I wanted to flag your attention to two articles on Hamas and the Israel-Hamas War generally.

On the fate of the hostages, the Times of Israel reports that senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad tells Al Jazeera that his group is not interested in releasing any more hostages, even for a ceasefire lasting multiple weeks. I take this as more confirmation of the point we discussed yesterday, which is that the remaining hostages, or at least a substantial number of them, are the sole remaining strategic asset Hamas has. Hamas’ leadership rightly see itself as in a war to the death with Israel. So they’re not going to give those hostages up.

Over the last three months many Democrats have gotten accustomed to seeing absolutely abysmal presidential poll numbers and reacting in one of two ways. Either they slip into despair or they wall off the information on the reasoning that we’re almost a year out from the election and the numbers have limited meaning so far in advance. There was a period in the middle months of the year when Biden was a bit ahead of Trump or the two were roughly tied and then starting in the fall Trump appeared to move meaningfully, though still only marginally, ahead. But something odd happened this week. It illustrated a few points about the ways in which polls operate, how they’re interpreted and what meaning we can draw from them.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss a major ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court, the myriad of Trump-related cases headed for the Supreme Court, and some actually non-horrible polls for Joe Biden.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.