Brendan Carr Threatens News Broadcasters Over ‘Fake Polls’

Brendan Carr, Trump’s attack dog at the FCC, is warning the polls are “fake,” and that he’s ready to do something about it.

“During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm,” he claimed on X.

“Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations,” he added, adopting Trumpian terminology and capitalization.

There’s something to this; as we’ve noted on TPM, there’s been a weird spate of truly fake polls, many seemingly created by AI. Fake polling outfits have been discovered twice in recent months; when exposed, the people behind them claimed they were simply conducting a “social experiment.” It looks, more realistically, like a bid to rig the betting markets.

But there’s also a long tradition of both sides — and especially Republicans — crying foul when they don’t like what polls are saying. Trump’s movement has taken this to a new level in recent years, denouncing information it doesn’t like as fake and a bid to, as Carr described it this week, “interfere” in the “regular functioning of the electoral process.” Trump’s ridiculous and now-dismissed lawsuit against Ann Selzer — the storied pollster whose very-wrong survey in 2024 showed Harris winning Iowa — is one recent, dramatic example of this.

Carr’s invocation of the term “news distortion” describes a real violation of rules on which the FCC is empowered to take action, but this is not that. “Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should ​answer for it, but broadcasters ​who report publicly available polling ⁠data should never be punished when a poll is wrong,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the Democratic commissioner on the FCC’s board, said. “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do ​not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

Given this, it makes sense to see Carr’s message as primarily aimed at Trump and his allies, a form of cope, as Republicans fret that the grim numbers for their side ahead of the midterms will send the message to voters that it’s not worth turning out. The latest scandal around a fake pollster — “Wedgewood Polls” — arrives at a convenient time for this push, allowing Republicans to dramatically overstate “Wedgewood’s” influence.

“I’ve been sounding the alarm that the polls are WRONG,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote in an X post flagged by Josh Marshall last night. “IGNORE THE POLLS, and GO VOTE,” he wrote. “We have 13 days to SAVE AMERICA!”

Senate Intelligence Democrats Issue Warning About Election

The top Democrats on congressional intelligence committees said yesterday that they fully expect the Trump administration to claim “foreign interference” next month as it seeks to undermine confidence in the election.

• Democrats said they planned to counter this messaging if they have reason to think it is false. “If, at noon on Election Day, the president announced that the Iranians have undertaken operation, I’m on TV saying ‘I’m Gang of Eight and I have received no such briefing, no such information, and I have no reason to believe that this is accurate,'” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking member on the House intelligence committee.
• “Now, does that end the crisis? No, but that’s the first step,” he added.
• The idea of foreign interference has loomed large for election denialists, who claim, for various baseless reasons, that other countries can control our voting machines, and that this is cause for Trump to declare a national emergency or for his administration to take other, drastic actions.
• Jared Holt, a longtime researcher of the far-right, writes that Trump-aligned figures are increasingly talking about elections as a “national security” issue, but that broader calls for a national emergency declaration around the 2026 midterms have not really caught on within the online spaces where Trump’s most hard-core supporters gather.
• A recent poll by ABC News and the Washington Post found that “7 in 10 lack confidence that President Donald Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.”

Tabs

• Republicans have relentlessly spread the myth that James Talarico is himself trans, or has pro-trans positions that they assume will turn off Texas voters. A fascinating investigation by the 19th and Uncloseted Media finds that these claims and conspiracy theories were very much not in the discourse ahead of Talarico’s run. In the day and a half after he won the primary, these messages exploded across social media, pushed by prominent Republican and reactionary accounts. It’s the most cut-and-dried look I’ve seen at the coordinated efforts by online influencers to shape the conversation — often in ridiculous or false ways — during this year’s midterm.
• Crypto-aligned donors have spent a whopping $55 million opposing Sherrod Brown’s run for Senate in Ohio, Politico reports.

Man of the Hour

This one is a weird one. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that Marty O’Donnell, running as a Republican for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, runs an online forum where neo-Nazi rhetoric abounds. One user mused that the Nazis “did some good things” and another asked, “Was Hitler really an evil guy?” Another odd detail of this story: The forum is devoted to the “Halo” video game franchise, for which O’Donnell, the candidate, wrote the music. When he decided to run for Congress, he suggested to the die-hard gamers on the site that they become “The Marty Army,” which, apparently, they did. O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent, Susie Lee, is favored to win.

Are We at War?

“The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections,” the New York Times reports.

There’s a lot to pay attention to this year. With Democrats putting up seemingly fantastical numbers in the polls, the map is expanded in ways that no one thought possible a year ago. Is Texas in play? Is Kansas? Looming over it is Trump’s cult of personality, and the lie that any election in which he or his allies run, they win.

This list is an attempt to pinpoint races that tell the story of where America is at this November, explain why, from TPM’s perspective, these races matter, and look ahead to the conversation we’ll be having in coming months.

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1. Peggy Flanagan (D) / Michelle Tafoya (R) — Minnesota Senate

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism. 

What to know:

Michelle Tafoya (R) has been doing well in polls in recent months, showing her within a few points of Peggy Flanagan (D) in what is normally a solidly blue state. That’s inspired the Trump administration to pull out all the stops to put its finger on the scale, rebooting the racial panic it tried to stoke last winter over the state’s Somali population. The capstone of that effort is the administration’s legal gambit to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar (D). It seems unlikely that this is going to land well in a state still recovering from this year’s federal invasion, which claimed the lives of two U.S. citizens. If Flanagan wins, as it still seems she will, Minnesota could end up as a prime candidate for Trump to target with his expected election interference. 

What do the polls say?

It’s close. 

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2. The Five Congressional Seats Texas Republicans Redrew Their Map to Win

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Voting rights. 

What to know:

There were few congressional districts in Texas that went untouched by the legislature’s late-2025 redistricting bonanza, carried out, at Trump’s behest, in a mid-cycle gerrymandering bid to help Republicans hold the House regardless of voters’ wishes. Texas Republicans were the first to answer Trump’s call, and the party salivated over the boon they could extract from the giant state. Now, however, it appears that the Texas GOP may have overplayed its hand. In two heavily redrawn districts along the border, Texas’ 28th and 34th, Democrats stand a real chance. After all of Republicans’ work, Cook Political Report rates one, the 28th, represented by Vicente Gonzalez (D), as a “toss-up,” and another, the 34th, represented by Henry Cuellar (D), as “leans Democrat.” GOP spending patterns show that they are not taking the other three — the 9th, the 32nd and the 35th — for granted either. In order to create those five, theoretically pro-GOP districts, many other districts had to give up some Republican votes, ironically turning much of the state into a battleground where Democrats, in the right cycle, could snatch back some seats . 

What do the polls say?

As usual with House races, there aren’t many public polls. But following the Republican money suggests that they are getting uneasy here. 

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3. Troy Jackson (D) / Susan Collins (R) — Maine Senate

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Separation of powers, expanding Democrats’ map. 

What to know:

Sen. Susan Collins (R) has been Democrats’ white whale for multiple cycles now, a talented politician who has defied political gravity and hung on in a state that’s only getting bluer. When Democrats’ first choice, Graham Platner, imploded after he was accused of sexual assault, they desperately grappled around for a replacement, landing on former state Senate leader Troy Jackson (D), who put together a lightning-fast nomination campaign. Jackson has not quite made up for lost time, with his truncated campaign and lack of Platner’s charisma keeping this race tight enough to make Democrats nervous.   

He’ll hope to get a boost from ballot mate Hannah Pingree (D), who seems comfortably bound for the governor’s mansion.

What do the polls say?

Recent polls have given Jackson a small edge, but it’s a nail-biter. 

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4. Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson (D) / Marshall Rawson (R) — Florida House District 10

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism.

