WHY AREN'T SCOLDY PUNDITS TELLING REPUBLICANS TO MOVE TO THE CENTER?

I want to show you two maps from The New York Times. The first is a (preliminary) map showing where 2026 Democratic Senate candidates improved on Kamala Harris's 2024 margins. (At the link, click "Shift from 2024" to see this.)

Nearly every arrow is blue.

I'm not sure when the map was made. It doesn't show much in Maine, where the vote count has been somewhat slow. But there's a state map of Maine now, and it looks a lot redder:

The reason is obvious: Troy Jackson beat Susan Collins in Maine by a slightly smaller margin (6.6%) than Kamala Harris's defeat of Donald Trump in 2024 (~6.9%). Nearly everywhere else in the country, 2026 Democrats massively outperformed Harris in 2024. But not in Maine.

So here's my question: Why aren't pundits wagging their fingers at Democrats and saying that in order to be a truly competitive national party, Republicans will need to forgo MAGA/Fox News/Heritage Foundation/Stephen Miller extremism and become a party of Eisenhower Republicans, or at least Susan Collins Republicans?

I know that Collins wasn't effectively a moderate. She didn't stand up to her party when it counted. But many Maine voters thought she did, even this year. That's the reason she didn't lose in a landslide.

So whey aren't the Matthew Yglesiases and Ezra Kleins saying that Republicans need to field candidates who are moderates on abortion and immigration and taxes and healthcare? Why aren't they saying that Republicans are too in thrall to their most zealous, most extreme voters and groups and now need to reach out to the middle? Why aren't the pundits telling us that Republicans are in an elitist bubble and have lost touch with real Americans, the ones who hate AI and data centers and Flock cameras?

I say this because it sure looks as if Republicans have learned nothing from Tuesday's drubbing. The big story of the day is the fate of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Oh, sure, the possibility that he might be impeached in the lame-duck session by a Republican-controlled House, or fired by Trump, suggests that the GOP has learned something. But consider what might happen after that, or instead. The New York Post reports:

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ruled out voluntarily leaving his job to take a Senate appointment....

The former Fox News personality’s cleanest offramp, ironically, is joining the Senate by gaining Tennessee Gov.-elect Martha Blackburn’s support to appoint him to her vacated seat....

A ... person close to Trump said that if he were in Hegseth’s shoes, he would be begging Blackburn for the Senate appointment.

Hegseth has mismanaged the war. He's mistreated the military. Even Republicans know he's unqualified. And he's very, very far right. In a mirror-image situation, if Democrats were in power and just lost a midterm shellacking, then announced that they wanted to reward one of the unpopular president's most criticized and most ideological subordinates with a Senate seat, there'd by so many denunciations of the "tone-deaf" Democrats that the New York Times opinion section and The Atlantic might have to publish special issues to print them all. The decision wouldn't be seen as merely a red-state governor tossing a disgraced right-winger a bone. It would be described as symptomatic of a party-wide crisis in the Democratic Party, a sign that Democrats were in deep denial, their radical-left fever still unbroken.

Or imagine a different parallel. There's a Democratic senator who, like Blackburn, has just been elected governor and will need to be replaced: Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota. Imagine if Klobuchar appointed Ilhan Omar to her Senate seat. The cries of pundit horror would be audible from space.

Klobuchar is a left-centrist -- she certainly won't appoint Omar. I assume she'll appoint Angie Craig, the moderate congresswoman who lost the primary to the progressive lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, who's now a senator-elect. But even if Craig isn't appointed, the appointee will be someone who's not a lefty ideologue.

In this situation, most Democrats would make a safe, "respectable," down-the-middle pick. Republicans don't bother with that. They just go far right whenever they have a chance. And our political culture thinks that's just fine.

FOR THE RIGHT, ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, UNEXPECTEDLY

I don't have to tell you how big a win this was for the Democrats -- a flip of seven and potentially nine seats in the Senate, the possibility of the largest House majority either party has had in this century, a sweep in Texas statewide races -- senator, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general (and the demise of the most overtly bigoted candidate in America, Bo French, in the race for Texas railroad commissioner, as well as wife-beater Max Miller in his Ohio House race and Brandon "AK Guy" Herrera, a gun-fetishizing content creator fond of Nazi jokes and misogyny, in a House race in Texas). Lauren Boebert is losing! Virginia Foxx trails her Democratic opponent by 99 votes! It was an amazing day.

