An Interesting Data Point

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’ve told you a few times about Professor Michael McDonald’s early vote analysis. He has a paywalled final analysis of the early vote in North Carolina. The upshot is that by conventional early vote analysis, Donald Trump appears poised to win North Carolina. That wouldn’t be a surprising result either on the basis of history or the current polls, which show a dead heat race with the slightest advantage to Trump.

But McDonald also notes that it is an unusual cycle with conflicting signals. The polls look more favorable to Harris than the numbers in the early vote. Actual votes matter more than polls of votes, by definition. But this is a reminder of what early vote analysis is based on. We’re largely going on party registration and limited demographic markers as a proxy for voter intention. Those will generally point in the right direction, except when they don’t.

Continue reading “An Interesting Data Point” →

A Small Coda to Today’s Backchannel

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As I argued in today’s Backchannel, I believe Harris, win or lose, has run an almost flawless campaign. To the extent that is true, we had a preview of it in that cruelest month, July 2024. I do not think there was a single story published discussing murmurs from Harris world about whether Biden should drop out, what kind of race she might run, anything like that. It goes without saying that that kind of chatter would have been poisonous for the Democrats’ eventual chances. Despite some people’s illusions, Harris was always the only plausible replacement candidate. It doesn’t take a genius to know such chatter would be damaging. But as I argued in the last post, it comes down to execution. It’s not enough for the potential candidate not to be talking, or her top advisors. It’s a matter of controlling every random person who might claim to have insight into Harris’ thinking. That requires a total level of discipline that starts at the top. I suspect it’s only really possible if, as we’ve been told by the people in Biden world, Harris remained absolutely loyal to Biden until the moment he decided to step aside. I don’t want to rehearse that whole question again. But that is a very, very tough position to be in. It would be irresponsible not to be ready for the call to come. But even the hint of preparation for it would be disastrous. It was an accurate preview of the kind of campaign Harris would run.

What Kind of Race Did Harris Run?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

The great secret and poverty of campaign reporting is that the majority of it is based on reading the polls or the eventual result and then writing a story of the campaign to match that outcome, predicted or real. Every losing campaign is run by idiots and vice versa. With that reality in mind, I wanted to share some opinions in advance of the results. I think Kamala Harris has run an almost flawless campaign. Many people think a great campaign is made up of a great strategy, or perhaps a great speech. The truth is that campaigns are almost all down to execution. That’s particularly so in an early 21st century American presidential campaign, when the main constituencies and issues are chosen in advance and not by the candidate.

An upstart city council or even House candidate might upset the status quo with an outside-the-box campaign or set of issues. Presidential campaigns don’t work that way. Presidential campaigns are won by energizing and mobilizing key constituencies, shaping the issue agenda in your favor and having more days on offense than defense. On the constituencies front, that means base and reach constituencies. On issues, it’s mostly about raising the salience of issues where a majority agrees with you. Above all, it’s about not making mistakes. It’s also about running a campaign of the quality that you force a lot of mistakes by your opponent. As I said, it’s mainly about execution.

Continue reading “What Kind of Race Did Harris Run?” →

Trump Spent The Final Weekend Showing Exactly Who He Is

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

As Clear A Referendum As Ever Could Be

Donald Trump slogged through the final weekend of his third presidential campaign as the Republican Party nominee demonstrating in blatant ways nearly every facet of the misbegotten character that makes him unfit for public office at any level.

He mimed stroking and fellating a microphone on a rally stage in Milwaukee. He talked favorably of the press corps in attendance taking bullets intended for him at a rally in Pennsylvania. He said he should have never left the White House after his 2020 election defeat, contemplating a coup by intransigence. He bizarrely claimed that the counting of votes should be over by 9 p.m. on election night, thus stoking anew bogus election fraud conspiracies centered on the time it takes to count votes.

new lows

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) 2024-11-02T07:17:03.480Z

It wasn’t that long ago that the most persistent challenge Republicans in public life presented to reporters, watchdogs, and the sanctity of the English language was disguising their unpopular, often cruel, and elaborately expensive policy preferences under layers of double talk, misdirection, and word play. With Trump it is all undisguised. Perhaps we can count that as small blessing.

