Halloween is right around the corner, and it sure seems like monsters are running the country. This week I’m joined once again by Derick Dirmaier, Hunter Walker and Nicole Lafond to discuss what’s scaring us about the world right now. We’ll also catch up on the week’s headlines, and we’ll name the Person of the Week.

Come hang at 1 p.m. ET!

The New Republic has a new piece out by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach called How the Consulting Class is Eating the Democratic Party. It’s a very interesting piece and I recommend it to you. The following is a series of comments, responses, thoughts, not necessarily in any particular order. That’s in part because this is a big article and in a several different articles bundled into one, some parts of which I agree with more than others.

The basic gist is that you have a Democratic consulting industry based on profit maximization which is burning through Democratic Party patience, commitment, money rather than cultivating them for the long haul. That expresses itself through high-pressure, doomy fundraising asks and by SuperPACs, fundraising vendors, consultants, etc. who spend a huge amount of fundraising dollars on fundraising itself. Here’s one key passage from the piece …

I’m not sure where to start with this. The latest news is some mix of Webistics, Jukt Micronics and Animal House. But here goes. Yesterday we noted that a FiftyPlusOne investigation had led to the outing of “Wedgewood Polls” as a publisher of entirely fake polls. It’s still unclear the precise motives, but some political narrative setting aim and gaming betting markets seem like good bets. The details are wild. (But see the earlier post or FiftyPlusOne’s write-up for more.)

Early this morning I woke to a short item in The Washington Post noting another pollster, SoCal Strategies, had straight up disappeared. By disappeared it meant that overnight its website, Substack and Twitter account had all vanished. In the earlier write-up of the investigation of Wedgewood, FiftyPlusOne had noted that one of the ways it had initially vetted Wedgewood was speaking to people at another polling firm where one or more of the Wedgewood guys had worked. I can’t remember if I’d already heard SoCal’s name come up in this story. But when I saw the Post item I immediately knew it had to be them. Yes, fake polls are a problem. But stuff like we’re seeing here is super rare. They had to be connected.

Here is one of those things we can see on the horizon and it will be important to be ready for. It will become especially important if Democrats take both the House and the Senate.

It’s a given that even with only the House under Democratic control, we’re in for a period of pretty intense inter-branch conflict. Just how intense, whether Democrats will fight as much as their partisans demand … those things we can’t know. But this basic feature of the next Congress is pretty clear. What I’d like to discuss here is a wrinkle in that fabric that hasn’t gotten enough attention.

One interesting dimension of the “Wedgewood Polls” story I discussed last night is that Republican leaders are latching on to it as evidence that all the polls are fake or at least wrong. Normally you might see this as part of election denial or setting the stage for questioning results. Maybe it’s some of that. But this looks much more like trying to prevent the bottom from falling out in an already bad situation. If your core partisans think the election is already lost a chunk of them just won’t show up to vote at all. And that’s how you can take a bad election night and turn it into a disaster.

Here’s a tweet from this afternoon from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) …

A crazy, crazy story unfolding tonight in the online virtual terrain of political social media and poll-watching. It’s late. But I will give you the bare outline. Seemingly out of the blue earlier this evening an outfit called “Wedgewood Polling” put out a press release stating that all but one of their polls had been fake and that the fakery was all part of a “social experiment” to test how easy it would be to produce fake polls that got aggregated on the big aggregation sites and made their way into news stories. If you’re thinking, wait, didn’t I hear something like this last summer? Yes, you did. There was a smaller-scale version of this, with the same “social experiment” rationale back in August. “Wedgewood,” though, released a lot of polls, in a number of high profile races, not just two or three of them. And there’s at least an argument that they meaningfully impacted some Democratic primary races. They certainly helped shape some campaign narratives. They had appeared to be the only independent poll of the Mississippi Senate race and the only one at all since August.

But then it got weirder.

On this week’s episode of The Polltober Show, Kate and Josh discuss whether the story of the midterms can be trusted in this week’s grab bag episode.

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I corresponded with a TPM Reader from the tech world recently who marveled at the political salience of data centers when data centers have been around since the late 90s. Many data centers today are orders of magnitude larger than their pre-AI relatives, gobbling up much more energy, making more noise and physical pollution. But he noted that the bulk of them aren’t nearly that large. These points each have some truth to them, though I think it understates the real-world impact of hyperscaler data centers. And, as I’ve noted, a lot of our collective social angst about data centers and AI is really focused on oligarchy — the way that it appears to be the tech oligarchs’ world and we’re just living in it. The ability for town and county councils to say no to data centers is irresistible precisely because it’s the one case where democratic self-government is in a position to say “NO!” and that’s so contrary to all our other experience these days. But there’s an entirely different vantage point on this question I want to focus on.

The impact of particular data centers in particular places is one issue. But the macro-story is even bigger and more jarring. Axios has a piece this morning about how the housing sector is getting hammered by the hyperscaler AI boom, both buildings and buyers. And as you may have heard the lack of affordable housing is a rather pressing issue in American society today. This applies to everything from inflation/scarcity of the physical building blocks that are used for building housing to the scarcity of capital to fund it. If that sounds overstated look at this chart from a study we discussed late last month and which got written up in various publications.

In my earlier posts on the Habba-Grenell mutual self-immolation spectacle, I’d told you that while Ric Grenell is as nasty as they come, I was skeptical that he was quite dumb or reckless enough to be involved in what Alina Habba and her new husband were alleging.

But I may heve been wrong!

There’s a new report out in Axios that adds a bunch more detail to the story. But before getting to that report, there’s some important context and caveats. I wouldn’t see this new Axios report as quite a “report” in the sense of new reporting that advances the story. It’s better to see this as three players (the White House, Grenell and Habba/Mildon) each of whom are trading a very hot potato back and forth between the three of them and hoping not to be the one left holding it when the music stops. But instead of a literal potato, that lashing out is taking place through new batches of leaks. We need to be clear that each batch of new leaks is from an interested party, with its own goals and agenda. And it may include some false details or more likely ones that are misleading. But on balance each batch of leaks is probably mostly true, helps fill out the emerging picture and sinks both adversary parties (Grenell and Habba/Mildon) deeper into the quicksand.

Today’s world would be a fascinating object of study if one weren’t also living in it. The price of energy isn’t the cause of Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity. But for months it’s been driving it to new depths. The price of oil plateaued in early October, which seemed to blunt some of Democrats’ electoral momentum. On Friday though it jumped up again, with the Brent Crude price hitting $110 a barrel, the highest since May. That was the worst of all possible worlds for Trump and that clearly played a key role in his decision to waive sanctions against Russia. Reuters reports that the prospect of greater supply from Russia knocked oil off those highs in early Monday trading in Asia. That was clearly the main goal of that waiver. But just in the last hour, reports have come out that Ukraine launched a massive volley of 1,000 drones targeting Russian energy infrastructure.