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Bipartisan Group of Senators Finalizes Update to the Electoral Count Act

Yesterday, a group of senators led by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Susan Collins (R-ME) produced two bills to update to the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The bills clarify what the role of the vice president is when the electoral votes are being counted and a few related issues.

The first bill states that the veep has no authority to discard electoral votes, or question them, or even pause the proceedings. He or she is not an umpire. He or she is like the sportscaster up in the booth reporting on what happened. Republicans support the bill because they know Kamala Harris will supervise the counting on Jan 6, 2025, and they don't trust her. Democrats support the bill because they know some day there will be another Republican vice president, and in advance they don't trust him or her. So both parties have an interest in making it explicit that all the veep is supposed to do is watch and then announce the result.

The bill also states that the governor of each state must submit the electoral votes. This means that stunts like Donald Trump's getting a rogue slate of electors to submit their votes can't be done anymore because the rogue slate would not have the governor's seal and signature and thus would be instantly discarded. Also, the bill removes the part of the old law that allows the legislature to declare a "failed election." Instead, the legislature can change the date if there are catastrophic events that prohibit it on the original date. For example, if there was a hurricane that blocked roads, flooded polling places, and knocked out electric power all over the state.

The update also raises the number of members of Congress who have to object in order to force Congress to deliberate and possibly discard electoral votes. Right now it takes only one senator and one representative to force a discussion. If the bill passes, it would take one-fifth of the members of each chamber to challenge a state's electoral vote. That is a much bigger barrier than requiring only one in each chamber.

The second bill raises the penalty for people who intimidate poll watchers, election officials, or candidates from 1 year to 2 years. It also provides guidance for handling absentee ballots and reauthorizes for 5 years the Election Assistance Commission that used to help states run elections. In addition, it makes tampering with voting systems a federal crime and requires election records to be preserved.

So far nine Republican senators have said they support the bills. If all the Democrats support them, only one more Republican is needed. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is not among the nine, but has said he supports updating the Act, so he might be the tenth.

The bills have a few other provisions but fall far short of what the Democrats tried (and failed) to pass in H.R. 1, which would have done many things to prevent states from disenfranchising voters. (V)

The Congressional Hearings Are Having an Effect after All

Many political professionals initially felt that the Select Committee's public hearings wouldn't dent Donald Trump's armor at all. Now it appears that Trump fatigue may be setting in and that even Republicans are getting tired of the drip-drip-drip of bad news. Politico went out and talked to over 20 Republican strategists, pollsters, and politicians and confirmed that Trump has been at least somewhat weakened.

For example, Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical leader in first-in-the-nation Iowa, said: "Frankly, I think what I sense a little bit, even among some deep, deep Trump supporters ... there's a certain exhaustion to it." Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer who served as Trump's ambassador to Luxembourg, said: "This is all undoubtedly starting to take a toll—how much, I don't know. But the bigger question is whether it starts to eat through the Teflon. There are some signs that maybe it has. But it's too early to say right now." Dick Wadhams, a long-time Republican strategist in Colorado, said of Trump: "I do think he's compromised himself into a situation where it would be very difficult for him to win another election for president." John Thomas, who works on Republican House campaigns across the country, said what he is hearing is: "Love Trump, love his policies, wish he would just be a kingmaker." It goes without saying that a kingmaker is not a king. Thomas added that it is not Trump hatred that he is seeing, but Trump fatigue. People are tired of him ranting.

Sarah Longwell, a Republican pollster who has been running focus groups all year, says that the number of Republicans who want to see Trump run again has dropped since the hearings began. In fact, in three recent focus groups, nobody wanted him to run again. She also noted that people wanted to move on from all the talk about Jan. 6.

Part of the reason former supporters are souring on Trump is that the number of people who feel Trump misled them has increased, while the number who think Trump committed a crime is now a majority.

