Before we head into a chaotic midterms election next week, Josh Marshall sat down with journalist Steve Clemons and political strategist Adam Jentleson to unpack a few theories about what Democrats did right and wrong ahead of this crucial election, and what we can expect to see unfold in Congress over the next several months. Josh digs deep into one layer of the conversation here, but you can access the full discussion below.

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Josh Marshall will lead a panel discussion tonight at 6 p.m. ET digging into various theories of Democratic messaging over the last few months leading up to the midterms.

He’ll be joined by two friends of TPM: journalist Steve Clemons and political strategist Adam Jentleson. Clemons is the editor-at-large for Semafor, a one-time blogger for TPM, and an old friend of Josh’s. Jentleson is the editorial director of the Battle Born Collective, an influential voice for filibuster reform, and a former chief of staff for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

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President Biden and his team have reportedly been planning to have the President deliver a speech on protecting democracy ahead of the midterms for some time. But the recent uptick in threats and political violence as we get closer to the election — including the very high profile attack on the husband of the woman second in the line of secession — expedited the urgency of the message.

The Republican challenging Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers next week has openly fessed up to his plan to target elections administration in the purple state in a way that ensures Republicans permanently control it.

It’s virtual, and anyone can join.

If you’ve been following my colleague Josh Marshall’s ed-blog posts the last several months, you’ve likely read a few of his pieces centered on the theory that Democrats should be putting the disastrous Dobbs decision at the forefront of their messaging campaign to voters this midterms cycle. His case has been simple: Democrats need to make the calculus clear to demoralized liberal voters. Yes, they had 50 seats in the Senate for the last two years, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the filibuster to pass Roe-like protections (or to pass any number of other Democratic priorities). Like it or not, there were two Democratic holdouts on the filibuster.

So Democrats, Josh argued, needed to go to voters with a clear promise: Give us two more senators, and help us hold the House, and we promise — we’ll restore the right to an abortion that the conservative Supreme Court took away.

After reports surfaced last week suggesting that the Jan. 6 Committee was struggling to find a lawyer on Trump’s team who was authorized to accept service of a subpoena, team Trump has reportedly been served.

Election conspiracy theorists and adherents of Trump’s Big Lie are running in races across the country this midterms cycle for high profile, state-level positions that will give them the authority to carry the torch of 2020-esque MAGA election challenges into the future.

Donald Trump has been holding meetings with allies, lawyers and MAGA Republicans in recent months to prepare for how exactly to contest the results of the 2022 election, Rolling Stone reported this weekend. In case it was ever a question — he plans to.

The team has reportedly been discussing legal and rhetorical avenues Trump and his allies might take to challenge the results in certain races that don’t go their way. The team is also discussing how aggressive to be in races where the winner is not known on the night of the election.

That brings us to Pennsylvania.

You’ve likely seen some headlines today about the trove of ex-Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s texts that were obtained by reporters for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, later, Politico. AJC’s article, published last night, detailed the messages’ highlights, and said they came from an anonymous source. The 59-pages worth of messages are from Loeffler’s final weeks in office before she was defeated by Sen. Ralph Warnock (D-GA) in the January 2021 runoff election.