What to know:

Even in today’s Republican Party, it’s rare that you have someone who attended the Charlottesville white supremacist rally run for a state House seat. But Marshall Rawson (R) is one such candidate. Rawson activism with a neo-Confederate group called League of the South has been known for a decade, but it didn’t emerge until after he won his primary that he had attended the biggest white supremacist rally in a generation, at which participants famously chanted “Jews will not replace us.” TPM broke the story of Rawson’s attendance in September. 

What do the polls say?

The Florida House district is extremely Republican, and Rawson will likely win. 

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5. Jon Ossoff (D) / Mike Collins (R) — Georgia Senate

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism, election denial. 

What to know:

This race is one of several that will determine control of the Senate. But it also features perhaps the most extreme candidate running for the chamber this cycle, Mike Collins (R), who not only is slavishly loyal to president Trump, but has joked about killing immigrants, retweeted a video of white university students making monkey sounds at a Black woman, and cheered the January 2026 FBI raid on Fulton County’s election office with a since-deleted post on X: “Go get ‘em Kash.” Given this, it may not be surprising that he has constantly been asked to explain why so many white nationalist and anitsemitic figures have turned up in his campaign, congressional office, and family. What has been surprising, though, is his complete inability to answer for it. In recent debates, Collins has fumbled through questions about these connections, and refused to concede Trump lost the 2020 election.

What do the polls say?

Collins’ opponent, incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff (D), is ahead. 

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6. Sherrod Brown (D) / Jon Husted (R) — Ohio Senate

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Expanding Democrats’ map. 

What to know:

There was a time when Ohio picked the president. That broke down in 2020 when Trump won the state by 8 points despite losing reelection. It has trended increasingly red in recent years, raising the question of whether a Democrat can still win statewide. If one can, the conventional wisdom goes, it is Sherrod Brown (D) in 2026. His opponent, Jon Husted (R), has struggled to distance himself from the many data centers he brought to Ohio during his time as lieutenant governor, and that the public now adamantly opposes. If Democrats can’t pick up this seat with an optimal candidate in an optimal cycle, it’s hard to see when they ever would. 

Elsewhere on the Ohio ballot, the contest for governor between former state health department director Amy Acton (D) and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R) is also competitive. Ramaswamy has struggled throughout his campaign to connect with voters and to hit baseballs. Some polls have Acton up by as many as nine points. The race is wrapping up on a particularly nasty note, with an attack ad featuring Acton’s mother — long estranged from the candidate after she stayed with the man who sexually abused Acton when she was a child — to paint Acton as a liar. The Ramaswamy campaign doubled down amid the ensuing outrage, calling Acton a “serial fabulist.”    

What do the polls say?

Acton is running a tick ahead of Ramaswamy, but both that race and the Senate one are extremely close, the Democrats having a slight edge.

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7. Secretaries of State races, including in New Mexico, Arizona and Georgia

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism, voting rights, election denial. 

What to know:

The secretary of state’s office may have gone without much attention before the Trump era, but no longer. The official who oversees elections in key states is in the cross-hairs of those who believe the myths that election was stolen in 2020, and that widespread fraud and non-citizen voting continues to help Democrats. In Arizona and New Mexico, two election denial activists are themselves on the ballot, running for the role. In Georgia, the Republican candidate has reportedly said there were “irregularities” in the 2020 election but has stopped short of claiming Trump won. That candidate, Tim Fleming (R), has also repeated false claims about mail-in ballots being used to commit voter fraud and has been evasive about whether he would be ready to do as his would-be predecessor, Brad Raffensperger (R), did and stand up to Trump. Fleming did tout that he has voted for the president six times during a debate in May. When you have a Republican administration that has shown it is hellbent on seizing the constitutional right to administer elections from states, it’s pretty crucial to have people who are not election deniers serving in those roles in the lead up to 2028. 

What do the polls say?

Too little polling to say anything conclusive.

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8. Adam Hamilton (D) / Roger Marshall (R) — Kansas Senate

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Expanding Democrats’ map. 

What to know:

Though everyone is surprised that a Democrat may be on the cusp of winning a Senate election in Kansas, the party has experienced electoral success in the state before — and relatively recently. Current, term-limited Gov. Laura Kelly (D) won in 2018 and again in 2022, riding, the first time, the backlash to Trump and, the second time, the backlash to Dobbs. Now, Democrats could strike gold again with popular Methodist minister Adam Hamilton (D), who is up against the uniquely unlikeable and scandal-hobbled incumbent senator, Roger Marshall (R). This is the kind of race where Democrats will need everything to go right, but they at least have secured themselves a candidate compelling enough to put the state into play, and possibly to give Democrats a blueprint for other deep red state races. Elsewhere on the ballot, polling shows a competitive gubernatorial contest between state senators Ty Masterson (R) and Cindy Holscher (D).

What do the polls say?

Hamilton v. Marshall is as close as can be. Holscher is running a few points behind Masterson.

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9. David Crowley (D) / Tom Tiffany (R) — Wisconsin Governor

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism, voting rights, election denial.

What to know:

Tom Tiffany (R) is a weird character, and Wisconsin is important. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) announced last summer that he would not seek a third term in office, creating an open race for governor in Wisconsin for the first time since 2010. Tiffany, a member of Congress, has done nothing to engender confidence that he would support free and fair elections in the state. The main problem with the Trump-backed Tiffany is the extent to which he threw his weight behind overturning the results of the 2020 election. Tiffany didn’t just vote against certifying President Biden (D) as the winner of the election in Arizona and Pennsylvania (he vowed to do the same for Wisconsin but that vote was interrupted by the mob of Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol), he also joined a Ken Paxton (R)-led effort to throw out Wisconsin’s election results after Trump lost. His election denialism continues to this day, too — in June he embraced the FBI’s investigation into the 2020 election in Wisconsin. 

But Tiffany is no exception to the trend that’s emerged in recent weeks, as Republicans try to distance themselves from the deeply unpopular president who is not on the ballot but wants voters to pretend he is. In September, Tiffany’s campaign conceded “Joe Biden won” when asked about the 2020 results. Even then, his campaign still involuntarily offered to “cooperate with law enforcement on investigations” into Wisconsin elections.

What do the polls say?

Close, but Crowley seems slightly ahead. 

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10. Phil Weiser (D) / Viktor Marx (R) — Colorado Governor

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism.

What to know:

Viktor Marx (R) is a unique character well-suited to our unique political moment. Over his years as a Christian nationalist leader, author, and self-described “high risk missionary,” the Republican Party nominee for governor in Colorado has boasted of having personally rescued thousands of people from conflict zones and of attaining multiple black belts in various martial arts. His impressive resume is not limited to the earthly realms, however: he has also, in his telling, battled demons and faced down Satan himself, biographical details TPM has covered with interest. Critics have questioned Marx’s claims. He’s likely to lose to the Democratic nominee, Phil Weiser, potentially dragging fellow Colorado Republicans down with him. 

What do the polls say?

Marx is almost certainly going to lose. 

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11. Kristen McDonald Rivet (D) / Tom Smith (R) — Michigan’s 8th Congressional District

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism, election denial. 

What to know:

This is a weird one. The Republican candidate Tom Smith won his nomination by accident, likely due to racism. (Smith actually dropped out of the race in July and a different Republican, a Navy veteran and former law enforcement officer, had earned Trump’s endorsement in the primary. The Trump-backed candidate’s name was Amir Hassan, and, well, as one GOP strategist put it to Politico in August, the “GOP base was reluctant to support a dude named Amir Hassan.” Hence, Michigan voters elected the white-bread sounding Tom Smith, who was no longer running.) TPM later learned and was first to report that Smith attended protests in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 and live-tweeted the whole experience from “Jar Head Salsa,” a Twitter account for the food company he runs with his son. 

What do the polls say?