So Trump's main problem is the gradual accumulation of evidence that he encouraged the riots and broke the law that is getting to the voters. That may increase with today's hearing, which is going to focus specifically on the 3 hours during the riot when he could have tried to stop it and chose not to. This will be the most direct attack on Trump personally of all the hearings and could have the biggest impact. (V)

House Conservatives Praise Pence

In a warning sign to Donald Trump, yesterday the Republican Study Committee—the largest bloc of either party in the House with 157 members—praised Mike Pence for his courage in certifying the 2020 election. As readers well know, Trump cheered on the mob that wanted to hang Pence. This suggests that some Republicans are coming to realize that there is strength in numbers and if over 150 Republicans band together to support Pence (and implicitly oppose Trump), they can get away with it and live to tell about it. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) even stood up during the meeting and told Pence: "I just want to say thank you for defending our Constitution. I'm happy to shout it from Mar-A-Lago to Bedminster but I just want you to know how grateful we are." Make no mistake about it. This is a direct attack on Trump from a conservative Texas Republican, something unthinkable 6 months ago. And the assembled Republicans clapped after Roy finished speaking. So it may be that the hearings are (indirectly) having an effect on congressional Republicans as well as on Republican strategists (see above item). It is perhaps noteworthy that Pence was invited to address the RSC by its chairman, Jim Banks (R-IN), a solid (?) Trumpist.

Messages like this implicitly tell Pence that a run against Trump in 2024 might not be a waste of time and that in a multiway primary with Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and others, he might well have a chance. On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell said: "I think we're going to have a crowded field for president." Turtles are not known for sticking their necks out when that isn't needed, and this one is especially cautious. All of these hints suggest that Trump will not be a shoo-in for the GOP nomination if he runs in 2024, especially not if he is also under indictment in Georgia and elsewhere.

The main thing going for Trump in the primaries, if there are indeed multiple candidates, are the rules. Unlike Democratic primaries, in which delegates are allocated in proportion to the candidates' vote totals, most Republican primaries are winner-take-all. This means in a six candidate field, if Trump consistently gets 30%-40% of the vote and that is more than anyone else, he scoops up all the delegates.

The combination of the hearings, Trump fatigue, and the reaction to Pence by House conservatives all suggest that the 2024 Republican primary may be more open than has been assumed so far. Trump generally has a pretty good feral sense of which way the wind is blowing. If he feels that he is no longer a shoo-in for the nomination, he may decide to cut his challengers off at the pass by announcing his candidacy before the midterms. (V)

Judge Orders Giuliani to Testify

Rudy Giuliani was subpoenaed to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta on July 13. He blew it off and didn't show up. Since Giuliani doesn't live in Georgia, he thought he could just ignore orders from Georgia courts with impunity. Not so fast, Rudy. Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, who is investigating whether Donald Trump violated any Georgia laws while trying to cling to power, was not amused and asked the New York Supreme Court to force him to appear. The Court agreed and yesterday Justice Thomas Farber ordered Giuliani to show up in Atlanta on Aug. 9 to testify. If Giuliani fails to show up in Georgia, he could be held in contempt of court in New York, where he does live. If that happens, he could be arrested in New York and be possibly even shipped involuntarily to Georgia.

Willis' investigation keeps spreading. At first she was interested only in whether Donald Trump's call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), asking him to "find" 11,780 votes, violated Georgia law. But now she seems to have widened her net and is looking at other aspects of Trump's attempt to steal Georgia's 16 electoral votes. In particular, she has informed all 16 of the fake electors who signed a fake electoral vote certificate that they are potential targets for criminal charges related to forging an official document. In practice, the letter to the fake electors is an invitation to flip and rat out the people who asked them to become a fake elector and tell her all they know about the plan.

The reason Willis wants Giuliani to testify is that she wants to know what role he played in assembling the fake slate of electors. She also wants to ask him about the hours-long testimony filled with lies that he gave to the Georgia legislature. He claimed massive voter fraud, but was unable to provide evidence of it and spewed other falsehoods.

