Late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) sister Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) will both advance to an Aug. 25 runoff to determine which Republican will appear on the ballot in November to replace Graham after his unexpected death earlier this summer. The Associated Press projected Graham’s sister would advance early in the night, but it was unclear if Norman or Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) would clear the hurdle until moments ago when the AP determined Norman would advance as well. None of the candidates were able to secure the majority of the vote to avoid a runoff.

We’re almost to our goal of raising the critical sum of $500,000 in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We’re 90% of the way there.

Just a short time ago TPM reporters Layla Jones and Josh Kovensky exclusively published the new draft rule by which the Trump White House aims to violate the Constitution by changing who gets counted in the federal census and thus the number of representatives allotted to each state. It aims to drastically shift power to smaller and more rural states — in other words, the MAGA heartlands.

It’s a great piece and builds on topics TPM has followed closely for 25 years.

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It’s sitting right there in front of us. But it’s still worth noting. The political stories of the moment are heavily geared to the long-tail effects of Donald Trump’s antic and ego-driven escapades: the decision to make the Reflecting Pool “American flag blue”; the eagerness to get a plane as a present (which he could take home with him after his presidency) from the royal family of Qatar. There are countless examples. In each case, the initial driver is the president’s personal cupidity and grandiosity, things which have no relation to any aspect of public policy or really any public support. They begin unknown and pretty quickly end up unpopular. He does them because he can, with the Supreme Court having removed basically all of the immediate brakes on a president’s power. But those initials gambits — the hunger for gifts and cash prizes — lead to bad news stories, legal impediments, or often technological snafus. Those in turn lead to embarrassment, anger, outbursts which repeat the process of bad news stories, legal impediments or technological snafus.

Dear TPMers,

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This afternoon, Emine Yücel, Josh Kovensky and John Light will join me on our YouTube channel to discuss their investigation from last week showing that the Trump administration has on multiple occasions withheld funds from blue states just because they voted blue — you know, the kind of story that would have been leading every news program for a month in the Before Times. Anyway, join us at 1 p.m. ET.

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Sometimes I write a post which is about information that is not new or secret but new to me. This is one of those posts. I’m sharing it because the information is new to me and I suspect many TPM readers. It’s helpful for me in thinking about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as the most visible left faction within the current Democratic Party. Recently I noticed that many or most of the DSA elected officials who’ve achieved some level of electoral success have been denounced, censured or rejected by the local affiliates or council who endorsed them in the first place. Along similar lines, the national DSA is consistently more doctrinaire and left-wing not only than it’s candidates but its local chapters in the major metros where its power is strongest. This isn’t surprising or really new. It’s a general pattern for ideologically-based organizations, an unsurprising feature of the tensions between ideology and complex electorates.

Back to those prominent DSA-backed politicians. I and many others have argued for a while that “socialist” seems more a matter of branding for a lot of DSA candidates, whereas the actual policies and positions sound a lot like pretty ordinary New Deal-style liberal-labor politics. Of course, what counts as “socialism” is wildly over-determined. You’ve certainly see those memes that show like the Socialist Party platform from the 1910s or 1920s and it mostly matches things we take for granted or did take for granted as the mid- and late-20th century New Deal state.

One of our great doctrines here in the Editors’ Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it in one place, and you lose or gain it in equal measure everywhere else. That’s catching up with Donald Trump. He got into the Iran War as a way to escape the emotionally crushing experience of declining popularity and power at home. But his ebbing power went with him to the Persian Gulf. And now it’s arrived in Israel, too. This was obscured for a while by the fact that the U.S. has almost unimaginable military power and a constitution which, as it has evolved if not how it was originally intended, puts almost no short-term limits on a president’s ability to wage war. But the two were always umbilically connected. It was the pain of bad news at home that spurred Trump to jump so recklessly into his Iran debacle. And it is the same unpopularity that has him so desperate to end high gas prices and inflation before the midterms. They’re all connected.

Trump has no poker face. To live in Trump’s era is not only to see his inner life but to be engulfed by it. It’s hard to think of a case in which the deciding player between warring powers has more clearly signaled his desperate desire to get out of a conflict on almost any terms. The Iranians have internet too. And they can see all of this. They have now issued a fresh set of new demands: end sanctions, leave the region, pay reparations, release frozen assets and more — in addition to make the Strait of Hormuz a permanent Iranian toll road. More or less total capitulation.

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Very interesting piece. According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of the GOP House caucus, went down to defeat is that he was targeted with $2 million by a SuperPAC funded by solar industry execs. They didn’t hit him on renewables or environment policy. They used garden variety attacks about Ogles’ missed votes while playing up the conservative credentials of his primary challenger. Of course, climate and environment advocacy have close to no supporters in the contemporary GOP. But Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is going after the much smaller group which goes out of its way to hurt the renewables industry in any way it can. It’s their third win this cycle.