There aren’t many polls of this race, but things are not looking good for Tom. For starters, Kristen McDonald Rivet (D) has wildly out-raised him. As of the beginning of this month, the Democrat had raised about $5 million in donations and contributions to her campaign. Tom’s raised about $250,000. 

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12. Missouri ballot amendments 

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Voting rights, abortion. 

What to know:

You may recall one of the few bright spots to come out of the 2024 elections was the passage of an amendment that enshrined the “right to reproductive freedom” in the Missouri Constitution. The measure passed 52% to 48% and protected abortion in a state led by politicians who would outlaw it if given the chance. Now, the Missouri General Assembly is asking voters to repeal that same constitutional amendment that they voted into law just two years ago. Amendment 3 would ban abortion in Missouri with exceptions only for medical emergencies, fetal anomaly, rape and incest. The measure would also ban gender-affirming care for minors. Missouri Republicans are gambling that some mixture of low turnout and confusing ballot language will help them thwart the clearly articulated desire of their constituents.

That perversion of democracy will sit alongside its triumph, as Missouri voters will also get the chance to vote up or down a maximal Republican gerrymander, despite state officials’ best efforts. The legislature passed the map last year, gerrymandering Black and Democratic voters in the Kansas City area out of electoral power, then tried to shield the new map from the state’s referendum voting process. They failed, due mostly to the still-normal Missouri Supreme Court — which, as we predicted, those same politicians are now looking to dismantle and MAGA-fy. 

What do the polls say?

There’s limited polling of these measures.

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13. Matt Dunlap (D) / Paul LePage (R) — Maine’s 2nd Congressional District

Why is this race especially important to TPM?

Extremism.

What to know:

Paul LePage (R) is an old school TPM character: He was Trump before Trump, he often jokes. A trailblazer on the hard right, he denounced immigrants as “the enemy” and labeled one political opponent a “socialist cocksucker” a full decade ago. He looms large in Maine, where he served as governor from 2011 to 2019. The district in which he is now running — Maine’s 2nd — covers a huge portion of the state, the largely unpopulated north. Republicans often win it, though for the last several years it’s been held by Jared Golden (D), a conservative Democrat who is retiring. Matt Dunlap (D), a much more mainstream Democrat, is running against LePage to replace Golden. It’s been conventional wisdom that Dunlap is too progressive for this district, though a big enough blue wave could net the seat anyway. Recent polls show Dunlap ahead. Cook Political Report rates it “lean Republican.”

What do the polls say?

Dunlap seems to have a slight lead. 

Josh Kovensky, Hunter Walker and Christopher Mathias contributed reporting.

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) …

Don’s ‘Dividends’

Republican incumbents and candidates facing data center outrage back home have been trying to get President Trump to land where he just landed on data centers for months, as the party works to develop some sort of concrete campaign position for candidates on an issue that has sparked ubiquitous backlash across the nation.

Republican leadership and Trump’s allies, for their part, attempted to carve out a compromise lane for candidates to operate within on the campaign trail, as Trump made his position on the matter clear: he’s in bed with Big Tech and, thus, entertaining no nuance. Both Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Vice President JD Vance tried to obscure Trump’s obstinance on data centers by suggesting in August and September that the tech companies expanding and building them need to cover their electric costs, either by “putting power back into the grid,” as Vance suggested, or by finding ways to make the data centers “self-sufficient.”

“They ought to be able to take care of their own utilities, their own power, and that ought to be a given any place they go in the country. But they shouldn’t be going places where there isn’t support for them at the local level,” Thune told a local South Dakota TV station in September.

Another Senate Republican, Jon Husted, is locked in a heated campaign in Ohio that is also foundering under the weight of the data-center backlash. I’ve written before about the data center skeletons in Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-OH) closet, left over from his time as lieutenant governor. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has skillfully spun this baggage into a pretty compelling attack operation. Husted then mounted an ultimately unsuccessful gambit to try to get Senate Dems to help him pass legislation that would help him on the campaign trail, which I wrote about here.

But the crux of the matter is this: Husted was pushing to pass a bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, that would direct state utility regulators to consider implementing new standards that ask Big Tech companies to cover the cost of electric bills and the grid updates needed to run their data centers.

Officials in the Trump administration in August were even working to convince tech and utility companies to sign a pledge to prevent AI model-driven electricity cost hikes.

This is all to say, Republicans have been trying to stand in this lame space between support for Big Tech and its wild enthusiasm for data centers and AI, and Americans’ bipartisan outrage about the risks to their communities and their finances that come along with the facilities. And Trump has not let them, determining a few months back that anyone who is against data centers — and the strain they place on local resources — is “backwards and poor.”

Now, just shy of two weeks from Election Day, he’s come around to other Republicans’ position. In a Truth Social post this morning, Trump “mandated” (whatever that means) that tech companies “make their own electricity” and pay communities that host the facilities “dividends” (he also put this term in quotes, so unclear if he or anyone knows what that means):

As the President of the United States, I have been watching Data Centers very closely, and have come to a very strong conclusion. New and large, in some cases gigantic, Data Centers are mandated by me to make their own electricity, and give or sell any excess back to the local community, or grid, and therefore there is electric price increase. In fact, there could be a substantial decrease. Other elements likewise! If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a “dividend.” I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck. MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!! GREAT FOR THE U.S.A. President DJT

Republicans have done this to themselves by advocating against AI regulation (state level anti-regulation measures were ultimately stripped from the Big Beautiful Bill before passage, however) and getting in bed with the tech oligarchs gunning to buy off politicians for years. And Democrats struggled with how to message on the matter until the American public invited them to seize on their indignation.

There are a few key races that will reveal whether Trump’s last ditch data center pivot was effective this cycle.

Speaking Of Big Tech Backlash

This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

The Overton window on expanding — or packing or unpacking — the Supreme Court is now wide enough that it’s worth revisiting one inevitable part of the conversation: FDR’s Court-packing proposal in 1937. Misconceptions about the events abound in popular discussions.

Here’s the short version of the story you’ve probably heard: In 1935 and early 1936, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court handed down several decisions whose doctrines threatened important parts of FDR’s New Deal economic policies. After his overwhelming reelection in November 1936, he decided to pack the Supreme Court with six new justices, using the excuse that the sitting justices over the age of 75 weren’t able to handle the Court’s work effectively. Announced in January 1937, the Court-packing plan came as a surprise to political Washington, and immediately met strong resistance. FDR slogged on but the plan suffered several severe blows, including a letter from Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes endorsed by liberal justice Louis Brandeis saying that the Court was completely up to date with its work. Other developments undercut the urgency for the president and his allies, including a decision favoring New Deal economic policies in March 1937 in which swing justice Owen Roberts cast the deciding vote and the retirement in May of conservative justice Willis Van Devanter. When the plan was formally interred in a mid-summer Senate vote, a New York journalist called Roberts’s vote the “switch in time that saved the nine,” and the phrase — and Roberts’s vote — have come to dominate today’s understanding of the episode.  

That version isn’t completely inaccurate and it isn’t a caricature, but it does contain some misconceptions, the most important of which is probably the focus on the captivating “switch in time” phrase. If we think that the story of the Court packing plan has some lessons for us today, it’s important to clear up these misconceptions. Historians have written books about the events surrounding the Court-packing plan and this essay won’t be able to explore all the ins-and-outs of a complicated set of events. Even more, the story has many moving parts, most of which are connected to others, so you can pick pretty much any place to start.

Was the Court-packing plan a surprise?

Yes and no. After one important decision in May 1935 going against the New Deal, FDR held a press conference and said that the Court wanted to take the country back to the horse-and-buggy days. Almost from the start of his first term FDR groused about the possibility that the Supreme Court would stand in the way of what he thought were programs needed to recover from the economic crisis the nation faced. Ideas about “doing something” about the Court floated around Washington starting in 1933, leaked from the administration to favored reporters and discussed at Georgetown dinner parties.