What happened was something that seemed impossible for most of recent U.S. history: the Republican Party and the American right were held accountable for their actions.

Here's how American politics has tended to work in recent decades: Republicans gain power and make the rich richer while forcing the non-rich to run twice as fast just to stay in place. Republicans start endless wars that accomplish nothing for the American people. Republicans (with the help of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party) empower large businesses even at their most reckless, sometimes with devastating consequences for ordinary Americans. Republican jurists restrict the voting rights of non-whites, seize reproductive rights from women, and allow the super-rich to spend unlimited money in order to buy elections.

And even when voters get fed up with Republicans, the response of voters often seems muted, especially in the past decade. After four years of Donald Trump, Joe Biden won a decent-size popular-vote victory, but he needed to eke out wins by an eyelash in several swing states in order to secure the win. In 2022, Democrats were able to prevent a Republican wave election after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, but Trump, who appointed three of the justices responsible for the Dobbs decision, came roaring back two years later.

It's quite possible that yesterday's shellacking of the GOP will be reversed in two or four years' time, but for now it feels good. It feels good because we can draw a straight line from the actions of America's worst supervillains to so many of the Democratic wins.

Trump's brutal immigration crackdown largely targets hard-working Hispanics rather than criminals. The people who chose this approach -- Trump himself along with Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bovino, Markwayne Mullin, and the worst of them all, Stephen Miller -- outraged Hispanic voters so much that they turned the red state of Texas purple, and for the moment more blue than red, in one election cycle.

Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned the final provision of the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting power. In response, Black voters in the South turned out in large numbers, leading to big victories in Georgia, the Carolinas, and possibly even the Mississippi Senate race.

Trump himself gets the blame for the pointless and inflationary war and the pointless and inflationary tariffs. The strikingly unpopular Elon Musk stands in for the entire arrogant tech oligarchy; James Talarico singled Musk out as a villain and won by double digits.

Voters chose Democrats because they hate data centers and hate Flock cameras. They chose Democrats because they hate the way Trump, his sons, his son-in-law, and all their friends have enriched themselves in the past two years. Jon Ossoff and other Democrats made that a major issue and won big.

What's gratifying is that this doesn't seem like just a "thermostatic" win for Democrats -- the normal adjustment to a win by the other party two years earlier. It's much bigger than that, and it's for obvious reasons.

The Trump administration thought it could get away with assaulting rural hospitals, making health insurance more expensive, allowing infectious diseases to spread, cheerleading an AI boom that's threatening jobs. The Republican Party thought it could shout "Sharia law!" and "Men in women's sports!" and voters would ignore Trump's obsession with the ballroom and the arch and the Reflecting Pool, along with his proud indifference to ordinary people's pain, economic and otherwise. Republicans thought their usual playbook -- portraying themselves as the only true Americans while demonizing their opponents -- could get them through anything. It didn't work. That's deeply satisfying.

NO, TRUMP WON'T QUIT OR FLEE TO RUSSIA, AND OTHER FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE MIDTERMS

I hope no one believes this:

Jamie Rowen, an international law expert and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned on a Saturday episode of All Rise News that President Donald Trump and his strongman allies appear to be laying plans to flee to friendly dictatorships if they lose power and face prosecution at home.

"You can imagine that if he loses an election that he thinks was rigged, even if it very clearly wasn't, and he loses by a sizable margin...that he too might face some type of criminal investigation for all of the crimes that he is currently committing," Rowen told journalist Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News.

She suggested Trump, too, would seek refuge in Russia, saying he "will have colluded with, say, Putin to figure out a way to escape to that country."

"That's all I can keep thinking," Rowen said. "They are laying a plan for all of them, no matter what the consequence in their countries are, to flee to other dictatorships that support them."

