Air Date: 10-30-2026

Today we look at the midterm machinery. The administration's attempts to mess with the election continually lose in court, but the tampering attempts will keep coming: whose ballots get thrown out, which winners get certified, who ultimately gets seated. Voting too big to rig, early and in overwhelming numbers, is only the beginning, followed by people being ready to show up and protect the count.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. Today, we look at the midterm machinery. The administration's attempts to mess with the election continually lose in court, but the tampering attempts will keep coming.

Whose ballots get thrown out, which winners get certified, and who ultimately gets seated. Voting too big to rig, early and in overwhelming numbers, is only the beginning, followed by people being ready to show up and protect the count. For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today include Takes by Jamal Bowie, On the Media, Today Explained, 

Last Week Tonight, All In with Chris Hayes, and Resistance History with Tad Stormer. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections. Section A: Rigging the Count and Fighting Back. Section B: The GOP Radicalized. Section C: On the Ballot, Candidates and Races.

And Section D: What This Election is Actually About. And now, on to the show

Elon Musk is officially the single largest donor to ever exist in American politics. In this election cycle alone, he has dropped over $400 million on elections. Between this cycle and 2024, that's well over half a billion dollars he spent. The vast majority of that has gone to the Republican Party and conservative organizations in an effort to help Republicans win elections.

Right now, he is all but funding the Republican campaigns for Senate and the House. Musk in particular is throwing money at Ken Paxton in Texas, at Ashley Hinson in Iowa. He's trying as hard as he can to save the Republican Senate. And I'll say I'm glad that Democrats have begun to make hay of this.

James Talarico in particular is really hitting Ken Paxton for being bought for entirely by Elon Musk. 

Elon Musk is trying to buy this Senate seat in Texas We just found out that the richest man in the world is almost single-handedly bankrolling this effort to install Ken Paxton in the US Senate and stop this movement we're building in our state.

But again, this is, this is genuinely crazy. A genuinely crazy thing. You have not seen this kind of outright attempt to just buy an election wholesale since the beginning of the 20th century. This is a fun fact. One reason we got direct election of senators, in addition to the referendum and the initiative in the early 20th century, is because large business interests were just outright buying state legislatures.

They were buying state legislatures and then having those state legislators do what they wanted, including putting their guys or their preferred guys in the US Senate, because if you remember, under the original Constitution, the Senate is not directly elected, it's chosen by the state legislature. We haven't seen this kind of thing in a long time, is the point.

Obviously, it is the product of any number of Supreme Court decisions, beginning with Buckley v. Valeo in the '70s, which established money as being equivalent to speech, and continuing on with, I think, one of the most infamous rulings of the modern era, Citizens United, which strengthened free speech rights for corporations and strengthened their ability to spend money.

The Court has also been hostile to disclosure rules. It's been hostile to really any attempt to restrict the amount of money flowing into politics. And it's also been hostile to attempts to prosecute corruption in politics. So, so much of our current reality is a direct product of a Supreme Court that at best has a Pollyannish view of the relationship between money and politics, and at worst is simply trying to help its billionaire allies corruptly influence American politics for their own political and ideological benefit.

But I don't just wanna talk about the corruption here. I don't just wanna talk about the problem of extreme amounts of money in politics. I've spoken before about how this can backfire to some extent on a tactical level, but broadly, just thinking about how we want our political system to work, how we want our political system to look, a system in which a single person can spend nearly half a billion dollars to influence elections is a broken system.

It just is. And if I could wave a magic wand, I would wave a magic wand basically implementing a constitutional amendment that overturns Buckley, overturns Citizens United, and puts the question of money in politics where it belongs, in the hands of the people and their lawmakers, not in the hands of Supreme Court justices.

Yes, I can see the theoretical argument that money is speech, but we also need to acknowledge the obvious point, which is that people with a lot of money occupy a very different social status, social strata than the rest of us. And their ability to unilaterally influence politics is categorically different, qualitatively different than someone donating a couple dollars to a candidate or spending money on some lawn signs All right.

The other point I wanna make here is that Elon is not just the Republican Party's single largest and most important donor. For four months in 2025, Elon Musk was the de facto shadow president of the United States, running the executive branch through the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing and destroying programs, slashing and destroying federal research funding, slashing and destroying an agency, USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, which for all of its problems, also did provide life-saving care and assistance to millions of people worldwide.

And since Elon destroyed USAID, in his words, "put it in the wood chipper," researchers estimate that hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable children in the world have died, and millions will die as time goes on. That's all blood that Elon Musk has on his hands. It's striking that in the most recent interview Elon had with Walter Isaacson, he just described himself as getting a little enthusiastic, going a little overboard.

Yeah, you seem to get a bit too intoxicated by it, in a way, with the chainsaws and all that. I think I 

did. Yeah, I guess that... Yeah, I th- I think that's true. Yeah, yeah. Kinda got carried away, basically. 

Yeah, we all go overboard in life, and some of us, end up becoming mass murderers when we do.

In addition to that, Elon Musk might be the most prominent ideological white supremacist in the world, and certainly the richest one. He spends his time on X sharing all kinds of bug nuts, white nationalist and white supremacist propaganda. He supports the neo-Nazi party in Germany, AFD, and he's even helped encourage a program or two in the United Kingdom.

what I see happening is a destruction of Britain. initially a slow erosion, but a rapidly increasing erosion of Britain, with massive uncontrolled migration. 

Biggest donor, responsible for mass death, far right and white supremacist activist with worldwide reach. That's Elon Musk. And yet, you would be hard-pressed, very hard-pressed, to find any example of anyone asking a Republican candidate for office whether they support Elon's actions in this regard, whether they have an answer for Elon's actions in that regard, whether they're comfortable taking money from someone like Elon Musk.

It's not as if the American press doesn't know how to ask about outside actors. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, the Michigan Senate candidate for office, campaigned with Hasan Piker once and has never stopped answering questions about that. Other Democrats who have nothing to do with Hasan Piker answer questions about the guy, and he's just a streamer.

Meanwhile, someone who effectively served as President of the United States, leader of the federal bureaucracy, someone who is the richest man in the world, who's funding the Republican Party's campaigns, escapes real scrutiny. What's up with that? 

What's up with that? What's up with that? 

I don't know. I don't have an answer.

But I do find it maddening. Drives me a little crazy. Because what do you mean Republicans aren't answering for this guy? 

I don't expect them to give good answers. I expect them to give mealy-mouthed nonsense answers, but it feels like something they should be asked. It does... It feels like something that, that's actually the responsibility of the political press to ask, that their job isn't just to adjudicate partisan conflicts, it's to actually get answers to important questions.

And the extent of Elon Musk's influence over American politics and global politics and American foreign policy seems to be a very important thing to discuss. And yeah, I for one would like to know if these Republican candidates denounce Elon Musk. Will they disavow Elon Musk? Will they give back his money?

Because for my part, I think number one priority for any future Democratic presidential administration should be to disentangle Elon Musk entirely from the American government, to cancel his contracts, to even, if necessary, nationalize SpaceX and Starlink, and to make sure that this guy loses the influence he has over the American state.

It's not just that he's personally reprehensible, it's not just that he is dangerous, but that his larger interests are actually directly opposed to that of the American people. So if the press isn't gonna make Elon an issue, and they should, Democrats should. Democrats should make Elon Musk an issue. If he wants to play the game of politics and the game of state, then let's play the game of politics and the game of state.

As you write in your article, Gen X, the generation of Americans born in the years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the sexual revolution, is also currently the most conservative pro Donald Trump generation in the United States.

You say that part of that can be explained by the rapid social transformation that they experienced in their lifetime. 

Yeah. I didn't mean to pick on Gen X in particular, but I think part of the reason it's really interesting to look at them is that their lifetime encompasses so many social changes.

When we think about the span of human history, we think in centuries. We don't think in a single generation growing up. And what we've seen happen in terms of social hierarchy and ability for traditionally marginalized groups to make some increases in their ability to achieve higher positions, higher status, more power, that's all happened in the span of one generation.

And so it wasn't just the civil rights legislation, it was also in the '60s and '70s, we saw the women's rights movement. And we forget how fast women's power has increased. my mother couldn't get A credit card or a bank account without a man's permission until 1974, at which point she was 28 years old already.

Hmm. 

There wasn't a women's bathroom in the Senate until 1992, and the progress in terms of LGBT rights are even more recent, right? In 2015, we got national same-sex marriage to be codified into law. So all of these changes happened between the birth of Gen X and the current day. One way to think about this is that I can't imagine America going through a period where it upends centuries of racial and sexual inequality, and there not being some kind of backlash to that.

That's a helpful way of thinking about it. Does the data support that? 

It's a little difficult to measure specifically why people do things. However, the data that I do have suggests that the most, let's say, passionate partisans in American politics are those who we would call the most polarized, actually, the ones who are most likely to be angry at the other side and to think of the other side as evil.

The people that are the most likely to do that are the Republicans who are the highest in racial resentment and hostile sexism, and the Democrats who are the lowest in racial resentment and hostile sexism. 

These are the two groups that are most polarized from each other. 

Yes. Yes. They're the angriest and most polarized emotionally, and that divide between the high racism and sexism Republicans and the anti-racist and anti-sexist Democrats is fueling all of the kind of emotion and passion of our disagreements.

So I guess just to put it bluntly, the greater threat to our democracy, you believe, is that a subgroup of Republicans have grown more racist and sexist and seek to reshape- The country 

Actually, so I'm gonna-- I will push back on that part. It's not that the Republicans have grown more racist and sexist, it's that the people who are the most racist and sexist have become drawn into the Republican Party.

That's interesting. Can you explain why that distinction matters? 

So I did a study that came out in twenty twenty-one with Julie Ronski and John Kane. Believe it or not, in twenty eleven, only seven percent of Republicans thought Donald Trump should run for president. Things changed relatively quickly thereafter, but in twenty eleven, he was not a major political figure.

And so you can look at the people who loved him the most in twenty eighteen and go back in time and see what were the things they had in common in twenty eleven, without his influence, without him really changing the way that they think about politics. And we found a couple of things. One is that one characteristic that they tended to have in common is that they were intolerant towards traditionally marginalized groups: Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, or LGBT people.

They held real disdain for them in twenty eleven. People who hated those groups in twenty eleven were the most likely to like Trump in twenty eighteen. The second thing is that a large portion of them were politically unaffiliated in twenty eleven, so they did not feel like either political party really represented them.

And this is important because this is one of the things that political scientists have always said about the, the amazing stability of the American two-party system, is that a two-party system, they used to say, is uniquely stable because an extremist movement cannot take control of one of two political parties.

There's no electoral ability for that to happen. It's not gonna be popular enough. And effectively, what Trump did was to attract enough people into the Republican Party who already Were very unhappy about the social progress that had been made to that point, and made them a majority of the Republican Party.

So there had always been this faction of the Republican Party that its leadership really did appeal to, right? We had the Southern strategy, and we have sort of dog whistle politics going back to Nixon and Reagan. That strategy, however, generally appealed to those voters, but didn't do everything they wanted.

And what Trump did was to attract enough of those voters into the Republican Party to give them controlling power. And after that, they really started going after these policies to undo the progress of the 1960s and '70s, even though it's a minority movement in terms of popularity. Most Americans don't feel this way.

The vast majority of Americans are not racist and sexist, and they don't like it. They don't like talking about it in general- Yeah, yeah ... which is why usually people who push for more rights are told to be quiet, but they don't like it existing either. 

This polarization between Republicans who are high in racism and sexism, and Democrats who oppose racism and sexism, the polarization between these, these two subgroups, this is data that you wrote about in your last book, Radical American Partisanship, which you wrote with Nathan Calmo.

Can you talk a little bit about how you conducted these studies and kinda what you learned from it? 

Prior to this project, the most extreme questions we asked Americans about their feelings about the other party were things like, "How would you feel if a Democrat moved in next door?" Or, "How would you feel if a Republican married your child?"

We think of that as social distance questions, right? How close socially do you wanna be with people on the other side? But we hadn't really asked a lot of questions about the sort of more extreme version of that, which is, are you willing to call them evil? Are you willing to dehumanize them? Are you willing to use violence against them?

And so that's what this project was motivated by, and we started collecting data in 2017, and we've been collecting data on this every year since. And so if you're a Democrat, it says, "Do you think Republicans are not just wrong for politics, they're downright evil?" We ask, if you're a Republican, we say, "Do you think Democrats are a threat to the United States and its people?"

And then that final question was, "People in the other party don't deserve to be treated like humans because they behave like animals." In 2017, about 20% of American partisans were willing to dehumanize the other party. That has, in more recent data, gone up to about 40%. In 2017, about 40% of people were willing to say the other side was evil, and that's gone up to 60%.

God. And, and about 60% in 2017 were willing to say the other party's a threat to the United States, and that's now about 80%. 

And this is what you call moral disengagement? 

Correct. So moral disengagement is basically a set of attitudes that allows you to harm another person and still feel like you're morally good.

It's not necessarily that the harm makes you feel good, it's that you have to feel like the harm is a good thing to do. So those types of attitudes allow people who would not otherwise be violent to engage in violence. 

So i- if I'm hearing you correctly, you believe that the fact that there are the conditions for political violence is a story and is alarming, but yet you still don't believe that polarization itself is the greatest threat to American democracy.

Right. So it's important. It's definitely important. There are basically two ways to make Democrats and Republicans stop being polarized against each other. One is for everyone, essentially all the people who are asking for the maintenance of their rights that they've earned over the last sixty years, for them to just stop arguing about it and stop complaining about it and give up those rights.

That's one way. 

That would turn the temperature down. 

It does. And in fact, in the 1950s, part of the reason we had so little polarization is that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress agreed that we should have racial authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South and we should keep women in the home. And with those two things agreed upon, they could do a lot of work together.

There was plenty of things that they were willing to compromise on because they weren't arguing about these central questions of equality. And the issue now is that we have made so much progress, which would be very difficult to undo without extreme amounts of state violence, right? You can't re-oppress half of a country after they've been given rights, unless you want to create an extraordinarily violent authoritarian state.

Or we could essentially have a country where everyone has equal power, and the people who hate that have essentially accepted that these are values that America cherishes. These are things that are worth having an argument over. And so ending the polarization itself right now is ending that argument.

You write, quote, "Polarization is the country's immune response to an unpopular, anti-democratic, and intentionally divisive faction grabbing for disproportionate power. Tamping down that immune response only allows this minority faction to have greater control." 

Right. There is a real asymmetry to the kind of who is asked to be civil and who is asked to calm down.

Usually, the people who are asked to be civil are the ones who are on sort of the lower level of power. The people who have the most power often aren't told to be civil because, it's difficult for the people with less power to tell someone more powerful than them to be civil. Mm-hmm. People on the left are consistently told, "We hear your message, but you have to be more civil about it.

You have to really wrap it in tissue paper and make sure that everybody is comfortable." And that's effectively saying, "You shouldn't be defending the rights that you've earned over the last sixty years. If people try to take it away from you, it's more important for you to be quiet and reduce polarization than it is for you to have those rights maintained."

you wrote something I would say distinct about this whole Ilhan Omar investigation.

It's easy to say, "Oh, we're norm busting. Oh, democracy's on the brink." unfortunately, we've said it a million times, but, but you had something else to say when you looked at this investigation. What was it? 

Well, I was fascinated by the way Trump was playing around responsibility for this. He often likes to, to claim responsibility when he breaks these norms.

But in this case, he said, "Oh, this is a DOJ thing. I don't know anything about it, although I like it." 

I hope they treat her fairly, but I think she's a very dishonest person. 

And that distancing I thought was interesting and a little bit strange. 

You see it as part of a pattern? 

Yeah, we've seen this thing from Trump sometimes, where he likes to hide behind lawyers if he thinks something is a little bit maybe hot or controversial.

even when he seems to be involved, he'll say, "Oh, the lawyer's in charge of this. I don't know anything about it." 

It's one of these- I'm not the one making this 

decision. We have lawyers 

that don't 

wanna do this 

You're the president I'm gonna just follow what the lawyers say. But I've decided I shouldn't be involved.

The Justice Department will handle it. 

And then kinda wait to see how it plays out. 

Which is exactly what's happening here? 

It sure looks that way. 

What exactly does this clearly hogwash denial accomplish for the president? 

That's a great question, and I think it's a little bit hard to tell. I, I think he can have it both ways, basically.

People who are in the MAGA coalition who really wanna see the administration go after Ilhan Omar are getting what they want. they, they get the search. They have Tom Homan going on the Sunday shows saying that he thinks the case against her is strong. 

