Editors’ Blog

We’ve got our first “Roe and Reform” score change. The office of Sen. Duckworth reached out to Kate Riga this morning to inform her of Senator Duckworth’s position change on Friday. She’s now in the Yes column. That means the “Keeping It Vague” group goes from 11 to 10 members.

Our new and revised “Roe and Reform” list has just been published. A new, cleaner format. Details on where all 50 Democratic senators currently stand on passing a Roe law and committing to suspending the filibuster rules to guarantee an up or down vote. I’ll be honest. This isn’t moving fast enough. It’s frustrating. If Democrats can line up commitments to pass a Roe law in January 2023 if they hold the House and add two additional senators, their chances of holding Congress will increase substantially. I really think it’s likely the make-or-break thing. But Democrats across the country need to pressure their senators to get on board, make the clear and public commitment. The problem is that senators living in Senateworld have their own instinctive resistance to committing, even to things they support. When you live in Senateworld, the importance of these kinds of things can be lost on you. The tens of millions of people who are devastated, angry, outraged, afraid don’t necessarily focus on the admittedly kind of obscure issue of legislative vote counts and how they interact with election messages in a topsy turvy midterm. But there’s this big, big opportunity that just requires getting all the wires connected so the machine can really move. That’s why this list is so important. It’s a guide that can help ordinary voters actually put Roe on the ballot in November, not just as a vague slogan but for real.

A former leader of a religious right activist group recently admitted on a podcast that the language that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito used in his damning majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade mirrored rhetoric the Christian group has been pushing on Supreme Court justices for decades.

Rev. Rob Schenck recently appeared on an episode of the State of Belief podcast to discuss his efforts as a former member of the group Faith and Action to, essentially, sway justices’ views on social issues through prayer sessions. The interview is from earlier this month, but Politico surfaced it here. It’s worth a listen if you want to get a better understanding of how these unofficial evangelical lobbying-via-prayer efforts work, but it reinforces a theme we covered earlier this summer when an official at the evangelical organization, Liberty Counsel, was caught on a hot mic bragging about secretly praying with Supreme Court justices.

On Saturday, in a post about the current state of and future of Trumpism, I said that a key reason for the slow deterioration of Trump’s 2024 support is his relentlessly backward-looking and self-centered focus. In other words, it’s the Big Lie and the ways in which the Big Lie has incorporated the Mueller probe, his impeachments and all of his other first term wounds and grievances. TPM Reader TS wrote in to say that while he agreed with my argument he wondered whether Jon Chait’s related piece modified or changed my view of this. Chait argued that the conventional wisdom, which holds that Trump needs to give up his fixation on the 2020 election, is plainly wrong. Not only does he not need to drop the Big Lie — in fact, it’s his best strategy for getting the 2024 nomination.

So who’s right?

I got this fascinating report from TPM Reader EK about the situation in Arizona’s 2nd district …

I wanted to share a closer look at one House race to get some insight into where Nate may be off.

FiveThirtyEight shows Walt Blackman with an 84% chance of winning over incumbent Tom O’Halleran in Arizona’s new 2nd Congressional District.

First, the Republican primary is in disarray. Blackman has proposed murder charges for women who get abortions. Trump came to Arizona to endorse Ed Crane, who has very few ties to Arizona. Trump was actually booed by the audience because they want Ron Watkins, who had a key role in forming Q Anon.

Attached is a flyer Crane supporters mailed to Republicans attacking Blackman for the Aug. 2 primary.

I’ve been noting in different posts that there are more disconnects than usual in making sense of the 2022 election. A lot of things don’t quite seem to fit. Is this the continuing upheaval of the last two years? A shift in the trend? Or just wishful thinking? Who knows. But TPM Reader YK noted to me recently a little detail that helps quantify that disconnect. Our friend Nate Silver’s 538 forecasts include three versions. One with a mix of polls, expert opinion and a mix of history, fundraising, voting patterns and more. It’s this last one that is usually treated as the canonical forecast. That one currently shows the Senate at 50%-50% between Democratic and Republican control. With the House it’s 85%-15% in favor of the GOP. (Technically, these are the percentage of times the computer simulation gives victory to each side.)

One great theme of reportage on the Trump presidency is that it took Trump almost his entire term of office to learn how to make the federal government run to his purposes, to bend it to his will. He learned to ignore his cabinet secretaries and operate through the lesser-known officials with their hands on the levers of power. He found ways to exploit the maze of loopholes, workarounds and unenforceable laws which essentially allowed him to ignore Senate confirmation and oversight. This week Axios published a big report on how Trump and his top advisors are planning to use this knowledge in a second term to gut the federal bureaucracy and restock it with an army of Trump loyalists. In other words, in term one, Trump’s very ignorance and laziness provided a critical insulation against his worst instincts and most malicious goals. In term two he will hit the ground running knowing exactly what to do.

While accurate in many regards, this view of the man and the trajectory of his presidency misses the essence of it. What hides from most, almost in plain sight, is that Trump now rarely discusses any political agenda — even in the broadest, most guttural and least policy-oriented sense of the term. There is no agenda other than revenge and payback for the injustices and injuries he personally suffered in his first term: the Democrats, the RINOs, Mueller, the impeachments, the “fake news”, what he memorably calls “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Big Tech.” Remember that “fake news” wasn’t part of Trump’s 2016 campaign argot. That was appropriated from the growing discourse of campaign misinformation he profited from and retrofitted for use against what he perceived as an unfriendly press. Grievance and payback have always been the central touchstones of Trumpism. But this is distinct. To appreciate his arc we have to go back to the beginnings of the Trump presidency.

I wanted to flag again that the congressional generic ballot continues a small but steady creep in the direction of the Democrats. The shift is basically since the leak and then official release of the Dobbs decision. To be clear, Democrats are still very much the underdogs in the battle for the House, though they’re close to tied in the congressional generic ballot. The two prognostication sites I watch put the Dems’ odds in the 15% or less zone. So, not good! But the movement is in their direction and there’s more than three months to go.

At the same time, conventional wisdom is moving strongly in the Democrats’ direction in the Senate. There have been a lot of signs of this that conventional opinion really missed because they were seeing things so much through the prism of a GOP wave election. One of these now sees a 55% likelihood of Democrats maintaining control of the Senate and the other 50%-50%. These have each moved significantly in the Dems’ direction just over the last week.

Last night’s Jan. 6 House Select Committee primetime hearing was the final one for this season, or at least until September. It was, in part, a showcase of the fear felt that day — even by those Republicans who boosted Trump’s lies. Juxtaposed against somber moments (recordings played of security officials fearing for their lives, considering making goodbye calls to their families) were absurd and even comical ones — most notably, footage of Senator Josh Hawley hauling ass once the insurrection got violent. Earlier that day he had raised his fist in a gesture of solidarity with the rioters from the comfort and safety of a secure and cordoned-off space.

If you didn’t see the Jan. 6th’s committee’s (for now) final hearing, it was a powerful presentation. The two big takeaways, if you’re already pretty versed in what we know about that day, are these: the exfiltration of Mike Pence was probably a closer-run thing than we’d even imagined. Members of Pence’s Secret Service detail were apparently talking of calling loved ones to say final goodbyes before they decided to move him to the Capitol complex’s secure location. We also saw more of Trump’s alternatively sullen and desperate refusal to face reality — or, perhaps more specifically, refusal to dispel his supporters’ absolute belief that his “landslide” victory had been stolen. Just a pathetic, degenerate huckster capable of great violence and evil.