Democrats Will Need to Pull Off a Few Upsets If They Hope to Retain Control of the Senate
A look at the race for Congress
Democrats have good reasons to feel bullish about Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The race for Congress, however, is a different story.
The Senate
Let’s start in the Senate, which is an uphill battle. Democrats currently hold the majority in that chamber via some odd math: While Republicans hold 49 seats, Democrats hold only 47, but the Senate’s four independents—Bernie Sanders (VT), Joe Manchin (WV), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Angus King (ME)—caucus with the Democrats to give them a 51-49 majority. That means if Trump wins, Democrats can’t lose a single seat, as JD Vance, in his capacity as Trump’s vice president, would cast the tie-breaking vote to determine control of the chamber. Alternately, if Harris wins (making Tim Walz vice president) Democrats can only lose one seat to stay in charge.
The bad news for Democrats (and this news will keep getting worse as this article goes along, so brace yourself) is that they’ve all but conceded one seat already. In West Virginia, one of the most Republican states in the nation, Joe Manchin is retiring, and there’s no way voters there will replace him with a Democrat. (On a side note, one has to wonder what good Manchin believes he’s accomplished during his time in Washington. Did he really believe that putting the brakes on the Democratic agenda helped his electoral prospects? What a waste of an opportunity.) The Democrats, therefore, have no room for error going forward.
The one bit of good news for Democrats is that polls indicate they’re faring rather well in the battleground states. These races include:
Arizona: If you trust the polling, Democrat Rueben Gallego is crushing MAGA Republican Kari Lake in the race to replace Kyrsten Sinema, who is retiring. This is a good add, as the formerly progressive Sinema has been a thorn in the side of Democrats by holding numerous bills hostage to her quixotic demands. Lake, who ran for governor in Arizona two years ago, has turned many voters off with her ultra-MAGA persona, which she’s tried to shed to no avail.
Michigan: Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin holds a small lead over former Republican Representative Mike Rogers to replace Democrat Debbie Stabenow, who is retiring after serving four terms. Polls usually show Slotkin running ahead of Harris in Michigan.
Nevada: First-term Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen is facing off against Afghanistan War veteran Sam Brown. Rosen jumped into the lead in polling following Biden’s withdrawal in July.
Pennsylvania: Three-term incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey is in a competitive contest with businessman David McCormick. McCormick, who is self-funding, was the GOP establishment’s preferred candidate in the 2022 Pennsylvania senate race but lost by less than 1,000 votes in the primary to the Trump-endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz. Polling in this race has narrowed recently and its outcome may mirror that of the presidential race, but Casey has a good brand in Pennsylvania and would likely run ahead of Harris.
Wisconsin: Two-term incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin is once again demonstrating her ability to connect with rural voters in her race against bank executive, businessman, and bad candidate Eric Hovde.
The most pessimistic polls in these five races suggest they are toss-ups, but average polling indicates they all lean Democratic. All five states are also currently toss-ups in the presidential race, with Arizona and Nevada leaning red, Wisconsin and Michigan leaning blue, and Pennsylvania split evenly.
But back to the bad news. Democrats are also defending seats in Ohio and Montana, states Trump won in 2020 by 8 and 16 points respectively. That’s not good in an era when the number of split-ticket voters has diminished significantly. Democrats are most optimistic about their chances in Ohio, where three-term incumbent Sherrod Brown is fending off a challenge by automobile dealer Bernie Moreno. Brown has populist credentials that will likely help him in the Rust Belt state, while Moreno is yet another Republican nominee with a sketchy background. Will that be enough for Brown to overcome the wave of support Trump will likely turn out in Ohio? Analysts have this race listed as a toss-up, and Democrats remain optimistic about Brown’s chances.
The same cannot be said when it comes to Montana, though, where it looks like three-term incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester’s time in office is up. It won’t be for a lack of effort: Tester is a good candidate who will comb the state for votes. The problem is Montana keeps sliding to the right and there may not be enough votes to put Tester over the top even if he convinces every Montanan who would consider supporting him to vote for him. If Tester has any hope it’s because his opponent, businessman and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, is a flawed candidate who has exaggerated his biography and recently made derogatory comments about Native Americans. Democrats will continue to support Tester due to his built-in advantage as an incumbent and because Montana is an inexpensive state to campaign in, but most pundits and analysts think this seat will flip to the Republicans.
