So here we are. So much of the last 24 months has been about the Trump opposition rebuilding its energies, pacing its morale, marshaling its resources, building walls as firm against autocracy as possible with no power in Washington and preparing for the shot at reclaiming as much of that power as possible. In a week and a day we’ll get the first measure of the results. And we’ll get our first look at how the table is set for the next two years.
I wanted to return to the topic we discussed at the end of last week — the Democratic email and text fundraising colossus — but now from a different perspective. I wrote a response to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s piece in The New Republic about all the problems with the system. While I don’t agree with every point, it’s a very valuable article and points toward at least two straightforward if challenging-to-implement reforms. But we also shouldn’t lose sight of what an amazing accomplishment and how incredibly needed Democratic small donor fundraising is. It is a genuinely mass-based, non-oligarch system of funding political campaigns at a time when the Supreme Court has given billionaire oligarchs free rein to buy campaigns and offices at scale.
Want to keep reading?
Join TPM to get full-access to our reporting, newsletters, and other member-only features.
Nearly two hours of oral arguments just concluded in the California election case, and it looks very unlikely that the Trump administration is going to prevail in this early stage of the litigation.
In an unusual Sunday afternoon session conducted via Zoom, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals weighed whether to order Los Angeles County to segregate and not yet count the mail-in ballots of alleged noncitizen voters from a dubious list of 20,000 voters compiled by the Trump administration.
So here we are. So much of the last 24 months has been about the Trump opposition rebuilding its energies, pacing its morale, marshaling its resources, building walls as firm against autocracy as possible with no power in Washington and preparing for the shot at reclaiming as much of that power as possible. In a week and a day we’ll get the first measure of the results. And we’ll get our first look at how the table is set for the next two years.
I wanted to return to the topic we discussed at the end of last week — the Democratic email and text fundraising colossus — but now from a different perspective. I wrote a response to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s piece in The New Republic about all the problems with the system. While I don’t agree with every point, it’s a very valuable article and points toward at least two straightforward if challenging-to-implement reforms. But we also shouldn’t lose sight of what an amazing accomplishment and how incredibly needed Democratic small donor fundraising is. It is a genuinely mass-based, non-oligarch system of funding political campaigns at a time when the Supreme Court has given billionaire oligarchs free rein to buy campaigns and offices at scale.
Want to keep reading?
Join TPM to get full-access to our reporting, newsletters, and other member-only features.
Nearly two hours of oral arguments just concluded in the California election case, and it looks very unlikely that the Trump administration is going to prevail in this early stage of the litigation.
In an unusual Sunday afternoon session conducted via Zoom, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals weighed whether to order Los Angeles County to segregate and not yet count the mail-in ballots of alleged noncitizen voters from a dubious list of 20,000 voters compiled by the Trump administration.
We’ll be sharing more details with you over the course of the next week. But I wanted to let you know we’re trying something new and exciting with our election night coverage. We’ll be doing a live video-cast for the evening, including me, our publisher Joe Ragazzo and the rest of our editorial team coming in to discuss different races as the evening goes on. Think of it as a TPM version of what you might see if you spent the evening watching MS NOW or CNN. Basically it will be a mix of the latest results (and looking under the hood at details in key counties and precincts which tells you where things are really going) and discussion of what it all means. I hope you’ll join us.
I wanted to give you a brief update on and impressions of the Israeli election which is on Tuesday. An overview of the polls suggests that the opposition bloc may get a few more seats than the Netanyahu bloc but that both will fall far short of the 61 seats required to form a government. Most polls have shown both blocs in the low 50s while the remainder of the 120 seats go to two Arab parties/coalitions. One of those is Ra’am, which is probably now best termed “non-Zionist” since it accepts Israel as a Jewish state and sat in the brief non-Netanyahu government in 2021-22, and the Joint List, which remains firmly anti-Zionist and probably wouldn’t sit in any government and also wouldn’t be invited to any. What this amounts to is high odds for a stalemate in which neither side can form a government and new elections have to be called. In that case, you have several more months in which Netanyahu remains in office as “caretaker” prime minister.
Three stories have jumped out at me from the Israeli press over the last two or three days. The first, just today is that Netanyahu posted an AI photo of a nuclear blast over Tel Aviv saying that his election is all that can prevent it.
