Despite the dependability of election years’ October neurosis for Democrats, this year’s bout has prompted a flurry of stories on the phenomenon (heck, we did a whole podcast episode about it).
Continue reading “Burdened By What Has Been, Dems Enter Election Home Stretch With Typical Anxiety”Reuters has a story out reporting missed targets and internal investigations of inflated or faked doorknocking numbers at America PAC. That’s the Elon Musk PAC which now appears to be running most of the pro-Trump ground operation. Oddly, one of the sources in the Reuters piece is Alysia McMillan, an America PAC canvasser who was profiled in the Post just the day before yesterday. The story doesn’t totally have the goods — internal complaints about not meeting their election target, one Elon deputy investigating inflated numbers. Hard to know precisely what that means in the context of an operation involving tens of millions of dollars across multiple states. But it’s in line with lots of smoke and red flags about the whole operation.
There appears to be a scam text operation targeting ACTBLUE donors in which the text basically tries impersonate or imitate the kind of text you might get from your credit card company if there’s a suspicious transaction. If you’ve gotten one of these please let us know as soon as you can.
I wrote a lot earlier in the month about the questions marks surrounding the Republican and Trump ground operations in this election. To recap, the campaign outsourced most of its efforts to a series of super PACs, which has ended up mainly being Elon Musk’s America PAC. The initial driver of the whole thing was Turning Points Action, which critics rather presciently predicted didn’t have the organizational heft or experience to do something at that scale. The Trump campaign itself has focused on what is at least a pretty unconventional approach, largely ceding conventional ground operations in favor of focusing on Trump-identified non-voters. My read on that whole question is that there are lots of red flags and lots of smoke. But just what it will all mean or the impact it will have I’m not sure. TPM Reader CH wrote in today to ask me what is going on on the Democratic side. Do we assume Harris has a strong ground operation or is that a wobbly assumption?
Here’s what I told him.
Continue reading “Ground Games”Judge Tanya Chutkan for the District of Columbia unsealed nearly 1,900 pages of appendices containing evidence supporting Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump over his 2020 coup attempt on Friday.
Continue reading “Chutkan Unseals Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Appendices Over Trump Objections”This new piece in The Atlantic captures what the article’s author, Ron Brownstein, portrays as the current air of pessimism, or at least deep sobriety, within Democratic campaign and political operative circles. The general gist is that Harris hasn’t sealed the deal with voters, hasn’t closed the sale, whatever metaphor you choose. And the shortcoming is that in her effort to build up a positive brand, she hasn’t focused voters enough on the horrors of another Trump term. (Of course, one of the earlier lines was that it wasn’t enough to demonize Trump. There had to be a positive agenda. So that seems to have changed. Let’s not worry about that difference of opinion.) I’ve always been of the mind that the other guy being scary and dangerous is among the best reasons to vote. (In medicine, “first, do no harm” is seen as a pretty good general approach.) In any case, that’s the idea, the emerging argument, that Brownstein picked up among Democratic insiders. He fleshes this out by noting a series of recent polls showing voters have a rising perception of retrospective Trump approval — in other words, how they remember their approval of Trump’s presidency, even if their recollection of how they felt is actually substantially more positive than it was at the time. There’s no denying there is a small but measurable movement in the poll averages in Trump’s direction. But it’s less clear whether that tilt is picking up a real change in the situation on the ground. And I think it’s even less clear whether outside observers know why it’s happening, if indeed it is. Mostly people are reading their pre-existing assumptions and fears into bumpy data, the drivers of which are largely inscrutable.
Continue reading “Into The Storm”A couple weeks ago I spoke with TPM’s developers, Matt Wozniak and Jacob Harris, about everything from the evolution of the site’s tech stack to books they’d recommend to living in Florida under the DeSantis regime. You simply cannot tell the story of TPM without Woz, as we call him, who has had the heroic challenge of managing TPM’s tech infrastructure for over 12 years. When Jacob came aboard several years ago, it was a true turning point for the organization. A lot of the work they do isn’t sexy but it’s all extremely important and directly correlates to our ability to be lean and efficient, which ultimately helps us survive and thrive. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
With JD Vance’s claim that Trump won in 2020 and Trump himself calling Jan. 6 a “day of love,” the GOP ticket is doubling down on the Big Lie with three weeks to go before Election Day – and Kamala Harris is having none of it.
