President Trump was asked this afternoon at Joint Base Andrews if he will respect next week’s midterms results, “whatever happens.”

“I will if they’re honest elections, yup,” he said before walking away from reporters to board a flight to go campaign for a candidate in Texas who secretly — or perhaps not so secretly — doesn’t want his help.

Trump has used this line before to give himself cover to challenge the results of elections he doesn’t win. Back in May 2024, when he was running against President Joe Biden, Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would only accept the results of the presidential election if “everything’s honest,” before going on another one of his diatribes about how he thinks he won the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin and “in other locations.”

The California Scheme Comes to Washington State

The Department of Justice on Wednesday told Washington state officials to segregate ballots from 400 people who it claimed are — or, at least, “appear to be” — noncitizens registered to vote.

It’s a repeat of what the DOJ has undertaken in California — first in Los Angeles and then in each other county in the state.

“People who are non-citizens are registered to vote and are voting in our state,” Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington, claimed in a press release yesterday. Floyd is a former immigration judge who was hand-picked by President Trump for the post. “We have identified over 400 non-citizens who are registered to vote and have voted in multiple elections.”

The DOJ’s claims to have found large numbers of noncitizen voters have repeatedly fallen apart. Some California county officials said the lists of supposed noncitizen voters provided to them by the DOJ contained only people who had not voted. Others said the lists contained people who did not live in the county in question. The DOJ this summer claimed to have found 16,000 noncitizen voters in Nevada, a number it eventually reduced to 185. As Nevada officials investigated, it turned out none of those people identified were, in fact, noncitizen voters.

In recent weeks, the DOJ has also been charging alleged noncitizen voters, a few dozen at a time. Its not clear how solid those cases are, and they will not have a chance to be litigated before the election.

“We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed,” a spokesperson for Washington’s secretary of state said in an email to NBC. “The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results.”

In California, a federal appeals court ruled 2-1 yesterday that it could not order Los Angeles to go forward with the DOJ’s similar demand there — that local officials segregate ballots. The court did not reach the merits, finding on procedural grounds that it was not time for it to weigh in. But the judges suggested the outcome would have been similar on the merits.

Despite its sloppiness, the impact of the DOJ’s scheme is two-fold.

First, it serves to bolster Trump’s frequent but baseless claims that noncitizen voting happens on a mass scale and swings elections. This will become useful after the election, as the administration seeks to further undermine confidence in the result.

Second, the claims — coupled with recent operations to arrest alleged noncitizen voters, a DOJ program dispatching poll watchers to blue cities, Trump’s offer of a bounty for “voter fraud,” and a noted escalation in anti-immigrant rhetoric — stand to suppress turnout among voters who are legally registered but who nonetheless fear getting caught in the administration’s crosshairs.

Bolsonaro Family Hits a Rough Patch

• The tale of President Trump’s Brazilian ally Flávio Bolsonaro has gotten grimmer in the 24 hours following his surprising loss to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
• First, Trump declined to vigorously back Bolsonaro’s charges that his election loss was tainted. Trump called the election “rigged,” but didn’t go further. Soon after, Bolsonaro backed off his vow to try to get the outcome annulled.
• Also yesterday, Bolsonaro’s was ordered by Brazil’s Supreme Court to hand over his passport as he is under investigation for an alleged a money laundering scheme.
• Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, has been living in Texas, and had suggested publicly that Flávio should leave the country. Eduardo, after being convicted for a scheme to get the Trump administration to intervene in his father Jair Bolsonaro’s trial following his coup attempt, has been, from Texas, lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in his brother’s now unsuccessful presidential campaign. 

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

This year in Arizona, we took on one of the most powerful industries in the world and won.

Chaos is the Goal

As David Kurtz has been chronicling for TPM in his daily newsletter, the Trump administration has started to undertake what much of America long expected: it is trying to intervene in the midterms to help Republicans retain control of Congress.

The Department of Justice sued Alaska on Friday, demanding that the state delay certification until an investigation can “determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan” — a Republican on the ballot with the same name as the incumbent GOP senator — “were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.” Trump said he asked the DOJ to initiate the suit. Experts see the case as weak.

In California, the DOJ demanded that Los Angeles — and then every other county in the state — segregate ballots from a list of names it provided, claiming those people were noncitizens likely to cast ballots.