We'll let the evidence lead where they leads, but she'll be held to the same standard you and I are held.

for Trump, I, I think he sees these as a little bit, times when he wants to wait and see how they play out. He wants to see how much backlash there is. Do Republican congressmen get nervous about the idea of investigating a member of Congress like this, even if they don't like Omar personally?

And so by creating a little bit of distance, he c- It's a bit of a trial balloon approach. He can see how it plays out before he claims credit, or blame for whatever's happened. 

In your piece, you write about all the other times he's done this. Can you give us some of the highlights? 

Yeah. I think one that jumps out to me in particular is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has in many ways become the face of the Trump immigration crackdown. 

So the Trump administration admitted he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador. 

The administration admitted that they had made a mistake. and then they tried to retroactively find some reason to justify why he needed to be thrown out of the country.

And this is a case where Trump was going, "Oh, I, I d- I don't know anything about it." Pam Bondi is doing it. Then the attorney general, he said 

I'm not involved in the legality or the illegality. I'm, I have lawyers to do that. 

speaking of Bondi, one place where we can see Trump kind of trying to play both ways is this amazing message he posted on Truth Social, where he's demanding that Bondi go after Adam Schiff and Letitia James and, and wondering why there aren't results.

And it was phrased in this very strange way, as though it were a message to her directly.

And in fact, we then had reporting from a couple outlets later on that it was intended as a DM. He was trying to direct her what to do. So even when he publicly pretends that there's some sort of distance, we can see that he is trying to direct the Justice Department to do exactly what he wants and to go after his political opponents, not over any particular allegations, but because they are his political opponents.

Seems like there's this interesting tension here, right? Trump in every respect and avenue of his being wants to be utterly in charge, take credit for everything, be the smartest person on everything. He has authoritarian tendencies, we've seen time and again. But then he says, "Oh, I've got no idea what these lawyers are up to.

They're in charge. They're leading the charge. Don't ask me what we're doing there." Has he ever acknowledged the great inconsistency there? 

I have never seen him acknowledge it. Mm. And I think it's interesting. if there's a downside for him, I think it's that it undercuts that impre- the I alone can fix it kind of thing.

Mm. 

He, he's suddenly disclaiming it. He's saying he has no control over these things. I, I think it cuts against his image, but I don't think he ever really acknowledges that contradiction. it's very odd. I, I... it's interesting. Here's a guy who wants to be all powerful but also never wants to be held accountable, and those two things seem to be both at play in these examples.

Has it ever backfired? do his followers say, "Oh, well, that's just the lawyers. That wasn't the president. It's not as important," I guess? 

Trump tried to do that a little bit in the Epstein case. he said, "Oh, y- w- we should release the files as long as, every- everything's in order."

You don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, 'cause there's a lot of phony stuff- Yeah ... with that whole world. 

And then once it turned out that voters actually wanted that, he tried to shove it onto the Justice Department. We had Bondi and we had Kash Patel coming out and saying- 

We will continue to release whatever we are legally permitted to do so.

Okay. I strongly encourage you to do that, Kash. I don't... This issue's not gonna go away. 

And I don't think that worked for Trump. Mm. Because w- and we've seen this, we saw this at the time, and we've seen it since. We see even, even in sort of trail reporting in these l- last weeks of the election. You have voters who are really upset that the, the files didn't get released, and they don't really care whether it was Trump's decision or not.

They elected him because he would knock down the system, because he wouldn't follow the rules and protect all the old people, and here he is doing it. 

Mm. Yeah, the Epstein example feels like a great case in which even Trump's base, or at least parts of his base, just refuse to buy the ruse. In these other cases, though, the president feels very comfortable hiding behind lawyers.

Epstein may have been the exception. The lawyers in these other cases s- appear to at least do whatever they think the president wants. Do they get results? 

I think that's part of the, the trick, too, is that they know very much what he wants. He makes that clear. He-- There's no secret that Trump wanted James Comey, to face consequences for, I don't know, opposing Trump, and there's no secret that he wanted them to go after Ilhan Omar either, which makes the deniability not all that plausible.

But they don't really get results. A-and I think part of the problem here is Trump has pushed out many of the lawyers who are particularly skilled. He has people left who are willing to do whatever he would like them to do, but they don't necessarily have the chops in court to do that, which is why we've seen cases being thrown out, federal judges reproaching prosecutors, threatening sanctions, speaking very harshly, not giving them the benefit of doubt in court the way that federal prosecutors are accustomed to getting.

I, I think back to somebody like Bill Barr, who in many ways was very willing to do what Trump wanted, was very eager to, bury the Mueller report. But when it came to, for example, post-election conspiracy theories, he said, "Look, there's just-- there's not evidence. There's nothing here." Refused to do it.

I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit. 

People like Bill Barr are now seen as, wishy-washy RINOs by the MAGA people. They want only the most loyal. And, there was an amazing, comment that Peter Thiel made in an interview not long ago, and he said, in the first administration, they had people who were smart but disloyal.

They've overcorrected this time. They have people who are very loyal, but they're not that smart." And I think we see that in the, the kind of court results. 

To bring this back to the moment we're in and Representative Omar, how big a deal is it for Trump to take this playbook and apply it to citizenship of a sitting United States representative?

I think it's really troubling. we have seen Trump looking to strip citizenship from people for lying on, or for allegedly lying on, on applications, which is, an authority the government has. And I think it's clear that Trump has want, has had it out for her for a long time. You go back to 2019, where he was saying that members of the squad should go back to where they came from.

So all I'm saying is if they wanna leave, they can leave, John. They can leave. 

He was presiding over "Send her back" chants about Omar, at, at a rally So this is another case where he seems to have a target, and then they're looking for evidence retroactively to find a way to go after it. It's troubling in any case, but especially for, an elected member of Congress in the opposition party.

you have cases of it. It, it, it, I think that makes it even more troubling than a lot of these other things. 

President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. We have far more important work to do than canceling each other.

We have got to build, and President Donald Trump is a builder. 

Okay, I'll say this, no one takes a stand about not taking a stand quite like JD Vance. You know what? Given a choice between Nazis and non-Nazis, let me unequivocally state boldly and clearly that I would like to talk about something else, please.

And while, to be fair, Vance has publicly condemned antisemitism, and when asked directly, has condemned Fuentes, even saying at one point he could eat shit, it is noticeable the extent to which he's paired that condemnation with attacks on affirmative action or immigration, issues where he and Fuentes have some common ground.

At one point, he even told an interviewer, "If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who work so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it." In fact, in that Turning Point speech, he had some notable lines that really wouldn't feel out of place in a Fuentes rant, from mocking Soros DAs and Jasmine Crockett's street girl persona to telling this fun joke.

Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar's candidate for mayor of Mogadishu. What? Minneapolis Little Freudian slip there 

What a fucking cunt. Oh, sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Little, little Freudian slip there. What a fucking cunt. It's no wonder Fuentes himself has said JD Vance panders to the far right, but simply doesn't want the baggage of associating with the far right, and it's not just Vance trying to have it both ways.

A year after Kevin Roberts finally condemned that Fuentes Carlson interview, he attended a national conservatism conference where he noticeably declined to even say their names, instead proposing a different approach. 

I'm sometimes asked about one or two of these podcasters in particular. Let me say here that as idiotic and absurd as their rhetoric and conspiracy theories can be, that they are irrelevant, irrelevant to the conservative coalition we are building in America

What I've learned is that the worst thing you can do is to engage with them. Because speaking as a parent of four, when you have a toddler who's misbehaving, you just need to ignore them. 

Okay. I mean That's pretty bad parenting advice in general But it also isn't remotely applicable here. If your toddler's throwing a tantrum because you made pasta in the wrong shape, sure, ignore it.

Parent how you want. But if your toddler hosts a four-hour podcast- ... in which he discusses his favorite Himmler deep cuts, I'd think about maybe intervening. Oh. Anyway, I am very sorry for Kevin Roberts's kids, but congrats to their therapist, I guess. It's not often that you have game tape to analyze during a session.

But as much as Roberts might want to pretend that these figures and their views are irrelevant to his party, or, or Vance might insist that they only deserve a second of attention, that is a hard case to make given how prevalent some of this extremism now is. Because it's not just the candidates you've already seen.

Ohio Senator John Husted recently fired his 25-year-old political director for using Nazi soldiers as his profile photo, and Georgia's Republican candidate for Senate, Mike Collins, has come under heavy criticism for having multiple ties to white nationalists, including, by the way, his own son-in-law, who is apparently a pro-white nationalist and social media influencer.

And if you are thinking that that sounds like a pretty unhinged combo, you'd be right about that. As scrolling through his content, you quickly go from posts like, "Why you should eat red meat," through, "You must stop watching porn," and- ... "Dealing with loneliness." Quick side note- ... the hat's probably not helping there.

To stuff like this Telegram post, whose caption explains that it contains, quote, "All of the proof Jews control our government through finance," which he said, "My wife made," who you'll remember, is Mike Collins's own daughter. And if you're thinking, well, that is just his kid, you should know Collins's former chief of staff was on a group chat with famous white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, and Collins himself once responded to an antisemitic Twitter account that said of a Washington Post reporter, "In case you were wondering, yes, she is," meaning Jewish, with, "Never was a second thought."

And while Collins has completely denied any antisemitic intent, saying, "You'll just see stuff that ain't there," are you sure about that, Mike? 'Cause it sure feels like there's a lot there to see. A- and it's not just Collins. There are other worrying candidates further down ballot, like Marshall Raulson, who's currently running for Florida State House.

He attended the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, and marched with the League of the South, a racist and antisemitic neo-Confederate group. And while he's since tried to downplay that, saying, quote, "We arrived late on the second day after the march-" Not only is that in no way exonerating- ... I'll point out that once he did show up, this video shows him getting a pretty warm welcome.

Marshall's finally here. Hey. It's so good to see y'all. What's up, brother? Hey, man. What up? Making... Yes, sir. How you doing, Mrs. Raulson? Clear. Stay on camera. 

Yeah, they seemed pretty happy to see old Marshall there. And while it went by fast, it is worth noting that that friendly exchange took place right next to a swastika flag.

And if you have a conversation right next to a swastika flag that does not begin, "Hey, the fuck is that swastika flag doing here?" I feel like that's already a pretty good tell And it gets even worse because Rawson later stood among the marchers at the rally. That is him right there, and that is the guy who not long after killed a counter-demonstrator with his car.

So condemning Rawson should be the lowest possible bar to clear, and yet when a reporter asked 28 Florida Republicans, many of whom had endorsed Rawson, if any of this changed their mind about him, only three even bothered to respond, with one, Byron Donalds, sending back a boilerplate condemnation of racism generally without mentioning Rawson by name, and the other two actually standing by him.

The point here is far-right views in the Republican Party are by no means irrelevant, and they are way past the point of being ignorable. Some of them are literally on the ballot in nine days. In an election, by the way, where the single-biggest campaign spender is this fucking guy, of the Adolf Aloha wave.

And some longtime members of far-right movements seem fully aware of these developments. In fact, when Jared Taylor, the founder of the white nationalist New Century Foundation, was recently invited to speak at a Maryland university, he recorded a video afterwards in which he both shouted out the guy that invited him there, Colin McKevers, who's running for the state legislator by the way, under the slogan, "It's time to fight for our home", and pointed to the largest shift that he saw underway.

The Republican Party is, in effect, the party of white people. Look at a Trump rally. It might as well be a meeting of the sons and daughters of the Confederacy. There's a big difference between old Republicans and young Republicans. I can go to a meeting of old Republicans and no one knows who I am.

Young Republicans treat me like a hero, and even a few old Republicans are beginning to see the light. Voters will decide in November how well they like Marshall Rawson, Bo French, and Colin McKevers. And to all you Republicans who know what's at stake, your time to stand up for your people may come sooner than you think.

Oh, I don't like anything about that. I don't like the way he pronounced the word white. And I especially don't like it coming out of the mouth of a man who looks like Carl from Up if he went down some dark paths after Ellie died. The one thing I'll agree with him about there is that the time for choosing is here.

Some of the candidates you've seen tonight, whether they are running for the first time or are up for re-election or a new job, are currently favored to win. But even if they all lose, and I hope they fucking do, the party that put them on the ballot still has to reckon with how it got to this point. And while I'm sure mainstream Republicans will keep trying to dodge this issue, many are clearly betting that they'll be able to make it through the midterms without having to take a principled stand that could lose them a single vote.

Make no mistake, this party is at a crossroads right now. Their current leader is, by the standards of both the Constitution and even the most generous cardiologist, on his way out. And the next iteration of this party is currently being decided amid a rising chorus of white nationalists, open neo-Nazis, and bigots.

And while I know that is a pretty ugly picture to paint of their party, if Republicans are not willing to actually stand up and do something about it, then I'm afraid, much like a certain politician running in upstate New York, it might soon be the only picture of it they have fucking left 

This past weekend marked the fourth round of No Kings protests. This time, however, the protests were not only aimed at opposing Donald Trump's authoritarian agenda, but also encouraged people to get out and vote. It is voting season. Tens of thousands of Americans took to the streets in more than 3,000 cities and towns from New York to Grand Rapids to Houston to Los Angeles.

Americans showed up to make clear they're fed up with Trump, and they're ready to vote 

If you believe in democracy, if you believe in justice, you have to be here, and you have to stand up and make your voice heard, and you gotta vote and make your voice heard that way, too. 

He's president right now, but there will be a time when he will be held accountable.

And I truly hope I get to see that day. 

As a disabled woman, no one's gonna take my vote or my voice from me. 

No one is above accountability, and we cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while decisions about our lives are being made. We left our kings and queens in Africa. 

It was a really inspiring display, but if you were on Instagram this Saturday looking for more info from the No Kings folks about the protests, you may not have found anything, and that is because the Instagram account for the No Kings Coalition was suddenly suspended for more than an hour during the rallies.

Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, one of the No Kings organizers, responded to the suspension with this statement, quote, "We have no explanation for why we were locked out for four hours today. We will be seeking answers, and we will be organizing for more than answers." Meta, the parent company, of course, of Instagram, has since apologized for suspending the account, claiming a sharp increase in activity that looked like automated bot traffic caused the shutdown.

Tonight, the No Kings Coalition is demanding Meta answer more questions publicly. In a letter obtained by MS Now, the organizers tell Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, quote, "The public deserves answers. Americans are voting. The election is fast approaching. Time is of the essence. Responses to our questions should be shared publicly no later than 5:00 PM Pacific Time on Wednesday, October 21st."

And Ezra Levin's the co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the major organizations behind the No Kings movement, and he joins me now. I want to talk about, the Meta part of it, but just to talk about the weekend, the trajectory of this is th- there was a kind of, wandering in the wilderness, dazed feeling that so many people felt in January and February and March of 2025, and it does feel like a different world now.

This is the first mass opportunity people to have to have this sort of democratic input. There's been special elections. There's been off-year elections in some states. How have you watched the sort of course of this change? How, how do the organizers like yourself think about where this movement in, is in this moment when people can have some input?

Look, Chris, it's all been leading to this moment, and we've said this from early on. The goal has never been protest for protest's sake. The goal has never been just to get out there in mass. The goal has been to prevent an authoritarian from consolidating control, and one of the ways you do that when elites in, the law firms and higher education and media are all collapsing in response to an assault by an authoritarian regime, one of the ways you do that is to show up in big numbers and show you're not scared.

And that's what we did for No Kings 1 with five million people. That's what we did for No Kings 2 with seven million people. That's what we did with No Kings 3 with more than 3,300 protests and more than eight million people. No Kings this past Saturday was not intended to just be a protest. It was intended to respond to that moment that we now have to exercise that constitutional right to vote and to protect that vote by driving the early vote to the largest numbers we've ever seen in a midterm.

And I'll tell you, this is data I haven't shared with anybody else yet. On Saturday, zip codes that had one of these 3,000-plus No Kings protests had a 51% increase in early vote compared to the last midterm. Wow. Early vote's up everywhere. It's especially up where the No Kings events are happening. So this was a wildly successful weekend, and we're not done yet, despite what Meta tried to do.

Let's talk about the Meta part of it. y- y- you say in your, One of the questions you have to them, what, if any, communications Meta or its representatives have had with the Trump administration about No Kings and other pro-democracy protests, who were you in contact with, and what topics were discussed?

It does seem to me, and I'm just gonna, give my read on it, plausible that there's some technical reason, that it isn't nefarious. w- w- why, why are you so concerned? 

perfectly plausible. Look, I don't know the inside out of Fa- Facebook or Meta or Instagram. What I do know is that Facebook was the company that allowed Russian bots and agents to reach 126 million Americans in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

I know that Facebook's own internal report, Meta's own internal report, found they failed to stop the Stop the Steal movement that led into the January 6th insurrection. I know that just last week, the highest electoral court in Brazil told Meta that they could not do anything to favor the pro-democracy ruling majority in that country at the, in order to support the authoritarian faction that is currently rising.

