A lot of you are getting campaign text messages. If they’re pitches for money, those aren’t as important. But I’m particularly interested in ones that are putting nuggets of news in front of you to, in theory, drive your vote for one or the other candidate. If you’re getting these and haven’t requested they stop, I’m very interested to see them. Ideally, if you can screenshot them and send them to me at the regular TPM email, great. If you can cut and paste, that works too. Let me know what you’re seeing. And if possible, let me know where you’re getting them geographically and anything general about your political profile that might help me understand what kind of people the campaigns are sending them to.
The Beltway demand for Kamala Harris to do her ninth or twentieth “substantive” (read: mainstream media) interview is reaching a fever pitch in the wake of Harris’ campaign announcing a new round of podcasts, Late Night and influencer interviews coming right after her appearance on 60 Minutes. Yesterday’s Politico’s Playbook captured the mood in a newsletter edition that managed to be both catty and frivolous, a churning mix of trying to make “fetch” happen and “debate me, bro” hectoring. Yes, she’s doing a bunch of interviews, they announced. But sorry lady, they just ain’t the right ones …
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Florida has become the state where elements of a future, second-Trump-presidency America already come into view. We’re seeing some of these things happening right now in Florida. The example I’m about to share with you legitimately shocked me. (That’s a high bar.) It’s about the pro-choice ballot amendment which would restore Roe protections in Florida if it gets the support of 60% of voters. As in most other states, getting to 50% isn’t that difficult. 60% is much harder. To head off even the chance that the ballot initiative might hit that challenging high bar, the state of Florida is already spending a substantial amount of tax payer dollars campaigning against the initiative. Now we learn that the state is quite literally threatening jail time for the employees of stations that agree to run one of the ads for the pro-choice amendment. You heard that right — not sue under some claim of defamation but actual criminal charges.
When I first read this I thought it was one of those civil suits. Opposing campaigns will occasionally do this to scare stations out of running their opponent’s ads. I’ve never seen a state government do it, but particularly litigious campaigns occasionally do. But it’s not a civil suit. They’re threatening criminal charges.
A few fact points to explain what’s going on.
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