And that, coupled with the loss of West Virginia, would mean Democrats would lose control of the Senate no matter what happens in Ohio and the other battleground states. And that would mean a unified Republican caucus could block Harris’s Supreme Court and Cabinet nominees (along with her judicial and administrative nominees) and her entire legislative agenda.
To make matters worse, Democrats have little chance of knocking-off a Republican incumbent or winning an open seat currently held by a Republican. Doing so would require flipping a seat in either Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, or Wyoming, all of which favored Trump by over 15 points in 2020 (although a shock poll out of Nebraska this week showed incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer down one to independent Dan Osborn. Voters in Nebraska don’t think Dan Osborn is related to Tom Osborne, do they?) Thankfully, polling shows Democrats have no vulnerable candidates in reliably Democratic states, with one exception: Maryland, where Democratic county executive Angela Alsobrooks is facing off against former Republican Governor Larry Hogan to replace Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. Polls generally show Alsobrooks has a solid if not spectacular lead over Hogan. Hogan, however, has made a name for himself as a moderate, non-MAGA Republican, and his ads suggest he’d serve as something like an independent. Maryland voters could find that appealing, but I also think Marylanders are not inclined to send a senator to Washington D.C. to caucus with the likes of Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz. Alsobrooks should win this race in a high turnout presidential year.
So Democratic prospects for retaining control of the Senate this November look pretty bleak. Some Democrats, however, see an opening in the two largest red states on the map: Florida and Texas.
In Florida, former Democratic Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is challenging first-term Republican incumbent Rick Scott. There are reasons for Democrats to be optimistic here, no more so than that Biden came within 3.5% of winning Trump’s adopted home state in 2020. Scott only won his Senate seat in 2018 with 50.1% of the vote, which amounted to a little over 10,000 votes. (The close margin could be attributed to the fact that Scott was running that year against incumbent Bill Nelson, but Scott also has never won a statewide election by more than 1.2%.) It also helps that Mucarsel-Powell is from Miami-Dade County, where it is absolutely necessary for Democrats to run up the vote if they have any hopes of winning statewide. While analysts originally wrote the contest off for Democrats, recent polls have shown the race tightening.
But winning Florida would still be a challenge for Democrats. While Obama won it twice, the state always seems to slip through Democrats’ fingers, often in the cruelest of ways. Democrats are still traumatized by the 2000 election fiasco, and their hopes for victory in Florida were dashed in both 2016 and 2020. In the last presidential election, Biden performed 700,000 votes better than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, but Trump boosted his own turnout by over 1 million votes to win handily. Democrats believed they had a shot at defeating Senator Marco Rubio in 2016 and 2022, but neither election was close. And while Ron DeSantis only won his first election for governor by 0.5% in 2018, he rolled to re-election in 2022 by nearly 20 points after becoming the nation’s MAGAiest governor, suggesting to Democrats that the state was now out of reach.
Winning Florida would be a heavy lift for Democrats. Running a statewide campaign in the nation’s third-most populous state requires massive financial and organizational resources that could be spent more efficiently in other races. Meanwhile, Scott is wealthy enough to self-fund his campaign. Florida is also very diverse and home to large Cuban and Venezuelan communities that are skeptical of left-wing politics. Retirees who continuously flock to the state tend to be conservative. The Miami metropolitan area, once a Democratic stronghold, is now competitive. While there have been signs of life lately for Democrats (they pulled off a surprise upset last year in the Jacksonville mayoral race, and DeSantis’s brand of politics has lost its shine) the state party is still in the midst of a rebuild. It would likely take a Harris surge to put the state into play.
For years now, Democrats have been waiting for Texas to turn blue. Some believe that time may have finally arrived. The Democratic nominee for Senate is Representative Colin Allred, a former professional football player who represents a Dallas-area House district. He is running against two-term incumbent Ted “Cancun” Cruz, one of the most disliked members of the U.S. Senate. Polling suggests Cruz has a small lead over Allred.
