Bernadette Greene-Placentia would like you to know the story of her rape is not an “October Surprise.”
She did not conspire with the media to publish the graphic details of her sexual assault on the same day early voting ballots were sent out to voters in Arizona. Her harrowing account of being bludgeoned and violated by two men in the middle of the night in a suburban parking lot is not a “hoax” she concocted to win over voters’ sympathies. Her fragmented memories of the attack, and her initial reluctance to go to authorities, are not evidence of an elaborate lie, nor of a nefarious Democratic plot to wrest control of Congress, as some right-wing influencers have suggested. It was hard enough coming forward to say she was raped, she told TPM. Now she has to contend with all these men, with millions of followers online, loudly asserting that maybe she wasn’t. She can’t help but remember that these men publicly trying to poke holes in her story have mothers. “Is this really how you were raised?” she wants to ask them.
Most American households were not eagerly awaiting a set of tax data that was supposed to come out from the Internal Revenue Service in July. Now the data is missing, with little explanation — and that’s attracting growing attention.
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.
This article is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Significant polling errors most often result when late-deciding voters break differently from historical patterns. That’s likely to happen this year, and not in a way that favors Republicans.
Start with the observation that the current midterm environment is utterly unlike any in recent history. The CNN average of recent polls pegs the proportion of voters who disapprove of Trump at 65 percent, and a recent You/Gov Economist poll found that of those who disapprove, 84 percent of them disapprove of him “strongly.” We’ve had no recent midterm cycle in which most American voters strongly disapprove of the president.
If we look at the distribution of Trump disapprovers, the implications for Republicans become even more ominous. Let’s say that Trump’s most loyal MAGA voters make up 30 percent of the electorate and assume, plausibly, that most of them associate largely with Americans of similar views. Since this group is largely devoid of Trump disapprovers, the upshot is that an overwhelming majority of voters not in this group — some 70 percent of the electorate — are Trump disapprovers. And since there are also almost no undecided voters among Trump loyalists, the portion of the electorate that describes itself as “undecided” also must consist almost entirely of Trump disapprovers.
To see how this may matter, consider the observation that most of us are more heavily influenced than we realize by the behavior and beliefs of peers. (This was the core premise of my 2019 book, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work.) As decades of careful studies have shown, peer behavior strongly influences almost everything we do and think — what we eat, how much we exercise, whether and how much we smoke and drink, how much we weigh, and which candidates we support.
Now imagine the decision facing an undecided voter. She’s almost surely not a Trump loyalist, and virtually all of her close friends and relatives are likely to disapprove of Trump, a majority of them strongly. They’re unhappy about gas prices, the cost of groceries, corruption, the war in Iran, the behavior of ICE, and more. Herself a likely Trump disapprover, she’s almost surely unhappy about many of these things as well. Late deciders in past elections often tended to break toward candidates who share their political identity. If this year’s late decider is a conservative, that would predict she’d vote Republican. But given everything we know about human behavior, casting that vote would be difficult in the current environment. It would mean bucking the views of almost everyone she knows and cares about.
How much might all this matter? A recent generic ballot poll estimated that 8 percent of likely voters remain undecided. If these voters would have split 4D-4R in a normal midterm environment, a 6D-2R split in today’s climate would hardly seem unlikely. And that four percentage point swing would almost surely be more than enough to erase any pro-R polling bias from other sources.
But there’s more. Peer influences shape not only the decision about whom to vote for but also the decision about whether to vote at all. This influence will of course cause current polling averages to further understate Democratic strength.
In a recent interview with MS NOW host Jen Psaki, former Obama adviser David Plouffe was understandably reluctant even to discuss the possibility that current polls might be understating Democratic strength. Acknowledging this possibility could of course encourage some people to slack off, thinking the prize already in hand.
But understating Democratic prospects also entails risk. As we’ve seen, Republican seats are vulnerable in many areas that earlier Democrats would never have thought to contest. There’s reason to believe that the playing field may yet warrant further expansion.