Nahhh. Like James Carville's repeated assertion that Trump will quit after the midterms, this doesn't jibe with anything we know about Trump, and it ignores the safeguards that will continue to protect Trump even if his party faces the largest imaginable drubbing: (1) A half-cetury-old Justice Department opinion says that a president can't be prosecuted while in office. (2) It will still be impossible to convict him in the Senate if the House (by a simple majority) impeaches him, because Democrats will need at least a dozen votes from Republican senators to reach a two-thirds majority, and Republicans still won't be ready to defy him. (3) The Supreme Court has protected virtually everything he does as president from legal scrutiny. (4) Even after the midterms, Democrats will still be Democrats, and therefore they'll be afraid to take bold action against Trump, especially because the mainstream media will be urging them not to.

And Trump hates travel. We've known this since the 2016 campaign. Politico reported this just before Election Day that year:

... for Trump, near-nightly returns to Manhattan — from as far west as Reno, Nevada — mean a chance to sleep in his marble-and-gold hued 66th floor penthouse in Trump Tower....

Even when Trump doesn’t return to Manhattan, he almost always overnights in one of his many other properties: the sumptuous Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the exclusive, private Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, or his Trump-branded hotels in Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas. Through Saturday, only four nights in October had Trump not slept in a bed that he or one of his companies owned.

If Trump has ever traveled to a non-Trump property just for the pleasure of being in a new place, I'm not aware of it. His sons and son-in-law might flee if faced with serious legal peril, but Trump won't.

Carville's belief -- that the job will be too frustrating for him after a Democratic Congress is sworn in -- is belied by this:

It was the day before the election, and the president had decided to come [to the Reflecting Pool], a place that excites him, to talk about many of the topics that make him happiest. Trouble is, almost none of those topics have anything to do with the issues that are driving this election.

At a time when voters have made clear they’re most concerned with the high prices of gas and groceries and a new war in the Middle East, Mr. Trump used his final in-person appearance before Americans head to the polls to talk about drain pipes, top soil, limestone, fountains and his favorite kind of columns.

“The pipes now are totally renovated,” Mr. Trump said. Propped up next to him was a poster board showing an aerial view of the pool, with this caption: “Back, and more beautiful than ever!”

The “brand-new pipes,” Mr. Trump said, are “very important in terms of the algae and other things. And it’s a complete job, and we’re very proud of it.”

Also:

The Trump administration has submitted its proposed overhaul of East Potomac Golf Links for federal review, calling for a new championship golf course and a $304.5 million seawall around the Hains Point peninsula....

The 55-page concept proposal, obtained by The Washington Post, was submitted Friday to the National Capital Planning Commission....

Building makes Trump happy. If a Democratic Congress makes trouble for him elsewhere, he'll still have this. And if the Democrats try to block his projects, he'll get to engage in one of his other favorite activities -- siccing lawyers on people, either to get what he wants or to prevent them from getting what they want from him. For Trump, it's all lifefuel.

Remember that Trump first gained fame as a builder -- he was probably the most famous builder in the world in the 1980s -- but after that, he wasn't really building anything. He'd buy up buildings, refurbish them a little, and slap his name on them, to no great media fanfare. He'd make deals to brand other people's buildings, which he mostly didn't own. He was a TV star and a brand name, not a builder.

But now, using your tax dollars and bribes from rich people, he gets to be a builder again. It's like going back to the bloom of his youth. He's reliving his glory days. Why would he give that up?

*****

And will today's results be the Democratic rout we're all hoping for?

In the House, absolutely. In the Senate, I think Democrats will prevail, but there are still some worrisome polls in Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, and Alaska, and the huge overestimation of Abdul El-Sayed's lead in the Michigan primary has me concerned that the polls could be wrong again. So I wouldn't bet the rent money on a Senate flip. (I would bet the rent money on a House flip.)

I think Democrats will win enough of the worrisome states to get to 52 (which is necessary to preclude a possible post-election John Fetterman ratfuck) -- and possibly beyond. I feel surprisingly confident about Kansas, and Iowa might work out also. But the extreme "reach" states -- Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi -- probably aren't happening. (I think Florida is the least likely of those three, because the combination of old white Fox addicts and Cubans makes the red wall insurmountable.) I'll be delighted if I'm wrong, though.