Giuliani and the fake electors aren't the only people Willis has subpoenaed. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and failed Georgia secretary of state candidate Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA) also got orders to appear before the grand jury. Graham made two phone calls to Raffensperger after the election. Willis wants to hear from him what he said to Raffensperger.

Unlike AG Merrick Garland, Willis is actively and publicly vigorously pursuing her case against Trump, collecting witness testimony and evidence she can use in court. It sure looks like she's going to get to the finish line before New York AG Tish James, and certainly before Garland. (V)

Twenty Counties Will Decide the Midterms

We (and others) have written a lot about redistricting, and which districts are competitive with the new maps. Politico has taken a slightly different view and has published an article about the 20 counties that will probably determine which party controls the House next year. This has value, because people usually have a better concept of where counties are than where (badly gerrymandered) House districts are. Here is their list.

  • Maricopa County, Arizona: Phoenix and its surroundings in Maricopa County contain 60% of Arizona's population. The voters here will determine if Arizona goes red or blue. The county used to be Republican, but the growing population of Latinos and college-educated suburbanites gave Joe Biden a narrow victory in 2020. The fate of both the state's gubernatorial candidates and the Senate candidates will be determined here.

  • Orange County, California: Once the heart of conservatism in California, in 2018 every House district that touched Orange County elected a Democrat. Democrats have a 4-point registration margin here but redistricting has shuffled candidates around. There will be as many as five competitive races here this year. In 2000, 64% of the county's residents were white. Now over half are either Latino or Asian-American. That largely explains the shift, but these are groups that tend to have low turnout in midterm elections.

  • Adams County, Colorado: This working-class panhandle-shaped county that is 72 miles wide is now its own district, the newly created CO-08, whose makeup is 40% Latino. But the partisan breakdown is unusual, with 44% being independents. This one is truly up in the air.

  • Cobb County, Georgia: This rapidly changing county could determine the fate of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA). It has been trending blue since 2016. It still has a white majority, but barely, at 51%. It used to be Republican but demographic change, with more Black and Latino residents, has turned it blue.

  • Gwinnett County, Georgia: Along with Cobb County, Gwinnett facilitated the Democrats' historic victories in Georgia in 2020. It used to be largely white and Republican, but it stunned the state when Hillary Clinton won it in 2016. It is now highly diverse, with political flyers in many languages.

  • Miami-Dade County, Florida: This is the most populous county in Florida and has voted Democratic for president for 30 years. But the Democrats' margins are shrinking and they have to grow for the Democrats to offset Republican growth in The Villages. The county is 69% Latino, with Cuban-Americans the largest group. In 2020, two House seats here flipped from blue to red. The Democrats have their work cut out for them to get these seats back.

  • Seminole County, Florida: This is a suburban county outside of Orlando. FL-07 is an open seat, partly located here. The county was traditionally Republican, but is trending blue. The Republicans changed FL-07 to include parts of heavily Republican Volusia County in the district. With the new lines, Donald Trump would have beaten Joe Biden 52% to 47%.

  • DuPage County, Illinois: The second most populous county in Illinois used to be solidly Republican. However, an influx of minority voters is making it more diverse and more friendly to the Democrats. Two House districts touch it: IL-06 and IL-11. Crime and inflation are especially big issues here.

  • Johnson County, Kansas: Johnson is a historically red county suburban that is trending blue. Schools are a big issue here. In local school board elections, conservatives ran on banning social liberalism and critical race theory and won. The county is a suburb of Kansas City and has a quarter of all of Kansas voters. It is a highly educated, high-income suburban county, exactly the kind Democrats have been targeting.

  • Oakland County, Michigan: Oakland is one of the wealthiest and most populous counties in Michigan. It is also full of independents, who could swing the state. Parts of five House districts are in the county and two of these, MI-07 and MI-10, are swing districts. In MI-11, two Democratic incumbents, Andy Levin and Haley Stevens are facing off. In MI-12, Rep. Rashida Tlaib faces a well-funded challenger in Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey.