Still, FDR hadn’t directly targeted the Supreme Court during his 1936 reelection campaign. Instead, he regularly attacked the American Liberty League, an advocacy organization founded and funded by wealthy opponents of the New Deal. The League produced a series of pamphlets designed as templates for legal briefs laying out the constitutional arguments against a host of New Deal programs. When FDR went after the League, he was really taking on reactionary legal arguments he feared the Supreme Court would adopt. So, in the guise of the American Liberty League, the Supreme Court was part of the 1936 presidential campaign.

Supreme Court reform of some sort was in the air after FDR’s massive victory in November 1936. The development of the Court-packing plan was a closely held secret within the administration. The content of the announcement on February 5, 1937, was something of a surprise. But no one was surprised that FDR wanted to move some sort of Court reform through Congress.

Was there a switch in time?

No, but maybe yes. On June 1, 1936, the Supreme Court held a New York statute setting a minimum wage for women workers unconstitutional by a vote of 5-4, with Justice Roberts in the majority. Then, on March 29, 1937, the Court held an essentially identical Washington state statute constitutionally permissible by a vote of 5-4, with Roberts in the majority. Coming less than two months after the Court-packing plan’s announcement, Roberts’s “new position” is the switch in time.

It’s been known for decades, though, that Roberts actually cast his deciding vote in mid-December 1936, before the Court-packing plan was announced. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone was absent because he was recovering from a near-fatal illness. The justices divided four-to-four, with Roberts voting to uphold the Washington statute. Stone’s vote was necessary for the new majority but everyone knew that he’d vote to uphold the Washington statute (he’d joined the dissent in the New York case).  The case was essentially over when the Court took its initial vote. The formal vote was delayed until February 6, 1937, the day after the Court-packing plan was announced. Justice Felix Frankfurter later reported that Roberts came up with a lame explanation for his switch, saying that New York’s lawyers hadn’t explicitly asked the Supreme Court to overrule a controlling precedent but Washington’s lawyers did. (The excuse was lame because New York’s lawyers had indeed asked the Court to overrule the precedent, though in a short and somewhat cryptic paragraph.)  Whatever the reason, it didn’t come “in time” — that is, it didn’t come as a response to the February 5, 1937, unveiling of the Court-packing plan.

Remember, though, that Court reform was in the air. Maybe Roberts was picking up what we’d now call “vibes” about a threat to the Court, and maybe the lameness of his explanation was just a cover story for a change induced by the general atmosphere of threats to the Court as an institution.

Was the plan doomed from the start?

No. Vote counters knew that the House of Representatives would accept the plan. All the action was in the Senate, where there was fierce opposition from conservative Republicans and some Democrats, and unease among other Democrats. 

An adept politician, FDR held an ace in his hand, and everyone knew it. He promised one of the seats on an expanded Supreme Court to Senate majority leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas. Robinson found the offer irresistible. He called in all the chits he had with his colleagues, putting together a potential majority for the plan one vote at a time. Political observers at the time weren’t sure what the outcome would be but they were inclined to think that Robinson could pull off a victory for FDR.

The final vote was scheduled for mid-July in an exceptionally hot (and un-airconditioned) Washington. Robinson held a meeting–social gathering where he continued to lobby wavering colleagues. The combination of heat and stress gave Robinson a fatal heart attack. The possibility of a majority for the Court-packing plan in the Senate always depended on personal ties between Robinson and other senators, and, with his passing on, the plan failed. 

Did FDR lose the battle but win the war? How?

Yes, yes, and maybe no. FDR lost the battle over expanding the Court but reached his main war goal — having a Court that wouldn’t completely obstruct his favored programs. As with almost all successful military campaigns, the path to the goal wasn’t straight. The war wasn’t over on March 29 when the nation learned that Roberts had voted to uphold Washington’s minimum wage law. FDR’s legal team worried that Roberts wasn’t going to be a reliable ally going forward — and indeed he wasn’t: a careful modern statistical study shows that Roberts reverted to his conservatism within a year.

The war wasn’t over on May 18, either, the day Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his intention to retire even though the retirement seemingly gave FDR the opportunity to replace a conservative with a reliable supporter of the New Deal. 

Van Devanter had wanted to leave the Court for years, mostly so that he could take care of his medically compromised wife. The obstacle was financial. Van Devanter was something of a penny-pincher, once complaining that he had been overcharged five cents for a package of seeds. With some reason, he worried that his financial condition would deteriorate if he left the Court. As the statutes stood at the beginning of 1937, lower court judges could either retire from the bench and continue to receive their judicial salaries or they could resign and take their pensions. The rules for Supreme Court justices were different. They had to resign, not retire — they could take their pensions, but not their salaries. And that mattered because judicial salaries for retired lower court judges couldn’t be reduced, but judicial pensions for them and for Supreme Court justices could be — and they were, as part of the austerity programs Herbert Hoover and FDR pursued at the Great Depression’s outset. That was what worried Van Devanter, because the statutes didn’t give him the retirement option. He would have to resign and be at the mercy of congressional decisions about judicial pensions. 

Hatton Sumners, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, had long thought that treating Supreme Court justices worse than lower court judges was silly. Some lawyers worried that “retirement” required that the judge be available to serve as needed — something now known as “senior status” — and that the Constitution didn’t allow that for Supreme Court justices. Sumners disagreed. In 1936 he introduced a bill to eliminate the difference. It failed. The next year, with Supreme Court reform on the table, he tried again. With some misgivings, and aware of the important role Sumners would play in shepherding the Court-packing plan through the House, FDR’s lawyers decided that Sumners’s bill wouldn’t undermine support for Court-packing.  The House passed the bill on February 10, the Senate on February 26, and FDR signed it on March 1, whereupon Van Devanter decided to leave the Court.

Why wasn’t the ability to appoint a justice enough to get FDR to abandon the politically costly Court-packing campaign? The answer: Senator Joe Robinson, to whom FDR has promised a court seat. Despite that promise, Robinson wasn’t a full-throated New Dealer and FDR’s lawyers worried that he might end up as unreliable as they feared Roberts would be. FDR took his time filling the vacancy Van Devanter created, with the excuse that Robinson was still needed to push the Court-packing plan through the Senate. A month after Robinson died, FDR nominated Senator Hugo Black to the Court, giving him a reasonably solid five-to-four majority. The next year conservative Justice George Sutherland, who like Van Devanter had wanted to leave the Court for several years, retired, and FDR nominated Solicitor General Stanley Reed to succeed him. 

By then the war really was over. The Supreme Court didn’t invalidate any major New Deal programs after 1937, although it did sometimes interpret major statutes — especially the National Labor Relations Act — in ways less friendly to labor than FDR’s labor allies would have liked. Democrats suffered severe losses in the 1938 midterm elections, mostly because the nation was in a severe economic recession induced by FDR’s too-rapid return to the orthodoxy of balanced budgets — but maybe the Court-packing episode made it easier for some voters to abandon the Democratic Party.

In the even longer sweep, the conservative war against legal liberalism continued. Liberals liked to describe a “New Deal settlement” that coupled judicial deference to legislatures on matters of economic policy with judicial activism on civil rights and civil liberties. Recent scholarship has made the case that conservatives never really accepted the so-called settlement, making some tactical concessions while biding their time — which came toward the end of the 20th century.

Did 1937 set a “precedent” for Court expansion?

Maybe yes, but a lot depends on how you describe the precedent. Focus on the politics of Court size and the answer is that the 1937 episode might have created what the British call a constitutional “convention” against changing the size of the Supreme Court simply to affect predicted outcomes — but that kind of convention can itself be changed when politicians think that it stands in the way of getting something important done. And focus on the politics of the federal courts more generally and the answer is that changing their powers to advance partisan goals is standard practice.

