Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now the US ambassador to Israel, went on Twitter yesterday and called the siege of a Palestinian family’s West Bank home by a group of Israeli settlers, a “horrific act of terror.”

Now what’s happening there is that and worse. In many ways what’s been happening in the West Bank for the last year and a half is worse than what is happening in Gaza, though the death toll is orders of magnitude less. But this isn’t Mike Huckabee. He’s one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement and the most violent and nationalistic parts of it.

So what’s up here?

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I noted a few days ago how many of the news stories of the day are knock-on effects of earlier episodes of Trump’s cupidity or grandiosity. Airport Food Truck-Gate goes back to the wildly corrupt and unconstitutional personal gift of a plane; the Reflecting Pool prosecutions go back to his whim and rushed decision to make the bottom of the Reflecting Pool blue and then the way in which he was embarrassed when his no-bid contractors messed it up. I want to return to one aspect of the plane story.

Yes, it’s corrupt, silly, stupid, etc. But Trump got the gift from the royal family of Qatar. Qatar isn’t any gulf state. It’s not UAE or Saudi or Kuwait. Qatar’s regional brand, their niche in the complex geopolitics of the Gulf, is that they’re close to both sides. They host a U.S. military base. They have decent relations with the U.S. They also have close relations with Iran. They were until recently the host of Hamas.

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Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made the same argument a number of times — most recently with TPM Reader AB whose email dispatch you can read below. I wanted to share it with you because it informs my way of understanding these things.

After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary last year, there were so many powerful people eager to take him down and so many ways it would be easy to do it. It’s very, very challenging to navigation the transition from a lefty/social democratic/identity politics milieu to a broader society-wide electorate. Obviously New York City is a very blue city. It’s not Wisconsin or Michigan, let alone Texas or Ohio. But the same general point remains. It’s an incredibly challenging needle to thread, one that requires immense, innate political skill. Mamdani fielded all the standard attacks, some fair, some very unfair, and again and again he was able to finesse them. This, to me, was the biggest signal. He’s an immense political talent. Some have it; most don’t; he does.

Of course I have my own issues with him on Israel/Palestine. But even on that issue, perhaps especially on that issue, I saw how he was able to navigate a super challenging electoral thicket. Again and again.

Which brings me to Francesca Hong.

From TPM Reader AB …

I am but one anecdotal data point from Wisconsin, but as a politically engaged liberal in Madison, I’ve had plenty of conversations in the last week that align with your suppositions of how Crowley won.   

While I don’t really identify as a Socialist, I am highly motivated to support ‘socialist’ projects and see them implemented.  I put ‘socialist’ in quotes, because public education, fire dept, and public libraries are all socialist projects — but also pretty basic services. 

That said, for much of the primary, I was all in for Hong — she campaigned relentlessly and leveraged social media deftly, and she was meeting the moment with the piss and vinegar and fight that so many of us crave in this moment. She was also the first and only candidate on the Dem side to take a stand on Data Centers, calling for a 1 year moratorium (ironically, the only candidate in the gubernatorial race to support a 100% ban on data centers was Tom Tiffany’s opponent in the Republican Primary, Andrew Manske). 

Having discussed the results and prediction markets, let me address a different question I saw brought up last night. If the polls have been this wildly off in Wisconsin and Michigan, how can we be confident that Democrats are set for a banner showing in November?

The best answer to this is that you shouldn’t be confident, or, at the very least, certain of anything. But the comparison is mostly apples to oranges. Midterm elections are fairly high turnout affairs and we have lots of historical data about turnout patterns. So the composition of the electorate is fairly predictable. Fairly. Primaries are quite different. It’s a bit like saying you have a hundred kids who are going to be in the school lunch room — a table with the jocks, one with the nerds, one each for the goths (dating myself), the richies and the stoners — and they’re going to vote for student body president. But now let’s say only 20 students are going to show up. It’s a very different result if it’s the goths and nerds who show up vs. the jocks and the richies.

We went late into the evening waiting for absentee ballots in Milwaukee County last night. But Milwaukee County executive David Crowley will become the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, despite it seeming like a certainty that Francesca Hong would be the winner. As of yesterday, every recent poll had shown Hong at least 20 points ahead. The two most recent public polls had her 22 and 25 points ahead. (The most recent poll from Crowley’s own camp showed Hong 19 points ahead!) We’ll come back to the question of why these polls have been so wildly off. But there was a different casualty from the night’s results that I personally enjoyed witnessing because it’s a hobbyhorse or pet peeve of mine — and it seems to be as well of the numbers crunchers/data nerds whose Twitter feeds I watch on elections night. I’m talking here about the “prediction markets.”

John Light has a run-down of results from last night’s major primaries in South Carolina, Wisconsin and Minnesota in this morning’s Brief. The evening saw DSA-backed progressive Francesca Hong lose her bid to become Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate in an upset, prominent election denier Mike Lindell lose his own gubernatorial bid in Minnesota, and more surprises.

Check out John’s post for the TLDR on a busy primary night.

The Democratic Wisconsin governor’s primary is looking a bit like a replay of the near upset in Michigan but with a twist. It looks like the more conventional Democrat (Crowley) is going to beat the progressive insurgent (Hong).

It’s too close to call. But as of about 10:15 p.m. ET it doesn’t look like Francesca Hong is getting the number of votes in the counties she needs them in to win. The current totals show David Crowley with less than a one point margin. But if you look at where the votes are coming from and how many have been counted, it’s probably not that close. One potential wildcard is that if this is really close, Milwaukee County, counts its absentee ballots last, and a non-trivial number were likely cast before Crowley even got back into race. So who knows how that would play out. Assuming Crowley wins this is going to launch a complicated debate about the degree to which this was a pretty gargantuan polling error vs. whether there was just a big, big consolidation of the vote for Crowley in the final days. Either way, the odds currently seem to favor Crowley.

Meanwhile, and as expected, the Trump-backed election denier Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) — who was really a major over-achiever about his 2020 election denialism, both voting against certifying President Biden’s win in key states and signing on to a failed lawsuit to overturn the results in his own — easily won the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin tonight. Khaya Himmelman has more on his devotion to the cause here.

Update 10:31 PM ET: The current results and where the race is likely to end up have tightened a bit. But what looks to be the remaining vote still seems to favor Crowley, just less clearly.

Update II 11:03 PM ET: This race has gotten much, much tighter. The result is much more in doubt. It looks like it will come down to absentee ballots in Milwaukee County, with the uncertainty created by Crowley briefly not being in the race.