In this morning’s piece I mentioned going back to read articles I’d either missed on publication or read without focusing on these issues of ground game. One of the most interesting pieces in this category is the piece Tim Alberta wrote for The Atlantic which appeared just after the June debate disaster but a couple weeks before Biden’s departure from the race. The article is based on what seems to have been many months of reporting with a lot of access to the team running Trump’s campaign — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. There are a number of really quite interesting storylines in the piece. I’m going to focus on the question of ground operations. Even back before the events of the summer, this was a big enough deal that it is one of the two or three dominant issues the piece grapples with.
Let me start by explaining, based in large part on Alberta’s piece, what the Trump campaign’s argument and theory of the election is on its own terms. It goes like this. The suburbs are heavily polarized. There’s not that much being accomplished by traditional door-knocking and canvassing there. And it tends to be a mass game: How many doors you knock, how many conversations you have, etc., with not enough focus on whether you’re zeroing in on the high-value contacts. The campaign points to Iowa, which was a key early test for Trump’s fight for the renomination and also a sore spot from back in 2016 when Ted Cruz got a jump on Trump and actually beat him. In 2024, the campaign tried something different. The key premise of its approach is the belief that there is a substantial population of people who are really into Trump or at least very down with the Trump worldview but just don’t vote. They’re just totally disaffected from politics and the political world. But if they did vote they’d be certain to vote for Trump. This isn’t a crazy idea since disaffection from elite institutions and elements of mainstream culture is sort of inherent in Trumpism.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Yesterday, the jury delivered a verdict in the federal trial of three of the five Memphis, Tennessee police officers responsible for the fatal beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols during a 2023 traffic stop. The jury spent three weeks listening to powerful testimony, including from the other two officers involved who have alreadypleaded guilty. The verdict was mixed. All three officers were found guilty of witness tampering, but two were acquitted of all civil rights charges and one was found guilty of a less serious civil rights violation.
The fact that these officers will be held accountable for their actions is important and may provide some measure of comfort to the Nichols family. At the same time, individual prosecutions against police officers for misconduct are exceedingly rare, often yield mixed results, and are insufficient to honor the memory of those like Nichols who should still be alive today. To prevent the needless deaths of more Black Americans during traffic stops, we need to pursue meaningful systemic change in police traffic enforcement.
Police officers interact with the public via traffic stops more than at any other time — they make roughly 20 million of them per year. Black motorists are stopped more often and are more likely to be searched than their white counterparts, despite being less likely to possess illegal drugs or weapons. As many as half of all traffic stops are made for minor infractions unrelated to dangerous driving, and police often use these pretextual stops as an excuse to investigate other crimes — an often unsuccessful practice rife with racial profiling.
Traffic stops for minor violations are not only pervasive, ineffective and racially biased — they also put drivers’ safety at risk. Last year, nearly one-tenth of the 1,352 people killed by police in America were killed during the course of a traffic stop. Police use of force is even more common. On an annual basis, police use or threaten to use force on 1 million people, resulting in 75,000 nonfatal injuries. These dangers are more real for people of color, who experience greater risk of an encounter with police escalating into violence, and who are three times more likely than white people to be killed by police.
No amount of money, fame or notoriety can shield Black drivers from the dangers of police traffic stops. Last month, Tyreek Hill was pulled over and physically restrained by Miami-Dade police officers while he was only a few blocks from the stadium where he would later play in the Miami Dolphins home opener. Hill — like so many others whose experiences with police violence have made the national headlines — called for the officers involved to be held accountable, and to reignite the fight for police reform that has stalled in recent years.
Nichols’ murder also spurred lawmakers to confront the pervasion of racial injustice within police enforcement of traffic laws. The Memphis City Council made progress by passing a series of reforms, including one aimed at reducing traffic stops for minor infractions like broken tail lights. Similar driving equality policies have been implemented elsewhere, but the pushback to this public safety win in Memphis was swift. Less than a year after the bill passed, conservative lawmakers in the Tennessee state legislature preemptively overruled the will of local voters and passed a bill prohibiting local districts from enacting these types of reforms.
Tennessee’s regressive action can and should be an outlier. People with platform, influence, and policymaking authority should wield it to shine a light on the systemic changes that could mitigate some of the most harmful police traffic enforcement policies and practices in local communities. These changes include:
Urging localities to enact driving equality laws and ordinances restricting the use of traffic stops for low-level violations that don’t endanger roadway safety, like Philadelphia and Virginia have done.
