Can the Democrats Really Be Doing This Well?

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.”

Trump and His DOJ Go All In In Minnesota

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.

• Reports suggest the investigation focuses on immigration paperwork Omar’s father filed on her behalf decades ago.
• The right has been agitating for awhile to denaturalize Omar, with Fox News and the New York Post even publishing explainers on why doing so would be so hard in order to keep their readers’ expectations in check.
• The November election looms over all of this. Some polling has suggested the contest between Peggy Flanagan (D) and Michele Tafoya (R) in Minnesota is close. Trump has, accordingly, been stoking anti-Somali hate in the state, as we noted on Friday. That continued over the weekend, with Trump stating in Ohio: “The Republican Party, we believe that Somalia bandits, third-world gangs, and jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio, they do not belong in America. We got to get them the hell out of here.”
• The DOJ typically has a “blackout” period within 60 days of an election during which it refrains from taking steps in political cases. That was ignored here, with Attorney General Todd Blanche, per the Washington Post, signing off on the raid.
• TPM will have more on this developing story later today.

Agents Instructed To ‘Misrepresent Themselves’

Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!

Democrats released another damning whistleblower disclosure this week. This one alleges some disturbing, and potentially illegal, activity from the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing effort to access state voter rolls as part of the Trump administration’s relentless campaign to unearth proof of President Trump’s conspiracy theories about noncitizens voters. 

Chaos and the Courts

A set of dueling federal court decisions sets the stage for the kind of legal flurry we can expect between now and the midterms.

As Kate Riga reported for TPM, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who oversees appeals for the federal judicial circuit that includes Missouri, denied an effort by the state’s Republican leaders to use a gerrymandered map in the midterms. Moments later, a federal district court judge ruled in another case that those maps should be used.

To catch you up: Voters in Missouri can put any act of the state legislature to a referendum — including these new maps. But Secretary of State Denny Hoskins invited full chaos by waiting months, until the primary election was underway, to reject a petition by thousands of voters to hold a referendum on the new maps, which were produced at Trump’s request. Last week, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously that voters should get their referendum, and the pre-gerrymander maps should be reinstated. Thanks to Hoskins, the state now faces the bizarre situation of having held its primary under different maps than it will use in its general election.

That Kavanaugh rejected Missouri’s appeal without referring it to the full court suggests he felt there was very little chance his colleagues would go along with it. But, as Kate details, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark — a Trump appointee who is chief judge in the Eastern District of Missouri — on the same night issued a temporary restraining order requiring Hoskins to use the new, gerrymandered maps. The orders point in different directions, and will need to be resolved somehow in the coming days. The main group challenging the gerrymandered map, People Not Politicians, immediately appealed Clark’s order to the 8th Circuit.

This set of court decisions does not directly involve the Trump administration, though Missouri’s new maps were created at the president’s urging. In several other cases, however, the Department of Justice is frantically working to get its assault on the midterms before the Supreme Court. It yesterday appealed its bid to audit states’ voter rolls, using its controversial and faulty SAVE database, to the Court. It has multiple times asked the Court to rule on its bid to implement a Postal Service plan that is poised to sow extensive chaos with mail-in ballots.

The Court’s uneven approach to ruling on election-related chaos that could cause disruption makes it hard to know what to expect here. Yes, the Court tends to side with Republicans — but on something as dramatic and sweeping, with potential to sow chaos, as the USPS rule?

As David Kurtz wrote yesterday, we are seeing an unprecedented assault on the midterms by the executive branch. In past elections, we’ve seen Trump and his allies approach November with little plan beyond flooding the zone with misinformation, and hoping options emerge. Even in 2020, when their attempt to overturn the election resulted in a mob ransacking Congress, they were largely making it up as they went, as TPM has reported through close analysis of White House messages and documents.

This time is different. Chaos is still the plan, but we are seeing a whole-of-government effort to create it, involving not just the president’s close advisors but each federal agency, now fully underway months before the election. The end goal isn’t clear — there may not be any specific one. But chaos presents the administration with more options — more opportunities to spread disinformation, to question the results — than an orderly election.

The question now is the extent to which the Supreme Court will go along with it.

A Senate Swing State That Counters This Year’s Trend

Rep. Chris Pappas (D) will face former Senator John Sununu (R) in New Hampshire’s Senate race this November after both easily defeated primary opponents last night.