Texas is the most-populous red state in the nation, but Republican margins of victory in presidential elections have been shrinking of late due to an influx of college-educated voters. Obama lost Texas in 2012 by about 16 points. Trump won the state in 2016 by 9 points and followed that up in 2020 with a 5.5 point victory. That put Texas to the left of states like Ohio and Iowa. While Democrats continue to improve in Texas’s major metropolitan areas, those gains have been offset somewhat by poorer performances among the Lone Star State’s established Latino community, particularly in South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley. There is a sense Texas’s state leadership is too conservative for its electorate, particularly when it comes to abortion, but there are no clear signs yet that voters are ready to switch out Republican rule for Democratic leadership.
When Cruz was last up for re-election, he defeated Beto O’Rourke by around 2.5%. Allred could improve on that, but he’s also a less charismatic candidate. If Democrats wanted to make Texas more competitive, they should focus on identifying and registering more Democratic voters before the state’s October 7 deadline, as Texas has one of the nation’s lowest turnout rates.
Like Florida, however, Texas is a large state that is expensive to campaign in. Does it make sense, then, for Democrats to invest resources in Texas and Florida—two states analysts consider a stretch for Democratic candidates—when those resources could be used to defend incumbents or shore up candidates in states Democrats know are winnable? (As a point of reference, only about 1.5 million more people live in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than Texas and Florida combined.)
I’d argue Democrats have no choice. Democrats should assume both West Virginia and Montana are gone. If they’re aiming for a majority in the Senate, they need to put Texas and Florida in play. That could happen if Harris surges and Americans grow tired of Trump, which I think is within the realm of possibility. If that came to pass, Democrats would in all likelihood easily win the battleground-state senate races, so they need to be ready to seize the opportunity to expand the map. Additionally, Cruz and Scott are hardly beloved incumbents. Rather than wait for the right circumstances to arise, Democrats should look to create some luck of their own in Texas and Florida. And who knows: Maybe going on the offensive in Texas and Florida will generate that sense of momentum Harris needs to separate herself from Trump in the polls and build, if not a blue wave, maybe at least a swell that can sweep a couple of Republican-held Senate seats out to sea.
The House
Democrats’ prospects are better in the House, where the conventional wisdom is that Republicans will almost certainly lose what is currently a three-seat majority. At this stage, however, I’m not convinced a Democratic majority is as much of a slam dunk as most assume, or, even if Hakeem Jeffries is destined to become Speaker of the House, Democrats will walk away with a numerically significant majority.
The focus this year is on a little over two dozen districts currently represented by members of Congress who are not from the same party as the presidential candidate those districts favored in 2020. That includes 19 Republicans in districts Biden won and 8 Democrats in districts Trump won. We live in an era in which a vanishingly small number of voters split their tickets, so if this trend continues and Biden districts remain Biden districts and Trump districts remain Trump districts, that should be enough to deliver the House to the Democrats.
Additionally, ten of the nineteen Republican members of Congress representing Biden districts first won election to the House in 2022, meaning their Democratic opponents did not benefit from Biden’s coattails. This is true of all five Republican members of Congress from the New York districts Democrats are targeting (the 1st, 4th, 17th, 19th, and 22nd) along with districts in Arizona (the 6th), California (the 13th), New Jersey (the 7th), Oregon (the 5th), and Virginia (the 2nd). Only two Democrats from Trump districts—Alaska’s at-large district and Washington’s 3rd district—took their seats after the 2020 election, but the fact they managed to win Trump districts during the midterms of a Democratic presidency and without the advantage of incumbency suggests they may possess an uncommon reservoir of political skill.
There is, however, some concern among Democrats about those New York districts, two of which are located on Long Island (the 1st and 4th) and two more that are centered around exurban communities in the Hudson River valley (the 17th and 19th). Perhaps it’s because fellow New Yorker Donald Trump speaks their political language by pitting himself against urban America, but pollsters report those districts aren’t sliding to the left as many expected.