Encouraging local police departments to adopt policies prioritizing their resources to respond to infractions that pose an immediate threat to traffic safety over minor violations, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Michigan have done.
Encouraging local prosecutors to establish policies that require the declination of cases that are based on evidence obtained during a non-safety or pretextual stop, like counties in Vermont, Michigan and Minnesota have done.
Supporting community-focused efforts such as organizing brake-light clinics in Memphis, assessing alternatives to police traffic enforcement in Los Angeles, and improving data transparency in Connecticut.
For too long, certain police officers have abused their power by inflicting harm on the very people they’re sworn to serve — making driving more dangerous for Black Americans and other people of color. Holding individual officers accountable for violence and misconduct is critical, but systemic change requires systemic action in partnership with the people who live this reality every day. We’re seeing successful policy strategies take hold in communities across the country, proving that it is possible to move past individualized justice and America’s legacy of racial bias, over-policing, and undue violence.
‘You’re As Defiant A Defendant As This Court Has Ever Seen’
Nearly four years later, the slow grind of accountability for the embrace and perpetuation of the Big Lie in the 2020 election continues — even as Donald Trump himself is poised to potentially win back the presidency next month.
In a contentious sentencing hearing Thursday in Mesa County, Colorado, former county clerk Tina Peters was still trying to convince the judge that the 2020 election was stolen. State Judge Matthew Barrett was having none of it.
“You are no hero,” Barrett told Peters. “You’re a charlatan who used, and is still using, your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”
Peters was convicted in August on multiple counts related to tampering with the voting machines she oversaw as an election official, all part of her half-baked pursuit of proof of her baseless contention that the election was rigged. A man with connections to My Pillow Guy Mike Lindell was given access months after the election to one of the county’s Dominion Voting machines, and the fruits of that fishing expedition ended up being shown at a Big Lie event hosted by Lindell.
“Peters was found guilty of three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She was also convicted of first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failure to comply with an order from the Secretary of State, all misdemeanors,” Colorado Public Radio reported. She was found not guilty on three other counts.
Peters was tearful at times during her sentencing but remained unapologetic, which further irritated the sentencing judge. “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe,” he told her.
In handing down Peters’ sentence, the judge said he considered her convictions serious and noted that prison is for “people who are a danger to all of us.”
“I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” the judge scolded Peters. “You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen.”
Liz Cheney Stumps For Kamala Harris
It was an extraordinary tableau in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party.
Liz Cheney, the scion of the Cheney family whose father’s notorious vice presidency was a horror to progressives in the aughts, was greeted with cheers of “Thank you, Liz” at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Appearing alongside and endorsing Harris, Cheney gave an eloquent speech on the historic dangers posed by Donald Trump to the Constitution and the rule of law.
Having ended a career in Republican politics by taking on Trump, including serving as co-chair of the House Jan. 6 committee, the former representative, who was once the third-ranking member in the House GOP leadership, reiterated anti-Trump themes she has struck for a long time. But never in a setting like this (the first 50 seconds is when the crowd is chanting her name):
Jan. 6 Developments
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: The Striking Details That Jack Smith Used To Tighten His January 6 Case Against Trump
Lisa Needham: Jack Smith’s bombshell immunity brief: In a sane world it would be Watergate-level news.
WaPo: Who’s who in Jack Smith’s massive Trump election interference filing
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Trump an extension from Oct. 17 to Nov. 7 to file his response to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s mammoth brief on presidential immunity. That was less additional time than Trump had requested.
2024 Ephemera
Former President Barack Obama launches a four-week campaign blitz for Harris.
Elon Musk will attend Trump’s Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the July assassination attempt that wounded Trump and killed a supporter.
NYT: Photos from when he was a college student in 2006 show Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in blackface as Michael Jackson.
Docks Reopen
After reaching a tentative agreement on higher wages, the longshoremen’s union suspended its strike and resumed work at ports on the East and Gulf coasts.
Always Be Grifting
When CNN requested an interview with Melania Trump about her new memoir, her book publisher asked for $250,000 in exchange — before later calling it an “internal miscommunication.”
