Three Republicans were running in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary. Trump in June endorsed Amir Hassan, a Navy Veteran, former Guantánamo guard, and Department of Homeland Security official. Hassan was up against Thomas Smith, a retired engineer, and Al Lemmo, an anti-abortion activist. In July, Smith suspended his campaign and endorsed Lemmo, who had decried Hassan as a “possible Trojan Horse candidate and lifelong Democrat.”

On Tuesday, Smith, who was no longer running, won a pretty clean victory over his Trump-endorsed former opponent.

Though the AP called Abdul El-Sayed the winner of the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan as I went to publish this post, this race turned out to be much, much closer than people expected or what polls predicted. The margin ended up being just under 1% or about 15,000 votes. We become so entranced by polls that we often fall into thinking that a candidate like El-Sayed bobbled the race at the end or Stevens mounted a comeback. There may have been some late movement. But it’s important to remember that our narrative of the race was built around polls that were simply wrong. Very wrong. It was probably always much closer than people realized. Indeed, the margin is close enough that those polls might actually have shifted the outcome of the race by depressing Stevens’ turnout or juicing El-Sayed’s. It’s a good reminder that whether you’re a volunteer, a voter, an activist, or a campaign worker you play these things out till the very end. Polls are usually right. And they’re a good guide. Except when they’re not. And this was a big “except.”

It looks like we are going to get a big test of some cardinal (possibly outdated) assumptions about American politics. I’m thinking first about the Michigan Senate race (though we might have something similar in the Wisconsin governor’s race). Several recent polls show Abdul El-Sayed holding a consistent, substantial lead over Rep. Haley Stevens. The primary is on August 4. This has been presented as a prototypical Democratic establishment vs Bernie progressive/insurgent race. And in key respects it is.

El-Sayed has all the Bernie/progressive positions. He’s run a campaign that places a heavy emphasis on the Israel-Palestine issue. And he’s centered AIPAC in his campaign in a way that even for many longtime critics and haters of AIPAC (including myself here) has a distinct whiff of antisemitic conspiracy theories. To wit, yes, AIPAC sucks. They’re a blight. They are functionally a Republican operation these days. But they are not the secret hand guiding things in the background every time there’s a bad news story or reverse of fortune for some progressive candidate, which is basically the role they’re playing in El-Sayed’s campaign.

In press conference comments today, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened that state election officials could face jail time if they fail to cooperate with the White House’s purported efforts to “secure” the midterm elections, which seems to involve a range of illegal demands from the White House, Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. The specific demand is for states to feed their voter rolls into the federal “SAVE” database which purports to identify noncitizens on the rolls. Mullin seems to be saying that if states refuse to bend to these illegal White House demands, the federal government will then scrutinize those states’ election returns (by seizing ballots?) and hold state election officials criminally responsible for any illegal voting. (Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has already sent out threats all 50 states and D.C. along these lines).

We have here again the old story. States run elections in the United States. This is guaranteed and mandated by the federal Constitution. Congress can set uniform rules for administering elections. The executive branch plays no role at all in setting rules for elections or administering them. The White House’s strategy is to use illegal means (threatened criminal punishment against state officials) to assert power or compel authority the Constitution simply doesn’t allow. This isn’t how anything works. A president cannot legitimately create by force powers that the Constitution specifically denies him.