So forgive me, Chris, if I don't take the at face value what Meta is currently claiming is just a glitch issue. I don't think anybody with their head screwed on straight would take a press release from this trillion-dollar multinational corporation that has a history of undermining democratic processes and say, "Well, that must be all there was."

We have questions, and I would encourage everybody to ask these questions. You don't have to be a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent. You don't even have to like No Kings. You should just worry that there is a trillion-dollar company with a monopolistic grip on billions of people who has the ability to undermine our elections, and you should be worried about and asking that question as an individual in this country, but also as a member of Congress or congressional staffer who might also have those questions and wanna start an investigation.

Yeah, and, and, in Brazil, to your point, there was, accounts associated with, Lula, the, the, the sort of s- sitting center-left president running for re-election, that were, that were throttled or shut down. There was a, it, it went all the way up to that country's Su- Supreme Court, and Chris Murphy, senator, said this: "Meta took down the No Kings organizing page today, the biggest day of protests this fall.

They provided zero explanation." Subsequently, they did provide some explanation. "It stayed down for the entire afternoon till most of the protests were done. Outrageous." He says, "Put it on the January, investigation list." Do you think, there is calculations being made by the very wealthiest people in this country who threw their lot in with Donald Trump and were all at the inauguration and gave the inauguration money and have given money to the ballroom, a- about what might change after this fall?

Look, I don't know what agreements Mark Zuckerberg has made with Donald Trump. I do know that he rushed after Trump's election to go and have dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago. I do know that he's donated millions to him, that he settled a $25 million lawsuit to, with him, that he donated to the ballroom. So we have a fair number of facts there.

But here's the other thing I know, Chris. Mark Zuckerberg can't steal this election. Donald Trump can't steal this election. We have a flawed but functioning democracy in this country that can indeed reflect the will of the people, and we know what that looks like. Six months ago in Hungary, a mass of nonviolent organized people- Hmm

around that country succeeded in not just taking down an authoritarian, but they drove turnout in their elections to the largest levels they had ever seen, and won by such a amount that that authoritarian wasn't able to sabotage the results, and they are able to usher in an era of accountability and reform.

For folks out there who are worried about election sabotage, I am, too. But here's the solution. Make it too big to rig. Drive up early vote, and then organize in your community to protect the vote. That's how we ensure democracy reasserts itself in this country.

the results from Brazil and Serbia are in your feeds this morning, being turned into an American message for next Tuesday, joined with what happened six months ago when Hungary voted out a far-right authoritarian. So yesterday, Brazil rejected another one. Also yesterday, Serbia's student movement beat a third.

Now, as all the chatter is going, it's our turn. Vote blue, deliver a landslide, and America does the same. I think we all get the appeal. People need evidence that the far right can lose at the ballot box. It can, but those victories don't tell us the same result is available here next Tuesday, because we're not holding the same kind of election.

Yesterday's runoff in Brazil was for the presidency and nothing else. The office at the center of the fight was on the ballot, and Lula won it by more than four million votes over Bolsonaro. But the first round three weeks ago went to the far right. Bolsonaro's party and its allies took Congress, and Lula's gonna have to govern against a legislature filled with Bolsonaro's family and friends.

His win is a big deal, but it's not a mission accomplished. It's a challenge begun. And yesterday, Serbia elected a parliament, and the majority that won it gets to form the government. But the result came after two years of consistent protest and organizing by a student movement that grew out of a body count, a railway station canopy that collapsed and killed 16 people.

The students didn't just show up on election day, discover democracy, and vote out an authoritarian government. They built a movement, carried it across the country, and created an electoral vehicle that could turn that work into parliamentary power. Hungary did something similar in April. It elected its entire legislature, and the opposition won that with a two-thirds majority it needs to start dismantling the constitutional machinery that Viktor Orbán had used to entrench himself.

But it did that behind Péter Magyar, who came out of Orbán's own party, his own side of the fence, and it ran on a very particular program, what it was going to do with the power it was asking for. Those are different elections in different political systems, and that's not just an inconvenience to be brushed aside on the way to an inspirational sermon to turn out your neighbors.

It determines what the votes you turn out can actually do. Folks, we are not holding a national election next Tuesday. We're holding 435 separate House elections and Senate elections only in the states where those seats are up. And add all those votes together, and you can call the result a national verdict, but the national total has no force.

It elects no one, which is why the generic ballot polls are useless. The only part of the federal government you can replace in full is the House. About a third of the Senate is up. The president is not. Two-thirds of the Senate and the entire federal judiciary remain beyond your reach. That's not by accident.

The founders did not want you, the people, to be able to replace the national government in a single election. At the beginning, the House was the only part of the federal government you could touch at all. Senators were picked by state legislatures for staggered six-year terms, the president chosen by electors from each state, and federal judges, of course, held their offices for life.

And that is our constitutional system. It has not changed much. The 17th Amendment lets you elect senators and changed nothing else. The terms are still staggered. The presidency still comes through electors, not the popular vote, and the courts still well beyond your reach. Our system operates to make sure one election cannot do what just happened in Serbia and Hungary: replace the government.

A landslide next Tuesday could deliver a House majority, shift the Senate, and amount to an unmistakable public rejection of this government, but it can't change the Trump regime. It can't remove the president. It can't replace most of the Senate or even touch the justices ravaging our Constitution.

Serbian voters could replace their parliament and, through it, their national government. Hungarian voters could elect an entire legislature with the power to begin changing the constitutional order. Americans have no election that can do either of those things. That's the difference between what your votes are being asked to do and what they can do.

Folks, work to change the system. I'm with you, but understand the system you're working to change. Don't lower your expectations, but aim them where they belong. Our resistance history tells us that people who misunderstand where power sits misunderstands what it takes to move it. They mistake a national verdict for a transfer of power, and on the Wednesday morning after the election, they find that most of what they voted to change is still there, and someone is already asking you for your next vote.

The current discourse around Brazil and Serbia also puts the entire obligation back on you, not on those running for your vote. You turn out. You vote blue. You deliver the landslide. You save democracy. The people asking for your vote aren't being pressed with anything like the same urgency, not to say what they intend to do with the power they might get from you.

A House majority would matter, folks, but the question isn't whether Democrats can win one. It's whether they're prepared to use it as an opposition. The Brazil and Serbia discussion is stopping short of that question. Those elections are just becoming one more lesson about what voters must do instead of a demand for more specifics from politicians asking for their support.

If Tuesday falls short, voters are gonna be told too many people stay at home. If Democrats win and the abuses continue, you're gonna be told the majority wasn't large enough, the Senate is difficult, the courts are out of reach, and the real answer has to wait for 2028. Every one of those obstacles is real, and that's exactly why people should understand them before the election rather than have them handed back afterwards as excuses.

Serbia and Hungary show that authoritarian power can be beaten. Brazil shows it can be kept out. But all three show that people have to understand the state they're trying to change, organize for the power actually available to them, and keep working once the votes are counted. Otherwise, their victories become American campaign slogans, and we learn nothing from them at all.

And what's that old saying about what happens when you ignore your history? There's a lot more to say about the importance of next week. The election matters. Your vote matters. We just have to be clear about how. 

We've just heard clips starting with Jamal Bowie detailing how Elon Musk has spent hundreds of millions of dollars this cycle to elect Republicans and asking why the press never makes candidates answer for the richest man bankrolling them. On the Media argued that polarization is democracy's immune response to a racist, sexist minority faction that Trump drew into the Republican Party to seize disproportionate power.

Today Explained examined how Trump distances himself from the investigation into stripping Representative Ilhan Omar's citizenship, claiming the Justice Department acts alone while making clear he wants her targeted. 

Last Week Tonight spotlighted Republican leaders' refusal to confront the white nationalist rising within their party. All In with Chris Hayes covered the demand that Meta answer for suspending the No Kings Instagram account during October's protests, citing the company's record of failing to stop Russian bots and stop the steal.

And Resistance History with Tad Stormer explained that the founders built a system where no election can replace the national government. 

So a landslide could flip the Congress, but can't remove Trump or the courts. And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dive sections. Remember, we can only make this show with your support, and that includes following us on all the platforms you use. Check out our link in bio right in the show notes for every place to follow us and every way to support us, 

Including one-time donations. 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.

I'm deeply behind on the production schedule, so I'm skipping listener questions and voice messages today. If you have thoughts either before or after the election, maybe existential dread, maybe something else, feel free to drop us a note. there's a link to leave a voice message in the show notes or connect with us on socials or by email.

All details are in the link in bio in the show notes.

I really don't have much to add this close to the election, recording before we know the results. Everyone knows they should vote, and everyone knows that voting is just the beginning. As evidenced by 2020, when Trump loses, the fight goes on and on until the bitter end. So we should absolutely expect the same this time.

Really, the primary thought I've been having over and over for the past two years is how right the progressive left has been at predicting Trump's authoritarianism. Trump is sort of known as being unpredictable, but that's only true on the day-to-day level. When you zoom out, he's incredibly predictable.

It's a lot like the difference between the weather and the climate. It's hard to predict what's going to happen in a particular place on a particular day, but it's comparatively easy to see the overall trends and make reasonable predictions about how things are likely to go in the future. 

I keep thinking back to the experts on fascism and authoritarianism who have been making accurate predictions and warning about where we've been headed for nearly a decade, and the Trump supporters who were shaken out of their blind support just after the last election when he started to do everything the left said he would.

The vibe shifted quickly, and there were multiple prominent commentators willing to say aloud that the loudest anti-Trump progressives who sounded hysterical in their predictions turned out to be right all along.

Right now, the expert analysis is that we are squarely in the competitive authoritarianism stage of losing our democracy. 

it's a dire place to be, but it's still a point that is significantly possible to come back from. If things devolve further from here, it continues to get more difficult to recover the farther we slide. So if you want to align yourself with the people who've been making the most accurate predictions all along, I think that's a good understanding of where we are and the stakes ahead of us.

And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today. First up, Section A: Rigging the Court and Fighting Back, followed by Section B: The GOP Radicalized, Section C: On the Ballot, Candidates and Races, and Section D: What This Election Is Actually About

President Trump is making a final campaign push to help Republicans maintain control of Congress as some of the country's most closely watched races remain competitive. But the battle for the US Senate is also playing out in court. In Alaska, the Trump administration has filed a lawsuit seeking to potentially block certification of the election if the Republican incumbent loses.

Our White House correspondent, Liz Landers, has been following both developments and joins us now. So Liz, let's start in Alaska, where the Justice Department has filed this unusual lawsuit. Why is the DOJ getting involved? 

The Department of Justice has taken a series of potentially political actions really close to election day now.

What was filed here in Alaska is they're trying to block the certification of the vote there, but only if the Democrat, Mary Peltola, wins and beats the incumbent Republican senator, Dan Sullivan. The issue here is that there is another candidate named Dan J. Sullivan, who's also on that ballot, and Republicans are worried that voters could get confused by this.

But this has already been litigated by the Alaska Supreme Court, who said that Dan J. Sullivan could stay on this ballot. The Department of Justice is bringing this lawsuit, they say, to protect the integrity of the Senate election there. They say in their lawsuit that the federal government could be harmed by this election certification if it is, quote, "tainted by a frivolous candidacy because that undermines confidence in the makeup and workings of the federal government."

President Trump was asked about this earlier today 

Well, I'm the, I'm the one that said do it. They have two guys who are unnamed, Dan Sullivan running. I know. So the Democrats put up a guy, never po- I don't think he ever voted before. All of a sudden he decides to run for the Senate, and his name is Dan Sullivan.

One is Daniel S., one is Daniel J. The Daniel J. is the fake. 

Daniel J. Sullivan has voted in Alaska races before, just to be clear. But I asked the former Department of Justice, civil rights attorney, David Becker, who's also an election expert, about this, and he said, "This is purely a matter of state law, and the Department of Justice has no authority and no role here."

He said that this kind of litigation is unprecedented to try to block the certification of an election 11 days before the vote. 

The Justice Department also announced charges today against two former FBI officials over their testimony about Hunter Biden's laptop. What are they accused of doing? 

The Department of Justice is claiming that these two FBI officials lied in congressional testimony that they gave in 2020- 23.

And this was about their involvement in a specialized foreign influence task force in these investigations into Hunter Biden's laptop, and that they knew about the laptop. The attorneys for one of the former FBI officials who was charged here, Nikki Flores, said in a statement to the news hour that, "The government's reasons for charging Nikki are as transparent as they are unjust, to push a false narrative for a shot at political points."

Hunter Biden's laptop story broke just a few weeks before the 2020 election. I'm sure you remember covering this. The laptop contained emails that appeared to show discussions of Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings, and at the time, Democrats questioned whether that was Russian mis- and disinformation.

And so finally, with election day approaching, you've got some of the biggest names in politics, to include President Trump, hitting the campaign trail. Who's heading where? 

President Trump goes to Georgia tomorrow to help in that Senate race there. Also, he's headed to Michigan on Sunday. Mike Rogers is in a tough, election there, the Republican against the Democrat, Abdul El-Sayed.

Also, former President Barack Obama will be in Michigan as well tomorrow campaigning with Abdul El-Sayed, and he will also be going to Ohio as well. The former president has also cut a bunch of radio ads for other down ballot candidates. 

we have to separate out two things. The first is what Donald Trump is trying to do, and the second is what he'll get away with.

So what he's trying to do in Alaska is to say that he gets to decide, who gets to win elections, right? like if you're not his preferred candidate, you don't actually get to be certified the winner. In California, meanwhile, he's trying to decide... He's trying to say that he gets to decide and tell the state whose ballots get to count.

So between him deciding whose ballots get to count and who gets to actually win, Trump is trying to take care of the, the, the, the, the election, tabulation and counting process, and that's all he's got left, Jen. he's unpopular, his party's unpopular, they're gonna lose the House, they're gonna lose the Senate, so this is what he's got left.

So he's trying those things, and they are very dangerous, and we need to take it seriously that, that what starts in California is gonna spread beyond California, what starts in Alaska is gonna definitely spread to other states. There are gonna be other, as you put it, doomsday scenarios. but it doesn't mean he's gonna win.

Like we are, we, we are beating him in court. We just won another case in Utah today. we're gonna beat him in California. We're gonna, and we're gonna beat him in Alaska. So, like these are serious things, but people should have confidence that we, that we are on top of it, and we will fight back and win.

You are, and, and I have listened to everything you've said about this, but for people who are just tuning in, maybe they've seen headlines. You're very confident about the legal aspect of this case. You, you have said that. You just repeated it there. Despite the weakness of the case, you've also called this the most serious threat to free and fair elections that we have yet seen.

some of that may be because of this potential to, to spread. this is a low bar if Todd Blanche thinks this is the doomsday scenario. But why do you feel that way about this particular, case? 

Yeah, absolutely. So look, let's go back in time. In August of 2025, Donald Trump posts on social media that the states are merely agents of the federal government for counting and tabulating ballots, and that they have to do what he, the president, says, okay?

That's what he said in 2025. He has repeated versions of that ever since. And so what we are seeing now is the most direct manifestation of this. So why is this so dangerous? Well, number one, you have him saying, "I told the Department of Justice to do it." Okay? That's pretty extraordinary. Number two, what they are trying to do is allege that they have sweeping authority to roam the country and decide that this state can't certify a Democrat the winner, but can certify a Republican the winner.

And, that is just an extraordinary assertion if you just take a step back and think, "Here is the chief executive of the, of the executive branch," right? Here is the person that people view as leading government, and he is saying that he can pick and choose who the winners are before the voters even cast ballots.

Mm-hmm. And he has the full pow- He has the- Full embrace of the Department of Justice. Not in 2020 he was saying these things, but as you pointed out in the intro, like Bill Barr and the White House Counsel's Office was like, "Sir, sit down. No, you can't do it." Now- Right ... Todd Blanche is like, "Yes, where would you like me to go next?"

And, and Kash Patel's "I'll just open another bottle of champagne. We'll celebrate." 

Yeah. It, it, it is, it, it is such an important reminder of how different, as much as everybody watching may disagree with Bill Barr and may disagree with a lot of people who were in the Justice Department the first term, we are in a different universe right now.

When you think, they are hanging this on this absolutely, obviously there's no legal basis of it. It doesn't even make sense, and this is why we just wanted to pull it apart. Even the kind of narrative justification, that they are making here, that the, the two names of the candidates may, give them some sort of justification.

