I’ve been a bit behind on my election updates, in part because an election brings up so many things we have to work on here at TPM beyond writing about it. But it’s also been because of the contrariness of the polls and other election indicators. In the nature of things, I get asked a lot to predict the political future. In the last two weeks I’ve felt a creeping anxiety about the outcome of the November election. But it is less because of what I think is likely than the stakes that are involved. Let me try to explain what I mean. Read More

No one but Trump and those he associates with can better manage the combination of the horrific with the absurd. Which brings us to the latest in the Jamal Khashoggi story. Most you can see everywhere in the news. But there is one key point I want to note. Read More

Here’s key new information on the Khashoggi front. CNN just reported that the Turks had reason to believe or perhaps even certainty Khashoggi had been murdered within hours of his disappearance. They were even able to place Turkish security services personnel or police on the plane they took back to Saudi Arabia. This strongly suggests they had the alleged tapes almost immediately. The critical question now is when the Turks communicated this knowledge to the US. Video after the jump. Read More

We’re about to start drilling very deep into the details of the final weeks of the election. Just two and half weeks to go. We have a lot of reporting coming. More Inside Briefings. More commentary and analysis from yours truly. But I wanted to flag one thing. This is my curated list of polling and election data experts on Twitter. I make no claim to it being definitive or encyclopedic. It’s something I’ve just cobbled together for my own use over time. But when we get near elections and especially on election nights, it’s a good concentrated feed of people who really bring knowledge, expertise, experience and numeracy to figuring out what the flood of data actually means.

This is a brief note and is in no way a defense of the Saudis. But I think we can see another common pattern between our relationship with the Saudis and the Russians. In both cases, because President Trump is not only resistant to taking action against Saudi Arabia but apparently under some kind of corrupt influence by Saudis there is a tendency to propose more and more extreme responses. This is a manageable but dangerous tendency we should all be mindful of, with both countries. Read More

We’ve seen months of clues that Roger Stone is in the crosshairs of the Mueller investigation. We heard yesterday that Mueller may be preparing a report and a new round of indictments for soon after the election. Now we hear that Stone is high on the list of what Mueller’s investigators have wanted to know about in their post-cooperation agreement meetings with Manafort. Read More

We did some software upgrades overnight. As part of that, a setting got changed so that some Prime members are now seeing an alert about ad blockers. That was unintentional and we are working to roll back that change this morning. Thanks for being members.

TPM Reader JL is right. This is a big deal.

Based on 538’s forecast which just got posted, if every race goes the way 538 is calling it (insert caveats here), the following states among others will have a Democratic governor: WI, MI, PA, FL. That’s a whopping 75 electoral votes right there.

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Here is a story about an on-going lawsuit by a group of advertisers against Facebook. It all seems fairly technical and distant from most of our concerns. But it’s actually something that has had a huge impact on the evolution of the news publishing industry over the last few years, and something that seems to have been based in large measure on Facebook’s fraud. Read More

The more you read this Bloomberg report on the Mueller probe, the more questions it raises. Mueller may be prepping a report of some sort soon after the midterms. But he’s also not close to being done with the probe. The biggest news, as far as I can see, is the hint that Rod Rosenstein is losing patience with the probe and is pressuring Mueller to wrap it up. Read More