TOP DONOR TO HALEY STEVENS'S NEW BFF IS AN ANTI-SEMITE AND MUSLIM ELIMINATIONIST

A couple of days ago, when Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan was escalating her fight with her party's Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, I wrote a post in which I made a leap from her attacks on El-Sayed to the unabashed Islam-bashing we're seeing from the Republican Party in Texas. I said:

You can say that [Stevens is] trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites.... But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

I cited a Texas Monthly story about Nate Schatzline, a top adviser to Governor Greg Abbott, who doesn't believe there's any such thing as non-radical Islam.

“The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”

I also quoted Bo French, the GOP's candidate this year for a seat on the state's Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry: French says that Texas should "round up" every Muslim.

A commenter said I was irresponsible for connecting Stevens to these Texans:

Linking the behavior of Stevens these past few days to two weird Texans who want to deprive Muslims of their freedom of religion is a stretch, Steve.

But there is a link between the rise of Islam-bashing in Texas and the candidate Stevens has now officially endorsed in the Michigan Senate race, Republican Mike Rogers. One of the biggest donors to the Rogers campaign in Michigan is a rich Texas Islamophobe -- and anti-Semite -- who has been instrumental in pushing the Texas Republican Party in the direction of Muslim-bashing.

I'm talking about Tim Dunn. Along with fellow far-right oil billionaire Farris Wilks, Dunn has been pushing the Texas GOP farther and farther to the right in recent years. They were the major funders of Bo French's successful primary campaign this year.

A political action committee funded by Texas’ most prolific hardline conservative donors was the main benefactor to Bo French’s campaign for the Texas Railroad Commission in the March Republican primary, spending $375,000 to bolster his bid.

The Texas Freedom Fund for the Advancement of Justice, formerly known as Defend Texas Liberty, gave French $225,000 and spent another $150,000 on an ad promoting his candidacy in a widely circulated conservative newsletter. The two PACs have been predominantly financed by West Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have deployed tens of millions of dollars to pull the Texas GOP and Legislature toward their hardline, anti-LGBTQ+ and immigration stances.

Dunn and Wilks provided this support before French's notorious tweet lamenting the fact that people of South Asian descent were rooting for the Texas Longhorns, but they gave the money well after French posted an online poll asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?”

Respondents had two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”

French's bigotry is constant -- and that appears to be just fine with Tim Dunn. Dunn and Wilks also bankrolled Nate Schatzline's successful run for the state legislature in 2022. Earlier this year, their True Texas Project funded a conference that

promises to educate attendees about the “threats of sharia law, totalitarianism and communism” that they say threaten their Christian faith....

Conference speakers include Texas Sen. Bob Hall of Rockwall, who compared Islam to Nazism at a state education hearing in June; State Rep. Andy Hopper of Wise County, who suggested banning Islam as a religion at a political event in March; [and] State Rep. Brent Money of Greenville, who formed an anti-sharia legislative caucus this year....

This year, Dunn reached beyond Texas to give millions of dollars to Mike Rogers in Michigan:

A Texas oil billionaire with deep ties to the Christian Nationalist movement and a rising presence in the national GOP scene, has contributed $5 million to a super PAC backing Republican Mike Rogers’ U.S. Senate campaign in Michigan, marking a foray into Midwest politics.

Tim Dunn’s contributions to the Great Lakes Conservative Fund, or GLCF, were made in two installments of $2.5 million each in April and June and accounted for more than 98% of the PAC’s total fundraising during the first half of 2025....

Dunn isn't just an Islamophobe -- he's a Christian nationalist who doesn't believe Jews should hold leadership positions in politics.

Former Republican Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, who is Jewish, told the Texas Tribune that Dunn felt he was unqualified to hold that position, telling him in 2010 that “only Christians should hold leadership positions” in that state’s lower chamber.

Yesterday, on X, we heard from Ray Wert, a journalist who was a senior staffer to former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. Wert is married to Mallory McMorrow, who ran in this year's Michigan Democratic Senate primary along with Stevens and El-Sayed. Long before Stevens endorsed Mike Rogers, Wert -- who's Jewish -- encouraged Stevens to put her name on an op-ed denouncing the bigotry surrounding the Mike Rogers campaign. Wert says she refused.