When you think about them repeating this in other states, where does your head go in terms of justifying saying we're not going to certify the election? 

Yeah, look, this is where I, like in some ways I don't engage in the like this is why it matters, it doesn't matter. I mean- Yeah ... Lisa Murkowski ran and like probably some number of people thought she was Frank Murkowski, right?

the fact is candidates benefit from all kinds of confusion. Sometimes it's two people on the ballot with the same name. Sometimes it's someone who's on the na- who's on the ballot who has a name of someone who they think is someone else. like, that, that is not the basis for kicking someone off the ballot.

But even if it was, Jen, as you pointed out, that is why we have states. That is why we have state ballot access laws. That is why in some states you have to collect a lot of signatures. In some states, you can just pay a fee. In some states, these get reviewed. In some states, they don't. This is a function of state law.

So the reason why I say this is going to spread is because the legal theory that they have is that a law, and you don't need to be a, a voting rights expert, you don't need to be a lawyer to spot the flaw here, that a law that is called the National Voter Registration Act, the National Voter Registration Act actually gives the federal government the power to look at the composition of a ballot and say, "We think it's too confusing or misleading, and therefore the National Voter Registration Act allows us to say we can tell states they can't certify elections."

Here's the clue. The National Voter Registration Act deals with voter registration. 

Hmm. For the non-legal experts watching out there, what's next here? 

Yeah, so what's next here is the lawsuit was filed, in federal district court in Anchorage. I expect that in the coming, hours you will see that my law firm will be moving to intervene in this case on behalf of, let's just call them interested parties.

Jen, you've known me a long time. You can probably, have some guess there. and, and, and we will intervene to make sure that we don't have a circumstance in which the Department of Justice and the State of, Alaska are litigating this without the, the, the, the legal views of other interested parties.

Okay. I know what you mean, I think. But what can you tell more people who are watching and thinking, "What does interested parties mean?" What do you mean by that, to the degree you can say? Yeah, 

look, it's not a, it's not a secret that we represent a large number of Democratic campaigns- Right ... and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

So look, I'm gonna wait for the f- filings before I announce exactly, who we will be representing. Right. But you can assume we represent, as I mentioned, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and we represent a lot of, Senate Democratic candidates. 

Yeah, interested parties. No, I just figured it, for people who are tuning into this, I wanna make sure they have a full picture of all of this.

When you look at, other states and what you hope, because you were involved in so many races and so many campaigns, are there things, looking at what they just did, the Trump administration just did, that you hope Democratic attorneys general, other states are preparing for? Is there anything they can do proactively at this point?

Yeah, there's a ton we can do proactively. there's stuff that Democratic states can do. But I do think it's important to recognize that, California's a Democratic state, Alaska is a Republican state, right? Yeah. So we can't just be focused on what it is that states can do where Democrats are the attorney general or the governor or the secretary of state.

In those states, those, they need to, make sure that, their, their election officials at the county level understand their obligations under state law. one of the things that we just saw tonight in California is that the Department of Justice is now suing not just California and LA, but they're now suing, they're, they're threatening to sue in, in 48 hours 18 more counties.

Mm-hmm. And so what happens is, w- Steve Bannon said that they wanna flood the zone, a few years ago talking about the media. One of the things I worry about is that Republicans and the Department of Justice will just flood the zone- Mm-hmm ... and we won't be litigating, in just a state.

We'll be litigating in a lot of counties, and it is hard sometimes for these counties to put up- Yeah ... the kinds of fight that they need to put up when the Department of Justice shows up. So I think Democratic AGs need to make sure that the counties and the sub-counties, understand the protocols for dealing with these kinds of things.

The, the states in which, where Democrats don't control, government, the state of Texas, lawyers like me and, and, and, and advocates and ordinary citizens, we need to be paying attention. Because, in Texas, if, if the Department of Justice shows up in Texas and says, "Remove these 20,000 people," Ken Paxton is not gonna say no.

Yeah. Greg Abbott's not gonna say no. So we need to be watching those things really carefully. And, campaigns have ways of monitoring the voter file and other things. But we need to be watching these things to make sure we are prepared to move very quickly, because time is of the essence in these final days.

the situation that we find ourselves in as a country is so precarious that some national security officials are covertly treating the President of the United States like he is a national security threat, and for good reason. And said individuals have been privately briefing federal, state, and local lawmakers about what to do in the likely event Trump uses his paramilitary force to try to intimidate voters on election day, or if he tries to nullify election results altogether in certain precincts.

Now, nobody knows for sure what's gonna unfold on or after election day, but it's reasonable to prepare for the absolute worst because Trump has done so much to signal to us that there's gonna be some fuckery. He rejected international election monitors that would help to determine whether or not the midterms were free and fair.

He's intimidating local election officials by explicitly threatening to jail ballot processors if they tabulate votes of non-citizens. And his Department of Justice is suing California for not disenfranchising thousands of voters that they're accusing of being non-citizens, which is based on Trump's own bullshit database.

And on top of that, his FCC is even threatening networks for sharing polling results that Trump doesn't like. And according to a report from The Atlantic, Trump's being pressured to declare martial law if the midterms don't go his way. And as Axios reports, the prospect of martial law is being discussed more and more by his most psychotic allies because they think that martial law will give Trump the power to either cancel or postpone the election or give him the ability to seize control of voting machines, even though that's not technically true.

The problem is that if he tries to do something like that, regardless if he declares martial law or not, it'll be the federal courts who will have to stop him. The question is, what happens if he doesn't listen to the courts when they say stop? And therein lies the problem. It's why he's being treated like a national security threat, because there's a number of things that he can do that would spark a genuine constitutional crisis.

Utah's lieutenant governor, who's a Republican by the way, publicly acknowledged that election threats are coming from within our own government, which is unprecedented. And Noah Robertson of The Washington Post wrote a piece about the national security officials that I referred to earlier, and how this small group of them, it includes both current and former national security officials, are privately preparing a number of unnamed lawmakers from unnamed states for the absolute worst-case scenario.

Robertson writes, "In their discussions ahead of the midterms, the national security officials have detailed ways the Trump administration could use its federal powers to sway the upcoming vote, covering categories that include legal and illegal activity. Among their concerns are that the administration could deploy troops or immigration agents to polling stations or seek to nullify results based on claims of voter fraud.

Their meetings with lawmakers have mainly focused on raising awareness, especially among Republicans, of the potential for interference, and on counseling them to be prepared to publicly oppose any such efforts. With state governments, they've focused more on how to harden election protocols that could be exploited by the federal government, the two members of the group said."

Quote, "All of them have said, 'We're concerned, but we don't know what to do,' one member of the group said of its meeting with lawmakers. 'The outcome that we hope for is that states would be prepared for any contingencies should they arise,' the person continued." Now, needless to say, it is astounding to read about how national security officials, both current and former, are treating the president like he's a national security threat Which is good.

Like, it's crazy that it's come to this, but it's good that they're actually acknowledging that he is the threat to national security that he's always been. And I feel like news outlets don't really wanna acknowledge that obvious truth, because what do you do once you accept that that is the situation that we're faced with?

Like, the president who swore an oath to protect the country is actually the greatest threat that the country faces. We've never been in a situation like this as a country, and people don't really know how to react because, there's nothing we can look to. There's no handbook of what to do when you're faced with somebody who is very clearly an authoritarian.

And even if you prepare for every potential scenario, there are limits to what our institutions can do to rein in this authoritarian madman. And David Rohde, who's a national security reporter for MS Now, he laid out one of many hypotheticals where Trump could feasibly get away with at least a little bit of straight up election theft.

Senator Mark Warner and Representative Jim Himes are the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. and Jason Crow as well, who's on Armed Services and... But they are saying flat out, that President Trump represents a grave threat to the integrity of the midterm elections.

And the worst-case scenario for them is that the president just pulls out a, a piece of intelligence that... And they can, he can fabricate one, or you can find any kind of intercept. The NSA picks up so much traffic from so many countries that it says anything you want. But it, it would be the president getting up on election night and saying, "The Chinese have hacked every voting machine, in Des Moines, Iowa."

And I say that because that's a blue spot in a very red state. There's a competitive House race there. There's a very competitive Senate race. And you could have federal, you have Kash Patel come in and saying, "We're gonna investigate this hacking by the Chinese." They could try to seize voting machines, stop voting that day.

that's the, the... Another scenario is, and people have talked about this for months, ICE agents, ICE operations being carried out right near polling stations. It is illegal under federal law for armed federal agents or armed federal soldiers to go into a polling place. Who upholds that law? But ICE agents showing up would be a way to deter people from turning out.

And there's, and I'm just, I'm talking about election day. He's clearly gonna discredit the results after election day. on a positive note, there's 75 different voting rights groups and other legal firms that have drafted, according to Senator Warner, virtually every imaginable legal dre- motion Responding to what the president could do on election day and to go immediately to federal judges and say, "Stop this."

Can 

we- Will the president obey federal judges' orders? 

And that's the million-dollar question, isn't it? The law only constrains presidents who respect the law. Federal judges might technically have the legal authority to block Trump from doing certain things, but, there's no way to enforce their rulings.

They don't have a military or a police force to compel rogue lawmakers to do what they say. The president, however, does have those things, and at the end of the day, Trump is the one with all of the power. He holds the cards. Our fate is in his hands to a large extent. Federal judges don't have a paramilitary force.

Trump does. Legal organizations that sue him might have legitimate cases, but they don't have a military. Trump does. So the only question is how far is Trump willing to go to get what he wants? The good news is that there are still some people in his administration who are trying to talk him down from the ledge, but the bad news is that he's already committed enough crimes to be jailed for life as it is, so he doesn't really have an incentive to not commit even more crimes, especially if committing more crimes will keeping, keep him out of jail a little bit longer.

It's when you have a five-star wanted level in GTA, you're already being pursued to the highest degree, so you're not gonna be concerned about committing even more crimes to evade the cops because there's nothing more that you can do to make them pursue you any harder. And Trump's kind of reached that point, albeit in real life, where he might feel like he actually does have more of an incentive to break even more laws than to follow the law, given how deep in shit he's already in.

But as it stands now, none of this is a foregone conclusion. He could surprise us all and pull an Orban and just concede, but realistically, that's probably not gonna be the case, which is why most Americans are expecting a gigantic shit storm. A poll conducted by The Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos found that 70% of Americans are not confident that Trump will accept the results of the midterm elections, and for good reason.

And as Brett Wilkins of Common Dreams reports, the 2026 American Values Survey conducted by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Brookings Institution found that 58% of Americans agree that President Trump is a potentially dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.

this is their headline, Trump appointees asked a federal cybersecurity agency to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it The reporting starts a few months into President Donald Trump's second term. Political appointees of the Department of Homeland Security, of course it was the Department of Homeland Security, it's always the Department of Homeland Security, made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it, and report back the findings so they c- could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. Specifically giving this information to the White House.

Who at the White House? Question mark, question mark, question mark. But suffice to say that it would get very high up in the Trump administration, this information of how these machines could be hacked. Now, for a cybersecurity agency, not necessarily wrong, so long as you're going to, let the company know that there are vulnerabi- r- vulnerabilities in their machinery.

That would actually heighten America's cybersecurity if that were to be the case here, but of course, it's not. The proposition was shocking to CISA's career staffers, according to one former, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices.

The request made CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. Quote, "My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any election results they don't like," one of the former officials said. "This goes against everything CISA represents." And I think that is the immediate fear that should pop into anyone's head as soon as they hear the headline from this story.

Was the Trump administration looking for an opportunity to potentially have access to voting machines, a backdoor hack into these machines, to be able to change election results should they so wish? Or to even just be able to, later, after an election has been run, to be able to say then after the fact, "We found this vulnerability in the machines, and because this vulnerability works, therefore We, need to cast doubt on these election results 'cause they could have just been the result of a hack.

These are potential outcomes from all of this. It did not end up coming to pass, in part because of DOGE. Yes, Elon Musk makes an appearance in this story as well. The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative.

The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA. Oh my God, the incompetence of the Trump administration on full display here. They cannot do the shady shit they want to do because their gutting of the government prevented themselves from being able to have access to the expertise required to actually pull off this shady shit.

Oh my God. Think this through. Had DOGE not existed, the Trump administration would've been able to carry this out. So the inability for the Trump administration to carry this out was not out of some, moral center, them reflecting on what they were doing here and deciding that it was wrong. No, it was based on the fact that they had laid off the people who should have been able to do this, and their own incompetence got in the way of their own malicious intent.

Likely malicious intent. I should be careful there Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions, protecting the nation's voting systems. In Trump's second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third.

The president's 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which would necessitate, or could necessitate, 900 additional layoffs. So if you are concerned about American cybersecurity and its election security in the year 2026 when cyber hacks and the like and attacks are becoming all the more common, well, it's only going to get more common because the Trump administration is taking firm aim at America's election security and looking to try and influence the results of elections through things like deploying ICE agents to polls.

As Singer reports, the, surveys c- came from respected polling outfits, all of which found that President Donald Trump's abysmal approval ratings threaten even Republicans in House districts that Donald Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024.

For example, a new Franklin & Marshall College poll in Pennsylvania released Thursday morning found Democrats with a 14 percentage point lead on the generic ballot in the state of Pennsylvania. The generic ballot. If, if the elections were held today, who would you vote for, Republicans or Democrats, to control Congress?

That sort of thing. On that, in swing state Pennsylvania, which voted for Trump in 2024 by just under two points, the voters now prefer Democrats to be in control of Congress by 14 points If this poll is anywhere close to accurate, that, notes Singer, should be more than enough for Democrats to flip all four GOP-held seats currently rated as competitive by the Cook Political Report.

Pennsylvania's first, seventh, eighth, and tenth, if you're keeping track at home. A State Navigate poll of Virginia found even more grim news for Republicans, with Democrats leading there by a stunning 20 points in the generic ballot in the state. That kind of swing leftward could lead Democrats to flip three GOP-held seats in the state in the first, second, and fifth districts.

That is close to the number of pickups that Democrats would have scored under the House map that Virginia voters adopted this past spring before the state's right-leaning state Supreme Court threw out that map. Remember that? Democrats could end up winning most of those seats anyway, even without the attempted gerrymander meant to counter the Trump-ordered House map gerrymanders in Texas and elsewhere around the country if, of course, that polling is correct.

Meanwhile, right-leaning Real Clear Politics analyst, Sean Trende commissioned Emerson College, another very respected outlet, to conduct 10 polls in House districts that are six points more Republican than the nation as a whole. In other words, very Republican districts. And across those 10 polls in those very Republican districts, GOP candidates are behind the Democrats in nine of them, in very red districts.

Two of the races where Trende's data found Democrats ahead, Singer observes, are currently rated as likely Republican contests by well-respected Cook Political Report That would be Arizona's second district, a district won by Trump by 15 points in 2024, where Democratic, candidate Jonathan Nez leads, GOP Rep Eli Crane by two points.

The Democrat is winning according to this poll in Arizona's second district for the U.S. House, a district Trump won by 15 points. In Missouri's second district, which Trump won by eight points, GOP Rep Ann Wagner trails Democratic challenger Fred Wellman by five points. Indeed, notes Singer, it's when so-called likely Republican races, as Cook Political Report characterizes many of them, when likely Republican races start falling, that would bring a Democratic House majority from a very narrow one to one large enough that the Democratic leaders would have a ton of breathing room to pass legislation in the final two years of Trump's tenure.

Ultimately, in the final two weeks of the election, Donald Trump's job approval is sinking and Democrats are ascendant in states and districts that would otherwise not even be competitive in a neutral environment if you believe the polling. But the most important news is not the numbers themselves and whether you believe them, but the fact that Republicans believe them.

Their own polling is not showing them something different than the public polling that the rest of us are seeing that I, just went through some of it out just today and yesterday. At least if their reaction to all of this is any indication of how they are feeling just over a week out from election day.

Quote, "People are freaking out. You see it in their faces," said GOP Texas State Rep Dade Phelan to the Texas Monthly last week. "There's a serious concern like I've never seen before," he said. Quote, "The scary part is we don't know where the bottom is," an unnamed GOP strategist told Politico. And what Singer describes as the pièce de résistance, a comment that an unnamed Republican gave Axios on Wednesday this week, quote, "The wall has broken.

The enemy is inside the fort. We are now fighting hand to hand." 

What a drama queen. 

So never mind what the polls say. Republicans clearly believe they are in deep, deep trouble. It's why Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson are now putting out tweets telling people to, quote, in all caps, "Ignore the polls!"

