Late Update: It’s all but confirmed. The special counsel’s office just released a “Superseding Criminal Information” in the DC case. That is in all likelihood the abbreviated set of charges Manafort will agree to plead guilty to. More soon …
In the last dozen years we’ve seen at least two and arguably three wave elections, with two tied to a midterm election: 2006, 2008 and 2010. They have certain common characteristics, along with others from earlier decades. One is that key patterns generally take shape or come fully into view at the end of the summer. Whether this is because our media and political cycles our designed to kickstart after the Labor Day holiday, whether it’s the shift from summer or just a certain proximity to election day that creates a critical mass of focused attention in the voting electorate, I’m not sure. But we are currently seeing a pattern that looks a lot like these earlier cycles, with a congealing trend coming out of late August into the first days of September. Read More
We’ve discussed at various points all the ways that President Trump has signaled to Paul Manafort that a pardon is on offer is he just keeps his mouth shut. It’s even worse than we thought. Read More
Steve Negron, the newly-minted GOP nominee to face Rep. Annie Kuster (D-NH) recently defended so-called ‘gay conversion therapy’. “When you look at these young children that are trying to make a decision, and I remember when I was 15-16 I was confused, I had a lot of options in my life,” he said in a Facebook Live interview with local station WMUR last month.
This a fascinating, must-read backstory that is one of the many, really countless reasons hearing from TPM Readers has been such a treat and something I’ve profited from so much for almost 20 years. TPM Reader Joe Rieser, one-time General Counsel of the DNC, has a fascinating follow-up and addenda to the second installment in our 2018 Series on Voting Rights and Democracy …
I had been away on vacation when TPM’s August 16, 2018 article on voter fraud mythology was published and did not come across it until just recently. I was heavily involved with one of the episodes described in that article, namely the Republican efforts in Louisiana in 1986. In my world, we call it the Louisiana case. There is one significant piece of evidence that the authors of the article failed to mention with respect to that episode. I think it is worth bringing to your attention because of how strongly an admission by a Republican operative in an undeleted email underscored the Republicans’ racial focus in suppressing the vote.
Now Marist has a generic poll out today too: this one has a 12 point spread for the Democrats. This comes after the Q poll I flagged below.
A new poll out this morning from Quinnipiac has the Democrats with a 14 point advantage in the congressional generic ballot. That’s on the high side of recent results. 538 currently puts its current ‘average’ at 8.6 points. The poll is of registered voters, sampled 1,038 respondents and was conducted between September 6th and 9th. Read More
Listen to my conversation with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper about Trump, Russia and just who is working for who.
Last week, in his sentencing hearing, George Papadopoulos expressed deep remorse for his crime and asked for a lenient sentence, which he got: 14 days in jail. In her weekend interview, Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, seemed to all but troll the Special Counsel’s office with the widespread suspicions that she is in fact herself a spy or tied in some fashion to Russian intelligence. After the sentencing I thought, what happened to all the “deep state” conspiracy theories Mangiante had been peddling on Fox News all summer, asking for a pardon, going deep into the Fox News/Hannity-sphere with every conspiracy under the sun? Read More