More than a year after President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard into Washington D.C. on a broad crime-deterrence mission, the once unthinkable scene of armed soldiers patrolling American streets has become the daily backdrop. A panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday delved into how long that would continue.
In a major escalation of its multi-prong attempts to interfere in the midterm elections, the Trump DOJ has given California 48 hours to take steps to prevent an unknown number of alleged noncitizen voters in Los Angeles County from voting — or face legal action, Reuters exclusively reports.
This new Trump DOJ initiative is different from its earlier, largely unsuccessful efforts to obtain voter information from various states. Instead, it is now demanding that Los Angeles County take affirmative steps to prevent the counting of ballots cast by people on a list provided by DOJ who it alleges are “likely noncitizen voters” who received mail-in ballots.
The Trump DOJ’s demands came in the form of a threat letter Tuesday to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber from acting Deputy Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter — an extraordinary intervention by the department’s No. 2 official.
The existence of the letter was confirmed by the Justice Department. It’s not clear how DOJ came up with its list, which was provided to Los Angeles County on a “password-protected thumb drive.” Past attempts by the Trump administration to identify noncitizens who are allegedly registered to vote have been deeply flawed and wildly inaccurate.
In the letter, McCotter sets an arbitrary 48-hour deadline for California to review the DOJ list, but the more alarming development is what other steps McCotter demands that California take, according to Reuters:
These are the most aggressive steps the Trump administration has taken in its jihad against mythical noncitizen voting, which it greatly exaggerates as a pretext for the federal takeover of elections, the delegitimization of free and fair elections, and the disregard of election results that it disfavors.
“Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” McCotter wrote in the letter, echoing one element of the Trump administration’s long-running disinformation campaign. McCotter threatened to seek emergency relief in court if California does not comply with his demands.
The latest move — challenging entire batches of ballots and threatening to go to court unless Los Angeles County undertakes specific steps in its handling of the election — comes as the election in California is already underway. Mail-in ballots were sent out to every voter in the state beginning on Oct. 5, the same day that ballot drop-off centers opened statewide.
This is the kind of Trump administration interference that election officials nationwide have been dreading and planning for this entire election cycle. The executive branch has no constitutional role in the conduct of federal elections, which is delegated to the states.
It’s not yet clear if the Trump DOJ sent similar demand letters to election officials in other states.
In another blow to President Trump’s U.S. attorneys scheme in blue states, a federal judge appears poised to disqualify Bill Essayli as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bloomberg reports.
Essayli was already disqualified by the court from serving as acting U.S. attorney, but the Trump DOJ tried to sidestep that ruling by making Essayli the first assistant U.S. attorney — with all the powers to run the office.
But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a similar case in Nevada, ruled that first assistants assume the power of the U.S. attorney only if they were already installed when the office was vacated.
D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is stumbling all over herself to get in on the targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) by the Trump administration.
The day after DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations executed a search warrant on Omar’s D.C. home in a what appears to be a bogus investigation into how her late father obtained naturalized U.S. citizenship, Pirro went on Fox News to declare that Omar is under separate DOJ investigation over her financial disclosure forms.
The public announcement of a criminal investigation by Pirro would be highly irregular at any time, but especially coming just three weeks before the election, further cementing the politicized nature of the Trump administration’s targeting of Omar … as if there was any doubt.
In the immigration investigation, family members of Omar have been issued grand jury subpoenas, the NYT reports.
You can be forgiven for thinking that the Trump DOJ had relented after six months and began sharing evidence with Minnesota in the three ICE shootings during Operation Metro Surge. Hennepin County prosecutor Mary Moriarty held a press conference in July announcing the evidence-sharing agreement that had been reached with DOJ.
But in new court filings yesterday, Minnesota officials, including Moriarty, revealed that the Trump DOJ ceased cooperating again after her press conference. And the impression they leave is that the agreement, which was struck with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and led to an initial round of evidence sharing, was quickly scotched by Main Justice after news of it broke.
In her declaration, Moriarty says that she spoke with U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen on Sept. 10, “who told me, in sum and substance, that evidence sharing from the USAO as agreed to in the June 26 letter would be on pause indefinitely ‘in light of challenges with D.C.’”
The new revelations come in a federal lawsuit that Minnesota filed in D.C. seeking to obtain evidence gathered by DHS and DOJ in the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota has already charged ICE agent Christian Castro in the Sosa-Celis shooting.
In Houston, the district attorney is considering charging an ICE agent who allegedly ran his vehicle over a Mexican national Saturday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. ICE’s claim that the man ran in front of the ICE agent’s vehicle is undermined by security camera footage showing the car veering toward the fleeing man. One of his legs was broken, not both, as previously reported.
WOW. Kristi Noem and Elon Musk, among others, "chose to turn the power of the federal government against a singular employee with an impeccable record of public service. … The attacks against Ms. Comans were based entirely on false information" and many officials "knew [they] were untrue."
