Most Americans who oppose Donald Trump agree the threat to democracy is the major issue of the 2024 election. But what, precisely, constitutes the threat? To most Democrats, the danger is that the election will install into power a president who admires autocratic regimes and wishes to replicate their methods by encouraging violence, using the government to punish independent media and prosecute his political enemies.

But another, smaller group of people say the threat to democracy is that there will only be one candidate running against Trump. They define “democracy” as giving voters in the general election the choice of multiple non-Trump options.

At the moment, Biden is facing potential spoiler campaigns from the center (No Labels) and the left (Cornel West.) The substantive critiques those two spoiler campaigns have with President Biden and the Democratic party are ideologically diametrical, but their process argument is the same.

“There is no true democracy in America when two ruling parties actively work to prevent voters from having choices,” says Peter Daou, West’s campaign manager. “Would you accept a restaurant with only two (rotten) items on the menu? Of course not.”

“The attempt to shut down No Labels is not an attack on the organization. It’s an attack on America’s democracy,” claims Joe Lieberman, one of the organizers of the centrist third-party campaign.

Notably, West and Lieberman alike aren’t merely making a procedural case that they require ballot access. They are arguing that even to denounce their campaigns imperils democracy. Lieberman’s comments came in response to the Democratic Party merely instructing its officials to attack No Labels as a threat to democracy.

Daou, in an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, complained that the very act of criticizing his campaign is undemocratic. “Let’s say this cycle we also say the same thing, which is, ‘Oh, my God, we have to stop Donald Trump or we have to stop whoever the Republican might be,’” he theorized. “And this happens the next cycle and the next cycle and the next cycle. Where is the so-called democracy that we’re supposedly protecting or saving? What we’re doing is we’re crushing third parties. We are stifling democracy itself, Isaac.”

Daou and Lieberman are not simply asserting that third parties must have the right to appear on the ballot. They are insisting democracy requires that they run and that the major parties refrain from denouncing them as spoilers.

At the risk of insulting the reader’s intelligence, apparently, it is necessary to point out that the choice construction of a presidential election is nothing like a restaurant menu. When you order from a restaurant, every diner gets to eat whichever dish they want. For that reason, it’s in the restaurant’s interest to provide them with as many options as the restaurant can competently supply. When I go to a restaurant, I want the menu to offer me something that caters to my individual tastes.

To continue with the restaurant analogy, a presidential election is like a restaurant where, even though we have different choices on the menu, every diner gets the dish that gets ordered the most. That changes the incentive completely. In that kind of restaurant, I would neither expect nor even want a menu with lots of choices. I would want a menu designed to give me the choice closest to my preference. I happen to love Indian food, but putting chicken tikka and lamb vindaloo and saag paneer on a winner-take-all menu ballot might well mean that I wind up eating a bologna sandwich.

If we could live in a world where everybody got the president of their choice, I am confident nobody would care how many presidential candidates jumped into the race. The reason Democrats are concerned about the proliferation of candidates is that the election is going to result in just one president.

The nature of the American presidential election system, which lacks both parliamentary coalitions and ranked-choice voting, is that multiple candidates make it easier for a candidate to win with a minority of the vote. Democrats believe that the intensity of opinion around Trump — and the Democrats’ need to win a strong majority of moderates in order to have a majority — means that having multiple non-Trump candidates increases the odds of a Trump victory.

Third- and fourth-party enthusiasts seem (or perhaps just pretend) not to comprehend this dynamic at all and instead insist putting more choices on the November election is tantamount to “democracy.” Of course, you could expand choices by running more candidates in the primaries, which are open and decided by the voters. But neither the No Labels faction nor the Cornel West faction are willing to actually compete for the Democratic nomination. (Daou, revealingly, originally managed the campaign for Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson before giving up when she went nowhere).

The Wall Street Journal has repeatedly argued that criticizing No Labels is unpatriotic and anti-democratic. “President Biden said in a rare recent interview that No Labels has ‘a democratic right’ to do this, but ‘it’s going to help the other guy,’” complains an editorial this week. “Now comes a Super Pac trying to raise millions of dollars to assail No Labels, according to a fundraising pitch to prospective donors. What do these folks have against democracy?”

The Journal used to insist that wealthy donors spending money on ads to promote their point of view was a freedom so vital that campaign donations couldn’t even be regulated. Now, apparently, it’s a threat to democracy.

The Journal also professes to have no idea why anybody would even object to a No Labels candidacy. “What we don’t understand is the obloquy heaped on No Labels. Its members are patriots who want to spare the country from a campaign that offers four more years of the last two polarizing Presidencies,” pleaded a July editorial.

Of course, the Journal understands perfectly well why Democrats object to a spoiler campaign. “Yes, this does pose a threat to them because it’s likely to drain votes away from the Biden side,” boasted a Journal editorial writer in a video segment praising No Labels.

Lieberman’s own motives are only slightly more opaque. In an interview with CT Insider this summer, he dismissed polling that found a No Labels candidacy would pull more votes from Biden than Trump by insisting, “I haven’t seen exactly that one, that’s not our poll.” (As the interviewer noted, those numbers actually did come from his organization.)

And while Lieberman has been publicly assuring Democrats that No Labels would stand down if its candidate isn’t in position to win the election, he told CT Insider he might stay in the race anyway:

Even if we don’t think we’re likely to win, is there a constructive role for third party, a third ticket, bipartisan in which the American people can say by voting for that by partisan ticket, “Hey, Republicans and Democrats, we’re not buying what you’re selling, we want a third choice and No Labels is offering it to us.” So we may decide to run even if it’s not so sure that we can win, if we think we can have that kind of positive effect on whichever of the two candidates gets elected next November.

If your primary motivation in life is to exact revenge on the Democratic Party over personal slights, it’s easy to talk yourself into believing that you’re following some higher principle. But nobody should indulge their self-delusions. Skipping an open primary system to instead flood a first-past-the-post ballot with competing candidates to lower the plurality threshold for a terrifying authoritarian to win power has nothing to do with “democracy.”

High interest rates may soon get higher. CNN reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sent a “stark warning” to Wall Street on Monday that it is possible the Federal Reserve will raise the benchmark rate all the way to 7% — even though most analysts think it will top out under 6%. If his “contrarian” prediction is correct, “you’re going to see a lot of people struggling," Dimon said.

But the new era of high interest rates is already rippling through the economy and government.

The effects are being felt in the housing market: CNBC reported that mortgage demand fell 6% during the last week of September because “mortgage rates just continue to climb higher.” Rate hikes are affecting car buyers: The average monthly payment on a new car is $736 — up $33 from a year ago, per Axios. And they’re being felt in Hollywood: Financial Times noted that entertainment companies are putting an end to the “golden era of cheap streaming” because rates are making TV and movie production more expensive. Expect fewer new shows and higher streaming subscription costs.

Washington isn't immune to the effects, either. The federal government was able to swallow rising deficits over the last 15 years, Eric Levitz argued in Intelligencer, because it could borrow money cheaply. Now the yield on a 10-year bond is at 4.8%, “its highest level since 2007.” If the rate stays that high, “the implications for the nation’s finances will be profound.” If federal borrowing continues and rates don’t come down, “interest payment will come to consume more than half of federal tax revenue by 2050.”

‘Higher for longer’

“Forget the shutdown,” The Economist editorialized. America’s “real fiscal worry” is rising bond costs linked to the Federal Reserve’s decision to keep interest rates “higher for longer” as it tries to rein in inflation. Right now, the Feds spend 2.5% of the country’s gross domestic product servicing the national debt. By 2030, that number will be 3.2%, “equaling an all-time high and more than the cost of defense.” And that might even be a low estimate. It’s clear that American politicians cannot “continue to act as if deficits do not matter.”