  • Kent County, Michigan: This former Republican County gave the country Gerald Ford, and also has ties to Betsy DeVos. George W. Bush got 59% of the vote here in 2000, but Joe Biden got 52% in 2020. Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump the second time. Now he is being challenged in the primary by Trump-endorsed John Gibbs. Whoever wins the primary will have a tougher time than Bush due to an influx of Latinos and a decrease in the white population. The new map also favors the Democrats more here.

  • Dakota County, Minnesota: The farmland in the southern part of the district is bright red while the Twin Cities' suburbs in the north are bright blue, so MN-02 is torn. The county is also changing, with 100,000 new residents in the past 20 years, many of them white college graduates who are Democrats. Unemployment is very low, but people are worried about inflation.

  • Clark County, Nevada: Seventy percent of Nevada's residents live here, either in Las Vegas or in the surrounding area. It's the whole ball of wax. In recent years, it has trended Democratic, but this year could be different. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) will fight for her political life here this year as will Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV), whose district is now redder than it was before. Reps. Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Susie Lee (D-NV) are on the NRCC's target list.

  • Rockingham County, New Hampshire: Traditionally, New Hampshire Republicans were fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, Trump changed all that in his suburban county 50 miles from Boston. The biggest towns, Salem and Derry, are Republican while the coastal areas are Democratic. Joe Biden eked out a win here in 2020 with 50% of the vote. The Democrats hold both of New Hampshire's House seats and Maggie Hassan's Senate seat, but all of them will be competitive this year.

  • Duchess County, New York: This county on the Hudson River north of New York City has elected only one Democratic county executive in all its history. But the new map has shaken things up. Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) was the congressman in NY-18 for a decade, but now he will run in NY-17. The people running in NY-18 are new to the county, but the Democrats have a slight edge here as Biden got 54% of the vote in 2020.

  • Wake County, North Carolina: If the Democrats want to flip Sen. Richard Burr's Senate seat from red to blue, they need to do well in the Research Triangle in Wake County, and especially in Raleigh. A huge number of voters (41%) are registered as independents, with Democrats trailing at 36% and Republicans at 23%. So Democrats will win here, but they need to win big to counter the Republican vote in western North Carolina.

  • Lehigh County, Pennsylvania: This is one of the few places in the country where split tickets still happen. The demographics are changing rapidly here, with a booming Latino population. Republican Charlie Dent was sent to Congress several times, but when he retired, Democrat Susan Wild won his seat in 2018.

  • Luzerne County, Pennsylvania: Luzerne County is a white, working-class Rust Belt county with high unemployment and low incomes. It used to be Democratic, but people are losing faith that the Democrats will do anything for them. Donald Trump won the county twice. Although Joe Biden grew up in an adjacent county, the Democrats will be sorely tested here.

  • Hidalgo County, Texas: A traditional border county, Hidalgo may be changing, as the Latinos who have lived there for generations are taking another look at the Republicans and liking what they see. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the county by 40 points, but Joe Biden's margin was only 17 points. The open House seat here will feature Trump-endorsed Republican Monica De La Cruz against Democrat Michelle Vallejo. The new map favors the Republican, though.

  • Kenosha County, Wisconsin: When a white police officer in Kenosha shot a Black man, Jaocb Blake, in 2020, demonstrations followed and 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse showed up for kill two protesters. The conflict ignited a small race war. In 2016, Trump won the county, the first Republican to win it in 44 years. In 2020, after the shooting and riots, Trump's margin went up tenfold and the county elected its first-ever Republican county executive, Samantha Kerkman, who campaigned on public safety. Paul Ryan was once elected from this area, but the new map is somewhat more Democratic.