Trump Didn’t Want Disaster Aid For Blue California
With the death toll from Hurricane Helene rising to 213, 72 of those in and around Buncombe County (Asheville), E&E News interviewed two former Trump White House officials who said that Trump was going to withhold disaster aid for the 2018 California wildfires because it’s a blue state — until they “pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”
So, I’ve been trying to poke around further into my new favorite mystery: the GOP ground operation and what on earth is going on with it. So far, I’ve been looking back at articles I’d read on publication and rereading them, and at articles I had not read and reading them for the first time, for clues into the Trump/RNC ground game question that I’ve been discussing in recentposts. One thing I hadn’t fully grasped or perhaps had forgotten is that Turning Point USA and its chieftain Charlie Kirk had a big role in pushing for the ouster of Ronna McDaniel at the RNC. And the push seems to have been in significant measure about wanting to take over or play a bigger role in GOP field operations. So a substantial amount of the impetus for all of this appears to have originated with Turning Point and its campaign arm, Turning Point Action. So that’s one clue.
Republican officials in Montana are already resurrecting the independent state legislature theory, which would imbue state legislatures with enormous power over federal elections.
Getting a majority on the Supreme Court to affirm some version of the theory has been a recent white whale of Republican state legislatures as they seek to make voting more difficult without the other branches of state government interfering. The Supreme Court in 2023 rejected a maximalist version of the theory pushed by North Carolina Republicans that would have empowered state legislatures to control voting laws, election administration and redistricting alone, to the exclusion of state courts and state constitutional guardrails..
But the majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, left room for ambiguity, saying that “state courts do not have free rein” in hemming in state legislative action, that the courts cannot “transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.”
What “transgresses the ordinary bounds,” though, is anybody’s guess.
Montana Republicans are taking advantage of that vagueness to encourage the Court to produce a more robust form of Roberts’ theory, one which severely limits the extent to which state courts can enforce their constitutions (many of which include a right to vote).
In this case, the Montana Supreme Court knocked down two voter suppression measures — one of which would end same-day registration, curtailing registration at noon the day before the election, and the other which would ban the paid collection of absentee ballots — finding that they violated the state constitutional right to vote.
The Republicans say that the court has gone too far into the legislature’s terrain, that they should be able to make voting more difficult with impunity. They’re asking the Supreme Court to take up the case this term.
It’ll be a critical test to see how thoroughly the Court actually opposes the theory, which puts the true integrity of our elections (not the shorthand Republicans use when they want to give a respectable gloss to voter suppression) at serious risk.
Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out his most detailed case yet in a filing unsealed Wednesday for why Trump can still be prosecuted in spite of the Supreme Court’s capacious immunity decision.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the VP debate, the last big scheduled event before the election, along with some 11th-hour Senate plays and Eric Adams’ indictment.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
As I’ve explained, this issue of turnout operations and what we can glean about them is one of the things I’m most interested in finding out more about as we hurtle into the last 30 days of the campaign. None of the information I’ve found so far gives any definitive answers. I’m not even sure definitive answers are possible. But I’m going to pass on some interesting hints I’m finding. The thing you hear again and again about canvassing and ground operations is that you cannot just overwhelm it with money. Money is obviously critical. But you need a lot of institutional experience and time to make it work. With TV ads you really can overwhelm it with money. Get a billionaire with unlimited funds, cut some good ads and get them on TV. Done and done. One of the big factors operating now in swing states is that outside groups are paying 10 to 25 times the ad rates of campaigns. But still, unlimited money can help with that. Canvassing and field operating takes time and institutional experience.
I’m a broken record on this. But I’m struck by the relative stasis of the Harris-Trump presidential campaign. It hasn’t always felt like that of course. It’s hard on the nerves. And it’s not like nothing has happened. We’ve had a sitting president drop out of the race, a mind-boggling two assassination attempts, a smackdown of a debate, two conventions. And yet stability in the polling numbers has been the calling card of this race. Joe Biden was behind. He fell further behind starting about two weeks after the June debate. After he dropped out Harris immediately moved the race into a tie. Then over a couple weeks she opened up a lead of roughly three points. It’s basically stayed right there for the last two months. The minor undulations have been so small as to likely represent little more than churn and statistical noise.
The Story Of What Happened On Jan. 6 Is Ours To Own
In what is likely the last big Jan. 6 development before the election, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the unsealing Wednesday of the 165-page filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith that presents his best case for why presidential immunity doesn’t shield Donald Trump from criminal prosecution for subverting the 2020 election.
