Air Date: 9-9-2026

Today we look at the strategies being deployed by the Trump administration and their enablers to undermine the midterm elections and what it actually takes to fight back. The lawyers fighting in court against the efforts to destroy our democracy are clear-eyed that you cannot litigate your way to a free election. The most durable defense is a turnout margin too large to plausibly contest, and organizers are building toward it now.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we look at the strategies being deployed by the Trump administration and their enablers to undermine the midterm elections and what it actually takes to fight back. The lawyers fighting in court against the efforts to destroy our democracy are clear-eyed that you cannot litigate your way to a free election. The most durable defense is a turnout margin too large to plausibly contest, and organizers are building toward it now.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

Consider This

Straight White American Jesus

Start Making Sense

Strict Scrutiny

The BradCast

and Runaway Country

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 3 sections;

Section A, Threat And Backfire

Section B, Cracks And Constraints

And Section C, Resistance And Response

And now, on to the show.

Miles, I wanna start with you. Could you just help us understand how the Trump administration has tried to change the way Americans vote? 

Sure. Though I will also note at this point that for most voters, this election is on pace to look basically identical to 2024, 2022, basically previous election cycles, even though Trump's actions have inserted a lot of uncertainty.

The president notably has signed two executive orders, one aimed at new registration requirements, the other at voting by mail, and both at this point have been blocked by the courts. The Justice Department and the Departmen- Department of Homeland Security are both also investigating the 2020 election, as well as voter fraud more broadly in novel new ways, and that has many experts and officials worried about what that effort could potentially look like as this election gets underway, specifically on this issue of potential law enforcement- interference in either voting or vote counting. 

It's not just the election administrators, it's Democrats as a whole. I've been reporting on a task force in the Senate where at least 11 Democratic offices, their staff, outside litigators, and cross-ideological good governance groups are all working to respond to what they describe as active threats to the election process, as well as prepare for future threats.

That's everything from issues at a single voting location to Trump dispatching federal troops or ICE agents to the polls. 

Troops at polling sites? 

Trump was asked by PBS News back in May, Liz Landers asked about whether he would dispatch the National Guard or ICE agents to voting sites, and he refused to rule it out.

He said he'd do anything necessary to protect elections. We should say troops at polls is illegal, and when I asked the Department of Homeland Security about this specifically, an official told me that ICE agents would not be sent to the polls, and the administration refused to engage with me on what they describe as hypotheticals.

Okay. I wanna note here that elections themselves, and here we're talking about the actual process of casting a vote to choose your representation, that is supposed to be a nonpartisan function of our government. So I wonder- Is that changing? Is this becoming a partisan issue? 

Not at the administrative level, really.

there are very few election officials, including Republicans, who have bought into Trump's level of election denial. It's just a lot easier for Democrats to talk about the worst case scenarios that they're watching for, considering that elected Republicans have to obviously worry about the political ramifications of opposing Trump, especially at this early stage where we haven't seen a lot of these interference efforts actually take place yet.

Eric, is there a partisan divide in who is actually pushing back publicly? 

As far as elected officials on this task force, it's explicitly a Democratic effort. When Republicans talk about election integrity, which they do, they're not addressing Trump's interventions or proposed interventions in the voting process.

They're talking about this more or less imaginary problem of ineligible folks casting ballots in American elections, which investigations and research shown, and has shown over and over again, is not widespread enough in the United States to shape election outcomes. White House spokeswoman Lauren Byrd told me, quote, "President Trump has been clear, and he is absolutely right.

We fix this now, or we lose our country." That's a call to pass his election overhaul legislation, the Save America Act. Separately, Juana, it's worth remembering before he was Speaker of the House, then Congressman Mike Johnson played a central role in Trump's legal efforts to remain in power in 2020 and 2021, despite losing the presidential re-election effort.

I'll be watching to see if Republican lawmakers do take action if some of the big fears of federal involvement in elections, like troops at polls, come to pass. 

Okay, but elections, they're run by states. How is all of this playing out for the people who are actually in charge of administering elections?

It's complicated. they're threading this needle of not wanting to scare people, but also wanting to talk about some of these issues, so that way they can re- reassure voters that the election system is secure and that it is safe to vote. I was talking about this dynamic this summer with a few election officials at an event hosted by the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Connecticut Secretary of State, Democrat Stephanie Thomas, told me that people approach her all the time who are worried and can't even really describe why.

Grandmothers approach me concerned, and I say, "What are you concerned about?" And they say, "I don't know. I just feel afraid." So regardless of whether or not any of these things materialize, it is taking a toll on voters. 

it's worth noting, Juana, that midterm elections are already much lower turnout elections than presidentials.

2022, for instance, lagged way behind 2020 and 2024 in terms of turnout, so there's a risk that these sort of ambiguous worries amplify that effect. 

And Eric, Republicans are in control of both chambers of Congress, and they control what comes up for a vote. So- What does that leave Democrats actually able to do other than sounding the alarm speaking out?

they're planning, right? They've held tabletop games so they're not caught off guard by the same failure of imagination, what they describe to me as a failure of imagination, that caught them off guard five or six years ago around January 6th. Allied groups are also directly involved in litigation to stop the Department of Justice from obtaining state voter rolls, which they describe both as federal overreach and a pretext to encumb- to encumber eligible voters.

Democrats also have this massive bully pulpit. Lawmakers are some of the most visible folks in their communities, and they're trying to be the connective tissue between local officials and these national resources. Vitally, task force members want to emphasize that they feel prepared and that voters should feel confident casting their ballot.

Here's Vanita Gupta, a task force advisor who was the number three in Biden's Department of Justice. She's now at New York University Law School. 

Maybe the process of getting from here to a new Congress may be messier than any of us would like, but we are going to have free and fair elections so long as people don't take for granted their right to vote.

Miles, there are still voting issues before the court, so what else could still affect this fall's elections? 

the thing is we don't really know, right? Trump is incredibly unpredictable, and voting officials say preparing for all the different scenarios is almost like preparing for a hurricane, where you don't know exactly what's going to happen.

That said, election officials are feeling pretty confident right now. The law is very clear on who runs elections and protecting voters' rights, so now it's just a question of reaching these voters and reassuring them. 

So we have this, we have what happened on the shadow docket yesterday, and then we have a kinda larger context, for our elections that you've outlined a little bit here. Here's George Chidi writing at, The Guardian. "A series of moves by Donald Trump's administration to sow doubt in the integrity of US elections has intensified concern among voting experts and sparked hope among election deniers that it could declare a national emergency.

The White House and US federal agencies have released a string of documents this summer, including disputed analyses of alleged voting by non-citizens and historical intelligence memos stoking expectations that the US president could move to exert greater control over Nove- November's US midterm elections.

Trump used a primetime television address in July to claim again that US elections were vulnerable to foreign manipulation and repeat the lie that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen." I think one of the things here that we have, and we lost Matt's, we lost Matt's camera there.

one of the things that I think is at play here is, for me, a couple of things. I was with, sen- Representative C- Jared Huffman last week, and, one of the things he said in the event we did together is he's worried about everything that I-- we're worried about. He is concerned that Mike Johnson will not seat people, Democrats in Congress who are elected this cycle in 2026.

He's worried about, shenanigans on Election Day. he's worried about, everything that, that we're mentioning here in terms of ICE being at the polls, people being confused as to whether or not they're allowed to vote, there being hijinks with the Postal Service and what they might get up to.

His answer to that was this election needs to be too big to rig. There needs to be a landslide in the way that is undeniable and, wherein, there's mass demonstrations and protests if, the Speaker of the House or anyone else is unwilling to complete the democratic process as it is spelled out in our Constitution and so on.

But that leads me to w- th- this idea of a national emergency, and I think we lost Matt. So Matt, did we lose you? 

I'm here. I- 

Yeah. 

You can hear me? 

I can hear you, but I can't see you, so that's, we will... Yeah, we'll see what's going on here. all right. what that leads me to, Matt, n- now that I know you're here and I'm glad I'm not talking to myself, is, the, the growing call on the American right for Tr- oh, there we go.

Hello, Matt. i- is the growing call on the American right for Trump to declare a national emergency, in order to, again, muck up the elections and make it such that the elections don't proceed how they should, don't, go according to plan so that there's confusion, doubt, all kinds of stuff. So here's, the leader of this call is Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon has been talking about this a lot. Here's him with a on a recent interview with a recent guest talking about it. I- we could have picked one of 10 times he's been talking about it, but here's just one instance from, the last week. 

Do you agree we're past the time, we're past the point of no return that the Save America Act, which has some great elements in it, it's t- they're gonna come back if they were to debate it in late September, 'cause they're only coming back for a couple of weeks, then they're leaving to go campaign.

We're past the time that act- the great elements of the Save America Act could actually be implemented? 

So Bannon is like, "Look, y- w-we can't do the Save America Act." And the Save America Act, I think most of you listening and watching know, is a proposed bill that would totally change how, voting happens in this country.

If you have a different name than is on your birth certificate, other things, it would make it extremely difficult for you to prove who you are and to get on a voter roll in your district, your precinct. So this is not only people who've changed their name, for a number of reasons, this is anyone who's gotten married and hyphenated their name, taken their partner's name, and so on, right?

So I'm not gonna go over the entirety of the, the Save America Act. They tried to push it through. It didn't happen. So now Bannon is pivoting and saying, we don't have time for that now. What should we do instead?" 

Y-Yes, yes, but if we have an emergency order, we can get it implemented. See, the reason it needs to be a declaration of the emergency that exists is b- it, there's a lot of thresholds here.

So it-- in, in order for the president to have a say on how elections are conducted by the states, he needs to declare the emergency. China is in our election system, when you think about all that China's doing to us, giving us... sending the COVID over here, the, the killing 100,000 of us a year, over the last ten years, a million people, more, more than have been killed in all the wars since the Civil War all put together.

and they're in our election system trying to take over our country that way, where they did it for four years with their boy Biden. 

Here's the summary. China has so compromised our elections that we can't have them, and therefore we need a national emergency, otherwise we will get results that are skewed.

Now, let me just make one point and I'll throw it to you, is there's a strategy here that we're talking about for the last 10 minutes. USPS, Department of Homeland Security, and voter rolls. that's been going on since Trump took office the second time. If you've been paying attention, he's lost 23 to zero trying to get voter rolls from states and four states to give him those.

But there's another larger strategy that, Matt, I know you're very aware of, which is to say foreign influence on our country from Iran or other, quote-unquote, "Islamist regimes," communist influence on our country coming from Cuba and other places, and communist influence coming from China are linked to the DSA, the Democrats, and leftists in the country.

Therefore, follow me y'all, if you see in November large-scale wins by the Democrats, including these insurgent l- progressive candidates who are either associated with or adjacent to the DSA, they are claiming theoretically that those people must be somehow associated with or adjacent to the communist, Islamist or both influences coming from beyond our country's borders, whether that's China, Cuba, or, or Iran.

And you're like, where do you get that information, Brad?" And it's like, it's all publicly available in the Cuba report, 100 pages that came out in July, the remarks by Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio that came at the ministerial summit a couple of weeks ago, and NSPM seven, which Matt and I have talked about a ton on this show and that Matt and I respectively have talked about in other places.

So when he says, when Ticktin, Bannon's guest there says, "China's so in our elections we need an emergency," he's basically saying, "We are so compromised by a foreign entity we can't have elections, and so the president will probably have to take emergency control of everything." Does that make sense, Matt?

Thoughts, thoughts on this, and then I think we can get into the religious dimensions of that in a minute. 

I think when many people hear, claims about election rigging or challenges to the integrity of our election, they imagine that it is this, kinda binary or direct intervention kinda thing.

Like there, there'll be this bolt out of the blue, and suddenly Trump is gonna declare a state of emergency on election day and National Guard will be deployed, and they're gonna seize voting machines, and we'll-- everyone will know what's going on. The, the reality is it's a lot more like cancer, and it's eating away at, all, all these efforts, all, the, the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the conspiracy theories, guys like Peter Ticktin, who is a very prominent lawyer for the January 6th defendants, and all...

right? Part of what has occurred in the last six years in our country is one of our political parties has given up on the process of liberal democracy, and that, that begins with the 2020 election. there, there were elements of it long before 2020, but really it kinda crystallizes around the 2020 election and all of Trump's denial before the election and after the election, and then January 6th.

and we are still living in that mode now where right-wing media, right-wing politicians openly question the value of our elections and are urging all kinds of measures to, quote-unquote, "safeguard the election," by which they mean assure the outcome that they want. 

While Trump is trying lots of tactics to prevent Democrats from voting, he's been losing a lot. He's been losing in the courts.

He's been losing in Congress. He's been trying to get Congress, the Senate in particular, to pass the SAVE Act, which require, would require proofs of, proof of citizenship and photo ID for voting. But the Senate has never voted for it, 'cause the Republican leadership knows they'd lose. And the legal side of election protection seems to be in pretty good shape right now.

The lawyers have been preparing for this for years, ever since Trump, won election. And that includes, of course, the lawyers who w- work for the blue state attorneys general, the ACLU, the Brennan Center, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, all those organizations we read about Democracy Defenders, Democracy Docket, and of course the parties, the Senate Democrats and so on.

I was amazed to, to find what the big foundations are doing to support, all this election protection work. Ford Foundation, 60 million, MacArthur, 100 million, Open Society, 300 million, Democracy Fund, 500 million, that's Pierre Omidyar, and hundreds of millions more from Freedom Together, Rockefeller and others.

So lots of lawyers at work, lots of money being spent on this. what's not as well understood is the grats- grassroots part of election protection, and that's where Indivisible comes in with its millions of veterans of No Kings protests in thousands of places where people vote. Indivisible, of course, is best known for those huge one-day mobilizations.

Are you planning to do more of that around the election? 

here's what I can say on that front. We think that there is going to be a number of moments when it's gonna be really important to collectively show up en masse in the h- the period pre-election. We think that the most and important and most significant thing that we collectively need to do is establish, in a really movement-oriented way that we will not be scared out of exercising our right to vote.

and to really encourage people collectively to understand that this is an election in which we all get a say in our democracy, and we collectively have the power to drive the results that we want. And so we are looking at an additional collective day of action. It is not yet official. We're working through our, our grassroots networks.

We're working through with partners around the country because this is the kind of thing that you really wanna have everyone have a chance to weigh in on. Obviously, election season is quite sensitive that way. But we are collectively working towards, something that we hope to announce pretty soon.

Of course, what we really need is not just a big demonstration of millions of people. We need a big turnout for voting. 

