Josh Marshall
From TPM Reader CL …
Read MoreI stopped by the **** in **** PA to drop off my mail-in ballot this evening, around 5:15PM.
I’ve been voting in this fashion since 2020, dropping each primary and general election ballot at our local library every year.
As I drove into the library’s parking lot, I saw the familiar drop box and three volunteers / County Voter Services Department staff at the drop box.
After I parked, I approached the ballot box and was momentarily startled by a man in his mid-20’s with a bulletproof vest, other tactical gear with the word AGENT written on the back of the vest.
Is the Freedom Caucus on the Ropes? 
One of the many surprising things in the floppy and shambling political career of Colorado’s Lauren Boebert is that she has always been full freak show, a full Freedom Caucus stalwart, despite being from a GOP-leaning swing district. We expect the crazies to be from lopsided Republican districts where they’re never going to face any real price for their antics. But something’s caught my eye over the last week or so. There are actually three members of the Freedom Caucus who appear to have real races on their hands at the moment.
Each race is different, both in how serious a challenge the individual rep faces and in how much evidence we have to suggest they could be in danger. So let me go through all three.
Read MoreWe’ve spoken a number of times about the Republican ground game, or Get Out The Vote efforts. Just to review again, the Trump campaign made the decision to take GOTV operations away from the RNC and outsource it to a series of pro-Trump super PACs. The question now is: did the gamble pay off? Have the super PACs been able to field a solid ground operation or perhaps create one even better than the one the RNC would have created?
Read More
Are Right-Wing Pollsters Flooding the Zone?
I get this question a lot: are right-wing pollsters flooding the zone? So I thought I would answer it generally in a single post.
Are they? Yes, they definitely are. But there are some important caveats and qualifiers to know to make sense of the whole story.
Just to review the basics: There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.
Read More
Elon Musk’s Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign
There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical. But then you have what I’m going to describe next, which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating,” which we’ll return to in a moment.)
Read MoreReuters has a story out reporting missed targets and internal investigations of inflated or faked doorknocking numbers at America PAC. That’s the Elon Musk PAC which now appears to be running most of the pro-Trump ground operation. Oddly, one of the sources in the Reuters piece is Alysia McMillan, an America PAC canvasser who was profiled in the Post just the day before yesterday. The story doesn’t totally have the goods — internal complaints about not meeting their election target, one Elon deputy investigating inflated numbers. Hard to know precisely what that means in the context of an operation involving tens of millions of dollars across multiple states. But it’s in line with lots of smoke and red flags about the whole operation.
There appears to be a scam text operation targeting ACTBLUE donors in which the text basically tries impersonate or imitate the kind of text you might get from your credit card company if there’s a suspicious transaction. If you’ve gotten one of these please let us know as soon as you can.
I wrote a lot earlier in the month about the questions marks surrounding the Republican and Trump ground operations in this election. To recap, the campaign outsourced most of its efforts to a series of super PACs, which has ended up mainly being Elon Musk’s America PAC. The initial driver of the whole thing was Turning Points Action, which critics rather presciently predicted didn’t have the organizational heft or experience to do something at that scale. The Trump campaign itself has focused on what is at least a pretty unconventional approach, largely ceding conventional ground operations in favor of focusing on Trump-identified non-voters. My read on that whole question is that there are lots of red flags and lots of smoke. But just what it will all mean or the impact it will have I’m not sure. TPM Reader CH wrote in today to ask me what is going on on the Democratic side. Do we assume Harris has a strong ground operation or is that a wobbly assumption?
Here’s what I told him.
Read More
Into The Storm
This new piece in The Atlantic captures what the article’s author, Ron Brownstein, portrays as the current air of pessimism, or at least deep sobriety, within Democratic campaign and political operative circles. The general gist is that Harris hasn’t sealed the deal with voters, hasn’t closed the sale, whatever metaphor you choose. And the shortcoming is that in her effort to build up a positive brand, she hasn’t focused voters enough on the horrors of another Trump term. (Of course, one of the earlier lines was that it wasn’t enough to demonize Trump. There had to be a positive agenda. So that seems to have changed. Let’s not worry about that difference of opinion.) I’ve always been of the mind that the other guy being scary and dangerous is among the best reasons to vote. (In medicine, “first, do no harm” is seen as a pretty good general approach.) In any case, that’s the idea, the emerging argument, that Brownstein picked up among Democratic insiders. He fleshes this out by noting a series of recent polls showing voters have a rising perception of retrospective Trump approval — in other words, how they remember their approval of Trump’s presidency, even if their recollection of how they felt is actually substantially more positive than it was at the time. There’s no denying there is a small but measurable movement in the poll averages in Trump’s direction. But it’s less clear whether that tilt is picking up a real change in the situation on the ground. And I think it’s even less clear whether outside observers know why it’s happening, if indeed it is. Mostly people are reading their pre-existing assumptions and fears into bumpy data, the drivers of which are largely inscrutable.
Read MoreThe DeSantis administration lawyer who sent out those letters threatening TV stations with criminal charges and jail time over pro-choice ads himself resigned shortly after sending out the letters. The Miami-Herald got a hold of his resignation letter and it appears he didn’t feel like he could back the policy. John Wilson, former chief lawyer of the state Department of Health, wrote: “A man is nothing without his conscience. It has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.”
Read More