Yes, he's running for 2024, NPR with the headline of the evening.
The Washington Post is even more brutal.
100% factual stuff. Screw you for making me create the damn 2024 Elections tag already, you asshole. Let the pillorying begin.
And hopefully the indictments.
Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has defeated Republican Kari Lake in Arizona's race for governor, NBC News projected Monday.
Hobbs' victory is key for Democrats in a presidential battleground state and a rebuke to a prominent election denier — although the closeness of the contest left the result up in the air for nearly a week.
“I am honored to have been selected to serve as the next Governor of Arizona,” Hobbs said in a statement Monday night. “I want to thank the voters for entrusting me with this immense responsibility. It is truly an honor of a lifetime, and I will do everything in my power to make you proud.”
A record number of early ballots were dropped off on Election Day in Maricopa County, officials said, which had to be processed in a more time-intensive manner that includes signature verification. Maricopa, the state's most populous county, said Sunday that it estimated that its count was 94% complete after it received a historic 290,000 of those early ballots on Election Day.
Lake, a MAGA firebrand and former local newscaster who closely linked her campaign to former President Donald Trump and his false claims of a rigged election in Arizona, ultimately fell short after polling in the final weeks of the campaign suggested she was grabbing the lead from Hobbs, who as secretary of state in 2020 vocally defended the state's election system and the accuracy of the count.
About 90 minutes after NBC News called the race for Hobbs, Lake tweeted: "Arizonans know BS when they see it."
Federal prosecutors investigating Rudy Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine have closed their investigation after more than two years and said no criminal charges will be brought.
Prosecutors with the office of US Attorney for the Southern District of New York have been investigating Giuliani, the former personal attorney to former President Donald Trump, for possible violations of foreign lobbying laws since early 2019.
On Monday, they informed a judge overseeing the investigation that they were closing the case.
The notification came in a court filing with prosecutors asking the judge to terminate the special master who was appointed to oversee a review of documents obtained when the FBI executed a search warrant on the former New York City mayor’s home in April 2021.
“The Government writes to notify the Court that the grand jury investigation that led to the issuance of the above-referenced warrants has concluded, and that based on information currently available to the Government, criminal charges are not forthcoming,” prosecutors wrote.
A spokesman for the US attorney’s office declined to comment.
“It’s wonderful, long-expected news,” said Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani. “Unfortunately, Mayor Giuliani had to spend two and a half years to three years with this cloud over his head.”
Ted Goodman, a spokesperson and political adviser to Giuliani, said: “The mayor has been completely and totally vindicated. We hope this will help bring an end to the unwarranted attacks on the mayor - a man who is quite literally the most successful prosecutor of the most dangerous criminals over the past fifty years. I challenge someone to find a more successful crime fighter than Rudy Giuliani, a man who cleaned up city government and took down the mafia."
A federal appeals court Monday issued a nationwide injunction temporarily barring the Biden administration’s student loan debt relief program.
The ruling by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis is the latest in a series of legal challenges to President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of Americans. The Biden administration stopped accepting applications for its relief on Friday after a federal district judge in Texas struck down its plan Thursday evening, calling it “unconstitutional.”
Monday’s decision by the appeals court came after six GOP-led states argued in a lawsuit that the loan relief program threatens their future tax revenues and that the plan circumvents congressional authority.
“The injunction will remain in effect until further order of this court or the Supreme Court of the United States,” a three-judge panel of the appeals court said in its ruling.
The injunction will put the program on hold pending an appeal of a lower court ruling that had allowed the debt relief program to go forward. The Biden administration could ask the Supreme Court to lift the injunction.
“We are confident in our legal authority for the student debt relief program and believe it is necessary to help borrowers most in need as they recover from the pandemic,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “The Administration will continue to fight these baseless lawsuits by Republican officials and special interests and will never stop fighting to support working and middle class Americans.”
While in office, President Donald J. Trump repeatedly told John F. Kelly, his second White House chief of staff, that he wanted a number of his perceived political enemies to be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kelly, who was chief of staff from July 2017 through the end of 2018, said in response to questions from The New York Times that Mr. Trump’s demands were part of a broader pattern of him trying to use the Justice Department and his authority as president against people who had been critical of him, including seeking to revoke the security clearances of former top intelligence officials.
