TPM Reader JK checks in on a Montana Senate candidate’s absurd claims about his emergency room visit after he accidentally shot himself while visiting a National Park in Montana.

Speaking as a trauma surgeon, you’re absolutely right about Sheehy. There’s absolutely no reason for doctors to report a bullet in someone, unless it just got there. People come in with “retained missiles” all the time. If there’s a healed scar over it, it doesn’t matter at all – it just means they can’t get an MRI.  And of course it’s obvious when someone has been recently shot vs years ago. The whole story is complete nonsense from bottom to top.

I’d missed this from a few days ago. At NBC News, TPM alum Sahil Kapur notes that Democrats use of abortion ballot initiatives to coincide with the November election can be seen as a kind of replay of the 2004 election in which the Bush campaign got state Republican parties and activists to work to get anti-gay marriage initiatives on the ballot to goose turnout for their partisans. There are some pretty basic substantive differences, of course. Abortion rights that existed in 2022 have close to disappeared in many of these states and the ballot initiatives would bring them back and in many cases expand them. At the time legalizing gay marriage wasn’t really on the horizon in any of the states in question. But the functional similarity is a point well-taken.

Whatever happens in Arizona in November, we got a preview of the difficulty Republican candidates will have in states where high-stakes ballot initiatives literally put abortion on the ballot. Shortly after Arizona’s high court ruled that the state must go back to the 1864 abortion law which forbids virtually every abortion, Kari Lake, probable GOP Senate nominee (and governor over the water) released a remarkable statement. She first denounced the 1864 law, which she said she supported as recently as last fall. She said she opposed today’s ruling. She then demanded Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Republican state legislature “come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.” She then said that the decision will be up to voters in the ballot initiative that will be on the November ballot — that is, the initiative she actually opposes.

The court decision out of Arizona reminds us there are lots of unknowns still to reveal themselves over the course of this election. This is a pretty big one. The state court ruled that Dobbs means the near complete ban on abortion under an 1864 law must be enforced in the state. If I’m understanding the ruling, it is for the moment stayed. So it doesn’t go into effect today. But it likely will pretty soon. Arizona abortion rights advocates say they already have sufficient signatures to get an abortion ballot initiative on the ballot for November. That’s not confirmed yet. But these groups have a lot of experience knowing the number of excess signatures required to be certain you’re going to get on the ballot. So it’s a safe assumption that that ballot initiative will be on the ballot. It’s just not certain.

So what we seem to be looking at is a situation in which abortion will become illegal and the only recourse is to win that ballot initiative in November. That’s disastrous near-term for Arizona women and potentially very good news for every Democrat on the ballot in the state.

I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to be too focused on polls more than six months before a presidential election. But since polls have had such a big impact on the political mood and almost everything about how Democrats see their candidate, their coalition and the election itself I think it’s important to keep an eye on them. Or rather, since you’re inundated with them via commentary, it’s worth actually looking at the polls themselves, especially when they’re in flux.

All to that end, for months President Biden has been between 2 and 4 points behind in the polls — basically since late summer. But over the course of March that’s reversed and the average of recent polls puts him either tied or slightly ahead.

Let’s look.