Mother Jones

A majority of American adults say that the US House should vote to impeach President Trump—including one-in-five people who voted for him in 2024.

A new poll by Strength in Numbers, a data-based news website, and the market research platform Verasight found that 55 percent of respondents said they support the US House voting for impeachment. Out of the 1,514 Americans surveyed between April 10 and April 14, 37 percent said they opposed and eight percent reported they were unsure.

While this is just one poll in a collection of many, it is clear that Trump’s approval ratings are sinking. The New York Times’ daily average of dozens of polls has the president at a 38 percent approval rating. On January 27, 2025, the first average calculated following Inauguration Day, the Times recorded Trump’s approval rating at 52 percent. 

The numbers are striking, but there are few avenues for popular sentiment to achieve tangible results in Washington. There have been numerous calls from lawmakers to impeach and convict Trump or invoke the 25th Amendment, especially following his threats of genocide against the people of Iran. But they appear unlikely to succeed given the Republican majorities in the US House and Senate, as well as large support from his cabinet.

However, as I wrote on Sunday about Trump’s approval rating falling to its lowest point of his second term, if Americans see the upcoming midterms as a referendum on the failures of the current administration, then it could swing elections across the country.

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Enormous new batteries keep appearing on the grid, making it devilishly tricky to keep track of which is the biggest in a given region. That’s certainly the case in New England, where acute power needs and robust state climate goals are fueling a buildout of big batteries that keep breaking capacity records.

Canary Media recently covered the inauguration of the 175-megawatt Cross Town battery in Gorham, Maine, which was the largest in New England when it began operating in late November. But that trophy has already passed to a 250-megawatt facility in Medway, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston and about 10 miles from the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.

The Medway battery came online fully on February 25, according to developer VC Renewables, a subsidiary of global energy trader Vitol. “To be fair, I don’t expect Medway to hold that title for very long, either,” said Tom Bitting, managing director at Advantage Capital, which supported the project with a $158 million tax equity deal. ​“There are other batteries being developed in New England that are bigger, but I think it is all just a sign that we need all of it, and there’s huge demand for it.”

“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone.”

For instance, Jupiter Power, a heavyweight in Texas’ booming grid storage market, is developing the 700-megawatt/2.8-gigawatt-hour Trimount battery plant at a former oil-storage site in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. Jupiter aims to finish the project in 2028 or 2029. Trimount is slated to be among the largest stand-alone batteries in the whole country—Vistra’s battery in Moss Landing, California, set that record with 750 megawatts/​3 gigawatt-hours, before much of that capacity burned up in a disastrous fire.

The wave of battery megaprojects marks a new chapter for the region, which until recently was focused on building small-scale batteries. Massachusetts encouraged this by requiring energy storage alongside many distributed solar projects that received payments through the state’s main solar incentive; this rule led to a buildout of systems in the range of 1 to 5 megawatts.

Bigger batteries started taking off in the late 2010s out West: In California, Arizona, and Nevada, where developers can sign long-term contracts to deliver grid capacity; and in Texas, where they can bid into a uniquely competitive market.

The first three big batteries in New England—Plus Power’s Cranberry Point and Cross Town, as well as Medway, which was previously developed by Eolian—won seven-year contracts in 2021 to provide capacity for the New England grid, but the grid operator subsequently shortened that kind of contract to one year. After that change, developers have struggled with the lack of long-term capacity revenue; they can still charge up when prices are low and sell when they’re high, but that’s an unpredictable revenue stream that financiers might not want to underwrite.

Massachusetts has succeeded in building a robust fleet of small-scale solar—on recent sunny spring days, it has generated close to half the region’s demand. But leaders knew they needed batteries to keep cleaning up the grid in the hours when solar doesn’t produce. So they created a new policy driver for storage investment called the Clean Peak Standard, which officially took effect in 2020.

The rule orders utilities to serve a percentage of their peak-demand hours with clean electricity, and the target grows with each passing year. Companies that use batteries to save solar energy for the evening—when electricity consumption rises as people get home from work and school—earn credits that they can sell to utilities, providing some revenue certainty outside the wholesale market.

The administration of Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, views storage as a key lever to improve energy affordability, Undersecretary of Energy Michael Judge said, because it makes better use of existing grid infrastructure to meet peak demand.

Batteries can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without smokestacks or pollution.

“Store all that solar energy that we’re producing in the middle of the day and bring down the cost of operating the system for everyone,” he said. ​“You don’t have to run these peakers, and you get all the emissions benefits and integration of clean energy benefits, too.”