In a piece headlined Panic in the Final Stretch, the, redoubtable Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo similarly warns, "Ignore the polls," but that Republicans are not doing so, and their actions make that clear. The actions of the parties can be more convincing, he notes, especially in the last couple weeks.

This is, from Wednesday. Noting the White House's announcement on Wednesday afternoon that Trump would be going to Mississippi to hold a rally on Monday, he writes, "There's no way that this happens if Republicans don't think there's a real chance that Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi could lose to Democratic challenger Scott Collum."

That doesn't mean she will lose, notes Josh, who explains he is not predicting and he doesn't think that she will lose, but they think it's possible, so it must be close. It's important, he says, to understand the calculus behind a decision like this. You depress the morale of your partisans when you do something like this, just as it would be for Democrats to see a Democratic president holding the last week of campaign rallies in a state like Massachusetts or Maryland.

Or California. 

It's the same demoralization you're trying to prevent when you tell partisans that they shouldn't believe the polls, as Mike Johnson is doing. But you decide that you've got to do this just because the risk of losing is too high. last night, Trump held a rally, his second one for Senator Darlene Nordone Graham in South Carolina,and all the same logic applies, notes Josh.

Trump won South Carolina by 18 points in 2024 and Mississippi by 25 points, and now he's rallying in those states. What does that tell you? Perhaps a lot more than the polls do. While all of this is happening, he writes, "We still seem to have very close races in Texas and Iowa and Alaska and Kansas and other states."

A lot of the states that get Democrats to 51 seats in the U.S. Senate are still razor-close, he correctly notes. Different states have different dynamics, candidate quality matters, but it certainly looks like the map is expanding rapidly. And we see that most clearly from, not from what anyone is saying or from the public polls, but from what the campaigns and the party committees are doing and where they are sending their top people, like the President of the United States to Mississippi in the last week of the election?

And I share all of this in part because, A, encouraging news is always encouraging news, and given things like Desi Doyen's latest green news report later this hour, we can use encouraging news- ... wherever we can find it. 

True. 

But also because, B, if a state like Mississippi falls, or Texas, or Kansas, or Iowa, or Alaska, et cetera, Donald Trump is going to claim that it is impossible that any of that could happen without Democrats somehow magically stealing the election.

Well, you need to know going into this election day in just over a week that, yes, it is totally possible for that to happen in Mississippi, or Texas, or Kansas, or Iowa, or Alaska, or South Carolina. And both the polling and the actions of Republicans, including the President of the United States, bear that out.

Never mind what he says. Watch what he is doing. He will claim that the election was stolen. He will not have real evidence to bear that out. But if you know going in in advance that these things he's claimed, are impossible, could never have happened... Well, actually, if actually they are quite possible indeed.

Next, Section B: The GOP Radicalized.

Jon Ossoff of Georgia, debated his Republican opponent, Representative Mike Collins. Ossoff is running for re-election, and Mike Collins represents the most extreme MAGA faction of the Republican Party. Collins has also run into some trouble because it turns out his son-in-law is a vicious White supremacist, and he has staffed his campaign with a bunch of vicious White supremacists.

And Ossoff, to his credit, did not let up on that at all during the debate. 

And that's the problem, Mike. It's not just that you've hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online, it's that you're robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors.

Mike- Mike Collins is attacking your voting rights. But that's not a surprise when you consider who Mike Collins is. This is a man who cheered on a group of young men who were mocking a Black woman on a college campus with monkey sounds. If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.

His office has been in cahoots with some of the most notorious White supremacists on the country. He himself has amplified neo-Nazi propaganda. He's never apologized for it, and he should tonight. 

Now, I saw this and I thought this was great. You don't often see Democratic politicians talk this sharply about their opponents, talk with this much contempt about their opponents.

But Mike Collins is a contemptuous guy. Or, I'll put that in better English, Mike Collins is a guy who deserves your contempt. And so it was nice to see his opponent talk about him like he deserved your contempt. But over in the world of professional political punditry, which I admit I'm a part of, there were observers who were unhappy with Ossoff's strategy.

Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it's time to shut up. That's just not what we do here in this country. And the J- the Bull Connor stuff- 

Now, the way Brooks is putting this is that we don't do this because it is not decorous. It's impolite. It's uncivil, you might say.

But my question is, well, what if they're actual Nazis? What if we're not calling someone an orc? What if we're not insulting them? What if we're describing their ideology, their actual ideological allegiance? Brooks himself acknowledges the extent to which the Collins campaign is chock-full of these people 

I think what's accurate to say about him is he has a disturbing number of young men on his, around him who have, who have ties to the alt-right and some of the vile anti-Semitic stuff online.

Is it beyond the pale to not talk about it plainly then? Is it somehow not done because for whatever reason Americans are ontologically unable to become Nazis? That doesn't seem right. There have been Nazis in this country since the Third Reich actually existed, to say nothing of our own homegrown traditions of virulent and vicious and violent white supremacy, traditions that have a home in American politics, that are a part of American politics.

I recently re-watched the movie The Order about the white supremacist criminal gang terror group that terrorized the Pacific Northwest in the mid-'80s. Inspired by the book The Turner Diaries, they killed the Denver radio host Alan Berg in a targeted assassination, robbed a bunch of banks, killed a lot of people, general chaos and mayhem.

The movie's good, stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult. You should check it out. But in the movie, the Nicholas Hoult character, who plays the ringleader of this group, is talking with the leader of the more established white supremacist group, and is basically saying why they need to do violent action now. And the more established leader's saying, "No, wait, take your time.

We'll have people in the government soon. It's a long process. It's a race. It's incremental." And I watched that and kinda chuckled, I did this both times I've watched it, because he was right. Not only did they get people in government, they have their people in the White House That's the other thing, the other question I suppose I'd have for Brooks.

We know for a fact that there are people working in the Trump administration, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the Secretary of State's office, who have been associated with online Nazism, who have described themselves as fans of Hitler. This, these are established facts. Can we not call them Nazis 'cause it's impolite?

Seems to me that the least we should do is describe them as they are. Because as it turns out, actually being a Nazi is worse than being called one, and I need to emphasize this. This is not an exaggeration. This is a description of these people's views and ideologies. We're so used to movies and television and video games in which we kill Nazis, in which Nazis are the primary antagonist, that it feels like people have forgotten that Nazism isn't something someone dreamed up in a writer's room.

It was a live political ideology. I already mentioned it had adherence in the United States. They nearly destroyed an entire continent. They nearly destroyed an entire people. They are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of human beings. This all happened in what is still living memory.

There are still veterans of the Second World War around. There are still people who survived the camps around All of this is in living memory. And so to pretend like it's somehow off limits, somehow beyond the pale, I think I already said that one, but I'll say it again, somehow beyond the pale to identify people who have this ideology is just strange to me What it is is not political analysis, but theater criticism.

It's saying, "Well, that's, that's unsophisticated." But, the point of doing political analysis isn't to be sophisticated. It's nice if you can manage a sophisticated piece of political analysis. I try, I try to. But the point is not to be sophisticated. The point is to describe reality accurately. The point is to ensure that the people who listen to us and watch us and read us come away with a better understanding of the world.

And so what leaves one with a better understanding of the world? Is it obfuscating the actual truth, the reality of these people's beliefs and ideologies? Is it trying to hand wave away the fact that they are inadvertently sympathetic to one of the most hateful systems of belief ever devised by by the sick species, humanity?

Eh, we're not that sick. We're okay. Or is it just to be truthful and honest about it? I know it may make you seem like a Democratic partisan, I guess, to say that Jon Ossoff was right there, but he was right there. He was absolutely correct, and viewers should know that. They should know that what was being said was not untrue.

He was not lying. I'll put it this way. Mike Collins and his friends, they're not ashamed of what they are So we should feel very comfortable in honoring that lack of shame and saying what it is that they are. 

Your opening scene, if you will, is very precisely chosen. a- and you pick election night 2008, and you're in Phoenix, Arizona. 

Yeah. 

Why'd you pick that moment? 

Well, because that's where John McCain was, right? So John McCain returned to Phoenix, where he had lived, and also to the Biltmore Hotel where he and Cindy got married, and there's so much fact in this, but that was where his campaign headquarters was that night.

And I really wanted to look at American history, American political evolution, because I saw that night as being one where on the one hand many people, I bought a bigger TV that night, I invited friends over. we, we poured out onto the streets of New York City after it was announced that Obama had won the election.

And I, I thought about, "How do I look at this from the other side? How do I look at this from the point of view of older white men who are now truly terrified that they have lost their grip on this party?" And also looking back a little bit earlier historically to the night that I went to sleep thinking Al Gore had won, and then I woke up and met a guy named Hanging Chad, right?

Who I, who I'd never seen before. 

We all remember him. 

yes. So I feel like there was an evolution in the sort of structure and control of the Republican Party from within, that by the time Obama had won, the elders of the party really did start to feel they'd lost control. And then as we got towards Trump becoming the nominee, that to me in some ways became proof that they'd lost control.

and that's not even obviously in the book, but, but watching that evolution. And, and I think I can picture the guys in the book later debating, "Did we make Donald Trump?" And the notion would be, "We wouldn't know if we did, because that would be our plan in motion. That it wouldn't be traceable back to us."

And I also feel like that also unleashed the incredible, that had always had been there, rampant racism and sexism in this country, that now we've seen, just it growing and growing. And now with the rollback of, of Roe and so on, I just think, "Wow." And the school, the libraries being, the books being pulled back, and the librarians being told, "You can't, send a kid to another library."

It's a very, very scary time. 

It was very helpful for me for you to start on that day. Because as you said, it reminded us of just how aggrieved a whole population was about the election of, I think your l- your protagonist calls him an African in the White House. 

Yes. 

What drew you to get inside the heads of the big men?

w- what got you to do that as opposed to just focus or just ridicule? 

For me as a writer, I've always had this almost habit of picking, in a way, the least likely character to tell a story. So, at the end of Alice, who's the least likely character to talk about how we as a society have done a bad job dealing with sexual abuse of children?

Pedophile. I think, who's the least likely character to talk about the, explosion of racism and sexism in this country? An old, white, rich guy. so there's that piece of it. But I also feel like there was something for me on a, on a deeper level of wanting to- Have some other sense of understanding of how this person evolved, what their own sort of trajectory had been.

And it, it prompted interesting conversations for me, like with my editors in the UK who said, this guy and his cohort, the Forever Men, talk a lot about how they want to preserve democracy." And she goes, "But I, I see them doing the opposite, so what are you getting at?" And I said, "Well- That for me is part of what's so interesting because the notion of what democracy is is no longer agreed upon.

And so his version of democracy, he is dating back to, the Founding Fathers where, you know, probably many other people's version of democracy in this country would have occurred on that night when Barack Obama won. 

Well, just to quote a, a wonderful line from that scene in the hotel room. You say, "Being in that hotel room," this is the Big Guy reflecting, "Being in that hotel room on Tuesday, the election night, listening to men speaking in platitudes was a night unlike any other.

It was the long goodbye, the end of not just an era, but the end of the America as dreamed by our fathers." w- and, and there are many quotes like that capturing up how the Big Guy thinks about things. His wife ends up in a, Betty Ford clinic. His daughter is having her own dramas at school, and he's left alone with the guys, and they have a kind of Lord of the Flies madness come over them.

Talk a bit about what you were able to accomplish by focusing on this sort of all-male buddy-buddy scene. 

I'm always very interested in the difference between our public and private selves, and I feel like even within a family, people have selves that are private from the family. And so the Big Guy, by himself, plays war in his basement.

He uses Agent Orange on a ping pong table to defoliate fake trees and so on. His Agent Orange is yellow, is, is orange Jell-O, And then later in the book, there's this scene where he takes them all on a, hunting weekend at his ranch in Wyoming, and a bunch of private military contractors show up, essentially to demonstrate how you play war in real time.

So there, there is this both absurdity and question about how men play war. How do men behave when left to their own devices in that buddy-buddy way, and also in the very kind of jocular, competitive, top this, top that? and also even the language. Like I used to go to all these talks where Jack Welch would talk about GE, and Lou Gerstner would talk about IBM, and the way, they're running things up flagpoles and throwing them down the field, and all of these kind of euphemisms for different kinds of action.

so that interested me, and I also on another level wanted to have the Big Guy and his cohort be a little bit like Dr. Strangelove. I wanted to push them into the kind of absurd and surreal. And then what was super scary for me as a writer was every time I thought I was pushing them maybe too far- reality was intruding and pushing them further in the real world.

And so, I had hoped to have the book out by the last election. I'd hoped, that it would all be done, but you know, publishing takes a year, and I wasn't finished in time for them to have that lead time. And then when January 6th happened, people started calling me going, "Aren't you relieved?

Because you could be in big trouble now." So there's that piece of it where I thought, I am both slightly relieved and really horrified, because I think in some ways- Guys like the big guy, so wealthy white Republicans, have been able to spin, pay for, dispatch a kind of propaganda that is not accounted for.

And so we don't know where it came from, but it definitely was very, useful in inciting violence. 

One of the funniest dynamics in this election cycle is that Donald Trump is actively campaigning for Republicans going across the country, Alaska, South Carolina, Alabama. I'll note that he's not really campaigning in genuinely competitive states, or at least in the states that the Senate majority will hinge on.

They're sending JD Vance to those places, which honestly might be worse, but they're not sending Trump. He's going to the solid red states to try to boost turnout in places where you really shouldn't be worrying about boosting turnout, so that itself is an indication of the trouble Republicans are in.

But that's what Trump's been doing, going from state to state campaigning for Republicans, and each time, every time it happens, afterwards, Republicans in those states are quietly asking themselves Was this a good idea? Should, should this have happened? Does this harm us? Is every time Trump going out and saying, "Imagine that I'm on the ballot," is that costing us a percentage point share in Senate vote?

Is that costing us an entire House seat? There is a strategy for unpopular presidents who are campaigning in midterms, and that strategy is not to campaign. That strategy is to give your fellow partisans some distance, allow them to create some distance between themselves and your administration. It's frustrating for you if you're the president.

It requires you to undergo a little bit of ego death, but it is a necessary move to allow your party to sustain as many wins as it can to avoid a complete collapse. So you create some distance. You allow yourself that distance. Allow your fellow partisans to kinda distance them- themselves from you.

Trump refuses to do that. He believes he is popular. He believes that his words are magic, and that by campaigning he can save the Republican Party's majorities. He believes his promises of $5,000. 

If you elect a Republican House and a Republican Senate on November 3rd, you'll get $5,000, and if you lose, you get nothing.

If we lose, you get nothing. 

Are gonna juice turnout and enable Republicans to hang on, and that's just not happening. And in fact, I would argue that the opposite is happening, that the more Trump is going out there, the more Trump is essentially saying to voters that everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about.

The more he obsesses over his narrow concerns, like his ballroom and his golf course, the more he obsesses over the cultural wedge issues that he's trying to make the centerpiece of his campaign, namely the attacks on transgender people, the attacks on Somali Americans. The more he does all of this stuff, the more he just impresses upon voters that he doesn't actually give a shit about what's happening in the country, that he's only in this for himself and his self-enrichment, and that it's all the more reason to vote against Republicans.

Because it's the president himself telling you that if you wanna vote for Republicans or vote for him, you vote for Republicans, and so it stands to reason that if you wanna vote against him, you vote against Republicans. I'm not making any predictions about how the midterms are gonna turn out. I think that the modal outcome, the most likely thing to happen, it's gonna be a modest Democratic House majority and a m- very slim Democratic Senate majority.

But I will say that if Trump is as unpopular as he's looking right now, and he's very much trending towards the bottom of the 30s right now If voters are as angry as they appear to be, if Democrats are as energized as they appear to be, and if Republican turnout declines from where people expect it to be, then what is looking to be a bad night for Republicans could very likely be a totally catastrophic night for Republicans.

And we'll check in again next week and the day before the election to get a final sense of what we think is going on. But one thing is clear: Donald Trump himself is not helping. In addition to an administration that's truly disastrous, he is just acting as a campaigner, as a president, as a party leader in ways that are entirely at odds with Republicans ever recovering.

money has amplified the ability of the political class to bombard us with messaging more often and over longer periods of time. What used to punctuate life is now a constant state, and we're always in the most consequential election of our lifetimes. And oh, how grand and expensive this theater has become.

Elon Musk is digging through seat cushions in his Tesla for loose change to support Republicans in the midterms. He's committed between two hundred and seventy and three hundred and sixty million dollars, depending on the reporting outlet, just to maintain the Republican majority in Congress. And this has contributed massively to the polarized divide of our politics and the spectacle of it all.

forget baseball or Monday Night Football, politics is the new official national pastime. Widen the lens, then you realize that we're really not alone in this. People all over the world are agitating over conditions that we're largely responsible for. We've abandoned distasteful allies like Saudi Arabia amidst the destabilizing conflict that we brought to the region, and now the House of Saud is in crisis.

