The fast-ending premiership of the comical Liz Truss appears to be on the verge of finally concluding. Reports have gone out that she will resign imminently and a lectern is being wheeled out in front of Number 10.

Late Update: And it’s official, she resigned. Immediate resignation as head of the Tory Party. New party election within the next week, at the conclusion of which she will resign as PM.

We’re really getting down to the wire on the midterms and in ways that aren’t necessarily inspiring if you’re a Democrat. The conventional wisdom now has it that after a summer of Dobbs backlash that buoyed Democrats, inflation and the economy have now reclaimed center stage putting Republicans back in the ascendent. Is this true? Is there evidence to support this?

There’s definitely some.

Russia’s military situation in Ukraine has become so dire in recent weeks that, as you know, there’s been increasing discussion of whether President Putin might resort to the use of nuclear weapons to stabilize it or overawe Ukraine’s western allies into discontinuing aid. We think, rightly, about how terrifying this prospect is. But we shouldn’t forget that it is also a gauge of just how bad Russia is doing in conventional terms. But Putin may get relief if he’s able to hold on until January when a Republican House would block any more military aid to Ukraine.

That is what Kevin McCarthy is now signaling.

It’s quite late in the game. But the White House at least is upping its Roe and Reform promise. If Democrats gain seats, Biden says, he’ll sign a bill restoring Roe. That’s good. But it’s not going to be enough. To really break through this late in the election cycle, it’s going to take pledges for congressional leaders, specific senators seen as conceivable hold outs on the filibuster and more. Specificity remains critical. Being specific makes the pledge credible, tangible. Saying “if more are elected” makes you wonder how many more. 10 more, 2 more. The point is to make it concrete enough that Georgia voters know it’s in their hand in the Warnock-Walker Senate race. That it’s in the hands of voters in Virginia’s 7th district in the Spanberger/Vega race. There’s time to make a difference but it needs to be a full court press and it needs to be specific — specific number of wins, a specific time frame in which Democrats will pass such a law.

We’ve already written a lot in recent months about the near certainty that a Republican House will threaten a national debt default next year to force Joe Biden to essentially undo the legislative agenda he passed in his first two years in office. I didn’t realize that they are apparently focused on major cuts to Social Security and Medicare, or as they are calling it “structural changes” to the two programs. I take this from this morning’s PunchBowl newsletter.

Punchbowl cites this BGov piece and apparently their own reporting. But I’m reminded that our Kate Riga was on this aspect of the story on Friday, indeed citing the same BGov piece.

A member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents has asked if the university system’s Morris campus has become “too diverse.”

Steve Sviggum, a former GOP Speaker of the House, asked the school’s acting Chancellor Janet Schrunk if the school, which had 58% white enrollment pre-pandemic and 54% now, had become too diverse “from a marketing standpoint.”

The Miami Herald has another richly reported article on the migrant bamboozling operation Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida ran in San Antonio, Texas — the one that left 50 Venezuelan migrants in Martha’s Vineyard and spawned an on-going criminal investigation in Bexar County, Texas. The article is paywalled. So if you’re a subscriber give it a read. If not I want to summarize a few key new pieces of information, drawn mainly from public documents the DeSantis administration has been compelled to divulged under Florida’s sunshine law as well as on-the-ground reporting from the Herald.

Quote of the day:

“I was a victim of the January 6th riot just as much as any other member of Congress.”

—Rep. Marjorie Greene.

I want to flag your attention to what is happening tonight at Evin Prison in Tehran. Evin is a notorious prison complex known for housing many of the clerical regime’s political prisoners, including dual citizens. The complex is the scene of a fire tonight along with gunfire and explosions. I hesitate to say much more about it since it is a topic in which I have no expertise; even for those who do it is very difficult to understand just what is going on. Who started the fire or how did it start? Who is shooting who? There are reports security forces creating a cordon around the prison, preventing civilians from approaching it. But the mix of events – a fire at a prison complex heavily associated with regime repression, gunshots and explosions, ancillary protests on the periphery of the complex – have a strong regime crisis feel to them. It seems to mark a qualitative escalation from the continuing protests that roiled the country over recent weeks.

This is just a tiny morsel of data. So it may simply be noise. But it caught my eye. Recent polls in two key senate races show big spreads between registered and likely voters. Traditionally likely voter screens tend to favor Republicans, who are more regular voters. In recent years though that has been less consistent. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted 9/26 to 10/2 in Nevada gave Catherine Cortez Masto a +3 advantage among registered voters and -2 among likely voters. A Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin conducted from 10/3-10/9 showed an even race among registered voters and Ron Johnson up 6 points over Mandela Barnes among likely voters.