SCOTUS Decides Case on Mail Ballots

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

California sends mail ballots to every registered voter and allows the counting of ballots postmarked by election day even if they arrive a week later.  This process helps explain why the state's vote count is slow.  Despite the total lack of evidence for significant cheating,  the slow count gives Trumpists an occasion to spread lies about election fraud.

 Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

Just over four months before the 2026 midterm elections, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by, and received within five days of, Election Day. By a vote of 5-4, the justices in Watson v. Republican National Committee rejected an argument, made by the political parties and others challenging the law, that federal law requires mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett concluded that “the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argued that “from this Nation’s founding until the last few decades of the 20th century—a period that spans the enactment of all three election-day statutes—having an ‘election’ on a particular day meant completing ballot collection on that day.”

Mississippi passed the law at the center of the dispute in 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years later, the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party, along with a Mississippi voter and a county election official, went to federal court in Gulfport, Mississippi, to challenge the post-election ballot deadline; the Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit a few weeks later, which was combined with the first suit. They argued that Mississippi’s law clashes with a federal law, first passed by Congress in 1845, that designates the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the “election day.”

Billionaire Bucks

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

Bruce Mehlman:

Campaign costs are increasing much faster than inflation, with the richest Americans increasingly dominating election finance. Does this make our democracy more robust & resilient, or does it undermine trust, accelerate alienation & drive populism? 

Source: Americans for Tax Fairness 

Trump v. Republicans in Congress

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

Trump is acting without regard for the political needs of Republicans in Congress.  An unpopular war is just part of it. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Axios:

• The big picture: Trump has spent his second term steamrolling his own party, confident the lawmakers he humiliates will keep voting his way. You see it everywhere:He canceled the signing of a landmark bipartisan housing bill just hours before the ceremony — trying to strong-arm the Senate into passing the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter ID bill with no realistic path to 60 (or even 50) votes.
• He dismissed the housing bill — which his own White House had called "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history" — as "of minor importance."
• He berated the "Four Republican Losers" in the Senate who voted this week to rein in his Iran war powers, calling the rebuke "poorly timed and meaningless." (Hours after his barrage, Republicans passed a symbolic reversal.)
• He blew up a bipartisan scramble aimed at renewing the government's FISA surveillance powers, demanding the SAVE Act on voting rules be bolted on. He let the authority lapse rather than back down.
• He yanked his own intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, from a confirmation hearing hours before it began, leaving the nation's spy agencies under an acting director both parties distrust.
• He refused to brief Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and other senators on his Iran deal until after the text was finally released, leaving them to defend terms they hadn't seen.
• He blindsided senators by proposing a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund just as they moved a $70 billion immigration package, defending Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the building where the senators work.

Plotzing Plutocrats

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

Wealthy, self-financing candidates are hardly shoo-ins.  Michael Bloomberg (president, 2020) and Meg Whitman (CA governor 2010) are examples of plutocrats who plotzed.

Praveena Somasundaram, Clara Ence Morse and Erin Cox at WP:

Wealthy Americans have spent hundreds of millions from their fortunes in their quests to join Congress. It usually doesn’t pay off.

The most recent example came Tuesday in Maryland, when billionaire and former congressman David Trone’s record-breaking $25 million comeback bid ended in defeat in the Democratic primary. Trone, who amassed his fortune by co-founding a national alcohol retailer, has been one of the most prolific self-funders of congressional campaigns. He spent $134 million across six races over the course of a decade, winning three terms in the House but spending $101 million on contests he lost.

This year, voters gave mixed results to self-funded candidates on the ballot for state offices too. In California, billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer spent $218 million on his Democratic campaign for governor but narrowly failed to advance to the general election. In Georgia, billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson won the Republican gubernatorial primary after spending more than $100 million on his campaign. the Republican gubernatorial primary after spending more than $100 million on his campaign.

Of the top 20 self-funded congressional campaigns since 2000 by spending, only four were successful, according to a Washington Post analysis of publicly available campaign finance data from OpenSecrets and the Federal Election Commission. Together, the candidates spent more than $600 million on their campaigns.

 

Leftward Ho, Gotham City

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

Nicholas Fandos at NYT:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies swept a series of congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday in a remarkable show of strength for the insurgent left that sent shock waves through the Democratic Party.

Mr. Mamdani’s candidates toppled a pair of incumbents backed by the city’s political establishment, including major labor unions and the House Democratic leader. Another candidate backed by the mayor won an open House seat, and a handful of democratic socialist challengers he supported were winning down the ballot.

For months, Mr. Mamdani threw himself and his energized political organization into the three marquee congressional contests, campaigning late into the night in the race’s final days and calling the election a referendum on the direction of the party.

...

