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Let me give you a brief update on a story out of North Carolina, or rather rumors out of North Carolina. Because it’s really nothing more than rumors. But it could be real and could be a pretty big deal. We’re told that CNN is about to publish a story that is likely to, or could, knock Lt Gov. Mark Robinson out of the governor’s race in North Carolina. That’s pretty stunning because Robinson is a freakshow candidate even in the broader menagerie of GOP freakshow candidates. Hunter Walker had an early jump on his freak flag in this story from a year and a half ago. That raises the question of what could possibly be so bad, so insane, outrageous or criminal that it would knock him out of the race. The rumors suggest something of a sexual nature. There already was a story a couple week ago claiming, over Robinson’s denials, that Robinson was a regular at porn-shop viewing booths in the ’90s and early 2000s. So what could it possibly be? And don’t forget that a major shakeup at the top of the ticket in North Carolina could conceivably impact the winner of the presidential election.

Over recent weeks I’ve tried to share with you a series of questions about the campaign or features of the campaign that could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Most of these aren’t cases where you say “this campaign has to do this” or “this campaign has to do that.” They’re mysteries to me at least at a deeper level. The one I’d like to discuss today I’ve mentioned a few times in earlier posts.

Remember back in the spring the Trump campaign and really the Trump family did a sort of forced takeover of the RNC and as part of that move they closed down the RNC’s Get Out The Vote or field operations and decided to outsource that work to a series of super PACs of which Elon Musk’s America PAC and the Turning Point USA’s PAC are the biggest? This wasn’t totally out of the blue or not totally without some rationale behind it. The FEC recently made a ruling that gave campaigns and parties greater ability to coordinate with super PACs on GOTV work. So there’s some logic to that. But it’s not obvious on that basis why you’d shut down the RNC’s GOTV operations. So questions about that move have hovered over this. Was this just dumb? Is there some financial interest at work? Is it just part of asserting total control over the party apparatus? Or is it actually just a good idea, allowing the unlimited dollars of these PACs to up the party’s game? The weight of logic and some evidence points to some mix of the first few answers. But it’s been hard to totally rule out the last one.

I’ve written repeatedly over recent months about the politics of opacity in the Biden era. The debates that are in public are largely performative. The consequential conversations are among Senate Democrats and between Senate Democrats and the Biden White House. They are necessarily confidential and private. People who follow politics closely and feel deeply invested in the outcomes find themselves asked to take things on faith. Why didn’t they get to Wednesday’s milestone in April rather than the middle of summer? Why are Democrats still trying to find bipartisan ‘deals’ Republicans will always renege on.

I wanted to have a conversation with someone up there who can walk us through, at least in general terms, just how all this stuff is working and why it works that way. So yesterday we hosted an Inside Briefing with Sen. Brian Schatz (D) of Hawaii. We talked about all these questions and it provided a lot of helpful context to understand why these work as they do even if you don’t think it’s a good way for them to work. I learned a lot from it and I think you will too.

If you’re a member, you can watch our discussion after the jump.

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We’re going to need to wait for the dust to settle. But it’s clear there’s a major wave of hoax bomb threats today into this evening into swing states, seemingly in most and likely all cases targeting areas of heavy Democratic voting. Officials say they appear to be emanating from Russia. Key points are these. a) They’re not real. There are no bombs. There’s no danger. b) This is a focused efforts to disrupt voting and/or vote counting in Democratic areas. c) We know what’s going on here.

I want to start by thanking everyone who took a moment over the last 22 hours to contribute The TPM Journalism Fund. 310 of you have contributed since we kicked off our drive yesterday. Truly, thank you. And all of us here at TPM thank you. I explained below what the Fund is and why it’s so important. If you haven’t yet, please consider clicking here to become a contributor. More on that later today.