Democrats are also concerned about the five Biden districts in California (the 13th, the 22nd, the 27th, the 40th, and the 45th). Those districts, which are located in the Central Valley, northern Los Angeles County, and suburban Orange County, are all situated in areas of California that recently were reliably Republican but that have lately been shifting left. That shift, however, seems to have stalled somewhat. Additionally, all but one of those representatives ran in 2020 on the same ballot as Biden and won re-election in 2022, suggesting voters in those districts are primed to split their votes. It may be that the GOP House members who represent those old-school Republican districts have found a way to tailor their politics to fit their districts, which allows them to run ahead of their party’s presidential candidate. There is some hope that Kamala Harris’s California roots will translate into coattails here, but the Bay Area also seems worlds away from these districts.
Ultimately, it probably is likely that Democrats knock off enough of these Republicans to counter their own losses and regain the majority. However, to build a more functional margin by saving or gaining seats in Trump districts and clawing back seats in Biden districts, Harris will need to not only fare better than Biden but surge in the polls. Yet even if that happened, obstacles still remain. To begin with, notice that out of all those mismatched districts mentioned above, only four—the two districts in Arizona and the two districts in Pennsylvania—are in presidential battleground states, which makes it unlikely Harris will campaign in them. Furthermore, if Harris does begin building a wave, there aren’t many “lean” or “likely” Republican districts—perhaps less than fifteen—for her to flip. On the other hand, if Trump began surging, he could imperil another thirty Democratic seats.
There hasn’t been much attention paid to the race for Congress so far this year, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the races began shifting in October. I’m interested in seeing what happens in Nebraska’s 2nd district, which is the Democratic-leaning district centered around Omaha. Nebraska has three congressional districts, and the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in a district wins one of the state’s five electoral votes. It is highly likely Harris will win the Omaha district by a solid margin, which could endanger the district’s four-term incumbent Republican representative Don Bacon, who has never won with more than 51% of the vote. Given the makeup of the Electoral College, it’s possible the 2nd district’s one electoral vote could prove decisive (if Harris won every state Biden won except for Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, the 2nd district would supply the winning 270th electoral vote) so expect Harris to pay attention to Omaha to keep it from slipping away.
I’m also interested in races in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Three districts in eastern Pennsylvania—the 1st, 7th, and 8th—appear to be toss-ups. The 1st is a suburban-exurban district northeast of Philadelphia that Biden won but that is currently served by a Republican. The 7th (Allentown) and the 8th (Wilkes-Barre and Scranton), which lean slightly more Republican than the national average, are the sort of blue-collar, rust belt districts that were once reliably Democratic but that Trump has had success in. Those three districts could signal how well either candidate is doing in Pennsylvania, which will likely be the tipping point state in this presidential election. A similar story is playing out in Michigan, where there are two open seats (the 7th and the 8th) currently held by Democrats that are centered around blue-collar cities that have dealt with industrial decline. Democrats also hope to contest Michigan’s Republican-held 10th district, which is based in Macomb County (home of the blue-collar “Reagan Democrat”) but analysts only think it will come into play if Harris begins faring better than Biden’s 2020 numbers.
As the fall campaign enters its final month, more attention will be paid to the congressional races. These contests can clue us in to shifts in the mood among the electorate. If you are interested in tracking these races, I would recommend following this page at the New York Times.
Signals and Noise
If you want to understand voter behavior, read this article: “The Undecided Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are” by Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic (“When most people think about a voter still trying to make up their mind, they probably imagine a person who is highly likely to vote but uncertain whether to support Harris, Trump, or a third-party candidate. Both political parties, however, are more focused on a different—and much larger—group of undecideds: potential voters who are highly likely to support Harris or Trump, but unsure if they will vote at all. … ‘There are a gajillion more of those [irregular] people than the Harris/Trump ‘I don’t know; I’m still thinking about it’’ kind of voter, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a communications consultant for Democrats and progressive groups, told me. ‘There are more humans who are non-habitual voters than there are voters who swing back and forth. That’s just math.’”) Critically, pollsters find most people who haven’t made up their minds to vote yet would vote for Harris if they did.