The Trump administration has flailed at each of its major priorities. That includes, so far, its attempt to instill effective authoritarian rule: the Alien Enemies Act removals, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the occupations of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and others — they’re all marred by the same incompetence.
The buffoonery on display would be funny were it not so dangerous: it’s left lives ruined, and people killed. In the case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), it’s threatening to strip naturalized citizens of basic constitutional rights.
This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
On June 25, 2013, the Roberts Court handed down their decision in Shelby County v. Holder. The 5-4 decision gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965’s “preclearance” condition, which required states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting practices to get permission from the federal government before they could change any policy related to their elections. The country had changed dramatically, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; the “strong medicine” of the Voting Rights Act, he argued, was no longer needed, let alone justified. But Michael G. Miller and I show throughout our new book, An American Problem: How the Country Built – and the Supreme Court Broke — The Voting Rights Act just how misguided that reasoning was. In the parts of the country freed from preclearance by Shelby County, our electoral institutions have grown demonstrably less open to Americans of color.
When Mike and I started working on what would become An American Problem, a promise made by Justice Roberts in Shelby County still held. “Section 2” of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he wrote — the section containing the tools allowing litigators to attack election laws and policies that disproportionately harmed voters of color ± “is permanent and applies nationwide.” Although the Shelby County majority was happy to invalidate the preclearance regime that June morning, they told the country that tools remained still for removing discriminatory laws from the statute books.
The Trump Justice Department has mapped out its coming attack on mifepristone — much thirsted for by anti-abortion advocates, but deliberately delayed to avoid midterm backlash — in a new court filing.
The first step to imposing new restrictions (or reimposing ones previously lifted) is to conduct a “safety review.” Experts often point out that there are few drugs that have been studied and scrutinized as much as mifepristone, making the pretense of discovering some heretofore unknown risk factor fairly absurd.
“FDA is on track to obtain study results by mid-December 2026,” DOJ wrote of its review. “FDA will then need to review and evaluate/interpret the results and draft a report. FDA expects to complete that process not later than March 2027.”
The agency will then use those “findings” to justify a change to mifepristone’s REMS — Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy — or restrictions meant to police the use of highly dangerous drugs. Mifepristone’s safety profile has never justified these restrictions, but the anti-abortion movement’s decades of smearing the drug as unsafe has successfully made it harder to get under Republican and Democratic FDAs alike.
The Biden administration took the largest strides yet in removing some of these barriers. Most importantly, it lifted the in-person dispensing requirement, which has allowed patients even in red states to be prescribed the medicine over telehealth by doctors in blue ones, and receive it in the mail. So far, blue state shield laws have protected those providers from prosecution by red states, though a massive legal reckoning on these state jurisdictional issues is certainly coming.
That Biden-era REMS change is the crux of a Louisiana lawsuit against the FDA seeking to restrict mifepristone, with the state arguing that allowing the drug to be remotely prescribed and mailed undermines its abortion ban and forces it to expend money on Medicaid patients that have mifepristone-related complications. This week’s filing is part of that lawsuit. Historically, these lawsuits have struggled to amass legitimate examples of such mifepristone-related injuries, and Louisiana’s complaint leans heavily on state sovereignty.
The DOJ filing stated that the FDA is looking at the in-person dispensing requirement in particular.
“Following completion of its study and review, FDA will decide whether changes to the Mifepristone REMS Program are necessary and, if applicable, initiate any such changes in accordance with established processes,” it said. “FDA anticipates that it will be able to provide an update to its estimated date of completion as more information becomes known, particularly in March 2027 when it expects to complete its report on the final study results.”
