According to Susquehanna Polling & Research, a GOP polling firm, the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania is now a dead heat between Trump endorsed TV Doctor Mehmet Oz (28%) and outsider candidate Kathy Barnette (27%), with the late-breaking deciders favoring Barnette.

John Fetterman, the Lt. Gov. of Pennsylvania and the leading Senate candidate for the Democratic nomination for Senate, suffered a stroke on Friday. According to the statement he put out today, it was a minor stroke and he suffered no cognitive impairment. He says he is continuing the race. “I had a stroke that was caused by a clot from my heart being in an A-fib rhythm for too long. I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”

It’s hard to say that one mass shooting is worse than the next — other than in the brutal metric of body counts. They’re all different flavors of the same horror. But the news out of this afternoon’s shooting in Buffalo is particularly sobering, shocking, enraging. One of the ten dead was a retired cop working as a security guard at the grocery store. He engaged the shooter and shot him. But it didn’t stop him because the shooter was wearing body armor. That little detail is the one that just stopped me in my tracks.

Police appear certain that the shooting, allegedly by an 18 year old from out of town, was racially motivated, though they haven’t yet discussed the evidence that makes it so clear. Eleven of the thirteen who were shot are Black. Two are white.

You can never understand national politics without understanding the elite mores of Washington, DC. People toss around the word “elite.” But here I mean it in a more specific sense of the mix of journalists, staffers, elected officials, lobbyists, activists and more who have power in and essentially run the political town of Washington, DC. (The actual place where most of the population lives is a different thing.) As I’ve written in various contexts over the years that strata of the city remains heavily wired for the GOP, even though there are lots of people from that world who certainly aren’t conservatives and by definition many are Democrats. I wanted to flag something to you that kind of captures it.

When the Jan. 6 select committee begins holding hearings on their investigative findings in about one month, we may see video testimony from some members of the Trump family.

Biden is thinking about and asking the right question: “[Putin] is a very, very, very calculating man. And the problem I worry about now is that he doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.”

The quote is courtesy of this piece by Friend of TPM Olivier Knox.

According to a new Monmouth Poll, abortion (25%) is now tied with the economy (26%) as the most important issue in the midterms.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the reverberations and new dynamics since the bombshell draft Supreme Court opinion overturning abortion rights leaked.

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

Republicans are falling over each other to tell us as clearly as they can that the reversal of Roe is a massive electoral liability. You have longtime “pro-life” diehards running towards TV cameras insisting the whole thing is totally no big deal. In fact, you’ll barely notice anything happened. Lots of states will still have abortion. Abortions will be so easy to get you’ll be getting abortions right and left. Or at least that seems to be what virtually every Republican senator is saying.

There’s an argument to be made that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) et al. knew what they were getting themselves into; the wrath from Trump their little musketeers-ing might evoke.