The op-ed mentioned the large contribution from Tim Dunn and Dunn's belief that Jews shouldn't hold positions of power in politics. It also said this about Rogers:

Now let's look at the people working to elect him. On February 25, someone on X asked what should be done about Jews. A college student named Cameron Dundas replied: "Send them to North Korea?" Weeks later, Mike Rogers named him as his campus lead at a Michigan university.

He isn't the only one. Alexander Richmond, the Rogers for Senate campus lead at the University of Michigan, defended participants in the leaked Young Republicans group chat. You may remember that chat. "I love Hitler." Black Americans called "monkeys." Musings about sending political opponents to the gas chambers. Rape described as "epic."
་
So what did Mike Rogers' campaign say when asked about all of it? "There are a lot of people across the state, with varying viewpoints."

... did Rogers cut ties with Richmond? Nope! In fact, there's pictures of the two of them tailgating at the Michigan football game two weeks ago.

... when people who hold the Jewish people in contempt attached themselves to his campaign and his money, Mike Rogers made a calculation. He kept the check. He kept the coalition. And he has never answered for it.

The post-Trump Republican Party is emerging. It will be very Islamophobic. It might not fully embrace anti-Semitism, but it will keep the door open open to unabashed anti-Semites. Haley Stevens has chosen the Republican in this race. That's what she's siding with. He took millions from a hatemonger.

And while we're on this subject, let's start asking elite media gatekeepers why they don't think the bigotry of billionaires like Dunn, Wilks, and Elon Musk warrants the wall-to-wall, day-after-day coverage that Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur received in this Michigan Senate race this year.

I'D LIKE A DEEP DIVE ON HOW HALEY STEVENS DECIDED TO SHIV ABDUL EL-SAYED (updated)

The most curious thing about Haley Stevens's decision to shiv Abdul El-Sayed in the last week of the Michigan Senate campaign has nothing to do with Muslims, Jews, or Israel. It's this:

[In September,] Stevens appeared on TMZ Live and [fiancé Jason] Turkish tagged along. Stevens was visibly excited during the segment, at one point turning to hosts Harvey Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere and saying,

“Isn’t he cute,” she shared.

“His name is Jason and he loves me to pieces,” she added.

Haley Stevens ran unsuccessfully for Senate this year, giving up her House seat in order to do so. She's 43 years old, and it's perfectly understandable that she's trying to set up a second act for herself. But she a local pol. She didn't have much of a national profile in September, when this appearance took place. Why was she being interviewed on TMZ Live, which is mostly an entertainment gossip show but also dabbles in politics?

I assume someone at TMZ wanted to help her do a soft launch of her post-congressional career. It's odd to me that the boyfriend was there -- he had no public profile at the time -- but there he was.

And there he was again this week, on multiple platforms, including TMZ again.

Turkish, who announced his engagement to Stevens less than three months ago, has spent the past several days loudly condemning El-Sayed on every platform available to him, while announcing that he plans to vote for Rogers due to El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel.

Turkish, a Democratic donor living in Michigan who has also given to GOP candidates, attended a campaign event for Rogers Wednesday night. While there, he called El-Sayed antisemitic. Then, as Stevens sat for an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Turkish went on TMZ and, on his fiancée’s behalf, said “I don’t think she’s going to be supporting Abdul El-Sayed very much longer.”

Stevens, however, has repeatedly insisted she is still supporting El-Sayed.

Thiks is from a Mother Jones story with the headline "Haley Stevens’ Fiancé Seems Dedicated to Ruining Her Career" -- but I strongly doubt that he's going rogue in defiance of Stevens's wishes.

After Abdul El-Sayed beat her in the primary, I think Stevens agreed to endorse him under intense pressure from the party, and she's been chafing ever since. I think she feels locked into the commitment she made to the party when she endorsed El-Sayed, and Turkish's endorsement of Rogers is her way of stabbing El-Sayed in the back without actually withdrawing her endorsement.

This has the earmarks of an operation cooked up in cooperation with the Republican Party and its media wing. You'll never guess where else Turkish appeared in recent days:

The fiancé of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) joined Fox News on Saturday to trash Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as antisemitic just days before the midterm elections.

Jason Turkish joined Griff Jenkins on Fox & Friends Weekend to discuss his headline-grabbing endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race....