The case laid out by Smith broadly follows the already-familiar contours of the conspiracy to overturn the results of an election Trump lost. It’s a narrative we know because we saw most of it with our own eyes. What we couldn’t see directly was pieced together by the House Jan. 6 committee and journalists working tirelessly to document the conspiracy’s many disparate elements and to identify the vast cast of characters that ended the United States’ streak of peaceful transitions of power.
There remains great civic value in repeating that story for ourselves and for future generations so that it becomes woven into our collective memory like the Boston Tea Party or the firing on Fort Sumter or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Jan. 6 debacle is a part of the nation’s founding story, even though it comes nearly 250 years later, because the same principles that animated its creation were under sustained attack, the same threats that the constitutional system was specifically designed to protect against were on full display, and the reactionary forces of chaos and destruction that always linger just over the horizon advanced to within minutes and feet of prevailing over democracy and the rule of law.
Smith and investigators have amassed an overwhelming body of evidence of Trump’s culpability. The challenge for prosecutors in light of the Supreme Court’s ahistorical decision on presidential immunity is to demonstrate that Trump fomented, led and engaged in the conspiracy in his capacity as a private citizen running for the presidency, not in his capacity as sitting president. Alternatively, Smith also argues that in some instances where Trump’s conduct was as president, the rebuttable presumption of immunity can be overcome. But the delicate dance of overcoming the Supreme Court’s heavy thumb on the scale of justice, isn’t the core value of Smith’s work. The real value of the fact-based narrative presented by Smith is the story it gives all of us to remember and repeat.
As I read through Smith’s filing, I shared Rick Hasen’s “red-hot anger and wistfulness” that the Supreme Court has hamstrung the timely prosecution of Trump and that this case may never go to trial if Trump wins in November. Coupled with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the slam-dunk indictment of Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, we have edged to the precipice of irretrievably undermining the rule of law by creating a presidency beyond the law, at least when the White House is held by Republicans and given unlimited rein by this corrupt Supreme Court.
In the face of such extreme threats to democracy, it can seem quaint, trivial, or even pointless to continue to document the transgressions being committed against the will of the American people, which is fundamentally what Jan. 6 was all about. But the careful, meticulous, and relentless collecting of evidence, recording of facts, and repeating of the stories we tell ourselves about what happened and who was responsible powerfully cement in our national consciousness the story of who we are, where we came from, and what we must overcome to get where we want to be as a democratic, pluralistic country.
A Point Of Pride
I want to acknowledge briefly the work of the TPM team for its early, consistent, and ongoing coverage of the 2020 election subversion conspiracy because it in so many ways presaged the case Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out in full yesterday.
We have done too many stories to note them all here, and I will inevitably overlook some of the work of our team, so apologies to them for that, but here is a sampling of a handful of some of our most significant stories:
NYT: How Donald Trump could use the Justice Department to target his perceived political adversaries
Important
TPM’s Nicole Lafond: DHS Warns Every Level Of Election Admin Could Be Targeted By Domestic Extremists Next Month
Exclusive
WSJ: Elon Musk Gave Tens of Millions to Republican Causes Far Earlier Than Previously Known
2024 Ephemera
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) will make a campaign appearance with Kamala Harris on Thursday in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party.
The cash-starved National Republican Senatorial Committee is making a last-minute shift in its TV ad strategy.
CA Alleges Catholic Hospital Illegally Denied Abortion Care
The state of California is suing Providence St. Joseph Hospital of Eureka for allegedly breaking the law by refusing emergency abortion case to a woman carrying twins when her water broke at 15 weeks.
California Bans Legacy Admissions
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law a new ban on legacy admissions at private colleges and universities that is scheduled to go into effect in the fall of 2025.
NYC Mayor Adams Could Face Additional Criminal Charges
During a hearing in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors indicated that more charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams are possible and that new charges against additional defendants are likely.
Hurricane Helene Update
OLD FORT, NORTH CAROLINA – SEPTEMBER 30: Storm damaged cars sit along Mill Creek in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in Old Fort, North Carolina. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Hurricane Helene’s death toll rose to 180, making it the third deadliest hurricane to strike the U.S. and its territories in the last 50 years.
After visiting the Carolinas on Wednesday, President Biden will be surveying storm damage in Florida and Georgia on Thursday.
The hidden toll of hurricanes: “An analysis of more than 500 tropical cyclones that have hit the United States since 1930 found that the average hurricane leads to as many as 11,000 excess deaths — a figure hundreds of times higher than official mortality estimates.”