That's right. That's right. Absolutely. and what we think is gonna be really crucial during this window is understanding the connection between exercising our freedom of speech and exercising our right to vote, right?

fundamentally, the movement that we have been part of is a movement that is for small D democracy. It is a movement that is saying we, the people, are where the power ultimately resides, and one of the core ways in which that right is expressed and that power is expressed is via the voting booth.

And winning by undeniable overwhelming margins is by far the best form of election protection you've been ar- arguing 

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we talk about a lot in our own, anti-election sabotage campaigning is, the Hungary move, right? We were very much in touch with a lot of our friends in the Hungarian pro-democracy movement in advance of their election last year.

This is after n- almost two decades of rule by their authoritarian dictator, their mini Trump. And, there was an enormous amount of preparation and concern that went into the possibility of a stolen election. And also at the end of the day, they turned out and they won in such margins that it was, simply didn't pass the smell test to try to sabotage the results. And we are under no illusions that you can simply vote your way out of it with nothing else, no preparation, no organizing, et cetera. But we're also clear that massive overwhelming turnout is itself an election protection strategy.

And what a lot of our friends are worried about is election day. Trump declares, in this scenario, Trump declares a national security emergency and claims the power to send troops or ICE or the National Guard to blue polling places in swing states to try to intimidate, voters. The lawyers, of course, will be rushing to court to get injunctions to stop them because voter intimidation is against the law in every state.

What are individual groups, planning, thinking about for election day? 

first of all, let me say that part of this, this is partly why we, when we do our Hands Off Our Vote campaign, we talk about early voting as such a centrally important part of the strategy. Because early voting creates a visible demonstration that communities are turning out to vote.

They create-- It creates an orientation around voting as a season rather than just a single day that you take that action on. It spreads out the time window so that if there are risks, if there is a sabotage attempt, if there is a crisis, there is time to address it and make sure that you are getting your vote successfully in.

And so we're really gonna be encouraging people first and foremost to avoid the situation in which last-minute shenanigans, I say lightly, w- last-minute sabotage attempts on Election Day can meaningfully impact the outcome. So that's the first piece. The second piece is we really think that it's important for people to be connected at a hyperlocal level so that if and when there are sabotage attempts in your county, in your state, you know who's got the ball and how to show up and what to do.

A lot of our work in the key states where we are worried about sabotage is really about making sure that people are connected and trained in advance so that if there is a crisis, people are prepared. And I'll just add one additional thing on the ICE at the polls consideration, because this is something that I hear quite a lot from people and, we think it's both a, a valid concern, and we also want people to understand what could happen and what could not happen, because it's the kind of place where there's also a real risk of fear running rampant and people attributing to the administration powers that they don't have.

It is very possible that we would see the administration deploy ICE, CBP, some part of their DHS secret police force- into communities that are, have larger minority populations as a voter suppression tactic. We are concerned about that. The most important thing that I would urge people who are worried about on that front to do right now is to collectively get trained on knowing your rights, on Ice Watch, on the ways you can coordinate with your local immigrant rights infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

Because in a window where that kind of threat is being made, it's, racial profiling, attempting to suppress a community, the people who are gonna be organized to respond are the people who've been doing this work on a daily basis. So we really encourage people to not think of that as some kind of totally separate election threat, but another impetus to get trained and prepared and connected locally.

Groups that have been doing this not just for days and weeks, but for years. 

100%. 100%. 

As part of the multifaceted, multifront attack on elections and democracy designed to lock Republicans into power, oh, forever, back in April, the president issued a wildly illegal executive order on elections that purported to do a few things. First, on absentee ballots specifically, it directed the Postal Service to initiate a rulemaking to limit what kinds of absentee ballots will be delivered, requiring certain barcodes, and maybe providing that the Postal Service would only deliver ballots in states that had agreed to certain terms for how elections would be conducted.

The order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to establish a list of citizens to send to states to determine eligibility for voting, and the order included a threat that maybe the Postal Service wouldn't deliver ballots at all in states that didn't use DHS's list as opposed to the state's own lists.

And just to be clear, the state's own lists are sure to be far more accurate, so this was punishing election officials abiding by more accurate election administration procedures. Okay, we're not done, though, because the order also directed the attorney general to prioritize investigation and prosecution of state and local officials who allow people to vote who aren't authorized to do so, and allowing people to vote who aren't authorized to do so seems like something election officials wouldn't do, but the threat embedded in this part of the executive order is basically holding the possibility of criminal penalties over state and local election administrators to try to incentivize them to err on the side of not allowing people to vote, even where those people are eligible to do so 

Especially if the federal government might use DHS's less accurate lists to make allegations about who is and isn't allowed to vote.

100%. 

So multiple lower courts blocked the executive order, mostly on the ground that the president has zero authority to regulate absentee ballots and how state officials conduct elections. Under the Constitution, states have authority to regulate federal elections. Congress can impose rules if it so chooses.

The president cannot, but attempted to do so anyway. As ever, the federal government ran off to Daddy SCOTUS after these lower court decisions, and Daddy SCOTUS delivered for Trump and the Republican Party with an evil, cowardly per curiam opinion. That adjective, string of adjectives probably suggests it was the work of one John G.

Roberts, is my guess. Yeah. But their per curiam opinion blocked one of the lower court injunctions against the executive order. After the Supreme Court's decision in that case, another lower court that had blocked the executive order in a different case vacated its ruling, blocking the executive order in light of the Supreme Court's own order The reasoning in the Supreme Court opinion, such as it is basically, what's the big deal?

This executive order doesn't hurt anybody. 

this Supreme Court can somehow, with a straight face, in one breath say the president has all of the authority, and in the second breath say he just issued an executive order, but that doesn't mean anything. That's not- ... a law, so no one can go to court to challenge it.

truly, that is what the court- and I totally agree, this is obviously a Roberts production, even though it says per curiam. But the claim that this order doesn't really do anything or hurt anybody is clearly contradicted by evidence in the record, which of course the Supreme Court doesn't care about these days, but really should.

And it also is contradicted by factual findings specifically that the district court made, including that states were already diverting time and resources to prepare for the executive order to be implemented, and that some states had already spent millions of dollars printing absentee ballot envelopes that didn't comply with the executive order's and thus might have to reprint all of those envelopes.

Okay, so the district court found all of these things, but district court findings, the Supreme Court doesn't care, so it didn't even engage. I 

don't care, do you? 

No. I really don't care. Clearly don't. That, was a TLDR of the per curiam opinion. but in terms of what else it contained, in addition to just declaring that the plaintiffs were not likely to be injured and therefore didn't have standing, so the case couldn't be in federal court at all, it also said, just, in a belt and suspenders kind of way, that the case was brought too soon, because who is to say what might happen because of the executive order?

Maybe nothing, or maybe only super legal things. That seems totally plausible. 

This aspect of it was also completely unhinged. So a mere two months ago, the Supreme Court, in an opinion by John G. Roberts, handed the president greater control over federal agencies, which the court insisted were merely just arms of the president.

So the idea that these agencies would just shrug their shoulders at the executive order seems a little inconsistent with the whole unitary executive infection slash- ... infestation slash idea or theory, whatever it is. It's like we knew the chief didn't actually read his opinion in Slaughter because of what he wrote in Cook, and now we-

really know he didn't read- Yeah ... his own opinion in Slaughter. A- and then add to that, as Justice Sotomayor's dissent noted, the federal government itself conceded that it might use a state's failure to rely on DHS Homeland Security's approved voting list as evidence to support criminally investigating or prosecuting state election officials.

So It may have once been the case that the legal status of this executive order and its directives were unclear, but in a world with a unitary executive, especially when we're dealing with commands to law enforcement and DOJ, which the court said are purely executive and subject to plenary presidential control, the EO directive in that world just looks different.

And can I say that just, I think that's a really important linking of not just Slaughter, the president controls everything in the executive branch case, but also as Leah was just alluding to, Trump versus United States- Yes ... the president is immune, like forever and for everything case, because there is a lot of really problematic, wildly problematic language in that case about the president's complete control over law enforcement, and I think this executive order has to be read in light of that decision as well.

Completely. And somehow it gets even dumber- Yes ... because two days before the Supreme Court issued this order suggesting we couldn't possibly know what might happen because of the executive order, the Postal Service had already announced a rule that did the very things the executive order called for, which are illegal.

And- Wait, can 

we just say- The 

court didn't even acknowledge this ... 

the Supreme Court, Leah, cannot be expected to read both its own earlier opinions- Of course ... and rules issued by federal agencies- Yes ... in the very matter under review. That is way too much to ask of them. It's the summer. They're not 

even sitting.

they're also busy boys, and I'm not sure Brett Kavanaugh can read. So a lot- ... of complicating factors going on here. 

All 

true. speaking of things to read and people who read them, since they can read, I somehow decided to make myself dumber by reading the brief that was filed by the federal government to defend the Postal Service's rule.

The brief is insane. Like both, the rule is insane, as is the defense of the rule. So the brief likens the rule on delivering absentee ballots to Postal Service regulation of transporting cremated human remains and animal remains, as well as explosives. These are the analogies. I, 

I am less of a masochist, so I have to confess, I did not read that brief.

But I feel like just from your description, that tells you a lot about what they think of voting. 

Exactly 

Literally 

Right? It's either dead- 

Animal remains. Yeah ... 

Or it's dangerous. Yeah. 

Those- that's, in a word, how they feel about participation in our democracy. okay. So I think, as is hopefully becoming clear, the Supreme Court's reasoning in this per curiam opinion is also deranged because it is willfully blind, not only to the existence of a rule it doesn't mention, not only to its own prior cases, but also to everything we know about this administration, and specifically that this administration does more wildly illegal stuff in a day than we can possibly talk about on weekly, hour-and-a-half-long podcast episodes.

this administration is not operating in a normal, regular, orderly process, and so the idea that here of all places, that this rulemaking would follow some totally legitimate and normal procedure that would result in a carefully vetted and very legal rule is obviously delusional. And I think delulu is actually how you would put it, Leah.

Exactly. 

and just, to add a cherry on top, it cannot be the case that it is both so unclear how this executive order will be implemented, and who knows, nothing might happen because of it, and that it is an emergency warranting extraordinary relief that the president can't implement the executive order.

Because, as a reminder, this is an emergency application. This is the shadow docket. That is supposed to be the standard the administration is required to satisfy. 

Mike Lindell, Pillow Dude and 2020 election conspiracy loon who ran for the GOP nomination for governor in Minnesota a week or so ago with Donald Trump's endorsement before apparently losing bigly to Republican Lisa DeMuth by some 11 points.

That equates to about 45,000 votes. he had said last week that he would demand a statewide hand count of the election after what he described as evidence of possible r- im- impossible results reporting on election night, counts going backwards, all sorts of things, and his suspicion was that this was all done somehow with the use of secret computer algorithms That's all we know.

Now, I know a lot of, folks enjoy making fun of Lindell, and of course, we are no exception here at The Bradcast. 

True. 

However, when I said, b- last week and, several times last week that I supported Lindell's call for a hand count, I actually meant it. If he wants to pay for such count under Minnesota state law, which allows him to do so, I am actually all for it.

I am all for public hand counts of hopefully hand-marked paper ballots, which is what they use across the entire state of Minnesota, presuming at least that he, the candidate in this case, is willing to pay for it as required by state law. So this past Monday, Lindell was supposed to submit $825,000 to the Secretary of State of Minnesota by midnight in order for the counting to then begin the next day.

But he failed to do so. Instead, he claimed that, as the Minnesota Star Tribune reported, the Secretary of State had proposed an unle- a unlawful process to recount those votes. On Monday, Lindell's campaign said that he and Secretary of the Secretary of State's office could not agree on how the audit would be handled.

Only votes assigned to Lindell and DeMuth would be counted, not those earned by other candidates under what the Secretary described as the state's lawful method for this type of count. Essentially, the hand count would require counters to separate ballots into three different piles: one with votes for Lindell, another with votes for DeMuth, and a third pile for everyone else, and then they count the votes, for Lindell and DeMuth.

But the Lindell camp, they're arguing that violates state law and that, for some reason, he needs to know how many votes went to each of the other candidates- 

In the GOP primary ... 

in the GOP primary, as well, presumably in the GOP primary- Yeah ... as well, under his theory of how the, counting was wrong on election night due to some super-secret algorithm used by the deep state or China or something to keep him from becoming the Republican nominee for governor in Minnesota, a state where the Republican candidate will almost certainly go on to lose the popular vote this year to the Democratic nominee, Senator Amy Klobuchar.

And I'm not making fun of Lindell regarding that, that, that seemingly snarky comment about the deep state in China, et cetera. As the Star Tribune reports, when asked who Lindell believed was rigging the election against him, Lindell said, quote, "This is the uni party A term that, some on the right use to describe, this theory that most Republicans and Democrats are actually in secret coordination working to box out the far right MAGA folks on many issues.

Lindell continued, quote, "I believe our elections with these computers are being selected, not elected. Your guess is as good as mine. The deep state globalists, the CCP-" "... China. But in our own elections like this, I believe it's the uni party," said Mike Lindell. Okay, so China or the deep state, including Republicans, are so frightened to have Donald Trump's choice for governor in Minnesota that they rigged the election to keep him from winning the, winning the primary Even though the Secretary of State says that, Lindell's camp was told about these rules that were worked out a week ago, Lindell says he hadn't heard about this particular method for counting until Monday, the day that the payment was due to begin the counting on Tuesday.

So instead of paying that money, he filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court alleging that the state was not counting as per state law as he saw it. Okay, so sure. Yes, it's easy to make fun of Lindell on all of this, but if he wants to know who truly won or lost because he believes there was an algorithm or China or the deep state is out to get him, and he needs a public hand count to do it, and he's willing to pay for it, I'm fine with that because state law allows it if he's willing to pay, and I actually think it would do more good for everyone to see whether he won or lost if, in fact, he did lose.

Because the truth is, results are, in, even in Minnesota, where they use hand-marked paper ballots, they are computer-tabulated, either correctly or incorrectly, and the only way to know for sure is to have humans count those votes publicly, or at least a part, a small fraction of them in a post-election audit or a full hand count.

And yet, I've heard a lot of Democrats making fun of Mike Lindell for all of this, pretending to be just outraged by the fact that he wants a hand count or that he refuses to concede the election. He should have conceded on election night, they said. Now, he has... There is no legal obligation to concede anything.

That's a political nicety. Candidates are not required to offer some sort of official concession before the election is over. They can concede or they cannot concede. It's up to them. If he wants to challenge the results and spend his own money doing it, that is up to him. He's a candidate. He has that right.

