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Friday, March 13, 2026

State Legislative Elections and the Midterm


Natalie Fertig at Politico:
Democrats have flipped 28 Republican-held seats in state legislatures across the country over the past 14 months, a sign that the GOP is indeed at risk of losing control of the House, and maybe even the Senate, in the midterms.

Democratic wins have come even in deep red states, including Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, and often by margins that make Republican leaders uneasy.

“I’m ringing the alarm bell,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas GOP consultant who has run campaigns for Republicans in the state, including Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Dan Crenshaw.

The results of these state-level elections reflect the immediate concerns of the electorate, provide a launching pad for the next generation of national leaders and could influence the future makeup of Congress through redistricting. They may also give both Republicans and Democrats a preview of the midterm battles to come.
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Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Miscalculation

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

Mark Mazzetti, Tyler Pager and Edward Wong at NYT:

On Feb. 18, as President Trump weighed whether to launch military attacks on Iran, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, told an interviewer he was not concerned that the looming war might disrupt oil supplies in the Middle East and wreak havoc in energy markets.

Even during the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran last June, Mr. Wright said, there had been little disruption in the markets. “Oil prices blipped up and then went back down,” he said. Some of Mr. Trump’s other advisers shared similar views in private, dismissing warnings that — the second time around — Iran might wage economic warfare by closing shipping lanes carrying roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.

The extent of that miscalculation was laid bare in recent days, as Iran threatened to fire at commercial oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic choke point through which all ships must pass on their way out of the Persian Gulf. In response to the Iranian threats, commercial shipping has come to a standstill in the Gulf, oil prices have spiked, and the Trump administration has scrambled to find ways to tamp down an economic crisis that has triggered higher gasoline prices for Americans.

The episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond to a conflict that the government in Tehran sees as an existential threat. Iran has responded far more aggressively than it did during last June’s 12-day war, firing barrages of missiles and drones at U.S. military bases, cities in Arab nations across the Middle East, and on Israeli population centers.
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Monday, March 9, 2026

Bad Optics

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  For a reality-TV guy, Trump has seemed remarkably inattentive to optics.

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Sunday, March 8, 2026

The Epstein Story Isn't Going Away

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

 Julie K. Brown and Claire Healy at Miami Herald:

Three FBI interviews that contain graphic sexual and physical assault allegations against President Donald Trump were released Thursday by the Justice Department. The reports were follow-up interviews a woman gave to the FBI in 2019, when the agency was investigating Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking crimes.

There is no indication in the reports whether the FBI was able to verify her claims. The White House on Thursday called the woman’s allegations “baseless.” But a DOJ source told the Miami Herald that agents found her to be credible – and that they would not have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying. In the end, she declined to cooperate with their investigation, and they lost touch with her, the source said.

Favour Adegoke at Yahoo:

Federal investigators have released a new legal document that contains several suspicious findings in relation to Epstein's death by suicide.

According to the New York Post, one of the guards tasked with monitoring Epstein's tier, Tova Noel, searched for the latest update on the sex offender just moments before he was found dead by hanging in his cell, and also made an unexplained bank deposit of $5,000 ten days prior.

Noel was one of the officers who were accused of falsifying records to claim they checked on Epstein throughout the night of his August 10, 2019, suicide.

However, the document reveals that she googled "latest on Epstein in jail" at 5:42 am and then again at 5:52 am. It was about 40 minutes after her colleague, correctional officer Michael Thomas, found Epstein dead.

The document notes that Noel also searched for furniture online and reportedly missed out on completing her routine checks on Epstein, while Thomas checked for motorcycles.



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Saturday, March 7, 2026

Bad Times


 Sam Sutton and Megan Messerly at POLITICO:
Donald Trump won reelection on the promise of restoring the economy and eliminating illegal immigration.

