When Kamala Harris officially entered the presidential race late last month, she hit the ground running. The Vice President has been traveling the country, drawing large, energized crowds. Her newfound popularity, and, specifically, the size of those crowds, has predictably become a thorn in the side of Donald Trump, who sees crowd size as the ultimate measure of success.
Continue reading “About Those Crowd Sizes: Take A Look For Yourself”Nebraska, Maine and New Annals of WT Actual F
I suspect this won’t matter. A lot of facts aren’t known. And I’m not sure all the players have yet put their cards on the table. But I wanted to address the topic Nicole put on your radar yesterday. Republicans are making another push to change the electoral law in Nebraska and thus take away a single electoral vote which Kamala Harris is likely but by no means guaranteed to win. We start by making clear that Nebraska has every right to do this. All but two states allocated their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. It’s shifty and inappropriate to do it so late in the cycle for a clearly partisan purpose. But there’s no issue here of voting rights or election rigging. They can do this. I should note here that I don’t think it will end up making a difference. But, yeah … it could. It’s certainly possible that Donald Trump could become president again because of this.
Now, we don’t know whether Nebraska Republicans will be able to come up with the votes. We’ll come back to that. But if you remember when this came up earlier in the year, Maine (the other state with this system) said it would also make the change if Nebraska did. In other words, if Nebraska made the change, then Maine would counter and cancel it out. Nebraska Republicans were struggling to come up with the votes anyway. So that seemed to be the end of it. There wasn’t any point.
Continue reading “Nebraska, Maine and New Annals of WT Actual F”Trump’s Lawyers Rehash Already-Rejected Arguments In Endless Bid To Dismiss Immunity Case
Trump’s lawyers late Thursday night — having missed the 5 p.m. deadline set by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — used a basic procedural step to revive many arguments Chutkan had already rejected, a bid to get the immunity case dismissed or delayed.
Continue reading “Trump’s Lawyers Rehash Already-Rejected Arguments In Endless Bid To Dismiss Immunity Case”The 2024 Campaign Veered Off The Rails In One Bizarre Day
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What The Hell Was That?
Some days, y’all. Yesterday was one of them.
Rather than headlining any single one of the day’s weird, troubling, or strange outbursts, Morning Memo will just work through them in rough order of relative importance.
Straight-up Antisemitism
In two separate speeches in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Donald Trump laid a trap for Jewish Americans, blaming them for not supporting him in sufficient numbers given his support for the right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
Ground Zero For Trump’s Hate: Springfield, Ohio
Here are the latest developments:
- The small Ohio city under siege from attacks on its Haitian immigrant community by the Trump-Vance ticket is bracing for a possible Trump visit.
- Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who is from the Springfield area, penned a NYT op-ed defending the city, its Haitian immigrants, and the economic revival that they helped to fuel.
- The local health department refuted JD Vance’s race-baiting claims that the influx of Haitian immigrants has caused disease in the city to skyrocket, according to reporting by Greg Sargent.
Harris Puts Abortion Rights Front And Center
- A campaign event in Michigan hosted by Oprah Winfrey and styled like her talk show featured Kamala Harris and the mother of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old Georgia woman who died after waiting for treatment for complications from an abortion pill.
- The TV-talk-show-style event included appearances by an array of celebrities, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts, and Tracee Ellis Ross.
- Harris is back in Georgia today for an event where she will again focus on abortion rights.
2024 Ephemera
- The Harris campaign outspent the Trump campaign 20-1 in digital advertising on Meta’s platforms in the week surrounding their debate.
- The Trump campaign is making a late push to get Nebraska to change its Electoral College vote allocation to winner-take-all, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is leading the charge.
- Kamala Harris surprises Oprah with her gun ownership:
I See What You Did There
Kamala Harris with a dig at Donald Trump’s “concepts of a plan” for replacing Obamacare:
Kamala Harris: Nobody can start a small business with $5000.
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 20, 2024
Oprah: That’s a tiny business.
Kamala Harris: A concept of a business, pic.twitter.com/ysaByBmMlh
The GOP Is Stuck With Mark Robinson
The deadline for removing Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R-NC), the GOP nominee for governor, from the ballot passed at 12:01 a.m. ET today without any action. And so it appears that Republicans will ride this broken horse all the way to the finish line in November despite another bombshell revelation about Robinson’s conduct before entering public life.
The CNN story that had been rumored all day finally landed with enough force to sink any other candidate. But since March 2023, when TPM’s Hunter Walker first surfaced Robinson’s Facebook posts railing against gays, Blacks, and Jews, Robinson has managed to endure a series of stunning revelations without abandoning his Trump-endorsed candidacy.
By every account, the CNN story can’t quite capture how sordid the Robinson posts it uncovered actually are. Calling himself a “Black Nazi” is just a sampling. The well from which CNN drew makes NSFW look like a Disney movie.
It was almost comical when additional reporting chimed in that Robinson’s email was in the leak-and-dump Ashley Madison episode from a few years ago.
The calculus for Republicans has changed dramatically in North Carolina, where Biden’s exit from the race and Harris’ entry have put the state in play in a way that could seriously upend Trump’s path to Electoral College victory.
Curb Your Enthusiasm For The Salacious, Dear Reader
Olivia Nuzzi, the Washington correspondent for New York Magazine, is on leave after it was publicly revealed that she had a personal relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his presidential campaign.
After news of the relationship broke, Nuzzi issued a statement in which she did not name RFK Jr. but conceded that “earlier this year, the nature of some communication” between herself “and a former reporting subject turned personal.” She said “[t]he relationship was never physical” but she regretted not disclosing it. A spokesperson for RFK Jr. said: “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
TPM regulars will recall that Nuzzi, then 20, first appeared on TPM more than a decade ago, when Hunter Walker was covering Anthony Weiner’s NYC mayoral campaign, which lashed out ferociously at Nuzzi, a former intern, for going public about the inner workings of the campaign.