The 2024 Election: Policy
Andrew Duehren of the New York Times writes about Trump’s tax proposals, which would erode the income tax and strengthen tariffs to raise revenue. (“His ideas — if they all became law, far from a sure thing in Washington — would in effect move the United States closer to a taxation system used in many other countries. Most advanced economies, including Canada, Germany and Japan, collect value-added taxes, essentially national sales taxes on goods and services. The United States is unique for not having such a tax. Many economists generally support so-called consumption taxes, which they view as an efficient and hard-to-evade way of collecting money for the government. Still, several of those economists do not view Mr. Trump’s proposals as the right way to reorient the country’s tax system, arguing that they could explode the deficit, spur trade fights and disproportionately burden lower-income Americans. That’s because those Americans, who have less money to spend, use a larger share of their overall income to buy goods that would probably get more expensive under Mr. Trump’s tariffs.”)
“Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion US debt in crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper ‘$35 trillion crypto we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.”—Don Trump, convincing me more than ever that crypto is a scam.
Kamala Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio that she favors eliminating the filibuster to restore national abortion rights.
Trump told a rally that women “will no longer be thinking about abortion” when he’s president, adding “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.” A Republican presidential candidate running as a “protector” of abortion rights?
The New York Times examines Democrats’ hard line evolution on immigration. During her visit to the border in Arizona, Harris vowed to resurrect the bipartisan border bill Trump quashed earlier this year.
The 2024 Election: The Campaign Trail
Nate Cohn of the New York Times writes about the possibility that Trump’s edge in the Electoral College may be fading as he runs up vote totals in red states, cuts his margins in solid blue states, but continues to trail slightly in tossup states.
Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reports Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation is now almost entirely entrusted to Elon Musk.
At a rally, Trump urged his supporters to vote early…and then called voting early “stupid.”
A Haitian group in Springfield, Ohio, has filed charges against Don Trump and JD Vance for spreading false claims about their community that has endangered the well-being of its members.
“They’re dumping them in our country, and I never had proof. You know why? It’s common sense.”—Trump, admitting his claims about immigrants are fictional.
If Trump is so concerned with the well-being of pets, one has to wonder what he’ll make of Stephanie Kirchgaessner’s report for The Guardian that Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and the mastermind behind Project 2025, reportedly killed his neighbor’s dog with a shovel in 2004 after it kept his family awake one night.
Trump has also started repeating unfounded rumors about immigrants in Aurora, Colorado.
“All of your furniture-makers are going to come back and come back bigger and stronger and better than ever before! They’re mostly gone. They’re all coming back. This is why people and countries want to kill me. They’re not happy with me. It is. It’s a risky business. This is why they want to kill me.”—Don Trump, speaking in North Carolina
VOTER: “With many jobs being outsourced as we speak, what actions will you take to ensure that our jobs stay in America so we can continue to build the best cars in the world here in Michigan.”
TRUMP: “So pretty much as we’ve been saying and what I want to do is that I want to be able to — look, your business — years ago, in this area, I was honored as the man of the year. It was maybe 20 years ago, oh, and the fake news heard about it, they said it never happened, it never happened.”
BTW, Trump has made this “man of the year” claim before, but there’s no evidence he ever won such an award.
“No. 3, you know what that one is. We don’t have to talk about that one.”—Trump, listing the Democratic Party’s supposed reasons for allowing illegal immigration but losing track of his thoughts instead, during a meandering nonsensical “prepared” speech in New York City.
Trump called Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” during a rally in Wisconsin.
There is now a database that allows users to search all of Trump’s Truth Social messages. Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic used it to rummage through Trump’s messages and had this to say about the experience: “On their own, each of these posts is concerning and more than a little sad. But consumed in the aggregate, they take on a different meaning, offering a portrait of a man who appears frequently incoherent, internet-addicted, and emotionally volatile—even by the extreme standard that Trump has already set.”
Trump is now peddling watches. See the video here. (The economy is so bad he can only sell his watches for $100,000. “That’s a lot of diamonds. I love gold, I love diamonds.” Also, how many people who attend Trump’s rallies know what a tourbillon is? Talk about elitist.)