I have no problem with that. I really don't. I do have a problem with Democrats like Democratic election law attorney Marc Elias, who really should know better himself I have problems with him, making fun of people like Lindell for this or claiming that it's outrageous that he hasn't conceded already.

Elias should certainly know better because in 2008, Elias was actually the Democratic Party lawyer who led the successful legal challenge on behalf of Al Franken up in Minnesota when Al Franken was, apparently the loser on election night to then Republican Senator Norm Coleman. Franken lost by about 250 votes, at least of the unofficial results on election night.

That's obviously much closer than Lindell's race, who's said to have lost by about a thous- 11,000 votes. But after a long hand count and a legal process that went on for about six months before any US senator was officially seated in the race, Franken eventually was certified as the winner by about the same 250 votes or so that he was said to have, been behind on election night.

But ever since, Donald Trump falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election, offering zero evidence to support his claim of having won the Democrats or the deep state or China or Joe Biden or whoever it was steal it from him, ever since then, Democrats have become very touchy about any sort of questions concerning any election results whatsoever, no matter what happens, no matter how troubling, no matter how, vulnerable these voting systems may be, and they are vulnerable, very.

And making fun of those who, who, who do question the results like Lindell and putting them, putting Democrats into a situation where if there's a close election or a, a questionable result where results m- are potentially gamed, or they're just miscalculated, or voters didn't get to vote, or have their ballots rejected for whatever reason.

Democrats are really painting themselves into a corner, it seems to me, where if they want to challenge an election- 

If they need to challenge an election ... 

they'll be painted as hypocrites for doing so. Oh, denier now? that's gonna mean that they're probably not going to press for oversight of elections where they should because they spent the alas- the last six years suggesting that it's outrageous to have any question about results, about voting systems, et cetera they're gonna be less likely to ask for a recount or hand count even when they should ask for one.

They really don't seem to be thinking this one through. And I gotta say, I am really concerned that they're gonna find themselves in a situation this fall, or even in 2028, when for whatever reason, they won't demand oversight of an election result when they actually should demand that oversight because they're afraid to sound like the people that they have been making fun of for so many years, like Mike Lindell So yeah, make fun of Mike Lindell all you want, Lord knows we do, but not for asking for public oversight of his own election as an official candidate in that election.

At least if he is following the law to do so, as opposed to, calling for an insurrection or something State courts is gonna, sort out whether Lindell is right or wrong about his claims about how state law should work for a post-election candidate-funded hand recount. But be careful what you wish for, Democrats.

When you criticize him for daring to ask for such a count or for failing to concede, on, on election night or something when there is no legal requirement for him to do so, you're putting yourself into a corner, it seems to me. 

Up until pretty recently, Donald Trump had shown an uncanny understanding of how his supporters saw the world. Whether it was mass deportations or isolationist foreign policy, Donald Trump had an innate connection to the MAGA brain. He knew what it wanted, what it would abide, and what it would not Well, not anymore.

In the last few months, Trump has made some fairly shocking miscalculations: the war with Iran, idiotic trade battles with important US allies, a focus on ballrooms and helipads. Those priorities have shown just how entirely out of step this president is, especially with the people who matter most to Trump.

But this week, Trump staked out one of his most unpopular positions yet. And 

I can say, if I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big, plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous.

Donald Trump, champion of the AI data center. AI data centers are those very large, mostly windowless buildings that house computer servers, storage drives, and hardware, and basically make the internet run. In his support of these centers, Donald Trump is very much alone. Last month, an Annenberg survey found that 61% of Americans say they'd oppose a new data center being built in their area.

That is up from 49% in just March. Gallup, meanwhile, estimates the number of Americans who oppose these centers to be even higher at seven in 10. Now, okay, you might say, but exactly who is so opposed to these data centers? Is this just an issue on the far left, a concern for Bernie Sanders and AOC? 

Ask Peter Thiel, ask Elon Musk, ask Mark Zuckerberg if they want one of these data centers in their own backyard.

Ask any one of us here on this committee. 

But you would be wrong to think that the issue of data centers is a fringe concern. In fact, if there is one thing we are learning in this season of national discontent, it is that some of the central issues being litigated on the 2026 campaign trail, and very likely into the 2028 presidential cycle, include the power of corporations, big tech's impact on communities, and the threat of artificial intelligence.

And all of that anxiety is converging in the debate over data centers. You can see just how important the issue is becoming in real time. Last year, Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, celebrated a $20 billion Amazon data center investment in his state. But this month, Governor Shapiro has taken a very different position.

I've read your comments. I've seen your texts. I've listened to your phone calls, and I've talked with so many of you in person all across Pennsylvania. You don't want these irresponsible, burdensome, reckless AI data centers in your community, and I want you to know, I hear you 

Over in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, the former Democratic senator now running to reclaim his seat, has spent millions of dollars in ads painting his rival, Republican Senator John Husted, as the face of data centers.

In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed got the winning edge in his Democratic Senate primary after calling for state and federal moratoriums. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin governor, and by the way, a close Trump ally, has been running attack ads against his Democratic opponent, Dave Crowley, over, you guessed it, Crowley's position on data centers.

Data center David Crowley. Big tech wins, Wisconsin pays. 

In Wyoming, Republican Chuck Gray won the primary for his state's open House seat with a campaign against data centers and a call for a federal ban. But nowhere is this issue more alive than in the state of Texas. Last year, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said he wanted to make Texas the epicenter of AI development.

He wasn't far off from that goal because there are an estimated 248 data centers planned for the state, in addition to the existing 335, according to the Texas Tribune. So yeah, up until very recently, Texas was very much in the business of big tech until Governor Abbott realized, amid widespread public outcry, that it very well might doom his re-election.

Here he is on Sunday on ABC's This Week. 

I have pressed pause on any new data center. If you're a data center and you wanna operate in Texas, you have to first get the approval of those in local communities. 

Greg Abbott and his fellow Republicans up and down the ticket are rapidly coming to the realization that even in the reddest parts of a pretty red state, data centers could be the thing that makes or breaks a campaign.

And so now, as Democrats give these centers the cold shoulder, the Republican Party is racing to catch up. Yes, Donald Trump may still be basking in the warm glow of big tech, but the rest of the GOP is quickly understanding that when it comes to the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, you're either with the people or very much against them

In some ways, the biggest problems may be in the blue cities in states with Republican governors, Republican attorneys general, Republicans secretaries of state, Texas. Texas has a lot of Democratic votes in Houston, Dallas, and so on.

And in Texas, the attorney general is Ken Paxton, who happens to be the candidate for Senate, who happens to be running behind right now in the polls. James Talarico's three points ahead in the latest Fox News poll. I'm pretty sure there are Indivisible groups in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso What can you tell us about them?

There are a bunch of places where we're concerned. One is, as you mentioned, red-governed blue cities. and also, there are a bunch of other ... if I start listing the number of different concerns that we have- Yeah ... and the number of different geographies and exactly what we're at risk for, people tend to get a little overwhelmed.

Yeah. And so I really wanna encourage people to not think about this in terms of hyper-specific local guidance, but in terms of knowing your rights, getting trained, getting connected, dispelling administration propaganda and disinformation, turning people out to early vote, being prepared to do rapid response in response to threats in your area.

that might look like you are showing up to your local board of elections meetings in order to monitor a MAGA-adjacent supervisor, right? That might look like you are showing up to the state legislature in order to push back on a threat that impacts your city. The most important thing is to be connected to flexible local activist organizing communities that can help to direct you when the time comes, because this is not like an independent situation where you just can make your calls and be done with it.

We actually all have to be in relationship with each other and prepared to move quickly. 

I'm glad you mentioned the problems aren't going to end on Election Day. Election Day is, the first big challenge, but then there's the counting the ballots- Yeah ... and the certifying the ballots. Remind us what that requires and what it might require of us.

Yeah. so there are a number of different potential interference points that we are concerned about and monitoring, and that ranges from, as you said, Election Day, to the process of counting, to certifying the count, to the actual swearing in. And what I- January 

3rd, 

2027. 

January... 

Exactly. Exactly. And what I would say is that we will not be dropping our guard until the new Congress is sworn in, because at each point, there is some vulnerability to either legal or extra-legal attempts to subvert the process.

Some of that is gonna look like making sure that people are really organized so that there's very local backlash in the event that you see a state effort to do that. Some of that is gonna be around preparing the collective mobilization capacity, right? We have shown over the last year and a half that we can mobilize in literally historically unprecedented numbers.

If we need to do that again on much shorter notice, we will be able to do that. And some of it is just gonna be about collectively, pre-organizing and making sure people understand this is a real threat so that we can move swiftly if we need to. One of the biggest fears that we have is around people being too slow to understand what is happening in order to successfully react, and so we wanna do the pre-work to make sure people understand this is a real risk.

And, it isn't just Indivisible that is doing this work. Who else is, is part of this coalition? 

I would say, there's a really heroic cross-ecosystem effort to coordinate here because fundamentally what we're talking about is risks and threats that play out in 20-something different states, more really if you think about all the, additional ones that have congressional districts that might be at risk.

Each of those states there is coordinated effort by folks who are thinking about election protection, about voter rights, voting rights, about the legal strategies, about the mobilizing strategies. We are then in touch collectively to make sure that state actors are getting the support that they need from national actors, and we're making sure that the folks who are, you know, gonna be leading the legal strategies and the communications and narrative and the mobilization are all talking to each other.

Because fundamentally, this is not something where you can just have a legal response or a mobilization response. You actually need to wed those folks together in order to have a really effective strategy where you win the story of what is happening in the country, and you win the legal fights. 

I wanna just recall, what happened in Minnesota in 2025, 'cause I think there's some important lessons there.

That was a kind of a nightmare scenario for, for Indivisible Twin Cities. The night before the No Kings Rally was scheduled June 2025, the Democratic Party speaker of the state legislature, Melissa Hortman, was assassinated along with her husband by, what turned out to be an anti-abortion activist.

But he had some No Kings leaflets in his car, which the police recovered shortly thereafter. But the killer was still on the loose at the time the main No Kings Rally was scheduled to take place at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. You and I have talked about this before on this program. The Minnesota State Police urged people not to attend, and the governor, of course, had to follow the advice of the state police and cancel the speech.

But Indivisible decided to go ahead with that rally. That was a very courageous and important decision. And how many people showed up at the State Capitol? 

I believe it was something like 70,000 people. 

It was a great event, actually. Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, kinda gave the keynote speech.

And, it's not impossible that something scary and horrible will happen right before, election day this November, but we will remember what you guys did in St. Paul that day, and it's one reason why you say, "We will not be scared." 

and so much credit to Indivisible Twin Cities, who really did take that moment and turn it into something very powerful and a collective show of people power.

So Indivisible has a program called Hands Off Our Vote, a national program to ensure that all eligible voters get to cast their ballot and that those ballots get counted. How can our listeners find out more about all this? 

Yeah. you can go to indivisible.org and you can sign up. You'll get updates.

you can sign up for the Hands Off Our Vote campaign there, and you will be invited to trainings. You'll be invited to rapid response updates. If you are in a state that we have identified as a high-risk state, we will make sure that you can get connected to resources on what to do and how to take action wherever you are.

Last question: Do you think we will have free and fair elections in these midterms? 

I think we've gotta start from being real that, free and fair elections has been a moving target throughout American history, right? I, I know many people from across particularly the American South who would be very clear that they haven't been operating under anything that looks like free and fair elections for a long time, right?

And particularly when it comes to, attacks on voting rights, the ongoing efforts to really, to destroy the Voting Rights Act, all of the ways in which there's been... This is both the, the culmination of Trump's specific obsession with election sabotage and also a multi-decade campaign by a broad swath of the Republican Party to sabotage the right to vote, to make it harder for regular people to vote, and particularly to limit the rights of Black and brown folks to vote.

So I think they will attempt to throw every trick in the book at this election. I think that they will take advantage of, wherever they have the power to try to restrict conditions, and I think they will fail because there are more of us than there are of them, and there are more people who fundamentally want a free and fair election in which all of our voices are heard.

We've just heard clips starting with

Consider This tracing how federal investigations into 2020 and voter fraud, plus Trump's refusal to rule out National Guard at polling sites, has Democrats bracing for election interference this fall.

Straight White American Jesus detailed how the Trump administration is stoking doubt about November's midterms, with Steve Bannon urging a national emergency declaration to seize federal control over state elections.

Start Making Sense laid out the grassroots side of election protection, from local know-your-rights and ICE Watch training to early voting that guards against last-minute sabotage attempts.

Strict Scrutiny described how Trump ordered the Postal Service to restrict absentee ballots and threatened election officials with prosecution, then watched the Supreme Court wave the whole scheme through.

The BradCast cautioned that Democrats' post-2020 valid criticism of unfounded election challenges could leave them unwilling to demand legitimate recounts when close results actually warrant scrutiny.

Runaway Country examined how data centers became a defining 2026 campaign issue, pushing even Republicans like Texas Governor Greg Abbott to pause new construction pending local approval.

And Start Making Sense in part two of their discussion outlined how grassroots groups plan to protect the midterms in red-governed blue cities like Houston and Dallas, monitoring vote counting through the swearing-in of Congress on January 3rd, 2027.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

If you get value out of the show - and want to make sure we can keep going while getting it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.*

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or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today,

Rather than doing a commentary that I didn't have the mental energy to research and write this week, I thought I would give another update on the burnout I'm experiencing, but this time with the ADHD element included, which I don't think I mentioned during my last behind-the-scenes update. I was diagnosed with ADHD more than 25 years ago and I started hearing millennials referred to as the burnout generation at least 10 years ago, but it wasn't until within the past few years that I learned that people with ADHD are much more susceptible to burnout for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with.

The tricky thing about describing ADHD symptoms in the post-social media era is that if you just list the symptoms, then almost everyone can say that they feel like that sometimes or have that same experience. They then either wonder if they have ADHD, which they might, or begin to think that ADHD must not be that big of a difference because it seems like a bunch of experiences that are now fairly common.

I'll be the first to say that the reality of our understanding of ADHD has far outstripped the usefulness of the simple label, because now we know about several subtypes of ADHD. People can exist on a spectrum of severity within whichever subtype they most closely align with. The fact that we still only have one basic label to cover everything really doesn't make sense.

That's only complicated by the fact that algorithmic feeds have hijacked everyone's brains and made them feel distracted and as though their executive function is no match for the supercomputers, enticing them to do what's profitable for companies rather than what the individual wants for themselves.

