From what I can tell, the details on Haley Stevens’s last 36 hours, which I reported earlier this afternoon, have now been confirmed, re-reported by the Post and other publications. Appreciate the congrats. I think the best bet is that we, political obsessives, are overestimating how much this whole drama will affect the outcome in either direction. But if it has any effect, I think there’s a decent chance it will actually redound to Abdul El-Sayed’s benefit. One of the things that’s been hard to miss over the course of the day is the sheer intensity of the denunciations of Stevens from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, including many of her one-time supporters. That has many sources — but one of the biggest is that, as I reported earlier, she told many of these people, person to person, last night that she was absolutely still going to vote for El-Sayed. So they feel personally very burned.

Let me share a few quick thoughts about former Democratic Senate primary candidate Haley Stevens. As you’ve likely seen, Stevens showed up this morning at a Black church in Detroit with Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Let me say first that my best guess is that Abdul El-Sayed is going to win this race and that all this final-days drama with Stevens won’t end up to have mattered. I will also say that I can’t remember a spectacle quite like this, or any defeated Democratic primary candidate crashing out like this, in 30-plus years of observing Democratic politics very, very closely.

On Friday I said that while to that point I’d questioned Stevens’ judgment, wisdom and decision-making, I was now questioning her sanity. That was only slightly tongue-in-cheek. And even less so now. There’s a level of erratic, boffo behavior here that is even more than appears on the surface. From a mix of watching the morning shows and my own reporting, I can tell you that as recently as last night Stevens told multiple Democratic power players that she was still going to vote for Abdul El-Sayed. Last night. As I’m writing this, in addition to the church appearance, I’ve just seen that she is now officially endorsing Mike Rogers. She seems to be blaming that to some degree on that fact that she was disinvited from today’s Democratic unity rally. But whatever you think of Stevens and El-Sayed, her statement in advance of that rally made disinviting her unavoidable. She quite literally forced it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the 53-year-old Democratic senator who was seen as a likely 2028 candidate, has suffered a stroke, according to his staff. “The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery,” his chief of staff said in a statement.

Lot goin’ on. So let me just briefly flag this.

Remember the grifter war between Trumpers Ric Grenell and Alina Mildon (née Habba) over whether money back-channelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo made its way to the Kennedy Center, then named after Donald Trump? Soon after the initial story hit, another story revealed that Mildon had got a cool $50 million to work for (read: secure a pardon for) a Venezuelan billionaire. (He got the pardon.) All of these actions emerge out of the general divvying up of the spoils of Venezuela which Mildon, her new husband/nepo-oligarch Turhan Mildon and Grenell were involved in. (There’s no proving it, but I basically guarantee you that Grenell knew about the $50 million and got it leaked to the Times as retaliation.)

Now, I frequently joke about how in Term Two MAGA, it’s fine to be corrupt. But you’ve got to kick some of the sweetness up to the boss, just like Jimmy Conway had to kick some money up to Paulie after the Lufthansa heist in “Goodfellas.” I frequently struggle to understand, keep up with, just how true these things are. Yesterday, the Times returned to this story and well … here’s what they say happened.

From the Times (emphasis added)…

I was at the gym this afternoon when a press conference came on with the U.S. Attorney in Alaska floridly introducing a criminal investigation into this “Dan Sullivan” issue. One of my colleagues just noted that to do this, U.S. Attorney Michael Heyman “unrecused” himself from this case. “Unrecusal” is not a thing. He recused himself because he’s trying to get a judgeship from Alaska’s Republican senators Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski. I note this simply for the comedic nature of this spectacle. This investigation is itself a corrupt abuse of power on three or four different grounds at once.

Let me share some thoughts on this.

I’ve heard a number of people say they’re “troubled” or “disturbed” or unhappy that this happened. All I can say is that I would really recommend that you toughen up because you simply won’t make it through the next few years, even under the best circumstances. There is no crime here and no possibility of a crime here. This is trolling. At worst, it’s a dirty trick. If it is a dirty trick, it is a special kind since it has been out in the open and has been a staple of Alaska political news for the better part of a year. Election officials in Alaska already took note of the possibility of confusion and added the word “incumbent” after Sen. Dan S. Sullivan’s name on the ballot, as well as “registered Republican” to make certain that no one can be confused as to who is who. State authorities are the only ones permitted to judge this question and arrive at a solution to it, if it requires one. They already have.

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WaPo published a fascinating piece this morning tied to their latest poll of Kansas. The headline, figurative if not literal, is that they came up with a result that shows incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall not behind Adam Hamilton, but way behind. But they don’t buy their own result. What’s fascinating and laudable is that polls like this, this late in the cycle, often never get released or they get adjusted to bring them more into line with pollsters’ expectations or the consensus of other polls. But here the Post made the decision to release the poll as is and pull back the veil on all the internal details and decisions they made to get the poll as close to what they think is accurate as they could.

Differential response has been the bane of pollsters for more than a decade. We know that no one answers the phone (or the text message) when pollsters get in touch anymore. The problem is that Republicans and Democrats “never” respond at slightly different rates. And even more specifically, the slice of usually disaffected voters that Donald Trump has repeatedly activated when he’s on the presidential ballot are the most poll-resistant of all. So a huge amount of what has happened in the polling industry over the last decade is pollsters trying to find ways to tweak numbers in some coherent way to adjust for getting too few of those poll-shy Trump voters. (And to be clear, this isn’t the old idea that they’re embarrassed to say they support Trump. They just don’t want to talk to pollsters.) Further complicating the issue is that that activation — and the polling misses tied to it — doesn’t seem to happen in midterm elections, based on 2018 and 2022.

We’ll be live on YouTube at 1 p.m. ET today to recap the week’s headlines and talk about the election. Today, special guest Josh Marshall will be on the show. That is right — the founder of TPM himself will join me, Nicole Lafond and Hunter Walker. Hope to see you at 1 p.m.

As we get ready for the final days of the 2026 midterm campaign, I wanted to flag some key parts of our coverage. First, don’t miss our midterms liveblog which you can find on the front page and also at this link. We’re starting with a focus on election interference issues and then we’ll shift toward broader Election Day news and results as we move into next week. Next, the TPM team has done a comprehensive analysis of just who certifies election results in each of the Senate swing states and what funny business they can pull. You can see that here. We also have our take on which 13 races we think will define the midterms, which you can read here. Finally, join us here Tuesday night. For the first time we’re going to be doing live video coverage of election night. Think of it as comparable to what you might see on CNN or MS NOW but with more insight about how to understand the results, what’s happening in key counties and precincts rather than just the toplines and just TPM level analysis. I hope you’ll join us.

No big news or even original analysis in this post, just a general observation. I was just looking at the VoteHub Senate predictions. This is a relatively new entrant into the election modeling/forecasting world. They’re a bit more cautious than Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, seeing the most likely outcome as Democrats taking 52 seats versus 53. That’s probably actually technically the median result of running numerous modeling simulations. In any case, I was looking at the categories in which they place different races. For instance, they put Texas, as “Lean D”, so more likely to flip than Ohio, Maine and Iowa. I’m not sure that’s wrong. But it’s just wild to see.