“Rising interest rates mean deficits finally matter,” Greg Ip added at The Wall Street Journal. The now-dead era of ultra-low interest rates meant that “we had a blissful 25 years of not having to worry about this problem,” one analyst said. But it’s tough to see who might solve that problem: Former President Donald Trump and President Biden “have signed deficit-busting legislation” and nobody seems interested in either tax hikes or cutting Medicare and Social Security.

Don’t panic, Louise Sheiner wrote for The Brookings Institution. Yes, interest rates are high now — a big reason the deficit has increased — but “it is too soon to know whether the recent increases will persist, and if so, why.” If rates do come back down, or if the GDP gets an unexpected boost, the crisis will be averted. For now “it is much too soon to tell.”

‘The Romans had it worse’

Bank of America is taking the really long view on interest rates, Insider reported. The bank charted interest rates over 5,000 years of human civilization and found that while interest rates are relatively high now — compared to recent history — “the Romans had it worse.” The analysis was a bit tongue-in-cheek, however. “Investors can probably take the chart with a grain of salt.”

“So is the low-interest era really over?” asked The New York Times’ Paul Krugman. He doesn’t think so — and points to Japan as the model. That country has had both low population growth and low interest rates for a long time, and America is entering its own low-population growth phase. “Why shouldn’t we expect interest rates to go back to prepandemic levels once the Fed is done fighting inflation?”

Maybe there’s no reason for the Fed to raise rates further. The data suggests “inflation is falling,” Texas Tech University economist Alexander William Salter argued at The Hill, concluding that “fighting inflation is good, but causing needless economic pain isn’t.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for Donald Trump asked a judge Thursday to dismiss the Washington federal election subversion case against him, arguing the Republican is immune from prosecution for actions they say were taken in his official role as president.

The motion amounts to the most pointed attack yet by defense lawyers on the federal case charging Trump with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. It tees up a fight over the scope of presidential power, forcing courts to wrestle with whether the actions Trump took in his failed bid to remain in office fell within his duties as commander-in-chief or whether they strayed far outside his White House responsibilities and are subject to prosecution.

“Breaking 234 years of precedent, the incumbent administration has charged President Trump for acts that lie not just within the ‘outer perimeter,’ but at the heart of his official responsibilities as President,” the defense motion states. “In doing so, the prosecution does not, and cannot, argue that President Trump’s efforts to ensure election integrity, and to advocate for the same, were outside the scope of his duties.”

The presidential immunity argument had been foreshadowed for weeks by defense lawyers as one of multiple challenges they intended to bring against the indictment.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is expected to vigorously contest the motion. It is not clear when U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan might rule, but potentially protracted arguments over the motion — including an expected appeal if she denies the request — could delay the case as courts step into what defense lawyers described an unsettled question.

The Supreme Court has held that presidents are immune from civil liability for actions related to their official duties. But Trump’s lawyers noted in their motion that no court has addressed the question of whether that immunity shields a president from criminal prosecution, hinting that the defense will likely fight the issue all the way to the nation’s highest court.

“In addressing this question, the Court should consider the Constitution’s text, structure, and original meaning, historical practice, the Court’s precedents and immunity doctrines, and considerations of public policy,” they wrote.

Prosecutors appeared to anticipate the immunity argument, writing in the indictment that though political candidates are permitted to challenge their election losses and to even falsely claim victory, Trump’s actions strayed far beyond what is legally permissible in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the building to disrupt the counting of electoral votes.

In their motion, defense lawyers argue that the actions that form the basis of the indictment, including urging the Justice Department to investigate claims of voter fraud and pressing state officials on the administration of elections, cut to the core of Trump’s responsibilities as commander in chief.

The Justice Department has held that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted. The motion Thursday seeks to ensure that same protection to a former president for actions taken while in office, asserting that no prosecutor since the beginning of American democracy has had the authority to bring such charges.

“Every action of the Defendant charged in the indictment occurred while he was still in office as President of the United States, and, according to the prosecution, all concerned a federal government function,” they wrote. “Given the all-consuming nature of the Presidency, these facts alone strongly support the notion that the indictment is based solely on President Trump’s official acts.”

They contend that Trump’s tweets and public statements about fraud in the election and Vice President Mike Pence’s role in the certification were directly related to his assertion that the election’s outcome was tainted by fraud and that the Justice Department and certain states had failed to adequately investigate it.

And they say meetings detailed in the indictment with Justice Department officials also fall within his official duties because he was urging his agency “to do more to enforce the laws that it is charged with enforcing.”

Prosecutors alleged a broad range of criminal conduct in a four-count indictment issued Aug. 1, accusing Trump of conspiring with a half-dozen allies to pressure state officials to alter the results of their elections; enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states who could falsely claim that Trump had won; and persuade Pence to shirk his duty to certify the vote count before Congress.

The indictment says Trump knew the claims he was pushing about election fraud were false but did so anyway in an effort to undermine the integrity of the democratic process. But Trump’s lawyers say “the president’s motivations are not for the prosecution or this Court to decide.”

Trump’s lawyers also argue his 2021 impeachment trial acquittal bars his prosecution, saying the Constitution suggests presidents can only be criminally charged in cases where they are impeached and convicted by the Senate.

“President Trump was acquitted of these charges after trial in the Senate, and he thus remains immune from prosecution. The Special Counsel cannot second-guess the judgment of the duly elected United States Senate,” his lawyers wrote.

The case, one of four Trump is facing, is currently set for trial on March 4, 2024.

His lawyers have separately sought the dismissal of a New York state case charging him with falsifying business records in connection with hush money paid to a porn actress who alleged an extramarital affair with Trump years earlier.

In court papers made public late Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors of reviving a so-called “zombie case” to interfere with his comeback campaign for the White House and argued that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, only brought the case because of politics.

Defense lawyers also sought late Wednesday to postpone until after the 2024 presidential election the trial in a separate criminal case in Florida charging him with illegally hoarding classified documents.

In June, Democratic advisers began circulating the usual warning: The party needed to change its message. As the Washington Post explained, focus group testing had shown that the slogan of “‘economic fairness’ was a loser.” Instead, Democrats should talk about “growing the middle class.” Soon, leaders like Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) followed the path of former President Barack Obama, who had made growing the middle class a key part of his platform. Democrats were again aiming their economic appeal at the group between the poor and the rich: the vague middle.

We are used to hearing politicians press to “grow,” “build,” or “expand” the middle class. The idea has a cross-­partisan appeal, implying class politics without insisting on thornier demands: the need for redistribution (tax the rich) or hierarchy (trickle-down economics). But the phrase’s vexing dominance is a relatively recent trend.

The term “middle class” was rarely used in the nation’s first 140 years. In the 19th century, it referred overwhelmingly to the self-employed: farmers, artisans, and merchants. By the 20th century, it was largely composed of salaried workers.

It was only after the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s that use of the term “middle class” began to skyrocket. C. Wright Mills—the American sociologist most closely associated with the label—described the “new” middle class in 1951 as having to act on “somebody else’s” priorities.

This coincided with the mistaken idea of the United States as a “middle-class nation.” It beat back a radical leftist politics, rebranding the bourgeoisie as a positive force to fit the antisocialist imperatives of the Cold War. But throughout the term’s evolution, it was never quite clear who was being described.

Mills’ work largely rejected the idea of a singular middle class; he preferred “middle classes.” He worried that in the celebratory atmosphere after World War II, scholars too often assumed almost everyone in America was happily middle class. Today, the term has a similar blurriness. It encompasses either 42 percent of the US population or more than 90 percent, depending on how surveys are structured (and depending on what people—who do not want to call themselves poor or rich—say). As Fortune notes, the middle class includes anyone from the “part-time bartender” to the “suburban power couple” earning 20 times more. People who employ or manage the labor of others land in the same class as those being bossed.