On the margins of this campaign, Trump and his surrogates have muddied the waters around health care policy, Medicare, tariffs, and taxation. Political reporters still fall for this gamesmanship. But where it counted most – trying to soften the edges of Republicans’ brutal abortion policies – the political press was largely on point and unfooled.

For the most part though, what you see with Trump is what you get. It is why his defeat will be so cathartic and represent a genuine repudiation of the man and his movement. It is also why a Trump victory would be so devastating. As unfathomable as a Trump win would be after the last decade of Trumpism and especially the past three weeks of his careening, unhinged campaign, it remains a real possibility.

History will show that we knew everything we needed to know. Ignorance will be no excuse.

Obama On Trump

Former President Barack Obama quickly wove into his stump speech some of Trump’s weekend insanity:

Final Swing State Numbers

The final polling of likely voters in the seven swing states by the NYT/Siena College:

  • Nevada: Harris 49%, Trump 46%
  • North Carolina: Harris 48%, Trump 46%
  • Wisconsin: Harris 49%, Trump 47%
  • Georgia: Harris 48%, Trump 47%
  • Pennsylvania: Harris 48%, Trump 48%
  • Michigan: Harris 47%, Trump 47%
  • Arizona: Trump 49%, Harris 45%

By The Numbers

  • ABC News poll: Harris leads Trump nationally among likely voters 49%-46%. “Harris was +2 in early October, +4 (a slight edge) last week and is +3 in this poll,” according to ABC News.
  • WaPo poll: Harris leads Trump 48%-47% nationwide among both likely and registered voters.
  • Shock poll in Iowa: Harris leads Trump 47%-44% among likely voters, according to the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll by highly respected pollster J. Ann Selzer.

Election Threats Watch

  • WSJ: The Proud Boys Have Regrouped and Are Signaling Election Plans
  • NYT: On Telegram, a Violent Preview of What May Unfold on Election Day and After
  • Politico: Republicans bring back fake electors in battlegrounds
  • Bloomberg: ‘What Worries Me? Everything’: Officials Brace for US Election Day

Thread Of The Day

Former Trump DHS General Counsel John Mitnick posted a compelling thread to fellow Republicans about why he’s voting for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump:

He is not a conservative; rather, he is a would-be autocrat and fascist motivated exclusively by his personal self-interest. … You won’t escape the disastrous effects of his policies (e.g., tariffs) on the economy, global instability and damage to national security resulting from his admiration for foreign dictators, or the chaos, lawlessness, and persecution that he promises. No one will.

Disinformation Watch

  • WaPo: Trump escalates false claims of fraud, setting stage to cry foul if he loses
  • NBC News: Why Pennsylvania’s unusual voting laws make it ripe for rigged election claims
  • The U.S. intelligence community issued a rapid assessment that a fake video portraying Haitians voting in Georgia was part of the Russian disinformation campaign.

Quote Of The Day

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA): “It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.” 

Kamala On SNL-ala

On The Trail

Where the candidates will be today on the final day of the campaign:

Harris will spend the whole day in Pennsylvania, ending with a late-night rally in Philadelphia:

  • Scranton
  • Allentown
  • Reading
  • Pittsburgh
  • Philadelphia

Trump will hit three states today:

  • Raleigh, NC
  • Reading, PA
  • Pittsburgh, PA
  • Final rally in Grand Rapids, MI

Elon Musk Watch

  • WaPo: Election deniers were aimless. Now, with Musk’s help, they’re an army.
  • NBC News: ‘All hell has broken loose’: Inside Elon Musk’s high-stakes pro-Trump door-knocking effort
  • The Guardian: Elon Musk’s America Pac was warned about Trump ground game fraud months ago

What To Look Forward To In Trump II

  • More nastiness:

Trump on his second term: "It'll be nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) 2024-11-04T02:33:35.015Z
  • More purges: Conservative group’s ‘watch list’ targets federal employees for firing, the WaPo reports.

