This morning I dipped into the Times comments about the piece I wrote on abortion politics. They made me even more pessimistic about the Democrats’ electoral fate in November. Obviously comments at some level aren’t a good barometer of a larger population. But the level of self-defeating ignorance on display almost defied comprehension. I closed them up and decided to go about my day. The one critique that stood out to me was the argument that none of the abortion stuff matters because this midterm is really about the economy and especially inflation. So Democrats need to focus their message on that. And if possible, resolve those issues by election time.

It goes without saying that 1) inflation approaching 10% is not popular, 2) it is exceedingly unlikely that Joe Biden can materially reduce inflation in the next five months (in fact you probably need big shifts three months out from the election) and 3) taking stock of #1 and #2 if Democrats allow the midterms to be a referendum on inflation they will get soundly defeated since inflation is not popular.

During Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary, Mehmet Oz first insisted that he would remain a dual U.S.-Turkish citizen while serving in the Senate. To avoid any conflict of interest he said he would simply recuse himself from any foreign policy issues with any connection to Turkey. Then after intense criticism he agreed that should he be elected to the Senate he would finally renounce his Turkish citizenship.

That appeared to partly settle the issue. It actually got less attention that the fact that Oz isn’t even a resident of Pennsylvania. He lives across the state line in New Jersey. But through the campaign there has also been an oft-repeated suggestion that raising this issue — Oz’s dual citizenship — amounts to a form of prejudice or Islamophobia. In fact, an early May ABC News report claimed that “Oz is not the first high-profile candidate to face accusations of a so-called ‘dual loyalty,’ a claim reminiscent of attacks against Catholics, Jews and members of other religious and ethnic groups in previous generations.”

This article in the Post suggests that John Fetterman’s heart issues are considerably more serious than the initial reports suggested. His stroke was the result of a fairly significant cardiac issue — an underlying cardiomyopathy — that he just ignored or largely ignored for five years.

TPM Readers will be familiar with this argument which I made in a series of posts last month. But this is the Democrats’ best strategy for turning the tide in the midterms and saving abortion rights in the United States. I wrote it up for The New York Times.

I got invited to go on a podcast about Bob Dylan in which the guest chooses one Dylan song to discuss and that’s the basis of the episode. The podcast is called Pod Dylan. I demurred for a while because I really couldn’t figure out how to pick a single song. But eventually it kind of came to me in a moment of clarity. So we recorded it this week. And it came out today. If you’re interested, here’s the video version of the episode after the jump.

I’ve been working on a column about abortion politics. And as part of pulling that together, I’ve been sifting through recent polling data, especially surveys taken after the release of the Alito draft opinion. As is often the case, polling data on abortion can seem scattered and inconsistent, in large part because responses turn so closely on subtle differences in wording and framing. I’ll get to that in a moment. But looking at all these numbers really confirmed me in thinking that this is a powerful midterm issue for Democrats but … it won’t activate itself. It’s going to take specific actions to activate it for its full potential.

In Kentucky today Mitch McConnell said there can only be a deal on guns if it doesn’t do anything on guns but rather focuses on the “real issues” of mental health and school safety. So it seems we’re getting to the end of the standard Republican cooling off period in which Republicans make sounds about moving on gun legislation until the initial shock of the latest child massacre has worn off and they can go back to “no.” But I wanted to address a question that has come up in many of your emails in recent days about a notional bipartisan Senate deal on guns.

It’s hard to know what there is bad enough to say about the John Durham probe, which just saw its cause celebre indictment of lawyer Michael Sussmann drop kicked to eternity in a rapid acquittal. This was a corrupt effort from the git-go. Durham’s own deputy, who had worked with or for him for decades, felt obliged to resign because of pressure to produce meritless indictments to save Trump’s bacon in the dying days of his presidency.

I wanted to update you on recent developments in Ukraine. As I hinted at a week or two ago, we’re now seeing signs of limited but steady Russian progress against the Ukrainian military. That in turn has spawned a series of articles asking whether Russia is now “winning” the war after months in which the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion seemed to go from success to success. The question is one of perspective. So it’s worth getting into some details about the last three-plus months.

With the one time frontrunners both now removed from the ballot, a new poll shows that the new leader in the Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary is Ryan Kelley, a man recorded in multiple videos as literally part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. It’s not much of a lead. He’s currently pulling 19% support in what is now clearly a highly unsettled race. He’s followed by Kevin Rinke at 15% and Tudor Dixon — the candidate now backed by the DeVos family — at 9%.