All that said, the the simplest way to distinguish between genuine ADHD and people who spend more time than they would like on Instagram is a matter of degrees. Because my burnout is exacerbating my ADHD symptoms, I am feeling the degrees of severity with an absolute vengeance right now.

I know perfectly well what it feels like to procrastinate and have an urge to do something more entertaining than the work you've been putting off. Everyone's been through that. For people with ADHD, it can often be just a bit more severe. Sitting down at a desk to get to work can be a bit like leading a horse to water, but not being able to make it drink... for the entire day... even though their livelihood depends on them drinking...

When you add burnout to the mix, as I'm experiencing right now, the image that came to mind, even before I decided to use the horse and water analogy, is like trying to tame a bucking bronco, which I have never done, but I can imagine is difficult.

My resistance to doing the tasks I absolutely must do is not a passive, procrastinating, I-don't-feel-like-it kind of resistance. Right now, my attention is an angry, bucking, thrashing, wild horse of resistance that is pulling with all its strength on the rope like it recognizes the branding iron coming for it.

I mentioned previously, the advice for burnout differs pretty wildly between the U.S. and Europe, where structural supports to serve the needs of people are wildly divergent. On that note, I have a quick update. I was reading some ADHD-specific advice about avoiding burnout, and I kid you not, the advice was to build anti-burnout strategies into your day, such as taking a 20-minute break once a day during your work hours to do something genuinely restful and re-energizing, not just scrolling on a screen.

As always with this sort of stuff, it's not that that's bad advice, but boy does it feel insufficient to the task at hand, given all of the forces applying pressure to each of us, driving nearly everyone in our society in the direction of burnout.  And this advice was for people with ADHD. That feels underpowered for anyone, and we are apparently even more susceptible.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 3 topics today. First up;

Section A, Threat And Backfire

Followed by Section B, Cracks And Constraints

And Section C, Resistance And Response

But the long and short of it is that President Trump's executive order, or most of President Trump's executive order on mail voting was blocked briefly this week. It was unblocked, and now it is blocked again. And so legal experts, ge- the general consensus across the election law community is that is where we're going to end up, that this executive order will not end up impacting people's ability to vote by mail.

Yes, there could be more to this saga. It could get appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. But the bottom line is this, that the most likely scenario is that people will be able to vote by mail in 2026 the same way they were in 2024 and 2022. 

All the way up to the Supreme Court again, because it has already once been appealed up to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court's gonna have a lot of voting questions on their hands this year potentially. 

I want to set up this broader conversation that we're going to have by going a little deeper on the various ways that the Trump administration has tried to change voting in the US. Miles, what do you got?

Oh, man, it feels like a laundry list at this point. It's been a little bit of a spaghetti at the wall approach from the federal government and from President Trump when it comes to trying to impact the elections infrastructure. President Trump has made it clear he thinks that the presidency and that he as president should have a bigger hand in how elections are run.

That has meant two different executive orders on elections, the one we mentioned a second ago, and then another one last year. Both of those have been blocked so far at the courts. And then it's really funneled out to a lot of different aspects of the federal government. Notably, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security have both made efforts to try to investigate the 2020 election and investigate voter fraud more broadly in all of these different ways, which has raised a lot of concerns, a- about what potentially could still be coming for this election cycle.

Though I will just say, I think going back to the bottom line as people are getting ready to vote this cycle, it looks right now like the elections infrastructure is gonna be the same as it was in 2024 and 2022. I'm not positive that any voters are gonna really notice a difference when they go to vote this cycle at this point.

You mentioned the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. I think that we would be remiss if we didn't point out that those agencies are led by people who see their job as doing what President Trump wants them to do. There is no independence there. The Homeland Security Secretary has amplified the president's concerns about election security.

The attorney general has made it clear that he sees his role as doing what the president wants him to do. and so that's the context in which we are now going to have a conversation about your reporting, Eric McDaniel. you did this very deeply reported project about how Democrats in Congress are preparing for the what ifs.

What if President Trump and his administration try to go further to subvert the midterm elections? So what are Democrats focusing on? 

There's a long list of things, right? So I focused on the Senate, where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has put together a task force of at least 11 senators and a constellation of outside experts.

Many of the listeners to this podcast will recognize some of these names. Eric Holder, the former attorney general during the Obama administration, Mark Elias of the Elias Law Group, a prominent- A Democratic aligned election litigator. And, just a constellation of outside good governance groups, often cross-partisan or cross-ideological, who are all focused on election integrity.

I will say there are no Republicans in Congress as part of this effort, but they've been having, in the Senate, weekly meetings with staff. They've got a list of 100 threats they're looking at. Everything from issues at a single balloting location, all the way to the idea that the president might dispatch ICE agents or National Guard troops to polling locations.

And, it's not just what they're preparing for. All those lawsuits you and Miles were talking about with the DOJ trying to obtain voter rolls, for instance, they have been involved in that litigation. In fact, I talked to Marc Elias about it. 

One of the misunderstandings is that somehow this litigation springs out of thin air around election day.

Right now, my law firm of 60 people is litigating 87 cases in 43 states. This is not something that we wait until, election subversion has taken place or voter suppression is in full swing. 

A lot of preparations and a lot of action so far. 

How are they thinking about President Trump's playbook?

are they looking back at 2020? How are they thinking this through? 

For their view, I think it's pretty well summed up by a man named Justin Vail. He's a leader at the group Protect Democracy. 

Trump is seeking to deceive American voters About the security of our elections and spread false claims about voter fraud.

He seeks to disrupt the normal state and local management of our elections by exerting unprecedented and illegal federal control. If that's not all enough, Trump is prepared to outright deny election results that he doesn't like. 

And I wanna make clear here, a big part of this project is Democrats trying to correct for what they describe to me as something like a failure of imagination ahead of 2020, right?

The conversations around Trump's election denial then, they... Basically it was like, "What's the worst that can happen?" And then January 6th happened, and, the scales fell from their eyes. 

I think when it comes to thinking about the possibility of another January 6th, it's also important to remember that we're just in a very different political moment.

At least from the people I talk to, there's a lot of optimism that is not what we're looking at here. Obviously, the scenarios, the sort of doomscaping scenarios that have been brought up because of all the different ways President Trump has pushed these boundaries are real. But at the same time, couple things I would note.

One is that it's a lot harder to get people keyed up in the same way they were in 2020 for a midterm election. We see this for no other reason than just turnout. Getting people to vote in midterm elections is so much harder. We've never been able to see somebody on the ballot get this sort of election denial fervor in the way Trump was able to.

we saw this in 2022 when Kari Lake ran for governor in Arizona, tried to stir the same sort of doubts about when she lost that election. We saw it more recently just a little while ago when Mike Lindell lost the Republican primary for governor, in Minnesota. He's long pushed election conspiracy theories, connected to President Trump, tried to do it again in that election, and we haven't really seen evidence that people latch onto those theories in the same way with other candidates when they aren't President Trump.

To Eric's point about the fact that there was this failure of imagination from Democrats, I think generally in the election of- official community, it's the same thing, that there is, there was, they learned a lot from that experience and have been game planning a lot. The biggest thing to me is that their relationships for local voting officials, their relationships with law enforcement now are in a whole different place.

10 years ago, they didn't necessarily have their local sheriff on speed dial, and they are working in conjunction, in, across the country now. 

Yeah, and I think there is this other element, that it is 435 different Congressional elections, a bunch of Senate elections. This is not the election.

It is the midterms, plural. 

So the idea of trying t- the, to get them to activate in the way that we saw that activation in 2020 for a close House race, for instance, I'm not ruling it out completely, but you can see it, it would be a little bit more of a difficult sell potentially.

Voting, is a partisan choice, but- Is election administration partisan or has it become more partisan than it used to be? 

I think if you only listen to the clips, in terms of how people are talking about it, you might come away feeling that way. But I would say no at this point, that generally speaking, the election denial that we see from President Trump has not really seeped down to the local and state level overall.

there are pockets here and there, I want to be very clear. But overall, there are, especially even among Republicans, I would say Republicans are not as loud pol- because politically speaking, it's a lot more dangerous if you're an elected Republican to come out against President Trump loudly before the election, at this point.

But, we've seen states as red as West Virginia and Idaho, for instance, push back and say they're not gonna give their state voter roll data, that it would be illegal to do that, to give that to the Department of Justice. And I think that can k- serve as a little bit of a proxy, that state officials, even in deep red places, are not just going along with Trump willy-nilly at this point.

I wanna reiterate something you said that I think is really important for people to hear.

There's not gonna be Trump walking out on the, what's left of the, the, the White House lawn or in the Oval Office or anywhere else saying, "That's it. I canceled the elections. they're over, and I'm staying in power, everyone. I'll decide who's in Congress, and I'll decide..." it's not gonna be a grand proclamation.

It's going to be, as you say, a kind of cancerous process, by which you mean the spreading of cells that get broken down across the body of the American body politic. One of the ways that happens so effectively is that you link Democrats and specifically progressive candidates to foreign interference, foreign nemeses, foreign forces that you consider your, your, antithetical forces in the world: China, Iran, Cuba.

And you say, not only has China got, us, not only has Iran sent over, subversives, not only is Cuba bankrolling and... Cuba, who we've economically, just weakened in inhumane ways over the last six months in terms of our Trump administration. Not only are they, bad in terms of what they're doing outside the country, but they're actually working in tandem with the Democrats and with the DSA.

So when you see Mamdani, El-Sayed, if you see, Katie Wilson in Seattle, it doesn't matter, Karen Bass, it... whoever it is, they're probably in bed with the Islamists and the communists because that's the only way they can win, and they hate you, and they hate America. And then that leads us to something else.

and here's a point I wanna make, and I really am curious about your thoughts on this, Matt, is I don't think enough Americans consider that most folks would rather have... not most. Let me back up. A lot of Americans would like to have the desired outcome regardless of the process. And that means if they don't really get a vote, or they have to give up their vote for a certain amount of time under the guise that they'll get it back once things are back in order, that would be fine.

I wanna play a clip of Tim- Timothy Snyder, the historian and the scholar of fascism, who was on Katie Couric. And, he talks about how we don't really consider that, a lot of Americans are willing to live under fascism, under authoritarianism, because it would feel better to them. It would feel more ordered, more calm.

It would feel like the bad guys were put in place, and the bad guys would have no voice. So here he is talking about it, and then we'll get your thoughts. That 

people recognize the, what is happening and how high the stakes are 

Oh, I would start with that a different way because the question assumes that people care and that they're against it.

So one has to start by recognizing that there are a fair number of Americans who would be very happy to live under an authoritarian regime. A- and I think one has to start from that because if we start from... first of all, it's true, but secondly, if we go along with the kind of normal cliché that Americans love freedom and so on, then we end up convincing ourselves that whatever happens, it's, it must be freedom.

it's the same problem with democracy. if we convince ourselves that the US is a democracy, then whatever happens, we convince ourselves that somehow this is within the overall framework of a democracy somehow 

Here's the point I'm taking away from this, Matt, is To a lot of Americans, f- living under an authoritarian regime where the people they consider bad, they're enemies or threats to them, meaning Muslims, queer people, immigrants, non-Christians, they would feel more free under that authoritarian regime than they would living in a democracy where they have to share power with the entirety of the American populace.

What do you think? 

I think that's a very insightful statement, right ? W- as human beings, and this is mostly observation, but maybe there's a little theology in there as well, we are self-rationalization machines, right? We th- this is how we operate as human beings is we take a side, and then when w- we make up the arguments about why that side makes sense in, in real time.

And hopefully, and this is part of what a liberal arts education and kind of critical self-reflection, all these sorts of things are supposed to do is help you observe that process in yourself and start gaining some kind of benchmarks in reality and start checking that impulse within yourself.

But there's a huge portion of any population, any national population, United States, China, France, what-where- wherever it is, that is very comfortable with authoritarianism. And part of that is personality, part of that I'm sure is theology and religious culture, part of it is family of origin, right?

But there's some portion of the country that feels very comfortable with authoritarianism and would choose it. There, there's another portion that can rationalize their way into it, and I think that's what Snyder's talking about, right? My worries around the 2026 election are less about some of the hijinks right now and more about what comes after the election.

Because it's after the election, right? What they're doing now is sowing all these seeds of doubt, all the, these ki- in- inserting these kind of SERDs into the system that, that, that make people question, that make people ask, "Hey, is this real?" And then after the election, one, one of the, the realities is the, the process of seating a congressional majority is not as simple- Yeah

as you would think. 

Exactly. 

And so the- Exactly ... Democrats could win, and then- Yeah ... and then the, the Republicans could challenge all of those resort- results in the courts, and Mike Johnson could say, "Hey, these are all unresolved. We cannot seat these- 100% ... people who won the election." Yeah. "And so the Republicans just have to maintain our majority in Congress because we're just preserving the system so that we can figure all this out," right?

That, that is the kind of like real threat to stealing an election and rigging an election is the, the, the propaganda buildup on the front end that pays off as this kind of rhetorical denial of the election, and maybe practical denial of the election on the other- and I think there are a lot of Americans who could get around that.

And this is what that polarizing rhetoric, that conflation that wants to say the Democrats and the communists and the Marxists and Cuba and China and DSA and ev- they're all part of this. They're all part of the conspiracy theory. What that says to Trump supporters is, "Our tribe is always right."

"The other tribe is-- all the other tribes are unified against us, and w- we will win this election if the process is fair. And if the process is not fair and we lose, then we have to resist that," right? and it keeps th-this kind of tribalized, kind of self-rationalizing impulse in check and aligned, because Do- honestly, Donald Trump does not have to maintain 51% approval rating to maintain his hold on power.

He just needs to keep his side really unified, because they already hold all the levers of power, and they're more or less keeping all, trying to keep all their people on sides and say, "The other side wants to destroy you and wants to destroy America, and if they win, you're over." 

I'm gonna make one more point, and then we can go to, to take a break and do that. Here's Kevin Roberts talking in ways that I think really piggyback on everything you just said, Matt. He says, on, on Twitter, August 6th, so just about two and a half weeks ago, "Islam, like communism, may arrive peacefully, but it never leaves that way.

You can vote your way in, but you'll never vote your way out." That's exactly what Steven Crowder said on his We Need Fascism video. and it's a growing sentiment on the American right. Once communism and Islam and all these things arrive You might have Democrats who vote those people in, but you'll never vote them out.

And to me, that's a justification for saying once they're in or if they're in, we won't vote them out. We will... it's violent, it's violence time. Dem- democracy be damned. It's we need the outcome we want. The outcome we want is for there to be no Muslims in this country, is for there to be no leftists who have any power over cities like New York City or s- or to be Senate candidates in Michigan.