New Court Filing Puts Gaetz And 17-Year-Old Girl At Sex Party
NOTUS: “Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal, according to legal documents filed to a Florida federal court shortly before midnight Thursday, which cite sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies.”
Alaska Man Charged With Threatening 6 SCOTUS Justices
A 76-year-old Alaska man was indicted and arrested on charges that he allegedly sent more than 465 messages through the Supreme Court’s public website threatening to torture and assassinate six justices. The justices have not been publicly identified.
For Your Radar …
AP: “The U.S. military has moved about 130 soldiers along with mobile rocket launchers to a desolate island in the Aleutian chain of western Alaska amid a recent increase in Russian military planes and vessels approaching American territory.”
Stat Of The Day
Francis S. Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health:
The statistic that gives me the deepest heartache is this: More than 230,000 Americans died unnecessarily between June 2021 and March 2022, largely because misinformation caused them to turn away from what might have saved them in the midst of a dangerous pandemic, according to an assessment from the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. This death rate is the equivalent of four fully loaded 737s crashing every day.
Live Your Weekend The Way Shohei Ohtani Plays Baseball
On Thursday afternoon, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers had what is arguably the greatest regular season game in the history of major league baseball.
With the sporting world already watching because Ohtani was poised to pass a never-before reached milestone – 50 home runs and 50 steals in the same season – he proceeded to have a game for the ages, going 6-for-6 at the plate, hitting 3 home runs, stealing two bases, and generally having an otherworldly performance against the lowly Miami Marlins:
Enjoy a [lovely] weekend!
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Trump And His Friends Seize On Arizona Voter Registration Error As Conspiracy Theory Fodder
Earlier this month, Maricopa County election officials detected an error in Arizona’s voter registration system, which has jeopardized tens of thousands of registered voters’ ability to vote full ballot in the upcoming election.
Continue reading “Trump And His Friends Seize On Arizona Voter Registration Error As Conspiracy Theory Fodder”Lindsey Graham Helps Nebraska GOP Resurrect Effort To Screw Dems Out Of An Electoral College Vote
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is leading a delegation for Donald Trump to Nebraska, where the senator is making a last-ditch effort to convince a critical mass of the state’s Republican lawmakers to change how Nebraska awards Electoral College votes, a shift that could turn the state into a winner-takes-all situation.
Continue reading “Lindsey Graham Helps Nebraska GOP Resurrect Effort To Screw Dems Out Of An Electoral College Vote”Listen To This: The Post-Debate Universe
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh break down the state of the race post-Kamala Harris’ debate dominance.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
Ummm … What’s Going on In North Carolina?
Let me give you a brief update on a story out of North Carolina, or rather rumors out of North Carolina. Because it’s really nothing more than rumors. But it could be real and could be a pretty big deal. We’re told that CNN is about to publish a story that is likely to, or could, knock Lt Gov. Mark Robinson out of the governor’s race in North Carolina. That’s pretty stunning because Robinson is a freakshow candidate even in the broader menagerie of GOP freakshow candidates. Hunter Walker had an early jump on his freak flag in this story from a year and a half ago. That raises the question of what could possibly be so bad, so insane, outrageous or criminal that it would knock him out of the race. The rumors suggest something of a sexual nature. There already was a story a couple week ago claiming, over Robinson’s denials, that Robinson was a regular at porn-shop viewing booths in the ’90s and early 2000s. So what could it possibly be? And don’t forget that a major shakeup at the top of the ticket in North Carolina could conceivably impact the winner of the presidential election.
Continue reading “Ummm … What’s Going on In North Carolina?”Actual Springfield Ohio Story Is Pretty Different from What You’ve Heard
I continue to have what I guess I would call a mild confidence that not just the Trump campaign but some amount of the political press is missing the political valence of the situation in Springfield, Ohio — the point I alluded to in this post from yesterday. But I want to zoom in on one aspect of the story. Trump and Vance are obviously telling a really lurid and ugly story about half-savage outsiders being foisted on a town of hard-working Americans from the Heartland. But even a lot of the non-far-right coverage has operated on the assumption that either the federal government or some outside entity has essentially resettled a large community of refugees in this one city. But that’s not really what happened here at all. The influx of immigrants into the city is actually a direct result of economic redevelopment plans devised by local leaders, most of whom are Republicans.
Continue reading “Actual Springfield Ohio Story Is Pretty Different from What You’ve Heard”Yet More Polls
For reasons that are not altogether clear, a ton of polls came out overnight. Just in Pennsylvania alone, for example, I believe we have six new, decent-quality polls from just last night. We also have a few new national polls — Fox and NYT/Siena. I don’t know what appetite anyone has left for me doing deep-dive polling analysis of so many polls when, if you’re really that interested, you can see what the actual polling analysts say. (I have limited appetite to hear myself at this point.) I’d say the 30,000-foot takeaway is that they’re telling a pretty good story for Harris. We continue to see more evidence that Harris is consolidating real leads across the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and, yes … Pennsylvania. Of those six PA polls, three showed a tie. The other three showed leads of three, four and five points, respectively. Across these results you also see more signs of Harris consolidating or in some cases expanding on the 2020 Biden coalition, especially with “traditional” Dem constituencies. One detail I find interesting are the increasing signs that Republicans’ Electoral College advantage may be diminishing. As I said, if you don’t want to get into the nitty gritty, which may tell you less rather than more, the gist is that Harris seems to be consolidating a small but significant lead based on the Blue Wall states while remaining close or tied in the Southern tier states, where she may be better positioned in North Carolina than Georgia and possibly Arizona.