An Arizona county run by Republicans recently voted against moving forward with plans to try to get rid of electronic ballot-counting machines and to conduct the tabulation of the 2024 election by hand. While initially propelled in part by conspiracy theories about voting machines, the all-Republican county board of supervisors determined that ultimately moving to a hand count would be too expensive and the methodology too unreliable.

In the hours since special counsel Jack Smith announced charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump’s allies and the right-wing media have been pushing a weird theory that the special counsel wants to punish Trump with either hundreds of years in prison or … death.

Yes, death.

As my colleague Josh Marshall notes below, today’s Times/Siena Poll gives us the clearest sign yet that, if you’re a Republican candidate and you’re not named Donald Trump, your grip on the Republican Party and the minds and hearts of GOP voters is tenuous at best and barely existent at worst.

Just a few hours after we noted last night that Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, very softly criticized one line of Florida’s new Black history curriculum, Team DeSantis responded with outsized fury.

In his subtle critique of the curriculum, the only Black Republican member of Florida’s congressional delegation gave the DeSantis administration an out.

Donald Trump continues to wield power over the Republican Party in a way that no other 2024er has been able to penetrate quite yet. As the former president out-fundraises his competition and enjoys wide leads in early voting states like South Carolina and Iowa, the man considered to be his most serious challenger, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is running out of money. Politico reported just this afternoon that the Florida governor is letting one-third of his staff go, reportedly amid concerns over campaign coffers.

And his position of dominance over the party extends beyond the campaign circuit and into Congress.

The retired school teacher who ultimately survived an expulsion vote brought by her Republican colleagues in the Tennessee state House earlier this year — part of an effort that did ultimately expel two of her younger, Black colleagues — is reportedly planning to challenge Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) for her seat next year.

No Democrat has won a statewide race since 2006, when then-Gov. Phil Bredesen secured his reelection. But a face-off between Blackburn — who has a history of staunch opposition to tightening gun control — and state Rep. Gloria Johnson, (D) whose expulsion vote was predicated on her support for children and parents protesting lax gun laws in the state legislature, could test the energizing power of gun reform in a state recently racked by a deadly school shooting.

Ron DeSantis is struggling in the polls, and at acting like a human being in public. The Murdochs are losing patience with his flailing efforts to become the alt-Trump for voters exhausted by MAGA. He’s getting a lot of negative headlines now that his Republican-dominated state legislature back home has ended its legislative session and is therefore no longer producing anti-woke bills for him to sign into law and pump into Fox’s news cycle.

So naturally he’s turning to a key voting bloc that — at times reluctantly — got behind Donald Trump in droves in 2016 to propel him to the White House: white evangelicals. It’s an intrinsic shift for any Republican but especially for one who is banking his entire 2024 bid on what he perceives to be his unique ability to scoop up disaffected Trump voters looking for an alternative to the former president’s various disagreeable features.

There are two new reports out this week that dig in on where Rupert Murdoch is leaning ahead of the 2024 Republican primary, as he creates distance between his conservative media empire and Donald Trump, whose 2020 election lies have already cost Murdoch’s Fox News three-quarters of a billionaire dollars in just one defamation suit settlement. Murdoch reportedly is doing whatever he can to avoid being “stuck” with Trump again in 2024, privately expressing repeatedly over the last two years that he thinks Trump is unhealthy for the Republican Party, according to the New York Times.