The wild imprecision in defining “middle class” is partially to blame for the term’s worst political mobilizations. Its popularity has elbowed out discussions of poverty; with both parties beholden to the rich while appealing to a middle that can include 96 percent of the electorate, attempts to rectify inequality are easily dismissed as divisive.

It was during the 1992 presidential election, when Bill Clinton prioritized what his camp called “middle-class dreams,” that explicit appeals to this vague group of voters became common.

Like today, Clinton’s pitch was driven by focus groups. His pollsters zeroed in on people in segregated Detroit suburbs, hoping to bring back Democratic voters who had become Republicans under Reagan. The all-white groups studied did mention class grievances—many in the focus groups were unionized workers—but the settings invited crabbed racial complaints more than “middle-class dreams.” For Clinton, “middle class” implied white middle class. And the promise to listen to this group was hardly helpful to everyone in the middle: It led to liberals urging curbs on welfare, policies that propelled incarceration, and legislation for an “effective death penalty.”

Still, in our age of austerity, the term “middle class” offers one of America’s only whiffs of actual class politics. We do need to listen to those who identify as middle class—not in their expressions of racism, but in their disquiet about the contradictions of their everyday lives. You can sense possibility in the shaky way white-collar workers define capitalist miseries—unpaid overtime, crushing consumer debt, abusive managers—as woes shared by all workers. The imprecise, often ideologically driven idea of a middle class might be a lie. But it still has a role in how a politics uniting working people can emerge.

In September, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a ruling that appeared to be a major blow to criminal justice reformers seeking to shrink the state’s bloated prison population.

The 4-3 ruling struck down a law that empowered prosecutors to revisit and reduce excessive sentences through post-conviction plea agreements with defense attorneys. The law, which passed the state Legislature unanimously in 2021 and had the backing of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, was meant to create a formal process to release prisoners serving decadeslong sentences, in many cases for relatively minor crimes, handed down under the state’s habitual offender, or “three strikes,” law.

Verite News and ProPublica recently featured the story of Markus Lanieux, who might have been helped by that law. Lanieux was convicted in 2009 of aggravated flight from an officer, a crime that typically carried a two-year sentence. But two previous drug felonies allowed the Jefferson Parish district attorney to try Lanieux as a habitual offender, which resulted in a sentence of life without parole. If Lanieux had been originally convicted under current habitual offender sentencing laws, the most he could have gotten was four years.

The Supreme Court’s ruling came as the result of a legal challenge filed last year by Louisiana’s conservative attorney general, Jeff Landry, who claimed the law encroached on and usurped the exclusive power of the governor to grant clemency or pardons. Landry intervened in the case of William Lee, whose life sentence had been reduced using the now-overturned law.

His legal challenge was seen as part of a growing backlash across the country against prosecutors who have pushed to end mass incarceration, and it caused many district attorneys in Louisiana to temporarily drop negotiations to reduce excessive sentences while the case was pending.

Immediately after the court announced its decision, Landry, who is running for governor on a tough-on-crime platform, hailed it as a victory for public safety.

“This unconstitutional legislation resulted in some rapists and murderers receiving ‘get out of jail free’ cards,” Landry said. “That recklessness ends now.”

In a dissenting opinion, state Supreme Court Chief Justice John Weimer criticized Landry’s challenge and warned that the majority’s decision could “have the disastrous effect of undermining, and further limiting, the post-conviction relief procedure that has operated to correct the evils of the past.”

“The post-conviction legislation at issue here was unanimously enacted by the legislature, the people’s representatives, and signed into law by the governor,” Weimer wrote. “Its obvious purpose is to insure justice is done and to act as a counter balance or check on the renegade practices and prejudices of the past.”

News of the ruling quickly spread throughout the state’s prisons, said attorney Nick Trenticosta, who argued on behalf of the law before the Supreme Court and visited several inmates at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel the following week.

“It’s on every prisoner’s mind,” he said. “My clients are now in distress.” “It’s Not Fine, but It Will Be OK”

Trenticosta, however, was in the prison to tell them not to worry, that far from dealing a death blow to post-conviction resentencing efforts, the attorney general might have inadvertently given them new life.

In their decision, the justices said the new law was unconstitutional because it didn’t require prosecutors or judges to identify a specific legal problem with a prisoner’s sentence before granting relief. The ability to adjust a sentence without a specific legal basis, they said, amounted to an “act of grace,” like a pardon, which is considered the domain of the governor.

If the decision had stopped there, it could have been extremely damaging, Trenticosta said. But the justices went on to uphold the “absolute discretion” of prosecutors to provide such post-conviction relief, emphasizing it was the duty of prosecutors to “see that no innocent man suffers.”

According to Trenticosta, the decision affirmed, for the first time explicitly, the right of prosecutors and defense attorneys to cooperatively reach post-conviction deals. Three other defense attorneys with extensive experience in post-conviction deals generally agreed with Trenticosta’s analysis of the ruling’s language, though one of them was concerned about its real-world consequences.

Before the passage of the 2021 reform law, it was common practice for defense attorneys and prosecutors to meet informally to discuss the reduction of someone’s sentence. If both sides came to an agreement, they would take the plea deal to a judge to authorize, which avoided costly and timely litigation. There wasn’t, however, a court- or Legislature-approved structure to this process, which caused concern among some judges, Colin Reingold with a New Orleans-based criminal justice reform group called the Promise of Justice Initiative and three other defense attorneys told Verite News.

While one court where these deals happened frequently might have been comfortable authorizing them, others in places where such deals were rare might have balked. This resulted in an unequal administration of justice across the state, said the defense attorneys.

In its ruling, the court spelled out the eight grounds on which district attorneys could reduce someone’s sentence through post-conviction plea agreements. Some of those are fairly narrow, including whether the sentence amounted to double jeopardy or the requirement that DNA testing provides “clear and convincing evidence” of innocence. Others are more general and create a wider lane through which an attorney could argue for someone’s freedom, such as proof that “the conviction was obtained in violation of the constitution of the United States or the state of Louisiana.”

Importantly, the justices added, when defense attorneys assert one of those grounds in seeking a sentence reduction, prosecutors have no obligation to demand evidence.

“If a defendant seeks post-conviction relief pursuant to one of these grounds, a district attorney is not required by this decision to oppose the application.”

Jee Park, executive director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, said she worries that the ruling could create obstacles to negotiating lesser terms, possibly driving judges to demand more evidence than previously required to prove a reduction in sentence is legally necessary.

But she agreed that it wasn’t the end of post-conviction relief. “It’s not fine, but it will be OK,” Park said. “There are definitely still claims available to attack unjust and excessive sentences.”

For people like Lanieux, this comes as welcome news. Lanieux’s attorney, Amy Myers, was in negotiations with the Jefferson Parish district attorney to reduce his sentence under the now-overturned law when Landry filed his challenge. The district attorney, like many prosecutors across the state, temporarily halted those negotiations pending a decision.

Myers said the ruling reaffirmed arguments she had previously been making: that Lanieux’s sentence is unconstitutional because he had an ineffective lawyer, and that his sentence is cruel and unusual. Both are included in the eight grounds listed by the court.

“Markus has always had good legal issues,” Myers said. “If we have a district attorney who is willing to consider the merits of those legal issues, we can resolve Markus’ case.”

In an emailed statement, the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Lanieux, said it was “not inclined to further comment as to Mr. Lanieux’s case at this time.”