The Court’s size has been fixed at nine since 1869. Before that the Court grew to accommodate national growth — a “good government” reason for changing its size. Sometimes the timing of expansion was affected by partisan concerns. And in the decade of the Civil War, Congress expanded the Court, shrank it, and expanded it again mostly for partisan reasons but with some real “good government” explanation as well. 

FDR’s Court-packing plan was packaged in “good government” terms — too many of the Court’s justices were old and unable to keep up a work pace adequate to needs. That was a fig-leaf covering the partisan motivation and FDR and his allies quickly abandoned it. The fig-leaf that’s offered in today’s discussions is “thirteen circuits, thirteen justices,” but no one really thinks that there’s a strong good-government reason for having one justice for each circuit. The Court-packing plan’s failure might be understood as establishing a convention against changing the Court’s size unless there’s a real “good government” reason for doing so. 

Unwritten constitutional conventions like that are always up for grabs. One problem is distinguishing between practices that persist because no one cares enough to challenge them and practices that persist because people think they ought to follow them. The complicated politics that account for the failure of FDR’s Court-packing plan — Robinson’s death, Roberts’s change in vote, Sumners’s bill and Van Devanter’s retirement — weaken the case for saying that 1937 shows that there’s a convention against changing the Court’s size to affect predicted outcomes. Since then, the issue of the Court’s size didn’t matter enough for anyone to try to do something about it — until now. So maybe having a Court with nine members results from a practice rather than a convention.

Even more, conventions can be fragile — certainly they’re not as robust as provisions written into the constitutional text. A scholar writing in 1925 offered an example. From Washington’s presidency to the early 20th century American presidents stayed on American soil (broadly defined, it turns out). U.S. presidents stayed on the U.S. side of the Mexican border when they met their Mexican counterparts on the bridge connecting El Paso and Juarez. In 1914 Woodrow Wilson reluctantly declined an invitation to England to celebrate the anniversary of the treaty ending the war of 1812. Within five years he went to Versailles, and the convention disappeared. 

The picture is much more clear when we look at the politics of the federal courts generally. Congress has adjusted their powers for good government reasons, of course, but it also has routinely tinkered with the federal courts to change predicted outcomes. When Congress feared that the national courts would rule against workers seeking compensation for injuries, it shunted those cases to state courts. When Congress feared that state courts would treat Blacks badly, they allowed the cases to be shifted into the federal courts. The list goes on and on. Seen in that light, changing the Court’s size is just another example of treating the federal courts as one of the many tools politicians can use to achieve their goals.

Lessons from the past?

One of the first things graduate students in history are told is that they should be wary about drawing lessons from the foreign country that is the past. If lessons are to be drawn, though, they should be drawn on the basis of as full an understanding as possible of what really happened — an understanding informed by the story I’ve told, and of course by the even more complete story that can be found in the historical record.

That Didn’t Take Long

The top election official in Los Angeles County has done a preliminary review of the Trump DOJ’s purported list of alleged noncitizen voters and found it to be … shoddy. Surprising absolutely no one.

Out of DOJ’s list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California, more than 7,000 had Los Angeles County addresses. Dean C. Logan’s office took a sample of 200 of those L.A. voters and found that 1/4 may have been born in the United States, nearly 1/2 were cancelled or inactive voters, and nearly 3/4 had never voted, according to a new court filing:

It’s critically important to frame this properly: Election administrators must always balance making sure ineligible voters don’t vote with assuring that eligible voters aren’t wrongfully denied their right to vote. Make voting rules and regulations too strict and the risk goes up of excluding legitimate voters and not counting their votes.

It’s a balance that Trump and Republicans refuse to strike in their jihad to vilify noncitizen voters and elevate a vanishingly small problem into a reason to distrust election results. It’s telling that they voice more apparent concern about what they call “vote dilution” by noncitizen voting than they do about outright denying U.S. citizens the right to vote and have their vote counted.

In the California case, the shoddy list makes even more stark the incredible demand the Trump administration is suing to impose on the state. It wants California — with voting already underway — to introduce new additional steps into the vote tabulation process: review DOJ’s crap list, segregate all the ballots cast by people on that list, and run a real-time review to confirm whether those voters are citizens. Then — and only then — can California count those ballots.

Note on whom the burden falls here: The Trump administration can supply a flawed and unreliable list, then California — while already conducting a live election — has to run around and jump through the extra hoops that the administration has created for it.

Here’s how a top Los Angeles County election official put it in her own declaration in the case:

Because the County results must be submitted by December 3, 2026, and certified by the State by December 11, 2026, ballots held pending an open-ended federal review may, in practical effect, never be counted. This process would risk disenfranchising voters who are validly registered. The process the DOJ seeks to have the Registrar undertake jeopardizes that core right for potentially thousands of voters, not to mention the finalization of election results, confidence in election results, and the ability to allow new elected officials to be instated in their positions.

I should mention that the administration has offered to “help” California and work together in cooperative fashion to vet the administration’s crappy list, but it’s too precious an offer to need its own debunking:

“We’re not perfect and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in a Monday press conference, anticipating exactly what happened yesterday. “These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens.”

“Kind of the most confident.”

You get it.

Dems Sue Trump for Election Interference

Various Democratic entities filed a new federal lawsuit in D.C. to try to block the worst of President Trump’s attacks on the midterm elections, including his demands to purge voter rolls and not count ballots, his threats against election officials, and his interference in state-run elections:

The Corruption: $50M Woman Edition

Where to even start with this?

The recently remarried Alina Habba, who now goes by Alina Mildon, landed a guaranteed $50 million deal to serve as general counsel of a brand new corporate entity tied to Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, the NYT reports. Among the lowlights:

• The company — Concord Partners, LLC — was formed in Florida on Oct. 22, 2025 by Isabela Herrera, 27, the billionaire’s daughter and a U.S citizen.
• The deal was for $10 million a year for four years, plus bonuses, bringing the total guaranteed compensation to $50 million.
• Mildon “finalized the deal” while she was still the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
• Mildon’s start date was Jan. 1, 2026. By then, Mildon was a senior adviser to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the role she took after being disqualified as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
• President Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini on Jan. 15, 2026.

Mildon denies having any role in the pardon.

The timing of this revelation may be connected to the epic ongoing feud between Mildon and Ric Grenell that has produced a sleazefest of competing allegations of off-the-charts corruption.

Russia’s Failed Attack on Germany

This still hasn’t broken through in the U.S., but over the summer, Russia intelligence launched a drone attack on a cargo plane carrying military assistance to Ukraine while it was parked at an airport in eastern Germany. It was the most dramatic of Putin’s provocations against NATO countries which have been on an uptick since that failed attack.

The WSJ offers a comprehensive overview of that incident and its significance:

The attack was part of a broader effort to position agents, explosives and weapons across Europe to strike targets supporting Ukraine and sow chaos that could strengthen political opposition to military aid for Kyiv, according to investigators and intelligence officials.

Investigators have uncovered networks smuggling explosives, drones and weapons into the EU, along with safe houses and concealed underground caches near airports, arms manufacturers and other potential targets.

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about whether World War III is already underway. I think that’s overdetermined, but it’s also true that we probably won’t notice until we’re deep into it.

‘Mongoloid Moron’

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg writes about being targeted by President Trump as a “Mongoloid Moron” in the Oval Office yesterday — an outburst that the White House happily touted on social media.

Who Gets to Define We the People?

Jamelle Bouie: “[T]he drive to denaturalize Omar is, by itself, a startling attack on the liberty of all Americans. It’s a move that harks back to the worst of the nation’s past — those moments when the government sought to shape, define and ultimately choose who would be ‘the people’ of the United States.”