Mr. Kelly said that among those Mr. Trump said “we ought to investigate” and “get the I.R.S. on” were the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe. His account of Mr. Trump’s desires to use the I.R.S. against his foes comes after the revelation by The Times this summer that Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe had both been selected for a rare and highly intrusive audit by the tax agency in the years after Mr. Kelly left the White House.
Mr. Trump has said he knows nothing about the audits. The I.R.S. has asked its inspector general to investigate, and officials have insisted the two men were selected randomly for the audits.
Mr. Kelly said he made clear to Mr. Trump that there were serious legal and ethical issues with what he wanted. He said that despite the president’s expressed desires to have Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe investigated by the I.R.S., he believes that he led Mr. Trump during his tenure as chief of staff to forgo trying to have such investigations conducted.
After Mr. Kelly left the administration, Mr. Comey was informed in 2019 that his 2017 returns were being audited, and Mr. McCabe learned in 2021 that his 2019 returns were being audited. At the time both audits occurred, the I.R.S. was led by a Trump political appointee.
Mr. Trump regularly made his demands in response to news reports in which he thought his perceived enemies made him look bad. The president would carry on about having them investigated to the point that Mr. Kelly thought he needed to tell the president that what he wanted was highly problematic, explaining, in sometimes heated conversations, that what Mr. Trump wanted was not just potentially illegal and immoral but also could blow back on him.
Mr. Trump would eventually let the idea go, Mr. Kelly said, but during subsequent outbursts about his enemies he would again bring up his desires to have them investigated.
Throughout Mr. Trump’s presidency he regularly, in both public and private, ranted about Mr. Comey, whom Mr. Trump had fired in May 2017, and Mr. McCabe, who played a leading role in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Mr. Kelly said that along with Mr. Comey and Mr. McCabe, Mr. Trump discussed using the I.R.S. and the Justice Department to investigate the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan; Hillary Clinton; Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, whose coverage often angered Mr. Trump; Peter Strzok, the lead F.B.I. agent on the Russia investigation; and Lisa Page, an F.B.I. official who exchanged text messages with Mr. Strzok that were critical of Mr. Trump.
Let's get this out of the way first: John Fetterman was the lone Senate pickup for the Dems. He beat Dr. Oz by four, almost five points. Having achieved where other candidates failed, it's fair to ask if Fetterman is the blueprint for Dems to win back white working-class voters, because he did.
Did John Fetterman just show Democrats how to solve their white-working-class problem?
Mr. Fetterman’s decisive victory in Pennsylvania’s Senate race — arguably Democrats’ biggest win of the midterms, flipping a Republican-held seat — was achieved in no small part because he did significantly better in counties dominated by white working-class voters compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.
These voters for years have been thought to be all but lost to Democrats, ever since Donald J. Trump turned out explosively high numbers of white voters in rural and exurban counties, especially in Pennsylvania and the northern Midwest. Mr. Biden recaptured Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin two years ago largely by drumming up support in the suburbs, while working-class white voters stuck with Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Fetterman, with his tattoos and Carhartt wardrobe, and priorities like marijuana legalization, appears to have regained ground with the white working class — though whether he persuaded many Trump voters to back him, or whether he improved on Mr. Biden with the demographic in other ways, awaits more detailed data.
“It was enormously beneficial,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said of Mr. Fetterman’s red-county incursion. “It’s really what Democrats have to try to do. I know we’ve had a debate in our party — you work to get your urban and suburban base out and hope for the best.” But Mr. Fetterman showed that a Democratic win in a battleground state could also run through rural Republican regions, Mr. Casey said.
Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.
In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.
Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.
“Pennsylvania elections are about margins, and he cut into the margins Republicans had across the counties that they usually control,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. “He got a lot of looks from voters who aren’t very open to looking at Democrats right now.”
In almost no county did Mr. Fetterman improve on Mr. Biden’s margin more than in Armstrong County, in the northern exurbs of Pittsburgh, where more than 97 percent of residents are white and fewer than one in five adults has a four-year college degree.