The Epstein Tapes

In the final days before the election, author Michael Wolff is dribbling out excerpts of his hours of taped interviews with now-deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein that pertain to Donald Trump.

Good Read

Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien on “The Peculiarly American Roots of Trumpism“:

However shocked Americans may be by Trump’s ascent, his arrival and ongoing influence shouldn’t have caught them entirely by surprise. Trumpian characters have floated across the political and social landscape for much of the country’s history. Trump and his fellow travelers have become fixations because they’re more than mere carny acts, attuned to the public’s needs and paranoia. They’ve secured their place because they’re also a reflection of the people they court.

2024 Ephemera

  • WSJ: Who Will Win the U.S. House? Watch These Tight Races
  • WaPo: GOP’s closing election message on health baffles strategists, worries experts
  • The Hill: “New security fencing went up around the White House, U.S. Capitol and Vice President Harris’s residence in Washington, D.C. as authorities prepare for Election Day in the event there may be political unrest in the coming days.”

Quincy Jones, 1933-2024

In memory of the coolest cat who ever was:

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Was It Iowa’s Abortion Ban?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

We’re still pretty much where we were last night on that Selzer poll. It’s hard to know what it means or whether it matters. It’s just one poll. The most interesting day-after analysis I’ve seen centers on the fact that an abortion ban went into effect in the state just in July. And it went into effect pretty clearly against a big majority of the state’s residents. An earlier Selzer poll already showed Iowa much closer than people anticipated. It’s also a state with a lot of white people with college degrees. So there’s some argument that it might be more Harris friendly than people expect. It’s even occurred that picking up some of the ad spend out of Nebraska could be having an impact in Iowa. So maybe those are parts of an explanation. But it seems like folks working in the inside DC publications have fixed on the abortion ban blowback theory of the case. But that in itself is pretty disquieting news for the Trump campaign, to put it mildly. Note too that a lot of these polls we’re seeing now show abortion moving straight to the top of the issue matrix for voters.

Musk’s Vaporware Ground Operation

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As you might expect, the mystery of the GOP ground game and Elon Musk’s late, bulldozer entry into the 2024 campaign has become a fascination of mine even apart from its relevance to the outcome of the campaign. It really seems now that most of Musk’s supposed $150 million contribution to the Trump effort was simply lit on fire. I should note that even by their own accounts not all of that money was slated for ground operations and get out of the vote efforts. Some went to mailers, yard signs and other kinds of advertising. But it’s become one of the hallmarks of this campaign that Trump-aligned canvassers and door knockers are just nowhere to be found really anywhere in the swing states. To be clear, I’m not saying none — like no one has seen a single one anywhere. But what’s wild is that what I’m describing is actually not that far off than that. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina. Even in Arizona and Nevada I haven’t heard much that contradicts it. I’ve just had less visibility altogether.

Continue reading “Musk’s Vaporware Ground Operation” →

Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Term Suggests He Won’t.

Posted on by John Light

This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.

He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.

Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.

Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.

Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:

  • Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
  • Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
  • Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
  • Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
  • Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
  • Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
  • Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
  • Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”

This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.

Okay, What About the Selzer Poll?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

If you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s kind of hard to know where to start.

The simplest explanation is that there’s a pollster named Ann Selzer. Her home base and speciality is Iowa but she also does national polling. She has a very good track record. For various reasons among data nerds she’s taken on a kind of legendary status in recent cycles, not only for accuracy but also in 2016 and 2020 for releasing final polls that picked up in advance the surprises that came on election day. In other words, she has a record of outlier last polls that are later vindicated by election results. The almost totemic treatment of this poll can’t not be seen as a bit overblown. But Selzer has a very good record. There’s no getting around that.