The lists appear to have considerable problems, as have previous administration effort to identify noncitizen voters. One county’s list had only two alleged noncitizen voters, and the county clerk told the New York Times it appears neither had ever voted. Another county clerk told the Times that she had been sent the wrong list, with names only of people from a different county.

On Sunday, federal appeals court judges appeared skeptical of the Los Angeles effort, suggesting both that it was premature for the court to order the county to do as the DOJ wished, and that, even if the court had jurisdiction, the DOJ did not have a case on the merits.

This campaign has clear echoes of 2020 and early 2021, when the administration and allied lawyers went to court dozens of times seeking to throw out votes from various swing states. They used arguments that ranged from complaints about new, COVID-era election administration procedures to hare-brained conspiracy theories. Over and over, they lost.

But the legal campaign and the headlines it generated — along with a steady flow of ever-more out there conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric from the administration — created the appearance that, well, something must be off. Otherwise, how did all of these cases wind up in court? What’s everyone talking about? Regular Americans don’t have time to get to the bottom of it. The hubbub inspires doubt and creates chaos, which, for Trump, opens doors.

As TPM has chronicled through close examination of Trump allies’ texts and legal memos from the period immediately after the 2020 election — many of which we published for the first time — this strategy was part of a carefully calculated campaign.

As January 6 approached, the goal was no longer for victory in lower-level federal courts, but for a kind of deus ex machina — for either Congress to throw out the votes from certain states and seat Trump’s alternate slate of electors, or for the Supreme Court to step in and somehow invalidate the election without getting too deep into the specifics. Trump’s lawyers planned for a congressional stalemate over the results of the election to begin, but not end, on January 6. All of the lawsuits ahead of Jan. 6, regardless of outcome, would “force serious review in Congress of election fraud in various states,” one Trump lawyer wrote in December 2020, imagining an election that was still unresolved by January 20, 2021 — Inauguration Day.

The lawsuits initiated last week lay the groundwork to run this campaign again, this time with the full force of the federal government behind it. Even if the DOJ loses repeatedly in court — as looks likely, at least with these first two efforts — the appearance of still-unresolved questions tees up the argument that its premature to seat any new Democratic majority.

This is not to say this plan is likely to succeed. But its worth being clear-eyed about the road we’re heading down.

A Defeat for the Right in Brazil Inevitably Leads To Election Denial

• Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection Sunday with 51.76% of the vote. Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president who attempted a Jan. 6-like autocoup, recieved 48.24%.
• Immediately, Bolsonaro said he would not accept defeat. A Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice extended voting hours after bad weather and, Lula alleged, meddling by local officials prevented some voters from being able to reach the polls. Both candidates requested the extended hours, but Bolsonaro’s team later described it as a “judicial coup.” “It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the ​circumstances under which things unfolded,” Bolsonaro told journalists, saying he would seek to get the election annulled.
• The fact that Lula won by 4 million votes means Bolsonaro is unlikely to succeed.
• The U.S. State Department pushed hard for Bolsonaro to return to power, Reuters reports. In the months before ‌election campaigning began, two top State Department officials “instructed US diplomats in Brazil that it was US policy to restore ‌former President Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s leader – even though he had been disqualified from office for plotting a coup in 2022, when he lost the presidential election to Lula,” Reuters reports.

Tabs

• The right-wing strongman leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic — often compared to Hungary’s now-ousted leader Viktor Orbán — has conceded defeat in a parliamentary election that followed years of student-led protests against his reign.
• Speaking of Orbán, here’s the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board writing that the Trump administration wants him for UN Secretary General.
• “Companies with ties to President Donald Trump and his family are staffing up with lawyers and lobbyists, as Democrats threaten sweeping probes if they flip either chamber of Congress in the midterm elections,” Bloomberg Businessweek reports. That includes prediction market companies and crypto firms.

Woman of the Hour

It’s Kristi Noem, who, on October 16, put out what appears to be a fake press release, on fake letterhead to make it appear as if she was still involved in the Trump administration. “The Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas role was always a six-month appointment,” it read. “Secretary Noem remains at the State Department as a Senior Advisor.” State Department sources told Politico and CBS the press release was not real, nor was the letterhead it was published on.

Hello, and Welcome Back To The Franchise

Dobbs fallout may have dropped out of the headlines, but existential state-level battles that will decide the fate of women nationwide continue to rage. 

This cycle, there’s one anti-abortion amendment and three pro. Two of them could upend the abortion landscape in their states. 