“I expected him to win, but I didn’t think he’d do that well,” said Robert Beuth, 72, a retired factory worker in the county who voted for Mr. Fetterman, speaking of the statewide result. “I think the biggest drawback for a lot of people about Oz is that he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for election. To me that’s not right.” He added that he hoped Mr. Fetterman and other Democrats in Congress would “come up with some ideas” to help “poor people working two or three jobs just to get by.”
Congressional Democratic leaders on Sunday vowed to tackle the nation's debt ceiling in coming weeks, saying their party's election victories offer them leverage even as Republicans have promised a potentially explosive fight.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said they would act while President Joe Biden's fellow Democrats control both chambers.
"Our best shot, I think, is ... to do it now," Pelosi told ABC News' "This Week" program. "Winning the Senate gave us a lot of leverage for how we go forward... in the lame duck," she said.
Schumer said that Senate Democratic leaders would meet this week to discuss the legislative path forward, though he declined to offer any specifics.
"The debt ceiling of course, is something that we have to deal with. And it's something that we will look at over the next few weeks," he said.
Democrats clinched control of the Senate late on Saturday. It is still not clear which party will control the House.
Biden's Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, has urged lawmakers to act before the new Congress is seated in January, with the nation's $31.4 trillion line of credit expected to be exhausted sometime in the first quarter of 2023.
The debt ceiling must be approved each time it needs to be raised in order to ensure that the United States avoids a default, which would have catastrophic effects.
The mechanism is meant to control the nation's rising debt, although it has been ineffective in recent decades.
Republicans have said the debt ceiling would be an "important tool" to rein in federal spending if they take control of the House.
Pelosi warned Republicans would use the debt fight to take aim at two popular health and income insurance programs for older Americans, Medicare and Social Security.
Five days after a disappointing midterm election result and two days before former president Donald Trump is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, Republicans are grappling with an almost existential quandary: Who can lead the party to a post-Trump future?
In private conversations among donors, operatives and other 2024 presidential hopefuls, a growing number of Republicans are trying to seize what they believe may be their best opportunity to sideline Trump and usher in a new generation of party leaders.
Many blame Tuesday’s midterm results — Republicans made smaller-than-expected gains in the House and failed to gain control of the Senate — on the former president, who during the primaries elevated extremist candidates who fared poorly in the general election. The discouraging election outcomes, combined with Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden, have increased both public and private talk of considering a post-Trump world.
Many of the party’s top donors are actively trying to back other candidates and are tired of Trump, according to Republican officials and operatives in touch with them, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.
Many donors and operatives are already raving over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who has fashioned himself as a Trump-lite Republican and cruised to a nearly 20-point victory over Democrat Charlie Crist on Tuesday night, flipping Miami-Dade County — a heavily Hispanic, densely populated county that has not been won by a Republican gubernatorial candidate in two decades.
Other potential Republican candidates — from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to former vice president Mike Pence to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — are also quietly taking stock of what their own presidential bids might look like.
“The issue set was clearly in our favor — on inflation, on the border, on crime — and yet we failed to meet expectations,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff. “The question is: Are there different candidates out there where the issue set still works, but with a different style that is also more in our favor?”
A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Uncertainty also looms over the Republicans eager to move beyond Trump. After all, Trump’s poor showing Tuesday and the calls for him to recede have echoes of previous moments when Trump seemed politically doomed, only to resuscitate himself: The early days of his first presidential bid, when he dismissed the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam prisoner of war, as “not a real war hero.” The final days of his 2016 campaign, when an “Access Hollywood” tape emerged showing Trump crudely boasting about groping women. In the aftermath of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack, when Trump, having lost the presidency, encouraged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol.
It’s possible to divide the world in two: the part that venerates the humble-seeming fruit known as the date, and the part that does not. The part that does is home to hundreds of millions of people, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco across North Africa and Egypt to Mesopotamia and east to India. In this part of the world there aren’t really “dates,” because only a philistine would speak in such generalizations. There’s the plump sugar-bomb medjool, the chewy khalas beloved of Emirati connoisseurs, sweet and sticky Saudi sukkary, tart yellow barhi peeled and eaten fresh, the varieties picked early, called rutab, and served frozen with coffee at the upscale cafés of Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. There’s ajwa from Medina, said to be the favorite of the Prophet, the dark Persian kimia, the translucent deglet noor, and many others with evocative names like halawi or Sagai VIP.
