Status Check

Posted on by Josh Marshall

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!’

Posted on by Hunter Walker

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

Posted on by Josh Marshall

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

Posted on by Nicole Lafond

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

Posted on by Josh Marshall

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.

‘Spiritual Warfare,’ QAnon, And A Sitting Senator: Inside The Wild World Of Mike Flynn’s Political Action Committee

Posted on by Hunter Walker

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

Posted on by Josh Marshall

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.

A Prep for Watching Election Results

Posted on by Josh Marshall

We are going to be here a while today. And when I thought about writing today’s Backchannel, a standard post didn’t make sense to me since anything you receive in the late afternoon will be immediately dated. So I thought I’d write a simple cheat sheet of ways to watch election results tonight — if you’re into that sort of thing — and how to get as much signal and as little noise as possible. You’ll know many of these things. But I’m just putting them here in one place.

Continue reading “A Prep for Watching Election Results” → 

A Plaintive Cry For Election Reforms Before It’s Too Late

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.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

As voting wraps up across the country today, let me take a quick step back to offer not so much a curmudgeon’s take as a plea not to lose sight of how badly in need of fundamental reform U.S. elections are.

No other Western democracy has anything remotely like the America election system. U.S. election campaigns are too expensive, last too long, divert valuable time and attention away from governing, and compromise everyone involved in them.

If the kinds of foundational election reforms we need are a mountain to climb, then we aren’t even to base camp. A few years back, thanks largely to the post-Watergate reforms, we’d managed to ascend partway up the mountain. The system was still a mess and we weren’t close to the summit, but over the past 15 years or so, we have lost all of the ground gained and are basically back at the trailhead.

Thanks to adverse Supreme Court decisions, it will take a strategic long game to retool elections to make them fairer, more democratic, and less of a colossal waste of money, time, and resources. It will also take overcoming the vested interests that have turned U.S. elections into a cash bonanza free-for-all. It is a defining feature of this neo-Gilded Age. Monied interests weaken campaign finance rules, which helps them acquire more political power that they use to fend off reforms. It’s vicious cycle spiraling towards oligarchy.

I won’t run down the full list of needed reforms, but they include things like making voting mandatory, declaring Election Day a national holiday, shortening campaigns into a defined period, limiting the toxic intrusion of campaign contributions, including dark money and other surreptitious funding sources. The hallmark of the Watergate-era reforms was greater transparency, but that’s not enough. Public financing of campaigns and other reforms need to dramatically reduce the role of campaign contributions.

This sounds like pie in the sky stuff, but our politics is crippled by the way we elect public officeholders. The billion-dollar-boon to broadcasters, the endless campaign cycles that bleed together, the conversion of politics into a mass-market advertising campaign that serves no one – these are public policy choices. They’re not written in stone, though the Supreme Court has certainly tried.

The political game we see on the field is heavily influenced by the field itself: where the lines are drawn, what the ground rules are, how level the surface is. When you obsess over politics like most Morning Memo readers do, you can begin to forget how much of what you see is a manmade political landscape, not a natural feature of politics.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Election Threats Watch

  • Proud Boys claim they’ll be at polling places as Trump ups violent rhetoric and election fraud claims–NBC News
  • Right-wing activists and G.O.P. state lawmakers have filed some 4,000 “bad-faith” ballot challenges in Pennsylvania–NYT
  • The U.S. intelligence community continues to issue real-time warnings about election interference from foreign adversaries, particularly Russia and Iran:

Since our statement on Friday, the IC has been observing foreign adversaries, particularly Russia, conducting additional influence operations intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans. The IC expects these activities will intensify through election day and in the coming weeks, and that foreign influence narratives will focus on swing states.

Trump Campaign Fires White Nationalist In Its Midst

Reporter Amanda Moore discovered that the real-life version of a white nationalist online persona was the Trump campaign’s regional field director in western Pennsylvania. Luke Meyer, 24, admitted he went by “Alberto Barbarossa” online and was fired by the Trump campaign Friday after Moore presented her findings.

Meyer went out with a line for the ages, sending an email to Moore that said, “I am glad you pieced these little clues together like an antifa Nancy Drew.”

If I’m Moore, “Like An Antifa Nancy Drew” goes on my business card, is the title of my memoir, and is etched on my gravestone. People go entire careers without a plaudit as rich as that.

Where Are The Candidates Today?

  • Harris’ election night watch party is scheduled to be at her alma mater, Howard University in D.C.
  • Trump is back at Mar-a-Lago, with an election night watch party scheduled to be at Palm Beach County Convention Center.

2024 Ephemera

  • Musk Wins In Pennsylvania: “A Philadelphia judge on Monday rejected District Attorney Larry Krasner’s bid to classify Elon Musk daily $1 million giveaway to voters in battleground states as an illegal lottery that violates Pennsylvania consumer protection laws.”–Philadelphia Inquirer
  • Why It Will Be Harder For Trump To Subvert This Election: “[W]hile postelection chaos is quite possible, 2024 is unlikely to be an exact replay of 2020. In important ways, the system has been strengthened.”–Cameron Joseph
  • Crazy Scenario Alert: What happens if Republicans win the House but don’t elect a speaker in time to certify the Electoral College results on Jan. 6?–Politico

Good Read

Brian Beutler: Why Everyone In Politics Panders To Republicans

Policy Porn

David Dayen has a great piece on the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government’ approach to governing. This hits all my buttons for orderliness, fairness, level playing fields, getting shit done, avoiding waste, and steering clear of ridiculous outcomes. In my ideal world, it’s how everything should be run.

Alleged Accelerationist Busted In FBI Sting

A 24-year-old Tennessee white supremacist who thought he was about to use a drone packed with explosives to a destroy an electrical substation in Nashville on Saturday had actually been under FBI surveillance since June and was arrested without incident, according to authorities.

For context, via TPM: Aspiring Right-Wing Terrorists Are Targeting The Power Grid Amid Rise In Accelerationist Extremism

EXCLUSIVE

WSJ:

Western security officials say they believe that two incendiary devices, shipped via DHL, were part of a covert Russian operation that ultimately aimed to start fires aboard cargo or passenger aircraft flying to the U.S. and Canada, as Moscow steps up a sabotage campaign against Washington and its allies.

Women Don’t Forget

Shot:

Chaser, from Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN):

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