We don't want that. And therefore, if those people take office, you have to be ready for the fact that democracy's not gonna help you anymore. We're at the end of that. It's our tribe, it's our outcome, that's all that matters. There's a setting of the stage here for saying, "We are not the majority. We may never be again.

Who cares? All that matters is that we win, and we get the outcome we want. So if the voting process is mucked up, if we have to call into question every congressional Democratic win in November, if we have to tell the postal service not to deliver the mail so you can't do your ballot, if we have to do whatever, that's fine because, we only care about the outcome and not the process."

And I just wanna drive this home, folks. Please take this away from today My wife used to live in Amman, Jordan, and I used to visit her there, right? And she lived in Amman, Jordan after living in Egypt. She lived in Egypt during the, the Arab Spring. It was an incredibly tumultuous time in Egypt and other places.

And there was-- I remember on voting day, there was like 39 parties, Matt? And it was a democracy trying to find its legs, and I'm not gonna go into the whole history of what's happened since then. Living in Amman, Jordan after living near Ta- Tahrir Square during that, that period was so boring. It was boring.

Nothing-- Like, when we were in Egypt, we would go down to the square, we would talk to protesters, we talked to students over here, we talked to journalists over there. In Jordan, you just go get frozen yogurt, go home. It's a kingdom. It's a monarchy. It's an authoritarian state. Not a lot happening. Most people were just willing, are like, yeah, it's kinda nice.

There-- Nothing happens." There's a lot of Americans who would rather have a Trump regime that gets rid of the bad guys, imposes order, gives them no voice, no say, no ability to regulate their food i-in-in terms of, the FDA, their health, big tech. Who cares? As long as Trump's in charge and they handle it, and they get rid of the bad people, and they beat them up and terrorize them, I'm good.

I think that's a big takeaway from all this for me.

and I want to talk about the House races as well because, the, the control of the House is gonna be decided in a number of very, very swingy districts. We're talking about places, some of these House districts went for Trump. Districts in South Texas.

We're talking about districts in Iowa that are real swing districts that are incredibly close. A district in Wisconsin's 3rd. Three or four districts in Pennsylvania that are all made up of a fair amount of Trump country. And what Trump does with all these sorts of outbursts is directly undercut Mike Johnson's message.

Steve Benen at MS Now caught something interesting here. He pointed to a good example. Listen to Mike Johnson here. 

History will record this will be one of the most successful and productive Congresses in the history of the institution since 1789. Why? Because we did what we said we were gonna do.

We passed about 800 pieces of legislation. We codified over 125 executive orders, and we brought the biggest tax cuts and the biggest, wage increases in generations. 

So Mike Johnson has repeatedly said variations of this, that the Re- the Republican Congress has been extraordinarily productive. Now, the head of the Republican Party is saying, "No, it hasn't.

It's failed." And I think that's a good message, I really do. 

It is. But, this is the old joke. You're right, and you're right. They have been very productive in doing things the American people didn't want. Every time the b- big ugly bill is brought up, first of all, people aren't even sure what was in it, and secondly, to the extent they know, they don't like it.

So what the things were that were done, the people don't like, and on a whole range of other things that people want something done, they haven't. But I will tell you, Donald Trump used to have kind of a feral instinct for where the voters were, at least where his voters were. He has completely lost that, and I'll give you a very specific example.

Data centers. Data centers have become a flashpoint. They have become the focus of the public's ire about a lot of things, about AI, about corporate greed, about Silicon Valley, about flock cameras. Now, many of these things are not exactly tied together, but in data centers, people have found a symbolic enemy, a bogeyman.

What does Donald Trump do? He comes out and says, "I love data centers." Excuse me. That's gonna show up in a whole bunch of ads. You have people like Greg Abbott who have suddenly discovered data centers are not a popular thing. But no, Donald Trump is gonna come there and talk about data centers So he is so far off message now that he really does pose a, I think, a fundamental problem for re- many Republican candidates 

It's absolutely true.

I wanna return to something you said to close out, where you kinda talked about how we're looking at a bunch of layers that add up to almost, a perfect storm of effects, and I wanna go through them a little bit here. So you pointed out that Trump is bleeding Hispanics, and that's really important.

so the, the constituencies that Donald Trump gained with in 2024, non-white working class, Latino, young people, th- they're all gone now. So Th- Trump and the Republican Party has lo- have effectively lost those people. That's point one. Point number two is this hyper-energized Democratic base, which you mentioned, the enthusiasm numbers in all the polling, very clear.

We're seeing things like an 18-point shift in a state legislative contest in Western Pennsylvania that really attests to that type of energy that we're seeing. Point number three, though, that we haven't talked much about, is that Trump is absolutely cratering with independents and moderates, the center of the electorate, really bottom dropping out stuff, that kinda thing.

And so if you take those three things together, the thing that Republicans absolutely need to be able to fall back on is MAGA, is on Trump voters, because they're losing those other crutches, or whatever you wanna call them. And so for Trump to be going out of his way to tell those people not to vote, that's the perfect storm, I think.

And that, I don't, we don't know if it will be enough to win. I think obviously Democrats are right now on track to win at least the House and maybe the Senate as well, but we don't know that they will. This is the sorta thing, though, I think this kinda combination of factors that really could push it there.

Absolutely. And if he has to spend time and money recovering the MAGA base, in other words, winning those people back, he's gonna do the very things that alienate those other groups that you just said. The way elections are supposed to work is you take your base, you put 'em in your back pocket, you say, "Thanks very much.

Now let me go out and grab a bunch of other people who aren't so enthusiastic about us." And the base kinda says, "Fine, we get it. Go out, make your pitch to the middle of the country." Trump hasn't done that, so when he goes out now and he has to say, "Okay, MAGA people, I really love you. Look at all these wonderful things I've done for you.

I've destroyed, Iran 17 times. I've done all these things. I've cut healthcare," he's making his other problems that you just listed a lot worse. So you get into this no-win situation that is totally of his own making. 

he should have the base in his pocket already, and now going out there to have to energize them j- drives everybody else away.

I just wanna end on a bit of a sober note and see what you think of this. The flip side of everything we're saying here is that you can see things going wrong. All these Senate races are on a knife's edge. We're talking about having to win a lot of Senate races in very tough territory, places that voted for Donald Trump by double digits.

They have to win, Democrats have to win a few races in places like that. I think, Abdul El-Sayed is a question mark. I'd like to feel a little better about that race. I don't know about Troy Jackson in Maine. You can easily see Democrats falling short in the Senate. It could easily happen. And then in the House, the gerrymandering successes, unfortunately, that Republicans have had, kinda takes off the table something like a 40-seat win like the one we saw in 2018.

It makes it much more like trench warfare. There just aren't as many pickup opportunities. It looks very good, but you can see things going wrong, and I wonder how you think about that stuff. h- how troubled are you by those possibilities? 

I think it's very important not to be overconfident. That's an unusual problem for Democrats, but it's very real.

You gotta run through the tape, and these are close races. The other thing that I am worried about is that Donald Trump is busy screwing around with things like mail-in voting. And although he is unlikely to stop these things, he could very well sow mass confusion. And where there's confusion, people don't show up to vote So I think Democrats have to, number one, keep their enthusiasm high, number two, not get overconfident, and number three, put a lot of time and money into voter education so people know where they're supposed to vote, when they can vote.

They know the early voting rules inside and out. They know the mail-in ballot rules inside and out, and they really have to devote enough resources for those kinds of activities so that Donald Trump, in his effort to depress voting on our side, if you will, or the general electric- electorate, does not succeed where we have, failed to kinda keep educating, keep up with the voters, keep explaining what the rules are.

So that, I think, is a real concern, and I certainly hope Democrats are aware of this. I think they are. and I think on the flip side of this, you cannot underestimate quality candidates, and maybe I'll end on this. Good candidates beat bad candidates all the time. And if you wanna s- find out why certain candidates won in primaries, look at the kinds of candidates they are.

Look at how well they communicate. Look at how hard they have worked. Look at people like Angie Nixon in Florida. Look at, Abdul El-Sayed. Whatever you think of these people's ideological views, they are very strong candidates, and that's how most people vote. They don't put people on an ideological spectrum and say, "This guy is two notches to the left of where I am, therefore, I'm not gonna vote for him."

They say, "Wow, this guy really has Trump's number," or, "Wow, this gal really gets it when she talks about the super-rich." These are very strong candidates, and I think you really have to lean into them, feature them. And I think the job for people who are in our space is to make sure voters get to see who the real candidates are.

These aren't choices. You can have Mike Rogers, who is nothing more than a ventriloquist dummy for Donald Trump, or you can have El-Sayed. You can have someone who is just a mouthpiece, like a Michael Waller, who is busy defending a ac- credibly accused child abuser, or you can have a 16-year military veteran in Kate Conley.

These are very stark choices. And I think the more the voters see the actual candidates, the real choices, I think the better Democrats are gonna do 

Next, Section B, Cracks And Constraints

It's time to stand up and celebrate as Judge Talwani, a federal judge in Massachusetts, has saved mail-in ballots from the evil clutches of Donald Trump and the Postal Service. No, states will not have to use specialized mail-in ballot envelopes that they don't know how to use and haven't been provided, that have to be approved by the post office, and then upload all of your voter data into a portal that has to be approved by the post office.

You know why? Because the United States Constitution says there's only two entities that are in charge of federal elections. One of them is the states, the second one is Congress. You know what's not in the Constitution? The Postal Service controlling your mail-in ballot, as noted by Judge Talwani. And Judge Talwani has, how do I put this nicely, thumbed her nose at the United States Supreme Court.

Or, to put it more diplomatically, she knows that they're wrong. And now we have a round-trip case, right? In, in less than four days we went from Supreme Court ruling on Monday that the states do not have, standing because they came to court too early, to four days later, Judge Talwani having everybody, the states and the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the ACLU, everybody file new pleadings.

Let's get to the heart of the matter about the post office's new ruling. I'll make a ruling on it, which she did late last night, 14-day block of the rule, while she considers to consider... w- while she continues to consider the preliminary injunction as well. We're going right back to the United States Supreme Court on this issue, and every day the candle burns down i- between now and the midterms.

And now we're down to, less than, what is it, less than 80 days left. I'm Michael Popok, you're on the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF, and I've got this emergency order in my hands up on Legal AF Substack as well for our audience to read. How did we get here? Trump in March issues an executive order directing the post office to start monkeying around with the mail and the mail-in ballots, demanding that there be a different type of envelope and a barcode and a, and that they're gonna ultimately approve who's gets the ballots and who has their ballots delivered to an election office, who lives or who dies when it comes to mail-in ballots.

Who died and made them boss? No one, frankly. No one. And so the states ran into court. But because the post office had not yet issued the formal regulation, had not published it, as we say, in the federal registry, in the Federal Register, the United States Supreme Court said to the states, "You're too early.

You may be harmed one day. It may be unconstitutional what Trump's trying to do, but you gotta let him make the rule. Once they make the rule- Come back to us, except with one caveat. Come back to us, but if it's too late in the game, we're not gonna interfere with what the executive branch wants to do, even if it's unconstitutional, because it deals with elections, and we're gonna let the elections happen.

So every hour, every minute, every day matters here. That's why this is such a fast-moving case. That's why Judge Talwani moved so quickly. There's actually two other, cases down in, in the District of Columbia that haven't left the starting blocks yet, if you will, led by Mark Elias, but this is the Talwani set of cases.

Let me read to you from what she said, and then I brought the receipts because I've interviewed the California attorney general about mail-in ballots in the last 24 hours. It's his case that's at stake here, along with, Nick Brown of the Washington Attorney General's office, the Washington Attorney General, who's the head of the Democratic Attorneys General, Voter Protection Task Force, also about this case.

And then, of course, I had the great Mark Elias, who's handling one of these cases with us, and we'll go to those interview clips in a moment. But let me read from Judge Talwani. what she said is, the states now have standing. Their issue is now ripe. The f- the post office last Friday, a week ago, issued their final ruling, and now it can be on the merits decided by a judge whether it is right or wrong.

This is on page eight. Through the final rule, the Postal Service is refusing to send mail ballots to eligible voters unless states or local election officials submit their mail ballot envelopes and return envelopes and receive advanced approval from the United States Postal Service without regard to impending deadlines for the November 3rd, 2026 election.

The judge said even in the rule for the post office, they don't set an internal deadline for when they have to respond to the states. So how are the states supposed to do all of this in time? the court finds likely to succeed on the merits of their claim-- finds that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims, that the post office lacks authority to issue the final rule is unconstitutional in imposing these requirements, and the final rule is unconstitutional in prohibiting non-compliant state and local officials from using the US Postal Service to mail ballots.

They're trying to say, "Oh, no, you didn't... Oh, oops, you didn't check every box. You didn't do everything because you didn't have time, or was, or it's totally impossible. Sorry, you can't use mail-in ballots." That's what they're saying. This is like one of those, remember those coupons on the back of some thing you bought, and they, they could just give you the money or give you the rebate.

Oh, no, you had to cut out the box top. You had to cut out the QR code or the, pricing code, and you had to make sure it was mailed to this add... It was all these things 'cause they wanted you to fail. Same thing here. they... On irreparable harm, she says that the plaintiff states, on page eight, face irreparable harm where they're required to comply with a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections she says on page nine that the plaintiff states have neither the time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the portal, and upload citizen data t- to the portal all before the midterms.

And this will make them have to violate their own constitutional and state laws about administrating elections. In other words, complying with what Trump wants them to do will put them in the jackpot in violating the Constitution. And so she's entered this 14-day stay while she con- continues to consider the preliminary injunction.

we have levels of blocking, levels of injunction that are available to federal judges. Administrative stays last a few hours, temporary restraining orders a couple of weeks, preliminary injunctions, and then permanent injunctions. And the difference is both temporal, time, the length of time they last, but the elements are about the same.

Are you going to win? What is the likelihood you're gonna prevail on the merits of your case at the end of the case? You have to look now and project ahead. Irreparable harm, inadequate remedy at law, the balance of equities tips in your favor. These are the elements that are analyzed by the court. She also ordered under penalty of perjury on page 11, because you can't trust the federal government, she says, "Defendants must, within 24 hours after receiving service of this order, provide written notice of this order to the Postal Service and their employees and notify them they are required to comply with this order under penalty of contempt, and file on the docket a copy of that notice so I know that it was done."

No trust. There's no trust of the Department of Justice or the Postal Service or any branch of the Trump administration at all.

what the court did gave the administration a win that is hopefully temporary and hopefully superficial, but it's a win nonetheless, and the court's intervention reinforced the president's deeply dangerous and destabilizing campaign against absentee ballots as well as the integrity of elections.