Of course, these are not the only battleground counties, but they are certainly important counties to watch. (V)

Republicans Are Planning to Investigate Everything Next Year

House Republicans are expecting to take over the chamber next January. However, they realize that Joe Biden will still be president until Jan. 20, 2025, so passing bills has only symbolic value because even if they get through the Senate (impossible if Democrats retain control, and unlikely due to the filibuster if Republicans get control), Biden will veto them all.

Consequently, all the Republicans' plans are focused on holding hearings. The hearings will have no legislative purpose whatsoever. They will be 100% focused on trying to weaken the Democrats in advance of 2024. Nothing more, nothing less. The Republicans have a long history of picking some microscopic issue and turning it into the most important thing in the history of the republic. Was Hillary's e-mail server really the biggest issue facing the country in 2016? You betcha! Just wait until the hearings over Hunter Biden's business practices begin. That will break all records. In second place will be the withdrawal from Afghanistan based on the agreement Donald Trump signed. In third place will be the temporary shortage of baby formula that was caused when one of the plants that makes it was found to be producing tainted baby formula and shut down by health inspectors who were actually pro-life. Inflation will be in there somewhere, too, only that is a bit harder to pin on the Democrats and the causes (the pandemic and the war in Ukraine) are easy to understand.

The House has 20 regular committees, five select committees (one of which will be abolished the first day the Republicans get control, if they do) and four joint committees. The Republican leadership is now busy deciding which "scandal" each committee will hold hearings about. Some of them may be external to the government (e.g., Hunter Biden's business dealings) but some will be about investigating some agency of the Biden administration using the House's oversight power. There haven't really been a lot of mismanaged departments, so Republicans will mostly drag high-ranking officials before them and ask them rhetorical questions in the hope of embarrassing them.

It is possible the Republicans plans could be upset, to some extent, by turf wars. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), one of the biggest bomb throwers in either chamber, will probably head the Judiciary Committee if the Republicans win 218 or more seats. He is hell-bent on investigating immigration policy and what is going on at the Mexican border. This really is outside his jurisdiction, since the border situation probably falls under the jurisdiction of either the Foreign Affairs Committee or the Homeland Security Committee. Certainly not Judiciary. But Jordan is a force to be reckoned with, so he may be able to wrestle this away from the other chairmen. He is good at that since he was an NCAA wrestling champion in college.

Always lurking in the background is a potential investigation of the 2020 presidential election and who won it. No doubt Donald Trump will push a Republican-controlled House to do that and if Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) becomes speaker, he won't have the backbone to tell Trump to shut up. Republican strategists know that making the 2020 election the main focus of the House for the next 2 years is not the way to win in 2024, but Trump may just trump them.

To some extent, what the House does depends on which party controls the Senate. If the Republicans control both chambers, firebrand House Republicans can force votes in the Senate by passing bills that the Senate majority leader will bring to vote simply to embarrass Democratic senators up in 2024. However, if the Democrats hang onto the Senate, then embarrassing bills sent over from the House will just die in the Senate without a floor discussion or a vote.

In any event, Republicans are now working out their plans so if they get a House majority, they can hit the ground running and start their hearings on Jan. 3, 2023 or shortly thereafter. (V)

New Study: The Supreme Court's Rulings Match What Republicans Want

A new study by researchers at the University of Texas, Stanford University, and Harvard University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, further demonstrates what a lot of people already suspected: The Supreme Court is now operating outside the bounds of mainstream America. Until fairly recently, most Supreme Court decisions were in line with what the average American wanted. Now they are in line with what the average Repblican voter wants and are far to the right of what the average American voter wants.

For the study, the authors conducted polls that asked specifically about the issues before the Court to gauge public opinion on them. Then they compared the Court's decisions to what Democrats and Republicans wanted and concluded that the actual decisions lined up well with what Republicans wanted, not what all voters wanted.

