A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh talk about the campaign vibes, Trump’s misinformation campaign around recent hurricanes and the beginning of the Supreme Court term.

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

Before social media foreign subversion became a staple of partisan politics in the U.S., the first journalist to write about the topic for a big mainstream audience was Adrian Chen. He published a piece in The New York Times Magazine in June 2015. It was called “The Agency” and it told the story of the Internet Research Agency, the government-linked Russian troll farm which would become a centerpiece of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the long investigations that came after it. The IRA was owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner Group whose star would continue to rise over the next decade until he mounted an ill-fated rebellion against Moscow and later died “mysteriously” in a plane crash.

I mentioned on Monday that the DeSantis administration in Florida is literally threatening criminal prosecution of TV stations that run pro-abortion rights ads for the state ballot initiative to turn back Florida’s six week abortion ban. This piece in the Post largely repeats those earlier reports. But it does confirm that an additional station in Gainesville got the same threat letters. Presumably others have as well.

I wanted to share with you a few ideas, possible insights and caveats about campaign polls. These aren’t original to me in most cases, just some general points, observations, etc.

First, herding: Herding is the phenomenon in which even professional, good-faith polling operations start grouping together in the latter stages of a campaign because you don’t want to go too far out from the consensus numbers. Right now the national top lines have been between 2 and 4 points in Harris’ favor for a couple months. If you do a poll that gets you plus 10 in either direction, you’re going to think or are liable to think something’s wrong with your numbers. Somehow you’ve just got a spoiled set of data. Maybe you don’t release that poll or maybe you look again at the numbers and decide there are too few of some demographic subset and you re-weight that and it brings the topline back close to that 2-4 range.

It’s also the case that voter choice gets more settled in the final weeks of a campaign. So maybe the voters are actually herding themselves. There are lots of possibilities. But the general point here is that there are factors which can drive even ethical and professional pollsters in this herding direction.

When I asked to see the text messages you’re receiving, I was mainly interested in the presidential race and even more those coming from the right. I’m also interested in ones from the Harris side and from the big Senate races. It’s a fascinating and illuminating prism into an often subterranean part of the campaigns, and ones that can fly under the radar. But I was particularly struck by this text TPM Reader BG received in New York City.

It identifies itself as coming from a group called “Turn Left,” which is associated with Richard Ojeda from West Virginia. Ojeda’s name isn’t a household word. But you may remember him. He came to a fame as a West Virginia Democrat who voted for Trump in 2016 and then turned against him. He gained a lot of attention in 2018 and 2020 as a candidate who could give Democrats purchase in rural, Trumpy parts of the country. This ad combines the hurricane misinformation of the moment — $750 checks to storm survivors — with pretty florid and traditional anti-Semitic tropes about a “genocidal AIPAC” that has its “claws so deep in Washington” that it “cuts checks to bomb civilians while your neighbors drown.”

“This is what happens,” it continues, “when genocidal groups like AIPAC buy off our leaders. When the same corrupt politicians line their pockets with blood money, then look us in the eye and tell us there’s nothing left for healthcare, education or disaster relief.”

Full text after the jump …