I grew up in the part of the world that doesn’t care (in my case, Canada), where supermarkets banish this queen of fruit to remote corners of the health-food aisle with the lowly prune and the most obscure nuts. But I’ve spent the last three decades living and writing in Israel, part of the world where the date reigns. Now when I visit North America and see these fruits languishing on their remote shelves, it feels like climbing into an Uber with that Washington, D.C. driver who was once finance minister of Afghanistan. You can almost hear them whispering: Don’t you know who I am?
In Israel, I was first drawn to eating dates mainly because they were around all the time, served plain or stuffed with walnuts to guests in living rooms. Then I began to see them less as a fruit than as a kind of cultural marker. There are so many forces pulling apart the people of the Middle East and North Africa. But the date and its magnificent tree are woven through thousands of years of common history, rising elegantly above the dividing lines. The date offers a different view of the region than the one we’re familiar with, and the best place to start its extraordinary story is at the top.
At ten feet up the trunk of a date palm and rising, you’re still thinking about the ground receding beneath your feet, but at 20 feet your gaze shifts upward toward the approaching explosion of green above your head. At 40 feet the hydraulic platform shakes to a halt, and Yuval Shabo and the other workers at this Israeli date orchard grasp the trunks and leap into the fronds. It’s spring, when date palms reproduce, and the workers use curved knives to harvest pollen from male flowers, place the pollen in squeeze bottles and then apply it to the white petal clusters atop the female trees. It’s a different world at this height—birds gliding at eye level, the Jordan Valley stretching north toward Syria and south toward Egypt, the green frond sea waving in all directions. The workers stop on occasion to sip water or roll a cigarette. Ground-bound humans and their concerns seem irrelevant. Up here all that matters is the little brown fruit.
I found the same attitude in an orchard 1,300 miles away, near the Persian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates, at the famed oasis of Al-Ain. Here, too, it was pollination season, but at this oasis the old methods are preserved, and the treetops aren’t reached by hydraulic cranes but by fearless workers climbing barefoot. Instead of modern drip irrigation, the trees are watered by an ancient system known in Arabic as aflaj, which pipes in water from springs miles away and distributes it through an ingenious network of open channels, flooding each farmer’s plot in turn. As I crossed the oasis a flash of white fabric far above my head alerted me to a young man named Maksood Baluchi, holding a curved dagger and a basket of male flowers. He shouted down greetings but didn’t have much time to talk. There were lots of trees to go.
The same overriding sense of the date’s importance struck me several times during the past few months, sitting in air-conditioned libraries, hunched over books, looking at the ancient art and literature of this part of the world. When I began my research, the date palm seemed to appear merely as a background detail in art, from pharaonic tombs and Assyrian palaces to a 2,500-year-old seal impression showing the Persian Emperor Darius shooting arrows at a lion. But after a while my perception changed. The date palms stopped looking like decorations and came to the fore. After all, the pharaohs are long gone and Darius no longer matters, but the date palm does, feeding multitudes, linking people with their ancestors, rising everywhere like millions of green fireworks frozen mid-blast. Maybe these trees are the stars in the story of this region, and we’re the extras?
The picture in the Senate became clear late Saturday after Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada narrowly defeated Republican Adam Laxalt to win re-election, putting her party over the threshold, NBC News projected Saturday.
"Thank you, Nevada!" Cortez Masto said in a tweet Saturday evening after its two most populous counties, Clark and Washoe, finished counting mail-in ballots.
Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona won his re-election contest in Arizona, NBC News projected Friday evening, directing all eyes to Nevada. Both Laxalt and Masters were endorsed by Trump and promoted his false claims about the presidential race he lost.
Masto's victory means Democrats will hold the Senate regardless of the outcome of Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff election, when Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will face each other again after neither cleared the 50% threshold required under state law.
A Walker win would keep the Senate 50-50, where Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote for Democrats.
