The Supreme Court heard two cases Monday that give it an opportunity to limit agency power, a theme for the right-wing bench throughout recent terms.
Continue reading “Jackson Highlights Dangers Should Supreme Court Again Curtail Agency Power”Lawmaker Sues To Stop Counting Military Ballots In Wisconsin After Voter Fraud Stunt
Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-WI) — the Republican chair of the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee — along with a veterans group and two others have filed a lawsuit to temporarily halt counting military ballots in Wisconsin until their authenticity can be verified.
Continue reading “Lawmaker Sues To Stop Counting Military Ballots In Wisconsin After Voter Fraud Stunt”Russian Mercenary Leader Commits To More Meddling In US Elections
Russian oligarch and mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin taunted the U.S. on Monday about his country’s past, current, and future interference in American elections, likening himself to a surgeon set to remove the country’s “kidneys and liver.”
Continue reading “Russian Mercenary Leader Commits To More Meddling In US Elections”RNC Chair Says GOP Will Accept Midterm Results…Under Certain Conditions
Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel on Sunday wouldn’t say definitively whether the GOP would accept the results of the 2022 midterms – not without suggesting there could be reasons to reject the results.
Continue reading “RNC Chair Says GOP Will Accept Midterm Results…Under Certain Conditions”The Late Polls
With the election one day away I wanted to take a look at the latest polls. They still don’t tell a totally clear story. Big picture what we see is still much better for Republicans than what we saw in late summer or even as recently as October. All the key Senate races are more or less tied. That means anything from a one or perhaps two seat pick up for the Dems to a four seat pick up for the GOP is entirely plausible. But with all this sobering news we’re not seeing the kind of late polling breakout I might have expected. The generic ballot averages have actually ticked slightly back in Democrats’ direction over the last couple days, though this could well be statistical noise.
Continue reading “The Late Polls”You’re Doing Great, Elon!
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
10/10!
In addition to struggling with Twitter advertising, the new owner of Twitter dot com and purported free speech champion Elon Musk seems less than amused by the Twitter users with blue checks impersonating him in response to his Brilliant Plan to charge $8 a month for said blue checks.
- The not-at-all-thin-skinned Musk announced on Sunday that users impersonating others “without clearly specifying ‘parody'” would be permanently suspended.
(Also, he’s definitely not mad about the impersonations)
- The Tesla CEO has also threatened a “thermonuclear name and shame” of advertisers who dare to pull out of Twitter. So you corporations better give Mr. Space Man the money he needs for his new toy, or else he’ll call you out for something you … aren’t really trying to hide at all?
- Twitter is also asking dozens of the employees it fired in the massive round of layoffs (which wiped out half the workforce) to come back. Some of the employees were fired by accident, and others were fired before Twitter realized it actually really needed their experience to run the website the way Musk wants it to, according to Bloomberg News.
GOP Leaders Say Party Will Accept Election Results (With Asterisk)
Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, tacked qualifiers onto their “yes”s on Sunday when asked if they’d accept the midterm results.
- McDaniel told CNN that sure, Republicans will accept the results … after making sure the elections are “run fair and transparently” and letting “the process play out.”
- Scott said on “Meet the Press” that his party will “absolutely” accept the results, “but what we’re also going to do is do everything we can to make sure they’re free and fair, and if there’s any shenanigans, we are ready to make sure.”
- Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has refused to commit to accepting his potential defeat, saying on Thursday that “I sure hope I can, but I can’t predict what the Democrats might have planned.”
RNC Won’t Pay Trump’s Legal Bills If He Announces 2024 Bid
McDaniel made it clear on Sunday that if Trump launches a widely-expected reelection campaign for 2024, the RNC won’t be footing the bill for the legal fees the ex-president has amassed in court battles like New York Attorney General Letitia James’ (D) civil case against him and the Trump Organization.
- McDaniel told CNN that the RNC “cannot do in-kind contributions to any candidate right now,” plus “he’s certainly raised more under the RNC than we’ve spent on these bills.”
- The RNC has shelled out more than $2.3 million to pay for Trump’s defense.
UN’s Climate Summit Kicks Off
COP27, aka the United Nations’ annual climate change conference among global leaders, has begun in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
- Biden is expected to attend sometime this week, though it’s unclear when.
- Pakistan is leading a coalition of more than 100 developing nations demanding that wealthy countries pay for the “loss and damage” caused by the effects of climate change, including disastrous floods and droughts.
