Supreme Court to hear Colorado pre-K religious-freedom case
The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear arguments in a case between the Catholic Church and Colorado’s taxpayer-funded pre-K programs. The case asks whether religious schools can refuse admission to children of gay and trans parents, which would violate a state law against discrimination. For decades, the court upheld the separation of church and state, but over the past 10 years its conservative majority had increasingly focused on First Amendment protection of religious freedom. NPR reported that this shift complicates Colorado’s inclusive pre-K initiative.
Colorado built its inclusive pre-K initiative to ensure that virtually all 4-year-olds in the state receive pre-K education. To meet that goal, the state included religious schools as long as they complied with laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.
Qatar had been actively leading negotiations with Iran over the previous 72 hours to prevent further fighting, NPR reported, while U.S. partners in the Gulf were on edge and bracing for potential conflict. Qatar said little publicly about the negotiations. After tomorrow’s elections, President Trump may choose to bomb Iran again, an option he has discussed with Israel. NPR’s Aya Batrawy reported that Trump said the U.S. had neutralized key components of Iran’s military but that a couple of targets remained.
Iran said it had a two-day plan to stop attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz and resume talks with the U.S., depending on the U.S. response. Gulf states worried that further attacks would destabilize the region and disrupt global energy supplies.
NPR senior political correspondent Tamara Keith reported that congressional districts redrawn since 2024 as part of President Trump’s mid-decade redistricting push had produced more competitive races than expected. One of her spreadsheets listed all the congressional districts redrawn since 2024. Facing the historical precedent that the president’s party usually loses seats in the midterms, Trump had pressured Republican-led states to create more sure-thing GOP districts. Headed into voting, the results in two-thirds of those districts were very much up in the air, Keith wrote. In some cases Democrats were favored, in places Trump would have won by 10 points just two years earlier.
Keith focused on eastern North Carolina’s first congressional district. Last month, she noticed that Trump had scheduled a Greenville, N.C., campaign rally even as national Republicans essentially stopped running ads for his handpicked nominee, Michael Whatley and diverted resources to states with more competitive races. After reaching out to a few sources in the state, Keith concluded that the trip was almost certainly meant to help the Republican candidate in the district.
NC-01 had become one of the country’s most hotly contested and expensive House races despite new district lines that should have made it an easy Republican pickup, Keith wrote. Keith’s reporting included two days of driving through the very large district, one Trump rally, two bags of gummy candy and a lot of coffee before she returned to the office and her spreadsheet.
Keith said NC-01 was not an isolated case: a majority of districts redrawn as a firewall for a Republican majority had turned out to be far more competitive than expected. She planned to fill in the wins and losses beginning Tuesday night to see how the redistricting strategy turned out. At this stage in the midterms, Keith said, only the voting and waiting remained. On election night, she planned to work from Studio 31 at NPR headquarters, watching results roll in across browser tabs full of spreadsheets and sharing context with NPR listeners.
Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens endorsed Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open Senate seat less than 48 hours before Election Day, breaking with her party, NPR reported. The endorsement followed weeks of deteriorating relations with former primary opponent and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens cited El-Sayed’s ties to political streamer Hasan Piker, whose remarks concerning Jewish people and Israel had sparked backlash in August. El-Sayed sought to distance himself from the controversy, but Stevens criticized him for not doing enough to reassure Black and Jewish voters who had backed her in the primary.
NPR’s Sam Gringlas said he had met Democrats who did not support El-Sayed in the primary and were struggling with their votes this fall. He said the endorsement might not sway late deciders, but it was not the discussion the El-Sayed campaign wanted. Many Democrats were angry and were rallying behind El-Sayed, Gringlas said. Stevens’ longtime chief of staff and many other staff members had quit, and the Michigan Democratic Party chair announced that Stevens was no longer a member.
Gringlas said the turmoil exposed deepening fault lines within the party over Israel and its future identity. He said those questions were expected to linger even if Democrats reclaimed one or both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, especially as the party prepared to choose a presidential nominee in 2028.
NPR’s Tamara Keith separately reported that unhappy voters had shifted a previously favorable landscape for Republicans into a more challenging position for President Trump and his party, while Democrats urged voters to give them a chance to drive change. House Speaker Mike Johnson described the midterms as a “contrast election between common sense and crazy,” but Keith said midterms typically serve as a referendum on the sitting president and his party rather than a contrast.
NPR also published six things to watch on election night to determine who would control Congress, along with a guide to when polls close and where to watch results come in. Ahead of Election Day, NPR political correspondents answered listeners’ questions about possible midterm outcomes and what it is like to cover the excitement of politics. NPR noted that in every election, a key group of voters influences which candidates prevail. Its Politics team shared five insights from a year of engaging with voters who supported former President Joe Biden in 2020 and then switched to Trump in 2024.
Three shorter reports covered developments outside the election. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., 53, had been hospitalized after experiencing a stroke, his office reported, and was expected to make a full recovery. Hackers stole more than $6 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and the FBI concluded that North Korea carried out the attack. ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron earned more than $36 billion together in the quarter that had just ended, as the war in Iran drove up gas prices.
NPR’s Allison Aubrey used her “Your Turn” series on navigating midlife to examine burnout, which can become a challenge during midlife. As work and home obligations take up more of a person’s focus, burnout can slowly sap a sense of joy and wonder in everyday life. Psychiatrist Judith Joseph said anhedonia is the inability or reduced capacity to experience pleasure from things that are normally enjoyable. Joseph said it can accompany what she calls “high-functioning depression” and described the condition as depression’s “silent sister.”
Research published in the journal Cureus confirmed the hypothesis that people with high-functioning depression have increased levels of anhedonia and trauma, and parents and caregivers had the highest high-functioning depression scores. The feature noted that high-functioning depression is not an official diagnosis in the DSM-5 and that people who keep functioning may not recognize their symptoms or seek treatment until they are burned out. Joseph also developed an anhedonia quiz, which is not a diagnostic tool but can help people take stock of obstacles to living a more joyful life, and a framework for combating anhedonia called the Five V’s: Validation, Venting, Values, Vision and Vitals.