Her final poll of Iowa, which is of course now a securely red state, was slated to come out at 7 pm this evening. People were eagerly the results to see whether Trump or Harris might be doing better than you’d expect for Iowa. It’s a given that Trump will win Iowa. The question everyone had is whether Selzer’s poll would say Trump’s margin was bigger or narrower than one might expect.

The poll came out and Harris was beating Trump by 3 percentage points. 47-44. No one considered anything like that a possibility. It’s sent a shockwave through election land.

What does it mean?

Continue reading “Okay, What About the Selzer Poll?” →

Where Are We?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’ve tried to write this post a few times. But the information I’m trying to convey is so impressionistic, tentative and tid-bitty that it’s better suited to a stream of nuggets than a structured piece of writing. So I’m going to take the bullet point approach.

  • All the standard caveats about no secret information, either candidate could win and it wouldn’t be a big surprise.
  • Democrats in high-level campaign positions seem increasingly optimistic about their chances pretty much in spite of themselves. That’s been my sense from the beginning of early voting and that mood has built over the course of this last week. I’d say it’s best described as optimism they’re trying not to express and almost wish they didn’t feel.
Continue reading “Where Are We?” →

Outlaws On The Verge Of Power

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️

One way of thinking about the time since Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator into American political life is to conceptualize it as a spree. Trump has been gambling since 2015; he entered the GOP primary that year as a demagogic wildcard. People laughed at first, and thought his immediate surge in the polls was a fluke, but they were wrong: his support stayed high, as he both reflected and shaped the party’s base by humiliating GOP leaders to establish dominance over them.

Throughout, the draw of the spectacle that Trump created was the dominance that he exerted over his opponents. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) became “little Marco;” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had his personal cell phone number read out; Jeb Bush walked away almost completely emasculated. For many on the left, there was a deeply pleasing quality to this: politicians that had long been seen as hypocrites and shills for various nexes of moneyed interests were finally getting their comeuppance, upstaged by an obvious con artist who had no chance of victory.

That feeling obscured the truth. Trump was taking big risks, yes, but his appeal to segments of the American public was real and durable. The first significant instance in which he bullied his way to power was his first GOP primary, where he abused, intimidated, and scapegoated his opponents to beat them.

From there, Trump kept gambling. He took a risk in asking the Russians for help in unlocking Hillary Clinton’s emails; he took a risk in paying off Stormy Daniels; he took a risk in refusing to commit to accepting the results. They all mostly paid off: Trump won the 2016 election. Accountability, to the extent it came at all, has appeared in meager and late helpings.

His term was a shambles of day-to-day incompetence and impulsivity. But on longer-term issues that concern himself, Trump has shown a real capacity for learning and focus. As early as 2019, with his attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into smearing Joe Biden to win re-election, Trump began to twist the policies and resources of the federal government towards staying power. Ukraine led to an impeachment, but he pushed through: as COVID swept across the country, he began to implement the blueprint for a potential second term. He chipped away at protections for federal workers that keep them nonpartisan, and stacked top positions at DOJ and defense agencies with political cronies.

After he lost the 2020 election, Trump stayed the same — denying that he lost, he gambled on a series of outlandish plots that came dangerously close to success. He tried to bully state election officials. Courage at the top of the DOJ prevented him from enlisting it in his fight to stay in power; Mike Pence stopped the certification of Trump’s defeat from foundering in Congress.

That gamble failed, but only partly. Through a strategy of delay, some fecklessness by those empowered to hold him accountable, and a major assist from the conservative-stacked Supreme Court, Trump has managed to survive the legal peril in which January 6 placed him long enough to election day.