And it allowed the administration to claim a, quote, "win" for this wildly illegal executive order which purports to give the president authority over elections that he does not have at a time when the president is laying the groundwork for undermining confidence in elections and questioning the results of an election.

And a win, even a temporary one, on this executive order has the potential to move the Overton window- Yeah ... on the president's authority over elections, the integrity of our elections, et cetera. And as we talked about when we talked with Rick, in this respect, the Supreme Court's actions in this case are, I think, deeply analogous to what they did in birthright citizenship- Right

where there, too, in the court's first encounter with a wildly illegal executive order, a different one, the court handed the administration a procedural win, saying the lower courts were wrong to block the illegal birthright citizenship executive order via nationwide injunctions. And the idea that the executive branch is somehow injured and irreparably so if it is told that it cannot do something that is wildly illegal is on its own a ridiculous- Yeah

concept. And then you add to that the Supreme Court buying the administration's victim narrative, which emboldens the executive further because it's reinforcing this idea that it's the lower courts, not the president, that are overreaching and out of control. This also buys the administration time to potentially accomplish some of its goals, which in the birthright citizenship case meant buying them time to further destabilize the guarantee of birthright citizenship and manufacture- Yeah

arguments against it. 

Absolutely, and I think we will be, feeling the consequences of that for many years. Yep. Here, the effects may be felt much sooner than that Yes ... because the delay in light of the fast-approaching midterm elections means there is a very real potential to create chaos and uncertainty about how those very elections, and obviously critical elections, will be conducted, which could actually create problems in election administration and certainly could depress turnout.

Although, as Rick has mentioned, and it's important to add, mobilization can respond to these kinds of suppressionary tactics, and so it could be that people respond in ways that overcome whatever suppressive effect these interventions have, but that is not a reason not to be deeply concerned.

Okay, sorry, that was a long kind of ground-laying wind-up. Here is what has happened most recently. So on Thursday night, a Massachusetts district court judge, Judge Talwani, issued a new temporary restraining order. Okay, so this is in the new case filed after the Supreme Court's Monday night ruling, and the new case challenges the Postal Service order itself.

The one that Leah mentioned actually had already been issued by the time the Supreme Court's order came down, but went unmentioned in that order. Okay, so the earlier challenge was to the EO itself. This new challenge is to the order implementing some of the provisions of the executive order, and this new temporary restraining order restrains, blocks the implementation of this rule.

And I think actually there are two cases consolidated before- Yeah ... Judge Talwani, if I'm not mistaken, one brought by a group of states and one by a group of organizations led by the League of Women Voters. So I think that is where we are right now, a temporary restraining order in effect as of Friday afternoon.

As you mentioned, there's a great write-up at the Election Law Blog that Rick runs. this district court opinion I thoroughly enjoyed. It was extremely shady. it was like, "Oh, the US Supreme Court in its order suggested that my too early injunction might block the Postal Service from issuing a regulation.

Nope, didn't do that. also, by the way, guys, you didn't even mention the regulation that you..." anyways, loved that. So that is the current state of affairs, and I think it's safe to say there's a lot of uncertainty because we're not sure what the Supreme Court will do here, creating this weird Schrödinger's executive order situation where the ostensible rules governing the upcoming midterm elections are changing and still might be changing by the hour.

there was a period when the executive order was reportedly in effect, and the Postal Service announced it was. Yeah. And then it wasn't, and who knows, maybe it will be again. And before the district court issued this subsequent order blocking the Postal Service regulation, North Carolina said it had submitted its mail ballots to the Postal Service to comply with the new Trump rules for the November elections.

Again, teeing up the conversation you'll hear later between me and Governor Cooper about how the Supreme Court's anti-democratic hijinks are really influencing, how democracy and elections work on the ground in the upcoming midterms. And I think Justice Jackson also wrote a dissent.

Justice Sotomayor wrote one, too. And I think Justice Jackson really summed it up perfectly when she wrote in her dissent, quote, "In the end, what makes today's," that is the Supreme Court's ruling, "so off-base is the Court's lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment. It treats the government's stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the plaintiff state's claims are not justiciable.

Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the government's actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections." End quote. 

Yeah. it just brushes away some of the kind of procedural and legalistic overlay that a case- Yeah ... like this often comes wrapped in, and you're just like, "This is what is happening.

This is what the government is trying to do, and this is what is at stake," and I really appreciated that. Yeah. Completely. 

so we have no idea what the next couple of days or weeks will hold. there, I think, is a very real and wildly concerning possibility that the Court may have put elections between a rock and a hard place.

So initially, the Supreme Court said the challenges to the executive order were brought too early, but now we have a new challenge, and they can't possibly take the off-ramp of, there's no rule to challenge, and there's no actual injury." And that, I think, means there's a very real possibility the Court will say this subsequent challenge is too late, meaning too close to the election under the Supreme Court's lawless Purcell case and principle, which forbids federal courts, at least in theory, at least when the Supreme Court feels like enforcing it, from changing election rules too close to an election.

forbids federal courts from changing rules in a way that makes the election actually democratic and expands- Correct ... ballot access and voting rights. That's right. They are

meaning to prevent it- Changing in constricting ways Exactly, from constricting it Absolutely fine. Forgive me. That is actually- Yeah ... the correct definition of the Purcell principle, and- P 

law. P 

law ... obviously, right? Then, and what is so chilling about it is that you- If they are faithful to their own lawless principle, there is a real chance that they allow this wildly illegal executive order to go into effect, not because they can bring themselves with a straight face to say- Yeah

the president has this power. I actually don't think a majority of them even could do that, although two or three of them I'm sure could. but they might just say, it's just there's this principle out there, and, the, the order is there. Federal courts can't do anything to change it now," even though the order is the thing that would be changing the status quo, obviously.

but, I don't know. This is a very scary state of affairs. And even separate and apart from what might happen, when this case goes back up to SCOTUS, as it surely will, the original per curiam order that we were just talking about also contains some passages that might signal that some parts of the executive order might actually be substantively okay, including the threat of criminal investigation and prosecution of state and local officials.

So here is a concerning quote: "The injunction purports to forbid the attorney general to implement the president's enforcement priorities as to those same states." Again, echoes of the court's basically boundless conception of presidential power over law enforcement from Trump versus United States. And yeah, that part, which is on its own super concerning, I think we're only not talking about it much because so much else in the order- is insane. Yes. but even if none of the rest of it goes into effect, that alone would be an enormous problem. 

Yeah, and assuming the order blocking just the Postal Service rule stands or the Supreme Court lets it stand, what happens to other parts of the executive order, like these directives to investigate and prosecute state and local officials?

That is, even if the court says, "Yes, you can challenge this rule," the injunction against it isn't too late, then are they ever gonna allow anyone to challenge the other parts of the executive order? I don't know. 

As you may know by now, Donald Trump has gutted virtually every federal entity that oversees the integrity and the security of both campaigns and elections themselves, including those which are supposed to be overseeing the nation's sensitive computer-based voting systems, at a time when nearly a dozen states have reported evidence of hacking into their public utility systems in recent days, including their public water system infrastructure.

Some of those attacks are suspected of being carried out by Iran or its associates, and yet the Trump administration does not seem to be interested in hardening national cybersecurity around this November's elections. And frankly, neither do the Democrats, who seem to believe that, discussing known vulnerabilities in voting systems somehow feeds Trump's big stop the steal lie And it's a very precarious moment, it seems to me.

After spending roughly six weeks analyzing Dominion Voting Systems used in Puerto Rico's 2024 elections, Mojave Research, a firm, Mojave Research, came back to the Trump administration with findings that the company says startled its researchers, according to a NextGov report over the weekend.

Don't know how it startled them, since so much of what they found had long been known, but the systems they examined contained at least a dozen high or critical severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled, and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented, the company said.

And in Puerto Rico, where the company had been contracted by the Trump administration to review voting systems used in that recent elections, the researchers found active cellular hardware modems opened additional pathways into underlying software that was thought to be isolated. You've heard the story, "Oh, these voting machines, these tabulators are never connected to the internet."

the evidence found in Puerto Rico, in any event, suggests otherwise. But despite confirming those vulnerabilities that had been long ago, most of them discovered by other voting system and cy-cybersecurity experts, many of them that we have reported on this show in recent years. Despite all of that, the small cybersecurity firm found no actual evidence in those Puerto Rican systems that any of those weaknesses had actually been exploited, at least in the recent Puerto Rico elections, or that votes had been changed in any way.

The company still, however, wanted more time to be certain. But as its chief technology officer explained over this past weekend at DEF CON's Voting Village in Vegas, that's an annual hackers convention, the White House, after they heard that information about those vulnerabilities, they soon ended Mojave's probe thereafter.

Vulnerabilities, we don't care. Evidence that someone actually changed the results, apparently they care about that, or at least they claim to. As Mojave had prepared to move ahead with their probe, the work was abruptly shut down once it became clear to officials working with the White House out of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, that they were unable to find any evidence of actual manipulation of the system, at least in those Puerto Rican elections, where they used Dominion Voting Systems similar to those used in parts of more than 20 states across the entire battlegrounds a-and across the entire battleground state of Georgia As we've long been reporting, where Republican Secretary Brad Raffensperger has refused for four years now to patch, to apply security patches to those systems, to use the security upgrades that were created by Dominion to patch some of these holes And it was urged by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that all states, including Georgia, immediately use those patches to secure their systems.

That was four years ago when CISA made that recommendation. Georgia and many other locations have still not done so. And last month, you may recall, though it seems like a year ago, Donald Trump delivered a primetime address to purportedly announce the findings of his years-long probe of the 2020 election, which he continues to claim, without any evidence whatsoever, was stolen from him by Democrats or Joe Biden or the voting machine companies or China or Venezuela or who knows.

Rather than del- detailing any such evidence in his remarks last month, six years after the fact, he simply announced the release of certain previously classified documents and analyses that also, turns out, did not offer e- evidence of a stolen 2020 election, including a report from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA.

As Susan Greenhalgh, a longtime election integrity, security, and transparency advocate, explained in a press release at the time at the nonpartisan government watchdog FreeSpeechForPeople.org, quote, "A preliminary review of the documents reveals what we expected. There is no evidence of vote manipulation in the 2020 election.

But these documents," she writes, "also expose what we have been warning about for years, that our election systems are poorly secured and much can and should be done to mitigate these vulnerabilities." Specifically, she notes, the CISA report, quote, "debunks the widely held and often repeated notion that voting systems are not at risk to remote attacks because they are supposedly connected, supposedly not connected to the internet."

But she notes the report reveals, quote, "In multiple cases, CISA assessors, gained full network control within hours or days, demonstrating that many state, local, and tribal territor- terri- territory partners remain soft targets incapable of stopping even moderately skilled adversaries." These documents, she notes, illustrate a significantly damaging and corrosive aspect of Donald Trump's big lie that is often overlooked The assertion of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen bred the false counter-narrative that our elections are adequately secured.

Now I had the, honor of interviewing, the, Nick Brown, who's the attorney general of Washington, one of the leaders here of this case, and here's what he had to say, in advance of Judge Talwani.

Although he did tell me that he believed that Judge Talwani would do exactly what she did, which was to enter that emergency injunction on, Thursday night. Here's my interview with AG Brown. 

Now in your case, on the merits 

about the rulemaking, you'll get an order out of Judge Talwani, so will the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and the ACLU.

That'll come up to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, I guess on an expedited track- ... and back to the Supreme Court and sometime in September. What do you think they're gonna do? 

first I would start by, as you were going through that, it's just a good reminder that we would benefit from having more judges on our Supreme Court with trial judge experience, who actually know what happens at a district court level and have been there and done that.

'cause it was a good reminder of just the absurdity of it. the court did have to rule based on when the challenge was filed and the status of the process then. I cannot imagine that we lose on the substance of this case. it would be directly contrary to the explicit words of the, Constitution and all sorts of precedent, because we control our elections.

Congress obviously can implement laws to amend various portions of the elections, the timing and such, but the president certainly cannot via executive order, and that is what he is attempting to do. And so it would be quite absurd, for the Supreme Court to rule against the states. 

And similarly, I just had in the last 24 hour- 24 hours Attorney General Rob Bonta of California, who's the lead, his state is the lead plaintiff in the case, on with me, and here's what he had to say about this issue making a round trip back to the United States Supreme Court in the next week.

Play it. How quickly do you get back to the United States Supreme Court, and what do you think they're gonna do? They've, this is the second time now they've taken on Donald Trump's attempts to screw with mail-in 

ballots. Yeah, the federal government probably is eager to get back to the United States Supreme Court, but I just...

I think this is an open, shut ca- an open and shut case, Michael. It's, there's a, a, a clause of the US Constitution that's right on point that, that governs the issue, just like in birthright citizenship. In birthright citiz- citizenship it was the citizenship clause, which, showed that the executive order of the president trying to undermine, the components of that clause, were unlawful.

And here it's the elections clause which says that the states, and to a degree Congress, determine the manner of our elections. This determine how they are administered and how they occur. Not the president and not the United States Postal Service. So the president and the United States Postal Service are trying to take over a, a key component of our elections across this country, vote by mail, and the elections clause of the US Constitution doesn't allow them to do that.

I think it's very clear. you're right that the US Supreme Court's decision earlier th- this week was procedural and procedural only. It just dealt with the timing, but the substance, and in that order, that emergency docket order by the US Supreme Court, they went out of their way to say, "We are not addressing the merits.

We're not addressing the legality of the underlying substance of the conduct of, the president and the US Postal Service." Time, they said time will tell. 

I was just gonna say they were so cavalier and smug, though. Time will tell. Time is the thing we don't have. Now, it's a very odd Supreme Court that we're dealing with here.

Because when they issued their order on Monday, they said that the states were too early and therefore they were gonna be dismissed on technical grounds, with the ability to come right back once the Federal Post Office issued its final ruling. But by Monday, the Federal Post Office, the, the Postal Service had issued its final ruling the Friday before.

And so there was a lot made of that. In fact, the judge said, I don't think we can assume that the United States Supreme Court knew about the final order." And they kept talking about it in their... They kept talking in their order about there is, no, final order of the post office. It's, they ha- they, they wrote their entire majority decision six to three to kick out the states under the assumption there was no order.

So I asked Mark Elias, they, how did they not know the order came out on Friday when they wrote the opinion on Monday? He said, "Oh, no, they probably knew about it," but he has his own opinion, of which I agree with. Play the clip. 