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 2026-10-13T18:24:07.535Z
All the credit to the WSJ for the devastating series of stories that led to the forced resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle as U.S. ambassador to Greece. In surveying the aftermath of its work, the newspaper had a few more gems to drop about Guilfoyle’s final days:
Bad self portraits (the lyrics from the Lake Street Dive song are unbelievably on point): Guilfoyle decorated the official ambassadorial residence with large self-portraits.
AI did it: After the second major WSJ story, which relied on text messages showing her soliciting a major GOP donor to pay off her $100,000 Amex bill, Guilfoyle told White House officials that the text messages were AI-generated. “The officials didn’t believe her claims,” according to the WSJ.
Did she find out at the same time we did? This account raises the possibility that Guilfoyle found out that she was being asked to resign when it was announced by the White House, although that is not the only plausible interpretation:
During a Tuesday-morning prep session for his new press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first briefing at the White House, the president instructed Zacharia to tell the world that he was asking Guilfoyle to resign, people familiar with the matter said. Trump didn’t speak directly to Guilfoyle before making the decision, one of the people said.
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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for their free weekly newsletter to get the latest.
Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.
Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.
She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) and Rep. Mike Collins (R) held their second debate in the Georgia Senate race Tuesday, and many of the themes of the first reemerged. Ossoff turned over the many ways in which, even within the context of today’s Republican Party, Collins’ radicalism is on the surface. Collins struggled to return a blow, or to distance himself from the unpopular president.
Who won in 2020?
One of the moderators, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein, noted that Collins said Trump “won” the 2020 election as recently as June. Does he still beleive that?
Collins dodged, saying that “Joe Biden went into office” before pivoting to criticizing his presidency.
Ten minutes later, Ossoff returned to the question. “You didn’t answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”
“They know my views on that,” Collins replied. “There was a lot of doubt in that election.”
Fifteen minutes after that, Ossoff returned to it a third time. “You still haven’t answered tonight whether you believe Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election,” he said. “Here’s your third chance. Did Donald Trump really win the 2020 election? You want to answer, Mike?”
“I have said numerous times that Joe Biden was the president in 2021,” Collins said.
“Not what I asked,” Ossoff replied.
OSSOFF: You didn't answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?MIKE COLLINS: You know, the 2020 election. Everybody has seen my views on thatOSSOFF: What are they?COLLINS: There was a lot of doubt in that election OSSOFF: I didn't hear an answer
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:25:10.294Z
What’s up with all the white nationalists around Collins?
Collins’ white nationalism problem was again a theme of this debate.
Moderator Faith Jessie of Atlanta news station 11 Alive reminded Collins of Ossoff’s line last week — that he had “hired half the Third Reich” — and asked for his response. “Are you a white nationalist?” Jessie asked. “And what do you say to Black Georgians who question whether you will represent them equally?”
“I condemn any sort a hate speech,” he said. “Antisemitism, hate of any kind. It’s abhorrent. And I’ve fired people when things happen, fired them,” he added, a possible reference to his former chief of staff, who bragged of his efforts trying to get a Holocaust denier out of prison.
He then went on to suggest a link between people who feel “forgotten” and rising antisemitism. “We do have a problem with antisemitism and war and hate around the world,” he said. “These young people feel like they’ve forgotten and they’re just lashing out. And this hate speech has got to stop and we’ve got to educate them.”
Mike Collins makes apologies for white nationalists like his son in law: "These people feel like they've been forgotten. And they're just lashing out."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:17:57.415Z
About those Pinochet jokes …
Ossoff asked Collins about a joke he repeatedly made online, suggesting immigrants to the U.S. be tossed from helicopters — an allusion to extrajudicial killings carried out by right-wing Latin American dictators, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, a meme that the very online right loves to invoke.
“Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters,” Ossoff said. “I’d like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?”
Collins did not answer the question and pivoted to talking about the Laken Riley Act and border enforcement.
OSSOFF: Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters. I'd like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?MIKE COLLINS: *changes topic*
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:12:17.176Z
Since I was revising the post below as I got more information, here’s the latest on White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia’s apparent claim to have taken the bar exam in China.
Judd Legum revealed yesterday that notwithstanding Trump’s and Zacharia’s claim that she was an attorney, it doesn’t appear that she ever took or passed the bar in the U.S. Today reporters pressed her on whether this was true. Had she passed the bar? In what state? Zacharia responded that she took it “when I moved to China.” Reporters took that, understandably, to mean that she took the Chinese bar exam when she lived there between 2011 and 2013. The Washington Post reported, for instance, that Zacharia “said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.” But it’s more than that. Foreign nationals are not allowed to take the Chinese bar exam or practice law in China under any circumstances. Her LinkedIn bio says she worked at a Chinese law firm, Zhong Lun, while living in China. And that is possible. I assume it’s true. Foreigners can work at Chinese law firms but only for the purpose of advising on the law in the countries in which they are licensed to practice law. They are specifically barred from advising clients on Chinese law. I don’t know whether not having passed the bar in the U.S. would have been an issue on that front or not. Bottom line: In her first day on the job Zacharia gave everyone the impression that she took the bar exam in China. But that’s not true. Because she would not have been allowed to.