This filing is as much a signal to the anti-abortion movement as it is an attempt to get Louisiana to cool it until the midterms are safely finished and the FDA can do the dirty work itself. Activists have been outraged at the lack of movement in President Donald Trump’s second term, though they were somewhat assuaged when he nominated Heidi Overton — who has called mifepristone “dangerous to women” and celebrated Dobbs — as the new FDA commissioner. She has not yet received a confirmation vote.
The alarm bells are ringing. Five House Democrats appeared at a shadow hearing on Wednesday during which they warned that President Donald Trump and his allies are actively trying to interfere with next month’s midterm elections. While the members of Congress were clearly concerned about Trump’s ongoing efforts to suppress voting, they also touted their work to confront the issue and expressed optimism the president will not, ultimately, be able to derail the democratic process.
“We know this playbook. We know his personality. He’s a cheater. He’s tried it before. He’ll continue to try it,” Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) said to TPM following the event. “We are prepared. … We have a collective legal team to push back.”
Other representatives emphasized to TPM the importance of voter awareness, and of turnout, and expressed optimism that those two factors together would blunt efforts to undermine democracy.
“As Donald Trump continues to try to prevent people from voting and to reduce voter turnout, that’s gonna reverberate where the American people will be more determined to come out to vote, to make sure that they have a voice,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said. Trump’s actions, he said, make “it clear to them every day who is a threat to our democracy and they will want to reverse that.”
The shadow hearing, which took place in Meng’s Queens district, was convened by Democrats on the Committee on House Administration, who have put together an election security task force led by Ranking Member Joe Morelle (D-NY). That task force, which was put together at the behest of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, has been focused on wargaming potential threats to the vote and coordinating with legal and civil rights groups. As part of that work, Morelle has been barnstorming the country holding shadow hearings, which are unofficial proceedings convened by members of the House minority, to hear from local experts about their concerns and to raise public awareness.
Meng praised Morelle for “traveling the country to spread the word,” checking in with local election boards, and helping to build a “collective legal team.” While Meng noted Trump’s dramatic attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election, she is confident the work being done to prevent similar threats this year will succeed.
“I’d be shocked if he didn’t try to cheat, right? Like, that is literally his M.O.,” Meng said of Trump, adding, “We saw it in Georgia. We saw it on January 6th. But again, democracy will prevail.”
Morelle took a similar tack as he opened the hearing, which was also attended by Meeks , Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y), and Rep. Paul Tomko (D-N.Y.), and congressional candidate Brad Lander. While he noted Trump and his allies — many of whom were directly involved in the various plots and schemes to reverse the result in 2020 — have actively worked to block mail in ballots, to spread false claims about the election, and even to consider plans to avoid seating new members of Congress, Morelle also pointed out the administration has lost every single court case related to their efforts to curb voting.
“In my view there is nothing more urgent in this moment than protecting American democracy. … Ballots must be counted fairly and accurately and the House that is reflective of the will of the American people must be organized and seated properly on January 3, 2027. … In this fight for a free and fair election we are winning. So, for people who are concerned about threats, we are winning every time.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) speaks during a House Rules Committee meeting on February 10, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
Morelle rattled off several things the Trump administration has done that could affect the voting process, including threatening to deploy ICE agents at polls, which is a clear violation of federal law, and defunding cybersecurity agencies that combat foreign election interference. In the face of this, Morelle also encouraged people to “make a voting plan,” to be aware of their polling places and deadlines, and to sign up as a poll worker or watcher if they are able.
The members heard from several experts including Bethany Li, who is executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), and who explained how Asian voters can be harmed by the “misinformation around non-citizen voting” that is being spread by President Trump and other Republicans.
“Already we have been hearing from local community partners across the country about how this administration’s misinformation has created confusion and fear among naturalized citizens who are unsure if they are eligible to vote as a result of the federal government’s attacks on birthright citizenship,” said Li.
Li said her organization is doing poll monitoring in Asian-American communities in ten different states. Asians make up approximately 44 percent of the population in the Queens district where the shadow hearing took place. AALDEF is part of a coalition of civil rights groups that filed a lawsuit against the potential deployment of ICE at the polls. Li further explained the impact of those threats.