The Most Rancid Racism

In the racist rants of President Trump and his enablers, Somali Americans are both primitives who eat your pets and ingrates who are undeservedly “living the high life” at your expense:

Stephen Miller claims Somali-Americans in Minnesota are "buying Mercedes, buying BMWs, they buy a nice house, all their kids fly first class all over the world"(This is a lie!)

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T18:37:16.369Z

The only consistency is the rancid appeal to every base human emotion.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

Laura Loomer and Todd Blanche Are Fighting

Josh Marshall has been chronicling the many ways that Trump world is descending into petty feuding ahead of the midterms — and how, in the midst of that, Trump is starting to cut loose those hangers-on who look too much like dead weight. Josh has dubbed stories in this vein “‘Layla’-coda updates” which, TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo eventually explained to me, is a reference to the scene in Goodfellas when Robert De Niro’s character has his crew members killed off, one by one, to avoid sharing the cash from a successful heist. The coda of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” plays in the background as the bodies are discovered.

Anyway.

This dynamic of escalating intra-MAGA feuds and score settling has now come to involve Attorney General Todd Blanche, who has usually managed to hover above it all, studiously going about the work of prosecuting Trump’s enemies. Dragging Blanche into the muck is Laura Loomer.

The dispute between the two improbably involves the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, a 2022 law that allows members of the military, their family members, and others who were exposed to contaminated water on the North Carolina military base to seek compensation from the federal government. Wells on the base are believed to have been contaminated with toxic chemicals, a problem that went on for more than three decades; residents developed a wide range of conditions including cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

Loomer has, for some reason, turned up advocating for these military families, and on X accused associate attorney general Stanley Woodward of “sending these veterans insulting lowball offers designed to insult and belittle their suffering.” She described Woodward as “a lifelong Democrat at the DOJ” and suggested he was plotting to hand North Carolina to the Democrats in the midterms. “He has got to be one of the WORST hires of the second Trump administration,” she said. “But, I tried to warn people.” The message seemed intended to capture Trump’s attention.

Blanche shot back last night. “Laura, you should be transparent with your followers, and you are dead wrong about Stanley,” he wrote on X. “He is a patriot who is fighting for POTUS and the American people every day.”

Blanche went on to take personal responsibility for the Camp Lejeune cases, saying that the DOJ has been “consulting with and keeping the White House counsel’s office and DOW updated along the way.”

“Find a different obsession other than going after one of DOJ’s best fighters,” he concluded.

This dispute does appear to be on Trump’s radar. At a rally in North Carolina last night, Trump cast any DOJ offers that victims found unsatisfactory as part of an effort to keep the money from going to “trial lawyers.” “We want it to go to the families, not to the lawyers,” he said, per a local NPR station.

Trump then grotesquely told the crowd they better vote Republican if they wanted to see the veterans get their money.

“If we don’t win, there’s no money,” he said. “If we do win, you’re getting it.”

It’s not yet clear whether it’s time to cue the “Layla” coda in this story, but it does appear to be yet another example of the brutal midterm environment — Democrats are favored to win up and down the ballot in North Carolina — causing accusations to fly among the president’s allies.

The ‘Manosphere’ Falls on Hard Times?

No one ever found the “Joe Rogan of the Left,” and maybe it doesn’t matter.

• As I noted in July, the New York Times recently conducted a fascinating analysis that found traffic to and engagement with various right-wing media personalities — such as Benny Johnson and Steven Crowder — to be falling.
• Puck this week reports on research from the Democratic-backed Speaking With American Men project that finds male voters holding increasingly negative opinions about a range of male, Republican-aligned influencers, from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson to the recently arrested Tate brothers.
• Axios flags research from Cygnal’s 2026 Young American Men survey also finding Trump and Vice President JD Vance to be unpopular with this demographic.
• It is, of course, unclear that the podcasts were ever truly the problem — or even a significant part of the problem. I still have not heard a convincing explanation that fully captures how to think about voters post-COVID, anti-incumbent angst, and the role various media play in either inspiring it or piggybacking on it. That angst can be seen prompting instability worldwide, not just in the U.S. — sometimes empowering reactionary parties, but sometimes working against them.
• Regardless, manosphere-aligned influencers are still sowing toxicity into our politics. Christopher Mathias writes for TPM on the campaign by these figures to cast Democratic candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s story of being raped earlier this year as a hoax intended to attract votes.

Tabs

• Don Jr. disagrees with his dad about the Iran war, two unnamed people tell The Atlantic for an article that sure reads like the younger Trump trying to distance himself from one of the administration’s least popular decisions.
• Elena Kagan denounced a series of recent Supreme Court decisions during an appearance at Catholic University, in particular casting Rucho v. Common Cause, which effectively greenlit partisan gerrymandering, as “deleterious” to our democracy, with its impact on display this year. She also criticized decisions like Citizens United that have opened the doors for a deluge of money in politics. “The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.”

Woman of the Hour

It’s Alina Habba, already locked in a damaging feud with fellow Trump world operator Ric Grenell, and now the subject of a New York Times investigation that finds a Venezuelan billionaire set her up with a gig through which she’ll make $50 million. In exchange, the billionaire, Julio Herrera Velutini, finally got the pardon from Trump he had long been seeking.

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.

Subtle Trump Distancing May Not Be Enough

Republican Rep. Thomas Kean Jr (R-NJ) may be best known on the national scene as the son of the former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean and the Republican member of Congress who piqued curiosities when he missed months of votes earlier this year, later to reveal he had been hospitalized for depression. He’s also the Republican incumbent in a key battleground House race coming up next month where he faces an increasingly popular Democratic candidate in a race that the Cook Political Report now rates as “lean Democratic.”

Projections about the race started to shift in mid-September. While Kean was able to flip New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District back in 2022 (mind you, after the seat went to a Democrat for the first time in decades in 2018) and he won reelection by five percentage points in 2024, President Trump won the district by just about 1 point the same year. So, it was hardly an exercise in bravery when he decided to aggressively break with Trump on a few key issues during debates with his Democratic challenger Rebecca Bennett last month.

But Kean was one of the first Republican candidates this cycle to break with Trump on an issue that TPM has been following closely throughout Trump’s second term, as he innovates on the idea of political retribution against his perceived political foes and those who did not vote for him for president. I wrote about Kean breaking with Trump in detail here, but, in essence, Kean, on the debate stage, stood up for the infrastructure projects that Trump’s White House decided to shut down as part of some Russ Vought-led anti-DEI retribution campaign against blue state and city officials in the New York City/New Jersey area.

“I will challenge anybody who gets in my way, including this president,” Kean said last month, when asked about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding for the Gateway rail tunnel project — a $16 billion infrastructure renovation plan for the tunnels that connect Manhattan to New Jersey.

But the distancing from Trump may not be enough. It appears that Republican congressional leadership has all but written off his reelection campaign as a lost cause. While both House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) have traveled to District 7 to stump for Kean and Bennett, respectively, the New York Times reported last week that there is a pretty glaring sign that the Republican Party has abandoned Kean’s bid. Per the Times:

Top Republican super PACs aligned with President Trump and congressional Republican leadership are cutting off financial support for two Republican House members seeking re-election, according to three people with direct knowledge of the plans.

The decision represents the first instance this cycle of national Republican groups abandoning incumbents as the party scrambles to prevent more widespread losses in the midterm elections.

Officials with the two super PACs decided to cancel all remaining advertising booked for Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr. of New Jersey and Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa over the weekend after internal G.O.P. polling had showed their re-election chances dimming.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, the political action committee aligned with Johnson, is reportedly “redirecting $10 million from the seats it is effectively ceding in Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio and spreading it across 16 new districts, two of the people said,” in the Times’ words.

