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The Trump administration on Tuesday asked a federal judge to dismiss the D.C. government and the commonwealth of Virginia’s attempt to block construction of President Donald Trump’s planned triumphal arch, arguing that the jurisdictions cannot prove that they will be harmed by the project.
D.C. and Virginia sued on Saturday to halt Trump’s planned 250-foot-tall arch, which the president hopes to build on a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery. The jurisdictions say that the project would lead to traffic problems, harm emergency evacuation routes across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and cause other regional disruptions. They also say the arch is illegal because it has not been authorized by Congress, would violate Washington’s Height Act and does not comply with other laws.
In a court filing Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers said that some alleged harms, such as traffic disruptions, were theoretical and therefore “too speculative” to prove that the jurisdictions have legal grounds to bring their case. DOJ lawyers also contended that the arch and other federal construction projects should not be subject to the Height Act, which generally limits D.C. building heights to 130 feet.
Trump administration lawyers have said that they hope to win approval for the arch from a federal review panel on Thursday and begin construction immediately afterward.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was already weighing whether to halt the project after three Vietnam War veterans and a historic preservationist alleged that the towering arch would harm their experience of visiting the nearby military cemetery.
Chutkan has imposed strict requirements on the administration’s plans, including mandatory updates before beginning construction, after several federal judges questioned whether Trump is seeking to outrace the courts for his controversial construction projects.
Rachel Apa, 24, a first-time marathoner and former college athlete, died Sunday after collapsing near Mile 24 of the New York City marathon from rhabdomyolysis.
Rhabdomyolysis, or rhabdo, is a rare condition in which muscles break down, spilling toxic quantities of proteins and electrolytes into the bloodstream. It causes acute kidney injury in up to 50 percent of cases. In severe instances, kidney failure can occur.
Approximately 26,000 people get rhabdo each year in the United States. Causes include overexertion, severe muscle injury, dehydration and overheating, as well as certain medications.
A 2026 study reviewing hospital records immediately after the New York City Marathon from 2017 to 2023 found a total of 39 cases of post-marathon rhabdo; 24 of them occurred in 2022 — the hottest race year on record.
Symptoms of rhabdo warrant emergency medical attention and include muscle pain, weakness and swelling, as well as dark urine and in some cases decreased urination, nausea and fainting. Most people recover with intravenous fluids.
One study of runners with rhabdo suggested that the rare cases of acute kidney failure probably represent a “perfect storm” of factors, including high-level exertion and risk enhancers such as heat stress, or a concurrent viral or bacterial infection.
Alaska voters will choose Tuesday among Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, Democrat Mary Peltola and other candidates in a key U.S. Senate race. But the state may not have an unofficial winner in the race until more than two weeks after Election Day.
Initial returns Tuesday night will show only voters’ first choices and will remain incomplete, as election officials count absentee and questioned ballots. Alaska has 131 hand-count precincts, which slow the count, especially in its rural areas.
If no Senate candidate wins a majority in the first round after all eligible ballots are counted, the state will run a ranked-choice tabulation. The last-place candidate is eliminated, and those ballots are transferred to each voter’s next available choice. The process repeats until two candidates remain.
That could matter because Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired teacher whose name closely resembles the incumbent’s, received 2.5 percent of votes in the August primary. A voter who ranks Sullivan Jr. first and Sen. Sullivan second could still have the ballot count for the incumbent if Sullivan Jr. is eliminated. But a ballot ranking no remaining candidate becomes inactive.
Republicans accuse Democrats of recruiting Sullivan Jr. to confuse voters, which Peltola denies. Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) has ordered an investigation and asserted that certification could be “stopped or changed” if wrongdoing is found. A federal judge Sunday dismissed a Justice Department suit to block certification if the senator loses; the department is appealing.
Alaska will accept eligible domestic mail ballots through Nov. 13 and overseas ballots through Nov. 18. Ranked-choice tabulation is scheduled for Nov. 18, with certification targeted for Nov. 25.
For the first time in three years, the median U.S. home price is falling.
The real estate brokerage Redfin, tracking home sales in all major markets, said prices two weeks ago fell 0.2 percent compared to one year earlier, and last week fell 0.1 percent, bringing the median price to $389,601.
Daryl Fairweather, Redfin’s chief economist, explains in two words: “Mortgage rates.”
With rates above 7 percent, renters are reluctant to become buyers, which dampens competition, and those who do choose to buy can’t afford larger payments.
During the pandemic, sale prices rose dramatically. The median home price in February 2020 was $259,000. Two years later, it was $335,000.
Prices then fell for a period in 2023, at a time of rising mortgage rates, before once again resuming their climb at a slower pace.
