Ken Klippenstein has a piece in The Intercept about the Saudi-driven OPEC production cut as the “October Surprise” of the 2022 election cycle — one not simply aimed at maximizing domestic profits and assisting Russia in its war on Ukraine but specifically aimed at bringing Trump and his MAGA-infused GOP back to power. I think he’s right. I do notice though that the experts he quotes making this argument are longtime critics of U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia. So they are people inclined to see events through a Saudi-hostile lens.

This is frequently a difficulty in making sense of current events. You want to see what the experts say but most experts have their own preconceptions and established narratives through which they are inclined to organize new events. I wanted to add this caution as a limitation or counter to my own view. But it remains my own view. This move is not only an example of the lopsided and outmoded relationship with Saudi Arabia but a specific effort to damage the party the Saudi leader, Mohamed bin Salman, opposes in U.S. domestic politics.

EPIC/MRA, a signature in-state poll for Michigan: Whitmer 49%, Dixon 38%.

The Marquette University Law School poll is the premium in-state Wisconsin poll. Its latest poll yesterday had sobering news for Democrats. Ron Johnson is now 6 points ahead of Mandela Barnes among likely voters. What caught my eye though is that it was tied among registered voters. I’m not trying to unskew this poll. That 6 point margin is, unfortunately, in line with other recent polls. But a 6 point difference between registered and likely voters is really large. That may show a very large GOP turnout and motivation advantage or maybe it’s missing something. Notably the same big divergence showed up in Marquette’s survey of the governor’s race. But here it was far more in the Democrats’ favor. Gov. Evers was up by 5 points among registered voters and by one among likelies.

The latest news out of the Mar-a-Lago case, which Josh Kovensky explains here, really makes it hard to see how the government can avoid charging Trump with a crime even if they’d prefer not to. The government appears to have clear, corroborated evidence that after receiving subpoenas for the retrieval of classified documents, Trump directly ordered a resort employee to remove the records from the storerooms where the government’s investigation focused and to his personal residence.

Yesterday I noted this odd report that Elon Musk’s weird foray into Russo-Ukraine War peacemaking was preceded by a call with Vladimir Putin. This was revealed in a global intelligence newsletter published by Ian Bremmer. Then Musk denied that any such call had happened. That’s where we got to yesterday. But there’s more from overnight that I want to update you on.

The short version is that it seems pretty clear that Musk’s denial is a lie. And the original tweets themselves have a variety of references that seem like they come from a Russian nationalist or someone very familiar with the set of post-Soviet grievances which are the mother’s milk of Putin’s political world. (They refer to “Khrushchev’s Mistake” and the conquest of Crimea in 1783.)

Here’s the somewhat longer version.

As you can see in LiveWire, Elon Musk — really, unsurprisingly — had just talked to Vladimir Putin before going on to Twitter and proposing a peace plan which mostly amounted to Russia’s original war aims. Typical? Gross? Par for the course? Perhaps all of these. But it reminded me of something more general. Many of our would-be oligarchs in the United States seem quite attracted to the Russian strongman/oligarch model. It’s not just the authoritarianism but the way oligarchs operate within it. It’s part of the broader anti-democratic, authoritarian turn within a large swathe of the tech industry.

Not the same point. But this essay by John Ganz gets at some similar points.

Late Update: Musk now denies on Twitter that the conversation took place. He says he’s only spoken to Putin once and that it was 18 months ago. We’ll wait to hear what Ian Bremmer, who reported the conversation, has to say about it.

Bernie Sanders has an article in The Guardian saying it’s a mistake for Democrats to make abortion central to their closing argument for the 2022 election. He’s wrong. Let me explain why.

First, Sanders prefaces his argument with all sorts of caveats. He’s 100% pro-choice; he hates the Dobbs decision; abortion should definitely be part of their message. But the closing argument should be on the economy and economic justice. That’s his argument.

This argument will be grist for those in the Democratic Party who think that Sanders and the Sanders wing of the party see economics and mixed economy social justice as the essence of real progressivism while things like abortion are important but secondary — both substantively and politically. That’s a critique and intramural argument among Democrats I’m not going to resolve here. But my disagreement with Sanders is more focused.

TPM Reader GS followed up with this note about my crime post. Again, I know this can seem a little insular, writing about crime in my hometown. But I am doing so to address issues about crime, perceptions of crime and the politics of crime that are by no means local or regional.

Today a TPM Reader who left New York City during the pandemic wrote in to ask if the crime situation in the city is really as out of control as he hears. He told me he’s going on what he hears from people who still live in the city, media reports, etc. I told him that the city definitely feels grittier, dirtier and in some ways less safe than it did before the pandemic. I frequently hear people tell me they’re more leery of going on the subways late at night. So I told this reader that even among people who know the city well and have no political motive to play up crime or perceptions of social disorder many people do feel this way. But what I told this reader is that I hadn’t actually looked at the statistics recently, something I’ve done fairly regularly through much of my career since it’s a major interest of mine. So I did. The actual data is quite interesting, certainly more complex than the back-to-the-’80s narrative but also one that shows that many forms of crime have gone up quite a bit.

(Admittedly, this is a New York-centric post. But I write about it here as a proxy for the broader national mood about crime and the backdrop it is playing for the midterm election.)

Close elections can come down to highly contingent factors. In Georgia Republicans are suffering the completely predictable results of their own cynical decision to back Herschel Walker’s absurd campaign. But something else may be afoot in Nevada.

This has been a pretty close race all year, with a very thin margin for the incumbent, Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. But just over the last couple weeks Adam Laxalt has moved into the thinnest of leads. These are very, very small differences. It might be noise. It might be the general ebbing of the summer-long Democratic surge. Maybe Laxalt is just running a strong campaign. But there’s something else I want to point out. Where I live in New York, gas prices have been fairly stable recently. Still highish, but way down off the spring highs.