Latino voters, whose dramatic shift toward President Trump helped power his 2024 victory, are moving sharply back toward Democrats ahead of the midterms.

• Why it matters: Republicans built pieces of their 2026 strategy, including newly drawn House districts in Texas and Florida, around the assumption that Trump's historic Latino gains would endure. A reversal is complicating that bet in key races, Axios' Andrew Pantazi writes.

📊 Trump's breakthrough with Latino men was among the clearest signs of a changing GOP coalition in 2024. Two years later, those gains look far less durable, though Democrats haven't recovered all the ground they lost in the last decade. From two polls released yesterday:

• An NBC News/Telemundo poll found Latino voters preferred Democratic control of Congress 59%–35% — a 24-point advantage, double the margin the same poll found in 2024.
• A CBS News/YouGov poll tells the same story: Hispanic likely voters favor Democratic House candidates 60%–39%.

🔎 Zoom in: Latino men have undergone a particularly strong political whiplash.

• Hillary Clinton won Latino men by 31 points in 2016, according to the Edison National Election Pool exit poll, and Joe Biden won them by 23 points in 2020. But in 2024, Trump won them by 10 points.
• NBC now finds Latino men preferring Democratic congressional control 53%–39%.

Between the lines: 78% of Latinos disapprove of Trump's handling of the cost of living. 67% say Trump has gone too far on immigration enforcement, according to the NBC poll.

• 31% say they, or someone close to them, now carry ID because of ICE concerns. 27% know someone who has been detained or deported.

🥊 Reality check: Despite all this, Democrats haven't repaired their brand with Latino voters. Their net favorability is statistically flat vs. 2024, but the GOP's has fallen by 18 points.

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The White House is monitoring reports of a suspected plague case and related quarantines in Russia, a Trump administration official told Axios' Alex Isenstadt.

• Russian health authorities have taken precautionary measures in response to the death of a woman who worked at an anti-plague research facility, but have not confirmed that she contracted plague.

The Trump administration "is aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options," the administration official said.

• On Sept. 25, 28-year-old Daria Shipilova, who worked at an anti-plague research institute in Russia's Irkutsk region, broke a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen, local reports said.
• Shipilova was admitted to a hospital on Sept. 29 with symptoms of severe pneumonia and died overnight between Oct. 1 and Oct. 2.
• After her death, authorities imposed quarantines at several medical facilities in the region.

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President Trump's economic data keeps getting stronger. His economic polling keeps getting worse by the day, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes.

• Why it matters: The midterms are less than a month away, and the administration is circling the drain on voters' No. 1 issue.

It may be too late to change that, but it's also not clear anyone has much of a plan to try.

• National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said yesterday on CNN's "State of the Union": "If I say 'Oh, people are wrong, the economy is great,' then it looks like I'm insensitive. And if I then go into why the economy is great, then it looks like I'm insensitive."
• "It's true that the polls ... have been saying that people are looking a little bit depressed about the economy," Hassett said. "But if you look at their actions, the actions speak way louder than words."

💸 The big picture: There's ample evidence the economy is, statistically speaking, relatively strong.

• Economic growth is solid and accelerating.
• The labor market is relatively stable.
• The K-shaped economy is ending as lower-end wages rise.
• Public and private data say consumers are spending more than ever.

👎 The other side: People feel lousy.

• The Conference Board's consumer confidence index is at a 12-year low.
• Republican sentiment in particular is eroding at its fastest rate since the Great Financial Crisis, according to University of Michigan data.
• 73% disapprove of President Trump's handling of the economy, according to the latest AP-NORC survey, the lowest rating he — or President Biden — ever had.

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The White House Historical Association's People's House exhibition near the White House has overhauled its replica Oval Office for visitors to experience President Trump's second-term design choices.

• It's glitzier. And there's way more gold, AP reports.

The same rococo flourishes Trump installed in the world's most famous workspace have been recreated down to each wall appliqué at the White House Historical Association's replica Oval Office, which opened in September 2024.

• Gleaming vases, golden-hued swirling onlays, two dozen portraits in heavy gilded frames and knickknacks crowding nearly every available surface.

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The U.S. military evacuated a dozen B-1 bombers from the RAF Fairford airbase in the U.K. over the weekend, Axios' Barak Ravid writes.

• Why it matters: A U.S. official said the base was under threat of attack by Iran.

British security forces last week arrested several dual British-Iranian citizens suspected of planning an attack on the base.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel gave the U.K. intelligence that pointed to a threat of an Iranian attack.

The Pentagon said the U.S. military bomber force, including B-1s, B-2s and B-52s, "remain ready to deliver precision global strike capabilities — including through operations that launch and recover from the continental United States."

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"60 Minutes" last night went inside Mercor, the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar AI data company that uses more than 100,000 freelancers to train AI models with human expertise in finance, architecture, poetry and more.

• Why it matters: AI models need more data than they can glean just by eating the internet.

The CBS News show featured a winemaker, a music producer, and a physician who's training AI to accurately interpret lab results.

• "Everything that humans want AI to be able to do, we wanna teach it how to do that," Brendan Foody, Mercor's 23-year-old CEO (and a paper billionaire), told "60 Minutes" correspondent Jon Wertheim at the company's headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
• Mercor, with the slogan "organizing human intelligence," grew from 20 full-timers in January 2025 to 400 now. The unicorn's annualized revenue soared from $1 million to $2 billion in 24 months.

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BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Olivia Walton, who's leading a $100 million, bipartisan effort to cut the U.S. maternal mortality rate in half by 2031, tells me maternal health is a solvable problem, with state governments "in the driver's seat."

• "We have the medicine," Walton told me last week on the sidelines of the annual Heartland Summit of the nonprofit Heartland Forward, which promotes economic development in America's geographic middle.
• "We know what works. There are poorer and more rural countries around the world that are doing this better than we are. We also have pockets of what's working here in the United States."

Why it matters: Walton and her husband, Tom Walton, a Walmart heir, last month announced an initial $100 million, five-year commitment to Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America (HMHBA) to fund state matching grants, partnerships and infrastructure to scale successful maternal health practices.

💰 Driving the news: At the summit, Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies announced its first state grants — $10 million each to Arkansas and Kentucky over five years "to accelerate proven approaches to maternal care."

• Read the announcement.

Axios' Ina Fried, who has covered Apple for nearly 30 years, writes:

The iPhone Duo isn't even out yet. But developers are already having fun with the new design, creating apps that turn Apple's first foldable smartphone into everything from an accordion to a retro Walkman.

• Why it matters: Clever apps that couldn't exist on a traditional iPhone could help persuade early adopters to fork over nearly $2,000 for Apple's first foldable.

It's reminiscent of the early days of the iPhone, when developers turned its giant touchscreen and sensors into virtual versions of familiar objects, such as the virtual lighter apps whose flame flickered and swayed as the phone moved.

• Among the apps is Duo Man, a music player that turns the latest iPhone into a portable cassette player reminiscent of Sony's Walkman. Users open the Duo to choose an album and "insert" a cassette, then close it to start listening.

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