In a noticeable shift, Harris has expanded her usual campaign speech to include more direct critiques of Trump’s anti-democratic extremism. Earlier in the week, she pulled in his remarks on “enemies within,” going so far as to begin playing video of his remarks at her own campaign rallies. As the week comes to an end, she’s incorporating into her own speech Trump’s latest remarks minimizing Jan. 6.
“So now, we here, know Jan. 6 was a tragic day. It was a day of terrible violence. There were attacks on law enforcement — 140 law enforcement officers were injured, some were killed. And what did Donald Trump say last night about Jan. 6? He called it a ‘day of love,’” Harris told a rally in Wisconsin Thursday.
In Trump’s remarks earlier this week, he once again referred to the Jan. 6 rioters as “we,” an admission that is sure to pique the interest of Special Counsel Jack Smith: “We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walked down — this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows.” Trump’s claim that none of the rioters had guns is a falsity that he often repeats.
For her part, Harris folded Trump’s Jan. 6 lies into her larger “We Are Not Going Back” theme: “The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting — exhausted. … Enough,” Harris said. “We are ready to turn the page.”
CNN: At least 30 election deniers and 2020 fake electors are serving as Trump electors this year.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request by Donald Trump to postpone until after Election Day the public unsealing of a filing in the Jan. 6 case related to presidential immunity. In denying the request, Chutkan said she would order the appendices to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s mammoth filing on immunity unsealed today. Trump may seek appeal court intervention, but no sign this morning that he has done so yet.
Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, on Donald Trump’s increasingly dire rhetoric: “From a mainstream candidate, I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of tapping into the most vicious, nativist, racial backlash. He doesn’t even really use code words or anything. He’s just all in.”
Anne Applebaum: “The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the ‘bloodbath’ that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics. But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics.”
Mitch McConnell, in private: Donald Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist.”
Mitch McConnell, in public: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”
NBC News: Musk pushes debunked Dominion voting conspiracy theory at first Pennsylvania appearance
Former chief marketing executive at NBC apologizes for helping to create Trump’s reality TV image: “While we were successful in marketing ‘The Apprentice,’ we also did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”
A federal judge in Tallahassee blocked the DeSantis administration’s pressure campaign against TV stations for airing pro-abortion-rights ads in support of Amendment 4, with this withering summation: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
After intervention from a bipartisan group of Texas legislators, the state Supreme Court halted the execution of Robert Roberson that was scheduled for last evening. The late reprieve in the controversial shaken-baby case came after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene earlier in the day.
“Roberson remains alive following a 48 hours unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of covering the final days preceding virtually every execution to have been scheduled in the United States in that time,” Chris Geidner reports.
Kamala Harris: Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally. I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street pic.twitter.com/tjhbDB9m3R
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 17, 2024
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The DeSantis administration lawyer who sent out those letters threatening TV stations with criminal charges and jail time over pro-choice ads himself resigned shortly after sending out the letters. The Miami-Herald got a hold of his resignation letter and it appears he didn’t feel like he could back the policy. John Wilson, former chief lawyer of the state Department of Health, wrote: “A man is nothing without his conscience. It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.”
Continue reading “DeSantis Admin Lawyer Who Threatened Jail Over Ads Resigned”Unlike some of Donald Trump’s now-estranged former allies who are warning that the former president can and will make good on his promises to deploy the military to go after his political opponents — such as ex-Defense Secretary Mark Esper — some elected Republicans are struggling to respond to the whole “enemy from within” thing.
Continue reading “Republicans Don’t Really Know How To Respond To Trump Vow To Use Military Against Americans”