Editors’ Blog

All in all, things went well in court today for the Jan. 6 committee as it tries to enforce a subpoena for Trump presidential records. But there was one moment when the judge missed the significance of scope of the document requests, and the House lawyer didn’t bail her out. Josh Kovensky explains why the committee’s inquiry needs to start with what Trump was doing back in April 2020. Super important.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate work through Democrats’ loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race and what it means for reconciliation.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Yesterday CNN headlined that President Biden returned to a Democratic “nightmare”. The Times Peter Baker said Biden was returning to a “different country”. There’s no doubt Democrats had a rough night. They lost a close governor’s race in Virginia, a state they have come to see increasingly as home turf. They also narrowly lost control of the state House of Delegates which they first took control of in 2019. And while Democrat Phil Murphy won in New Jersey, Republicans made a very close race of it, in large part by a big drop off in Democrats showing up to vote.

As I wrote Tuesday night, this isn’t a surprising result. The President’s popularity is underwater. Polls say the public sees the country going in the wrong direction – a reality regardless of whether you or I think it is an accurate perception. But let’s also get real: the incumbent President’s party has consistently lost these two governorships every cycle for more than 30 years. The one exception was Terry McAuliffe in 2013. Murphy’s victory in New Jersey sees the first Democrat reelected governor in that state in 44 years.

From a longtime TPM reader:

I live in Madison County in Central Virginia, about 80 miles southwest of DC. Charlottesville and Albemarle County excepted, this is industrial-strength Trump country. … Yesterday’s  election unsettled me, a lot. Despite decisive wins across the board a palpable, consuming rage drives Republican energy here, a rage that mere victory will not sate.

In a blow to Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the method through which bans on mask mandates and other coronavirus-related mitigation measures were passed in the state was illegal.

A lot of progressives across the country as well as in Buffalo were enthused by what a few months ago had seemed like the near certainty that India Walton, a self-described democratic socialist who won the Democratic primary against longtime Mayor Byron Brown, would be the next Mayor of Buffalo. But it appears that Mayor Byron Brown has managed a comeback victory as a write-in candidate.

(Neither Republicans nor New York’s various minor parties fielded candidates. So Walton was literally the only name on the ballot. Brown’s campaign spent about $100,000 on rubber stamps with his name to hand out to voters.)

One anecdote doesn’t capture a state. But I wanted to pass on this note from a TPM alum …

I read and enjoyed your piece on McAuliffe’s loss. I think it’s all on target, atop the fact that McAuliffe just isn’t a base moving guy on his own.

It may not have changed the result given the headwinds at play, but from where I sit in the Northern VA suburbs of DC, it also seems like McAuliffe and the VA Dems got completely out-hustled and out-campaigned, while leaving their reliable voters to do the work for them.

The networks haven’t called it. But the numbers crunchers I watch have. What do we make of this result? My main reaction is that we should not be surprised that Youngkin won. By this I do not mean that this morning I would have told you this was going to be the result. In fact, I had an inkling in the last day or so that McAuliffe might pull it out. I mean on the larger canvass: this shouldn’t surprise us.

Why? Let me explain.

Nearly all of the Democratic members of the North Carolina state House staged a walk-out on Monday evening to protest the seating of a new Republican state lawmaker who has not only dabbled in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but who was present at the Jan. 6 Trump rally that became the insurrection.

The new state House member Rep. Donnie Loftis (R) has drawn the ire of North Carolina Democrats since his appointment. Loftis is a former county commissioner in the state and resigned his position on a local hospital board last year after he was criticized for posting coronavirus conspiracy theories on Facebook. In some of the posts, he referred to stay-at-home orders, enacted in the deadliest days of the pandemic to slow the spread, as a form of tyranny, according to The Charlotte Observer.

But it was Loftis’ presence near the Capitol while the attack unfolded that drove Democrats to walk out during his swearing-in this week, the state Democratic Party said in a statement.

I just saw this comment from my friend Chris Hayes …

My unified theory of American social and political life is that we’ve lived through and are living through a once-in-a-century trauma/disruption and the results of that are going to revereberate throughout almost every facet of politics for a while.

I agree with this, with this additional and I believe critical fact: the pandemic hit during a period of intense social and political turbulence and instability in the United States. Not only Trump’s presidency, the escalation of destabilizing actions during his presidency but remember that the pandemic struck within days of the end of the President’s impeachment trial.