Josh Marshall
Our Long National RCP Nightmare Is Over 
For most of this election season so far, FiveThirtyEight hasn’t surfaced its own presidential race average. Compiling these averages in a sophisticated and honest way is actually kind of complicated. (They explain their methodology here.) We used to play in this space with PollTracker. So I know from experience. For me it’s not that I put so much weight on the specific number. It’s just a simpler way of visualizing the trend over time.
Well, now they’ve finally rolled theirs out. So I don’t have to be so reliant on RealClearPolitics, which has both a clumsy methodology and goes to comical length to add or not add polls to juice their favored candidate. All that said, the absolute averages as of today as remarkably similar. Trump up .4% on FiveThirtyEight and .3% on RCP. This reminds us of some of the ironies and … how can I say it, melancholy and ennui of complexity. The FiveThirtyEight model is HUGELY complex and sophisticated. It factors in all sorts of different variables. It incorporates findings from individual states into the national averages and vice versa. And yet for all this statistical leg work the averages as of this moment are essentially identical.
Read MoreThere’s going to be a lot to talk about tomorrow with these new fake electors indictments out of Arizona. In fact, there’s so much happening in the news at the moment it’s a bit hard to keep your head straight. But I wanted to note just one exquisite point. One of the indictees is Christina Bobb, OANN talking head turned Trump lawyer, who just last month was appointed as the new head of the RNC’s “election integrity” chief. So yes, the GOP’s head of election integrity has now been charged with election subversion and election fraud. So we’re off to a strong start.
A Poll Obsessive Gives You a Calm and Sober Read
I routinely tell people not to look at every single poll but to focus on trends over time. That is, if you want to look at them at all. We’ll go into Election Day with the polls tight and the outcome still uncertain. I can say this because I actually watch them very, very closely … like unhealthily closely. It’s characterological. I don’t advise it for anyone else. But if you must, it’s okay, and I can relate.
This morning there’s a new batch of swing-state polls from Bloomberg/Morning Consult showing Trump ahead in all but one of those states and growing his lead versus the last of these polls a month ago. That’s not great at all. But as usual I would not invest too much weight in a single poll. These numbers are not in sync with other recent swing-state polls, though actually we have pretty few quality swing-state polls recently. But the overall trend over the last six or seven weeks still seems like what we’ve discussed in the last several posts on this topic. After several months of being behind by a small but real amount (2-4 percentage points), Biden has moved into roughly a tie.
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Nope. Fetterman Isn’t Going Full Manchin. Not Even Close.
Sometimes a story catches fire and just a really straightforward look at the fine print shows there’s really nothing to it. One of the recent examples has to do with Sen. John Fetterman and the increasingly vocal complaints that he’s gone rogue from his progressive roots and is likely to one day become or is possibly already on his way to becoming the next Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. There’s actually a whole conversation on social media about how we’ll soon see him coming out against getting rid of or abolishing the filibuster.
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All Talk Marge
Like David, I’m still not clear that we have a satisfying explanation of just why the last week on Capitol Hill happened. For the moment I’m just glad it happened. Ukraine will now get a major infusion of military aid which should at least stabilize the Ukrainian war effort. But even if we don’t really know why Mike Johnson did what he did, there are some other takeaways worth noting.
Read MoreLet me return to add a few more thoughts on what happened between Israel and Iran. Iran launched a massive fusillade of drones and missiles, but virtually none of them got through. A few days later Israel retaliated with a much smaller volley, which was apparently just a handful of drones that were launched from aircraft just outside of Iranian airspace. They were targeted at Isfahan, which is where Iran’s nuclear facilities are located, but were aimed apparently at a drone factory there. Iran not only hasn’t responded but has mostly pretended that it didn’t even happen, at least for domestic audiences. So Israel responded but at least for now they seem to have been able to do so and have the Iranians call things even.
Read MoreI hope you get a chance to read Josh Kovensky’s trial report from yesterday. He gets at a really good point which is that Trump’s attack on the very concept of the jury system is of a piece with the central conceit of Trumpism — that civic space, the idea that work on behalf of the republic which is not strictly a partisan exercise, is an impossibility. That is narrowly advantageous for Trump since he’s on trial and wants to discredit the process that could put him behind bars. But it’s not a momentary opportunism. It’s a premise, an attack on small-r republican government, which is at the center of his movement.
Is It the Simplest Explanation?
I’ve been having an ongoing exchange with a TPM Reader and friend about the simple question: Why is Mike Johnson doing this? Like YOLO Johnson, sure. But why? He’s been kind of dragging along for six months and yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s always been embarrassing. Why the “Let’s Be Legends” vibe now?
My friend asked if I thought it might be some sudden shift in the intelligence about the situation in Ukraine. Maybe, I said. But that didn’t seem right to me. Far more likely it was that the parliamentary dynamics simply hit a breaking point, perhaps spurred on by the sudden pressure to move Israel aid. If you’ve got one foot on the dock and another on the ship and the ship starts to pull off you have to make a choice. Stay or go. Equivocate and you fall in the water.
But this article from Politico suggests that new intelligence actually did play a key role.
Read More12:57 a.m.: It’s hard to know the precise significance of Israel’s retaliatory strike or how Iran might respond. So far Iran seems to be downplaying the attack internally, basically saying it was no big deal and showing video of Isfahan as if nothing was going on. And the attack does seem to have been fairly limited. But what jumps out is that the Israeli drones or at least most of them were able to hit deep within Iran without much problem. I assume that was the message of the strike: that Israel can strike deep within Iran basically at will, unlike Iran’s experience having virtually every one of its missiles and drones shot down. The Israeli target was a drone facility Isfahan. But that’s also where Iran’s nuclear facilities are, which were not targeted. As best I can tell, that’s the message: our missiles and drones get through.
10:55 p.m.: Unclear what’s happening yet. But there is clearly a major Israeli retaliation underway over the skies in Iran. Flights are being diverted. Airspace closed. Here’s the list I’m watching on Twitter if you’re still on Twitter. CNN says the attack is on non-nuclear targets. Presumably they are getting that directly from the Israelis or what the Israelis told the Americans. Apparently the Israelis gave the U.S. a significant heads up that this was coming.
House Installs New Speaker: YOLO Johnson
I don’t pretend to even understand the moving parts of how this is supposed to work. But almost out of the blue Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to go all-in on an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. As this started to come into view over the last two or three days, I’ve had a number of TPM Readers write in to say, why is this happening? What’s the catch? Or, why is he walking the plank like this? What is he sacrificing his Speakership for? And I don’t have a really good answer.
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