The last we heard of embattled Florida GOP chair and prolific threesomer Christian Ziegler, the state party was preparing to boot him from office notwithstanding the lack of any mechanism in state party bylaws to do so. But now police appear to be investigating a new potential crime.

Troy Republicans had a hot idea: appoint Jason Schofield, the former elections commissioner of the Rensselaer County Republicans, to serve as an assistant to the city clerk. Public service is a good thing. So that sounds normal enough. But what happened to Schofield’s gig as elections commissioner? Welllll …. he had to resign a year ago as part of pleading guilty to federal elections fraud charges tied to fraudulent absentee ballot applications in county elections back in 2021.

Okay, if you want to be really technical about it. It’s not Moms for Liberty, the group cofounded by Florida threesomer Bridget Ziegler. But it’s the same political movement of post-Covid rightwing moms mobilizing to take over school boards and rid them of the “woke mind virus.” Pennsylvania’s Clarice Schillinger runs two Moms for Liberty-esque SuperPACs, Keeping Kids in School PAC and Back to School Pac. She was also a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2022. Here she is hanging out with President Trump back in better times. She and Trump talked about “how the moms are upset and how we’re going to save America. And the grandmoms and the caregivers, all of us. When you touch our children, it’s about the future of democracy. This is what happens.”

Now Schillinger has been arrested touching children in the form of punching out a sixteen year old at a booze-drenched birthday party she threw for her seventeen year old daughter at the homestead in Doylestown, PA.

I wanted to take a moment to marvel over the Nikki Haley situation with you. The conventional take is that as she’s risen in the GOP presidential primary contest she’s getting the heightened scrutiny that goes along with it. But that’s not actually true. As with so much else in the news, that take is driven by vibes and the need for a storyline rather than any actual data. FiveThirtyEight says that on October 1st she was at 6.9% support in nationwide polls. Today she is at 11%. That’s a 4 percentage point shift when Donald Trump, today, remains literally 50 percentage points ahead. The only place where there’s even been a modest shift is in New Hampshire. And it’s quite modest. There she’s moved to about 25% support after almost two months at 20%.

So … Go Nikki! Laying the groundwork for a 2 to 1 trouncing in New Hampshire to build momentum for a … well, not really clear that it’s for anything. But let’s not be spoil sports!

I give you my favorite editorial fail of the final week of 2023, from the Times write-up of the Maine disqualification …

I love this story. Lauren Boebert has apparently seen the writing on the wall and now realizes she can’t be elected in her congressional district, Colorado’s 3rd. Too much interrupting Joe Biden’s State of the Unions, too many Beetlejuice handies, too many bonkers TV appearances. So she’s decided to run not in her own district but in the neighboring 4th district, which unlike the 3rd is solidly Republican. That district is available because incumbent Ken Buck is retiring.

She just announced the move in a Facebook video post this evening.

Responding to yesterday’s Backchannel …

I read your post and have to say, I share some of your optimism. Not because things are good or getting better—they’re not!—but because for the first time in what feels like forever, I see potential for the coming year to bring some extremely dark chapters in world history to a close.

First, the Trump-Biden rematch. Like you, I’m not discounting the possibility that Trump wins. But if he doesn’t, that’s the end of him as an active political figure. He’s too old to run again, too criminally liable, too spent. He’ll have a second political life after he dies, I’m sure, like Ronald Reagan had until Trump displaced him with a new cult of personality, but the man himself will be really and truly gone from our politics. Phew!

Responding to yesterday’s Backchannel …

You asked for our thoughts RE: Can Any Centers Hold?

Like you, I seem to have had a revelation (somewhere around 2022 but continuing this year) that the good people of America will be fighting Trumpist authoritarianism for decades to come. It’s become the new American sin – not the original sin, but the adopted sin. A sin that was completely avoidable yet irresistible to the power-hungry and to the ignorant. One thing that makes it so dispiriting is that broad swaths of the American public either don’t take it seriously, or they actively (think they) desire it. Life since 2016 has resembled a horror movie where people become zombies not because they are bitten, but because they go down the wrong internet rabbit holes. The mainstream press isn’t immune, either, having developed an insatiable thirst for “Forgotten Man” blood long ago.