During his 14 years of incarceration, the Iberville Parish native lost his mother in 2020 to COVID-19 and his sister last year to unknown causes. And on Sept. 7, the day before the news organizations published a story on his life sentence, Lanieux’s son was found dead in his cell at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center in Cottonport. Evidence relating to his death was inadvertently given to a funeral home, Verite News reported.

Lee, the prisoner whose case was the subject of Landry’s challenge, also maintains hope following the court’s decision, said his attorney, Trenticosta. When the Supreme Court ruled in the attorney general’s favor, St. Tammany Parish prosecutors reinstated Lee’s life sentence. Warren Montgomery, the district attorney for St. Tammany and Washington parishes, was not available to comment because of medical reasons, according to his office.

Despite the setback, Trenticosta expects to restart negotiations with the district attorney under the parameters established by the court. He said Lee’s case could fit under a number of them, including ineffective counsel, the unconstitutional withholding of evidence or a claim of innocence based on new evidence.

“Warren Montgomery believed that the new evidence shook the integrity of the conviction, and I don’t think anything has changed,” he said. “I fully predict that Mr. Lee will come home in the near future.”

Representative Matt Gaetz pulled off one of the biggest power moves in modern U.S. politics when he successfully led the effort to oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House this week, and experts weighed in with Newsweek about whether (or not) they think it was a good idea.

After months of threatening to remove McCarthy, Gaetz finally played his trump card against his longtime rival, introducing a motion to vacate on Monday. When the House voted on Tuesday, Gaetz secured the votes of seven other Republicans and all of the House Democrats to officially push McCarthy out of his leadership position.

"You all know Matt Gaetz. You all know it was personal," McCarthy told reporters after the vote. "It was all about getting attention from you."

The historic vote had been largely seen as the culmination of the brewing animosity Gaetz showed for McCarthy and some had questioned what would happen to Gaetz should he finally force a vote only to fail at ousting McCarthy. But now that the Florida congressman has succeeded, it begs the question as to whether the power move is enough to catapult him from conservative firebrand to leading voice of the House GOP, or if it will make him a pariah in his own caucus.

Republican strategist Alex Patton told Newsweek that the motion to vacate was a smart move for Gaetz should he want to pursue another political office that may come with more influence and power.

"Gaetz just became the early frontrunner for Florida's Governor's race in two years," Patton said. "We are likely to have a multi-candidate GOP field and with his alignment with former President Trump, Gaetz can win with a plurality.

"His actions raised his national profile, his small-dollar donations, and makes him the frontrunner for 2026 election in Florida Governor's race," he said. "It's clear he doesn't value being a Member of Congress and working towards legislating; he clearly has other plans."

But political scientist Gregory Koger pointed out that Gaetz is still a member of Congress until his term is up in 2025. So, his actions to throw the House into disarray and to thrust Republican infighting into the national spotlight could be detrimental to the next couple of years in his political future.

"Gaetz may have taken down the Speaker of the U.S. House, but in doing so jeopardized his own future," Koger told Newsweek. "He is now facing efforts from within and without Congress to expel him from the House Republican Conference."

Fed up with Gaetz's antics and disruptive behavior, House Republicans have reportedly begun considering expelling Gaetz for leading the effort to eject McCarthy. Specifically, he's earned the ire of Republicans in the Florida delegation, who have accused him of being driven by attention and campaign donations.

"Gaetz has very few friends in the conference," Representative Carlos Gimenez told Politico. "Gaetz maybe has a couple of friends in the delegation. But I'm not one of them."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also penned a scathing op-ed on Tuesday calling for the House GOP to expel the congressman for his "childish behavior" and "anti-Republican" conduct.

"House Republicans have far more important things to do than entertain one member's ego," Gingrich wrote. "Gaetz has gone beyond regular drama. He is destroying the House GOP's ability to govern and draw a sharp contrast with the policy disasters of the Biden administration."

Republican anger could begin with small retributions for Gaetz and his staff, Koger said, but it could also snowball into a massive GOP campaign to get Gaetz primaried and replaced by another Florida Republican who falls in line with the party's agenda.

"Narrowly speaking, it might just mean that Gaetz and his staff are no longer welcome at Republican meetings and will not receive any assistance from Republican party leaders," Koger said. "It might also mean that the House majority formally strips him of his committee assignments, ends all assistance from the National Republican Congressional Committee (the campaign organization for House Republicans), and that they actively seek to recruit a 'real' Republican for the 2024 party nomination in Florida's 1st Congressional District."

He added that House Republicans will continue to mull over what lays ahead for Gaetz, but that because there's no policy basis behind Gaetz's actions, his GOP colleagues will blame him for public disapproval over the ousting of McCarthy and the subsequent confusion as the House seeks to elect a new speaker.

"Going back to the 19th century, the primary duty of House members has been to vote for the Speaker candidate nominated by their party," Koger said. "Gaetz has not only violated that expectation but has publicly challenged a sitting Speaker of his own party, causing extreme embarrassment and chaos.

"Even with a narrow 221-212 margin of control in the U.S. House, Republicans may soon decide that they are better off without Gaetz as a member," he said.

In my younger years, I had a more materialist view of the world (meaning not that I cared about owning material possessions but that I attributed people’s beliefs and actions principally to their economic interests). Over time, I have come to put more weight on conviction, and less on self-interest, to explain why people do things. Matt Yglesias’s column arguing that the media is helping Donald Trump because he’s beneficial for its bottom line is a good example of how materialist analysis can go awry.

Matt is a terrific columnist, but his argument is unusually threadbare. It leans heavily on the assumption that because Trump’s election would profit leading media organs, their coverage decisions are designed to bring about that outcome:

For-profit enterprises tend to be good at aligning their work with the goal of making money, or else they’d find themselves going out of business. Reporters work for editors, who work for higher-level managers, who report to executives, who are accountable to boards and shareholders. The job is to cover the campaign for maximum revenue and minimum expense, not to inform the public — and if doing a bad job of informing the public puts Trump back in the White House, that is objectively not a bad thing from the standpoint of ratings, ad sales, and subscriptions.

What kind of coverage decisions does Matt have in mind when he is conjuring this profit motive? At one point, he cites the mainstream media’s tendency to treat flaws with Democratic presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton’s emails and now Hunter Biden’s access-peddling) as equivalent to Trump’s endless line of vastly worse scandals and crimes, which are undercovered owing to their sheer frequency:

A problem we saw during the 2016 campaign is that while many, many Trump scandals got covered, there was a convention of devoting roughly equal time to coverage of both candidates. As a result, no individual Trump scandal received nearly as much coverage as the Hillary email saga, allowing Trump to in effect benefit from the sheer breadth of wrongdoing. These days, similarly, there is a relentless drumbeat of “he’s old, his son is shady” about Biden while Trump overwhelms the system with the sheer quantity of crazy stuff happening.

At another point, he describes the media’s profit motive as a more direct interest in getting audience share:

But it’s also important for politicians and staffers and activists and readers to understand that business is business. The goal is to get people to click and watch and subscribe, and editors and managers are going to do what it takes to achieve that goal.

You may notice that these two accounts are at odds with each other. Take Matt’s example of a Trump scandal the media is underplaying: his confession in open court that Saudi Arabia would happily purchase his properties at an inflated price. I agree that Trump actually confessing in a legal document to the thing he has been accusing Joe Biden of doing without evidence should have received a lot more attention than it did.

But Matt’s second account of media self-interest is getting audience attention. I’m pretty sure that if the mainstream media devoted more coverage to Trump admitting he is open to bribes from the Saudis, those stories would land with the audience. The reality is that the mainstream media now relies on an audience that votes heavily Democratic. The imperative to get clicks and eyeballs pushes the media to cover Trump more, and more harshly, the opposite of the self-interest point Matt is making.

