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

Remember the grifter war between Trumpers Ric Grenell and Alina Mildon (nee 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 billioniare. (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 in Alaska. 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.

Regional GOP chair from Indiana sending out a letter reminding the members of the party central committee for the state’s third congressional district that they’re obligated to vote for Republican party candidates …

I don’t want to go poll by poll. You know where to find them. But we have new and pretty bullish new poll data in the battle for the Senate. (Yes, they’re just polls. They can be wrong and all that.) A bunch of polls have come out in the last 48 hours, including two high quality ones (CNN and NYT/Siena). Both show pretty substantial leads for Democrats in key Senate races.

Here are some general observations.

I jest, a bit, in the title. As I’ve told you several times, friends don’t let friends watch the early vote. But there’s one thing I want to point your attention to. I’ll explain in a moment why this leaves me mainly consistent.

There’s one thing that seems to be showing up fairly consistently across the country and particularly in the Deep South. That is a high proportion of generally younger, non-regular Democratic voters. And they tend to be less white, relative to the rest of the electorate. In a number of Deep South states you’re seeing high turnout for non-regular Democratic voters which in states like Mississippi for instance means mostly Black voters.