I’m not sure where to start with this. The latest news is some mix of Webistics, Jukt Micronics and Animal House. But here goes. Yesterday we noted that a FiftyPlusOne investigation had led to the outing of “Wedgewood Polls” as a publisher of entirely fake polls. It’s still unclear the precise motives, but some political narrative setting aim and gaming betting markets seem like good bets. The details are wild. (But see the earlier post or FiftyPlusOne’s write-up for more.)

Early this morning I woke to a short item in The Washington Post noting another pollster, SoCal Strategies, had straight up disappeared. By disappeared it meant that overnight its website, Substack and Twitter account had all vanished. In the earlier write-up of the investigation of Wedgewood, FiftyPlusOne had noted that one of the ways it had initially vetted Wedgewood was speaking to people at another polling firm where one or more of the Wedgewood guys had worked. I can’t remember if I’d already heard SoCal’s name come up in this story. But when I saw the Post item I immediately knew it had to be them. Yes, fake polls are a problem. But stuff like we’re seeing here is super rare. They had to be connected.

Here is one of those things we can see on the horizon and it will be important to be ready for. It will become especially important if Democrats take both the House and the Senate.

It’s a given that even with only the House under Democratic control, we’re in for a period of pretty intense inter-branch conflict. Just how intense, whether Democrats will fight as much as their partisans demand … those things we can’t know. But this basic feature of the next Congress is pretty clear. What I’d like to discuss here is a wrinkle in that fabric that hasn’t gotten enough attention.

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) …

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.

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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.

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.

Today’s world would be a fascinating object of study if one weren’t also living in it. The price of energy isn’t the cause of Donald Trump’s deep unpopularity. But for months it’s been driving it to new depths. The price of oil plateaued in early October, which seemed to blunt some of Democrats’ electoral momentum. On Friday though it jumped up again, with the Brent Crude price hitting $110 a barrel, the highest since May. That was the worst of all possible worlds for Trump and that clearly played a key role in his decision to waive sanctions against Russia. Reuters reports that the prospect of greater supply from Russia knocked oil off those highs in early Monday trading in Asia. That was clearly the main goal of that waiver. But just in the last hour, reports have come out that Ukraine launched a massive volley of 1,000 drones targeting Russian energy infrastructure.

Last week, as part of the emerging “‘Layla’ Coda” moment around President Trump, I flagged this story about a nasty feud between Alina Habba and her erstwhile pal and Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba went to the White House with the explosive charge that her now-husband, a Turkish nepo-oligarch named Turhan Mildon, had given $6 million to Grenell for the Kennedy Center, then Trump’s top vanity/legacy project. But Grenell, she claimed, had siphoned the money off, presumably for himself. At the time Grenell was running the Kennedy Center. Mildon first came into the Trump orbit because he had major ties to the Maduro regime and major holdings in Venezuela. So he needed to get juice in Trump world so he didn’t lose his toys when MAGA started dividing up the spoils after the U.S. invasion. But now it seems Habba, now Alina Mildon after her marriage last month, may have bitten off way more than she and Turhan can chew.

After making the initial accusation, the Turhans have been talking much less than Grenell. Her story had also shifted around a bit, according to the initial Times report. The $6 million, or possibly $5.6 million, was to be carved out of a $17.6 million check for some other unspecified business deal. But when Habba, or rather her husband’s, lawyers presented the White House with the evidence for this transaction, the source of cash was redacted.

I’m thinking this nephew guy has turned out to be a problematic figure … The story here is about a deal to sell arms to the police in Haiti and the company in question, Fencebridge, was founded by “Daniel Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager, and Bryan Seaver, one of Parton’s nephews who was also her head of security.”

From the Miami Herald (gift link) …

A private security firm founded by two people close to late country music legend Dolly Parton is at the center of an unusually complex arms deal in Haiti that several sources with knowledge of the matter say was worked out with little due diligence.

The security firm, Fencebridge Strategic Risk, entered into a multimillion-dollar agreement about a year ago to supply the Haiti National Police with semi-automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as the agency struggles to combat violent gangs that have claimed the lives of more than 25,000 Haitians since 2021.

Fascinating nugget of data from an Economist deep dive cross-referencing polling data with the location of datacenters: “Voters across the country are shifting towards Democrats, but for those living within 2km of a data centre the veer has been even sharper. Americans who live near a data-centre site are around six percentage points more likely to support the Democrats than those who live further away (see chart 2). Six months ago there was no such difference.” Link (requires sub).