Deepened alliances between the BRICS nations who seek to displace us as the center of global trade and monetary policy left the Europeans to fend for themselves and held a gun to their heads to increase austerity measures while contributing more to defense spending. Continued to fund the barbaric activities of Israel in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

Worsened the spread of disease and poverty in the Global South by stripping funding and aid to dependent regimes. Trump has gone rogue again and invited Russia back into the trade fold, sparking panic among European nations with a much bigger vested interest in containing Putin's appetite. Protesters have set the streets of France ablaze for several nights in a row, setting the stage for the right-wing government of Marine Le Pen.

Lula might be on the precipice of losing to the highly corrupt son of the imprisoned former leader of Brazil. The far-right AfD party in Germany recently stunned by winning a state election. The conservative province of Alberta put secession on the ballot in Canada. Now, thankfully, it was rejected because Albertans now dislike Trump more than they dislike the elites in Ottawa.

So that's the one good thing that Trump has done, I suppose. There are so many channels that are bombarding us with political and economic information that it feels as though the pendulum isn't just swinging harder, it's going faster. Faster like a metronome that's on the highest setting, but it's actually worse than that.

Our perception of left-right dynamics in this country has fundamentally changed over the course of the last half century. It's as though somebody stuck a wedge or a doorstop right into the bottom of the pendulum, so it gives the impression that the middle is now as far left as this thing can go. It's why centrists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are portrayed as the radical left.

Any serious investigation of their beliefs and their voting records belies this impression, and yet here we are. So why do we have such difficulty placing policies on the political spectrum? Well, consider the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed. A Muslim man running for Senate in Michigan has had to defend his faith, not in Islam, but in the capitalist system, and then also disavow the so-called socialist wing of the Democratic Party as though that exists.

Much of the electorate, by the way, isn't buying it because of his devotion to Medicare for All. It's the centerpiece of his campaign. So this extremely anodyne and very sensible policy adhered to by every other developed nation on the planet is somehow now the distinguishing feature of leftism, at least according to the American electorate.

This is the same electorate that barely registered the overtly racist posts from our president, who repeatedly referred to him as Muhammad. That his name is Abdul isn't enough. It has to be even further lampooned just to ensure that we all get it. And we can't be too careful. after all, we elected a man president whose middle name is Hussein.

Had a Black man named Mark been running in Michigan and the president referred to him as Tyrone, things would be a little different. If a Jewish man named David was referred to over and over in a post as Hyman, things would be different. Drawing attention to a Muslim man's name by calling him by another stereotypical Muslim name is as deft as it is horrifying.

And I offer this to illustrate just how enormous our blind spots have become. In much the way that our ears aren't tuned to Islamophobia, we can't seem to wrap our minds around critiques of capitalism. The fact that it has immiserated so much of the world's population and still enjoys the warm embrace of both major parties in this country is telling.

Dismantling capitalism isn't a foreign concept in these United States. This was once a vigorous debate in this country. But we're so far removed from the conversation that socialism is now like the myth of the invisible ship on the horizon.

Our eyes can see it over in the distance, but our brains can't conceive of exactly what it is. The short-term goals of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, are aimed at making life more tenable for the working class and providing political agency to underserved voices. These are very pragmatic and human principles.

It's a very s- it's a simple but winning strategy, by the way, that was epitomized by the Mamdani campaign. And yet, I'm sure that many who align with DSA today, at least peripherally, aren't prepared to co-sign some of the core tenets of the organization's platform to overhaul the US Constitution and abolish the Senate and the Supreme Court, among other institutions.

See, at its core, DSA is part of the Marxist international tradition, but it has playbooks that develop over long periods of time, and along the way they help people. Now, both conservatives and liberals have seized upon those convictions, the long-term convictions, to portray DSA as radical and dangerous.

The difference is that conservative movements want the same thing. Only the liberals are fighting for the status quo. The right-wing alliance of techno-fascists, Christian nationalists, and neoconservatives would also like to alter the Constitution, and we're not talking about this. Except they want to replace it with a feudal monarchy.

The only thing they can't agree upon is whether their new king will be a tech bro, a priest, or a general. Now, overlaying every narrative is this weighted blanket of capitalism. It smothers some, but it warms others. The true consensus in this country isn't around democracy, it's capitalism. That's why a campaign built around saving our democracy doesn't land in quite the way that the political consultant class thinks it should.

We'll take more or less democracy just so long as our hallowed markets are protected by the state, because we all have bills to pay, and we've been told that this is the only way to pay them. The devil we know in all of that. The defenders of capitalism like to say things like, "Capitalism has extended our life expectancies."

Okay. Was it capitalism, or was it clean water supplies and higher agricultural yields and advances in hygiene, sanitation, vaccines, and medication? They'll concede a couple of these ideas, but they'll counter with the idea that capitalism, at a minimum, was the engine that brought about these innovations.

But was it capitalism, or was it government research and funding of university laboratories and wartime systems that actually increased our understanding of industrial production that led to these innovations? Maybe they'll say, but just when you put us in the context of history, there's no denying that the capitalist epic has delivered a higher standard of living globally.

Was it capitalism that did that, or did it happen in spite of capitalism? And would it have been more widespread and universal without capitalism? This is the debate we have to be having. We can't have it enough because it helps frame our understanding of what comes next. But in these moments, in these moments of turmoil and confusion, there are more pressing concerns that are designed to keep us off balance.

Like if we're always looking to the next election and we're sweating the details in between, if we're hanging on every executive order or unprecedented action of the administration, it keeps the blinders on by design. Flood the zone and what have you. Trump's buffoonery obfuscates the reality that the purveyors of our current fascistic leanings are and have always been one step ahead of us for a long time.

Recently, we reported on the seven-point plan that was cooked up by Russell Vought's personal think tank to disrupt the electoral process by refusing to seat newly elected congresspeople who can't demonstrate the capacity to honestly take the oath of office, or at least the one that they think exists.

The GOP has already put in the work to disenfranchise reliably black voting blocs through redistricting and other efforts, and the black-robed gangsters on the Supreme Court finally finished the long fight to gut the Voting Rights Act after granting First Amendment protections to money. We've exported our chaos, our belligerence, and our fiscal irresponsibility to the rest of the world while we crank up the dollar press in the basement of the Treasury just to paper over our malfeasance.

And as a result of our actions, the planet-killing currency of fossil fuel is now the harbinger of doom for the global supply chain and industrial agriculture production, which could lead to starvation and famine. We've even endangered the AI industrial boom that we created by pushing up borrowing costs beyond the point of reason, which was always the danger of pushing our chips all in on an unproven and frankly dangerous technology.

So if you put it all together, it feels as though any minute America might just blow its top. And so we focus our attention once again on the election cycle because it's pablum for the masses. It's so much easier to root for teams than to question the game. 

Abdul El-Sayed was asked a question at- Oh. Was it 

a good question? 

We shall see. I think we should watch, the first minute of this. 

It's a simple question. 

No, your friend's got the mic. But you answer your... I, I'm asking you a simple question. You give me your name, I'll answer the question.

Okay, Tommy. 

Hi, Tommy. How are you? 

I'm great. 

Are you? Do you know what the Constitution of the United States is? 

I have one simple question. No. Will you disavow the Muslim method? 

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But I wanna- Absolutely ... I wanna ask the other question that you're asking. Why are you asking the question?

Well, because they're a terrorist group. 

Okay. Well- No, no, but what are you implying? The, the... Do you assume that I wouldn't? 

Yes. 

Why not? 

Because I have not heard you disavow them yet. 

Have you disavowed them? I haven't heard you disavow them yet. 

I disavow them. 

Do you? Great. But here's the thing about it.

You're asking the question because implicitly you assume that I'll have dual loyalties, right? You assume that somehow I wouldn't disavow or that I'll have some higher order allegiance than to the Constitution. Correct? Tommy, is that what you imply? 

Yes. 

Why would you think that about me? 

Because I have not heard you disavow.

No, no, no, no. Why would you actually think that about me? 

Because I have not heard you disavow. 

But I just did, but why would you actually think that? Why would you... Why... Have you asked everybody in your life if they disavow? 

I just love him. 

What a great point that everyone's been talking about, for weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and weeks about this particular candidate.

So well done. He's so good at this. He's so good at, being put on the spot and having a truly offensive question posed to him time and time again, and just taking it in stride- Some people think it's too aggressive ... and flipping it around, and not playing into whatever... the, this is, these bad faith questions are hoping to elicit some sort of a response, some sort of talking bite that they can use to, smear him with, and he just is so graceful with this.

they're still trying to smear it, but they got nothing, man. Mm. They got nothing. they are desperate. 

he does a really good job here of getting this question, "Do you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?" and he says, "Yeah, sure. Absolutely," but, and goes to the real point of, "Why are you asking the question?"

Throws it back on him, but he wasn't prepared for the... Abdul El-Sayed was prepared for the question, but Tommy was not prepared for the reverse question of, so racism is the only- Yes, yeah, to be clear ... only conceivable reason- 

Yeah, 

yeah ... that you would, that you would bring this up. Just a very good job of saying, "Yeah, sure.

Absolutely." Not talking about that because who needs to talk about that? Because none of us need to go around disavowing every 

group. Because of course. Because of course. 

Because of course. 

Exa- yes. 

And even a lot of Republicans are not believing that he said, "Yeah, sure." 

That's the first thing he says. "Yeah.

Sh- sure, yeah. Absolutely." 

Absolutely. The, "

Absolutely." And he also, he did say, "Absolutely." He also says in his answer, "I just did." He, n- he does, and then he says that he does. 

This is such bullshit. It's just such a bad faith question. you're- 

Well, the reaction to him saying, "Yes, absolutely," and pretending that he didn't say that, and being like, "Well, he's blah, blah, blah," that speaks to his answer and the nature of the question, and what we're talking about.

so you need him to do a full-throated, "Here's my, my long form letter about disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood, and I'm weirdly the only candidate you require that of. And obviously I do, and I have, and you still don't hear me, so why is that true?" it's not just "Why are you asking the question?"

"Why are you not hearing my answer?" 

And doing that- Puts, like it brings it back so you're not doing it on their terms. The reason he asked this question is 'cause it's "Oh, I win either way." Either he has to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood and then he's talking about the Muslim Brotherhood, or he won't do it and then he's a terrorist or whatever.

Exactly. And he manages very smoothly to do the thing and then reframe the conversation, so now we are talking about how he reframed the conversation, and they are having a hard time talking about this connection they're trying to make between a Muslim guy with Muslim-sounding name and evil, right? Yes.

Like- 

What's, are they doing for, again, for weeks, for months, about the, all the, the Piker stuff. Every single thing. Do you disavow this? Do you disavow this? Do you disavow this? They have a long list of things that he specifically has to disavow all the time, or else he's a secret terrorist or whatever.

And, it's really, good. They, it was finally, presented. 'Cause it's very clear that i- again, if you're not, a Republican operative or, a Gunther Eagleman type or whatever, you're gonna see that clip and go, "Oh, that guy thought he had, a gotcha question and isn't prepared for the answer, and he's b-

we see what happened. It's satisfying to see him finally address that because it's not just that person who's been asking. It's been a pattern. And to have a very solid clip of hi- him explaining, "Here's what's happening when I am asked this question all the time." 

So this guy, Tommy Teple, is a Republican operative.

He's not just- Oh ... some 

guy. He's not Joe the Plumber. He's not just a concerned citizen? He's not just, really concerned about this? That's so interesting. 

No, he wasn't independently thinking about this as an actual issue. 

The average person doesn't think about this, constantly and need this discussed all the time?

Okay. It's- 

Yeah, he worked for, Josh Hawley. 

Oh, so, so I get it. No, he was a m- he's a manly man of valor. I didn't realize that. 

Tommy Teple also has a close relationship with this Christian nationalist named Sean Feucht, who was, like, a big, anti-lockdown guy. there weren't actually lockdowns. But anti-lockdown guy early on in the COVID pandemic.

So, not just, "I work for Republicans," but, "I work for a specific kind of Republican-" Mm-hmm ... "and I'm into, Charlie Kirk world." 

I'm not sure if you guys saw this. after all this went down, Jan Crawford, reporter at CBS- Ooh. Duh, ooh. re- tweeted what was clearly meant to be a DM. "Tommy, thank you.

I had to watch this twice to catch Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's nanosecond 'Yeah, absolutely' response." No, you didn't It was loud and clear anyway. his subsequent uninterrupted three-minute diatribe proving your exact point is the kind of spectacular self-own most people only dream about triggering. Congrats.

She tweeted that and then deleted it pretty quickly. Very weird, very weird thing for a reporter. 

It's completely expected of, c- certain people to, to do that. unsurprising, but obviously bad and- 

But basically w- to me it felt, well, so, "Oh, this is just all part of your coordinated, attempt to plant people there.

Ask, go there and ask that question." Oh, yeah. "Go there and do this." Yeah. "Try to get this soundbite. Try to own him," and he didn't Fall for the bait. And it's so desperate to me to pretend as though his very well-reasoned and well-articulated and measured response, pointing out the implicit racism and bias in the question, doesn't prove anything except that you fucking suck, Tommy.

I just gotta say this again, I know I started with this, but I'm just so impressed by him. I, I truly can't imagine needing to be up there and keep your patience the way he has. It, it, it is truly remarkable. and just the, the attention of the whole country is on you. Mm-hmm. You- Not backing down and, yeah

have the kind of focal point, and, and, and I just, yeah, I commend him. 

Yeah. Yeah, he did a great job. and I know people are framing it like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe he, went... attacked this voter. He pu- he punched the voter in the face." Oh, man, it's just like he's a 

political- He dilophosaurus-ed the v- the voter

Yeah, yeah. things came out- Yeah ... and he spit the venom at him. And 

he, 

and he handled it perfectly Spit everywhere, yeah. That's not a, that's not an Abdul El-Sayed voter. Mm-hmm. That was somebody- Mm ... coming there- Maybe 

he's won over ... 

trying- Maybe he won him over. Maybe he won him over. I doubt it. But, that was someone coming over trying to make him look bad.

Didn't take the bait. Good job. 

Now, Section C: On the Ballot, Candidates and Races.

On October 19th, the Justice Department said it charged 28 California residents with federal voting crimes. The DOJ says that this can improve their n- figure that there are 20,000 non-citizen voters in the s- state of California.

You called the number of people charged a, quote, "drop in the bucket of 23 million registered voters." H- who-- what, what, what's going on here, and what is the federal government trying to do? 

Well, I think the federal government is trying to sow seeds of distrust in the middle of an election in the biggest blue state in the nation, because they are staring down a big blue wave and getting thrashed in, the prospect of getting thrashed in the midterms, and they are planning, for what's next.

This is their contingency plan. They're gonna start, after the election, after they lose, start blaming so-called fraud. that, that's what they did in 2021. It's the same playbook. they're socializing that idea now. Maybe they'll even try to, improperly, try to, inter-interfere with and block certification of final tallies, because of these allegations.

We'll have to see what they do next in the coming days, where and, and, and how much. But it seems like a unprecedented escalation. And, to the point, 28, individuals, a- and mind you, they're arrested. They haven't been convicted of anything, and some of them are saying, "I never registered to vote.

I never voted. I, I don't know why you're arresting me." So we'll see what they can prove and what they can't. But that is a, a, a, a drop in the bucket of the 23 million voters. It's .0001%. And it is completely consistent with, what I've always said and completely undermines what they have said. They have said there is widespread voter fraud and that Democrats are involved in it.

and what this shows is that Fraud is exceedingly rare. It happens at times. And here, the, the, this is mostly Republicans, among the 28 arrestees. So instead of widespread voter fraud being advanced by Democrats, it's, exceedingly rare, rare, isolated incidents of voter fraud, perpetrated mostly by Republicans.

So I think, they're reaching, and grasping at, for straws. But we have to remember wh- wh- who they are and what they have done in the past. Remember, this is a president who asked the Secretary of State in early 2021 of Georgia to find, to find, mind you, 11,000-plus more votes that do not exist so he could win that state when he lost.

Uh, he fueled the, attack on the Capitol trying to undermine the certification of the President of the United States who won that election, Joe Biden. He seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. He issued multiple executive orders that tried to undermine the fundamental right to vote, the right from which all the rights flow, including interfering with vote by mail, which we had to go to the US Supreme Court to protect, including trying to create additional restrictions on, what is required, to, to, to provide to be able to vote and, and preventing certain vote by mail ballots from being counted.