A Warnock victory would make it 51-49, giving Democrats one extra vote in a chamber where they have often been stymied by internal dissent from members like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Biden can now count on partners in the Senate to confirm his judicial and administration appointments, even if his legislative agenda ends up effectively blocked because of a Republican takeover of the House.
Republicans headed into Tuesday's election confident a "red wave" would sweep them into power in the Senate and give them a commanding majority in the House.
As it became clear that neither would materialize, conservative leaders and media figures began pointing fingers and blaming each other for the surprising defeat — with Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy all facing backlash.
"The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new," Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted after it became clear his party had lost hope of retaking the Senate.
The one state where the Democrats crashed and burned on Tuesday was Florida. GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis trounced Democratic former Rep. Charlie Crist, GOP Sen. Marco Rubio handily beat Democratic Rep. Val Demings, and the difference in both cases was the loss of the Latino vote in the state to the GOP, especially in Miami-Dade County.
Inside a packed section of La Carreta, the iconic Cuban restaurant in Little Havana, trays were packed with croquetas and guava pastelitos, while a DJ blasted music for people wearing MarÃa Elvira Salazar T-shirts.The election night party was for the freshman Miami Congresswoman of Florida’s Congressional District 27 — a district with the largest share of Hispanic residents anywhere in the state — who danced her way past the treats, onto the makeshift stage to declare victory for a second term.“This election proves what Ronald Reagan famously said, that Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it,” Salazar said Tuesday at her victory party, declaring an early night win over her Colombian-American opponent, Democrat Annette Taddeo.
Until tonight, because 2022 has been the year of the Hispanic Republicans,” she added.Salazar’s statement is true for Florida, where Hispanic support for Republicans in the 2022 election — and for Gov. Ron DeSantis in particular — was crucial to a decisive and crushing victory over Democrats, according to a Miami Herald analysis of precinct-level results. The margin of victory for DeSantis — a nearly 20-percentage-point difference — has catapulted him onto the national political stage and into a potential 2024 presidential run.
Supercharged by a supermajority in the House and Senate, Florida legislative leaders broke their silence Wednesday and confirmed they are prepared to discuss further abortion restrictions in Florida in the next year.But how far they will go is the big question, and interviews with the presiding officers indicate they already appear to be taking different approaches.Incoming Senate President Kathleen Passidomo told the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times in an interview that she wants to see the 15-week ban approved last year by lawmakers reduced to 12 weeks with the addition of an exclusion for rape and incest, which is currently not allowed.“I went on record on the abortion bill in support of an exclusion for rape and incest, and I’d like to see that,’’ said Passidomo, a Naples Republican who will be sworn in this month as the third woman to be Florida’s Senate president. “And I think in order to accomplish that, I think we would have to reduce the weeks. I don’t have a problem going to 12 weeks.”Under the law passed earlier this year, all abortions are banned 15 weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period. Women can still obtain an abortion after that cutoff if their health is threatened or if their baby has a “fatal fetal abnormality,” but there is no exception for victims of rape or incest.Incoming House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, said the House is likely to support additional restrictions as well but he was unwilling to “put a number on it.”“I don’t think it’s time for me to put a number on it until we’ve organized,’’ Renner said, noting that there are 30 new legislators joining the House after the election, including a record 85-member Republican majority. He was not prepared to say if they will want to see an outright ban on all abortions or further limits on the existing 15-week ban.“I personally am pro life and would like to see us move more in that direction,’’ he said. “But I want to hear from my colleagues in the House and my colleagues in the Senate before we take any steps in that direction.”
With Dems now needing only a Senate win in Nevada or in the GA runoff to keep control, and the House still up for grabs this morning, Greg Sargent gives us five Village narratives that were shattered on Tuesday.
1. Democracy was on the ballot, and (for now) it’s winning.
We have long been told that inflation and crime are “real” issues that truly matter, while Democratic warnings about the fate of democracy wouldn’t motivate voters. I also feared this.
The precise role of those warnings in driving Democratic overperformance is uncertain. But we can already say Donald Trump-fueled election denialism suffered a rebuke at the polls, and that voters meaningfully reduced the threat it poses.
With Democrats sweeping gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where GOP governors could have certified sham presidential electors for a losing GOP candidate — a big pathway to a stolen or crisis-ridden 2024 election has been choked off.