One collection of data people obsess over in the weeks before a big election is the early vote – a relatively new feature of American elections. You can’t know who people voted for but you can know who is voting by different metrics and you can draw inferences from that. Take all this early vote data with a huge, huge grain of salt. On the one hand it’s just way to easy to interpret the numbers through the prism of one’s hopes. But there’s a bigger and more immediate reason for skepticism today. To understand what early numbers mean you need to have some theory of who is going to vote early and who late. And basically, I think, we don’t. Or not a good one.

Following up on the MAGA-under-pressure, intra-MAGA knife fights breaking out, whack everybody front. From this morning’s Politico Playbook …

PLAYBOOK IN PRINT: Natalie Harp printed a copy of yesterday’s Playbook about Susie Wiles’ future for President Donald Trump, according to two people with knowledge. It caused a “freakout,” as three people described it to Playbook. The president “blew up” over more bad headlines about his chief of staff, and Wiles and allies “burn[ed] up phones around town” trying to quell the situation.

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.

Today on TPM’s Untitled Friday Live Show (Name TBD), one of TPM’s true passions: Grifting in the USA.

TPM editor Nicole LaFond, investigative reporter Hunter Walker and Head of Product Derick Dirmaier and I wanted to discuss if we are living in a golden age of grifting. But, we were interrupted by some breaking news: Katie Zacharia’s very, very special time as press secretary has come to an end.

We’re asking readers to help us with something important as well. If you’ve been reading The Brief, you know each day John Light selects a Man of the Hour. If you can’t guess who won this week, well, I doubt you really read the site.

Check it out!!

Earlier this week, we saw former Don Jr. fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle summarily canned because she became a scandal lightning rod, in a particularly pitiful way, right when Donald Trump doesn’t need any scandal headlines — not just going into the midterms in a couple weeks but also into 2027 when it seems highly likely that at least the House will be in Democratic hands. Then yesterday, we had this new MAGA war break into the open which pits Alina Habba and her new Turkish oligarch boy-toy husband against Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba claims that Grenell either pocketed or misdirected a $6 million check her now-husband wrote as a contribution to the Kennedy Center. I suspect that Habba may be out over her skis on this one. Grenell is the worst. But he’s not stupid. I’m skeptical he’d try something quite that reckless.

In any case, today we have yet another new story just kind of breaking out into the open out of nowhere.

“Democrats have been way too timid and modest in their expectations in the past. There’s a real chance for something big happening with this election, and I’m kind of old. So why not see if you can if there’s anything you can do to help?”

That’s a quote from Steve Pajcic, who was a politician himself decades ago and appears to have made a bundle of money over the years and has become a fairly prodigious philanthropist. There’s a Times write-up of him today — that’s where the quote comes from — and it’s about his and his children’s decision to drop about $7 million late dollars in the longshot quartet of southeastern Senate contests in Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi and the no-longer-so-long-shot race in Kansas.

Back in August I did a write-up on a deep dive on polling error put together by Republican consultant/pollster Pat Ruffini. When it comes to Ruffini’s work, I have a funny mix of assumptions and impulses. Ruffini’s a data guy and not a bullshitter. His numbers and analyses are real and solid. He’s also a Republican partisan. So he’s not above looking for the most favorable possibilities in the numbers. And I think it’s fair to say the series he’s done on this is generally aimed at Republicans and trying to send the message, “It might be okay” or “It’s not as bad as it looks.” At the same time, I am eager for it to be as bad for Republicans or worse than it looks.

Take that for what you will. Just a little truth in advertising and transparency for all involved. Ruffini just did a follow-up on this deep dive where, amazingly, there’s a new reason to think it might not be as bad for Republicans as it looks! Again, though, Ruffini’s a smart guy with a lot of data up his sleeves and he might be right.

“According to sources who spoke to WBTV on the condition of anonymity, the text thread between some Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers includes a competition over who can pull over the most black drivers. There are also numerous uses of the ‘n-word’ related to use of force and discharging firearms at black residents.”

— WBTV3

I was waiting to hear how White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia would explain how and why she claimed she’d taken the bar exam in China despite that not being completely possible. She’s still mainly refusing to answer this question. But the Journal reports that Zacharia sat for the bar exam in California in 2011 but didn’t pass. (In fairness, many people don’t pass on their first try. California is known as a challenging bar exam.) The Times meanwhile got a moment of phone time with her on a tarmac in Arizona and asked her about taking the bar exam in China.

It was all a misunderstanding, apparently.