The more serious flaw in his argument is that it lacks any direct evidence that economic considerations have influenced the mainstream media. Traditional media in the United States follows a series of norms. One of the most important of these is a fire wall between the economic interest of the publisher and coverage decisions by journalists.

To be sure, that line has been breached many times in the long history of American journalism. But those breaches are noteworthy, even scandalous. We know about them because it’s the kind of scandal that is perhaps most prone to being exposed — a scandal that occurs within a journalistic organization and generally at the expense of reporters.

If there were any cases of the owners of, say, CNN or the New York Times exerting even mild pressure on the journalistic side to help Trump win an election, the odds that they would leak to the public are extremely high.

Matt has a quote from Les Moonves, the CBS executive chairman, saying Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” One important piece of context for this quote that he doesn’t share is that Moonves said it during the primary campaign, when most observers doubted Trump stood any chance of getting elected. Another chunk of Moonves’s comments — “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us” — clearly indicates that he envisioned Trump providing a ratings bonanza during the campaign, not a four-year term.

More important, Moonves was not saying that he ordered CBS reporters to help Trump win the nomination in order to help the company’s bottom line. Nor have any CBS reporters ever claimed to have gotten an order like this.

The final problem with the materialist analysis of media coverage of Trump is that Trump, while good for media traffic, was extremely dangerous to its survival. Indeed, these two trends were linked: People flocked to buy subscriptions to major newspapers because doing so was an act of solidarity with institutions the president was publicly threatening.

During his first term, Trump openly used his power to punish independent media, taking a lucrative Pentagon contract away from Amazon to hurt Jeff Bezos and trying to block a merger to hurt CNN. Bezos’s tiny Washington Post business might have benefited from this dynamic, but his vastly larger Amazon business was harmed. In a second term, Trump’s vowing to impose much greater harm. (“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.”)

I don’t think any mainstream-media owners consider the bump in audience share they’d get from a second Trump term remotely worth the existential risk of his goons subjecting them to economic retribution and legal harassment.

I am not disputing Matt’s contention that the media has failed to convey the enormity of Trump’s unfitness for office and how this differs in scale from the ordinary shortcomings of regular politicians. I think he misidentifies the central issue, however.

The main problem with the media is that a very large part of it is composed of partisan Republican outlets. That is, the media is roughly divided between mainstream organs, like the Washington Post and CNN, which try to follow norms of objectivity, and organs like Fox News, which don’t. There is, in fact, a great deal of direct evidence that both the ownership and management of Fox News have pressured journalists to advance specific political outcomes, from hyping the caravans during the election run-up to attempting to make Ron DeSantis the party’s future.

A media landscape in which about half the coverage is trying to be fair, and half the coverage is operating as the media arm of an ideological movement, is inescapably going to produce an imbalanced understanding of reality in the public. The only way to avoid that outcome would be for the entire mainstream media to start mirror-imaging the media ethics of the Murdoch family, which would have all kinds of practical and moral downsides.

It is true that the mainstream media itself tries to practice objectivity in ways that are often flawed. I’ve been writing critiques of this my entire career. But stories like the Times writing that both parties deserve blame if Republicans force a default on the debt don’t occur because the Sulzberger family needs Trump to get reelected and pulled Carl Hulse aside to suggest he depict the debt-ceiling hostage crisis as a both-sides issue in order to deprive Democrats of a message. Nor do I think Hulse or his editors were chasing clicks. I think the method of alternating quotes from the two parties and then declaring them equally valid is a particular kind of old-fashioned idea of how objectivity works.

As Matt has written before, the old notion of objectivity was shaped (I would say merely influenced) by an imperative to attract advertising that formed the basis for journalism to make a profit. In the subscription-driven world, that financial incentive no longer exists. If you want to understand why many journalists and editors still believe in the old values they were taught, you need to look somewhere other than their owners’ bank account.

Imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States spent an entire morning debating whether penguins are the primary cause of colon cancer or whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by aliens from the planet Venus.

That’s more or less the quality of arguments that former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco presented to the Court on Tuesday, as part of a quizzical effort to convince the justices to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional.

The good news is that the Court appears unlikely to buy what Francisco is selling. All three of the liberal justices took turns beating up Francisco, with an exasperated Justice Sonia Sotomayor telling Francisco at one point that she is trying to understand Francisco’s argument and is at a “total loss.”

Sotomayor appeared to be joined in her frustration by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, two Trump appointees who showed little patience for Francisco’s attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency that Francisco is urging them to strike down. Like Sotomayor, Barrett also repeatedly pressed Francisco to explain how, exactly, his proposed interpretation of the Constitution would actually work.

By the end of the argument, even Justice Clarence Thomas — ordinarily the most conservative member of the Court — appeared fed up with Francisco’s inability to articulate a coherent argument.

It seems very unlikely, therefore, that the Court’s decision in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association will end in the CFPB being struck down — and that’s a very good thing. As the banking industry warned in a brief to the justices, striking down the CFPB would mean striking down the agency that writes the rules telling them how to comply with federal laws governing mortgages. Without these rules in place, the entire US mortgage market could seize up — taking out about 17 percent of the US economy in the process.

A decision against the CFPB, in other words, could usher in the kind of economic ruin that hasn’t been seen in the United States since the Great Depression.

Francisco also spent much of the Tuesday morning argument reiterating positions he took in his brief, which could invalidate a wide range of federal programs — including Social Security and Medicare.

At various points, for example, Francisco seemed to argue that the CFPB is unconstitutional because a federal law gives it “perpetual” funding, meaning that it is funded until Congress passes a new law withdrawing that funding. But nearly two-thirds of all federal spending is perpetual, including major social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The Community Financial case is before the justices because the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an increasingly rogue court dominated by far-right Republicans, last year bought the argument that the CFPB is unconstitutional. The one good thing that can be said about that decision is that it now appears very likely to be reversed.

Even the current very conservative Supreme Court appears to recognize that the Fifth Circuit’s approach would sow far too much chaos and that it would give far too much power to judges.

So what is the constitutional case against the CFPB?

Francisco claims that the CFPB exceeds Congress’s power under a provision of the Constitution which provides that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” As the Supreme Court said in Cincinnati Soap Co. v. United States (1937), this provision “means simply that no money can be paid out of the Treasury unless it has been appropriated by an act of Congress.” So, before the federal government spends any money, Congress must pass a law permitting it to do so.

The problem with Francisco’s argument is that Congress did pass a law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which funds the CFPB. So, under well-established law, Francisco’s arguments are flat-out wrong. Notably, before the Fifth Circuit’s decision in this case, no court had ever held that any act of Congress violates the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause.

As several justices repeatedly pointed out during their increasingly frustrating interrogation of Francisco, Trump’s former solicitor general had a difficult time pinning down why, exactly, he thinks the CFPB is unconstitutional. But he did seem to be arguing for two novel new limits on Congress’s power to spend money.

At various points, for example, Francisco seemed to fault Congress for not appropriating a “fixed” sum of money to the CFPB. Instead, Congress passed a law that allows the CFPB to spend up to a certain amount of money. In 2022, the total amount of money CFPB was allowed to spend was capped at $734 million, and this cap increases each year with inflation.

But, as both Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and many of the justices pointed out, there are gobs of federal laws — both modern and historical — that permit a federal agency to spend up to a specified cap. The 2022 legislation providing most agencies with their annual funding, for example, contains more than 400 provisions that appropriate funding “not to exceed” a certain amount.