For Trump personally, the stakes in 2024 have never been higher. The risks he’s taken to get here have crossed so many legal boundaries (forget about ethical lines, come on) as to make this quite existential for him. One thing that struck me, watching him in the courtroom for his Manhattan hush money trial earlier this year, was how much time he’ll have spent in court in the year leading up to a potential victory. The sexual assault defamation cases, his New York Attorney General case, the hush money criminal case — it’s a lot of time spent stewing quietly in dingy rooms, as people recount horrible things you’ve done.

And yet, it’s not nearly enough to say that Trump’s gambles over the past decade of American life have failed. Next week’s election is the big one, where all of it may come due; for him, or for the country.

— Josh Kovensky

Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend

  • Hunter Walker does a wellness check on Mike Lindell ahead of the election, as he and Steve Bannon preemptively declare a Trump victory the only acceptable outcome.
  • Khaya Himmelman reports on a group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania who are suing to invalidate hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots, based on false evidence.
  • Emine Yücel has the latest on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) disastrous (for the Trump campaign) admission that Republicans will, in fact, gut Obamacare if Trump wins and Republicans get both chambers of Congress.

— Nicole Lafond

Mike Lindell Is Preemptively Denying Next Week’s Election 

As you may know, Steve Bannon, the on-again-off-again adviser to former President Trump was released from prison on Tuesday after serving a nearly four month sentence for defying a subpoena in conjunction with the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Bannon quickly returned to his “War Room” podcast where he had a very special guest for Wednesday’s episode, MyPillow entrepreneur and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell. 

Lindell, who is a major financial backer of various groups, digital platforms, and far right broadcasts that have spread false narratives about Trump’s last loss, took the time to preemptively insist next week’s election is already a clear victory for his dear leader. Referring to “early voting” without citing any actual numbers, Lindell said it was now clear that any Trump defeat would be illegitimate. 

“Everyone sees now. Republicans have overtaken Democrats in this early voting in a lot of places. That’s like a poll coming out. It’s going to be very hard for them to hide that from the people,” Lindell said, adding, “In order to steal an election, you’ve got to make it somewhat believable. No one’s going to believe this now.”

Of course, Lindell tends to not believe elections. It’s kind of his whole thing. And everything he cited to justify this latest version of his conspira schtick is nonsense. Early voting is not, in fact, “like a poll coming out.” While it can be an interesting indicator, neither early voting or polls are exact definitive depictions of a final vote. And despite Lindell’s claim, the early voting data is overwhelmingly favoring Republicans, the actual figures we have so far are mixed. 

Obviously reality has never exactly stopped Lindell. He went on to suggest the past two election cycles were rigged by unspecified “deviations” before sort of saying the quiet part out loud. 

Lindell is one of many Trump allies who have recently made confident declarations that the former president cannot possibly lose next week’s election. The boasts seem like a clear attempt to issue a prebuttal and get Trump supporters ready to fight as they have been in the past. Lindell essentially admitted this. After insisting any Trump loss would be unbelievable, Lindell went on to tell Bannon that his goal is spreading these false narratives on far right platforms in order to amp up the Trump base. 

“Our voice has gotten so much bigger like your great show. … They’re not going to have more votes than voters again and get away with that,” Lindell said. “We’re getting our news from all the different podcasts all the different platforms that have opened up.”

For Lindell, advancing these false narratives is going to be the way to win in a race that he somewhat contradictorily characterized as already won by Trump and deviously rigged against him. 

“This is going to be what we need to open things up when they try and do — they’re already trying it,” Lindell said. “We’ve just got to make people aware so everybody is on fire for this election.”

Getting Trump supporters prepped to fight any potential defeat isn’t Lindell’s only goal. He also has pillows to sell and Bannon was happy to help.  

“Mike, I want to talk to you … I’ll call you after the show about doing a prison line of pillows. Pillows in federal prison are a rare commodity,” Bannon said as they wrapped up their chat. “Mike … before you turned your life over to God … you were both a degenerate gambler and a drug addict. And so, you know about getting on the wrong side of the law.”