And, and he continues to advance conspiracy theories. He continues to say, he won the 2020 election when Joe Biden didn't. He lost. He continues to use the State of the Union and primetime press conferences to advance these conspiracy theories. And so that is who is behind these, this most recent set of arrests, here in California.

And, this isn't the first time this happened. In Nevada, the Department of Homeland Security approached, Nevada officials and said, "We have 16,000 people that we've identified who are ineligible on your voter rolls." And when push came to shove, they couldn't demonstrate that any were ineligible.

They demonstrated that zero, were ineligible. And, forget about 16,000 that they alleged. And so f- forgive us if we're skeptical here. And there was a sample of the data of these 20,000, purportedly ineligible voters that, that was done by the L- the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters, and it found that three out of four of them never voted in any election.

They had no record of voting. Over 50% of them do not have active voter registrations. They've either been, canceled or they're inactive. And, and just under 50% were citizens, which means they are, they are, very likely eligible voters because they're citizens, and that gives you the right to vote, of course, if you're the right age.

So, The data is trash. It is unreliable, it is error-prone, and the entity, the federal government that is engaged in this action, has a r- a long history of advancing debunked conspiracy theories. And so I do think that they are trying to sow distrust and socialize what they will do next to try to justify their interference in the election.

So I wanna go back. You mentioned the Supreme Court ruling, earlier this month. so the court, you were part of a multi-state coalition that won before the court with regard to mail-in ballots. What does that mean for California voters? 

Right now it means it's business as usual, that vote-by-mail, the preferred way to vote by 89% of Californians, at least in as of 2025, is fully available to them.

That all the ways and all the days that California, with its, voting laws, provides to Californians, eligible voters in California to vote, are fully available. You can, everyone gets a vote-by-mail ballot. It's universal vote-by-mail. They can put it back in a, a, a, a post box. they can... In, in a mailbox.

They can put it in a ballot box. They can bring it to a polling station. They can bring it to a elections office. They can vote on Election Day. they have a long window of almost, 30 days, during which they can vote. so, the, the good thing is nothing has changed and all of the, the, the ways and days to vote remain available, and that was touch and go until just a few weeks ago when vote-by-mail, w- the president was trying to interfere with it, along with the United States Postal Service, and we had to go all the way up to the highest court in the land to affirm what we always knew to be true, which is that states, n- not the executive branch of the federal government, determine the time, place, and manner of elections.

And the president had to be stopped and blocked from interfering, in our election here in California and throughout the country, at least with respect to vote-by-mail, by the US Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. 

So it, it hasn't just been federal officials. We had the- Right ... Riverside sheriff who was ordered to return 650,000 ballots by the California State Supreme Court.

What went wrong there? And I think for- ... many voters in California, they'd be wondering, what stops Riverside's sheriff or another sheriff or another county in California from doing that again on November 3rd? 

Well, I'm glad you make that point because whether it's the President of the United States or a rogue lawless sheriff, trying to interfere with the elections in California, we will stand strong for the fundamental right to vote, to protect it, to make sure that it is not improperly interfered with, and that our elections, that the integrity of the elections is protected, they remain accurate, reliable, safe, secure.

And what went wrong with the Riverside Sheriff, seizing ballots is, he acted lawlessly as a law enforcement officer, completely embarrassing and, and, and, and inappropriate. And he removed, ballots from the custody and control of the local elections official, the local registrar of voters in Riverside County, that, that was never to happen.

The law prevents that removal of the ballots from the custody and control of the registrar of voters, and he failed at the time to comply with my binding directions to him as, his, as someone who under the Constitution of the State of California has supervisory authority over him. and the... We went to the California Supreme Court.

they found, unanimously in our favor that he improperly removed ballots from the custody control of the local registrar of voters, and that he failed to, comply with my binding instructions, so he was ordered to return the ballots. We inspected them and determined that, there was no, interference, with them.

They, they remained, their integrity, remained intact. and, going forward, the legislature in its wisdom with the governor here in the State of California have imposed additional, liability on those who do what, the, the Riverside, County Sheriff, Sheriff Chad Bianco did, which is there will be criminal liability going forward if such conduct occurs.

So if Sheriff Bianco sees fit to engage in a similar act going forward, he will be held criminally liable. 

Give me just a little bit of space here to deal with this Muslim Brotherhood thing- Please, please do. Because no one- Yes ... in all of media is dealing with this in the proper way. Mm. The Muslim Brotherhood is almost 100 years old. Do you know when the United States, classified them as a terrorist group?

Earlier this year. Mm. Donald Trump did it. Since, since his mother has been implicated in supporting that group, which is 50 years ago, they were not considered a terrorist group by the United States 50 years ago. So are we now saying we're gonna retroactively say he's responsible for something or that she is responsible for supporting terror when they were not a terrorist group in the United States?

There've been 10 presidents between then, when she supported them, and now. Not a single one of them, Democrat or Republican, decided to make the, deem the pres- Mu- Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. Do you know how many terrorist attacks on American soil the Muslim Bro- Brotherhood is responsible for?

Zero. But if we're gonna say that, that children are responsible for their parents, Donald Trump's dad was, was arrested at a Klan rally in Queens in 19, '27. Are we saying that Donald Trump is responsible for his dad's actions?

Vice President and former Ohio senator, JD Vance, said he'd been left feeling disgusted, not by Ramaswamy's ad, but by Republican pushback against it 

I'm a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining more about that advertisement than they are about what the d- Congressional Democrats and other Democrats want to do to the United States of America 

Meanwhile, President Trump has been fiercely defending the ad repeatedly on the campaign trail in Iowa, saying he advised Ramaswamy not to take it down, but instead to thank God.

And when I first saw it, I said, wow, that means Vivek easily will win the race. And then I got a call from Vivek. He said, what would you recommend? Because I'm getting killed in the press. Why? He said, because they think I should immediately take the ad off. They did an ad of the mother saying the daughter is incompetent, a liar, a disgusting, unreliable person.

I said, it's a big thing. It's like a big story about he must take that ad down immediately. He must. No, the mother is calling the daughter a terrible person and a liar. Everybody should be so lucky. Why would you shield somebody from that? Why would, why would we do that? So I told him, leave it up and look upstairs and say, thank you, God, very much.

I appreciate it. So. 

The Ohio governor's race is just one of several hotly contested races in Ohio. For more, we go to Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis. Her latest piece is headlined GOP Doubles Down on Ad Exploiting Ohio Democrats' Childhood Rape and Abuse. Abby, this is an incredible story. you have a woman who, contends that she was raped and sexually abused at the age of 12.

And the man who did it, her stepfather, was indicted. And then he and her mother, who he was married to, fled to Pennsylvania. And Dr. Acton has not seen her mother in, what is it, in, in more than 40 years, since 1978. And somehow Ramaswamy's people found this mother, and she talks about her daughter as a liar.

She last saw her when she was, what, something like 12 years old. Abby, tell us this whole story. And President Trump saying Ramaswamy called him and said, "Should I pull it down? I'm being killed on this." And Trump said, "No, just look up and thank God"? 

Dr. Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor in Ohio, has previously discussed on the campaign trail and in her previous role as, public health director, for Ohio during COVID, how she had a very rough childhood, living in tents at time, and that her stepfather sexually abused her when she was between the ages of 10 and 12.

And, Vivek Ramaswamy is now using that personal trauma as an effort to exploit what she went through and win this race, and he's currently polling beneath Amy Acton, which shows, I think, that this ad is a desperate attempt to, to, somehow pull off a victory despite poor odds. 

And, Abby, what is your sense of the reaction among the voters?

not, not just the political leaders, but the, the voters to this ad? 

So I think Ohio voters are understandably upset, and what's, what's really interesting is that Amy Acton among progressives was not, their favorite candidate. They were upset with some previous things she said about continuing, to uphold Ohio's laws regarding, trans girls playing sports, and so I think there were a lot of, progressives who intended to not vote for Acton or sit the election out.

And so this ad, I think is, energizing those people to come to the polls and support Acton, because of how despicable they feel Ramaswamy's ad is. And among Republicans, I've seen Republicans say that they just cannot vote for, for Ramaswamy after doing this. And I think it's important to note that a lot of Republicans and, of course, Democrats too, but, Republicans have been very frustrated by how the Epstein files, were handled by, the Trump administration.

And so here you have a situation in which, candidate, Ramaswamy is, is using the sexual abuse of a child to try to win a political campaign. And given everything that has happened with Jeffrey Epstein, these, these people are like, "That is where I, I draw the line." So I've seen many Republicans say that they are either going to stay home and not vote, which will hurt all the Republicans on the ballot in Ohio, and there's some other very close races, or that they're not going to vote for governor or maybe even that they'll vote for Acton.

It's... I think this ad is, is bringing, a lot of sympathy to her situation. 

South Carolina Republican Congress member Nancy Mace said she was stunned and shocked that between the Ramaswamy ad and Republican Congress members blocking the release of the Epstein files, quote, she said, "It's going to take a long time for Republicans to recover from this.

We are not the party of pedophilia," she said, unquote. And she also referenced Congress member Max Miller. He's running for re-election amidst accusations of domestic violence. His opponent, is the Bernie Sanders-endorsed Democrat Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker. Miller's ex-wife Emily Moreno, who's the daughter of Ohio's sitting Republican senator Bernie Moreno, claims Miller burned her chest and stomach by throwing hot water at her, held a gun to her head, and claims he fractured their two-year-old daughter's collarbone.

In August, Republican senator Bernie Moreno c- called on Miller to step down, writing on social media, quote, "He should not serve in the House of Representatives. I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he's left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does," Senator Moreno said.

Earlier this month, Miller's campaign released an ad denying the accusations of abuse against him, defending his decision to stay in the race. 

Too many of us know the pain of divorce. It's messy and complicated. For two years, my family's heartbreak has been dragged onto your TV because, well, that's politics.

Despite relentless press and investigations, every allegation against me was proven false. 

Abby Vesoulis, you and your colleagues at Mother Jones obtained some 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports pertaining to Miller through public records requests. Those records also include allegations dating back to high school.

Tell us what you learned about Max Miller, how voters in Ohio are responding to the revelations. We are also including the former press secretary for President Trump in his first term. Stephanie Grisham dated Max Miller, and then went on to write a piece in The Washington Post that he abused her. Talk about all of this in this last few minutes we have 

So what's most important, I think, to note about the Max Miller situation is, like you said, this is a pattern of allegations.

It's not just Emily Moreno who says that Max assaulted her on multiple occasions. There's also Stephanie Grisham, who reportedly was slapped by Miller when the two were dating during the first Trump administration. There's also, an allegation against Miller that he pushed a girl down the stairs when she was in high school because he denied her sexual advances.

Politico first reported on that in 2021 when Miller was running for his first term in the House of Representatives, and they cited three witnesses who saw that, exchange between Miller and the girl that he allegedly pushed down the stairs. I contacted that now woman over the summer, and she said she really didn't want to talk about it, because it was one of the most traumatic nights of her life even still.

And so it's, it's just so important to note that it's, it's not just Emily Moreno. And by the way, Emily Moreno's father is a Republican senator, so his ad, Miller's ad saying that this has been, dredged into the news because of politics, that just doesn't really make sense because wouldn't Merino have wanted, the Ohio contingency, in Congress to, to be full of Republicans?

So there's a lot of strange politics happening here 

The poster child of the big supposed voter fraud bust in California is a registered Republican. That's one of the discoveries by the local press in Los Angeles that has taken a close look at the 28 cases that the Trump DOJ claims shows the pervasive and allegedly systemic nature of voter fraud in LA, and they've been looking through every record that they can, putting multiple agencies together for a thorough investigation, and they came up with a grand total of 28 cases in a case that has 34 million citizens, more than 39 million residents, and more than 20 million registered voters.

28 cases. And in a big spectacle, in a big bust, one of the names that came up in the reporting that the Trump DOJ trotted out again and again was Omar Munoz, and we're gonna talk about his case in a bit, but the findings when the local press actually looked into the voter registration records at issue in these cases, the publication LA Material published, quote, "The poster child of Trump's LA voter fraud bust is a registered Republican," and they're referring to 72-year-old Omar Munoz.

Today on All Rise News and Legal AF, I'm going to talk about what the local press in Los Angeles is discovering and how it further shreds the Trump DOJ's myths of non-citizen voter fraud in the United States. Take a moment to subscribe right now. And I wanna start things off by reading the LA Times' account of what the big bust on Omar Munoz looked like from his perspective as it was happening According to the LA Times, quote, "Muñoz and his family gathered outside the courthouse.

Muñoz, who declined to comment on the charges against him, said he'd been up to have coffee early that morning when he heard the commotion outside. Agents said if he didn't open the door, they'd break it down. He described seeing helicopters, at least eight cars, and several agents from different agencies descending on his home and recalled thinking, 'What movie am I in?'

'That's a lot of money, taxpayers paying for that,' he said. 'They could have sent me a letter saying, report to the court.' Muñoz, who said he came to the US legally in nineteen seventy-five and has paid all my taxes since, said he explained to the arresting agents that he'd had six surgeries recently, and they didn't care.

He said he didn't learn about the charges until four hours later." So that's the story of Omar Muñoz, a registered Republican who the federal government now accuses of voter fraud and, like any other criminal defendant, is presumed innocent until proven guilty. There is a tendency in cases like these where a common defense is they didn't realize at the time that they weren't allowed to vote.

The cases of these twenty-eight people are in front of them. they are entitled, like any other criminal defendant in the United States, to the presumption of innocence. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about what happens often in these cases a little bit later. But focus a little bit on the scene that he described.

Seventy-two-year-old man, several recent surgeries. He wakes up early in the morning, by his own account, to have some coffee, and he notices helicopters circling his home. He sees at least eight cars filled with agents from multiple agencies, and they're all there for him, and that's the expenditure of taxpayer money.

Why that many officers? Why the helicopters for a seventy-two-year-old man accused of illegally voting? Maybe so the federal government can produce content like this.

But for the rest of us, it seems a little odd to, and more than a little odd to have the government spend so many resources to do this massive spectacle of a bust on a 72-year-old man. Here's what his wife told the Los Angeles Times. "Seriously? All these people just to come for an elderly person? It's unbelievable."

not that it should matter, but Omar Munoz was a registered Republican. He is charged with illegally voting, and he's become the public's fa- face that Trump is posting about his case on Truth Social, and that he's one of the people trotted out by the Trump Justice Department and Bill Essayli, who is the top prosecutor there and was disqualified from holding the title of US attorney because he was unlawfully in that position.

So he now calls himself First Assistant US Attorney, and there's a case right now to disqualify him because it is being argued that he is in that office unlawfully, and an appellate court, the Ninth Circuit, established that. But he's the one saying, banging the drum, that there is massive voter fraud and that his office is finally taking it seriously because California authorities are asleep at the wheel.

And he claims that there are twenty thousand likely non-citizen voters. That was his claim last week, and this week, twenty-eight cases, only twenty-one of them representing people who by their own admission actually voted.

Are you worried that your vote is not safe? Are you worried that they are tampering with elections and overwhelmingly we're getting reports of votes being switched from the Democratic to the Republican candidate? Let's, let's talk about whether or not these claims are actually true.

'Cause I woke up this morning, I'm on the West Coast, so everybody east of me had been in my comments on videos and posts about entirely different subject matter, asking me whether or not this was true. Are Republicans messing with the tabulation machines, with the voting machines? Are they switching the votes from the Democrat to the Republican?

And is this something that, that means that we're gonna lose the midterms because of vote tampering or whatever? people were really, really freaked out, understandably, because that video sounds really scary. It makes it sound like you cannot trust the integrity of our elections, you can't trust the voting machines.

And I think, while I believe that that creator is well-intentioned, I think there is harm that is done by making claims like this. So let's talk about what's actually happening, and then what we need to be aware of and how we need to act as we are voting in these midterms. A number of folks in Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee, including Dolly Parton's sister, made claims that when they went in, the electronic voting machine switched their vote from the Democratic candidate to the Republican, and they would switch it back, and it would do it again as many as three times before it would finally stick on the candidate that they actually wanted to vote for.

Local news media in all of those states have been covering this issue. 

I voted. When I went back and looked at the ballot, a Republican name Was done, so I had to go all the way back 

Lisa White says she noticed an incorrect selection while reviewing her ballot. Madison County Administrator of Elections, Lori Lutz, says no changes have been made to voter ballots, and the machines undergo extensive testing before voting begins.

And it's also tested by both Republicans and Democrats who are appointed by my board, who are machine techs, who are experienced in this. 

Meanwhile, local community organizations say they've received several similar complaints. 

