A gratifying but also really fascinating note from TPM Reader MG explaining why he finally made the decision to sign up after reading the site for many years — the role of evolving readers habits and the decline of Twitter are very interesting to hear and also match some of my own experience. Needless to say, if you’d like to join MG in signing up, just click right here …

First of all, thank you and thank you to the entire TPM team for the top notch work you all do.

I’ve been a TPM reader for as long as I can remember and frankly feel a little sheepish that it took me this long to pitch in to support the work that you do. At some point, probably when my work life got crazy busy and I didn’t have as much free time, I started relying more on my Twitter feed to keep up with the state of affairs in the world. My Twitterverse largely consisted of all of the writers I had always been reading before but eventually I stopped reading their work and was instead just scrolling through the feed to keep up with the news. Not mindless scrolling….I felt like it was providing a play by play from a variety of sources that I trusted. But I wasn’t clicking through to anyone’s actual reporting anymore.

Then the slow erosion of Twitter began.

We’re four days into our annual TPM membership drive and we’re making progress. I try to make these pitches fun and punchy. But really … it’s super, super important. These drives are always something of a leap in the dark. We don’t know how they’ll go. So a really sincere thank you to all 202 new members who’ve signed up so far this week. Thank you! (If you’re game, shoot us an email and let us know why you chose to sign up.) If you haven’t, please just click right here and join us! You get access to everything we publish and depending on which membership level you choose you get reduced or zero ads which makes reading the site faster and less cluttered. Most important, you support our team’s work. You ensure TPM stays vital and independent. Just click right here.

As my colleague Emine Yücel just reported, Tennessee Republicans have voted to expel one of the three Democrats who participated in a protest that broke out in the state House last week, as children and parents showed up to demand expanded gun control in the wake of another school shooting.

Emine and I followed the livestream of floor proceeding closely all afternoon and the rhetoric was, honestly, shocking. As Republicans gave lengthy, cringe speeches about the importance of following House rules, demanding to know how Rep. Justin Jones (D) carried a concealed bullhorn into the House chamber, yelled about him wearing the wrong type of lapel pin and argued that the Democrat from Nashville was intentionally creating chaos on the House floor to get attention because he is young, Democrats pleaded with their colleagues to drop the embarrassing crusade.

There’s a specter haunting the Republican Party — the specter of abortion. While it’s difficult to say that an issue that is important to so many voters and that has been talked about in politics for decades is still underrated as a driver of recent political outcomes, that somehow manages to be the case. Debates over transgender rights, “parents’ rights,” crime politics and inflation drive more headlines. But abortion is turning the tide in more elections.

The American political class got an early heads up in the Kansas abortion referendum blowout less than six weeks after the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022. We saw it again in Wisconsin on Tuesday, as the liberal Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, trounced the conservative, Daniel Kelly, in this consistently 50-50 state by 11 points. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used her prodigious political talent and a host of issues to drive Republicans from power in all three branches of state government in Michigan. But the core issue has been abortion rights. Of course, abortion was likely the single, central issue — coupled with a broader rejection of Republican extremism — which turned the 2022 midterm election from a GOP rout to a Democratic upset. Abortion is now acting like an electoral riptide or a shark, especially across the northern tier of the country, unseen at the surface but pulling one Republican after another under the waves.