The Ramaswamy campaign’s new ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mother, in which she repeatedly denounces her daughter as a liar, is making Republicans squirm even in this era of Trump-inflected gutter politics. Acton and her mother have been estranged for decades since her mother’s husband — her stepfather — was indicted for raping Acton when she was a child. 

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.”

‘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.”

Homan States Explicitly That Denaturalization is an Option

On Saturday, Tom Homan, President Trump’s “Border Czar,” made explicit what had only been reported before based on unnamed sources: the administration is looking at denaturalizing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), an outspoken critic of the president and one of the first Muslim members of Congress.

“I’m not going to get ahead of the bureau or HSI, but I’ve been told they have a strong case, and we’ll let the evidence lead where it leads,” he said on Fox.

“Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody,” he said at another point, adding, “And certainly, if the evidence points that way, that could happen.”

Homan, the kindler, gentler face of Trump’s immigration crackdown after Greg Bovino was shown the door amid his too-explicit fascism, is developing a reputation for his blunt comments making clear the administration is doing exactly what it appears to be doing. Long before the raid, he had been saying during media appearances that Omar was under criminal investigation.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin also made the “strong case” claim on a Turning Point USA podcast Friday. “This was about enforcing once again our nation’s laws, and it’s a strong case,” he said.

The Trump administration has attempted to ramp up denaturalizations, though it’s a complicated process and its ability to navigate it has seemingly fallen far short of its ambition. It’s filed hundreds of cases, though each of those cases is still pending.

This latest, politicized prosecution, ramped up, in violation of DOJ policy, within weeks of the midterms, has inspired widespread condemnation. “The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president,” former President Barack Obama said over the weekend, joining that chorus.

Omar’s lawyers said in a letter Friday, reported by multiple outlets, that the search violated her rights and the restrictions a magistrate judge placed on DHS. Her lawyers were not given a copy of the search warrant, they said, and DHS didn’t consult with the House general counsel, which would have given Omar an opportunity to prevent congressional work product from being seized.

“There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” said the letter, per the Wall Street Journal.

A Talarico Win Downballot

Much of the national conversation has focused on the possibility that a James Talarico win would help Democrats flip control of the Senate. That level of support for a Democrat could, however, have significant effects down-ballot as well.

• Governor Greg Abbott is facing a strong challenge from state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, with Cook Political Report on October 1 shifting the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”
• In the U.S. House, there is the possibility that Republican’s attempt to gerrymander their way to a majority will backfire. In order to create five districts in which they hoped their candidates would win, they had to make many others less Republican; Democrats now have a real chance in some of those.
• Meanwhile, even the districts Republicans gerrymandered in such a way that they expected them to flip may not: they used a vote for Trump to measure the districts’ Republican lean, but many voters — especially Latino voters — voted for Trump in 2024 but still voted for Democrats down ballot.
• The Texas state legislature could also see a significant shift, as former Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan outlined in a fascinating recent interview with Texas Monthly. “People say eight Republican seats are at risk. I could see ten,” Phelan said. “I hear there’s more than that in the margin of error. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to lose. But these suburbs are nasty. Nasty. Houston, DFW, Bexar County [San Antonio]—you can’t spend enough money to keep up. And if Talarico wins this and gets the margin up to six or seven, it’s a bloodbath down [the] ballot. I don’t know how people survive.”
• Early voting begins in the state today.

In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

People love a grand conspiracy. The bigger the scheme is, the more people get drawn into it. And the more details and players that are involved, the more believable it seemingly becomes. After all, who would go to the trouble of making up something so complicated? It must be true.

And nobody loves a conspiracy more than President Trump. He and his inner circle especially seem to have fallen in love with what has literally been dubbed “The Grand Conspiracy.” It’s a hopelessly complex, entirely unevidenced theory claiming that a high-ranking group of political figures have been plotting in the shadows for years to stop Donald Trump from making America great again through investigations, indictments and impeachments. It has all the hallmarks of the type of grandiose schemes that Trump supporters especially fall for: countless players, sprawling plots, intricate secrets, and a total lack of evidence that it actually took place.

Despite lacking cogent answers to foundational questions such as “what it is” and “who is doing it,” revenge for the Grand Conspiracy has been a driving force in the administration, prompting an investigation that has trundled along over the last year and a half, involving dozens of officials looking for some reason to indict the president’s enemies.

