Most one-term presidents aren't remembered that fondly. Presidents like George H.W. Bush look a lot better in the long distance of history, whereas President Jimmy Carter who recently passed away still has a bit of a mixed legacy. And that's probably where Biden's going to end up.
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What Trump’s cabinet picks reveal so far
Jon Lieber, Eurasia Group's head of research and managing director for the firm's coverage of United States political and policy developments, shares his perspective on US politics from Washington, DC.
This is what we're watching in US politics this week: It's Trump's transition, of course. Lots of activity happening over the course of the week with some unexpected developments, including a lot of very unusual cabinet appointees. Sean Duffy at Department of Transportation, former "Real World" star and congressman, who has very little experience with transportation other than presumably driving a car, and of course, competing on the "Real World/Road Rules Challenge" is going to be in charge of the transportation department.
Other picks like Pete Hegseth have been a little more controversial. The former Army National Guard member and Fox News host has been accused of sexual assault. Not a great look for the incoming Secretary of Defense. But he's nowhere near as controversial as the recently withdrawn pick, Matt Gaetz, the firebrand Congressman from Florida who resigned his seat in order to become Trump's attorney general, and then found out that no Republican wanted him in that job.
Gaetz's withdrawal will allow some of the more controversial attention to be focused on people like RFK Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, somebody with a long career in the nonprofit management space, but no experience in public administration and who's been extremely critical of the US's Public Health Administration, including on toxins in foods, additives in foods, vaccines, and the approval process for them. And he's tapped into a strain of anger among Republicans at the public health apparatus that they say failed to protect the public during the COVID-19 epidemic, pointing to inconsistent and sometimes unnecessary masking guidelines. Things like social distancing, keeping the schools closed, and of course the vaccine recommendations that a lot of Republicans rejected during that pandemic. RFK's confirmation odds, however, look pretty good if you look at the relatively warm reception that he's been received with by most Republicans.
One area that's still totally in doubt for the most part is Trump's economic team. It's been two weeks since the election, there's no treasury of the secretary, there's no USTR. There is a commerce secretary pick, another Trump ally who has no experience in public administration, Howard Lutnick, a lot like Wilbur Ross in the first administration, but potentially leaving Trump's trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, without any clear role. So there's a lot more clarity on the national security side than there is on the economic side for now. That may change over the weekend. And of course, the one thing with President Trump is you could always expect the unexpected.
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