At other points, Francisco criticized the fact that the CFPB has a “perpetual” funding stream. Again, this is a common feature of US appropriations that also stretches back 230 years. Most federal spending is perpetual, including Social Security and Medicare.

In fairness, Francisco didn’t actually urge the justices to invalidate the majority of federal spending. At various points, he tried to argue that the CFPB’s funding bill is unique in some way that would allow the justices to strike down this one agency without also invalidating most of the rest of the government.

But his attempts to limit the scope of his argument produced baffled responses from many of the justices, several of whom were quite open about the fact that they couldn’t even understand the lines Francisco was trying to draw — hence Sotomayor’s comment that Francisco’s arguments left her at a “total loss.”

Barrett, for her part, asked several questions trying to pin down how, exactly, Francisco’s proposed rules would work. If Congress cannot enact a “perpetual” appropriation, for example, then how long may an agency be funded before that funding goes on for too long? If Congress must provide agencies with specific instructions about how much money it can spend, how specific is specific enough? And which actual words in the Appropriations Clause impose the limits on Congress that Francisco proposed?

Kavanaugh, meanwhile, was largely quiet throughout the argument, but he did pipe up a few times to ask why the CFPB’s funding is constitutionally problematic, so long as Congress retains the power to repeal that funding at a future date. When Francisco complained that the president could veto such a repeal bill, Kavanaugh pointed out that Congress could threaten to defund other agencies (which receive annual appropriations) in order to pressure the president to agree to a law changing the CFPB’s funding structure.

Indeed, while some members of the Court’s right flank initially appeared open to Francisco’s arguments, their patience seemed to thin as the argument went on. In his last exchange with Francisco, for example, Thomas asked the former Trump solicitor general to complete a sentence for him: “Funding of the CFPB violates the Appropriations Clause because ...”

In response, Francisco criticized Congress for “delegating to the director” of the CFPB the power to decide how much money the agency will spend in a given year, subject to the congressionally imposed cap. But that’s nothing more than a restatement of his earlier argument that Congress must specify a “fixed” amount of spending in its appropriations bills.

In any event, when one of the justices who is most inclined to agree with a lawyer’s policy views needs that lawyer to explain what, exactly, he is arguing — and when that question comes more than an hour into an oral argument — that’s a bad sign for that lawyer.

By the time the argument was over, only Justice Samuel Alito appeared to be a certain vote for Francisco’s poorly articulated position. And Alito, who is typically the most reliable Republican partisan on the Supreme Court, was reduced to incoherence himself — complaining at the end of the oral argument that he is concerned the Court’s decision in Cincinnati Soap does not impose a sufficiently aggressive “limiting principle” on Congress.

So the good news is that a truly awful legal argument, one that has no basis in constitutional text and that would have catastrophic consequences if it were embraced by the Supreme Court, appears unlikely to win more than three or four votes even on this very conservative Court. And it may not win more than one or two.

It appears, at the very least, that there is some real daylight between the median justice and the arsonists on the Fifth Circuit.

House conservatives blocked a Republican bill to avoid a government shutdown, dealing House Speaker Kevin McCarthy another defeat with the clock ticking toward the midnight deadline on Saturday when federal agencies run out of money.

The failure is the latest display of the dysfunction that has engulfed Congress in the days and weeks leading up to an increasingly inevitable government shutdown. House Republicans have been mired in internal battles over spending and political tactics that have put them at odds with Democrats and most Republicans in the Senate.

The Senate is working on its own bipartisan bill to avert any shutdown, but still has procedural steps to get through and the chamber may not vote before a shutdown begins.

McCarthy ignored the Senate's proposal and chose to move ahead on a GOP crafted measure funded agencies through October 31 and included border security provisions that were part of a Republican-passed bill. It also included a provision creating a bipartisan commission to study the national debt.

But going into the vote there were already a block of hardliners who said they wouldn't approve any short term bill, many of them demanding that Congress complete action on all 12 spending bills. The vote was 198-232, with 21 GOP members voting against it.

At a press conference before the vote McCarthy downplayed internal divisions and essentially dared fellow Republicans to follow through on their threat to block it. "Every member will have to go on record of where they stand. Are they willing to secure the border or do they side with President Biden on an open border and vote against a measure to keep government open?"

Republican holdouts were unmoved. Their argument all along has been that Congress should have their work writing spending bills, not pass stop gaps. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., repeated his stance ahead of the vote.

The House had 9 months to pass 12 individual appropriations bills.

I will not be complicit in extending irresponsible Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending levels.

No CRs. — Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) September 29, 2023

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., noted the White House already issued a veto threat on the GOP bill, stating during the floor debate, "this is a complete waste of time."

Democrats denounced the steep spending cuts in the GOP bill, instead of keeping current spending levels for all agencies, the measure walled off a few departments, but slashed others by 30 percent.

"This bill would slash investments in cancer research, leave communities recovering from natural disasters out to dry, undercut allies with a $1 billion cut to Israel and further cuts to our support of Ukraine, defund law enforcement and makes our communities less safe, and take food out of the mouths of millions. This bill raises costs on American families at a time when the cost of living is already too high," Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations bill said.

The Senate's spending bill would fund government agencies through November 17. It includes $5 billion for disaster aid and $6 billion for assistance for Ukraine. McCarthy opposed pairing additional money for Ukraine on a stopgap bill, and argued Congress needed to address the situation at the southwest border.

A group of Senate Republicans and Independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are working on an amendment to the Senate bill that would address border security, in an attempt to make it more palatable to the GOP House. It's unclear whether their efforts will yield a proposal that will get support from Senate Democrats. But some conservative House Republicans remain staunchly opposed to including any additional aide for Ukraine.

A group of House Republicans and Democrats have been meeting to push a bipartisan plan in the event of a shutdown, many of them representing swing districts across the country, and warning about the negative impact of any shutdown.

On Sunday, an ABC/Washington Post poll gave us all heart attacks when it showed President Biden trailing former President Trump by ten percentage points. Responsibly, the Post and ABC took pains to say that that result was an “outlier.” But, more than a year before the 2024 election—before any of Trump’s trials or jury verdicts, before House Republicans do or don’t impeach Biden, before another sure-to-be-controversial Supreme Court term, and who knows what else—pretty much every major media outlet has weighed in with headline-grabbing polls showing Trump and Biden to be running even.

All of this has created enormous panic – both from Democratic partisans, and from everyone else who dreads a second (and forever) Trump Administration. Could it really be true that Americans are more likely to elect Trump after he tried to overthrow the election than before?

If you share this panic, you might be suffering from Mad Poll Disease. Symptoms include anxiety, problems sleeping, loss of affect, and feelings of helplessness about the future of democracy, which are only exacerbated by frantic Twitter exchanges about polling methodology and sample bias.

Today, I want to show that, regardless of the methodology, pollster, or publication, horse race polls— more formally known as “trial heats,” which ask respondents whom they intend to vote for—are worse than useless. This is especially true more than a year ahead of the election – but, as I’ll explain, it’s also true in the weeks and months before.

Horse Race Polling Is Punditry in Disguise

Imagine that in September 2016 you were watching a panel with five pundits discussing the presidential race in Florida. The first says they think that Clinton is up by 4 points, the second thinks she is ahead by 3, another two think she’s only ahead by 1 point, and the fifth thinks Trump is ahead by 1 point.

Because I used the words “pundit” and “think,” you have no trouble understanding that those were opinions. But since polling glosses itself with scientific veneer, many people don’t understand that polling is also dependent on the opinions of the pollster! To do a poll, pollsters have to make their best guess about who will eventually vote, and then “weight” the survey results they get to match the demographic composition of the electorate they expect on Election Day.