And there are many, many enemies. They include a greatest hits of Trump’s obsessions and grievances, from former special counsel Jack Smith to minor players like former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and even former President Barack Obama himself. According to Grand Conspiracy believers, they are all powerful Deep State figures who supposedly worked together in a single, years-long scheme to destroy Trump and undo the will of the people. 

Precisely what these conspirators have actually done remains unclear — even, seemingly, to the prosecutors themselves, who, per the Wall Street Journal, complained to the Justice Department that they weren’t getting much guidance from the local U.S. attorney. The probe is now being run out of Washington, where it continues to baffle those assigned to move it forward. 

In the last few weeks, there have been a host of indications that DOJ efforts to prosecute these figures — and tie them all together into one grand scheme — are falling apart. And, as the Grand Conspiracy prosecution flails at DOJ, the claims also aren’t doing much in the court of public opinion, where Republicans are looking for anything they can find to shore up their crumbling midterm prospects.

Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.

Bobby Pulido is in the middle of everything. 

The famed Tejano singer is trying his hand at politics in his home state of Texas, which is a crucial part of Democrats’ pathway to a potential House majority in Washington. And the blue wave that has made those lofty ambitions more and more realistic has been partially fueled by Latino voters’ shift away from President Donald Trump amid mounting anger with ICE and his mass deportation agenda. 

Of Course a 2020 Fake Elector Is Involved in This Saga

As key members of the Trump administration refuse to give straight answers about whether they intend to send armed federal agents to polling places in a few weeks — which is against federal law — Wisconsin election officials are grappling with the vacuum that that ambiguity has created.

For more than a year, we’ve been covering the wishy-washy responses from Trump administration officials like Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to serious questions about the matter. President Trump has remained vague on the issue as well. The reason executive branch officials are facing questions about whether this is something they’re considering is twofold. The Trump administration has made it clear it has every intention of pulling out all the stops to interfere in states’ rights to administer their own elections, and Trump’s election denying allies outside the administration (e.g. Steve Bannon) are agitating around the idea. Trump himself has also expressed profound regret about not enlisting members of the military to seize voting equipment in 2020.

Hegseth has creatively dodged on the matter repeatedly in public, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee back in April that he has “never been ordered to do anything illegal, and I won’t” when questioned about deploying service members to voting sites. Patel and Mullin have been a bit less slimy about it by essentially admitting its something they’ve thought about doing. Patel recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he plans to have agents and intelligence analysts stationed at FBI field offices during the election in case there are any election security-related issues that need to be investigated. And Mullin has walked a similar line that leaves the door open for armed officers at polling places in particular (if far-fetched) circumstances.

“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” he said last month.

Election officials are now being forced to step in and address the potential for disruption should the administration concoct some sort of emergency justification for sending armed federal officers to key precincts. Federal law prevents the government from sending any armed troops, agents or officers to polling place unless it is to “repel armed enemies of the United States.”

Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission voted on Thursday to sign off on guidance that will be sent to local election officials to help them navigate such a situation. Here’s what the guidance says, according to the Associated Press:

The memo tells Wisconsin’s roughly 1,800 clerks who administer elections what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, Department of Homeland Security officials, FBI agents or local law enforcement shows up at the polls.

If officers arrive, the guidance says the head of the polling site should inform the municipal clerk, who should then tell the county clerk and the state elections commission. If the agents are there to observe, they must check in like any other observer and be subject to rules governing them, the guidance says.

Only one member of the board, a Republican, reportedly voted against sending out the guidance, in comments that actively diminished the threat and potential for major disenfranchisement in key parts of the country.

“I personally think this guidance is unnecessary because we have not seemed to need it the past 201 years,” Republican Commissioner Bob Spindell said, per the AP.

It may not surprise you to learn that Spindell was one of Trump’s fake electors in Wisconsin during the 2020 election.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Ranking Member Alex Padilla (D-CA) announced Senate Democrats recruited and trained more than 100 staffers to monitor voting and ballot counting during the upcoming midterm elections.

The official congressional election observers will be deployed to polling sites across nine states with closely contested Senate races in November, Schumer and Padilla told reporters on Wednesday.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access. Sign up for their free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Since being released early from prison in June, former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters has been granted extraordinary access to the halls of power in Washington.

Peters said she has traveled to Washington seven times, visited the White House at least twice, and met with senior officials at the Justice and Commerce departments — remarkable access for someone on parole after a 2024 felony conviction for tampering with voting machines in an attempt to show that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump.