Brad Lander, 56, a close ally whom Mr. Mamdani urged to run for Congress, ran up a staggering 30-point margin in the affluent 10th District in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. He defeated Representative Daniel Goldman, a wealthy Levi Strauss heir who had opposed the mayor in last year’s elections and had close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby.

Claire Valdez, 36, a little-known state assemblywoman also recruited by Mr. Mamdani to run, ran up larger than expected margins for the open seat in the Seventh District in a gentrifying swath of Brooklyn and Queens so far left it has been nicknamed the “Commie Corridor.”

She defeated Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, who had far deeper roots in the district and the support of the popular congresswoman, Representative Nydia Velázquez, who is retiring; the left-leaning Working Families Party; and nearly every major labor union in the city.

And Mr. Mamdani’s allies even won in the predominantly Black and Dominican 13th District in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. In perhaps the night’s most surprising victory, Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, another democratic socialist who entered the race as a political unknown, narrowly knocked off Representative Adriano Espaillat, the influential chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

 

GOP Groups Meddling in Democratic Primaries

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

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.  And it has happened in 2025 and 2026. (See the LA Mayor race.)

A network of GOP groups is supporting beatable candidates in Democratic primaries.

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

A network of purportedly progressive super PACs, spending millions in Democratic primaries across the country, is funded by a Republican dark money group, the American Prosperity Alliance (APA).

Newly filed FEC documents reveal that three PACs that claim to oppose Trump and Republican policies — Lead Left PAC, Real Change PAC, and California Blue PAC — are wholly funded by Conservative Americans PAC, another super PAC. Conservative Americans PAC, in turn, received all of its funding this cycle, over $30 million, from the APA.

The APA is a key part of the GOP financial infrastructure. It was established in 2022 and received $5.5 million in seed funding from the American Action Network, a non-profit associated with the House Republican super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund. Brian Walsh, a top aide to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R), is a senior advisor to the APA, according to a 2024 report in NBC News. Walsh was a founder and former president of the Congressional Leadership Fund and former president of the American Action Network.

Since 2022, the APA has raised over $100 million from undisclosed sources. Millions of dollars were routed from the APA, usually through intermediaries, to the Congressional Leadership Fund and its sister organization, the Senate Leadership Fund. The APA has also funneled cash to MAGA Inc, President Trump’s super PAC, the Republican Convention, and a host of other Republican groups. The APA does not have to disclose its donors because it is organized as a 501(c)(4) non-profit group.

David Wright and Patrick Svitekat CNN:

Despite the group’s name and messaging, filings show that Lead Left PAC received more than $3 million in May from Conservative Americans PAC — itself funded by American Prosperity Alliance, the influential Republican nonprofit.

In a statement, Conservative Americans PAC acknowledged its role in seeking to shape the Democratic primaries.

“Republicans are leveling the playing field after over a decade of Democrats meddling in our primaries, and with the Democrat Party in the midst of a civil war, Republicans would be stupid not to take advantage while pushing their candidates farther left,” spokesperson Samantha Bullock said.

 

Midterm: Congressional and Presidential Perspectives

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

Megan Messerly, Alex Gangitano and Myah Ward at POLITICO:

President Donald Trump believes he handed Republicans a winning playbook for the midterms — if only they’d follow it.

Gerrymander everywhere possible, get rid of the filibuster, fire the Senate parliamentarian and pass the SAVE America Act.


None of it is likely to happen, and the gap between what is likely and what is possible explains Trump’s frustrations with many in Congress and the anger the White House channels at operatives and pundits who say the president isn’t doing enough to help retain control of Congress.

“If everyone just follows his lead, follows the blueprints he’s laid out, and runs on the record that he has, then I think we’ll fare well,” said a senior White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The divide reflects irreconcilable views of political power: Trump’s ends-justify-the-means approach is colliding with the protect-the-norms posture of Republicans on the Hill and in statehouses. Unlike Trump, rank-and-file Republicans are staring down years of electoral consequences and hedging their bets on institutions they will have to operate within long after he’s gone.

And, with five months until the midterms, the president and many in his party have been left talking past one another.

...

A person familiar with Senate dynamics, granted anonymity to speak candidly, shot back that Thune’s eye is on the ball and that Trump’s focus on election integrity does more harm than good.

“Poll after poll shows that voters — the ones who decide general elections — are increasingly driven by the economy, not the SAVE America Act or arcane Senate rules, which is why John Thune has been practically begging his colleagues and the president to focus on wins like the president’s signature achievement: The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the person said. “It’s hard to turn on CSPAN2 these days without seeing Thune on the floor talking about the litany of pro-growth policies that are positively affecting American families – lower tax rates, no tax on tips and overtime, a bigger child tax credit. It’s no accident that he’s clearly trying to reset the narrative amid the litany of daily distractions.”