We had several complaints that has indicated that the machine is changing some votes.

People that they thought they had voted for, they didn't. 

Kept punching for the Democrat, Jerry Green, and it kept punching back to Marsha Blackburn. 

She says she tried to vote Democrat on her ballot, but the machine kept punting back to Republican challengers. 

It just, really kinda irritated me, and then I was very nervous about making sure that my vote was gonna be counted right.

At the Longview Rec Center in Spring Hill, she says she spoke with poll workers who had heard of similar complaints, and it wasn't the only location in Williamson County where we learned of this being an issue. 

You try to push the button for the candidate that you're selecting, and it goes to another candidate.

Yes, there are multiple credible reports of this happening in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, all Republican-controlled states. Does that mean that there is some vast conspiracy that is gonna switch all the Democratic votes to the Republican votes? No. Does it mean that there are overwhelming numbers of cases of this happening like that original creator claimed?

No I'm not gonna deny that it is a little bit hinky that all of the concerns that have been filed thus far are from Democratic voters claiming that their vote was switched to the Republican. That's, that's anecdotal evidence, but, I haven't seen any Republicans claiming that their vote was switched to the Democrats.

However, however, this is something that happens basically every single election that we have in the United States when you go to vote in a precinct that uses electronic tabulation machines. We have had reports of this happening for years, where the machine is not properly calibrated. It's a touch screen, and it's not properly calibrated, and so it doesn't record your touch accurately.

This is not something new, and it's one of the reasons I'm grateful to vote here in Oregon, where we have paper ballots. But when you use those electronic voting machines, guess what, guys? They print out a paper ballot at the end. And this is the point that I really wanna hammer home here, because I believe that that creator was well-intentioned, but I've seen a number of posts like this that are very alarmist, that make it sound like there is some broader, more comprehensive effort to tamper with the votes.

We don't actually know that what happened in those three states is vote tampering at all. We do know that it is miscalibration, and we've heard from precincts, from election officials in those districts that they have gone in and corrected the issues on those machines. So it's really important that we check the facts, that we not exaggerate.

If we are concerned about election integrity, if we are concerned about Americans having their right to vote protected, having the integrity of their vote protected, having the democratic process protected, we have to be really careful that we're not exaggerating. I know, really outsized claims go viral very quickly on social media, and creators are incentivized to catastrophize and to make things sound far more dramatic than they actually are When it comes to the question of whether or not votes have been switched on electronic tabulators in some southern red states, and whether or not that means that your vote is at risk, I wanna assure you that there is a very simple solution to protect the integrity of your vote.

You are not casting your vote on those electronic machines. They print out a paper ballot at the end. The solution is very easy. Do not turn in a ballot without looking over all of it. You wouldn't turn in your exam without double-checking your answers, right? Don't turn in your paper ballot without double-checking that everybody you meant to vote for is actually marked on your ballot.

It's that simple, y'all. Look at the screen when you are recording your vote. All of these voters caught this error because they were focused and engaged. They weren't distracted. And then when you print out your vote, double-check what the paper ballot says before you turn it in. It's not difficult. It's not difficult.

If this is some kind of plot by the Republicans to try and siphon off a few votes here and there for Republican candidates, then we need to make sure that, one, we're being diligent and attentive, and that we're not letting anybody do that to our paper ballots, but two, that we are voting in such massive numbers that if some of our allies, some of our fellow Americans are distracted and they did not catch this error, that we vote in such massive numbers that it overcomes any of these weak, piddly, pathetic attempts from various individual corrupt Republicans to sabotage our efforts to make sure that democracy is restored in the United States.

I am encouraging y'all, I'm, I'm cajoling y'all, please do not uncritically accept whatever you see on social media as gospel truth. There are bad actors everywhere in this election cycle. Please check the facts. I think that creators making outsized claims here do so because they know their content will go viral, they themselves are really anxious, and they didn't bother to check the facts, or they are folks who are here to make you believe that our elections are not safe, and maybe you should just stay home.

I'm not saying that that creator had bad intentions. I think she had every good intention. I am saying we have to be conscientious consumers. We have to be aware and have our critical thinking skills on, and we have to check the facts before we get all spun up about a social media post. This is a real problem with a very real, simple solution Check your paper ballot.

And finally, Section D: What This Election Is Actually About.

We're gonna talk about real topics, hispanic voters and immigration, trans panic as a campaign weapon, trump telling his people to pretend he's on the ballot. Good discussion for a normal campaign year but I can't see the normal campaign.

I can't see the normal election. Can you? What I can see is a government controlled by the MAGA right on one side, and on the other, everyone who wants to stand in its way. But the two sides aren't playing the same game. One is running in a normal election, and the other one is deciding for you whether that election's gonna count.

A week and a half out, and I can't tell you who wins the House. I don't think the folks at the Cook Report, and they're the smartest in the business, can really tell you either. Prognostication, yes. Certainty, absolutely not. But I can tell you that I don't think the count on election day is gonna decide things.

The FBI already walked ballots out of Fulton County under a warrant written for twenty twenty. Homeland Security says ICE won't be at the polls, except when it will. Kash Patel told senators he hadn't ruled out sending agents around. And the attorney general was asked yesterday whether the DOJ might step into state certification of results, and he answered more or less, "Sure, you can imagine scenarios with that as an outcome."

The ballots, the polling places, the certification, at every stage, the people who run the federal government, who have captured that federal government, the executive and the judiciary, have left themselves a door, and they've told you where it is. 'Cause nothing here is a secret plot. It's a stated position.

The election settles things only if they say it does, and that's the impression they want to give you. Even all the "but the rule of law" lawyers telling you that the law will hold, they concede that the threats to democracy do their work without ever actually being carried out. The experts whose job it is to assess all this stuff say no election will be overturned, but in the same breath, they say the most likely outcome is confusion, litigation, and turmoil over certification.

That's the deliverable, I think. You don't have to seize a ballot if enough people stop believing the results of the ballot. Trump put it plainest when he told his voters to pretend he's on the ballot. The election is about him, and he decides what it means. And the opposition, there's exactly one organized opposition in the country, and it agrees that the election is about Trump.

But Hakeem Jeffries calls this a failed presidency, a rigged election, democracy on the line, and then offers as the remedy winning the House. Fine, but the plan, if they win, isn't even a plan yet. It's a plan to create a one hundred-day plan about the cost of living and oversight hearings. The diagnosis of the problem is at the regime level, but the prescription is all playing out in a committee room.

If the Trump regime and authoritarianism is the problem, you don't answer it with a hearing schedule. But if a hearing schedule is the answer, then it was a normal presidency with just bad policy and bad people all along. They're saying the first, but they're offering the second. But what holds the two together is an assumption that a majority, once they win it, gets to govern, gets to take its seats But there are right now members of Congress from both parties who are circulating a pledge asking colleagues to promise not to challenge whoever wins.

Think about that. This is the thing that might be driving me most crazy right now. We have had elections in which the question was whether the losers would accept a result, right? The-- Those have been in our lifetime. Nobody asked whether the House would seat the winners, and now that's a pledge. It's a norm rewritten as a contract.

My God, those democratic norms. Make people add their signatures. Make it a public pledge. Why? Because the norms no longer hold on their own. This is absurd, but the absurdity is a measure of where we are. The only opposition to this government is staking everything on an instrument that its own members are just hoping still works, norms.

It's confusion, absurdity everywhere. So that's what I'm thinking about this morning. It's a strange thing to sit on a panel discussing all this in the usual academic register, as if we're simply waiting for Americans to deliver a verdict. But that's the register everywhere, not just on academic panels.

The smart lawyers say it's all illegal, and the law will hold. The watchdogs keep a running list of tactics for you. The experts say disruption is likely, but an overturned result is not. The forecasters have the Democratic leader already measuring the speaker's office for new curtains. Every one of them treats the election as the fixed thing and the threats as just weather around it.

The verdict isn't the question to them, but it is to me, and it should be to you. Whether anyone will accept the outcome, what it will change if they do, and who gets to decide all that, those are the questions, and none of the answers are in the hands of voters. They belong to whoever holds the warrants, signs the certifications, and then controls the gavel when the new House meets.

Right now, the honest answer to all three is that we don't know, and that's not something I've ever been able to say about an American election before it happened. The election itself is in question for maybe the first time in our political history. There have been eighteen sixty, eighteen seventy-six, twenty twenty.

They all posed massive questions, but every one was about whether the losers would accept a result and then what they would do. Lincoln won, and then the South left. Tilden won the popular vote, but then Congress cut a deal. Trump lost and then arranged an insurrection to keep the office. But the vote came first every time.

This is the first time the vote, the count, the certification, they're all in doubt before anyone has cast a ballot, and the first time the people raising the doubt are the ones in power, and maybe that's part of the point. So in a moment with nothing but questions, start by being clear about what your questions are.

What does this election need to do for you? What does it have to answer on November 3rd and in the days and weeks after about our leaders and about whether our democracy still does what it claims to do? Maybe it turns out that politics still matters, just that this opposition isn't up to the job, and you have to look elsewhere for an opposition that is up to that job in 2028.

Or maybe it's what came out of some of those earlier elections, that politics itself isn't up to the job of delivering the change we need, and the work has to happen somewhere else outside those channels. Those are different answers, and they're tougher ones, and none of this is a reason not to vote.

It's a reason to know what you're asking your vote to prove so that when the answer comes back, in whatever form it comes, you can read it. You're ready for it. That's the measure of where we are. Not who wins, but what you need the win to do. 

Prediction markets have become ubiquitous. So to start, how are prediction markets being defined? How do they differ or not from sports betting and gambling, and how are they similar?

Okay, you're starting off with a very hard question because 

there's this- It's a big question. 

There's this huge ongoing multifaceted legal battle happening in the United States right now to define prediction markets. So what the federal government and the prediction markets think is these are regulated financial instruments that are traded on regulated financial exchanges.

This view of prediction markets perceives them as a cousin to traditional commodities exchanges, except instead of trading corn futures, you're trading futures on who's going to win the Super Bowl, who's going to win the presidential election, whether Iran is going to nuke anyone. it's just this idea that these are financial markets for anything.

And Kalshi actually means, I believe, everything in Arabic, and, the idea behind the platform is that they want to commodify absolutely everything in the world. Now, a lot of states have seen this and gone, "Okay, wait, but you're also allowing people to trade futures on the outcome of sports events.

That's just sports gambling, and we want the tax money, and we don't think that the federal government should be able to just give you carte blanche to operate in our states without our permission, without you having to abide by state gambling laws." And so that's why there's currently... There's honestly dozens and dozens of lawsuits to the point where I don't have the exact figure.

It's upwards of fifty. Yeah, so at the moment, the status quo is that they're financial exchanges. Whether that will change and they'll be, reclassified as gambling platforms remains to be seen and will likely go to the Supreme Court. To make matters even more confusing, there are two main prediction markets right now, Kalshi and Polymarket.

Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange in the United States. Polymarket has Polymarket US, which is a federally regulated exchange with the United States. But Polymarket's flagship product, like what you're probably thinking of, the website polymarket.com that people go on and trade about the Iran war, that is an offshore unregulated exchange that Americans are actually banned from using, even though it's headquartered in America and heavily promoted in America.

So it's actually in sort of its own weird regulatory gray zone right now. And, I think there are intentions to bring the entire exchange back into the U- US, but right now the main Polymarket is not supposed to be accessed by people in the US. It doesn't have, the know your customer regulations that something like Kalshi does, so people can trade anonymously.

And it's just a different beast. So there's, that layer that makes things even more confusing. 

from your perspective, what is the difference between placing a bet on who wins the Super Bowl on something like DraftKings and making a prediction on something like the Super Bowl? And I guess I'm understanding that, this is complicated, but yeah, what, what is the difference between those two things?

Okay. It's complicated on a technical level in that when you're placing a bet on something like DraftKings, like DraftKings has a house, so you are giving money to the platform, and with prediction markets you're supposed to be trading with another person. It's supposed to be peer-to-peer, and that's why it's allegedly more like a financial exchange.

In practice, though, if I'm betting that the Bears win, and they win, I make money either way. Functionally, for most regular people who are using these platforms, there's not much of a difference at all 

Yeah, and I wanna get into some of the impact and some of the potential harm. But first, you alluded to some of these state fights, and so I wanted to get into one of them in Texas and how these prediction markets are responding.

So on Monday, The New York Times reported that the founders of Kalshi, the prediction market platform, dropped two hundred thousand dollars into a new Texas-focused PAC. The state has some of the strictest gambling laws in the country, where it's pretty much illegal outside of the state lottery and some animal races.

Kalshi's founders' contributions come one week after Texas lawmakers held a hearing to investigate whether prediction platforms like Kalshi are actually just gambling sites. What is known about how these companies are trying to influence lawmakers and shape policies that are going to affect their bottom line?

Kalshi in particular is making an extremely concentrated push into political lobbying. It has a murderer's row of lawyers, many of whom come from the Biden administration, fighting to ensure that it stays a federally l-- regulated financial exchange and doesn't get reclassified as gambling. It is basically continually hiring different comms people and lobbyists who come from DC and know how to get things done.

There is a few different organizations that it's associated with in addition to the PACs that it's giving money to. One is called the Coalition for Prediction Markets, and that does a lot of advocacy work on behalf of regulated exchanges, really trying to ensure there's, a bipartisan coalition that approves of these markets being regulated like financial exchanges.

It's also worth mentioning, right now the company has pretty deep pockets. it's been both Kalshi and Polymarket are tech unicorns at this point. They have a lot of money to spend, and they realize that this is an existential fight, so they are willing to put everything on the line and as much money as necessary on the line to ensure that they have the right people in Washington advocating on their behalf.

Yeah. And I wanna get into kind of who they have in, in Washington a little bit more and what's going on with the federal government in this regard, but I also wanna talk about their potential impact on the midterms. You reported in August that, quote, "Election officials are preparing for prediction markets to sow chaos in the midterms."

You spoke to election officials across the country for that story. What did you hear from them, and what are their major concerns? 

There's a lot of concern about this. One of the main concerns is actually not, directly tied to how the markets are resolved, so it wouldn't be tied to how, for example, Kalshi or Polymarket called an election, but it's tied to how these platforms currently use social media.

Both of the prediction markets have very, very popular X accounts and social media accounts, and they really use them like they are more traditional media companies. There's a lot of breaking, scoop. There's all of these news summaries blasted out to millions of followers, and there have already been some cases where the way that these prediction markets have been Updating their followers has been confusing or misleading for voters.

they've made social media posts that implied that a race w- was over when it wasn't. And so there's concern that their social media presences will be a disruptive force that right now when we're in a moment where a lot of people are more distrustful about election integrity than ever, if a candidate that someone has put money on them winning ends up losing, but then one of these prediction markets sent out a tweet two hours before the polls closed implied that it was a sure thing, that that could anger the electorate to the point where poll workers would be in jeopardy, or there would just be even more rancor and discord and, distrust of, of the election process.

So that's one of their concerns. Another major concern is that there could be market manipulation in some of the markets that are directly tied to elections. we've already seen Kalshi has caught politicians trading on their races. None of them were really successful in, moving the odds for a long period of time or anything, but there's still a risk, especially on Polymarket Offshore where, where people can trade semi-anonymously, that there could be bad actors coming in deliberately trying to manipulate the markets in a way that, again, would make the wagering electorate very angry when they ended up losing money on races that they thought they would, would win, in part because the markets were manipulated to make them think they would win.

There are a few different reasons why people are really concerned. And then there's just the, overarching concern that encouraging people to gamble on the elections is going to change their relationship with the electoral process in a very detrimental way to society. it's, it's not tied to any one specific race, but more of a general, this is degrading our democracy just by commodifying electoral races in this way.

I honestly think that that's the one that I'm, I'm the most on board with as a real threat. 

That's going to be it for today. Be sure to check out our link in bio right in the show notes for all the ways to follow us on social platforms, contact us, and support everything Best of the Left, including membership and one-time donations.

The additional sections of the show included clips from the PBS NewsHour, The Briefing, The Humanist Report, Status Coup News, The Bradcast, Takes by Jamal Bowie,

Laura Flanders and Friends, Uneffing the Republic, Some More News, What a Day, CNN, Democracy Now, Legal AF, Park Rose Resistance, Resistance History with Ted Stormer, and The Intercept Briefing. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dionne and Aaron for their production work for the show.

Thanks to Ben, our Swiss Army knife fixer behind the scenes, and thanks to those of you who already support the show by becoming a member, purchasing gift memberships, or making one-time donations. You'll find the link to support us in the show notes, along with links to join our Patreon and Discord communities for free, where you can continue the discussion.

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