Turkish ... described himself as a “lifelong Democrat” ...

There's the tell. This is a GOP op. There's very little that the Republican Party and the right-wing media love more than a person who can spew GOP talking points while saying, I'm a lifelong Democrat.

I don't think this is fake outrage on the part of Stevens and Turkish. But I think the specifics of the rollout are being coordinated with the GOP and the Rogers campaign. It seems obvious to me that Stevens has decided that her future is as a Democratic apostate. And I guess you can't blame her. There always a place in the right-wing media-sphere for anyone who decides to go this route.

*****

UPDATE: OMG.

Rep. Haley Stevens ... attended church services Sunday morning with Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers — a highly unusual move for a sitting Democrat in the waning days of a marquee race for a seat her party is fighting to hold.

Stevens and Rogers were seen separately entering Perfecting Church, a prominent Black church in the city.

Just admit it: You support Rogers. You voted for Rogers. You want El-Sayed to lose. Have the moral integrity to tell the truth.

*****

UPDATE: So she's officially endorsed Mike Rogers.

Haley Stevens says she is endorsing Mike Rogers for the U.S. Senate

[image or embed]

— Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) November 1, 2026 at 12:35 PM

Note that she still describes herself as "a proud Democrat." So now we know: She clearly intends to continue bullshitting us that way, probably for years to come, while parroting GOP talking points. I bet she'll even call herself "a proud Democrat" in her inevitable 2028 Republican convention speech.

THE MULTI-FRONT WAR TO DELEGITIMIZE DEMOCRATS AND BLUNT A BLUE WAVE

It doesn't matter how big the Democratic wave is on Tuesday -- our political culture will never acknowledge that the party deserves power.

We're already being told that a Democratic win won't really be a Democratic win. Here's a Ruy Teixeira op-ed in The Washington Post. Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002 but has increasingly positioned himself as a Democrat-bashing Democrat.

Democrats are on course to have a stunningly good 2026 election....

But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.

Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation.

But a Politico story suggests that Democrats, or at least Democratic politicians and operatives, won't see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party. They've already internalized the "Sure, they voted for us, but they still hate us" message.

More than a dozen lawmakers, campaign operatives, strategists and pollsters warned in interviews that national Democrats risk drawing the wrong conclusions if they take back control of at least one chamber of Congress next week.

Those figures from across the party worry that the midterms, which have become a referendum on President Donald Trump, have done little to improve the Democratic Party’s brand. They caution that a favorable political environment has papered over persistent problems for a party still grappling with why it lost the 2024 presidential election. And they admit they are still sharply divided over what its message should be heading into 2028.

“Don’t confuse them losing with us winning,” said Morgan Jackson, the senior adviser to Democrat Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign in North Carolina....

“This is not an affirmation of the Democratic Party in any which way,” said one veteran Democratic pollster working on Senate campaigns, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is very much a rejection of Trump.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times, which sets the agenda for much of the media, is fixating on a fake outrage Republicans are promoting, while overlooking a breaking story that should be deeply damaging to President Trump. Jamison Foser writes:

... the national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored [a] new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate....

At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days....

Meanwhile, the New York Times still has not told readers of a new rape allegation against Donald Trump that was made public on Monday in a report the New York Times dishonestly dismissed on grounds that “it largely cites allegations that have already been public.” The word “largely” is doing a awful lot of work in that sentence, given that the report includes a new rape allegation.

We know what the Times is doing, because the Times did this in 2016: It has concluded that the Democrats are likely to win this year, just as it concluded that Hillary Clinton was likely to win ten years ago, and has decided that the days just before Election Day are an excellent time to begin dragging the Democratic Party down, lest it get too uppity. I've said for decades here that the Times doesn't particularly like the far-right Republicans who rise to the top of the GOP, and often promotes Democrats who run against them or propose to clean up their messes, but it loathes Democrats once they've taken power -- and sometimes even when they're merely on the verge of accruing power. (The Times still yearns for a moderate Republican Party that hasn't existed in nearly half a century and will never exist again.)