“For Asian American communities, the potential consequences of such encounters really are not an abstract concern,” she said, adding, “Our communities include millions of immigrants. Just the insinuation that immigration enforcement could be near a polling location can create fear and confusion about who’s safe to vote.”
The members and experts who spoke at the hearing also emphasized voter turnout as a way to counter election threats. In response to a question from Meeks, John Cusick of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, stressed that the public has the ability to resist attempts to “sow distrust” in the voting process.
“Turnout is that solution. People should continue to show up,” Cusick said. “They’re expecting voters to not turn out.”
Meeks echoed that notion when TPM asked him about Trump’s recent Oval Office meeting with election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters, a former Colorado county official who was convicted of multiple felonies for her role in efforts to overturn the 2020 vote. Peters, who helped her fellow election deniers access election systems, was released after just a quarter of her sentence amid pressure from Trump. Meeks said he hoped people would react to learning about Trump’s efforts to interfere by turning out in strong numbers.
“What we’re doing and what we think will happen as a result of the work is that the American people see what’s happening also,” he said. “My confidence is in the American people.”
For his part, Morelle said the coalition of politicians, local officials, lawyers, and advocates who are confronting this issue are making progress. Thanks to the legal victories and other progress, he said the number of dangers being monitored by the task force is ticking down.
“We have monitored over 150 threats. The good news is: that threat list is getting shorter. By no means is it all gone away, but it gets shorter every day and we’re watching every single day as well,” Morelle said. “And I want to, you know, shout out to all the unsung heroes. I mean, there are thousands of people daily working throughout this country, attorneys, community activists, communicators, influencers … there’s so many people engaged in this effort.”
TPM asked Lander, who is in the midst of his first campaign for Congress, about one consequential Trump administration change to voting that has not gone away. Recent cuts to the Postal Service are continuing to cause delays to postmarking that could affect voter registrations and even ballots. Lander noted that’s another area where public awareness matters since people need to know they might need extra time for their paperwork.
“There’s no silver bullet here to protecting the integrity of our elections, but making sure people are paying attention is critical,” Lander said. “All we can do is make sure people know their rights.”
Along with the efforts of advocates and the task force, another reason for the Democrats’ optimism about turnout swamping Trump’s interference efforts is the president’s record low poll numbers. In his comments after the hearing, Espaillat suggested those could have the biggest impact of all.
“The way to stop a bully is to punch him in the nose,” Espaillat said with a laugh. “And the American people are punching Trump right in the nose.”
To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in America, Christopher Rufo is considered part of it. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the tony midtown think tank that holds black-tie galas; he recently enjoyed a polite sit-down interview with Ezra Klein on Klein’s massively popular New York Times podcast; and he has over 120,000 subscribers on Substack, a publishing platform whose owners have celebrated Rufo as one of their “best” political writers who readers can “trust.”
TPM has found fairly definitive evidence proving Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) misread text messages when he attempted to corner former special counsel Jack Smith during a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
Leadership at the Census Bureau has ordered staff to halt all external events related to the 2030 Census amid the agency’s release of a controversial, unprecedented rule proposal aimed at excluding immigrants from the U.S. population count, according to a copy of an email obtained by TPM.
President Donald Trump painted a terrifying picture during his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Standing on stage at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Trump offered a dramatic retelling of a brutal murder that took place in the state last August. Iryna Zarutska’s death made headlines around the country, but the killing that Trump weaved into the Republican Party’s midterm pitch has also emerged as a persistent fixation and rallying cry for racist extremists on the far right.
As he told Zarutska’s story, Trump spared no gory or dramatic details.
This week I asked 28 current and former Republican Party officials in Florida whether they would denounce an unrepentant white supremacist in their ranks, a man who will appear on the ballot this November as a member of the GOP.
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