AI and Oppo

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

 Joe Rodota:

Today, oppo researchers can provide quite a lot of value for less than $20,000 and month of digging. Just ask Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy Seal and founder of Civly.

While attending Harvard Medical School, Barkhuff started a Facebook group he named Veterans for Responsible Leadership. Following Trump’s election in 2016, the group morphed into a Super PAC. Barkhuff met Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, and befriended fellow Vermont resident Stuart Stevens, who officially joined the Lincoln Project in May 2020. Barkhuff recorded two videos for the group - “Betrayed” and “Conservative” - that racked-up three million views on YouTube alone. (You can read more about Barkhuff’s pre-Civly career in this December 2020 New Yorker profile by Paige Williams.)
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He and his friend Matt Haunauer, a data scientist with a Ph.D. from Indiana University, asked themselves: What if we looked at this from the other direction? What if we could learn more about candidates by mining their campaign finance reports, using AI?

“Lo and behold, we became an opposition research firm,” Barkhuff told me in an interview earlier this year.

The goal of his new firm, Civly, is to “democratize oppo.” Using Claude, the company can make sense of vast fields of data hovering on the Internet, from YouTube videos to the Ashley Madison client database.

The firm generates the first cut of an oppo research report using a proprietary tool trained on actual oppo research books prepared the old-fashioned way. Then an experienced oppo researcher reads through the draft, checking every item manually. In a few days, Civly can deliver a 20-page oppo research book for $7,500.

To build on that and support a campaign through Election Day, Civly offers a subscription-based service it calls the Command Center. Civly can also source and manage an oppo research “concierge” for campaigns that don’t have such capability in-house.

Among veteran oppo researchers, the Platner campaign’s $6,250 investment in a limited vetting of the now-famous oyster farmer prompted eye-rolls and guffaws. But it may point to the new economics of oppo research, for candidates and consultants alike..

Trump v. Free Elections

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

Erica L. Green at NYT:

The Trump administration has forced out the three remaining members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections, the White House confirmed on Thursday. The move comes as President Trump seeks to cast doubt on the outcome of the upcoming midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted.

Mr. Trump terminated, effective immediately, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, two members selected by congressional Democrats to serve on the Election Assistance Commission, and accepted the resignation of a Republican member, Christy McCormick.

The board has no other remaining members, as its fourth commissioner resigned this spring.

An unidentified White House official issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump reserved the right to remove individuals who “may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.” The White House official cast the dismissals as part of the federal government’s strategy to work across agencies to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse.

The official pointed to the recent decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump had the authority to fire most independent regulators for any reason, ushering in a vast expansion of presidential power. Mr. Trump had hailed the decision as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”

Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for months to claim that Republicans would face a tough midterm election, not because of the broadly unpopular war in Iran and plummeting approval ratings on the economy, but because the country’s election system is fraudulent.

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Last year, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that calls on the Election Assistance Commission to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information. It also seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day. A judge permanently blocked the order, saying the president exceeded his authority.

Michael Waldman, the president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, in a statement called the terminations “deeply concerning in light of President Trump’s relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections.”

Platner Plotzes

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

The Guardian:

Graham Platner, the embattled Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, has been accused of trying to influence the process of picking his replacement amid a chorus of calls for him to withdraw from the race.

Platner has publicly said he is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denied, was published on Monday.

A wave of prominent Democrats, from the progressive senator Bernie Sanders to the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, urged him to stand aside.

The Maine election is seen as a key component of the party’s effort to regain control of the US Senate in November’s midterm elections. Platner remains in the race, for now.

A senior state Democrat declared on Tuesday evening that Platner’s campaign would have “no role” in selecting his replacement, claiming that his team had tried to sway the process.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic party, said: “Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the US Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like.

Hans Nichols and Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Republicans are preparing to welcome a potential Graham Platner replacement in Maine's Senate race with $8 million in negative ads, aiming to introduce a new Democratic nominee to voters on their own terms before Democrats can.

Why it matters: Republicans are doing something Democrats wish they could: Move on from Platner.

The progressive candidate, who said Monday he is taking time to "reflect" on his next steps, remains officially in the race and is looking to leverage his status as the Democratic nominee to influence who could replace him.

Republicans, meanwhile, see an opening: three weeks to prepare a campaign against a Democratic nominee who will have little time to introduce themselves to voters.

Driving the news: Pine Tree Results, the super PAC backing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, raised $10.5 million during the first half of the year — matching what it raised during the same period in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter.The group pulled its anti-Platner ads Tuesday and has $8 million in cash on hand to define a likely fresh Democratic nominee for voters during a compressed campaign.

Among the donors to the pro-Collins super PAC is Blackstone president Jon Gray, a longtime Democratic donor. He contributed $250,000 well before Politico and CNN reported sexual assault allegations against Platner.

Anti-Incumbency 2026

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

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

A sour, anti-incumbent mood is sweeping across the nation on its 250th anniversary in what political analysts say is an especially troubling sign for Republican control of the House and Senate, given President Trump’s slumping approval rating.