And if Kari Lake’s gubernatorial bid in Arizona fails, as appears possible, none of the five most crucial swing states in the 2020 presidential election would have election-denying governors. (Republican Brian Kemp, who defied Trump, won in Georgia.) There’s also a real chance that none will have an election-denying secretary of state.
And so, while dozens of election deniers did win reelection to the House, we seem to be avoiding a situation in which voters failed to hold the most prominent deniers accountable for brashly flaunting their intentions to subvert democracy, which at bottom was a test of the public’s appetite for authoritarianism.
2. Kevin McCarthy’s dance with Trump has been a disaster.
Just after Jan. 6, 2021, the House minority leader privately concluded Trump should resign. Then he made a public pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to cement their alliance, and helped cover up Trump’s coup attempt for the next 20 months.
For a time, McCarthy’s game was widely treated in the media as clever. He was harnessing the energy of the Trump base to retake the House, even as the GOP didn’t appear poised to pay any political price for helping place Trump beyond accountability. We’ll never know what would have happened if McCarthy had taken the other path — using Jan. 6 to marginalize Trump — but we do know now that harnessing Trumpist energy failed to produce the decisive rout he predicted.
In a poetic twist, the Trumpier House Republicans now see McCarthy as a wounded animal, Punchbowl News reports. Even if Republicans win the House majority, its sheer narrowness is likely to make it easier for members of the MAGA caucus to knife McCarthy in the back, legislatively or with a leadership challenge — a fitting end given the corrupt bargain he struck.
3. Democratic “meddling” in primaries worked.
When Democrats elevated MAGA Republicans in primaries, believing they would be weaker general-election opponents, the roar of pundit criticism was deafening. And to be fair, at first it looked prone to backfiring by letting election deniers sneak into office.
But it was a bet that seemingly paid off. As HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard demonstrates, six of the most prominent election-denying candidates who were boosted by Democrats in House, Senate and gubernatorial races went down.
The critics oversimplified this matter. If you believe the House could pose its most dire threat to democracy simply by virtue of being GOP-controlled, and you also believe elevating a few election deniers might make that outcome less likely, then it’s not an entirely cynical strategy. It risked one outcome (adding a few election deniers to the House) to reduce the risk of another, worse outcome (a House under GOP control).
In fairness, it was probably too risky to elevate election deniers running for executive positions in states, where they could seriously subvert democracy. That said, they don’t seem to be getting into office either. As power politics, this strategy succeeded.
4. “Invasion” language did little for Republicans.
House Republicans poured enormous sums into ads depicting the migrant “invasion” in the vilest of terms. Republicans have long enjoyed a presumption of a major advantage on this issue, but aside from Trump’s 2016 victory, it keeps failing to deliver. The border was central in the 2018 and 2020 elections, and Republicans lost both (though with House pickups in the latter).
Some will argue that Democrats neutralized immigration this time by keeping some of Trump’s border policies, and it’s true that the party hasn’t made a case for its own immigration vision. Still, GOP confidence that President Biden’s “disastrous open border” would spark major electoral repudiation, giving Republicans space to hyper-radicalize their base around the issue, has proved wrong.
And if Blake Masters loses in the Arizona Senate race — after openly embracing “great replacement theory” and running ads featuring the most lurid and militarized “invasion” imagery imaginable — that will only add more evidence against the political effectiveness of this GOP strategy.
5. A radicalized MAGA House might not have free rein, after all.
It has long been suggested (including by me) that a GOP-controlled House would be able to run amok with Benghazi-style investigations and impeachments of everyone down to the White House chef.
But if the majority remains narrow, it’s unclear whether the votes will be there to impeach Biden. And while zealous investigations are expected to roar forward, Republican leaders are almost certainly going to struggle to prevent the unruly MAGA caucus from truly driving things off the rails.
Republicans will likely still win the House and the Senate is still in play. But the big emerging story of these midterm elections is that MAGAfied authoritarian forces enthusiastically embraced by the GOP suffered unexpected and potentially grave setbacks.
Whether Republicans will accept this interpretation and act on it is another matter entirely.