The justices are not elected and thus don't have to worry about being voted out in 2024 or any other year. Still, when they get out of line with public opinion, respect for the Court (which is the main thing that keeps it from being irrelevant) drops. This provides a stress test for the law. That rarely works out well. In the 1960s, whites in power in Southern states shut down public services and closed schools rather than integrate them as the Court required. Now we are seeing an analogous scenario, with blue state governors signing bills designed to thwart recent Court decisions, such as bills that promise to protect women traveling to their states for an abortion banned in their home states.

Sometimes something has to give. Either the Court moves to moderate its rulings and bring them more in line with public opinion or the opposition ultimately accepts the decisions and moves on. So far, the researchers see neither of these things happening. When governors use their powers to try to undermine Supreme Court rulings, the rule of law is severely tested, but that seems to be the immediate future. (V)

Whither Polling?

Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball has an excerpt from G. Elliott Morris' new book on the history of polling Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them. The polling industry clearly has some problems and this book addresses some of them and makes some suggestions, as follows:

  • Abandon phone polls: For something like 60 or 70 years, phone polls were the norm in the polling industry. A person or computer would pick, say, 2,000 random numbers from some area code or codes and call them. Back when response rates were 90% that worked fine. Now response rates are 5% and it doesn't work so well. If nonresponders were typical of the population at large, it wouldn't matter. All a low response rate would do is make polls more expensive. But it now appears that supporters of Donald Trump refuse to talk to pollsters, giving the poll a false bias towards the Democrats. The problem is now understood, but the solution isn't.

    Morris thinks that new methods are needed. One is very large online polls with normalization to make them representative. For example, if a state voted 48% Republican in the most recent election, an online poll could force the weight of the Republican responders to 48%, no matter how many Republicans filled out the form. Also, online polls give the possibility of longitudinal studies. If the same group of 5,000 people is polled Sept. 1 and then Oct. 1, any differences are probably real changes rather than just statistical noise. Then a statement like "Candidate X has dropped 4 points in the past month" would probably be largely true.

  • Talk about methodological error: There are two sources of error in polls: statistical and methodological. Consider estimating how many purple and brown marbles there are in a large urn by removing 20 of them blindfolded and counting them. Then do it again removing 100 marbles. You'll get a better estimate this time. And removing 500 (if the urn is big enough) will be better still. Bad luck might give you too many purples, but the larger the sample, the more accurate the estimate. Same with polls. Asking 4,000 people who they will vote for is twice as precise as asking 1,000 people because margin of error goes down with the square root of the sample size.

    You get methodological error when you stand in front of a Whole Foods store and interview every tenth person who walks out because Whole Foods customers are not representative of the population. Running a poll by interviewing every tenth person leaving a church Sunday morning has the same problem. Calling people Saturday evening is almost as bad because many young people will be out partying, but lonely old widows may be overjoyed to talk to someone, even a pollster. Calling at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday is going to miss a lot of mothers with young children, and so on. There are dozens of sources of methodological error that are not related to the square root of the sample size. Since it is impossible to quantify the size of the methodological error, pollsters ignore it. Maybe they should just double the statistical error, but they need to acknowledge it and somehow report it.

  • The limits of aggregation: Sites that aggregate multiple polls (as we do and as some other sites do) have to be careful. Averaging two polls fundamentally increases the sample size, which reduces the statistical error, but still doesn't fully address the methodological errors. It does help, though, because each pollster has its own techniques and averaging two or three of them may have those errors cancel out somewhat.

  • The role of the AAPOR: The American Association for Public Opinion Research, an industry group, could bolster pubic trust of pollsters by labeling them based on how open they are about their methodology. If a pollster used suspect methods or refused to explain how it worked, AAPOR could give it a poor rating and journalists could then report: "The F-rated Magic Polling Company just reported that Smith is beating Jones by 3 points" and let readers decide what to do with that. FiveThirtyEight makes an attempt at rating pollsters by comparing their final poll to the election results. This is worth something, but the sample size is small and they can't account for a pollster doing great one time in Oregon and then blowing it the next time in Alabama. All they can do is average them. Also, having the AAPOR issue and publish the ratings of methodologies would make the pollsters take notice, and might get them to improve their methodologies.