As I noted in the earlier post, new Press Secretary Katie Zacharia claims she passed the bar exam in China and to thus be an “attorney” despite never having passed the bar in the U.S. A Post article said that foreign nationals aren’t allowed to appear in Chinese courts. And I took that to mean that perhaps you could take the bar exam but not appear in court. (Many U.S. attorneys never appear in court. That’s only one part of practicing law.) But it looks more stringent than that. And it looks like Zacharia’s claim is likely false. It’s difficult to confirm a technical point like this about a foreign country. But numerous websites which provide information about practicing law in China say that foreign nationals can’t take the bar exam under any circumstances. Starting in 2021 there appears to have been a pilot program which would allow foreign national to take the patent bar. But even that required foreigners to have permanent residence which is apparently quite difficult to get. Foreign lawyers can work in Chinese law firms, but only to provide guidance about the law in the countries in which they are licensed to practice. (She appears to have worked in that capacity.) They’re specifically barred from interpreting Chinese law or acting in the capacity of a Chinese lawyer. So it’s pretty tight.
Again, maybe there’s some technicality that made this possible for her which doesn’t come up in any of the explanations I’ve found. But it seems like a pretty across-the-board ban.
Perhaps Zacharia was being cagey. She was asked at her appearance today where she’d passed the bar, in what state. She responded, “When I moved to China.” Reporters understandably took that to mean that she took the Chinese bar exam. But perhaps she was trying to hoodwink them.
More to come.
Late Update: This just-published article in the South China Morning Post says definitively that at the time Zacharia claims to have passed the bar in China foreign nationals were barred from taking the bar exam.
Eligibility rules for China’s national judicial examination in 2011, when Zacharia reportedly began working in Beijing, required candidates to hold Chinese nationality.
Foreign nationals were therefore ineligible to take the examination, a step towards qualification to practise mainland Chinese law.
Employment at a Chinese law firm does not, by itself, establish that someone holds a licence to practise Chinese law. SCMP has asked Zhong Lun to clarify Zacharia’s role and qualifications. The firm did not immediately respond.
President Trump stood by his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem while she weathered the blanketgate news cycle (when she reportedly screamed at a Coast Guard pilot after her blankie went missing); as she faced affair allegations; as she fashioned herself into the face of his administration’s ruthless immigration crackdown with her social media cosplaying; throughout the entire, disastrous Minneapolis operation.
It wasn’t until reports surfaced suggesting she had inappropriately doled out contracts to friends and spent millions of the department’s budget on advertisements that mostly featured her riding horseback near American landmarks — and Republicans began asking questions about it — that Trump pulled the rug out from under her. During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee back in March, Noem claimed Trump had signed off on the ads — the death knell to her career atop the agency carrying out the most barbaric aspects of Trump’s second term agenda.
While former Fox News darling-turned Trump family member-turned ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle officially accepted her ousting from Trump world in a post on Twitter Tuesday afternoon, her tale is similar. She faced the president’s wrath only because she did not hide her corruption well enough.
Allegations about Guilfoyle’s conduct while serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Greece — a position she was given around the time Don Jr. broke off their engagement and moved on to a Miami socialite — began surfacing in the Wall Street Journal in September. The reported conduct included allegedly threatening a Greek official, reportedly trying to bribe a Trump donor with influence in exchange for paying a credit card bill, and allegedly accepting improper gifts. Guilfoyle has denied the allegations and continued to deny them as she announced she’d leave the post Tuesday. But Trump began hinting on Monday that the hammer might soon drop. That’s potentially because the latest reporting from the WSJ on the Guilfoyle allegations included damning quotes from Guilfoyle doing the corruption, on a recording.
“Well, we’re looking at it,” Trump told reporters Monday when asked about the allegations. “We’re not happy.”
By Tuesday morning, Trump’s new press secretary confirmed her departure during the White House press briefing, and Guilfoyle posted a long message on X about her devotion to Trump world — despite the brutal and public sacking.
Serving as the United States Ambassador to Greece has been the honor of a lifetime. I will forever be grateful to President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for entrusting me with the extraordinary privilege of representing the greatest country in the history of…
— Kimberly Guilfoyle (@kimguilfoyle) October 13, 2026
Elon Musk is dumping heaps of money into the midterms and the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. waited til the final stretch of the election to make its big ad spending push. But does any of it actually matter?
On this week’s episode of The Polltober Show, Kate and Josh break down the spending disparity between the parties, and dig in to why Democrats might be better positioned than they appear. Plus, they talk through an exclusive memo with new House and Senate odds.
If you want your question answered next week, drop it on the YouTube comments on the latest episode of the TPM Show or the Polltober Show itself. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube page for all of our Polltober episodes, livestreams, and other original content!
I couldn’t think what to say about this beyond simply reposting the first two grafs of this Washington Post article …
The White House on Tuesday scrambled to answer questions about the legal credentials of President Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who made a brief and halting debut in the briefing room and later said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.