Must Read
“Conspiracy theories are predictable. Here are some of the ones you’ll see on Election Day” – CNN
“As climate change worsens, Egypt is begging families to have fewer kids” – The Washington Post
Key Analysis
“When Everything Happened So Much” – Slate
The joy and surprise that Twitter used to regularly bring has largely been replaced with anger, misinformation, and abuse. Aggrieved incels and white nationalists flooded the platform, wanting to make everyone as miserable as they are. Post–Jan. 6 changes to enforcement removed some of the worst accounts from Twitter, but by that point it was clear we were all miserable enough even without them. We wake up in the morning and stare into rectangles that just make us sad. No wonder Twitter’s most active group of users is shrinking.
Jan. 6 Panel Extends Trump Subpoena Deadline For Docs
The House Jan. 6 Committee announced on Friday, which was the day Trump was supposed to turn over the records the panel sought in its subpoena to him, that it had extended the deadline to sometime “no later than next week.” The committee’s deadline for Trump’s testimony remains Nov. 14.
Early Voting In Upcoming Midterms Eclipses That Of 2018
More ballots have been cast in the early voting period for the midterms tomorrow (!) than the total number of early voting ballots in 2018, according to the United States Elections Project.
- 39.2 million votes have already been cast as of Sunday. Early voting in 2018 reached a total 39.1 million.
- There’s been a consistent surge in early voting since 2014. About 31 percent of the ballots in that year’s midterms were early votes, and it jumped to about 40 percent in 2018.
ACB Again Slaps Down Attempt To Block Student Debt Forgiveness
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected an emergency bid to halt Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan on Friday, the second time she’s done so in conservatives’ legal challenges against the program. In both cases, Barrett acted alone instead of bringing the matter to the full court.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
What They Don’t Talk About About Polls
There are going to be big political winners and losers on Tuesday. But there are also going to be big polling winners and losers. Through this cycle different classes of pollsters have been seeing a very different race. Wednesday morning we’re going to know who was right and wrong. But here’s an aspect of polling that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s not just accuracy. There’s another part of this.
We know that polling has gotten both harder to do and more expensive to do as fewer people respond to polling phone calls. If one out of twenty calls gets answered, that’s a much more expensive proposition than if one out of three does. So non-response has been driving up the costs of polling, and that’s overwhelmingly hitting the pollsters who use live callers. Live calls are generally considered the most accurate, though it’s far from certain whether that’s still the case. Non-response also puts accuracy under growing strain because pollsters need to make sense of which political groupings are more or less likely to respond. If non-response is identical across all political affiliations it’s not a problem from an accuracy perspective. But that’s almost certainly not the case.
Continue reading “What They Don’t Talk About About Polls”Politics, Musk and ‘Brand Safety’
At the center of the escalating Twitter bonfire this week is the issue of “brand safety.” Musk and Republican leaders are now complaining that “woke” activists are breaking Twitter and pushing it toward financial collapse with calls for boycotts. That’s not what’s happening. Not even close. Are there various activists groups pushing for advertisers to pause or drop Twitter advertising? Yes. But they’re not the real problem. The issue is “brand safety,” which I thought I would dig into because it has implications far beyond the Twitter train wreck. It’s at the heart of many issues in political media.
First, how do I know anything about this? Why am I an expert? Before TPM moved to a subscription model, brand and influencer advertising were at the heart of our business. Because of that, for upwards of fifteen years I had to deeply immerse myself not only in the advertising business generally but in the niche of advertising in political media. It was a huge part of my work for years and I had to understand it really, really well — because the existence of TPM depended on it.
Continue reading “Politics, Musk and ‘Brand Safety’”Musk Was Toxic For Twitter from the Start
If you have been watching the on-going bonfire of Twitter, you may have noticed a couple new things at the end of this week. The exodus of advertisers continues. This morning Twitter began firing what most reports suggest will be roughly half the company’s workforce. The also faced a new round of lawsuits over the company’s allegedly beginning layoffs with no notice. Most notable today though was the shift in Musk’s own tone as expressed in his tweets and an impromptu appearance at a business conference. He’s shifted from swagger to panicked complaining that Twitter is imploding as a business because of a campaign by “activists” to make advertisers abandon the site.
Continue reading “Musk Was Toxic For Twitter from the Start”Guess What? Rubio’s Fake Story Continues to Collapse
No doubt it will come as a great surprise to you. But Marco Rubio’s story of a Rubio canvasser (who turned out to be a notorious white supremacist) who was viciously beaten over his political beliefs continues to fall apart. Cell phone videos of the incident have now emerged (seemingly from the assailants’ defense attorneys) which undermine the political attack storyline and actually show one of the assailants (just before the attack) telling Christopher Monzon to go about his business and keep canvassing.
Continue reading “Guess What? Rubio’s Fake Story Continues to Collapse”