Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Ranking Member Alex Padilla (D-CA) announced Senate Democrats recruited and trained more than 100 staffers to monitor voting and ballot counting during the upcoming midterm elections.

The official congressional election observers will be deployed to polling sites across nine states with closely contested Senate races in November, Schumer and Padilla told reporters on Wednesday.

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.

I want to flag this poll for you. It’s a poll of the Florida Senate race by St. Pete Polls, a mid-tier regional pollster. It shows appointed incumbent Senator Ashley Moody (R) and Democratic nominee Angie Nixon tied at roughly 45% of the vote. There’s not much polling of this race. There are two other recent polls, one by Change Research a respected but generally Democratic-aligned pollster, and another from Quantus Insights, a GOP-aligned pollster with an iffy reputation. Change Research had a tied race a week ago. Quantus had Moody up by eight points a bit less than a week ago.

I want to be clear that I am not predicting or expecting Nixon to win this race. What I do expect is that Republicans will likely need to fight to hold it. And that is significant in itself. There are other signs that Republicans are facing a rough political environment in Florida this year, at least one that looks very different from where Florida has been trending since 2018-20 when the state went from a GOP-tilting purple state to something approximating bright red. Yesterday, Nicole LaFond highlighted the video put out by South Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) which basically had Salazar telling Donald Trump: We didn’t know you meant mass deportation when you promised us mass deportation.

We can joke about the the substance of Salazar’s video but it speaks for itself as a measure of the political climate in the state.