Today's five.

Replacing your chief of staff with Stephen Miller three days after losing the Senate is a choice — specifically, the choice to run straight at the thing that just hit you. Republicans lost dozens of House seats and Senate control this week, with voters citing immigration enforcement as a driving factor. Miller, who designed much of that enforcement policy across both terms, is now the second most powerful person in the West Wing. Bloomberg framed it as a reshuffle; NPR called it "a defiant note." Susie Wiles, the first woman to hold the job, moves to Trump's political operation. "He gets it," Trump said. That's one interpretation.

Timing is everything: Houston's mayor announced limits on police cooperation with ICE exactly 72 hours after Democrats won statewide power in Texas for the first time in decades. Under the new order, a traffic stop stays a traffic stop — ICE only gets a call if someone's arrested for a jailable offense. Whitmire framed it as community healing; the BBC noted the backdrop included an ICE officer fatally shooting a Houston man who was driving to work. The Guardian and Tribune both led with the election connection; nobody buried it. The previous governor had threatened to withhold city funding over a similar policy.

Winning a seat in the Minnesota statehouse while your business is linked to an $18.5 million fraud settlement is a genuinely unusual campaign story. Abdi Daisane flipped House District 14A in St. Cloud, defeating a Republican incumbent to become the first Somali-born lawmaker in the statehouse from that city. His daycare, Blooming Kids, pulled in $7.29 million from the state's Child Care Assistance Program since 2018 — the connection to fraud runs through a nonprofit called Partners in Nutrition, which recently settled. All three outlets covering this led with the fraud angle. None of them mentioned whether his opponent made it an issue on the trail.

Miami walks into Notre Dame on Saturday as the top-ranked team in the country and somehow the team expected to lose by more than seven points. The last time an AP No. 1 was this big an underdog in a regular season game was 2014, when Mississippi State — Dak Prescott at quarterback — went to Alabama and got handled. Miami's star wide receiver Malachi Toney is injured, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that spread. Notre Dame is ranked fourth but apparently Vegas sees something the polls don't.

Eighty percent is a landslide by any measure, and Michigan voters delivered exactly that for Proposal 2, a campaign finance overhaul designed to get donor money out of electoral politics. Two lawsuits landed almost immediately. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy filed a federal First Amendment challenge arguing the measure's disclosure requirements could rope in journalists, nonprofits, and policy researchers who simply discuss elected officials — which is a broader net than "pay-to-play donations." Florida Phoenix led with the democratic mandate; Fox led with the speech concerns. The campaign says they expected this. The courts will decide by December 2026, give or take.