  • Public-interest groups should get involved: Doing online polling is not so difficult or expensive any more. We've even done a little of it. If more groups would do it and open source the results, it would provide a lot more data for other people to mull over. The Data for Progress think tank is based on this idea. If there were dozens or hundreds of other projects like that, each making clear what the results were and in what way the sample might be biased, that would provide lots of data for others to analyze. For example, we know that our readership is heavy on male Democrats over 30. If we were to run a poll asking "Would you vote for Biden or Trump next time if that is the choice?" the results would be meaningless given the audience. But a question like "Should the Democrats focus more on abortion or reforming the Supreme Court for the midterms?" might provide a valid data point for one segment of the electorate. If hundreds of groups ran cheap online polls and made it clear who was in their sample, even if it was highly skewed, that could provide valuable data for others to use as input.

In short, Morris thinks that the current system of calling people at random and hoping for the best needs to be rethought. (V)


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---The Votemaster and Zenger
Jul20 Maryland Takes Its Turn
Jul20 Georgia Is Going After all 16 Fake Electors
Jul20 Secret Service: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Jul20 House Votes to Protect Same-Sex Marriage
Jul20 Ohio Supreme Court Strikes Down Ohio District Map Yet Again
Jul20 They're in the Money
Jul20 When It Comes to Campaign Finance Law and 2024, Trump Is Ahead of the Curve
Jul19 Fox Has Its 2024 Candidate
Jul19 Democrats Are Packing
Jul19 Another Abortion Horror Story
Jul19 "Red to Blue" Targets California
Jul19 Bannon Trial Will Commence Today
Jul19 Bernie Endorses Barnes
Jul19 The World's Courts, Part II: Island Nations
Jul18 Lots of Talk about Texts
Jul18 Abortion Foes Want to Ban Online Ads
Jul18 Democrats Are Hoping That Trump Will Announce a 2024 Run Now
Jul18 Republicans Are Scared of Child Rape Case
Jul18 Will the Future Be Worse than the Past?
Jul18 Republicans Will Probably Hold Their 2024 Convention in Wisconsin
Jul18 The New PVIs Are Out
Jul18 Mehmet Oz Is in the Middle of a Nasty Inheritance Battle
Jul17 Sunday Mailbag
Jul16 Saturday Q&A
Jul15 Manchin Yanks the Rug out from under the Democrats--Again
Jul15 Senate Agrees to Clarify Role of VP in Elections
Jul15 Lost, Not Stolen
Jul15 Everything Trump Touches Turns Corrupt
Jul15 Abrams Is Awash in Cash
Jul15 Indiana AG Targets Indiana Abortion Doctor
Jul15 This Week In Schadenfreude
Jul15 Political Chaos in Italy
Jul14 Inflation Damnation
Jul14 Looks Like the Clock Is Ticking on Trump 2024
Jul14 LIV, and Let LIV
Jul14 Whaddya Know? Trump Lied
Jul14 Former Prosecutors Unimpressed by Garland
Jul14 "Fake News" About 10-Year-Old Rape Victim Turns Out to Be All Too Real
Jul14 California Makes Its Move on Guns
Jul13 The 1/6 Committee Hearings, Day 7: I Was Blind... Or Did I See?
Jul13 Bannon Just Keeps Digging
Jul13 Key Democratic Senate Candidates Are Raking in the Bucks...
Jul13 ...Meanwhile, Herschel Walker's Campaign Is a Dumpster Fire
Jul13 Man Arrested for Stalking, Threatening to Kill Jayapal
Jul12 Aaaaand... We're Back
Jul12 Bannon Looks to Be in Trouble...
Jul12 ...And So Does Graham
Jul12 Gaetz' Former "Wingman" Gets Sentencing Date
Jul12 PPP Was P.U.
Jul12 Johnson Will Be Out on September 6