The pundit panel I described above actually happened—with pollsters—thanks to one of the most useful pieces of political data journalism ever in The New York Times. The Times asked four respected pollsters to independently evaluate the same set of survey data to estimate the margin of victory for Clinton or Trump in Florida. The result: including the Times’s own assessment, the same survey produced estimates ranging from Clinton +4 to Trump +1. The 5-point range had absolutely nothing to do with a statistical margin of error, and everything to do with the opinions each pollster had about who was going to vote. (Forty-nine days after that piece was published, Trump won Florida by 1 and a half points.)

But that lesson didn’t stick in The New York Times’s own coverage. In October 2022, the Times blew up the then-conventional wisdom that House Democrats were competitive when it released its survey showing that Republicans had a nearly 4-point lead in the House—an almost 6-point swing since their last poll, just a month before.

The problem? Bear with me. In September, the Times made no assumptions about who would vote; it was a survey of registered voters. That survey found House Democrats leading by 2 points. Then, an October interview of registered voters found that the race was tied. But instead of reporting an apples-to-apples comparison that showed Democrats had lost 2 points among registered voters, the Times reported that among likely voters, Republicans now led by nearly 4 points. The Times’s pollsters basically conjured a dramatic 6-point surge to Republicans out of thin air by applying a different model to the October data than they had in September.

Their front-page headline also declared that Democrats were losing ground with independents and women. But here’s the thing: Independent voters hadn’t changed their minds; The New York Times changed its mind about which independents would vote. An apples-to-apples comparison of registered voters from that same October survey would have shown not a 9-point net drop for Democrats among Independents since September, but the opposite–a 5-point net gain for Democrats.

In every other context, reporters go out of their way to attribute opinions to sources. But political journalists report their survey results as mathematical facts—which makes it more difficult, especially for general readers, to remember the caveats that should accompany all polling results. Any time you read a sentence like “38 percent of white voters support Biden,” it actually means “our survey found that 38 percent of white voters support Biden.”

Unfortunately, the media is driving us into an epistemological cul de sac where what’s seen in surveys is presumptively more “true” than other evidence (such as administrative records, other sources of data, real-world observations, and more). To be sure, polling can offer important insights. But, to be useful, the results must always be placed in dialogue with other imperfect sources of signals about the electorate. Our confidence in any particular proposition should depend on the number and credibility of independent sources of evidence corroborating the proposition. By failing to meet this standard, the media has become a reckless super-spreader of Mad Poll Disease.

At the same time that media institutions are leading with dire warnings based on their own polling, they are all but ignoring other data showing remarkable Democratic strength in special elections, which has historically been an important harbinger of partisan enthusiasm. Democrats have been significantly overperforming their partisan index in special election after special election. And that’s not even counting Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s 11-point statewide victory in what was technically a non-partisan race, but was well understood by voters in Wisconsin as a MAGA versus anti-MAGA contest.

Horse Race Polling Can’t Tell Us Anything We Don’t Already Know

To begin to cure Mad Poll Disease, make this your mantra: Horse race polling can’t tell us anything we don’t already know before Election Day about who will win the Electoral College.

All we know, or can know, is this:

1. A popular vote landslide is very unlikely.

America is a rigidly divided nation in which the last six presidential elections have been decided by an average of 3 points, and, since 1996 (other than 2008), none have been decided by as much as 5 points.

2. The Electoral College is too close to call.

The Electoral College will almost certainly be decided by which candidate wins at least Georgia or Pennsylvania, plus two out of three of the other battleground states: Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (In a few less likely scenarios, Democrats would need to hold onto Nevada as well.) In both 2016 and 2020, the margin of victory in most of these five states was less than 1 point. Yet FiveThirtyEight found that the best polling had differed from the actual results in 2022 by only 1.9 percentage points on average. In other words, in 2016 and 2020, first Trump and then Biden won the states they needed to win the Electoral College by margins too small for the “best” polling to detect in the weeks before the midterms, when tens of millions of people had already voted.

3. Whether the anti-MAGA vote turns out again in the battleground states will determine the winner.

Unlike a voter’s choice between Biden and Trump—which hasn’t changed much in the last several years and is very unlikely to change in the next one—those who do not vote in every election are notoriously poor at forecasting their own behavior even a month before the election.

Since 2016, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have been a continuous ground zero for referendums on MAGA candidates. When the stakes of electing a MAGA candidate are clear to voters in those states, MAGA consistently loses. That’s why, in the 2022 midterms, the Red Wave never happened in those states. When Trump won all five of those states in 2016, Republicans had state government trifectas in four of the states, as well as six of the 10 U.S. Senators. Since 2016, Trump and other MAGA candidates have lost 23 of the 27 presidential, Senate, and governors’ races in those states and only Georgia’s state government still has a Republican trifecta.

If polls taken weeks or months before the election can’t tell us anything useful about close races (which, again, are the only races that matter in our current system), why on earth would we pay attention to polls taken more than a year out?

Change the Channel!

If you are worried that you will miss something crucial by ignoring the polls, consider the following.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast for the governors’ races on Election Day last year favored the loser in two of the five states that will decide the Electoral College and, likely, control of the Senate, and their forecast for the Senate races on Election Day last year favored the loser in three of the five battleground Senate races.

I’m not saying that FiveThirtyEight did a poor job; indeed, FiveThirtyEight has been essential in modeling best practices and data transparency, and serves as an important check on unscrupulous claims by outlier pollsters. I’m saying that, when elections are very close, it’s simply not possible for any polls or forecasting to tell us anything more specific than “the race will be close.” They’re just not accurate enough; it’s like trying to look for bacteria using a magnifying glass.

Now let’s look at FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 Senate forecast. Notice that it began five months before the election, or nine months closer to the election than we are today. In those five months, the odds of Republicans winning a Senate majority started at 60 percent, fell to 30 percent, and then rebounded to 59 percent the day of the election. Then, voters thwarted those expectations by increasing Democrats’ Senate majority, which was obviously even less probable than them simply holding their 50 seats.

Furthermore, the same five Senate races in battleground states mentioned above that were actually close on Election Day were also considered competitive a year earlier, when The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter issued its November 2021 set of race ratings. There is nothing that horse race polling could have told you that you didn’t already know.

(The Media Can) Never Tell Us the Odds

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argues, correctly, that the media should cover the stakes of an election rather than the odds, because the stakes are more important. To this, I would add that the media cannot cover the odds in a way that gives voters meaningful information—so the stakes are all we have left.

If you are old enough to remember what happened in November 2022, you should be profoundly skeptical of what the polling is telling us now about November 2024. Polling failed to anticipate the anti-MAGA dam that held back the Red Wave, partly because polling cannot tell us in advance who will turn out to vote. This matters because, as I’ve explained before in the Monthly, Democrats turned out in higher numbers in 15 states where the MAGA threat seemed more salient—but in the 35 states that lacked high-profile, competitive MAGA candidates, we saw the expected Red Wave.

It’s not unreasonable to imagine that if House races in “safe” blue states like California, New Jersey, and New York had been covered the same way as Senate races in swing states—with a constant emphasis that control of the chamber was at stake—the results in the House could have been quite different, too.

While the mainstream media cannot tell us what to think about this or that issue, it has a powerful influence on what we think about.

Case in point. In 1974, before the rise of the polling-industrial complex, the midterms were about Watergate—and even though Republicans had mostly abandoned Nixon, they still paid a steep electoral price, losing 49 seats. If the 2022 midterms had been covered in the same way, the central question would have properly been, “Will voters hold Republicans accountable for their efforts to overturn the election?”