Trump called Zacharia “an attorney” in his Friday announcement of her appointment, and her LinkedIn profile says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Ric Grenell, a high-profile Trump adviser. Asked Tuesday where she had been admitted to the bar, Zacharia said China — not a U.S. state or D.C., where one would need to have been admitted to practice law in the United States.
It’s easy to get tripped up by the sheer volume of Trump II depredations — the corruption, the retribution, the destruction, and the absurdity of it all. Add in the proximity of the midterm elections, and there’s a risk of falling into the pedantry of category distinctions.
What’s an election interference gambit versus an appeal to racism? What’s a fit of retribution versus an attack on the constitutional order? What’s an abuse of power versus conspiracizing? One easy framing adjustment is simply to use “and” or “all of the above.”
The unparalleled early holiday morning search by federal agents of the D.C. home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) three weeks before the election perfectly captures the importance of allowing for an “all of the above” category. Otherwise, you can’t truly make sense of it all.
An Attack on Elections
An overt investigatory step against a sitting member of Congress up for election in three weeks is an astonishingly brazen abuse of power. The DOJ norm to refrain from such actions within 60 days of an election doesn’t quite do justice to how out of the ordinary this search was.
The DOJ norm was put in place before the widespread use of mail-in ballots stretched out Election Day from a single date to a rolling two-month election, which would caution restraint even farther out. And in fact even in the old days, notable developments in investigations, in my experience, tended to slow by the summer, after the primaries had locked in the candidates for the general election.
This is precisely the kind of pre-election ugliness we talked about Friday.
An Attack on Naturalized Citizens
The purported basis for the investigation of Omar is immigration fraud — based on a persistent but baseless far-right conspiracy that decades ago, when she was 12, her now-deceased father schemed his way into the country illegally.
The search warrant, as described to the New York Times, lists “potential immigration crimes under investigation, including false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork, as well as a general conspiracy charge.”
The underlying theory of the case, such as it is, is that Omar should be denaturalized. It makes the citizenship of all naturalized citizens contingent and dependent on who is holding power at any given time.
An Attack on Somalis
Black women — see, e.g., Lisa Cook, Fani Willis, Letitia James — are a favorite target of Trump. Omar is Black and Somali and from Minnesota, a trifecta of Trump race-baiting, smearing, and dehumanizing. The search of her home came just a few days after Trump tried to instigate Minnesotans into a race war against Somalis. The message is so rancid: Omar doesn’t belong here, conned her way in (as a child), defrauded her way to financial prosperity, and has no right to be here, let alone in Congress.
An Attack on Congress
The executive branch enforcing the law against members of the legislative branch has always required a delicate balance of constitutional imperatives. There is nothing delicate or well-balanced about Trump’s ongoing attacks on Congress’ constitutional role. The Omar investigation is another in a series of threats against all members of Congress and against the legislative branch’s constitutional role.
An Attack on Elected Democrats
The Omar search is made worse because it comes after President Trump targeted her for years and publicly announced in January that a criminal investigation of her was underway. He has made the retribution element abundantly clear. It’s part of his broader attack on elected Dems — not merely a rhetorical attack but an abuse of his office to unleash the power of the federal government against his political foes.
It is all of the above — and more.
One other notable element of this retributive investigation: It is being helmed by Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of DHS, not DOJ. HSI has been in the lead on some of the most glaring retributive investigations in recent months. With a bloated budget, DHS, across its many component agencies, has police and investigatory powers that lets the Trump White House bypass or sideline DOJ. The FBI and DOJ aren’t sidelined completely. HSI can’t prosecute cases without DOJ, and DOJ had a role in obtaining the search warrant for Omar’s home (which, dismayingly, a D.C. federal judge signed off on). But this adds to the evidence that DHS is Trump’s favored tool of authoritarianism.
If there was any doubt that the Omar case is being run out of the White House, the administration did little to hide it. A senior Trump administration official told the Washington Post that in addition to Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow, the investigation involved White House deputy homeland security adviser Anthony Salisbury. I can’t emphasize enough how far over the cliff’s edge we are with White House-directed investigations.
The worst predictions of what a second Trump term would be like are coming true right before our eyes.
There will be a lot of equivocating about all the times search warrants have been executed on members of Congress for corruption investigations and the like, and it can't be stressed enough in how many ways HSI raiding Ilhan Omar is extremely not like that.
— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) 2026-10-12T12:48:26.501Z
It’s not just Ilhan Omar. You can feel the ramping up of retribution from President Trump as the midterm election draws closer:
D.C.: U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of D.C. damned near lost her mind in an emergency hearing over the Trump administration’s holiday weekend removal of more than 400 trees from a National Park Service golf course in the nation’s capital that President Trump wants to redesign unilaterally. Reyes had previously ordered that the Trump administration provide notice to the plaintiffs before any major changes were made to the course — and time for the court to address them. Instead, the administration provided notice at 5 p.m. on the Friday of a three-day weekend and removed the trees on Saturday. Reyes became the latest federal judge to rue having trusted the administration and given it the benefit of the doubt. “I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” she said.