And if all this isn't enough, we have the spectacle of Haley Stevens, an alleged Democrat who is clearly trying to defeat her party's Senate nominee in her home state because she's a ride-or-die Israel supporter and he's a Muslim and fierce Israel critic. Stevens, presumably under pressure, endorsed Abdul El-Sayed after he defeated her in the primary. But this week she began orchestrating a series of passive-aggressive attacks on El-Sayed, sitting by and insisting she still supports him even as her former campaign chair and her fiancé made headlines by expressing support for El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. The fiancé also showed up at a Rogers rally.

And then it got worse. Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell got Stevens and El-Sayed to agree on a unity rally, scheduled for tomorrow at a Black church in Detroit, along with South Carolina congressman James Clyburn. But Stevens then made two demands: that El-Sayed condemn an ad from an outside group associated with podcaster Cenk Ugyur that had been denounced as anti-Semitic (with some justification), and that El-Sayed take down an ad cheekily placed by his campaign on Fox News and Newsmax broadcasts -- an ad featuring words of praise from right-wing media figures, among them Tucker Carlson (who is an anti-Semite, but says nothing anti-Semitic in the ad).

El-Sayed has now asked Stevens not to appear at tomorrow's rally. I worry that she'll show up and bum-rush the lectern like Kanye bum-rushing Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards.

We can all envision the future of Haley Stevens. The carefully staged announcement that she's quit the Democratic Party. The book deal. The many, many appearances on Fox and CBS. The op-eds for The Free Press -- and, probably, The New York Times.

You can say that she's trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites even if El-Sayed himself doesn't share their beliefs. But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

Read some of what Texas Monthly has reported on Nate Schatzline, a top advisor to Governor Gregg Abbott on election security:

“The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”

... Among his goals for the coming year: preventing mosques from serving as polling places; cracking down on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of casting votes on behalf of long-dead relatives; and working with Abbott and right-wing Texas House members to reclassify Islam as a political ideology—a move that the far right has long sought so that it can legally target Muslims without running afoul of religious-liberty protections.

Emphasis added. And by "religious-liberty protections," we mean "the Bill of Rights."

Schatzline isn't alone, of course:

Bo French, the nominee for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, has argued that we must “round up” every Muslim.... And in June, at the Texas GOP’s convention, delegates openly celebrated the party’s lurch toward overt Islamophobia, pushing for Muslim Republicans to leave the party and branding Islam a “disease.”

This is the nationwide future of the Republican Party, a party Stevens will probably join soon. For now, she's trying to reduce her current party's power in the Senate, as are a lot of other nominally non-Republican figures, in many different ways.

DEMOCRATS MIGHT SHELLAC THE GOP, BUT WE'LL STILL BE IN "THE TRUMP ERA"

At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Paul Campos writes:

I keep seeing pundit musing about the end of the Trump era....

I think it’s highly likely that Democrats gain thirty or forty seats in the House next week, and win enough Senate races to control that chamber by four or five votes.

I think Democrats will make big gains in the House. I'm less sanguine about the Senate. Too many of the races Democrats are counting on are still well within the polling margin of error, at a time when there are signs that Democrats are much more willing to respond to pollsters than Republicans are. If I had to guess, I'd say that Democrats will fall short in at least some of the states where the polls say they're leading. My guess is Democrats will get to 51 or 52 seats, though I agree it's quite possible they'll do better.

But the question is: what then? Donald Trump and his base have no commitment to democracy because, among other reasons, they’re not democrats in even the loosest sense. Trump is a straight-up authoritarian, at the head of a mass anti-democratic political movement that at this point has most if not all of the hallmarks of contemporary neo-fascism.

Trump has already engaged in open flagrant sedition, in an attempt to overturn the results of a national election. He did this at a time when the upper reaches of his administration were not nearly as stacked with unhinged zealots and cultists as they are at present. That crime was also committed at a time when the Republican party was not nearly as all-in on supporting him no matter what he might do as it is now....

Why, given all this, do so many people seem so confident that Trump will in any sense whatsoever accept the results of an unambiguous electoral repudiation of his party and his movement? Because there will be nothing he can do about it? But that assumes a very great deal about how far Trump and his supporters throughout the federal government, the military, the courts, the governments of red states, the mobs in the street, etc. are or are not willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation.

I think we'll avoid the worst outcomes, for a couple of reasons.

