You have certainly seen lots of coverage of the expulsion of Tennessee lawmakers Justin Jones (D) and Justin Pearson (D) yesterday from the Tennessee state house. One particular encounter caught my attention from the debate prior to the votes. It’s the moment when Rep. Andrew Farmer (R), a sponsor of the expulsion resolution, lectured Pearson about his behavior, saying that Pearson just wants attention and doesn’t know how to behave. It’s worth watching it to get the flavor of the comments and Pearson’s response. Someone else said Farmer seemed to be like the caricature of the racist white lawyer from a 1990s-era movie. And that captures it. It’s demeaning. He’s talking to Pearson like a child who simply doesn’t belong in the state capitol and doesn’t understand the work being done there. You can see the interchange here.

Like John, I’ve also frequently found it hard to make sense of what is happening in Ukraine, especially in recent months when the conflict has shown relatively little movement in lines of control. From my understanding, the real question is what will happen in the offensive the Ukrainian army has long telegraphed starting sometime in the spring or early summer. The brutal fight over Bakhmut, from what I’ve been able to understand, has to be seen in that context.

A gratifying but also really fascinating note from TPM Reader MG explaining why he finally made the decision to sign up after reading the site for many years — the role of evolving readers habits and the decline of Twitter are very interesting to hear and also match some of my own experience. Needless to say, if you’d like to join MG in signing up, just click right here …

First of all, thank you and thank you to the entire TPM team for the top notch work you all do.

I’ve been a TPM reader for as long as I can remember and frankly feel a little sheepish that it took me this long to pitch in to support the work that you do. At some point, probably when my work life got crazy busy and I didn’t have as much free time, I started relying more on my Twitter feed to keep up with the state of affairs in the world. My Twitterverse largely consisted of all of the writers I had always been reading before but eventually I stopped reading their work and was instead just scrolling through the feed to keep up with the news. Not mindless scrolling….I felt like it was providing a play by play from a variety of sources that I trusted. But I wasn’t clicking through to anyone’s actual reporting anymore.

Then the slow erosion of Twitter began.

We’re four days into our annual TPM membership drive and we’re making progress. I try to make these pitches fun and punchy. But really … it’s super, super important. These drives are always something of a leap in the dark. We don’t know how they’ll go. So a really sincere thank you to all 202 new members who’ve signed up so far this week. Thank you! (If you’re game, shoot us an email and let us know why you chose to sign up.) If you haven’t, please just click right here and join us! You get access to everything we publish and depending on which membership level you choose you get reduced or zero ads which makes reading the site faster and less cluttered. Most important, you support our team’s work. You ensure TPM stays vital and independent. Just click right here.

There’s a specter haunting the Republican Party — the specter of abortion. While it’s difficult to say that an issue that is important to so many voters and that has been talked about in politics for decades is still underrated as a driver of recent political outcomes, that somehow manages to be the case. Debates over transgender rights, “parents’ rights,” crime politics and inflation drive more headlines. But abortion is turning the tide in more elections.

The American political class got an early heads up in the Kansas abortion referendum blowout less than six weeks after the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022. We saw it again in Wisconsin on Tuesday, as the liberal Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, trounced the conservative, Daniel Kelly, in this consistently 50-50 state by 11 points. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used her prodigious political talent and a host of issues to drive Republicans from power in all three branches of state government in Michigan. But the core issue has been abortion rights. Of course, abortion was likely the single, central issue — coupled with a broader rejection of Republican extremism — which turned the 2022 midterm election from a GOP rout to a Democratic upset. Abortion is now acting like an electoral riptide or a shark, especially across the northern tier of the country, unseen at the surface but pulling one Republican after another under the waves.

We’ve now had the day of spectacle and legal experts have had a chance to provide their first analyses of the case brought against former President Trump. On the substance the case isn’t difficult to understand: In the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, Trump orchestrated a hush money scheme to keep a series of affairs and assignations out of the press and in so doing broke a series of laws. The legal arguments behind the case are more complicated, involving both federal and state laws, and a specific argument about how different violations of the law interact with each other to create a broader pattern of criminal conduct.

And that’s a wrap. The AP has called the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. At TPM we wait for two media calls to consider a race settled. But tonight in the Editors’ Blog let’s put a fork in this one. (Celebrate by becoming a member during our annual TPM membership drive!!!!) From the beginning of the count, the de facto Republican Kelly has been running behind the numbers he needed in basically every part of the state. This one won’t even end up being that close. There will be a liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Scott Walker and his crew basically wired this state so Republicans were always in control. This may be the beginning of the end of that dominance. Not that Republicans can’t win of course. It’s basically a 50/50 state. But it was wired in such a way that Republicans still controlled things even when most Wisconsinites voted against them. Without control of the Supreme Court, the Wisconsin GOP’s crazy-level extreme gerrymandering may come apart.

9:55 p.m.: And AP calls it for Protasiewicz. Put a fork in Dan Kelly he’s done. Dems will control Wisconsin Supreme Court, a development with big ramifications in and out of the state.

9:53 p.m.: I’m not good enough with numbers to “call” anything. But I think you can consider the Wisconsin court race done with Protasiewicz winning with a relatively comfortable margin. Mid-single digits.

******

No one is calling the race here. But liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz seems to be running ahead of her necessary margins basically everywhere in the state. Conservative Kelly just doesn’t seem to have the numbers. There’s some reluctance to call the race I think in part because off-year elections can be so unpredictable. But I don’t think anyone looking at the details thinks there’s much chance Kelly wins. The election is nominally non-partisan. Thus the two candidates are not formally running as Democrats and Republicans, though in practice it’s a thoroughly partisanized contest.

Going into the primary, one GOP observer told me he thought only one of the GOP candidates had a shot in the general election. That wasn’t Kelly. Basically unelectable, this person said. It gives you a sense of lessons learned from the 2022 midterm.

This really is the big one. A lot rides on this and not just for Wisconsinites.

9:42 p.m.: Haven’t seen any formal calls but hard to see how Kelly wins this. Seems to be running behind the necessary numbers everywhere. Seems like Protasiewicz wins this and maybe by a pretty solid margin.

9:41 p.m.: Still not clear if Protasiewicz will win but Republicans already discussing impeaching her.

9:35 p.m.: Basically seems like Protasiewicz is running at or ahead of the margins she needs basically everywhere. Obviously that’s still with most of the votes uncounted. But you’d certainly rather be her than Kelly.

9:31 p.m.: A bit more clarity. Numbers are looking solid for Protasiewicz. But too early to say anything definitive.

9:25 p.m.: Results coming in pretty quickly now. But no real consensus on what the numbers show. Just a smattering of results and in an off year election differential turnout makes things hard to predict until we see more numbers.

Race not called yet. But it’s looking like Brandon Johnson is in a strong position to defeat Paul Vallas in the Chicago mayoral runoff. Johnson is the more progressive candidate, Vallas the more centrist or right-leaning. Both are Democrats. This was definitely portrayed as a referendum on urban Dem “soft on crime” politics. But voters don’t seem to have gone along with that narrative. Vallas currently has a tiny lead. But all the folks who know how to analyze the numbers say Vallas’ chances are on life support, given the votes that are left to be counted.

As I was writing this very short post, Johnson just moved into the tiniest of leads. But again, it’s not a matter of watching each additional vote come in. The remaining votes in toto seem to heavily favor Johnson. Dave Wasserman hasn’t called it yet but as of 9:05 he says it’s “virtually done.”