• This race shakes up the conventional wisdom a little bit. Though voters are down on Trump, the Sununu family is well known in New Hampshire and has developed a reputation for lightly resisting the president. John Sununu, for that reason, might not be dragged down in the same way his fellow, Trump-aligned Republican Senate candidates will be.
• He was, nonetheless, endorsed by Trump over former senator Scott Brown, who served as an ambassador in Trump’s first administration.
• (Pappas’ family is also well known, for what it is worth: they are the proprietors of the Puritan Backroom, a Manchester restaurant that claims to have invented the chicken tender.)
• Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball — two election prognosticators — both rate this race as leaning toward Democrats. Some recent polls, however, have shown Sununu — but not his primary challenger, Brown — beating Pappas.
• Democrats also worried that primary voters might pick Karishma Manzur, Pappas’ more progressive challenger. In the end he easily defeated her, 65%-33%, with 82% of votes counted, per the AP.

Tabs

• Republicans begin their uncommon midterms convention in Dallas today. Politico Playbook informs us that the “vibes are very bad” as things get underway.
• Elon Musk operates a voter registration website that collects, and can sell, voters’ personal details, Popular Information reports.

Woman of the Hour

Its Natalie Harp, who, along with two other aides, apparently got a Christmas gift of $45,000 from President Trump, per the Washington Post — a seeming violation of the law.

‘Years’ to Send Out Mail-in Ballots

Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.

“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in a declaration as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.

“If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”

Maricopa County, Patrick said, will send out 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting. Patrick wrote that under the new USPS rules, a single error could lead to the entire batch being rejected.

That squares with what a whistleblower from inside USPS alleged: a single error — which, the whistleblower underscored, could be human or technical — could lead to the entire batch of 10,000 ballots being sent back to election officials to be resubmitted.

Ann Jacobs, a former chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, wrote on X that getting Milwaukee’s 33,567 primary election mailed ballots out could take more than two months. “At a minute each, that’s 559.45 hours or 69.94 work days,” she wrote. “At 30 seconds each, that’s 279.73 hours or 34.97 work days. A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it’s 93.25 hrs.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin – we don’t have 35 work days,” she continued. “This is true across the nation.”

Indeed. In fact, North Carolina — a state with some 7 million registered voters and some important races in November — begins sending out absentee ballots today.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court yesterday to immediately allow it to implement the USPS rule, despite a lower court injunction on it that is still working its way up to the Supreme Court.

Hat tip to NOTUS for flagging some of these former election officials’ comments.

Missouri Secretary of State’s Games Lead to Republican Gerrymander Being Blocked (at Least for Now)

The Missouri Supreme Court blocked an aggressive Republican gerrymander from being used in the November election.

• It’s a (late-breaking) loss for Republicans’ efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of political power after the Supreme Court knocked down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act last spring.
• This President Donald Trump-backed map redrew a district in the Kansas City area, attempting to flip one of Missouri’s two Democratic congressional districts.
• The state Supreme Court held yesterday evening that some procedural hijinks meant November’s elections must be held under the old map, and that voters must be given a chance to vote on the new maps on the November ballot.
• The hijinks include a wild maneuver by Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins: Opponents of the new map submitted hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, more than enough to put the maps on the November ballot. Missouri law says that voters can hold a referendum on any act of the state legislature.
• But Hoskins waited until voting in the primary election — under the new maps — was underway to reject the petition, concluding that the state constitution did not empower voters to challenge redistricting.
• The state Supreme Court rejected that interpretation, and his broader gambit, finding redistricting was indeed an act of the state legislature.
• This all will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tabs

• Layla A. Jones has a fantastic piece for TPM probing how a baseless, right-wing freakout about an obscure data privacy technique used by the Census Bureau has culminated in claims that bureaucrats used the survey to steal congressional seats for Democrats. This fringe contention is now shaping Census Bureau policy.
• The Wall Street Journal paints a rough portrait of John Fetterman, concluding from an investigation that “the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.”

Woman of the Hour

It’s conspiracy theorizing television host Maria Bartiromo, ousted from her job at Fox Business for mysterious reasons. One report claims that she shared with the White House internal guidance about Fox’s decision to limit coverage of Trump’s July speech that attempted, again, to sow doubt in the 2020 election.

Are We at War?

JD Vance tackled the White House press briefing yesterday. “I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now, there is no active shooting,” the vice president said, before acknowledging “Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping.” The remarks, however, did not openly acknowledge the United States’ retaliation for what Vance described as “flare ups.”

Democrats are taking a convoluted, complex provision that was included in Republicans’ Big Beautiful bill to pin the blame for the national boom in data center construction squarely on Republicans ahead of the midterms.

President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is most widely known for making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and offsetting the cost of those tax cuts by gutting social safety net programs for America’s most vulnerable. But the legislation did a lot of other seemingly anodyne things. For one, the bill expanded and made permanent an IRS tax incentive program that began in 2018 to encourage and support economic growth and job creation in rural areas.

