The first I heard of this was late this afternoon from TPM Reader EM. But even after EM shared a link verifying the story, I still couldn’t quite believe it was true. But it really does seem to be true. Not only have reporters from multiple local news outlets covered it, they also have pretty clear photographic evidence. Mailers going out in support at least of Colorado’s GOP House candidates Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd are being sent and paid for by the Arizona Republican Party.

So here’s the deal. The Colorado GOP appears to be under the control of one weird dude, Dave Williams, who spent most of the party’s money on preventing people from firing him as party chair, trying and failing to get himself nominated for a House seat and … oh yeah, one other thing, Lauren Boebert. Other Colorado Republicans tried to oust Williams but a judge ruled against them. El Paso Country District Judge Eric Bentley ruled against state party chair pretender Eli Bremer and confirmed that Williams is in fact the chair of the Colorado Republican Party. In any case, the point is that, for the moment, the Colorado GOP is basically the personal property of this guy Williams. Once that happened, Coloradans in at least two congressional districts started getting mailers for the local Republican candidate coming from the Arizona state Republican Party.

So what’s going on here? Why is the Arizona Republican Party, which has a contested Senate and presidential race, among others, funding campaigns in Colorado?

Here’s what appears to be happening.

I was just replying to a note from TPM Reader RG who was telling me about the situation in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District. It reminded me to remind you just how helpful I find these updates and additionally how much I enjoy reading them, especially in these final weeks of a general election campaign. I know about that race in the most general way; I know who the candidates are. But RG got me down into the details on who’s spending, what the ads look like, what the media markets are, etc. And we’re not talking about inside information. I don’t have the sense that RG is a political professional in any way, though he appears to be volunteering with one of the campaigns, just a politics-focused concerned citizen who knows his neck of the woods politically. In other words, probably like you and so many other TPM readers. So if you, like RG, have information I’d really love to know. There’s probably more going on if you’re from a swing state or in a state or district with other contested races. But let me know regardless.

I wanted to add a short post-script to the post below about Democratic freak outs. I realized in this context it might be read as “don’t worry! Kamala has this!” I don’t think that’s a fair or logical reading. But people understandably read things and interpret them in the context of the moment. So let me be clear: I’m not saying that. My point is more that there’s very little evidence that anything has changed or changed more than very marginally since two or three weeks ago when the mood was pretty dramatically different. Indeed, I not only hear from people thinking Harris is now going to lose the election. They’re already on to the mistakes she made that led her to lose the election.

My own take is one of very cautious optimism. That’s in part based on the current polling information and various hunches I have about turnout, polls, recent election cycles etc. Those hunches could be totally wrong. Which is why I don’t tend to write about them. By the hard evidence in front of us — which is itself not that hard — the race could easily go either way. Indeed, I’d add an additional point. People say this race is super close, maybe the closest ever. I’m not even sure that’s true. What we have is a very high uncertainty election. That’s not the same thing. I think it’s quite possible that either candidate could rack up a pretty sizable winning margin, at least in the Electoral College. There are just so many untested or minimally tested assumptions upon which the “closest election evah” hypothesis is based.

But again, back to my point. I’m not saying, don’t freak out, Kamala’s got this. I’m saying the race is very similar to where and what it was in the second half of September. Close then, close now.

I’ve had a few of you take me to task recently for writing so much about polls. I’ll take that under advisement, though I hear from many readers that they like those posts. The reality is that most political people follow polls closely, even if they wish they didn’t, and they want insights into just what they mean and how to interpret them. But today I want to discuss something a bit different, albeit still somewhat adjacent to polls. That is, what’s with the Democrats’ tendency to freak out, even in the face of the most limited kinds of disappointing news in polls or other markers of campaign performance?

We’ve discussed this phenomenon from various perspectives in recent years. But, big picture, why does this happen? Why do Democrats freak out like this?