Joe Biden spent the last three months warning Americans about threats to democracy.
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) November 12, 2022
Kamala Harris spent the last five months traveling the country to talk about abortion.
The keys our victories were threats to democracy and abortion.
Give @POTUS and @VP credit where it's due.
Here endeth the lesson.
So Republicans are very mopey and disappointed as the Red Wave sputtered out, and while the big losers were Trump, Kevin McCarthy and Fox News, the biggest loser on Tuesday night was Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who bet it all on using the National Republican Senate Committee he chaired in retaking the Senate, being the hero, and going straight for Mitch McConnell's job.
For nearly two years, former President Donald Trump has demanded Senate Republicans dump Mitch McConnell as their leader but has never offered an alternative.
This week, one was set to emerge: the man in charge of the Senate Republican campaign arm who has been feuding with McConnell for much of the year.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida was poised to challenge McConnell, Republicans briefed on his plans told me, until he decided against a bid Wednesday morning, when it became clear Republicans may not capture the majority and there was to be a Senate runoff in Georgia.
Scott had cut an announcement video declaring his intentions, word had reached some prominent conservatives outside the Senate and a handful of GOP senators had gotten wind of his plan and started calculating just how many votes his longshot campaign could accrue at the leadership vote next week in the Capitol.
He would have been virtually certain to lose. But Scott’s challenge was not so much aimed at unseating the longtime Senate Republican leader as it was channeling the anger of grassroots conservatives, and the former president, who were peeved at McConnell’s criticism of the “candidate quality” of this year’s roster of Senate GOP candidates.
The idea was that those supposed mediocrities would romp to victory, credit Scott for his steadfast support and shame McConnell for his lack of faith — while also starting to loosen the 80-year-old’s grip on his leadership post. But only one of those candidates — Ohio’s J.D. Vance — won his race outright. Arizona’s Blake Masters appears likely to lose, Georgia’s Herschel Walker is in a runoff, and Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz and New Hampshire’s Donald Bolduc were defeated.
With Republican hopes for claiming the majority now dependent on a tenuous vote advantage in Nevada, McConnell’s August assessment of the candidates looks prescient. Because of recruitment failures and Trump’s interventions in primaries, the GOP was saddled with candidates who lost, are likely to lose or simply cost McConnell’s super PAC and Scott’s campaign committee tens of millions of dollars in bailouts.
The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.
An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.
The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump’s false claims about “Antifa,” an “organization” that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to drum up proof ever existed.
The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment; “twisted efforts,” Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting “baseless conspiracy theories” to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s “political gain.” The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the “friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests” — up to and including “First Amendment speech activity.” Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an “anarchist extremist” specifically because “sufficient facts” were never found “to support such a characterization.”
One field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily “thrown together,” adding they “didn’t even know why some of the people were arrested.” In some cases, it was unclear whether the arrests were made by police or by one of the several federal agencies on the ground. The analysts were never provided arrest affidavits or paperwork, a witness told investigators, adding that they “just worked off the assumption that everyone on the list was arrested.” Lawyers who reviewed 43 of the dossiers found it “concerning,” the report says, that 13 of them stemmed from “nonviolent crimes.” These included trespassing, though it was unclear to analysts and investigators whether the cases had “any relationship to federal property,” the report says.
A footnote in the report states that “at least one witness” told investigators that dossiers had been requested on people who were “not arrested” but merely accused of threats. Another, citing emails exchanged between top intelligence officials, states dossiers were created “on persons arrested having nothing to do with homeland security or threats to officers.”
Questioned by investigators, the agency’s chief intelligence officer acknowledged fielding requests by Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to create dossiers “against everyone participating in the Portland protest,” regardless of whether they’d been accused of any crime, the report says. That officer, Brian Murphy, then head of the agency’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), told interviewers that he’d rejected the idea, informing his bosses that he could only “look at people who were arrested,” and adding that it was something his office had done “thousands” of times before.
The DHS report, finalized more than a year ago, includes descriptions of orders handed down to “senior leadership” instructing them to broadly apply the label “violent antifa anarchists inspired” to Portland protesters unless they had intel showing “something different.”