It took several years for the rule to actually spur batteries in the multihundred-megawatt range, but now that era has begun. Advantage Capital, for example, factored in revenues from the Clean Peak Standard when it analyzed and underwrote the investment in the Medway project, Bitting noted. A total of 725 megawatts of battery storage had qualified for the Clean Peak Standard as of early March, according to state data.

Stand-alone grid battery projects are also bolstered by a federal tax credit that can cut investment costs by 30 percent, an incentive that the Trump administration preserved in last summer’s budget law even as it slashed support for wind, solar, and electric vehicles.

Clean Peak cash alone doesn’t pay the bills; battery developers still need to make money in the marketplace. Though New England lacks long-term capacity contracts, storage companies in the region have at least two factors working in their favor: some of the nation’s highest electricity prices and growing demand for power.

“It’s very difficult to get additional generation online in an area with high population density, because regardless of what type of power generation you’re building, it requires a lot of space,” Bitting said. Batteries, though, can fit a lot of power into a relatively small footprint, without the smokestacks or pollution that make it hard to build new fossil-fueled plants in populous areas.

Batteries compete directly with gas power plants to serve the peak hours of demand, when prices are highest. That’s especially valuable in New England, where gas supplies are stretched thin between power generation and home heating on the coldest days of the year.

“When it’s cold, the households are going to continue to demand it,” Bitting said. ​“But if we can ease some of the peak on the utility side, that will provide a relief valve to supply.”

Jupiter Power’s colossal Trimount project will continue New England’s foray into large batteries, with the ability to discharge enough power for roughly 500,000 homes, per the developer. Trimount was the largest of four battery projects selected in December from Massachusetts’ statewide solicitation to bring on more Clean Peak power. Previously, battery owners could sell off their Clean Peak credits on a quarterly or annual basis. The new solicitation was designed to produce ​“cost-effective” long-term contracts for storage, giving developers more stable revenue to plan around. Furthermore, Healey doubled down on grid storage in a March 16 executive order that calls for another 5 gigawatts installed by 2035.

“That kind of policy signal, combined with the state’s grid reliability challenges and its decarbonization commitments, creates the conditions for investment at scale,” Hans Detweiler, senior director for development at Jupiter, said in an email.

Massachusetts officials also hope to speed development with new permitting rules, which run large battery applications through a state-level body instead of piecemeal local processes. Community members still get to weigh in, but the program has a clear 15-month timeline and allows just a single appeal to the state Supreme Court, to ensure a more timely resolution of conflicts in the permitting process.

The true test of all these policies will be whether the recent megabatteries kick off a trend, or remain bold outliers in the region’s energy system.

The most parasocial relationship I have is with a family of eagles that lives in Big Bear Valley, California. I watch them for hours every day through a camera mounted above their nest that is streamed live onto YouTube. There is a mother and a father who’ve been named Jackie and Shadow by the Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that runs the webcam. They have two little chicks that, for now, are nameless. Eventually, the two chicks will have their names selected by a group of third graders in Big Bear.

I turn on the livestream when I start my work day, usually watching on my second monitor, but occasionally parking myself on the couch and opting for a more full-screen experience on the TV. I spend my day typing Slack messages, and Jackie and Shadow spend theirs hunting and feeding their babies and maintaining their nest and watching for threats.

When my husband calls on his way home from work to check in I tell him about these developments.

“How was your day?” he asks.

“It was good, but a little stressful because Jackie and Shadow had to leave the chicks to chase off some ravens that were getting too close to the nest.”

“Oh,” he says, “that is stressful,” kindly refraining from pointing out that this information tells him nothing about my day.

My day, usually, is good too, if not also a little stressful. I run the fact-checking department for Mother Jones. I read the news, and like my colleagues, I live in it. I read their reporting carefully, looking for any leaps in logic or possible factual discrepancies or potential legal issues. I believe strongly in what I do, what we do here at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and I like doing it too. Sometimes though, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility of being a journalist in today’s world, or by the news or by just being a person existing.

But I look up from a court document or new draft of a story or an email from a writer when I hear Jackie start to crow. My dog hates the sound, and she’ll pace the living room, looking for the source. Usually, Jackie is shrieking in delight as Shadow delivers a fish from the lake, and she will immediately jump up to feed her chicks. They are just about two weeks old now, but they are growing so fast. They have to, because they’ll fledge the nest in just about eight weeks.

It reminds me of when my husband returns home from work, sometimes with a little treat he’s picked up on the way: a piece of chocolate or a small bag of chips. I crow with delight too, though I have spent the entire day only feet from my kitchen and its full pantry, while Jackie has spent hers 145 feet in the air in a Jeffrey pine tree.