During President Trump’s first term, the IRS designated certain “economically distressed census tracts” as Qualified Opportunity Zones in order to spur economic growth in those areas. Under the program, investors can receive tax breaks for job creation in rural parts of the country, according to this IRS fact sheet (might come as a shock but I do not have any prior knowledge about QOZs, as the IRS refers to them, and had to do some research to write about this particular part of the tax code 🫠).

Anyways, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) was a champion of making these tax credits permanent and expanding incentives for rural development, and oversaw getting provisions about the IRS program worked into the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed into law last summer. Republicans at one point championed the expanded tax benefits included in the bill as an opportunity for more data center construction in rural areas, according to Politico.

But that was a different time when opposition to data centers wasn’t known to be the one issue uniting Americans across the political spectrum, which my colleague Josh Marshall and I have written about a bunch in the past few weeks. Republicans are now struggling to message on the issue as the head of their party, President Trump, makes it impossible for them to hold any nuanced position on the matter — and therefore speak to voters’ outrage about the data center explosion.

Democrats are leaning in to this.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) launched a new rhetorical flex over Republicans on the increasingly bipartisan issue during his news conference on Monday.

“Every single House Republican but one or two voted to unleash data centers on the American people in an unfettered fashion,” he said.

The details of what Republicans actually did to expand the tax incentives are incredibly in the weeds, but the Wall Street Journal has a good rundown from summer 2025 here, and so does the Brookings Institute.

But Democrats’ messaging about the expanded program and Republicans’ interest in expanding it for the purpose of big tech development is catching on, per Politico:

The next day, a senior House Democrat — Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts — made a similar observation on the chamber floor.

“A year ago, Republicans were bragging about giving tax breaks to Big Tech in order to build data centers,” McGovern said. “With November on the horizon, some House Republicans are acting as if they did not turbocharge the data center build-out.”

Comer Claims McConnell Will Be Back for Next Session

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) told CNN that the senior senator from his state will be back to his duties in the Senate at the start of its next session on September 14. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not performed his work duties in months and was hospitalized in mid-June. It took weeks for his office to share information about the hospitalization.

After conspiracy theories swirled online about McConnell being secretly … not alive anymore, the Democratic governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear began calling on the senator to give Americans some sort of proof of life and update on his health. Reports surfaced that he may have suffered some sort of cardiac episode at his home in June. In July, McConnell announced that he had been hospitalized after a fall and was in a rehabilitation center. He was discharged in early August.

“I have not talked to Leader McConnell. I’ve talked to his staff, many of whom are from my district originally. And they have all said it’s their goal for Senator McConnell to be here when the Senate comes in,” Comer told CNN Thursday.

No One Wants to Go to Trump’s Fake Convention Part 2

ABC News has more reporting today on Republicans who are up for reelection this fall — and even some in solidly red districts — skipping out on the Republican Party’s unconventional midterms convention in Dallas later this month. That’s primarily because they want distance from Trump, who is set to headline the event with an anticipated speech spinning his deeply unpopular record so far this term.

Yesterday’s edition of Where Things Stand had the details on Politico‘s survey of nearly 70 Republican candidates and members of Congress. The majority of them said they’re skipping the affair.

ABC spoke to a handful of the most vulnerable House Republicans, and they all said they didn’t plan to attend or were still undecided. About 100 Republican members of Congress and candidates are expected to make the trek — and shell out the $25,000 to $100,000 that each attendee has been asked to contribute to the House Republican campaign committee in order to attend.

Vance’s Subtle Dig

Vice President JD Vance hosted the White House press briefing Thursday, since no one has been hired to replace Karoline Leavitt since she decided to leave the Trump administration. Reporters asked him about his ongoing friendship with Tucker Carlson, despite the former Fox News host’s stark criticism of major elements of Trump’s second-term agenda. He responded saying he was bothered by people who stopped being friends with his wife when he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, but his response also appears to contain a subtle dig at Trump, who throws literally anyone and everyone under the bus for any perceived double crossing.

“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” Vance said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

Read This From TPM Today

Hunter Walker checks in on Vice President JD Vance’s adventure into filling in a White House press secretary this afternoon. He repeatedly contradicted himself about whether or not the U.S. is, in fact, at war with Iran: White House Iran War Denialism Reaches Absurd New Level in Briefing Where Vance Both Confirms and Denies Bullets Are Flying

Yesterday’s Top Story

Trump Calls on His Most Loyal Henchman to Shut Down Facts He Doesn’t Want Reported

What I’m Reading

Maria Bartiromo Out at Fox News, Fox Business  

Schools Giving Aid to Minority Students Could Lose Tax Exemptions Under Trump’s New Rules

ICE Gave New Hires Access to Restricted Info on Palantir App Before They Passed Background Checks