It seems like longshot presidential wannabe and Problem Solver caucus stalwart Rep. Dean Phillips (D) can’t decide whether endorsing Medicare for All or denouncing DEI and other “woke” nostrums is the way to get over three percent in the national polls. I’m sure some disagree with me. But “DEI” is just a label. What matters is a candidate’s record and what policies they pledge to implement or support in the future. What is significant in Phillips’ case is that he appears to have scrubbed his campaign website of “DEI” language right after receiving a $1 million dollar campaign pledge from plagiarism influencer Bill Ackman who has become something of an anti-DEI crusader.

Phillips’ campaign didn’t say directly that it pulled the language based on Ackman’s criticism and cash. But Ackman is saying that. And Phillip’s campaign isn’t disagreeing.

Here’s a paragraph from Politico …

From Northern Virginia we have another one of those stories about significant election irregularities that you’ll likely never hear about since they don’t fit into the MAGA storyline that is all most political reporters seem to care about. I didn’t know about it myself until I got a note from longtime TPM Reader LB.

Our story starts in November 2020 in the Northern Virginia county of Prince William. The General Registrar in Prince William was Michele White. She resigned at some point in 2021, possibly because of the feral Trumper harassment that led so many election officials to quit during that period. She was replaced by a new registrar, Eric Olsen. Olsen found irregularities in down-ballot races in the 2020 election — but not ones great enough to affect the outcome of any race. Olsen then reported those irregularities to newly elected Republican state Attorney General Jason Miyares.

Roughly 110,000 voters turned out for last night’s caucuses. That compares to 187,000 in 2016. (2012 and 2008 were closer to last night’s numbers 122,000 and 120,000, respectively.) But that’s still the lowest turnout in more than a decade and dramatically lower than the last contest in 2016. To me the turnout number is much less significant than the result, which I discussed here.

But it’s not insignificant.

There are a few possible explanations. One is that it was incredibly cold last night. But let’s be honest: winters in Iowa are always cold as fuck. They’re used to it. More significant, Republicans could be pretty confident that the outcome of the caucus and the overall nomination battle are both pretty much settled in Trump’s favor. That is a big disincentive to show up. Those explanations, especially the second, get you pretty close to a good explanation.

But not all the way there.

For something like a year I’ve been predicting that Donald Trump is absolutely positively going to be the 2024 nominee. I was predicting that back when a lot of people really thought that Ron DeSantis was going to at least give Trump a run for his money. I don’t make confident predictions unless I’m certain there’s little chance of being wrong. But I must tell you that this result simply isn’t the victory most reporting makes it out to be.

The Republican version of the Iowa caucus is simply a vote, carried out by less formal means. Each participant writes down a name and that gets counted — no real caucusing. The final result shows Trump getting 51% of that vote.

That is not just a plurality win, the metric customarily used to judge this contest. It’s actually an absolute majority. Barely. (DeSantis has 21.2% and Haley 19.1%.) But everyone now recognizes that Trump is running as the de facto incumbent. Certainly he’s running as the universally recognized leader of the GOP. And yet he has only barely managed a majority in a state which — unlike, say, New Hampshire — is pretty tailor-made for his politics. To put that characterization into context, while Iowa is today is a fairly red state, it has long had a reputation as a state which has a very liberal Democratic Party and a very conservative GOP. The Iowa GOP caucus electorate especially is made up of a high percentage of conservative evangelical voters. It’s overwhelmingly rural. By any fair measure, 51% of those voters is underwhelming.