New York: The Trump DOJ apologized to a federal judge in Manhattan after pro-Trump TV ads paid for by the federal government continued to air after the court ordered an immediate halt to the ads on Sunday evening. The DOJ lawyer told the judge that he emailed her temporary restraining order blocking the ads to DHS counsel 72 minutes after it was issued, but DHS counsel didn’t see the email until the next morning. Notably, the Trump DOJ had stopped short of defending the legality of the ads in court, arguing instead that the ads were already scheduled to stop running so the case was moot.
holy shit — a protester at the Trump rally gets physically assaulted after they interrupt the rally by a man who punches her in the face. Trump smears the protester as a "fat guy"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-12T23:46:07.086Z
Surveillance video captured an ICE agent appearing to strike a fleeing immigrant Saturday morning near Houston. The man, who was apparently not the initial target of ICE, reportedly suffered two broken legs in the incident.
Even as President Trump was publicly dangling the possibility of firing Kimberly Guilfoyle, the WSJ was cranking out another in its series of wtf stories on the U.S. ambassador to Greece: “At Davos, Kimberly Guilfoyle Boasted of Private Jet Trips, Luxury Stays.”
The WSJ didn’t just have witnesses to Guilfoyle’s grasping at Davos in January. It had a recording of her, too. Some of these quotes, y’all:
Alas, we learned this morning from the White House press secretary that President Trump has asked Guilfoyle to resign. It was fun while it lasted.
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Ever since he contributed to the White House ballroom project last year, things have gone well for Konstantin A. Sokolov: the Treasury Department gave a company he manages a license to get around international sanctions against Russia. The State Department appointed him to run a $201 million foreign investment fund in the Caucasus. And, per sources familiar, he convened meetings to discuss investments related to Donald Trump Jr.’s VC firm, 1789 Capital.
It’s a remarkable winning streak for the Russian-American investor, who, until 2025, had a meager public history of political giving.
With three weeks until Election Day, those who evaluate the electoral landscape — race raters and prognosticators — are bringing their analyses of various contests in line with the ongoing wave of rosy polls for Democratic candidates. Toward the end of last week, one race rater, Cook Political Report, moved its assessment of 18 House contests toward Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, another race rater, changed its assessment of Alaska’s governor and Senate races, which it had rated as “toss-ups,” to “leans Democratic,” and shifted four House races toward Democrats.
TPM also obtained a not-previously-reported memo from Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy that advises hedge funds and institutional investors about what to expect from global elections, among other topics. It upgrades the odds for Democrats in both chambers of Congress. The consultancy now places the odds that Democrats flip the House at 90% (up from 85%) and the odds that they flip the Senate at 60% (up from 55% at the end of September).
It predicts a growing likelihood (40%) of Democrats winning a 20-plus seat majority in Congress, based in part of Democrats’ growing numbers on the generic congressional ballot. That’s a far cry from the outlook for the GOP last spring, amid its post-Callais gerrymandering onslaught. And the memo predicts that Republicans’ last-minute deluge of money is “probably too late” and will not be enough to save them. “Evidence that spending has swayed voters is scant,” it reads.
This is all going on as the Democratic Party’s approval rating remains not-great, though recent polling shows it to be rising. Here at TPM, we have a theory of what’s going on there: Voters are not happy with how Democrats have fought Trump. That does not mean they are happy with Trump — in fact, the Democratic Party’s low approval, per this theory, is an outgrowth of Trump’s low approval. It leaves room for voters to rally behind new Democratic candidates while maintaining their discontent with the party writ large.
But that could, of course, be wrong, and, under other theories, it may speak to weakness in Democratic support that the polls are not otherwise flushing out.
The Eurasia Group memo sees Republicans’ best hope now as the possibility of a massive polling error. “We think that polling misses in 2020 and 2024 mostly resulted from underestimating Republican support, especially among voters without a college degree, when President Donald Trump was on the ballot, and that there is no reason to expect similar bias this year,” it reads. “However, this kind of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and the possibility that it recurs is a major reason our odds for Democrats are not higher.”
This electoral backdrop is essential for understanding the latest travesty in Minnesota, where Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D) house was raided Monday as part of a criminal investigation that “Border Czar” Tom Homan teased a month ago.
This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Donald Trump’s ability to jail millions of people without even a bond hearing depends on what the Supreme Court thinks about one man’s case.
I’ve been in a conversation over the last few weeks about a possible piece I might write for another publication about Democrats and the politics of masculinity and power, particularly how this relates to how young men have shifted to the right in the Trump era. I mostly think that this is an issue that affects Democrats generally, and is not just narrowly about this or that demographic group. This has been a theme in lots of conversations at TPM over the last 20 months when it comes to the extra-ideological division among Democrats between “fight” and accommodation and civility. Going back even further, to late 2004, I’ve been writing about what I call “dominance politics,” or, originally, “bitch slap politics.”