But, after January 6th, most political reporters didn’t even entertain the notion that the midterms could be about Trump/MAGA. Instead—made savvy by academic research about how midterms are always thermostatic elections—they regularly insisted that, according to their polls, voters only cared about rising prices and crime.

Einstein said, “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” So, even after the January 6th hearings began, the media continued to discount the idea that the midterms could be another referendum on Trump and MAGA, relying on polls that showed that the hearings were not substantially increasing the number of Americans who thought Trump was guilty. They couldn’t “observe” the fact that the hearings were re-energizing infrequent anti-MAGA voters who already believed Trump was guilty, and were convincing them of the importance of keeping his MAGA fellow travelers out of office in their states.

I am not arguing that journalists have a responsibility to help Democrats get elected; I am arguing that journalists’ most important, First-Amendment-justifying responsibility is to give voters the information they need to be democratic citizens. Instead, the fraternity of leading media pollsters (and it is, sadly, pretty much a fraternity) judge themselves after an election by how well they anticipated what voters would do rather than by how well informed they were, or what they actually cared about. Thus, there has been no public soul searching about how to better understand what motivates voters even after this latest epic miss.

Margin of Error or Margin of Effort?

Enough of the statistical stuff. Stressing over polling makes us think election outcomes are like the weather—something that happens to us. In reality, election outcomes are what we make happen—especially in the battleground states, which are so evenly and predictably divided.

Remember: any election within the margin of error is also within the margin of effort—the work we must always put in to get enough of those who dread a MAGA future to turn out to vote. The only FDA-approved cure for Mad Poll Disease is to pay attention to what matters: the ongoing MAGA threat.

The House Republicans have been promising that the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was going to be filled with fireworks from the word go. We would see evidence of bribery and extortion and payoffs from foreign companies in the tens of millions of dollars, the "Biden Crime Family" would finally be exposed as the international gangsters they are Donald Trump would be exonerated. Or something. They held their first hearing yesterday and all those fireworks blew up in their faces.

Keep in mind that they decided to hold this preposterous hearing two days before the government is set to shut down because a tiny rump faction of extremists in their party is demanding that they get everything they ever wanted or they'll hold their breath until they turn blue. Nobody knows exactly what that is other than to torture Speaker Kevin McCarthy and make America miserable again. It's been reported that they have no plans to table their "inquiry" when the government is shut down even though their staff won't be paid and all regular business is usually curtailed until an agreement is reached. Not this time. It's full speed ahead.

It would be one thing if they had even bothered to prepare for this silly hearing. But clearly they did not. The day before the hearing we caught a glimpse of just how bad it was going to be when Jason Smith, R-Mo., the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the committees tasked with pursuing the "inquiry," was asked a question by NBC News reporter Ryan Nobles during a press conference.

That was a perfect preview of what was to come in the hearing the next day. They have been blatantly manufacturing what look like WhatsApp messages based upon IRS summaries of what was allegedly in them. In the hearing on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., caught them red-handed creating a fake Whats App message that totally distorted the actual text.

Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious.

The fabricated text message implied that back in 2018 Joe Biden's brother James told Hunter Biden that he would "work with" his father alone for some nefarious purpose to give Hunter a "safe harbor." Even though, once again, Joe Biden wasn't in office at the time which these Republicans don't seem to realize means that he wasn't in a position to commit treason or whatever they think he's done, they sure made it sound suspicious.

But more importantly, the rest of the summary, which they left out, showed that Hunter (then in the throes of substance abuse disorder) needed help from his father to pay for his alimony and his kid's school tuition and his uncle Jim was offering to talk to his Dad to help out. This had nothing at all to do with business of any kind. It's a personal text dealing with a family matter. They knew that and they purposefully doctored the text to make it sound fishy. I doubt it's the only time their "evidence" has been similarly manufactured.

That was pretty much how it went all day long with Republicans stepping in it over and over again. The Democrats, led by the extremely competent Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and aided by excellent committee members, Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, Jasmine Crockett, D-Tx., Maxwell Frost, D-Fl., and more all of whom obviously did much more homework than any of the Republicans who babbled their way through the hearing, casting aspersions and throwing out innuendo with no evidence that the president had done anything wrong.

Even their "star witnesses" who had no evidence of their own to present, testified that a president could not be lawfully impeached with the evidence that has been presented although one of them, the perennial GOP impeachment witness Jonathan Turley, did say it was absolutely fine to go on a fishing expedition to see if they can find something that would fit the bill. (He didn't say it quite that way, but that's the gist of it.)

It's clear that the plan is to use the hearings to curry favor with their Dear Leader, smear Biden and hope that a smoking gun emerges that they can use as an excuse to vote to impeach. But it seems that they themselves have lost the thread and no longer even know what they are accusing the president of doing. When confronted with facts, they can't explain it.

Their Republican colleagues were dismayed.

Stephen Neukam of The Messenger reported that one GOP aide told him "Comer and staff botched this bad. So much confusing info from Republicans and Dems are on message. How can you not be better prepared for this?"

The right-wing media, or certain elements of it, also seem to be shocked that the hearing was such a train wreck. Fox News' Neil Cavuto seemed somewhat befuddled by what he'd just watched:

I don't know what was achieved over these last six-plus hours. The way this was built up — where there's smoke there would be fire…but where there's smoke today, we got more smoke...The promise of explosive testimony and proof …did not materialize today. The best they could say now after this six-plus hours of testimony back and forth is that they're going to try to get more bank records from Joe Biden and his son. Said that they're needed to determine if a crime was committed. Understood. But none of that was presented today, just that they would need those records to further the investigation after months of Republican probes that failed to provide anything resembling concrete evidence.

That is exactly correct. On the other hand, some of his colleagues were convinced that this was all part of a master plan:

I think we can all agree that blowing witnesses at a House inquiry would be a risky strategy. That's something you definitely want to save for the trial.

Sadly, this will not be the end of it. It's very likely that they will proceed to an impeachment vote and it's also quite likely it will fail which is going to make Donald Trump very, very unhappy. They'd better hope that he is so busy with the two civil cases and 91 felony indictments he's juggling that he doesn't have time to pay close attention to this farce.

One of Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia lawyers is moving to withdraw himself from representing the former New York mayor and Trump co-defendant.

David Wolfe filed notice Thursday to withdraw from the Fulton County 2020 election conspiracy case.

Giuliani was among the 19 individuals, including former President Donald Trump, indicted in a sprawling Georgia racketeering case centered around the group’s efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results.

Earlier this month, Giuliani pleaded not guilty to 13 charges related to his role in the alleged conspiracy. Still, the charges in Georgia are just a splash in the bucket amid a growing torrent of legal problems.

Last week, Giuliani’s former attorneys sued him for almost $1.4 million worth of unpaid legal fees, all accumulated through a myriad of lawsuits, investigations, and litigation brought against their ex-client. These include the Georgia case, an investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation, his disbarment proceedings, and 10 other civil lawsuits brought against Giuliani.

In May, Giuliani’s former assistant Noelle Dunphy sued him, alleging she had been subjected to sexual harassment and abuse while under his employment. On Monday, an excerpt of former White House aid Caddisy Hutchinson’s upcoming book included claims that Giuliani had groped her as they waited backstage during Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 2021.

Earlier this year a D.C. disciplinary committee recommended Giuliani be disbarred. The committee wrote that “Mr. Giuliani’s effort to undermine the integrity of the 2020 presidential election has helped destabilize our democracy. His malicious and meritless claims have done lasting damage and are antagonistic to the oath to ‘support the Constitution of the United States of America’ that he swore when he was admitted to the Bar.”

The way lawyers are Ditching Giuliani, he soon may find himself struggling to find representation, even his own.