Very interesting piece. According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of the GOP House caucus, went down to defeat is that he was targeted with $2 million by a SuperPAC funded by solar industry execs. They didn’t hit him on renewables or environment policy. They used garden variety attacks about Ogles’ missed votes while playing up the conservative credentials of his primary challenger. Of course, climate and environment advocacy have close to no supporters in the contemporary GOP. But Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is going after the much smaller group which goes out of its way to hurt the renewables industry in any way it can. It’s their third win this cycle.

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A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over “left” vs “centrist” politics (should the Ds “move to the left” or “move to the center”) but very united over fight vs accommodation. So focus on the latter and agree to disagree on the former. I also noted however that these terms are wildly over-determined and mostly don’t mean very much. For this specific question, those polling results are still broadly valuable because those are the catchphrases by which a major intra-party debate is identified. So if that’s the language being used and people split roughly down the middle, you know it’s very divisive and no one side is going to beat the other. It’s a standoff, and what you really want going into a critical midterm is unity.

But it’s still important to remember how little these terms actually mean, and to consider the complexities and uncertainties they paper over. I was reminded of this when I saw Axios describing a Reuters poll which Mike Allen said showed that independents are “progressive-curious.” The evidence was that substantial majorities of independents support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires (64%) and government-provided health care for all Americans (60%). But 43% are less likely to vote for a candidate who identifies as “democratic socialist.”

I mentioned this in my morning post today, but one of the weirdest, Trumpiest, vehemently anti-immigrant and scandal-plagued members of Congress lost a primary yesterday. Goodbye Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN). Those seeking to pass legislation denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani or giving Trump a third term will have to find another congressional champion.

I just finished recording an episode of The TPM Social Club with Josh Kovensky. We had an awesome conversation with Jake Bittle about the state of the Colorado River, which unfortunately is vanishing. That episode will drop tomorrow and we hope you’ll check it out.

While we were recording, I noticed a notification from Slack: We had just published a major investigation showing how the Trump administration had repeatedly admitted in court to withholding grant money from blue states simply because they voted blue — a shocking thing to put in writing in a legal dispute. The authors of that story were Emine Yücel and my trusty co-host, Josh — although that doesn’t mean I knew it was imminent. 

The New York Times has a piece today with the title “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Specifically it’s about the centrist pressure group Third Way and a plan with a budget of $15 million to, as the group’s president Jonathan Cowan puts it, “prepar[e] for the next war that is coming.” I’ll note that during the first two years of the Biden administration Third Way was notably and consistently supportive of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. It was a sign of the remarkable party unity that allowed Biden to push through a remarkably progressive agenda with a tied senate. I’ll also note that you place an article like this because you want to show the people who gave you the $15 million that you mean business. So talk of “going to war” is sort of what you want to show them.

That said, this is remarkably ill-conceived and a misunderstanding of the current moment.

Jon Cohn has a good piece in The Bulwark on the challenges ahead for Abdul El-Sayed. The “brutal path ahead,” Jon calls it. I’ll note here that Jon is based in Michigan, despite beginning his journalism career in the East Coast cities where most political journalists are based. (In other words, his report isn’t based on parachuting into the state for a few weeks.) He notes the two, equally accurate narratives coming out of this primary battle. El-Sayed built a potent and victorious movement. Sanders-style progressive Democrats seldom win these contests in purple states. El-Sayed did. And he did it in the face of concerted opposition from the state’s Democratic establishment, the national establishment and an ocean of outside money, mostly from AIPAC.

It’s also true that Republicans will now run a viciously Islamophobic campaign against him, which will get extra traction from his association with the willfully inflammatory Hasan Piker. There’s another dynamic we’ve seen across numerous establishment-progressive battles. The Platner campaign pitched itself as appealing to working class or at least culturally working class voters who are usually unreachable by Democrats. But the polling showed that the demographic profile of Platner’s supporters looked pretty similar to what most Democrats have gotten over the last couple decades, and especially since Trump — the educated and affluent. The loose outlines of El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan look similar. Both make a pitch about young voters but they tend to appeal most to educated and downwardly mobile voters — so again, another version of standard early 21st century Democratic coalition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a link to the interview in full.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We held an event Wednesday evening at a bar in Brooklyn, co-hosted by TPM and Marisa Kabas’ indy site The Handbasket. I really enjoyed it and I wanted to thank everyone who came out. We have an expanding roster of in-person events. We’ve held events in Chicago, Boston and Austin over the last year or so — usually live podcasts — and we do them more frequently in our home bases in New York and D.C., where they’re easier to put on. Please join us for one of these when we do one in your area. They’re so much fun and it’s really special to meet and spend time with members of the far-flung or sometimes close-flung TPM community.

It’s become a cliche of the politics of this moment that the one thing that unites all Americans in our polarized age is that they hate data centers. But a dimension of this occurred to me during the discussion between Marisa and I that was moderated by TPM publisher Joe Ragazzo. I hadn’t thought of it before.

I saw this tweet and it struck me as one of the more powerful indicators of the need to untether ideology from “fight” in intra-Democratic battles. The party is very united on fight, very divided on ideology. So you unite on “fight,” let different constituencies/states find their center of gravity on ideology.

Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.