I thought of this this weekend because there was a blip of attention to comments from David Brooks on The Newshour. “The insinuations that El-Sayed is involved in terrorism because he’s Muslim, ridiculous. Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it’s time to shut up. That’s just not what we do here in this country.” There are a slew of problems with this. Not least of which are false equivalence and appeals to ethnic hatred and bigotry. Ossoff didn’t call Mike Collins a Nazi. What Brooks is referring to is Ossoff’s debate swipe when he told Collins, “You’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online.” This isn’t some random swipe. It’s been one of the biggest stories of the campaign season that week after week reporters keep finding members of Collins campaign, political operation or family who are associated with far-right or neo-Nazi individuals and organizations or who distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. This is merely an aggressive statement of facts that are unambiguously in the public record. But it’s not the specifics of Ossoff’s attack or Brooks’ tut-tutting I want to focus on here. It’s the more general and more important issue of tut-tutting, elite gatekeeping and how this relates to how Democrats operate in the public sphere.
President Donald Trump has been sending checks to millions of Americans ahead of the midterms, seemingly in an effort to encourage voters to forget Republicans’ recent destructive actions making healthcare harder to access and afford.
This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
On June 25, 2013, the Roberts Court handed down their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s “preclearance” condition, which required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to get permission from the federal government before they could change any policy related to their elections. The country had changed dramatically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; the “strong medicine” of the Voting Rights Act, he argued, was no longer needed, let alone justified. But Michael G. Miller and I show throughout our new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built – and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act just how misguided that reasoning was. In the parts of the country freed from preclearance by Shelby County, our electoral institutions have grown demonstrably less open to Americans of color.
When Mike and I started working on what would become An American Problem, a promise made by Justice Roberts in Shelby County still held. “Section 2” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he wrote — the section containing the tools allowing litigators to attack election laws and policies that disproportionately harmed voters of color ± “is permanent and applies nationwide.” Although the Shelby County majority was happy to invalidate the preclearance regime that June morning, they told the country that tools remained still for removing discriminatory laws from the statute books.
But this is no longer the case.
This story was originally reported by Sara Luterman of The 19th. Meet Sara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
More than 25 years ago, Lois Curtis called a lawyer with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society from a pay phone in a hospital hallway. She had an intellectual disability and wanted help to get out of the state hospitals where she had lived for most of her life. Instead of spending her days heavily sedated and shuffling between the day room and the place where she slept, she wanted to be in her own apartment, to make her own decisions about what to do with her days.
“She’d say, ‘Get me out of here. Would you please get me out of here? When am I getting out of here?’” recalled the lawyer, Sue Jamieson, in an oral history for the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
With representation from the legal aid group, Curtis and her co-plaintiff, fellow Georgia resident Elaine Wilson, brought a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in 1999. In Olmstead v. L.C., which stands for Lois Curtis, the majority held that the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act guarantees that people with disabilities have a right to live outside the walls of asylums, state hospitals and nursing homes.
More than two decades later, that right is under threat. In June, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice published a memo stating that the federal government has no obligation to enforce Olmstead. In August, the DOJ began withdrawing from cases where it had previously been defending people with disabilities (and their families) who wanted to receive care in their own homes.
As we have this ongoing discussion about AI, I want to return to the question of scale and externalities and how they are the defining feature of the Silicon Valley economy. We can’t make any sense of today’s discussion of LLMs and AI without placing it in that context.
“Externalities” are all the byproducts and secondary effects of, in this case, a business enterprise. If you make paint or industrial solvents you create various kinds of pollution in the process. How is that dealt with? Specifically, are you, the paint or solvent maker, responsible for dealing with those consequences? Even more specifically, do you have to pay for dealing with those consequences or are they absorbed by the society at large while the profits of the enterprise go exclusively to you? “Absorbing” those consequences can mean accepting levels of illness, diminished quality of life or simply having society at large pick up the tab for various kinds of remediation. The externalities are really just costs, but often semi-hidden ones. A huge amount of public policy deals with properly or improperly bringing costs and externalities into alignment.
With Election Day less than a month out, it seemed like a good time to check in on some of the weirdest and worst campaign ads of the 2026 cycle. There are already some doozies out there. Some make gratuitous use of AI, and a good number involve rampant transphobia, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising. Per the Washington Post, the GOP is leaning particularly hard into AI ads, with Republican candidates and groups behind 80% of the 164 AI spots tracked by the Wesleyan Media Project this cycle. The party plans to spend a whopping $1 billion on ads in the final lead-up to the election, much of it coming from the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc., though it’s unclear how much of a difference that river of cash will make in improving the GOP’s grim electoral prospects.
The campaign spots highlighted below are just a small sampling of what’s out there. If there are other goofy or off-putting ads we should know about in your area, drop us a line at talk@talkingpointsmemo.com
‘Tough Mountain’ Values Involve Shooting People
Chuck Edwards abruptly dropped his reelection bid to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in August after the House Ethics Committee found that he gave uniquely creepy gifts and poems to young female staffers. So the GOPer tapped to replace him, state lawmaker Jennifer Balkcom, had a narrow window to introduce herself to voters. The vibe she’s going for, apparently, is “tough mountain wom[a]n.”