Bannon then asked Lindell to “tell me about the pillows.” Lindell noted he was offering a specially designed “Free Steve Pillow” to the “War Room Posse.” He also touted the rest of his wares including his standard pillow, which happens to be on sale for a price that is a commonly used Neo Nazi code, a fact Lindell has insisted is just a coincidence. 

“There’s all the classic pillows that I got attacked for for me being a Nazi because they’re on special for $14.88,” Lindell said, later adding, “I don’t know if you know this Steve, but while you were in just a week ago it’s been a celebration of our great leader, you getting out. MyPillow has made it through the storm.”

— Hunter Walker

Citizen Activists Sue To Invalidate Pennsylvania Mail-In Ballots Before They’ve Even Been Counted

A group of activists are challenging mail-in ballots based in parts of southeast Pennsylvania, alleging that these ballots are coming from voters who have moved out of state permanently and are therefore ineligible, according to reporting from Votebeat. 

These challenges rely on the cross-checking of data from the state’s mail-ballot request database with information from the U.S. Postal Service, with the activists claiming that the voters in question are not residents of Pennsylvania anymore and should be ineligible to vote in the state. It’s worth noting, as Votebeat does, that according to Pennsylvania law, a voter does not need to receive their mail-in ballot at a Pennsylvania address. 

This is an unreliable way to determine whether someone is actually eligible to vote or not, however — it’s impossible to know from that data alone if a voter has moved permanently or not. 

On Tuesday, a group known as Citizen AG filed a federal lawsuit against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt over what they claim are more than 270,000 possible ineligible voters, according to the Lebanon Daily News. According to the lawsuit these 270,000 voters have been marked as inactive, having not responded to notices since before the 2020 election, and should therefore be purged from the voter rolls. 

Andrew Garber, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, in an interview with Lebanon Daily News said: “These lawsuits alleging states need to kick people off the voter rolls, these are laying the groundwork for people to challenge election results they might not like this fall.”

For months now, Republicans have been alleging issues with the voter rolls and mounting baseless lawsuits against voter list maintenance practices to set themselves up to cry voter fraud if Trump loses next week. Experts have previously explained to TPM that these voter roll maintenance challenges are simply a way to sow seeds of distrust in the election system. 

“The ultimate goal of these lawsuits is to lay the foundation for later claims that the election results can’t be trusted because the voter registration rolls can’t be trusted,” director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center Jonathan Diaz previously told TPM. 

— Khaya Himmelman

Johnson Tries To Claim ‘No Obamacare’ Just Means An Improved Obamacare

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went on Fox News on Thursday to try to do some clean up following his remarks indicating that Republicans will tackle “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — AKA gutting Obamacare — should Donald Trump win his third bid for the Oval Office and the GOP keep the House. 

Johnson claimed his words were twisted, saying he just meant that the ACA needs “improvements.”

“We need to expand quality of care, access to care, and, obviously, lower the cost of healthcare,” Johnson said. 

“They took a clip out of context,” he added.

The House Speaker’s backtracking comes shortly after Trump and his campaign attempted to do damage control after Johnson indicated that Republicans are planning to either get rid of the popular ACA or substantially gut it during a campaign event in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania the Republican speaker attended for House candidate Ryan Mackenzie (R).

“Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,” Johnson said on Monday, according to a video obtained by NBC News.

“No Obamacare?” an event attendee asked Johnson.

“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded, reportedly rolling his eyes. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”

In reaction to Johnson’s remarks the Trump campaign said, “This is not President Trump’s policy position.”

“As President Trump has said, he will make our healthcare system better by increasing transparency, promoting choice and competition, and expanding access to new affordable healthcare and insurance options,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday night. 

Trump has a long history of wanting to do away with the ACA — including when Congress unsuccessfully tried to repeal it during his presidency — but has avoided saying anything specific about his health care position this cycle, knowing it’s a political liability.

— Emine Yücel