I suspect that they had gotten it written and agreed to by the end of last week, and then were probably taken by surprise that late last Friday night, the US Postal Service then finalized their rule.

And so by the time they got to Monday morning, were ready to issue the opinion, they were not going to go back and renegotiate with each other changes to that document, and they were just like, "Ah, screw it. We're just issuing it," even though you are exactly right that it reads as a bit of a non-sequitur because it keeps talking about how the Postal Service has not, yet issued a rule, and the Postal Service could issue a rule that's different than what Donald Trump wanted, and we're all scratching our head and being like, "The Postal Service just issued their rule two days ago, on Friday night."

So I think that's what probably happened there. 

Now, all Trump wants to do is sow chaos. He doesn't really believe that the post office can, and the states can actually implement this, this executive order in time for the midterms. Putting aside whether it's constitutional or unconstitutional, he just wants to create chaos, and sow seeds of discontent, and be able to challenge, the midterms and the r- election results, 'cause he says he's on the ballot.

"I'm on the ballot," he said. Okay, you're on the ballot. We agree with that. and then he was asked by a reporter, how are you ever going to implement this? And watch his gibberish, in which he quickly talks about, no, they can do it, 'cause I once played golf in North Carolina. Wait for that non-sequitur.

Play the clip. 

Mr. President, the Supreme Court earlier this week ruled on mail-in ballots, and there are states like North Carolina that have ballots that go out next week. How are states supposed to implement this in time? 

they're in- they're 

irrelevant. North Carolina's great. it's a great place.

I won it golf three times, and they do some mail-in ballots. But basically, they ruled on the legitimacy and the way we wanna make them legitimate, and, it was a great ruling for the Republican- 

so just to give a little more context, that vulnerability in Dominion's system that Marilyn, found a very easy way to exploit, is a consequence of Dominion shoddy engineering and putting in place, a, an ineffective randomi- m- random number- Generator. Yeah ... 

generator in the system. It's supposed to create a random number that's printed on the ballot, and it's not supposed to be traceable back to any specific time that the ballot is cast. 

researchers at, University of Michigan and Auburn University, Alex Halderman, Drew Springall, a- and as well as Braden Kleman uncovered this problem in 2022.

They wrote a very, well-respected research paper about it- ... and they tried to alert, relevant agencies and election officials about it. Dominion, did respond by making a software update, w- or softwar- another, another version of their software- ... a, a newer version that included a competent random number generator.

But, the Secretary of State of Georgia, as Marilyn told you, did not want to apply the patch as, and a lot of other election officials have basically just hand-waved it away and said, "This is too complicated. You have to be a Princeton-trained researcher to be able to make any sense of it. Not ordinary people are not gonna be able to understand this.

It's not really a problem." And Marilyn said that's not a good enough answer- ... especially in the, the ages of AI, as you mentioned. She was able to apply ChatGPT and uncover how a lot of people were able to vote. and this is- And she, we should 

underscore, 

she had- and this was also done- 

Yeah.

l- let me just underscore. She has, m- no experience in, computer coding, reading source code. She didn't have access to that. She didn't need access. All she needed was the public records and a chatbot, essentially, to be able to figure out how pretty much everyone in the state of Georgia voted.

So much for the secret ballot 

And so much for the idea that this is a very comp- complex problem and only, very dedicated and, resource intense- 

... 

geniuses would be able to figure out. And Marilyn said, "I'm just gonna ask AI." And AI did it for her. this is a problem for, specifically mostly for Georgia.

There are other states that could, have this problem, but it... Georgia's specifically, susceptible because it does make its ballot images and a lot of information public, which is a good thing. We're not trying to say they shouldn't be doing that. We're saying that the vendor shouldn't be making their, crappy systems- with shoddy engineering and using bad rand- random number generators, and they should, And when they are identified, then the s- the, the, the election officials in the secretary of state's office should pursue the updated, corrected product. Instead, they have not. and so there's...

This is a, a big problem that, exists currently in Georgia, but the problem, as you mentioned, is that we're seeing is that, election officials and elected officials on both sides of the aisle are trying to ignore these problems as well as the revelations in the documents that were released, after Donald Trump's- 

bizarre wh- Oval Office speech about election security. 

We will get to those 'cause there's still a few more items that have come up that I'm trying to make sense of here, in, maybe related in this question, to voting system security, but maybe not. and the fact that we don't really know for sure, that feels to me like one of the problems here.

There was a very interesting result last week out of the primary elections in Michigan where a candidate, a Republican candidate by the name of Amir Hasan, was endorsed by Donald Trump for a US House seat in a pretty competitive district, with a sitting, Democrat currently in that seat. This Trump-endorsed, candidate, Amir Hasan, lost that Republican party by, or that Republican primary by about 20 points, which was unusual in and of itself, but he lost it to a guy named Thomas Smith, who had endorsed a third person in that race when Thomas Smith dropped out of the election weeks earlier.

He hadn't campaigned. He had no campaign website. He had no, money. But he ended up winning over Trump's endorsee in a landslide. Now, many have chalked this up to pure Republican racism in this case. Amir Hasan was Black, formerly a Muslim, though he converted to Christianity, and that is probably what happened here.

why they would vote for someone who was off the ballot rather than the third candidate who that person who had dropped out had actually endorsed, I don't know. But these numbers are strange enough that it sounds akin to some elections we have seen over the years where, an issue or the names of the candidates actually get mixed up in the database, when they're tallied or when they're programmed.

The problem is we would never know about that if that is actually what happened. If the, the candidates were just on the wrong lines, we would never know unless there was some sort of examination of the programming or the ballots, which almost never occurs. How would or how could the public get an answer to a question like that if anybody actually wanted to know that the voting systems tabulated a race like that accurately?

the obvious, the easy and obvious way is to go back and look at the paper ballots, and do a recount of the paper ballots to make sure that they count, that they, align with the computer-generated results to ensure that there wasn't some sort of programming error or bug or something that caused, a miscount.

Because it does happen. we've seen it, we see it with regularity. and the best way, and the most definitive way, is to go back and look at the paper ballots. And everyone says, "Don't worry, we have paper ballots." the paper ballots are only good if you actually go back and look at them.

If you're just going to take the number that is spit out by the computer, then the paper ballots are not serving any purpose. The problem in Michigan is that they, do their audits well, well after the election. I don't think they audit primary ballots, I'd have to go and check- 

as a regular course.

I think, if my memory serves correctly, it's only for, general elections- ... every two years. But they typically do the audit months after certification. So any information that you might find about a misprogrammed ballot scanner is useless later, after the fact- It would be too late

because it's well after certification- Yeah ... and well after somebody might be seated. 

And, Yeah ... and in this case, the guy who had dropped out of the race but ended up winning the race, he won it by, 20 points. So it was not like it was, close enough that there would be, any sort of recount.

In many states you can't even request one, even if you- fear something like that if the, if the final results aren't within a certain, bound. so there is unlikely to be a recount in that race. and I'm not sure how many ballots were cast by BMD, touchscreen ballot marking device, versus hand-marked paper ballot.

But it all just puts, so much smoke into these, systems that it makes it easy, as I see it, for a bad guy like a Donald Trump to come out and make claims that are largely impossible for the public to check, or at least for them to know one way or another. Does that make sense?

Yeah, i- it, the election security community, the computer scientists have long said we need to have affirmative evidence of the election result that's spit out by the computers Before certification in the form of a meaningful audit of the paper ballots, we're not just supposed to be trusting the computers because we know that they have flaws.

And we know that they're vulnerable to manipulation. And in, and even, strong s- computer security systems can be vulnerable to ma- manipulation, but unfortunately every time anyone looks under the hood of these machines- ... they're just aghast at how bad they are, like in the case of Dominion that you mentioned earlier, and we've also, had other experiences with other vendors.

I don't wanna pick on Dominion because I, I think they're all, they all have their problems. Yeah. the problem is that we have a national mindset. We have been caused, to think that we can just trust the m- the computer-generated results through a very effective PR campaign that has been going on, for a long time, well before 2020.

But it really ramped up into a special high gear after 2020 because of Trump's big lie, as I, as I tried to, emphasize in the statement that you read. Yep. That we have fostered this very, very dangerous, mindset that we can't ever question election results, and we can't confront the known vulnerabilities because you'll be labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Yep. Or you're giving credit- credibility to the big lie. And two things ha- are true at the same time. The big lie is not true. Trump's own big reveal of documents show that, and at the same time, our election systems are vulnerable and really need... I- it shouldn't, they should not be trusted without verification.

S- And we need that verification, and we are not demanding it. 

And Finally, Section C, Resistance And Response

When you don't vote, you don't get to the jury and the fate of those in trial. When you don't vote, you don't get to help determine the judge that sits on the bench. So don't tell me you out here hollering Black Lives Matter if you don't vote. Black lives don't matter to you if you don't vote Don't tell me you're mad that Daniel Cameron has not indicted the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor if you don't vote, 'cause you ain't got nothing to do with it.

How dare you not vote? When we don't vote, we dismiss ourselves from being part of leveling the playing field of justice in the United States of America

And thank you very much for that, Reverend Howard John Wesley of the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. Thank you so much for that. I play clips like that on this podcast, and you've heard them in the past from, Reverend Howard John Wesley because he talks so much sense, and we have to pay heed to what the brother is saying to us.

We cannot afford, dear listener, and welcome to this brand-new edition of The Politicrat. It's the first one of September, on this second day of September. Thank you for being here. We cannot afford to sit here and not participate in voting. It's the most important thing that we have in this country is our vote, and our vote is our voice.

And on this episode, dear listener, I am going to be spending the entire episode, save for maybe a few minutes, talking about what we need to be doing now ahead of the midterms. It is September. We're just two months away exactly tomorrow, exactly two months away from the midterms. November the 3rd is the date for those.

But on this episode, I'm going to be talking to you about the importance of voting early and the importance of voting early in person because that is the reality that we are going to have to face in the midterms. We are gonna have to, in the United States of America, vote early in person. That is what we're going to have to do.

You hear a lot of people who are sitting around and panicking and saying, "Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God," and that does not help us right now. It does not help the panickers. It doesn't help anybody. We have to have solutions, and on this podcast, you will get solutions from me. Of course, you'll get the analysis, but most importantly, you will get solutions because I think it's very clear by now.

We all know what the issue is. We all know who the issue is, and we all know what the issue is and what they are doing to our voting in this country. We know who it is, but we are more in number than they are in number, and we cannot afford to be distracted. And I think the biggest enemy that we have now, you and I, dear listener, is distraction.

It's not even Donald Trump, quite frankly. It's distract- And obviously, he is a huge, enemy in terms of what he's doing to this country, obviously. That is obvious. But I would argue to you, dear listener, that even more than him and even more than these Republicans, the, and the corporate news media, the biggest enemy we have right now is distraction.

We are constantly being distracted, constantly Shiny objects are dangled in front of us every five minutes. We are overloaded with stupid and useless information and trivia, and we are oversaturated with every breaking news alert. And so that's why we're so mentally tired and mentally fatigued most of the time, overwhelmed, filled up with bull and BS and bullshit, and we are so oversaturated and over-sim- stimulated that by the time we try to focus, we can't And that's all by design.

And we need to wake up, stop paying attention to nonsense, stop focusing on Laura Loomer, stop focusing on Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce or any other picayune thing that has nothing to do with whether or not you're gonna be able to put food on your table next year or next month or this month or today or tomorrow Voting is going to go a long way toward determining what kind of gas prices you have.

Voting is going to go a long way toward determining what kind of leaders you have, both locally, on the state level, and actually on the federal level. Voting is key. And I hear it, I get it. There'll be people who, and I've said it myself here, voting is not the only thing. Voting is not the only thing. But you know what?

I'm going to amend my statement for the next two months. Right now, dear listener, voting is the only thing

Voting is the only thing that we must be focusing on right now. Nothing else. Not the Epstein files, not Laura Loomer, not the Democrats with their squabbles, not the Republicans. Our focus must be voting That means being registered to vote. That means checking your voter registration frequently. That means going to the website iwillvote.com and checking your voter registration frequently, at least two or three times a month.

I would say even more than that per month. That means checking out what kind of voter ID, if any, that you need if you live in a state that requires it. That means making sure you register people to vote. That means also educating people about voting and speaking to people that you know or maybe don't know and asking them what they care about in terms of issues and tying the issues they care about to the people that they need to vote for who have an impact on those issues for better or for worse, and have the power to impact those issues and change the situation with those issues and policies that the person you talk to cares about.

That means mobilizing people to vote. That means having a plan in advance of November's midterms. That means bringing people to the polls. That means driving people to the polls. That means having a plan in place now to do that. And that also means, really important here, voting early in person That is what we are all going to have to do

Because what we obviously see now in the news with the United States Postal Service is obviously very concerning. And so we're going to now have to vote early in person. Now, there are maybe a few states that don't have early voting, but most every single state in this country does So I really implore you, dear listener, to take advantage of early voting.

Maybe you are somebody, or maybe you know somebody who usually votes on election day itself. There is a tradition of voting on election day among a great many millions of people in this country. But what I would say, particularly in the case of this particular election coming up on November 3rd, 2026, is to vote in advance.

Vote early.

So if we think about, the abortion access fight, right? There was a particular conversation I had with one of the, a Georgia-based, organizer who was talking about the abortion fight and talking about it in relation to, civic engagement, and was saying that there are ways in which the abortion fight- if we center abortion, we can actually talk to other people in very specific ways.

If we talk about abortion, we can talk about the court system with men. We can talk about, there are all these other things that actually rise to the surface if we talk about things that matter to women that we might not have actually paid attention to. And so I think that feels really important.

But there's also ways in which women organize that feels important as well. There are ways in which women do the work of bringing people together that feels important as well. When I organize in spaces with other women and that are women-centered and women-led, I find that I know there's gonna be food at the meeting.

I know we gonna make sure people are fed. That's important, right? That's important- ... to meet people's basic needs. I know that there's gonna be childcare at that meeting because if I want, a woman who works 9:00 to 5:00 and who is directly impacted by what's happening to show up at my meeting, I need to make sure that she might- she has a space for her kids to show up as well.

So the particular ways that we organize that make space for more people and that make space for us to actually build a mass movement. 

you listed some barriers, implicitly, to women participating at the center. What else is out there that's standing in the way that we need to take care of?

Misogyny inside of our movement. It feels like really number one is that, we live in the world. The misogyny is in the air. It's in the air we breathe. It's in the atmosphere that we were all raised in, and so none of us are immune from it. And so we have to be constantly fighting against it, even inside of the movement.

