On 3 November Americans renew the whole House and a third of the Senate; Democrats need a net gain of four seats to prise the upper chamber from a 53-47 Republican majority. The economy they are judging cuts two ways: third-quarter GDP grew at 3.4% a year, while September prices rose 3.6% — well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. “The country is doing unbelievably well,” Trump told reporters on his way to a South Carolina rally. Voters are unconvinced: the cost of living remains, by some distance, their first concern.

Yet the closing week belonged to Alaska. Two men named Dan Sullivan sit on the Senate ballot — the Republican incumbent, and a retired schoolteacher. On Wednesday the New York Times reported that the campaign of the Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola, had worked with national party aides to recruit same-name “spoiler” candidates. The response was extraordinary: the president and his justice department filed suit pre-emptively, to block certification of the Alaska result should the incumbent lose. A congressional inquiry, subpoenas and a governor’s investigation followed, with Trump demanding Peltola’s prosecution.

Refusing a result in advance is the reflex of a government that treats defeat as fraud by definition. The opposing case, though, deserves a fair hearing. The reporting is solid, the recruitment was denied before it was confirmed, and a party that casts itself as the guardian of democratic norms did go looking for decoys to confuse voters. Ballot stacking is legal and both sides use it — which indicts the practice rather than excusing this instance of it.

Meanwhile the most expensive midterm cycle in history pours its money into advertising: farmer-funded spots attacking the administration’s record on prices, and in Ohio an attack ad withdrawn after a wave of revulsion. Obama campaigned in Georgia; Trump urged supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”. Both camps are rehearsing their account of Tuesday night before a single vote is counted. When the story of an election is written in advance, what is left for the voters to decide?

Jodi is one of only three substantial Nanotyrannus skeletons known to science, and she went under the hammer at Sotheby’s on Tuesday after a twelve-minute battle between six bidders. At $47.3m she fetched five times the top estimate — the second highest price ever paid for a dinosaur. She came out of the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, 191 bones and a near-complete skull, sold with “full rights”: her owner may make and sell replicas.

Palaeontologists are uneasy. Thomas Holtz, of the University of Maryland, notes that museums are closing over shortfalls a tenth of Jodi’s price, and that a skeleton hidden in a private ballroom is “no different than if it had just been left in the ground”. Sotheby’s replies that the sale rewards those who dug her out and saved her: on private American land a fossil belongs to the landowner, and without a market much would erode away unseen.

Huerta died of cancer on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield. Born in New Mexico in 1930, she taught school before she became an organiser. In 1962, with César Chávez, she founded the union that became the United Farm Workers — in a year when the average American farmworker earned 93 cents an hour. She ran the picket lines of the Delano grape strike and the four-year boycott that followed, then bargained the contracts they won.

Her slogan travelled further than her name: Barack Obama, who gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, conceded this week that he “too often” gets the credit for “Yes, we can”. The tributes were shadowed by the accusation she made public this year — that Chávez raped her in 1966. Some fear that reopening it divides a fragile cause and unmakes its only icon; others answer that a union cannot ask its women to keep its secrets.