First, Donald Trump is an authoritarian, but in one sense, he's not a "straight-up" authoritarian. A straight-up authoritarian would study the battlefield -- American democracy -- and identify and set in motion the most effective ways he could neutralize it. A straight-up authoritarian wouldn't spend hours every day on architectural projects, wouldn't be writing 1,318-word social media rants about a streaming-cable political comedian, wouldn't be entrusting his attempted election steal to government lawyers who struggle to obtain indictments. He'd figure out what works and do more of it.

How far are Trump and his supporters willing to go in the face of democratic repudiation? This seems like a scary answer, but on one level it isn't: they're willing to go far as Trump tells them to go. It's still much, much farther than they would be permitted to go if this were a well-functioning democracy, but they don't seem to be getting the go signal for a true authoritarian crackdown. Trump and Pete Hegseth don't appear to have mobilized the military. Mobs of MAGA thugs aren't launching unprovoked pre-election attacks on Democrats all over the country. Trump is appealing the many, many court rulings that have gone against him, but he isn't defying them.

I continue to believe that Trump isn't prepared to stop a Democratic wave election by any means necessary. What he is prepared to do is empower his administration to put together a dog's breakfast of anti-Democratic acts that don't add up to a comprehensive election-stealing plan but make him feel good.

So at a time when Democrats are likely to win a double-digit margin in the House, he's targeted precisely one specific House candidate, Ilhan Omar. She was elected in 2024 by a margin of nearly 50 points, and she'll probably win by an even bigger margin this year. Maybe he'll obtain an indictment against her. Maybe she'll be in a cell when the new Congress is sworn in. But Democrats are still likely to have a large House majority without her.

Trump's other gambit for saving the House seems to be the Justice Department's effort to block voting in California unless the state agrees not to count ballots from approximately 20,000 people the feds claim are illegally registered voters. Democrats are likely to win 47 of the state's 52 House races; if the Trump regime could take all those seats off the board altogether and convene a California-less House in January, Republicans would likely retain their majority. But the courts have rebuffed this effort so far, noting that there's no reason contested voters' ballots can't be challenged between Election Day and the scheduled election certification in December.

(Keep in mind that approximately 20,000 voters -- many of whom will undoubtedly prove to be citizens or non-voters -- spread out over 52 congressional districts average out to approximately 400 per district. It's likely that no House race in California will be decided by a margin that small.)

In the Senate, Republicans might have struck pay dirt with the story of Democratic operative in Alaska recruiting a candidate with the same name as the GOP incumbent. Alaska's Republican governor has ordered an investigation and says the state might not certify a win by Democrat Mary Peltola, even though there's no evidence that she was personally involved, and even though the state Supreme Court okayed the candidacy of the same-named candidate. This one could get tied up in court for months. But the feds' pursuit of Peltola is a strategy to try to win one seat. It's not an overall strategy to steal the Senate.

Yet I think Trump would be satisfied with this. Like millions of other Fox News grandpas, I think he's content -- in a way a true authoritarian wouldn't be -- with the opportunity to turn on the TV and see a lot of ragebait stories hinting that the evil Democrats are getting away with something. A true authoritarian would have a plan to prevent the opposition from winning; Trump seems content to have Attorney General Todd Blanche as his personal content creator. Alaska was rigged! An immigration fraudster won in Minneapolis! There was massive cheating in California! Trump seems as if he'd be satisfied believing that Republicans should have won.

It might get worse than that -- thugs at the polls, mobs in Washington. But it looks as if lawsuits rather than jackboots are Trump's go-to this year. The key person seems to be Blanche, not Pete Hegseth or Markwayne Mullin or Stephen Miller. That's Trump's lifelong happy place: employing lawyers to make trouble for his enemies in court. Unlike a true authoritarian, I don't think he cares if it works, as long as he's certain he's right, and as long as he keeps on fighting.

This is why we can't talk about "the Trump era" ending on Tuesday. We'll still have to endure this exhausting and extremely Trumpian post-election battle. Peltola and Omar might be targets long after the new Congress is sworn in. Trump will still command attention, even if it's in defeat. We'll probably save democracy from him for the most part, but we won't be able to get rid of him that easily.