I give you my favorite editorial fail of the final week of 2023, from the Times write-up of the Maine disqualification …

Kate and TPM’s Josh Marshall talk with Professor Heather Cox Richardson about the state of American democracy and how we got here.

Belaboring The Point is now on YouTube! Check out the latest video episode of the podcast here.

Since this will be the final Backchannel of 2023, I want to devote it to a note of thanks as we go into the new year. 2023 was the first full year of The Backchannel. We launched it at the end of 2022, and it is a members-only newsletter. So I’m writing to you as the members who make TPM not only possible but vital: Thank you.

I wanted to take a moment to marvel over the Nikki Haley situation with you. The conventional take is that as she’s risen in the GOP presidential primary contest she’s getting the heightened scrutiny that goes along with it. But that’s not actually true. As with so much else in the news, that take is driven by vibes and the need for a storyline rather than any actual data. FiveThirtyEight says that on October 1st she was at 6.9% support in nationwide polls. Today she is at 11%. That’s a 4 percentage point shift when Donald Trump, today, remains literally 50 percentage points ahead. The only place where there’s even been a modest shift is in New Hampshire. And it’s quite modest. There she’s moved to about 25% support after almost two months at 20%.

So … Go Nikki! Laying the groundwork for a 2 to 1 trouncing in New Hampshire to build momentum for a … well, not really clear that it’s for anything. But let’s not be spoil sports!

Okay, if you want to be really technical about it. It’s not Moms for Liberty, the group cofounded by Florida threesomer Bridget Ziegler. But it’s the same political movement of post-Covid rightwing moms mobilizing to take over school boards and rid them of the “woke mind virus.” Pennsylvania’s Clarice Schillinger runs two Moms for Liberty-esque SuperPACs, Keeping Kids in School PAC and Back to School Pac. She was also a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2022. Here she is hanging out with President Trump back in better times. She and Trump talked about “how the moms are upset and how we’re going to save America. And the grandmoms and the caregivers, all of us. When you touch our children, it’s about the future of democracy. This is what happens.”

Now Schillinger has been arrested touching children in the form of punching out a sixteen year old at a booze-drenched birthday party she threw for her seventeen year old daughter at the homestead in Doylestown, PA.