A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump is pretty conspicuously declining to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s October election. I would be remiss I didn’t explicitly note that it is unprecedented and outrageous that a U.S. president is even considering a formal endorsement in the election of an allied country. They’ve often had preferences of course. But we used to have respect for the internal affairs of foreign governments, especially allied ones. In any case, we don’t now. And here we are.

This appears to be part of Trump’s deliberate move away from Israel and the closely related annoyance that Israel continues to complicate his other priorities, which are one part conventional geopolitics and one part corrupt deals with various Gulf States. But there’s another factor Axios points to which we’re familiar with from the U.S. endorsement game. Netanyahu’s polls look bad. And Trump doesn’t want to back a loser.

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

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

So what’s up here?

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to Francesca Hong.

From TPM Reader AB …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) sister Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) will both advance to an Aug. 25 runoff to determine which Republican will appear on the ballot in November to replace Graham after his unexpected death earlier this summer. The Associated Press projected Graham’s sister would advance early in the night, but it was unclear if Norman or Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) would clear the hurdle until moments ago when the AP determined Norman would advance as well. None of the candidates were able to secure the majority of the vote to avoid a runoff.

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Just a short time ago TPM reporters Layla Jones and Josh Kovensky exclusively published the new draft rule by which the Trump White House aims to violate the Constitution by changing who gets counted in the federal census and thus the number of representatives allotted to each state. It aims to drastically shift power to smaller and more rural states — in other words, the MAGA heartlands.

It’s a great piece and builds on topics TPM has followed closely for 25 years.

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It’s sitting right there in front of us. But it’s still worth noting. The political stories of the moment are heavily geared to the long-tail effects of Donald Trump’s antic and ego-driven escapades: the decision to make the Reflecting Pool “American flag blue”; the eagerness to get a plane as a present (which he could take home with him after his presidency) from the royal family of Qatar. There are countless examples. In each case, the initial driver is the president’s personal cupidity and grandiosity, things which have no relation to any aspect of public policy or really any public support. They begin unknown and pretty quickly end up unpopular. He does them because he can, with the Supreme Court having removed basically all of the immediate brakes on a president’s power. But those initials gambits — the hunger for gifts and cash prizes — lead to bad news stories, legal impediments, or often technological snafus. Those in turn lead to embarrassment, anger, outbursts which repeat the process of bad news stories, legal impediments or technological snafus.

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This afternoon, Emine Yücel, Josh Kovensky and John Light will join me on our YouTube channel to discuss their investigation from last week showing that the Trump administration has on multiple occasions withheld funds from blue states just because they voted blue — you know, the kind of story that would have been leading every news program for a month in the Before Times. Anyway, join us at 1 p.m. ET.

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Sometimes I write a post which is about information that is not new or secret but new to me. This is one of those posts. I’m sharing it because the information is new to me and I suspect many TPM readers. It’s helpful for me in thinking about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America as the most visible left faction within the current Democratic Party. Recently I noticed that many or most of the DSA elected officials who’ve achieved some level of electoral success have been denounced, censured or rejected by the local affiliates or council who endorsed them in the first place. Along similar lines, the national DSA is consistently more doctrinaire and left-wing not only than it’s candidates but its local chapters in the major metros where its power is strongest. This isn’t surprising or really new. It’s a general pattern for ideologically-based organizations, an unsurprising feature of the tensions between ideology and complex electorates.

Back to those prominent DSA-backed politicians. I and many others have argued for a while that “socialist” seems more a matter of branding for a lot of DSA candidates, whereas the actual policies and positions sound a lot like pretty ordinary New Deal-style liberal-labor politics. Of course, what counts as “socialism” is wildly over-determined. You’ve certainly see those memes that show like the Socialist Party platform from the 1910s or 1920s and it mostly matches things we take for granted or did take for granted as the mid- and late-20th century New Deal state.

One of our great doctrines here in the Editors’ Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it in one place, and you lose or gain it in equal measure everywhere else. That’s catching up with Donald Trump. He got into the Iran War as a way to escape the emotionally crushing experience of declining popularity and power at home. But his ebbing power went with him to the Persian Gulf. And now it’s arrived in Israel, too. This was obscured for a while by the fact that the U.S. has almost unimaginable military power and a constitution which, as it has evolved if not how it was originally intended, puts almost no short-term limits on a president’s ability to wage war. But the two were always umbilically connected. It was the pain of bad news at home that spurred Trump to jump so recklessly into his Iran debacle. And it is the same unpopularity that has him so desperate to end high gas prices and inflation before the midterms. They’re all connected.

Trump has no poker face. To live in Trump’s era is not only to see his inner life but to be engulfed by it. It’s hard to think of a case in which the deciding player between warring powers has more clearly signaled his desperate desire to get out of a conflict on almost any terms. The Iranians have internet too. And they can see all of this. They have now issued a fresh set of new demands: end sanctions, leave the region, pay reparations, release frozen assets and more — in addition to make the Strait of Hormuz a permanent Iranian toll road. More or less total capitulation.

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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.