But in the last week, both issues have threatened to turn into liabilities: A stagnant labor market and soaring gas prices amid the Iran conflict are hammering the economy, and the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security has cast new light on the administration’s increasingly unpopular immigration agenda. The economic backdrop has grown ominous — Wall Street analysts are warning that surging oil prices could lead to stagflation — and the blitzkrieg of bad news has jeopardized the GOP’s ability to keep voters focused on Trump administration policies that were designed to help with the rising cost of living.
“If you combine an economy that people don’t like with a prolonged war that you know nobody in his base believes they voted for, that’s a toxic problem,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. While Trump isn’t on the ballot this year, his party needs the president’s poll numbers to improve to keep the House and Senate.
“Don’t drag this war out,” the person said. “That’s my best advice for the administration. The country is in no mood for a prolonged war.”
The Iran conflict has put immense upward pressure on oil and gas –- prices at the pump have climbed by more than 11 percent in a week. Now, with employers shedding payroll and Trump pressing reset on who’s leading his immigration agenda, the president is on the backfoot on the two issues he needs to own for his party to win the midterms.

 Justin Lahart at WSJ:

The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the job market continues to struggle in nearly every sector.

The hiring numbers, reported Friday by the Labor Department, fell far short of January’s gain of 126,000 jobs. They were worse than the gain of 50,000 jobs that economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see.

The unemployment rate was 4.4%.

The labor market slowed markedly last year, with the U.S. adding the fewest jobs outside of a recession since 2003. That was in part due to the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce through a combination of layoffs and voluntary buyouts, but it also reflected the cautious approach to hiring that many businesses adopted to combat uncertainty about tariffs and other policy measures. Expectations that artificial intelligence could reduce staffing needs might have further cut into hiring plans.

Despite some high-profile announcements, the overall level of layoffs remains low. But businesses are limiting the number of new workers they take on. Moreover, job growth was highly uneven, with the healthcare and social-assistance sectors driving gains over the past year, and most other sectors shedding jobs.
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Friday, March 6, 2026

The Daines Switcheroo

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Manu Raju at CNN:

GOP Sen. Steve Daines made the last-minute decision to abruptly pull out of his Senate race to prevent Democrats from fielding a top recruit for the open Montana seat, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Daines was aware that if he withdrew too soon then Democrats would have a chance at fielding one of several potential Democrats — namely former Sen. Jon Tester or former Govs. Brian Schweitzer or Steve Bullock. Any of those Democrats could have put the state on the map in the midterms and likely have sucked up enormous cash, as Democrats have done in red states like Alaska and Ohio, scrambling the race for the majority in the fall.

Instead, Daines withdrew from the race minutes before the Wednesday evening filing deadline. Kurt Alme, who was US attorney in Montana, filed to run eight minutes before the deadline. With the deadline closed, no top-tier Democrat can now jump in the race.

While Daines taped a video recently in Montana explaining his decision not to run, he didn’t know until after Alme resigned as US attorney Wednesday afternoon that he planned to run for the seat, the sources said. Daines planned to run for a third term if Alme had passed on a bid, according to the sources.

President Donald Trump was aware of the internal deliberations, as were Senate GOP leaders, and the president issued a Truth Social post praising Daines and endorsing Alme minutes after the filing deadline closed.

Trump said on social media that Daines had decided to “pass the torch” to Alme.

Democrats sharply criticized Daines and the GOP for engineering a move to anoint a successor and deny voters a chance to consider from an array of candidates, including in the primary. But it resembles a similar move made last year by Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia in Illinois.

The timing of the announcement quickly drew criticism from another candidate in the race, independent Seth Bodnar, who said in a statement that Daines “has so little respect for Montana Republicans that he withdrew at the last minute to coronate his handpicked successor instead of giving them a voice at the ballot box.”

CNN reached out to Daines’ office for comment.


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Thursday, March 5, 2026

GOP's Nazi Problem: Florida Edition

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration was full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.\

The party's Nazi problem continues.

 Claire Heddles at Miami Herald:

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.” In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.

Interspersed throughout were discussions about events promoting the Republican Party at Florida International University. The school told the Herald the chat logs are part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair. The group chat — verified by two people in the group — reveals the extent of racism and extremism within the highest ranks of campus Republican Party leadership in Miami at a time Florida’s Republicans are reckoning with an increasingly emboldened far right.


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