Campaign finance filings from last week show that Bennett out-raised Kean by more than $2 million last quarter, though Kean still holds a cash advantage overall. Despite signs of a potential flip, Kean’s campaign is projecting confidence he’ll hold the seat.

“This is still a very well-funded effort that will be at parity with our opponents,” Harrison Neely, a spokesperson for his campaign said. “And historically, that hasn’t been the case in this district, we’ve always been outspent.”

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.

If you want your question answered next week, drop it in the YouTube comments on the latest episode of the TPM Show or the Polltober Show itself. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube page for all of our Polltober episodes, livestreams, and other original TPM content!

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This article first appeared at ProPublica.

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

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.

Open and Ongoing Ratfuckery

The Trump DOJ — corruptly deployed by the White House as an unprecedented election interference tool — sure is getting the headlines it wants from its campaign to prosecute alleged noncitizen voting while the midterm elections are already underway:

• NYT: Justice Dept. Charges 28 in California With Voting-Related Crimes
• AP: Justice Department arrests more than 2 dozen in California sweep targeting alleged noncitizen voters
• NPR: DOJ charges 28 in California with voting crimes as election tensions escalate

Even though those stories include the usual caveats — about the rarity of noncitizen voting, Trump’s track record of inflating the risks thereof, and the administration’s disinformation campaign targeting the election — the top-line news remains arrests and prosecutions.

DOJ says it has charged 113 people in 20 states with illegal voting and illegal registration offenses over the last seven weeks. 

The timing is no accident, of course.

Rolling out alleged noncitizen voting prosecutions right before the election instills fear in Black and brown communities, may dampen voter turnout, provides a ready-made excuse for GOP losses, serves as a pretext for challenging/delegitimizing the election results, and generally is a brazen display of ratfuckery.

The DOJ has not been discreet or muted in its approach. It has issued press releases touting its noncitizen voting prosecutions that contain photos of the defendants (albeit with their faces digitally obscured). Yesterday, acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter held a press conference in California — where mail-in voting is already underway — to announce the 28 new prosecutions there, which DOJ has dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”

The arrests weren’t low-key either. The wife of a 72-year-old man from Belize said federal agents showed up at their house before dawn in full tactical gear with guns drawn — along with camera crews and news helicopters. He later appeared in court still in his pajamas. He is reportedly a registered Republican.

The timing is especially glaring because some of the new alleged noncitizen voting cases go back years, to 2020 and earlier. A couple of the new California cases allege fraudulent voter registration as far back as 2002 and 2003. Some of the cases don’t even allege illegal voting per se, but rather making false statements on naturalization paperwork. One lawful permanent resident charged in North Carolina has been in the United States for so long that DOJ identifies her as a “national of former Yugoslavia.”

Why The Timing Is Extra Pernicious

But the timing isn’t accidental for another reason: Bringing these cases so late in the cycle leaves no time to test these allegations in court before the election. If the cases later fall apart, if they’re dismissed, if they result in acquittals, then … too bad, so sad.

The attempted prosecutions will have served their election disinformation purposes, and there’s no way to roll back the clock and undo the damage.

There are already early signs that some of the new prosecutions in California are flimsy. Some of the newly charged immigrants said they had no memory of ever registering to vote, the LA Times reported:

At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.

Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.

Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.

Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.

It’s not uncommon for noncitizens to end up being unknowingly registered to vote during previous interactions with the government. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law,” election law expert Rich Hasen noted.

DOJ’s One-Two California Punch

The new round of criminal cases is happening in parallel with the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against California trying to force it to segregate and not count alleged noncitizen mail-in ballots — again, while voting is already happening.

The administration continues to try to ratchet up pressure on California election officials. In a letter Friday, the DOJ reportedly warned that state election officials who knowingly process ballots cast by noncitizen voters are at risk of investigation.

In a striking admission, acting DAG McCotter, the DOJ’s No. 2, conceded yesterday that the list of some 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters that the administration is demanding California use to segregate ballots may contain some citizens:

WOW. Trump’s #2 at DOJ just admitted this:“There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens. We’re not perfect.”

— Governor Newsom Press Office (@govpressoffice.gov.ca.gov) 2026-10-19T18:25:27.311Z

Ultimately, the most pernicious aspect of this campaign against the phantom scourge of noncitizen voting is the risk that the administration’s sloppiness, indifference, and aggressiveness results in legally cast ballots from U.S. citizens not being counted.

In a 180-degree turn, the Justice Department has gone from its historic role of protecting and defending the individual right to vote to being the leading threat to free and fair elections.

Why California?

I remain puzzled why so much of the Trump administration’s election-interference and disinformation campaign is focused on California. The electoral math doesn’t add up. Thoughts?

Good Read

ProPublica:

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request. 

This scheme appears to have never gotten off the ground.

Just In …

WaPo: A small group of about 10 current and former U.S. national security officials with DoD experience has been discreetly advising state governments and members of Congress on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections.

Quote of the Day

“Our number one risk at this point is the federal government.”—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) on the biggest threat to free and fair elections

Pure Unadulterated Racism

Trump: "You go up to Minnesota — number one place in the entire country for the sale of Mercedes-Benz. And Somalians are buying them. They come here with low IQs and no money and they get rich. Do we feel stupid? Our fraud division is getting them all."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-20T00:27:21.787Z

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Bernadette Greene-Placentia would like you to know the story of her rape is not an “October Surprise.” 

She did not conspire with the media to publish the graphic details of her sexual assault on the same day early voting ballots were sent out to voters in Arizona. Her harrowing account of being bludgeoned and violated by two men in the middle of the night in a suburban parking lot is not a “hoax” she concocted to win over voters’ sympathies. Her fragmented memories of the attack, and her initial reluctance to go to authorities, are not evidence of an elaborate lie, nor of a nefarious Democratic plot to wrest control of Congress, as some right-wing influencers have suggested. It was hard enough coming forward to say she was raped, she told TPM. Now she has to contend with all these men, with millions of followers online, loudly asserting that maybe she wasn’t. She can’t help but remember that these men publicly trying to poke holes in her story have mothers. “Is this really how you were raised?” she wants to ask them.

Democrats Get Ready to Probe DOGE

Ahead of the 2024 election, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson joked on a livestream that Musk was “fucked” if Democrats won the White House. Musk had trollishly asked on Twitter why, despite two Trump assassination attempts, no one tried to assassinate Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That, he and Carlson mused, was enough for the Democrats to throw him in prison. “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” Musk said. “Will I see my children, I don’t know.”

Most American households were not eagerly awaiting a set of tax data that was supposed to come out from the Internal Revenue Service in July. Now the data is missing, with little explanation — and that’s attracting growing attention.

‘We Are Not Impressed by Their Case’

The Trump administration’s Justice Department has escalated its pre-midterm crusade against California, using the myth of widespread noncitizen voting as its justification for novel and bizarre adventures to try to undercut trust in elections ahead of the midterms.

Just last week, the DOJ sent a letter to election officials in Los Angeles demanding election administrators take a series of actions after claiming it found thousands of noncitizens who were registered to vote in the state. DOJ officials laid out a list of steps they wanted local election administrators to take to ensure that these people, who it alleged were “likely noncitizen voters,” didn’t receive mail-in ballots or have their votes counted.

Since then, the Justice Department has also sued the state of California and threatened investigations and the potential prosecution of any election worker in the state who might knowingly process ballots from noncitizen voters. The DOJ has previously issued similar warnings to election officials across the nation.

Noncitizens voting in federal election is vanishingly rare and there is no evidence to show that it has impacted the outcome of any federal election. But President Trump and his allies roll out the conspiracy theory that it is widespread anytime he loses, or thinks he’s about to lose, an election, as TPM has reported for years.

