Hey there, hope you’ve had a great week. I’m still a little fried from Tuesday night, when I stayed up to watch a stunning series of upsets in the U.S. House and Senate.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll talk about some of the midterm races you might have missed, and the way affordability concerns are playing out in communities around the country. We’ve also got new data about the labor market, but we’ll start in Alaska, where they’re still counting ballots. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

Americans are having a tough time stretching their dollars to cover soaring energy costs. In Alaska, some people are choosing between buying food and buying fuel to power their vehicles and heat their homes. And as the state descends into winter, residents who live in some of the nation’s most remote communities say they're scared of what may come.

“Gas is so expensive,” said Merle Custer, a Tribal Council member from Shungnak, where gasoline currently costs $26 per gallon. Custer, an elder, who was born and raised in the small Inupiaq village just north of the Arctic Circle, said he’d never seen gas prices as high as they are this year. “Everybody gotta chip in for gas to go out hunting, chip in their gas.”

More than 80% of communities in Alaska are not connected by road, so people use boats, four-wheelers, and snowmachines to get around. They rely heavily on gas for travel and on diesel to heat their homes and keep their lights on. On top of those expenses, everything from their medication to their food gets shipped in. “When we want chicken, it’s almost $50; and a little piece of steak, $57,” said Custer.

Because store-bought food is so expensive in Alaska’s rural communities, most people live a traditional subsistence lifestyle. They use the warmer months to hunt and stock up on moose, caribou, plants, berries, and especially salmon. All of it goes into their freezers, and that’s what they eat during Alaska’s long, cold winter.

For the first time in the history of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team’s players will be enjoying the baseball offseason as champions after winning the World Series last week.

How long this offseason will last, though, is anybody’s guess. The league’s collective bargaining agreement with players expires Dec. 1, and team owners are widely expected to lock the players out.

Owners want a salary cap. Every major team sport in the U.S except baseball puts a limit on how much a team can spend on its payroll. The idea is to prevent any one team from loading up on all of the top talent and skewing the competitive balance of the league.

The MLB players’ union does not want a salary cap. So a lockout seems inevitable, and could drag on into next season. At stake for the players is the ability to tap into a free market for their services after years of paying their dues.

Being a baseball player at the beginning of your major league career is very different from being an established player: There’s nothing free about the labor market when you’re a rookie.

Mike Trombley knows this firsthand. He pitched for three major league teams from 1992 to 2002.

“The very first few years in my career were horribly stressful,” he said. “I didn't know if I was going home tomorrow. I never had a guarantee of anything.”

That’s because in their first six years in the majors, baseball players are entirely under their team’s control. So in his early years, Trombley earned just above the league’s minimum salary pitching for the Minnesota Twins: Roughly $240,000 in today’s dollars. Despite his fairly comfortable pay, it was a precarious existence.

“I remember in 1994, ‘95, [it] felt like every game, this could be my last game,” he said. “Because, hey, they send me to AAA or ship me out or release me, I'm gone.”

School districts across the U.S. are facing a financial squeeze.

Food costs have jumped about 30% since 2020, including a 3.4% increase in August compared to a year ago. Some products like beef, eggs, and flour have risen even more.

Ryan Mikolaycik is in charge of feeding 66,000 kids as the executive director of food service at the Austin Independent School District in Texas.

“A fruit or a vegetable was about 25 cents a serving; now you're looking at more like 40-50 cents per serving,” he said.

Kitchen staff who used to get paid $10 or $12 an hour a decade ago are now making $20 an hour or more in many states as minimum wages increase.

Since the school food programs have to run a balanced budget, at some point, something has to give. Mikolaycik said they’ve had to make cuts in his district.

“Now it's like, OK, instead of having that person there in the kitchen, I'm going to cut a person and you’ve got to do with less,” he said. “Instead of serving bananas twice, we're going to serve it just once.”

The price pressures are compounded by the loss of federal dollars, as fewer students automatically qualify for free lunch with changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid. At the same time, school districts face changing regulations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

It’s why 95% of school nutrition leaders say they’re worried about their food program’s financial sustainability, according to a survey from the School Nutrition Association.

“Now you know what keeps a lunch lady up at night,” said Donna Hoover, director of nutrition at the Hickman Mills School District, which serves around 5,000 students in Kansas City, Missouri.

Idahoans picked an official state gun Tuesday, voting for the Winchester Model 1873 over five other firearms.

The vote is nonbinding, and Idaho’s legislature will make the final declaration next year. The Hill notes 11 other states have named official guns in the past 15 years.

Connecticut-based Winchester Repeating Arms Company marketed the Model 1873 as “The Gun That Won The West,” and the company produced hundreds of thousands of them between 1873 and 1916. Jimmy Stewart wielded one in the 1950s western “Winchester ‘73,” but the rifle was popular around the world.

That legacy has weighed on some of the Winchester heirs. Longtime BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan is one, and she wrote a book about her family’s role in shaping American history.

People have long speculated Sarah Winchester’s massive, eccentric San Jose mansion, built while the Winchester ‘73 was in production, was a manifestation of her guilt over the family business. Those rumors are disputed, but they’ve stuck to the Winchester Mystery House in its current form as a maybe-haunted tourist attraction. (Neko Case put out a great track last year, “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” that I considered for this week’s song.)

I’ll leave you with more digression: The Trump administration recently allowed the purchase of certain guns and accessories without registering them. We talked with a reporter at The Trace about that move, and other potential regulatory rollback.