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“Let’s start off by saying, Garrison, this is all lies. It’s ludicrous. I mean, they’re saying things that are just not true.”
That’s Stress Test host David Corn, describing to his co-host Garrison Hayes the barrage of Islamophobic attacks from Republicans desperate to hold on to Congress. As this episode shows, the GOP—from Donald Trump to JD Vance to Cabinet secretaries to senators and representatives—has made hateful bigotry a central element of its final midterms push.
Those assaults have primarily targeted Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, with Vance calling him a “cancer” with “zero attachment” to America’s land or history; Sen. Ted Cruz falsely labeling El-Sayed a “theocratic zealot” and lifelong Muslim Brotherhood supporter; and Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno declaring El-Sayed doesn’t belong in Washington, DC, because he doesn’t believe “Jesus came here for our salvation”. Pointing out that Moreno appeared to be establishing a religious test for service in Congress, David says, “That’s not what the Constitution says. That is what Christian nationalists say.” The race-baiting doesn’t stop there: Donald Trump warned that El-Sayed and Democrats will invite “hordes of jihadists” until Americans “cannot even have a Christmas.”
Noting that Vance mocked the names of Middle Eastern countries as unpronounceable, Garrison observes that the veep—a member of the elite with a Yale Law pedigree and financial backing from Peter Thiel—has been shamelessly code-switching: “I mean, he’s G-dropping: ‘When I was waitin’ at the gas—‘ Like, brother, we hear you speak. We know you don’t speak like that all the time.”
What does all this bode for Tuesday? That’s one of the themes of this episode, as David points out that this divide-and-conquer racism and white nationalism has been building within the GOP for years: “They really have been heading toward—I should say, maybe galloping toward—this view that there are different types of Americans, and white Christians are the only true Americans out there. “But this election is gonna tell us whether motivating the far-right base is enough for Republicans to win, even in red states.”
To that end, Garrison and David bring in Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman, who has been on the ground in Alabama reporting on the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and allowed Republican legislatures across the South to gerrymander to dismantle majority-Black congressional districts. “This Callais decision has really resonated,” Ari reports. “This is the Dobbs decision of 2026,” referring to the 2022 ruling that abolished the constitutional right to an abortion. “It has motivated Black voters like the Dobbs decision motivated women voters in the last midterm election.”
Black voters are acutely aware of why their rights are being targeted, Ari says: “They kept saying to me, ‘If our votes didn’t matter, why are they trying so hard to dilute our power, to gerrymander us out of representation?’”
The resulting surge in early voting may be one reason why Trump appears to be on the defensive, forced to spend critical campaign days shoring up deep-red strongholds like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Still, another threat looms after the votes are cast, when Trump’s election-interference schemes might kick into gear. The good news, according to Ari, “is that you can’t nullify an election through Truth Social, okay?” Even so, Republican legal challenges are already underway, and “what I worry about,” Ari says, “is what happens after the legal process has played out, ’cause I think that’s where things went crazy in 2020.”
The MAGA playbook at this point is clear: suppress the vote, stoke the base, then cry foul. Whether that strategy prevails will be determined by voters on Tuesday.
Producer: HyoJung Kim
Assistant producer: Sonel Cutler
Executive editor: James West
Senior editor: David Ritsher
Hosts: David Corn, Garrison Hayes
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