We have seen, we have been in places, I am at a women-centered organization with women leadership and women of color leadership in particular, and there have definitely been, times where we have been in spaces and we're like, "Oh, no one's hearing us," but when we send our male colleague into that space, then the message lands.

And so that, the misogyny that exists inside of our movement, we have to be doing battle against. We just have to do it. whether or not you decide that, you're gonna be a women-led or women-centered organization, we still have to be fighting the misogyny if we plan to build a free country, right?

If we plan to fight authoritarianism, we have, we just have to be doing it. And so I think that is one of the, the key barriers that I find is being able to actually be in space and be heard But also the misogyny that lends itself to the issues that are important to women, to gender justice issues being seen as side issues, being seen as not fundamental.

There was, so much back and forth right around this last, presidential election around, what was going to be the core issue that we're gonna take up? Was it gonna be democracy or was it gonna be abortion access? And we're like, these are not separate issues. These are not distinct and one-- and abortion access is not a side issue.

Reproductive rights and reproductive justice is not a side issue to democracy. And so we have to not face these things as, as if the things that matter to women, the things that are gendered are something over here, because gender justice matters for men, too. Patriarchy impacts us all. And so we have to be fighting against that kind of misogyny that is inherent inside of our movements.

I think of course, yeah, like I said, of course there is, access to childcare. I was talking to one of our organizers, who's been leading and doing a ton of work around data centers and data center resistance work in Texas in particular, and she noted, she said, "What I realized is that so many of the people who are in this fight with me are moms."

And I don't think that's a thing that people are noticing or are paying attention to because, they are paying attention to the ways in which these data centers will impact their children and impact, impact their children's future. And so-- but what she also noticed was that they feel apprehensive about stepping in because they don't feel prepared.

They don't feel like they have the training. They don't feel like they have the skill set. And so what are we offering in terms of leadership development for people on the ground that is accessible, that does not require you to have gone to grad school and got a master's degree in this thing, but that makes space for everyday people, everyday women to come into the movement.

thanks for that. I honestly do really appreciate it. I appreciate the work of the Women's March greatly. It's a source of constant, inspiration for me. you-- that was very useful analysis. I wanna, though, tap your, expertise and talk a little bit about strategic nonviolent action in decentralized movements.

over the last several months, the Women's March has organized and participated in several strategic nonviolent actions. Can you talk about which movements have inspired the creativity we've seen across your base? 

Yeah. oh my gosh. I would say w- we had been, one of the things that, that we really have been talking about as a team a lot is, Serbia and other European movements and in particular the use of humor and ridicule as a key part of how we can do strategic non, non-violence.

How do we bring that sort of humor and ridicule into, to counter this strong man, authoritarian, narrative and propaganda? And so we definitely have been looking, to those movements. We've been talking a lo- for me, I'm always looking at movements on the Afri- on the African continent, looking at Kenya, looking at, a- and of course, you know For myself and for some of my, a number of my colleagues, we are like students of the Civil Rights Movement.

So of course, we're looking at, at what we saw in the Civil Rights Movement. We're students of the Combahee River Collective in particular, and other sort of, feminist traditions here. We've been looking at, of course, Latin America and what we've seen the f- Latin American feminists do.

So we've been really leaning on, th- those traditions and trying to be really intentional about connecting to those sh- those, movements as well, so we can be constantly in conversation and in learning. we have been looking at the My Body My Voice, movement of, campaign that's been happening across the European Union, which is the sort of first multi-country policy around abortion access, that just moved through a European, Parliament this pa- earlier this year in March, I think.

And so we've been... There's so many movements that we've really been paying attention to. We've been paying attention to Brazil, and really learning from, from comrades and colleagues in Brazil. So many places that we've really been paying attention to, in terms of strategic nonviolence.

And I think, we've spent a lot of time in Mexico, talking to and learning from Mexican feminists, and looking at the ways in which sort of the, the fight around matricide has, shaped the feminist movement and how they've connected that and grown that to talk about abortion access.

There's so many places for us to lean into and learn from, both historically and contemporarily, and we've been trying to like, be in all the rooms and all the spaces with all the people so- to soak up all the things because, I was in a conversation with some folks talking about, doing work in Brazil, and there was-- they were talking about how, authoritarian governments, authoritarians move globally.

they have the intention to connect to each other and to build together globally. and in order to fight authoritarianism, we have to be doing the same thing. And so that's a lot of what we've been trying to do is say, "What are y'all seeing in Brazil? What are you seeing you know, in, in Canada?"

We've been talking to folks in Canada. We've just been really doing the work of trying to connect to feminists in as many places as possible. So we've been inside of, the sort of, feminist peace frameworks that people have been building here and abroad, and just really soaking up everything.

the US Postal Service, let me just remind you of what the news was, 'cause you may not be aware. The US Postal Service, dear listener, is acting on behalf of Donald Trump, according to a USPS whistleblower, who in, in a communique or in confidence to the senator out of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, said that the US Postal Service is designing mechanisms now in a very hurried way, a very rushed way, to implement the things that Donald Trump wants the Postal Service to do in terms of denying millions of people their mail-in ballots.

And these are millions of registered voters. These aren't millions of people who aren't voting or aren't registered. These are registered voters And there's some mechanism they're doing that's gonna expel a whole lot of ballots if one little thing is wrong. And this mechanism is not fully tested. It's being rushed in.

And so this whistleblower detailed all this, and then Richard Blumenthal, the senator out of Connecticut, US senator out of Connecticut yesterday, revealed this to everybody, and then the newspapers and all the press put it out there too. New York Times did, and Washington Post did, the Associated Press did.

And there's a 26-page letter, which I'm not gonna read to you now, that Richard Blumenthal wrote to the postmaster general, who is no longer Louis DeJoy. He left. it's, I think, Charles Steiner or something Steiner, or whoever the hell it is. he's the one who is now the US, postmaster general for the US Postal Service.

And so the senator out of Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal, wrote to him of a list of concerns and all of this because, again, as you know by now, last week a federal court judge said that this executive order that Donald Trump put out there regarding mail-in voting was something that was not constitutional, and he ordered that all of these plans with the Postal Service needed to be stopped immediately.

And it was a temporary block for two weeks. Now, there apparently is going to be a complete and full injunction, meaning that there is absolutely no time limit to the injunction. But this whistleblower for the US Postal Service, and thank you to that whistleblower, whoever you are. I know it's...

Obviously you're anonymous. Said that despite this court order being put in place by the judge, you still have the US Postal Service still rushing ahead to do what they have been told they cannot do So you have the criminality afoot here. And so What I am saying to you here, dear listener, if you live, dear listener, in one of these states that is a mail-in voting state, and I'll go and read those out to you, there are at least Certainly I'd say at least seven states that do mail-in voting almost exclusively.

now there are some states in that bunch that I'm gonna read, as I've already told you, California, that also allow in-person voting. You can pick one or the other. You may still get a, a ballot sent to you by mail if you're a registered voter in California, but of course you have the option of either utilizing that ballot that you get in the mail or going to your voting precinct locally.

You can do one of the o- one or the other, but you cannot do vote ob- you cannot do v- both, obviously. You cannot vote twice, obviously. That's a crime. So please be careful and make sure that you only vote once, okay? so even in Ca- California, you can choose one or the other, right? So it's not an exclusively all mail-in voting state technically because you can still go to the polls instead of going to vote by mail.

So that's what I wanna say. But the seven states are Washington State, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Vermont. Those are the seven states in the country where their elections are conducted by mail. Now, again, as I said, here in California, you have a choice between either voting by mail or going to the polls.

Now, there may be other states out of those seven where you can also do the same. I do know, however, for a fact, and I forget, I forgot the eighth state, Hawaii, is also the, a state that conducts its elections by mail, and I think those are all voting by mail exclusively. Now, but of those eight states, I'll read them out again to you.

Washington State, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Vermont, and Hawaii. I know for a fact that Hawaii and Oregon are all mail-in voting, which means that there is no in-person voting as far as I know. Now, there could be exceptions for that. I know that in Washington State there are, there may be some exceptions.

Certainly in Oregon actually there could be some exceptions as well. but those eight states, those are the states for people who get mail-in v- ballots. I want you to call the county Board of Elections, whatever your county is in your state. Now, Oregon I think has 36 counties. California here has 58 counties, right?

but what I want you to do, whichever county you live in and whichever state of those states that you may live in, I want you to contact your county clerk for the Board of Elections in your county, whomever that person might be, whether it's your clerk, whether it's your director of elections in your county, and I want you to look them up online, make a phone call to them, and ask them what they are doing regarding voting for the midterms in light of the Postal Service actions that have been happening Ask them if there will be an opportunity to vote in person in their county.

that's what I want you to do. Ask them if there is going to be an opportunity for you to vote in person in your county. That is what I would like you to do, okay? Ask them, I'm gonna say it a third time, ask them if there will be an opportunity for you to vote in person In your county and to vote early in your county.

That is what I want you to do. Because right now you wanna call your local county clerk, your county clerk of the Board of Elections so that you can understand where it is because, listen, I'll tell you this right now. I actually contacted, someone in Oregon. I'm not gonna give their name out because I- they didn't know I was gonna do this, so I'm not gonna give their name.

But I called an office in Oregon, I'm not gonna say which one of the counties, but I called one of the county clerk's offices in the state of Oregon, and they were enormously helpful. And I'm going to be having a second conversation with one of the c- with a clerk actually, of one of these counties, and it will be a conversation I intend to have soon.

I will report back to you as to the outcome of it about whether what this particular county in Oregon, is going to do. We don't know yet. In fact, I can share at least this, of the conversation I had today with one of the personnel at the county clerk in, office in question, which I won't reveal.

that person was very helpful and did tell me, that as of right now, there is no order to do anything different with voting in the state of Oregon. As per the secretary of state's office that has told the clerk's office I spoke to, that right now there is no, different plan of action regarding voting by mail.

That's what I've been told exclusively today by one of the county clerk's offices there in Oregon. So for those of you listening to this who are in Oregon or if you know someone in Oregon, right now there is no, as of now on September the 2nd, 2026, there is no, directive to do anything different regarding mail-in voting in light of the situation with the United States Postal Service and what the whistleblower at the USPS revealed yesterday.

and, certainly or rather on August the 31st, and then yesterday was disclosed to everybody by Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

when you talk about learning, I know you've been doing a lot of experimentation. what have you been learning from that process? 

We've been learning that people are ready for more, ... is one of the things that feels really, There's an appetite for people to do more, and that more looks a lot of different ways.

So people really bit on walkouts, when we were doing walkouts in January. N- now, of course, there's a lot of fear and a lot of learning that we have to be in, and that was one of the things that we noticed. But for the folks who were already taking action in marches, it didn't, it wasn't a stretch for them to then say, "Okay, now we gotta step it up," and walkouts feel important, right?

And so I think that's one of the things that we're learning. But we also are learning that we have to be in the work of developing people's leadership. So we can't just say, "Hey, we call for walkouts. Go walk out." We have to actually prepare folks. we have to actually be training folks and giving them information and materials.

and it, that, that part is really important because again, people are like, "Okay, I am a NICU nurse. What should I do? How can I be in solidarity? I'm a teacher. What should I do? How can I be in solidarity? How can I, work this with my union?" there's so many questions, and we've been able to cultivate all these questions and share them with, with our peers, share them with the folks doing May Day, share them with, w- with all, with all of our folks.

And so w- we've seen, Another thing that we've seen is this trajectory, in the research. We partnered with Dana Fisher to do some research of our folks who participated in the walkouts in January, and she's also been doing that, so some research with the folks which is, who have participated in the No Kings actions.

And we've seen this trajectory that, actually, you know, that first Women's March Kickstarted the thing. and those folks continue to engage and continue to take action in lots of different ways. And so some of that is electoral, but a lot of that is that they keep coming out to marches, they keep...

they participate in walkouts, they wanna learn, they wanna train, they wanna build. Another thing that we're learning in terms of people wanting to do more is that people actually want to build the skill to do things locally. we've been offering tons of trainings, and one of the things that, one of the ones that, that people really glommed onto and really wanted to be inside of is mutual aid.

there's so much mutual aid and so many mutual aid efforts growing. And so giving people the tools, and letting them go has been such a, a beautiful process to witness. And actually also offering people a space to then, even though they're building on their own, in their own communities, in their own networks, offering them a space for them to come together with other folks who are doing similar work and to share peer to peer, and to learn peer to peer about, what are we missing?

What did y'all do that worked that we can try? Here's what we did that didn't work. and so offering them those spaces, be it, in the comments on social media, or in the comments on the trainings, or in the app that we cr- that we s- that we set up, has been really fu- fruitful because people not only want to take action, people are in it because they wanna take action, but they also really want connection.

People don't wanna feel isolated. and people felt very isolated. So many of our folks told us after the election, after the presidential, that they felt isolated, and that they were coming out to actions because they wanted to feel like they weren't alone. And so that's another piece of this, is that we still do need those mass actions, those mass mobilizations.

and I know they get a ton of critique, but they are a way for people who have never been politicized before to find community, to find other folks who are questioning what they're seeing. And so some people might be at a place where the mass mobilization is not the thing for them, and they wanna escalate, and that's great, and that's important.

But we actually, what we're learning more than anything is that we need all the tools in our toolbox, and we need to be preparing people and engaging people to use all the tools in our toolbox, all the tactics towards what our collective vision 

that's really helpful. I, throughout my many years of organizing, usually lean into rage.

But I've learned that there's a kind of loneliness epidemic in the US. 

Yes. 

And, tapping into that, creating a sense of belonging for people, a community they can turn to that makes meaning of their lives might be the better way to go, right? yeah. And 

we find that even with our folks in like rural communities and the small towns especially, will say, I didn't even know there were other feminists until somebody organized a march and I showed up, and now we have a book club and we meet, regularly and we, we have a f- we're learning together about what feminism is.

and I didn't know because I live in this, in, in rural Michigan, that there were other people who thought like me, who felt like me." And so that is really important. If we're going to build at the scale that we wanna build, to build the kind of mass movement that is required to defeat authoritarianism, we have to lean into connection and into hope just as much as we lean into rage.

That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The NPR Politics Podcast

Straight White American Jesus

THE DAILY BLAST

Legal AF

Strict Scrutiny

The BradCast

The Politicrat

and The Anti-Authoritarian Podcast

Further details are in the show notes.

Thanks to everyone for listening, thanks to Deon and Erin for their production work for the show, thanks to Amanda for all of her work behind the scenes, thanks to our editors and thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations.

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So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay! And this has been the Best of the Left podcast, coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.