She’s a high-profile example of a group of Trump supporters and conservative activists trying to lay out a roadmap for the president to follow. They are urging him to take more extreme steps to try and influence the outcome of an election that many polls suggest could end Republican control of Congress. But as the election closes in, the activists are now voicing increasing concerns that the president and his administration aren’t going to act on their ideas.

Three Moments From Last Night’s Ossoff-Collins Debate

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) and Rep. Mike Collins (R) held their second debate in the Georgia Senate race Tuesday, and many of the themes of the first reemerged. Ossoff turned over the many ways in which, even within the context of today’s Republican Party, Collins’ radicalism is on the surface. Collins struggled to return a blow, or to distance himself from the unpopular president.

Who won in 2020?

One of the moderators, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein, noted that Collins said Trump “won” the 2020 election as recently as June. Does he still beleive that?

Collins dodged, saying that “Joe Biden went into office” before pivoting to criticizing his presidency.

Ten minutes later, Ossoff returned to the question. “You didn’t answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?”

“They know my views on that,” Collins replied. “There was a lot of doubt in that election.”

Fifteen minutes after that, Ossoff returned to it a third time. “You still haven’t answered tonight whether you believe Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election,” he said. “Here’s your third chance. Did Donald Trump really win the 2020 election? You want to answer, Mike?”

“I have said numerous times that Joe Biden was the president in 2021,” Collins said.

“Not what I asked,” Ossoff replied.

OSSOFF: You didn't answer earlier. Answer now. Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?MIKE COLLINS: You know, the 2020 election. Everybody has seen my views on thatOSSOFF: What are they?COLLINS: There was a lot of doubt in that election OSSOFF: I didn't hear an answer

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:25:10.294Z

What’s up with all the white nationalists around Collins?

Collins’ white nationalism problem was again a theme of this debate.

Moderator Faith Jessie of Atlanta news station 11 Alive reminded Collins of Ossoff’s line last week — that he had “hired half the Third Reich” — and asked for his response. “Are you a white nationalist?” Jessie asked. “And what do you say to Black Georgians who question whether you will represent them equally?”

“I condemn any sort a hate speech,” he said. “Antisemitism, hate of any kind. It’s abhorrent. And I’ve fired people when things happen, fired them,” he added, a possible reference to his former chief of staff, who bragged of his efforts trying to get a Holocaust denier out of prison.

He then went on to suggest a link between people who feel “forgotten” and rising antisemitism. “We do have a problem with antisemitism and war and hate around the world,” he said. “These young people feel like they’ve forgotten and they’re just lashing out. And this hate speech has got to stop and we’ve got to educate them.”

Mike Collins makes apologies for white nationalists like his son in law: "These people feel like they've been forgotten. And they're just lashing out."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:17:57.415Z

About those Pinochet jokes …

Ossoff asked Collins about a joke he repeatedly made online, suggesting immigrants to the U.S. be tossed from helicopters — an allusion to extrajudicial killings carried out by right-wing Latin American dictators, including Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, a meme that the very online right loves to invoke.

“Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters,” Ossoff said. “I’d like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?”

Collins did not answer the question and pivoted to talking about the Laken Riley Act and border enforcement.

OSSOFF: Mike Collins called for killing immigrants by throwing them to their deaths out of helicopters. I'd like to hear if Mike Collins stands by that statement. Do you still believe in the extrajudicial killing of immigrants?MIKE COLLINS: *changes topic*

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-14T00:12:17.176Z

The Tina Plan

• The election-denying former Colorado county Clerk Tina Peters, who met with Trump earlier this month, has been pushing an idea that the 2026 midterms will need instant “manual verification.” She’s got a whole website where she lays out “the Tina Plan,” though in fairly opaque language.
• In an interview that has been floating around since September but that I first saw surfaced by Newsweek, her lawyer, Trump’s longtime friend Peter Ticktin, makes plain what she’s talking about: “Her idea is grab, get control over the ballots as soon as the machines spit them through and then do a recount,” he told a right-wing podcaster.
• He went on to explain that, if Trump does not trust the results of a future election, he “is not going to relinquish control again.”
• “It’s better if we’re going to have a civil war of any sort that it be martial law with our side in control of the armaments,” Ticktin outrageously declared.
• That this is (likely) all big talk, and illegal, does not make it any less wild that these ideas may have been presented in the Oval Office when Peters recently met with Trump. Peters has also reportedly met with the DOJ and Department of Commerce.