So, I’ve been trying to poke around further into my new favorite mystery: the GOP ground operation and what on earth is going on with it. So far, I’ve been looking back at articles I’d read on publication and rereading them, and at articles I had not read and reading them for the first time, for clues into the Trump/RNC ground game question that I’ve been discussing in recent posts. One thing I hadn’t fully grasped or perhaps had forgotten is that Turning Point USA and its chieftain Charlie Kirk had a big role in pushing for the ouster of Ronna McDaniel at the RNC. And the push seems to have been in significant measure about wanting to take over or play a bigger role in GOP field operations. So a substantial amount of the impetus for all of this appears to have originated with Turning Point and its campaign arm, Turning Point Action. So that’s one clue.

As I’ve explained, this issue of turnout operations and what we can glean about them is one of the things I’m most interested in finding out more about as we hurtle into the last 30 days of the campaign. None of the information I’ve found so far gives any definitive answers. I’m not even sure definitive answers are possible. But I’m going to pass on some interesting hints I’m finding. The thing you hear again and again about canvassing and ground operations is that you cannot just overwhelm it with money. Money is obviously critical. But you need a lot of institutional experience and time to make it work. With TV ads you really can overwhelm it with money. Get a billionaire with unlimited funds, cut some good ads and get them on TV. Done and done. One of the big factors operating now in swing states is that outside groups are paying 10 to 25 times the ad rates of campaigns. But still, unlimited money can help with that. Canvassing and field operating takes time and institutional experience.

One thing we’ve talked about a lot this year in the Backchannel and the podcast is changes pollsters have made to their methodologies over recent years, in large part because of 2016 and 2020 polling errors tied to Trump. Kyle Kondick, of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, posted two good links on this that I wanted to share with you. The first is this short interview with Professor Charles Franklin of Marquette Law School who runs what is generally considered the signature in-state poll in Wisconsin and one of the most reliable nationwide. (Some of you may remember that Franklin was our polling methodology advisor back in the days of TPMPollTracker.) Then there’s this short article which goes over the changes industry-wide.

Wars are not only bloody and murderous endeavors, they are also unpredictable. The specter of former forays into Lebanon looms over Israel’s current one: easy to get in, harder to get out. After the stunning assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as well as most of the secondary leadership of the organization over the last three weeks, we’re hearing voices in Israel and the U.S. talking predictably about a “new Middle East.” Meanwhile others in the international community and the U.S. talk about these new developments as an “escalation” out of nowhere — Israel looking for a new war, basically.

This is complicated stuff, like everything which happens in this region and especially everything tied to Israel, the Palestinians, and the states surrounding both. But I wanted to share some thoughts on why this escalation and Israel’s fight with Hezbollah are qualitatively different from anything that is happening in Gaza.

After days of hints at it, Democrats are now making a serious foray into Florida and Texas in a last-ditch effort to hold on to their Senate majority. Before calling it “last-ditch,” I wondered what to call it. Is that too pessimistic? Too optimistic? I’m really not sure. You know the background. Democrats went into this cycle with an almost historically bad map. One seat in West Virginia was, by universal agreement, hopeless. Beyond that preordained loss, Democrats had incumbents up in a several of the swing states and new candidates trying to hold existing seats in other swing states. On the other side of the ledger there were no obvious pick-up opportunities. Starting from those inauspicious beginnings, the Democrats’ map has held up remarkably well. In all but one case, Senate Democratic candidates go into the last month of the campaign either favorites or strong contenders. That one exception is Montana, where Jon Tester is now a decided underdog. Which brings us to Florida and Texas.

Are these races really plausible?

One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.

It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term.

When New York Mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021, I told a number of people that I thought he’d either be a great mayor or end up getting indicted for something. A baseball player who bats .500 is a god. So I’m feeling reasonably good about this prediction. I tried to see whether I’d written this down somewhere. Back in December 2021 I wrote on Twitter that “I think there’s a lot about Adams that is really what the city needs. Most of the things. But also concerned that he’ll get indicted for something.” A month later I explained the basis of my largely misguided bullishness on Adams. “For clarity, I’m not cheering anything from the last three days. I think a mayor rooted in the politics of the city’s black middle class (which is Adams’ base) is better for the city today than rooted in the politics of liberals in Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

This general point I still believe.

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared … You will be protected, and I will be your protector … Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free …You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” You’ve probably heard some combination of these lines and others more than once by now. Donald Trump first posted them on social media sites and then added them to the scripted part of his speech at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday night. They’ve been greeted with a mix of consternation and mockery. I don’t want to speak for women. But I think it’s safe to say that any woman who has some meaningful investment in abortion rights and reproductive rights generally would find these words some mix of chilling, infuriating, bizarre and absurd. As I read them they essentially say, Only I can be and I will be your total protector. In fact, you will be so totally protected that you will cease to be who you are. Especially coming from a man known to be a serial predator and court-adjudicated rapist — “rape” being the ordinary word, according to the judge in the case, for the acts Trump was found to have committed — these words seem to describe less being protected than engulfed.

Perhaps most simply the words are, as a number of observers have put it, creepy.

I’ve been trying to get my head around a number of issues going on in the campaign. So today I’m just going to flag a few things to keep an eye on.

First, we have something that we’ve discussed a few times. Earlier this year, as part of the Trump campaign’s full takeover of the RNC, Trump’s campaign took field organizing away from the RNC and essentially outsourced it to a series of super PACs including Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s America PAC. (Musk’s group is run by a team of former DeSantis campaign staffers.) That seemed to many like a risky and possibly self-destructive idea. In modern politics, ground operations are the main role of the national political parties during a presidential campaign. They have experience at it. Why would you hand it off to super PACs, which are often long on dollars but can lack basic institutional knowledge and experience?

I wanted to take a look at the polling news from this weekend and try to help you make some sense of where the race is. Obviously I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in November or necessarily which polls to believe. But I think I can provide some overview of and context for why different polls might seem to show different things, and how to think about that difference. Yesterday, NBC News released a poll showing Harris beating Trump by 5 points nationwide and 6 points if third-party candidates were added. Another national poll from CBS showed Harris 4 points up over Trump nationwide. But it was the NBC poll which got the most attention because poll watchers still give some extra credit to the big, largely phone-based polls from the major national media organizations.

Obviously, no single poll should bulk too large in anyone’s thinking. But what gave the NBC News poll a lot of attention wasn’t so much the result, which was obviously good for Harris, as the fact that it tended to match and confirm and perhaps amplify the trends we’ve seen from a lot of other polls since the debate. Those polls show Harris solidifying a small national lead, consolidating small leads in the Blue Wall states while running about even through the southern tier swing states. There’s been a large volume of polls showing that. But people wanted to see one of those big, high-priced, phone-based polls say the same thing. In part, that was because you have the Times-Siena poll, which as I’ve explained in the past is very respected but also has a totally disproportionate impact on the media narrative about the race, saying something different. That poll has continued to show a much closer race than the great majority of other polls. A nationwide poll from last week from Times-Siena showed a tied race at 47 percent after one a few weeks earlier that showed Trump ahead by 1 percentage point. So that NBC poll wasn’t just another solid poll for Harris. It made it seem a bit more like Times-Siena is an outlier. Not wrong necessarily but an outlier from the majority of campaign.