This morning I want to kick off by sharing the Inside Briefing we held yesterday with Adam Jentleson. Adam’s a former Harry Reid staffer and relevant to this present discussion perhaps the most important filibuster reform activist. He’s got a book on it called Kill Switch you can find here. As is usually the case with these Briefings, in addition to wanting to make it informative for readers, I was mainly interested to answer two questions for myself. First, where are we on reforming or ditching the filibuster? and Second, what on earth is happening up on Capitol Hill about passing a big infrastructure bill which is supposed to be the centerpiece of the President’s agenda?

If you’re a member the video of our discussion is after the jump.

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Let me share a few quick thoughts on newspaper endorsements. This comes after we learned that first the LA Times and now the Washington Post will break with tradition and not endorse a presidential candidate this year.

First, I’m not sure there’s any point these days in newspapers endorsing political candidates, especially presidential candidates. I don’t think much about it either way. But, especially in the case of the Post, this is a bad and cowardly development. We can’t know for certain what went into these decisions. But the most obvious explanation is that they have billionaire owners who, especially in the case of Jeff Bezos, have other business interests which are vulnerable to adverse regulatory and contracting decisions as well as government harassment of other kinds. Those are very real threats and ones that a lawless president has a lot of latitude to exact without much if any real prospect of redress. It’s not a habeas situation. These are just discretionary decisions in most cases.

Wednesday I mentioned Michael McDonald, the professor at the Univeristy of Florida who is an election data guru. Something I noticed in the first days of early voting was that most of the swing states that surfaced gender breakdowns for early voting showed around a ten point spread between men (~45) and woman (~55). There are more women than men and women vote more than men. So the difference didn’t surprise me. But that spread still seemed pretty big. So I asked McDonald whether that was a signal of any sort. He said, no, that’s roughly the spread you see in early voting.

But over the last couple days, both in my exchanges with him and in a few of his tweet updates, something else has come out of this. That ~10 point spread is about what we should expect from other cycles. But we’re also seeing a lot more Republican early voting. All things being equal that high rate of Republican early voting should be compressing that gender divide. But it’s not.

Florida has become the state where elements of a future, second-Trump-presidency America already come into view. We’re seeing some of these things happening right now in Florida. The example I’m about to share with you legitimately shocked me. (That’s a high bar.) It’s about the pro-choice ballot amendment which would restore Roe protections in Florida if it gets the support of 60% of voters. As in most other states, getting to 50% isn’t that difficult. 60% is much harder. To head off even the chance that the ballot initiative might hit that challenging high bar, the state of Florida is already spending a substantial amount of tax payer dollars campaigning against the initiative. Now we learn that the state is quite literally threatening jail time for the employees of stations that agree to run one of the ads for the pro-choice amendment. You heard that right — not sue under some claim of defamation but actual criminal charges.

When I first read this I thought it was one of those civil suits. Opposing campaigns will occasionally do this to scare stations out of running their opponent’s ads. I’ve never seen a state government do it, but particularly litigious campaigns occasionally do. But it’s not a civil suit. They’re threatening criminal charges.

A few fact points to explain what’s going on.

I wanted to share with you some of my findings about the mass mailing of Trump mailers to registered Democrats in swing states across the country. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole. So in part, understand it as such, an entertaining mystery. But I think it’s potentially a bit more than a rabbit hole. It also sheds some light on the dynamics of the campaign, specifically on the Trump campaign, which has firepower heavily weighted toward a series of super PACs and outside groups both for messaging and ground operations.

As I’ve discussed in a few posts, I started hearing from readers who are registered Democrats with long histories of straight-ticket voting who are being inundated with Trump mailers. In some cases it’s as much as two or three mailers a day everyday. Others aren’t quite that level of saturation. But lots of readers who fit in what we’ll call the category of “poor target” are getting them. The reports come from all the swing states, though they’re concentrated in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and North Carolina. They’re also in Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada, but it seems to be a bit less there. In all cases the recipients have never seen anything like it before. So it’s not just that this is what always happens in swing states. Getting this many flyers from any Republican campaign is totally new. It all seems to have started in the last couple weeks.