On Monday, federal law enforcement arrested 11 people and charged 28 people residing in California, accusing them of making false statements and submitting fraudulent voter registrations. Each of the people charged have legal status in the U.S. but are not U.S. citizens, the DOJ said. The Justice Department is calling the sweep of arrests “Operation Protect the Vote.” The DOJ in an online statement accused California election officials of not properly maintaining the state’s voter rolls and ignoring its wild claims that there are some 20,000 noncitizens registered in the state.

My colleague David Kurtz got into the DOJ’s potentially unfounded accusations in Morning Memo a bit more last week, which you can catch up on here. There are plenty of reason to be suspicious of the DOJ’s claim that it has found tens of thousands of noncitizens on California’s voter rolls. The DOJ has been trying to force states to hand over their voter lists and/or to run their voter rolls through a faulty federal database that has a poor track record with finding eligible voters to be ineligible. Courts across the nation have blocked the DOJ’s campaign to seize voting records from states.

California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters on Monday that there is not a widespread issue with voter fraud in California and described the DOJ’s arrests as “a drop in the bucket” of the state’s 23 million registered voters.

“They provided no — no basis, fact, evidence, substantiation, backing for that allegation, all they provided was a list of people and nothing about why they’re purportedly ineligible,” Bonta said, referencing the DOJ’s claims that it’s identified 20,000 noncitizens on California’s voter rolls.

“If they have such information we would be happy to review it, but they’ve provided none. And what words they’re using are very important,” Bonta continued. “They’re not saying that ‘we have conclusive proof,’ they’re not saying ‘we know,’ they’re not even saying ‘we think we know.’ They’re saying ‘we believe it’s likely.'”

Bonta then brought up the last time that the Justice Department claimed to have found tens of thousands of noncitizen voters in Nevada earlier this year. Those claims fizzled out entirely.

“We are not impressed by their case, we are not impressed by their position. Our north start is the law and the facts and they have neither on their side,” he said. “We believe their case is meritless and we’ll make our position very clear in court.”

Steve Bannon has spent years trying to make himself the face of resurgent white resentment in America, championing the Trump administration as a means to punish the movement’s enemies while pushing the president to try for an unconstitutional third term.

But now, with the president’s approval rating at historic lows and the upcoming midterms set to wrest Congress away from the Republican Party, Bannon is looking downballot, stumping for Bo French, the Texas politician who has turned his race for a job regulating oil and gas in the state into a vehicle to test how far open racism can get you in politics.

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.

Trump Calls Judge ‘Crazed Lunatic’

Over the past week, the East Potomac Park case has morphed from another of President Trump’s personalist projects in D.C. to a burgeoning confrontation between the executive and judicial branches.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes had, by her own admission, bent over backwards to accommodate the Trump administration as it defended its supposedly nascent plan to remake a popular park in the heart of monumental D.C.

But then — in violation of her orders that the administration provide advanced notice and a chance for the court to intervene before undertaking any major projects in the park — the National Park Service removed hundreds of trees from the park’s golf course after providing scant notice just before 5:00 p.m. ET on a Friday before a holiday weekend.

That led to a fiery hearing in front of Reyes on Columbus Day in which she deplored the conduct of the administration and its DOJ attorneys. The hearing culminated with Reyes temporarily blocking any more tree removals at the park.

In the kind of self-defeating move that’s become common in cases where Trump has taken a close personal interest, the Trump DOJ responded to the courtroom woodshedding with a defiant motion on Friday evening calling on Judge Reyes to step aside from the case.

The motion to disqualify was over the top, accusing her of “histrionics,” “bias,” “disdain,” “open hostility,” and “animosity” toward the Trump administration in this and other cases.

The motion was signed by a single attorney: Stanley E. Woodward, Jr., the No. 3 official at DOJ.

Judge Reyes last night denied the motion to disqualify herself but not before eviscerating the Justice Department again: “That is a serious charge. The Court answers it. With the record.”

With that prelude, Judge Reyes spooled out pages of transcripts from prior proceedings in the case that rebutted the administration’s claims against her, before concluding:

It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the Government fails to meet the standard for recusal.

But things didn’t stop there.

Trump announced over the weekend that he plans to begin work on remaking the park on Nov. 15, closing it for 15 months. So much for Trump’s plans being nascent, as the administration had insisted for months. Judge Reyes took judicial notice of Trump’s post on Sunday and asked if it changed the administration’s prior position in the case:

The Court ORDERS that the Government notify it, by 8:00 p.m. today, whether it continues to take the position that it took in its October 16, 2026, filing, that, “there is no final agency action” and that “at most [] the President has given preliminary thought to” the plan to rebuild East Potomac Golf Course.

In its response — signed again only by Associate Attorney General Woodward — the administration insisted nothing had changed.

Then came this morning’s pre-dawn tirade from President Trump in which he called Judge Reyes a “crazed lunatic.”

Another hearing in the case is underway this morning on whether to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s plan. In her Sunday order, Reyes upped the ante by requiring Woodward and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert N. Stander to appear in person at today’s hearing.

Stay tuned …

We Can Afford to Have Nice Things

Until the open clash between Trump and Judge Reyes, I’d hesitated to cover the East Potomac Park case for a national audience because in some ways it’s a parochial D.C. issue and not of the same import as, say, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, the blight of the Trump Triumphal Arch, the renamings of the Kennedy Center and the Institute of Peace, or the unspeakable painting of the intricate exterior of the grand Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

But there’s more going on here than a threat to one public golf course.

For those not familiar, it should be noted that while the public golf course within the historic park is at the center of the dispute, the identity, public use, and access to the park as a whole is at stake. The park features a heavily used paved waterfront loop for walkers, runners, and cyclists. It has a playground and picnic area. People fish, enjoy the views of the D.C. core and northern Virginia, and watch planes taking off and landing from DCA.

The park was created for the public by Congress in the late 19th century and then was built using fill on the tidal mud flats of the Potomac. The low-cost golf course, like two other public courses in D.C. on National Park Service land, has always catered to a broad clientele, trying to keep the sport accessible.

What makes this a national story beyond the clash with Judge Reyes is that the narrowing of public spaces is happening in parallel with the shrinkage of civic life under Trump. The concern is that Trump’s plan would make the golf course more exclusive and less accessible. It would alter the public nature of the park as it has existed for more than 100 years.

Must See

Let me join the chorus of reviewers urging you to go see Nathan Fielder’s “You Can See Everything.” It’s among the smartest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I came to it unfamiliar with Fielder’s previous work and with only passing Wikipedia-level familiarity with the Theranos scandal.

If you’re a Theranos obsessive, you may come away disappointed. It’s not a Theranos documentary. It’s a psychological profile of Elizabeth Homes and of her romantic partner Billy Evans. While it may be tempting to make a judgment on Holmes’ culpability in the Theranos scandal based on Fielder’s work — and audiences probably come out of theaters chatting about exactly that — it would be a mistake.

The Theranos fraud, while inextricably woven into the documentary, exists separate and apart from it. Trials and depositions and financial filings and good investigative reporting already explore the fraud itself in great detail. This isn’t that. (If you feel the strong need for a villain in the documentary, Billy more than fills that role on his own — even though he had nothing to do with Theranos and didn’t first meet Holmes until after the company’s collapse.)

What really sets Fielder’s documentary apart is its acute self-awareness. It grapples openly with the range of challenges that confront documentarians and storytellers: the limits of objectivity, the nature of truth, the intrusive role of the observer, the inevitability of bias, the constraints of narrative forms. I’m barely even getting started. There’s a lot going on.

Fielder inoculates himself against the most obvious criticisms by confronting them as part of the story he’s telling. It gets super meta at times, but it doesn’t lose the thread of the story. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling it for you.

If you’re comfortable with uncertainty, bask in nuance, enjoy the challenge of juggling competing explanations, and can tolerate not having everything reduced to a single “answer,” you’ll delight in this artwork.

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