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Three Republicans were running in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary. Trump in June endorsed Amir Hassan, a Navy Veteran, former Guantánamo guard, and Department of Homeland Security official. Hassan was up against Thomas Smith, a retired engineer, and Al Lemmo, an anti-abortion activist. In July, Smith suspended his campaign and endorsed Lemmo, who had decried Hassan as a “possible Trojan Horse candidate and lifelong Democrat.”

On Tuesday, Smith, who was no longer running, won a pretty clean victory over his Trump-endorsed former opponent.

Though the AP called Abdul El-Sayed the winner of the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan as I went to publish this post, this race turned out to be much, much closer than people expected or what polls predicted. The margin ended up being just under 1% or about 15,000 votes. We become so entranced by polls that we often fall into thinking that a candidate like El-Sayed bobbled the race at the end or Stevens mounted a comeback. There may have been some late movement. But it’s important to remember that our narrative of the race was built around polls that were simply wrong. Very wrong. It was probably always much closer than people realized. Indeed, the margin is close enough that those polls might actually have shifted the outcome of the race by depressing Stevens’ turnout or juicing El-Sayed’s. It’s a good reminder that whether you’re a volunteer, a voter, an activist, or a campaign worker you play these things out till the very end. Polls are usually right. And they’re a good guide. Except when they’re not. And this was a big “except.”

Tighter than we expected based on the polls, at least!

NBC has called the Democratic Senate primary for Abdul El-Sayed. TPM tends to go with the AP for calls, or wait for multiple networks to call it.

Seemingly based on the NBC call, Mallory McMorrow, a third Democratic primary candidate who sought to occupy the middle ground between El-Sayed and Haley Stevens before dropping out, congratulated and endorsed El-Sayed early this morning.

Update, 6:41 a.m.: With the vast majority of the votes now in, El-Sayed and Stevens are separated by less than 20,000. El-Sayed still leads by roughly a percentage point.

I break down some of the details in tonight’s edition of Where Things Stand here. It’s the third item in tonight’s newsletter, so just wanted to flag it. It was strange.

Here’s a link to the interview in full.

The 2006 midterm is often viewed today as the ur-wave election. Indeed, it’s part of the only example in recent decades of two successive wave elections, something that just 20 years later seems almost inconceivable. What’s less remembered is that almost to the very end of the cycle it was considered a very uncertain thing whether Democrats would be able to retake control of the House of Representatives, which they hadn’t controlled since the 1994 blowout. In fact, if you looked at the numbers — polls, special elections, etc. — it had been pretty clear what was coming for months. To explain this discrepancy — how official D.C. had missed what was coming — many focused on the Foley Scandal which broke in September 2006. (Mark Foley, a lightly closeted House Republican got in trouble for what we’d now call sexting with underage male pages in the House page program and was forced to resign.)

President Trump is now demanding that Iran reach a deal with Oman on the Strait of Hormuz as soon as today or face devastating attacks from the United States. On its face, you can put this in the same bucket of Trump’s last six months: threats about ending Iranian civilization or committing various war crimes or whatever. But this is actually an example of how deep a hole the U.S. is now in, and how rapidly it’s sliding into conceding a system of post-war Iranian tolls on the Strait as a given.

What Iran and Oman are negotiating is an interim agreement in which they will jointly manage a system of tolls (calling them “service fees”) over what is an international waterway. The White House would certainly point out that this is a temporary rather than a permanent deal. But something so fundamental conceded in a provisional or temporary agreement is seldom withdrawn in a final accord. The mix of control and revenue this provides to Iran amounts to a massive strategic gain from the war Trump began back in February. But it seems well on the way to becoming a given in U.S. post-war plans.

In response to last week’s post about AI data centers, I got this fascinating response from TPM Reader RK. Very interesting details and nuanced. But mostly I find it fascinating because it complicates the storyline by placing the data center rebellion in a line of continuity with earlier opposition, in the same or similar communities, to efforts to build wind turbines or solar arrays — stuff liberals obviously think is great.

Intrigued by this post, as I’ve spent the past 2+ years lurking at township halls in Michigan, working on a book about the rising backlash against big companies with big plans to transform how land is used in rural communities. 

It didn’t start with data centers. I was originally interested in how rural communities are pushing back hard against solar and wind farms. In Michigan, you have Gov Whitmer pushing a clean energy agenda, which requires vast swaths of open land. It takes a lot of real estate to replace an oil or gas plant with a solar or wind farm, and that much open space is not available in cities or suburbs. So you wind up in rural areas where voters lean conservative, are skeptical about climate change, and would prefer to see their pleasant landscape left alone. Lots of yelling, recall elections, angry rhetoric as formerly sleepy town halls turn into sights of intense conflict.

Tomorrow is primary day in a number of states. Michigan is the state that will get the most attention. There are several big primaries but the Senate one on the Democratic side will get by far the most attention. It pits Abdul El-Sayed against Rep. Haley Stevens. Unless the polls are wildly far off the mark (not impossible in a primary election), El-Sayed will win handily. About a half dozen polls conducted over the last two weeks show El-Sayed winning by 10 points or more, many in the mid to high teens. Meanwhile the balance of general election polls show Stevens very narrowly beating former Rep. Mike Rogers while El-Sayed very narrowly loses to him.

This is not a large point but it’s one worth articulating explicitly.

Politics, like life, isn’t fair. One of the surest examples of this is that presidencies rise and fall with gas prices. Those presidents usually didn’t really do anything to make them rise or fall. And it’s quite difficult for a president to pull them lower, except on the margins. Donald Trump’s recent, ongoing slide tracks closely with gas prices, repeating a decades old pattern — even down to this later (?) part of the Iran War in which faux ceasefires and collapses drive short term ups and downs. But Trump is close to unique in being more or less 100% to blame for them. Current gas prices are almost entirely because of the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump started that war. And, as I argued last week, he started it more or less out of the blue.