An ad put out by the National Republican Congressional Committee shows Balkcom sitting beside her mother, identified on screen as “Momma.” “Mom raised us on her own. She taught us to be strong. And when someone broke into our house, she shot ‘em!” “You break into my house, you’re going to get shot,” her mom agrees, smiling.
This is apparently proof that the Balkcom women are fighters, and that the candidate will champion Hurricane Helene recovery funds and lower healthcare costs.
Forced Trans Teen Surgery in Texas
The GOP is pulling out the tired “X Dem candidate is for they/them” line again. In the Lone Star state, Texas PAC, a super PAC linked to Senate Republican leadership, is going after Democrat James Talarico by falsely claiming that he supports “using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” They’re apparently getting this from Talarico’s vote, as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, against a measure that prohibited gender-reassignment surgeries for children, which is not the same thing as voting to approve the use of taxpayer funds for such procedures.
The ad is misleading and its transphobic message is played out. But at least the AI is amusingly bad. As the Houston Chronicle’s Gwen Howerton describes it, “a Latino boy gets hit with a Transgenderification Beam and turns into a beautiful woman.” The kid ages a good 10 years via the special Animorphs-like transition.
The spot is one of several that seeks to boost Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid without actually mentioning Paxton at all, which makes sense given how little people like the man. Paxton’s estranged wife, state senator Angela Paxton, who had filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” alleging that her husband cheated on her, put out an ad urging voters to close their eyes and support the whole GOP ticket. “In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team; it’s about getting the whole team across the finish line,” she says.
Trump Threatens Us in a Hallway Again
In another 2024 throwback, Trump is literally just releasing a presidential campaign ad he ran that year again — this time with funding from the U.S. government. The black-and-white spot, titled “The Final Battle,” shows a somber Trump walking down a hallway, glowering into the camera. “We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists,” he says in voiceover. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” Trump’s pledge to get rid of the “warmongers” in our government hits a little differently seven months into the war he personally launched in Iran.
Though the White House insisted this and other pro-Trump spots funded by the government are simply “public service announcements,” not midterms ads, he reluctantly agreed to have his super PAC pay for the rest of them. That of course doesn’t mean he’ll reimburse the government for the $10 million the admin has already spent on these ads, though.
Steve Hilton Manages to be Both Confusing and Horny
Steve Hilton appears to be going for the “all press is good press” strategy in his long-shot bid to become California’s governor. The Republican candidate put out an innuendo-filled ad that confusingly suggests two progressive, lesbian Gen Zers are going to “just try” voting for Hilton.
It depicts two girls with dyed hair and piercings sitting on a bed in front of an LGBTQ flag on the wall, as indie music plays softly in the background. One says “I’ve never done anything like this before. What if my dad finds out?” And the other encourages her to give it a try anyway. As the camera pans to their laps, it turns out that “it” is actually casting a mail-in ballot for the Republican nominee. The ad ends with the music abruptly cutting out and the second girl urging the first to “lick”…the envelope closed. California Republicans and Democrats were quick to denounce the ad as uncomfortable and “weird.” The YouTube comments alternate between calling Hilton a creep and saying he’s made his sexual proclivities clear. My personal fave: “So be gay and vote by mail. Got it.”
Senate Republicans Just Make Stuff Up to Target Sherrod Brown
The Senate Leadership Fund is out with a different anti-trans spot in Ohio, and this one happens to be fully based on lies. As the Cleveland ABC affiliate puts it in the headline: “Woman accusing Sherrod Brown of forcing transgender surgeries isn’t from Ohio, didn’t have procedure as minor.” The ad features social media influencer Soren Aldaco, who blames Brown for forcing minors “like her” to undergo “childhood sex change surgery.” The ABC reporter found that Aldaco is actually from Texas, where she sought a double mastectomy at age 19.
It’s illegal to perform gender-affirming care procedures on minors in Ohio, and Brown has simply said that he thinks families and doctors — not government officials — should be allowed to make medical decisions about their healthcare.
The Classic Crazy Woman Trope, But Make it AI
AI ads are cheap, so candidates in state legislative races, which have less money sloshing around, have embraced them. Take Sen. Michael Lee, who is running to represent North Carolina Senate District 7. His ad, “Bonkers Bichler,” features an AI deepfake version of his opponent, Jessica Bichler, who is a yoga instructor and studio owner, doing yoga poses, meditating, and banging a gong. Because doing yoga means you’re a dang kooky hippie.
The bulk of the YouTube comments criticize Lee for pushing AI “slop,” being weird about a woman’s appearance, and mocking an extremely common form of exercise. “I wish he would spend more timing fixing our water issues and less time making fun of people who do yoga,” one reads.