Rising voter anger with the status quo has hit both parties, with eight House incumbents — five Democrats and three Republicans — losing primary races this year in addition to two GOP Senate incumbents, Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.) and John Cornyn (Texas).

Republicans on Capitol Hill fear the antiestablishment mood could cost them control of the House and perhaps the Senate as well.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott (S.C.) has warned Senate GOP colleagues privately “about how bad polling is, currently, for Republicans and how bad the president is losing ground among all groups,” said a senior Republican aide.

Senate Republican Conference Chair Tom Cotton (Ark.) also shared polling with Senate Republicans at a recent lunch meeting that showed independents moving in large numbers away from the GOP and toward Democrats, according to a GOP senator who attended the presentation.

McCarthyism and Trump

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

Trump really thinks he's cooking by running against "communism" and saying it over and over during his speeches pic.twitter.com/y6psiWvffQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 5, 2026

Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) would like a word:

Jonathan Banks has returned as Mike in a new video celebrating 250 years of America. pic.twitter.com/zLyeQDdz2p

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) July 4, 2026

Unprecedented Corruption

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

Eric Lipton at NYT:

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wife owned a profitable radio station. George W. Bush was on the board of an oil company while his father was in the White House. And Hunter Biden was paid by a Ukrainian natural gas company while his father was vice president.

But never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president, a financial disclosure report made public on Tuesday shows.

Overall, Mr. Trump’s revenue in 2025 jumped to at least $2.2 billion, compared with a minimum of $622 million in 2024 before he returned to office.

“It is completely unprecedented,” said Megan Gorman, a tax attorney and the author of a recent book, “All the Presidents’ Money,” that studied the history of presidential wealth dating back 250 years.

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Presidential historians said they could identify no other president in American history who entered into new business enterprises just before moving into the White House, and then continued to personally profit from them during his term.

Instead, they cited examples of efforts to avoid potential conflicts.

President Warren G. Harding continued to own an Ohio newspaper while he was in office, but it had been in his family for nearly four decades and after questions were raised about the investment, he agreed to sell the paper, shortly before his death in 1923.

After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson moved to the White House, his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, transferred her radio and television stations into a trust controlled by an outside lawyer and station executive, said Mark K. Updegrove, chief executive of the LBJ Foundation and a presidential historian.

Jason Horowitz at NYT

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and billionaire mogul who died in 2023, is often considered to have set the mold for President Trump with his mastery of the news media, gilded taste and, above all, legislative maneuvers that drew accusations of conflicts of interest.

Mr. Berlusconi passed laws that appeared tailor-made to protect and benefit his family’s vast business empire. And his annual earning disclosures showed he had been paid tens of millions of dollars while serving as prime minister.

This week, new financial disclosures suggested that Mr. Trump has broken that mold by making at least $2.2 billion in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses.

Mr. Trump’s profits are a haul once unimaginable for any leader of a liberal democracy, particularly a sitting American president. No modern Western leader has ever publicly disclosed such big windfalls while in office.

The Trump family’s earnings, experts said, have moved him into an echelon of enrichment more associated with strongmen in Russia and Turkey.

His gains were all the more striking because the United States has long positioned itself as a standard-bearer for financial regulation, anti-graft measures and the rule of law. Yet his cryptocurrency earnings highlight an unusually glaring conflict: As president, Mr. Trump oversees the regulation of an industry that, as a businessman, he also greatly profits from.

Profiting from the Presidency

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany at NYT:

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.

The results, detailed in Mr. Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report for 2025 and released on Tuesday, pulled back the curtain on the president’s business operations. His crypto ventures, the report shows, are now some of his most lucrative enterprises, a remarkable turnabout for a man who once slammed crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

The president’s finances, which had been something of a mystery, highlight a conflict in his crypto business: Mr. Trump is a major crypto industry operator and its top policymaker.

Eric Lipton, Andrea Fuller and David Yaffe-Bellany:

A large chunk of the $2 billion haul President Trump took in last year came as hundreds of thousands of his fans and other investors bet on a speculative cryptocurrency called $TRUMP, hoping its value would soar with his return to the White House.

But while Mr. Trump amassed an eye-popping $636 million from the cryptocurrency, known as a memecoin, many of his followers who heeded his call to purchase the coin came out losers.

That outcome, documented by an independent analysis of trades and fees paid out from $TRUMP token sales, is drawing renewed attention this week, as Mr. Trump for the first time has detailed the extraordinary $1.4 billion in revenue he secured just from the cryptocurrency industry since he returned to the White House.

The president’s 927-page financial disclosure showed how Mr. Trump and his family reaped huge financial rewards in 2025 through his money-losing Trump Media venture and a separate cryptocurrency firm called World Liberty Financial, even as routine investors suffered vast losses.

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“It is hard to wrap your head around that the president of the United States would engage in this level of self-enrichment at the expense of so many of his supporters,” said Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner who now studies cryptocurrency issues at Duke University. “This is a president of the United States who has made more money off crypto since he took office than he made in any prior year in his entire business career.”