Seven of the 10 states with abortion on the ballot chose to protect the right Tuesday — and Florida would have too, if it wasn’t subject to a 60-vote supermajority threshold.
Continue reading “Voters Continue To Choose Abortion Rights When They’re Not Thwarted By Inflated Thresholds”Phony Bomb Threats from Russia
We’re going to need to wait for the dust to settle. But it’s clear there’s a major wave of hoax bomb threats today into this evening into swing states, seemingly in most and likely all cases targeting areas of heavy Democratic voting. Officials say they appear to be emanating from Russia. Key points are these. a) They’re not real. There are no bombs. There’s no danger. b) This is a focused efforts to disrupt voting and/or vote counting in Democratic areas. c) We know what’s going on here.
Status Check
Okay, pretty bumpy ride for Democrats so far tonight. Florida was a bloodbath. In the parts of the country where we have results there’s a clear Trump trend in rural America. North Carolina and Georgia look touch and go for Harris. But we still mostly haven’t heard from the Midwest and the Blue Wall states. Those look encouraging based on turnout numbers in key cities and stuff like that. But we don’t have results. Same applies to Nevada. We need to see those numbers. That’s where we are.
Also important to remember. You win the Blue Wall states or you don’t. You can win or lose Nevada and it still comes down to those three states and the one electoral vote in Nebraska.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Says This Election Is About Getting J6 Rioters ‘Pardoned!’
The stakes of the race are very clear for MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). In an Election Day message to her followers on the social media platform Telegram Tuesday afternoon, Greene encouraged them to vote for former President Donald Trump so he might pardon people who were charged with storming the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
“January 6th was not an insurrection and agent provocateurs that fueled the protest,” Greene wrote, kicking off the message with apparent typos.
“Most J6’ers were nonviolent and just walked in the Capitol,” she added. “Vote Trump so we can get them pardoned!”
As of August, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, over 1,400 people have been charged for crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, which took place as Trump supporters converged on the building to protest the certification of Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. About 140 police officers who were guarding the Capitol that day were injured by the mob. Despite this, many of the participants in the violence have become a cause celebre for far-right politicians and Trump has expressed interest in pardoning them.
Greene has been a vocal advocate for some of the January 6 defendants, including participating in a delegation of House Republicans who visited a group of them who were being held in the D.C. jail. She began her Election Day message by sharing a social media post from an account purportedly belonging to a married couple, Tara Stottlemyer and Dale Jeremiah Shalvey, who were sentenced on felony charges related to the attack. The post described how Stottlemeyer and her husband had been separated from their young daughter during their prison sentences, which it blamed on the “Kamala DOJ.” Noting that Stottlemeyer could not vote as a result of her conviction, it encouraged others to support Trump and suggested he might free people who were incarcerated for taking part in the violence.
“Please vote to send home the J6 mom’s, dad’s, grandma’s and grandpa’s,” the post said.
According to federal prosecutors, Stottlemeyer and Shalvey were among the first people to breach the barricades at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Shalvey was convicted of having assaulted members of law enforcement during the breach, “throwing an object that hit an officer with the Metropolitan Police Department.” The pair subsequently broke into the Senate chamber and rifled through senators’ desks. Stottlemeyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Greene, who described the couple’s plight as “heartbreaking,” was among the Republican members of Congress who were involved in protests against Trump’s loss including one that was staged outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. She also was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results.
Greene began promoting baseless conspiracy theories that leftists in disguise were behind the violence as the attack unfolded. Her typo-filled Election Day message blaming the attack on “agent provocateurs” seems like an extension of that conspiracy theory. There is no evidence for either variation of the claim and Greene did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening.
Election Miscellany #7
The only clear trend we’re seeing tonight, early but seems widespread, is Trump outperforming his numbers in rural counties compared to 2020. What Dems will need is a counter-trend in suburban counties. We would expect that counter-trend. But we haven’t seen it yet or haven’t seen it clearly yet because we have very few suburban counties that are done counting. A lot of these rural counties just count much faster. It seems like we’re likely to see red areas getting redder, blue areas bluer, etc.
Trump Waits ‘Til Election Day To Finally Say What He Means On Abortion
It’s a theme TPM has tackled repeatedly this campaign cycle — elevating all the ways in which Donald Trump, his campaign, his MAGA allies in Congress and the Republican Party as a whole have repeatedly flailed in their attempts to appear as though they’re softening their stance on abortion — due to how electorally unpopular red-state bans have been — without alienating their staunchly anti-abortion religious right base.
Continue reading “Trump Waits ‘Til Election Day To Finally Say What He Means On Abortion”Turnout
We already seem to have pretty good evidence this is a high turnout election. We knew it would be high by recent historical standards. The question was whether it might top 2020 or whether it would be between 2016 and 2020. My sense is that it might end up being higher than 2020, which was the highest turnout in over a century. As to whom that helps, that’s less clear. My gut tells me that’s good for Harris. But that’s no certainty. Remember that Trump’s strategy is relying on low propensity voters. By definition, the higher the turnout the higher the percentage of occasional (low-propensity) voters. So there’s definitely a very reasonable theory that it might help him. We don’t know. For now I think we can just say there are lots of signs of high turnout. So we could have another presidential election that is the highest in modern history. Who it helps I don’t think we can say yet.
Send Me Your Reports
Today I’m very interested in your reports from the field: turnout, slices of life, anything and everyone. I want to see and hear about what you’re seeing.
‘Spiritual Warfare,’ QAnon, And A Sitting Senator: Inside The Wild World Of Mike Flynn’s Political Action Committee
Bishop Leon Benjamin had an ominous warning for his flock.
“We are at war and the war is very real,” Benjamin said during the meeting that his organization dubbed a “training.”
Continue reading “‘Spiritual Warfare,’ QAnon, And A Sitting Senator: Inside The Wild World Of Mike Flynn’s Political Action Committee”Election Miscellany #6
We’re already starting to see from the states releasing good real-time data that Election Day isn’t going to be as red as you’d expect based on 2020 or 2022. That’s not so much good for Democrats as simply what we should expect based on seeing more Republican and less Democratic early voting. As we’ve discussed, the relationship between early and Election Day voting tends to be largely osmotic: more Republicans voting early means fewer available on Election Day. Not complicated. The differences that determine election outcomes are going to be very marginal ones. One of the weird things about early vote counting mania this year is that people somehow get the idea that whole chunks of the electorate somehow just aren’t going to show up at all. That never made any sense.