By Allegra Kirkland
For nearly two years now, I have been extensively covering the various — some outright illegal, some legally questionable — ways the Trump administration has been trampling Congress’ power of the purse. Underneath all the technicalities and legal analysis lies the power dynamic it creates for Congress, specifically for the upper chamber, where most of the deal-making around appropriations and government funding happens.
As the Trump administration undermines Congress’ constitutional power, it’s also fueling the partisan polarization that is already at near historic highs. Bipartisanship has been dropping for some time, and the underlying trust issues between the two sides are growing.
At the core of all it, right now, is President Donald Trump.
Sources and congressional Democrats blame Trump and his admin for eroding the ability of lawmakers to work together on basic legislation, especially when it comes to government funding negotiations. How do you make a deal with someone who will shake your hand, then turn around and break that deal?
If you like pop culture references like me, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, put it this way:
“In Star Wars Episode V, Lando Calrissian makes a deal with Darth Vader but Vader breaks the deal,” Kogan told TPM. “In response, Lando says, ‘You said they would be left in the city.’ Then Vader turns to Lando and says, ‘I’m altering the deal. Pray, I don’t alter it any further.’ That’s exactly what Trump does.”
Kogan continued: “He turns around and he says, ‘I know we had a deal. I know it took months and months and months and months to make that deal. I know I looked you in the face and I said, you got a deal. I shook your hand and then I signed it into law. But I’m just going to break it. I’m just going to do whatever I want.’”
By Emine Yücel
This was just sent to me.
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 7, 2026
The photo was taken at a DMV today in New York City.
Why does the credit card machine at the DMV in Mamdnai’s NYC have the Palestinian flag as the screensaver on October 7th? @ZohranKMamdani disgraceful.
Deliberate and intentional. pic.twitter.com/UZDHOqgnU1
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Answers below
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I’m heading out on maternity leave until February! Will be having my second kid. Please send any TV and podcast recs, tips on navigating sibling dynamics, and specific advice on raising two boys to have good politics and emotional intelligence in This Environment to allegra.kirkland@gmail.com
And thanks to Derick and the rest of the team for holding things down at The Weekender until I’m back!
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“Look, $4 gas, $6 diesel is unacceptable. I think we all agree on that, but it’s still not enough to vote for a communist.” – House Majority Whip Tom Emmer
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Bari Weiss’s The Free Press is nothing if not predictable. Launching in the wake of the #MeToo movement and during the rise of what is now, unfortunately, referred to as “Woke 1,” The Free Press (née Common Sense 🙄) assigned itself the mission of protecting free speech. Never particularly subtle that they were really only interested in protecting the speech of the rich and powerful, Bari Weiss and co. quickly developed a formula of inverting reporting on alleged sexual abuse or bigotry by powerful figures to instead cast doubt on the victims. Under the pretense of “just asking questions,” The Free Press recast victims as political actors, either in cahoots with the mainstream media or using the media’s gullibility and/or commitment to wokeness to advance their agenda. This victims’ agenda, per their narrative, was inevitably to punish and silence the powerful, who they hated because the powerful were (here you can play a game of FP Mad Libs): white, rich, capitalists, men, successful, cisgender, conservative, good looking, etc. In the view of the Free Press, these victims weren’t victims at all, but collectively a censorious mob of college students, minorities, and feminists who would gleefully — and had the power to — scratch the First Amendment from the Constitution. Luckily, the “Honest. Independent. Fearless.” journalists at the Free Press weren’t going to let that happen. If, in the pursuit of this mission, they just so happen to become the publication of choice for the billionaire class, well that’s capitalism baby!
It comes as no surprise then that the Free Press is all over the Cornell fraternity rape story. In a classic victim-blame narrative inversion, FP writer Caitlin Flanagan wonders if “Jane Doe” might have been “looking for” something at the Chi Phi fraternity house. More egregious, the publication paid to promote the story on Facebook with the framing that women know that fraternities are bad places but go to them anyway. In other words: there is no fixing fraternities, we should focus on fixing the women. The fact that the Free Press paid to promote this ad suggests they know it’s rage bait. They know how our current media ecosystem works, how to game it for attention, and how to win favor and money from the powerbrokers. Just don’t get fooled about how they work. The words honest, independent, and fearless don’t come to mind.
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Danish artist Jens Galschiøt unveiled a sculpture depicting a naked US President Donald Trump surrounded by golf equipment. It was unveiled on the grounds of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg.
— CNN (@cnn.com) 2026-10-07T11:00:28.964949945Z
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Trivia answers: 1) Dennis Hastert 2) Fox News contributor, of course 3) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
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I’ve mentioned a few times that I think Democrat Angie Nixon, just based on my watching her in campaign appearances and interviews, is a very strong candidate — certainly the most canny and able of the DSA-affiliated major race candidates I’ve seen this year. Being a strong candidate, to be clear, is a different metric from whether you’re a good match for a state or district. But I also think her winning isn’t impossible. Same story we’ve seen in other places: bad bad climate for Republicans and an at best meh GOP incumbent. Ashley Moody is a DeSantis crony who was basically gifted the seat when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State.
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