Independent West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin said he cannot endorse Kamala Harris after Harris endorsed eliminating the filibuster to secure abortion rights. Said Manchin, “She knows the filibuster is the Holy Grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.” If I may: First, the filibuster is the “Holy Grail of democracy”? Really, the Holy Grail? Like this Holy Grail?
I believe the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights would like to have a word. You chose poorly, Joe.
Second, filibusters are not democratic, as they allow minorities to veto the will of small majorities. Third, filibusters turn the Senate into the House on sedatives. Fourth, filibusters today keep the two parties from talking and working together. And fifth, it’s already hard enough to get laws through the Senate with Manchin around. Thank God he’s retiring.
This Week in “WTF is Wrong with JD Vance?”
“The allegations are pretty far out there, of course, but I know that allegations aren’t necessarily reality….I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him — I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion.”—JD Vance responding to a reporter’s questions about Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s porn site scandal and whether he believes Robinson’s denials. Vance has allegedly had intimate relations with a couch (although those allegations aren’t necessarily reality) and has spent much of the past three weeks stoking baseless allegations that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets (although one would think Vance would know those allegations aren’t necessarily reality, but, like his amorous relationships with sofas, I suppose that’s up to the court of public opinion to decide.)
The Detroit News traces JD Vance’s conversion from intellectual to conspiracy theorist.
A video clip from just last year emerged of Vance claiming car seats are keeping parents from having babies. Vance suggested enhanced car seat safety requirements are responsible for 100,000 fewer births in the US. There’s actually a study that argues this, but if you think about it for a few minutes, there’s probably a lot more at play there (like the idea that parents may have scaled their lives to fit the number of children they hoped to have) than simply a car seat. But I can’t ask for that much critical thinking from an Ivy League graduate serving in the US Senate.
Here’s a screenshot from a video of Vance complaining about the price of eggs in Pennsylvania, which he says cost $4 a dozen despite a price tag behind him indicating they’re selling for $2.99. If he’s complaining that the eggs he’s holding cost $4 a dozen, someone needs to tell him there are way more than a dozen eggs in that package. (BTW, if you want to know why egg prices are rising again, it’s because of another outbreak of bird flu.)
Vance appeared Saturday at an event hosted by Lance Wallnau, a so-called prophet and political extremist who has claimed Kamala Harris practices witchcraft. Molly Olmstead of Slate has more on Wallnau.
The Mark Robinson “Situation”
“I didn’t put much credence in it. We’ve all done things in our past that we’re sorry for. Some of the things are crazy. I mean, if we just went on that, we wouldn’t be here for Trump, would we?”—A 70-year-old voter in North Carolina at a Trump rally commenting to the Washington Post on the “Black NAZI” scandal that has engulfed Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson.
Most of Robinson’s staff have left his campaign, apparently driven away after multiple supporters offered to connect Robinson with technology specialists who could prove the posts were false and Robinson basically replied, “Nah, I’m good.”
Republican governors Brian Kemp of Georgia and Bill Lee of Tennessee said they are no longer supporting Mark Robinson, which begs the question: Why were they ever supporting Robinson to begin with? Was the “some folks need killing” line from July not extreme enough for them?
REPORTER: “Are you going to pull your endorsement of Mark Robinson?”
TRUMP: “… Uh, I don’t know the situation.”
By Peter Wehner of The Atlantic: “The Republican Freak Show” (“The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.”)
Democracy Watch
TRUMP: Do you think Springfield will ever be the same? You have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out.
CROWD: Send them back! Send them back!
NOTE: The people Trump wants to round up are in the country legally. This is verging on fascism.
By Brian Beutler: “Republicans Have a Nazi Problem” (I wrote about this two weeks ago.)
By Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post: “Trump Gets Compared to [Hitler] Because His Rhetoric is That Bad”
“Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”—Republican Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, in a now-deleted social media post. Higgins would later express no remorse for his comments.
By Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: “The Nativists Have Taken Over the GOP” (“What’s particularly striking about these new numbers, though, is that they aren’t just about undocumented immigrants or crime; they’re about diversity more broadly and American culture. They’re about people from other places and with other backgrounds supposedly coming in and harming American identity. Call it “poisoning the blood” or something else; the Republican Party has gradually come to adopt it, after years of Trump upping the ante.”)
By Adam Serwer of The Atlantic: “The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race”
Thomas Edsall of the New York Times surveys political scientists to ascertain why a sizeable majority of Americans haven’t risen up to decisively defeat Trump following his multitude of transgressions.
Alex Leary and Sadie Gurman of the Wall Street Journal look at Trump’s (very personal) plans to upend the Justice Department if elected president.
Hady Mawajdeh and Noel King of Vox spoke with David J. Becker, the founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, about how election denialism could threaten American democracy even if new laws passed since 2020 keep Trump from interfering in the counting and certification of the results.
Trump incorrectly alleged that anyone living in a foreign country—including non-citizens—can apply for and receive a ballot to vote in the election. American citizens living overseas can apply for absentee ballots. Trump, in yet another attempt to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election, said Democrats were trying to “cheat” by courting the votes of Americans living overseas.
Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said he was committed to following regular order when certifying the presidential vote and would “follow the Constitution” come January 2025 so long as “we have a free, fair, and safe election.” The comments set off alarm bells on Capitol Hill among Democrats, who heard Johnson slipping into election denial mode once again.
A board of elections in Ohio has wisely stripped a sheriff who likened immigrants to insects and recommended recording the addresses of people who supported Kamala Harris of his role providing security for early voting sites in their county.
It looks unlikely that Republicans in the Nebraska legislature will have enough votes to change the way the state allocates its electoral votes. Republicans had hoped to go to a winner-take-all system rather than assign three of the state’s five electoral votes to the winner of each of the state’s congressional districts. The Omaha district looks like it will support Harris, which could prove decisive if Harris wins the blue wall states but loses the tossup Sun Belt states.
Politico reports on how nonprofits with deep ties to special interests exploit loopholes in laws meant to prevent lobbyists from wining and dining members of Congress with lavish, all-expenses-paid trips to resorts. One watchdog said the scheme basically emulates money laundering.
Stuart A. Thompson of the New York Times followed Elon Musk on X/Twitter for five days and found a third of his 171 posts contained false or misleading statements. Musk’s posts are seen by tens of millions of people.
Congress
Congress averted a government shutdown by passing a short-term spending bill that will keep the government open until December 20. Republican leadership once again relied on Democratic votes to get the job done.
Leigh Ann Caldwell and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post explain why Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s job is safe (for the next few months, at least) despite once again needing to work with Democrats to keep the government funded. (Reminder: Johnson became Speaker after Kevin McCarthy worked with Democrats to keep the government open.)
Annie Karni of the New York Times reviews how exceptionally inept the House Republican majority has been over these past two years.
Katherine Tully-McManus of Politico writes about Congress’s failure to pass a law that would specify how members of Congress would be replaced following a mass casualty event, an urgent need considering there have been at least four well-publicized events over the past twenty-five years that could have resulted in the deaths of multiple members and the current potential for acts of violence to alter the balance of power in Congress.
“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’ … OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”—Republican Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. Not sure, then, why Moreno thinks abortion is an issue for him to worry about.
A Senate committee has released a damning report about multiple critical failures committed by the Secret Service as it sought to protect Donald Trump at the Pennsylvania event where an assassin nearly killed him. The New York Times looks at how challenging it is to protect Trump, especially in light of recent intelligence indicating Iran sought to assassinate Trump.
Cool news of the week: Johnny Cash now has a statue in the Capitol building. It is one of two statues Arkansas has contributed to the Statuary Hall collection.
Polling and Demographics
By Kaleigh Rogers and Christine Zhang of the New York Times: “Accurate Polls Hinge on a Tricky Question: Who’s Actually Going to Vote?” (“In the flood of election polls you’ll see over the next few weeks, most polling groups will include responses from ‘likely voters.’ And often from nobody else.