Once the dossiers were received by the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to tie the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor abroad. Efforts to drum up evidence to support the administration’s claim that a “larger network was directing or financing” the protesters — a task assigned to another unit, known as the Homeland Identities, Targeting and Exploitation Center, diverted away from its usual work of analyzing national security threats — “did not find any evidence that assertion was true,” the report says.
What a difference a day makes: 24 little hours. As the darkness descended across America on Tuesday, editors at the New York Times locked in their doom-for-Democrats front page while 3,000 miles west in Arizona, the extremist femme fatale Kari Lake was boasting to reporters that “I’m going to be your worst frickin’ nightmare” as Arizona’s next governor. Inside the Beltway, the pundits who’d issued a political tsunami watch gazed out on the waters with their binoculars, waiting for a “red wave” to roll ashore.
Hardly anyone was paying attention to what was happening on college campuses from Tempe, Ariz., to Champaign, Ill., where teens and 20-somethings stood and waited for hours to cast their ballots in the 2022 midterms, patiently scrolling through their iPhones or even sneaking in some homework. At the University of Michigan, in a state where abortion rights were on the ballot through both a referendum and a pro-choice governor, hundreds of students — some draped in blankets as the mercury plunged — stood on a line for two to three hours to cast their ballot. It was a new twist on the save-America battle cry of “Wolverines!” from the 1984 movie Red Dawn.
“I was voting based on women’s rights in terms of candidates who were supporting women’s choice,” said Lauren Snyder, who endured Tuesday’s massive line at the University of Illinois. She added: “It’s important — as a student — as a young person to come out and vote for issues that I care about.”
As bright sunshine broke across America on Wednesday morning, the outlines of an epic and truly historic election were starting to come into clear focus. If democracy was on the ballot in 2022, as President Joe Biden and so many others had warned, then it was young Americans — especially those under 30, including women like Snyder — who just saved it. Shocked into action by the loss of their reproductive rights and repulsed by candidates who threatened not to count their votes going forward, Millennials and Gen Z put down their books (or their beers) to make sure any “red wave” was subsumed by the deep blue sea.
Here’s the situation, less than 12 hours after the nation’s last polling place closed: Control of Congress is very much up in the air, defying predictions that Republicans were on track for double-digit gains in the House and possibly tipping the currently 50-50 Senate. The situation remains fluid but it looks as if Democrats could have 50 or even 51 Senate seats; network projections show the GOP with maybe a five- to seven-seat House majority, but that could be undone by late vote-counting out West. Scores of Republican election deniers fell Tuesday, led by a landslide defeat for Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano. Arizona’s gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is currently behind in that state’s slow count — meaning future harassment of the press may have to come in a cranky letter to the editor, not from the governor’s mansion.
We got here through a Democratic surge among voters under age 45, but especially in the 18-to-29 bracket, and a female electorate that was clearly energized by the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision that had guaranteed abortion rights for nearly a half century. That was especially true here in Pennsylvania, where a preliminary CBS exit poll showed the No. 1 voter concern was not inflation, as experts predicted, but abortion rights, cited by 36%. CNN’s national exit poll showed the GOP won over-45 voters, while Democrats, who narrowly won the 30-to-44 bracket, gained from a whopping 28% win among voters aged 18 to 29.
“I think young people realize that this election cycle is so much about the issues,” Victor Shi of the group Voters of Tomorrow presciently told the radio host Dean Obeidallah shortly before the election. “Because the other side, Republicans, really have no issue that they can offer young people in terms of how they’re going to support our lives and how they’re going to improve it.”
The determination of young voters to be counted in 2022 clearly flummoxed a political establishment and a punditry that looked like a cadre of baffled generals fighting the last wars. Certainly in the past, midterm elections have tended to be disastrous for the party in the White House, especially with exacerbating factors like high inflation. The New York Times, in particular, struggled to turn the “Dems-in-disarray” battleship around, finally landing on a front page that read “GOP GAINS EDGE, BUT ITS EXPECTATIONS DIM.” Not quite “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” but not great. Remember, Politico had commissioned a poll that picked up the late Democratic surge on the congressional ballot, but dismissed it as “an outlier.”
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t an outlier.
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