“Up until this point, prices had been increasing on a year-over-year basis. That’s important psychologically for homeowners,” Fairweather said.
Even when prices were rising slower than inflation, people could “look at their Redfin estimate or look at what their neighbor’s home is selling for, and they’d see it is going up in value,” she said.
The past two weeks, though, saw a small but meaningful shift.
Those weeks also saw the highest median mortgage payments ever recorded in Redfin’s data, at $2,786, more than 10 percent higher than just a year before.
In some places, prices have fallen a lot. Prices in Austin, for instance, are down more than 4 percent compared to a year before, according to Redfin.
In other places, prices have been going way up. San Francisco prices rose 15 percent in a year. Pittsburgh and Cleveland, among the country’s more affordable markets, are still attracting buyers. Prices were up 7 percent and nearly 5 percent in those cities.
Election pollsters have made big changes over the past decade following significant election misses. While polls were more accurate in 2022 and 2024 than in 2020, Tuesday’s midterm election provides another major test.
One big challenge pollsters face is differential response rates across partisan groups. A Washington Post-Schar School poll of Kansas voters last week found registered Democrats were more than twice as likely as registered Republicans to complete the survey after answering an interviewer’s call — 32 percent versus 12 percent.
And on Sunday, the New York Times reported that White Democrats were about 30 percent likelier to take the survey than White Republicans in their final state-level polls this year, a bit higher than in final polling in 2020.
To account for this, pollsters contact more voters in groups that respond at lower rates. For instance, pollsters for the Post-Schar School Kansas poll made thousands of additional calls to Republicans to ensure they were represented in line with their share of the electorate.
A second and increasingly common method is weighting polls by past presidential voting, which ensures that supporters of President Donald Trump and former vice president Kamala Harris, as well as nonvoters, are represented in proportion to the previous election’s results.
This “recalled” vote weighting improved the accuracy of many polls in 2024 and has been adopted by The Post, the Pew Research Center, the New York Times and many other pollsters. But lower-turnout midterm elections pose unique challenges, and Tuesday’s results will provide a fresh indication of how effective pollsters’ changes were at improving accuracy.
Read more about how to understand midterm election polls in The Pollwatcher.
There’s a Tuesday night in November that captivates the nation, leaving households on the edge of their couch cushions as they await the results. This week is no different.
The College Football Playoff will release this season’s first round of rankings in its annual made-for-TV ESPN special tonight at 7 p.m.
For the sixth time in its 12-year history, the CFP’s first rankings reveal of the season coincides with Election Day. As a handful of states close their polls, teams and fans will learn where they stand entering the final month before the postseason. The same ratings collision unfolded during the 2024 presidential election.
In past years, when the show ran on the same night as election coverage, its viewership dipped from well over 1 million to an estimated 800,000. But neither ESPN nor the CFP expressed concern over the alignment.
Each Tuesday night from the first week of November through the end of the regular season, the CFP committee releases rankings that help schools understand how they’re viewed by the committee that will ultimately decide whether they compete for a national championship in December.
This fall’s edition, as little as it may be viewed, is especially intriguing. Only three teams remain undefeated, the fewest since 2014. The biggest surprise? No SEC team is without a loss, while Georgia and Kentucky are the conference’s only schools with one loss. Chaos. This may also be the last iteration of the 12-team playoff, as the CFP and ESPN are reportedly pursuing an expansion to 24 teams as soon as next year.
The Justice Department has deployed roughly 1,000 election monitors to observe voting at polling sites Tuesday, and nearly two-thirds of the jurisdictions chosen have consistently voted for Democrats in recent elections, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The department described the deployment as a record-setting effort to ensure election integrity at polling locations in more than 120 jurisdictions in all 50 states.
Though department monitors are dispatched every Election Day, this effort has prompted anxieties among Democrats who say they worry it will allow the Trump administration to interfere with the election or cast doubt on the results.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, maintained in a statement Tuesday the monitors were sent to pursue “transparency for elections in an assertive and nondiscriminatory manner.”
Of the jurisdictions the department selected for monitoring Tuesday, at least 89 voted for the Democratic candidate in the most recent three presidential election years. At least 29 consistently voted Republican, and five have swung between the parties at least once during the last three presidential cycles.
During the 2022 midterms, the Biden administration sent Justice Department monitors to 24 states, including to Democratic-leaning jurisdictions in roughly the same proportion as this year’s deployment, The Post’s analysis found.
Typically, Democratic administrations are interested in monitoring voting in heavily Democratic areas such as large cities because of concerns over voter disenfranchisement, language barriers and access to the ballot. This year, President Donald Trump and his allies have accused Democrats of attempting to cheat and pushed for greater federal control over how voting is conducted — claims that have largely been rejected by federal courts.
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