In theory, these poll numbers should yield more accurate results, since the people who actually vote are the ones who dictate the outcome on Election Day. But creating a precise picture of who will vote in November is a complicated endeavor.”)
By Rick Perlstein for The American Prospect: “The Polling Imperilment” (“In 2016, I experienced the desolation of my candidate for president losing after the most respected polling experts told me she had a 71.4 percent, 85 percent, 98.2 percent, and even 99 percent chance of winning. As a historian, I was studying how Ronald Reagan’s runaway landslide in 1980 was proceeded by every pollster but one supremely confident that the race was just about tied. I’ve just finished a fine book published in 2020 that confirms an intuition I’ve been chewing on since then. It turns out this is practically the historical norm. W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.”)
David Lauter of the Los Angeles Times has an interesting article about undecided young voters, who are warming to Harris, don’t like Trump, but may vote for him because of economic anxieties.
A Harvard poll found more young voters identify as conservative than liberal. It’s especially true for men. The leader of the study noted these voters were ten when Trump took office and consider his style of leadership normal, adding, “They think of Trump as an anti-hero and not a villain. ... I think it’s less about policy and much more about personality.”
Jennifer De Pinto of CBS News looks at how the presidential race remains close even though voters “like” Harris considerably more than Trump.
Gallup found that measures that have predicted the winner of presidential elections in the past like party affiliation, economic attitudes, and issue priorities favor the GOP.
A recent study found that identifying social media posts that contain false information as “disputed” actually makes people more likely to believe the lies.
Law and the Legal System
Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted following a federal corruption investigation. Nearly twenty other people in Adams’ orbit are also under investigation.
By Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post: “The Real Eric Adams Scandal: Is This Guy the Best NYC Had to Offer?” This is a stunning article. I never liked Adams, but I didn’t realize the depths of his buffoonery. Consider this exchange:
REPORTER: How would you summarize 2023 in one word?
ADAMS: New York. This is a place where every day you wake up you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center through a person who’s celebrating a new business that’s open.
The FBI reported violent crime declined by about 3% from 2022 to 2023, with murder down 11.6%, the largest single-year drop in two decades. Preliminary reports find these trends continuing into 2024.
The United States last week executed five prisoners in seven days, which last occurred in 2003. One of those inmates, Marcellus Williams, was executed by Missouri despite serious questions about his guilt and an admission by the prosecution that their case was flawed. Kamala Harris, who has opposed the death penalty in the past, will not go on record saying she opposes it, and the Democratic Party excluded a plank opposing the death penalty from its party platform this year.
Tessa Stuart of Rolling Stone reports that hundreds of pregnant women have been prosecuted since the end of Roe v. Wade related to incidents involving pregnancy, pregnancy loss, abortion, and birth.
A judge has ordered the liquidation of Alex Jones’ Infowars to pay the more than $1 billion he owes to the relatives of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting for falsely claiming the shooting was an elaborate hoax. (Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson invited Jones onstage during his national tour stop in Reading, Pennsylvania.)
Conservative media outlet Newsmax settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Smartmatic over false claims Newsmax made about Smartmatic’s voting machines.
International News
As part of its escalation of attacks in Lebanon this week, Israel bombed Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut and killed its leader, Hassan Nazrallah. From the New York Times: “Killing of Nasrallah Pushes Mideast Conflict Into New Territory”
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta called Israel’s pager attack a “form of terrorism.”
American Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes for The Atlantic about the unprecedented suffering in Gaza and, in graphic detail, the deaths of over two dozen family members.
Rachel Chason on the Washington Post writes that Israel’s economy is in “serious danger” on account of the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited an ammunition plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to thank workers for providing the munitions used in his nation’s war with Russia. It was not lost on many that Pennsylvania is a swing state.
Trump’s meeting with Zelensky, which included Trump praising Zelensky for exonerating him during his impeachment trial (he didn’t) and bragging about his good relationship with Vladimir Putin (who is trying to kill the people Zelensky leads) was a joke. Read about it here and here.
Bryn Stole writes in The Atlantic about Europe’s adoption of heat pumps, which can heat homes far more efficiently than heating systems used in most American homes.