Everything about watching these birds delights me, and simultaneously makes me feel totally insignificant. I get cold and I turn on our heat. Jackie braves snowstorms, creating a canopy with her wings to keep the snow off her chicks. I send more Slacks. Jackie shows her babies how to fly.

Sometimes Jackie stares directly into the camera, and I imagine she’s looking right at me. She can see through the camera and into my living room, me in my enormous stained sweatshirts, my dirty dishes around me, staring at my laptop screen. I wonder how it makes her feel about her nest way up there. I wonder, if from her vantage point, we look as small as I feel.

As NASA’s Artemis II journeyed into space earlier this month, one of the astronauts took a photo of Earth lit by the moon. Known as “Hello, World,” it’s the first published photograph of our planet taken by a human since 1972. “You could see the entire globe from pole to pole,” Commander Reid Wiseman, who took the photo, said when describing what Earth looked like from space. “It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”

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“Hello, World” and the Artemis mission have reinvigorated mankind’s awe of our planet. But for Earth to remain a habitable place for humans to flourish, it requires us to take care of it. On this special Earth Day episode of More To The Story, we’re featuring interviews with three influential environmental leaders: former Vice President and founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project Al Gore; longtime activist Catherine Coleman Flowers; and journalist, author, and activist Bill McKibben.

All three acknowledge the challenges of fighting climate change to protect our planet, especially at a time when the Trump administration is rolling back federal environmental protections. But they’re surprisingly hopeful about our capacity to protect the Earth for future generations.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Last summer, when Donald Trump began pressuring GOP-controlled states to redraw their congressional maps mid-decade, Republicans had a lofty goal: pick up a dozen or more seats in an effort to fend off a coming blue wave and retain the House in the midterms.

Trump scored early wins in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. But the gerrymandering arms race he started hasn’t resulted in the lopsided victory the White House envisioned. The approval by voters in Virginia on Tuesday of a new congressional map that could net Democrats up to four new seats shows how Democrats have fought Trump to a surprising draw in the redistricting wars.

Right now, the parties are basically even in the states that have redrawn their maps since last summer. The new map in Virginia makes it even more likely that Republicans will lose the House in November, given Trump’s tanking approval numbers and the fact that Cook Political Report forecasts that Republicans have to win three-quarters of toss-up races to remain in control, calling Democrats “substantial favorites.”

This is not how Trump and his allies envisioned things going. After easily securing the new maps in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina, Trump suffered a humiliating defeat when Indiana Republicans refused to redraw their districts. Other GOP-controlled legislatures, including Kansas and Nebraska, also balked. Ohio passed a compromise map that, while favoring Republicans, could have been much worse for Democrats. The courts in Utah struck down the state’s existing map, leading to a likely Democratic pickup. And Missouri voters could have a chance to block that state’s new gerrymander at the polls in November, all of which helps Democrats.

Democrats in California, meanwhile, pulled off an improbable ballot measure to offset the Texas gerrymander by redrawing the Golden State’s maps. Now, Virginia Democrats have followed suit, despite the fact that the process in Virginia was actually much trickier. Democrats had to retake control of the legislature and governorship last November in order to kickstart the redistricting process. Then they had to convince voters in a state that is much less blue than California to pass a constitutional amendment authorizing the very type of partisan gerrymandering that Virginia voters had sought to limit just six years earlier, when they passed a separate constitutional amendment giving a bipartisan commission the power to draw congressional maps. The takeaway is that voters dislike gerrymandering, but they now seem to hate Trump even more.

That said, the redistricting wars are far from over. Florida is planning to convene a special session next week to redraw its congressional map, which could net Republicans between two and five more seats. The Supreme Court could issue a decision any day now striking down the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act, which could shift a handful of seats toward the GOP—though whether those maps would take effect before November’s elections depends partly on the timing of the decision. (It’s probably too late for most Southern states to draw new maps before the midterms.) And the Virginia Supreme Court could still strike down the new voter-approved map; the court allowed the referendum to proceed after Republicans challenged it but has yet to issue a final decision on the constitutionality of the redistricting effort.

Trump has threatened to “take over” the election system, and the mid-decade gerrymandering spree he started is part of a multi-faceted plan to interfere in the midterms. But while that has deeply destabilized American democracy, the president hasn’t succeeded in stopping Democrats from racking up a series of electoral victories over the past year. The passage of the redistricting referendum in Virginia is the latest sign of Democrats successfully fighting back.