ABC News:
Early vote count surpasses ordinary midterm turnout
U.S. Elections Project shows more Democrats have voted early than Republicans.
"It's clear that we are above the 2018 midterm at the same point in time in states where we have comparable data to look at," McDonald told ABC News.
With 21 days and millions more ballots left before Nov. 8, McDonald noted that 2022 turnout is likely to be on par with 2018 midterm turnout, which broke records previously set more than a century earlier. Midterm elections typically turn out fewer voters than during years when a presidential election is held, but the recent numbers indicate a growing trend of participation over the past few years.
Peter Wehner/The Atlantic:
The Perfect Candidate for a Fallen Party
Herschel Walker perfectly illustrates where Trump has taken the GOP
Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia trying to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock, is a compulsive liar, so much so that he falsely claimed he has not made false claims about graduating from the University of Georgia. Walker’s speech is often unintelligible. His argument for why efforts to address climate change are pointless goes this way: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.”
The New York Times:
Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority
A New York Times/Siena College poll found that other problems have seized voters’ focus — even as many do not trust this year’s election results and are open to anti-democratic candidates.
Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.
In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.
That doesn’t mean they won’t vote, or that it won’t affect their vote.
Semafor is a new news site launched this week. Ben Smith is ex-NYT. This is a very good piece:
Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times
The Times, they say, is a great place to have worked. Like Atlas, I’m a former Times reporter. I left this January, after almost two years as the media columnist.
I arrived there a bit skeptical. The headline of my first column was that “the success of The New York Times may be bad news for journalism.” I quickly came to admire the deep commitment my colleagues had to the institution, and the durability of its folkways. But I also thrived in part because I heeded a colleague’s warning before I started: “Do not, under any circumstances, try to change anything.”
The Times is, as a former executive said to me once, “a business wrapped around a church,” not a place that morphs easily. That means ValueAct may struggle, as investors have before, in its push to transform the 171-year-old company, which is controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family.
David French/The Atlantic:
There’s Only One Group to Blame for How Republicans Flocked to Trump
And it’s not “the media.”
Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived. The theme is clear: Look what you made us do. The argument is simple: Democratic unfairness and media bias radicalized Republicans to such an extent that they turned to Trump in understandable outrage. Republicans had been bullied, so they turned to a bully of their own.
No aspect of that theory has been more enduring than what I’ll call the Mitt Romney martyr thesis. The Republicans nominated a good and decent man—so the argument goes—and the Democrats and the media savaged him. Republicans respected norms, Democrats did not, and now those same Democrats have the gall to savage the GOP for Trump?
I happen to agree that there has been, in fact, a Mitt Romney radicalization process. But it is quite the opposite of what this narrative suggests. It isn’t rooted in Republican anger on behalf of Romney but in Republican anger against Romney, and over time that anger has grown to be not just against Romney the man but also against the values he represents.
James Kirkup/The Spectator:
Spare a thought for Liz Truss’s comms advisers
The shakiness of her interview technique isn’t a quirk, it’s a material issue for her government
Watching Truss’s interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason last night, many viewers will have had thoughts such as ‘please make it stop’. Others might ask: why is she doing this? Going on TV to confirm that you’ve failed – but still think you can lead your party into the next general election – really doesn’t make things better. Likewise the frozen gaze, the startled blinking and the awkward laughing, all of which offered no comfort to an electorate facing economic anxiety. The overall effect was irritation, not reassurance.
Umair Haque/Medium:
This Is the Broken Britain Brexit Made
Why Did Britain Implode Over the Last Few Weeks? The Bill for Brexit Finally Came Due
The last two weeks have been a masterclass…in how to destroy your own country. The world’s watched, baffled, horrified, bemused, by what happened in — to — Britain. Never in modern history has a nation inflicted such catastrophe on itself, and if you think I exaggerate, let’s first take stock of what happened.
A new PM, Liz Truss, chose a new Chancellor of the Exchequer — think of him as the Finance Minister or Treasury Secretary. Together, they released a mini-budget, which consisted of mega-borrowing, to the tune of 500 billion pounds, much of it for…tax cuts…for the ultra rich. In response? Total economic carnage. The kinds of meltdowns we see in Latin American countries, or African ones — far poorer, less developed ones.
When I say total economic carnage, I’m not kidding. First the currency blew up, then interest rates spiked, as the market for government bonds collapsed, taking the nation’s pensions with it. All this meant that Brits suddenly experienced something like economic implosion — a process which’ll still take months to play out, but which will now inevitably include, among other things, waves of foreclosures on homes, rising defaults, skyrocketing inflation on top of the inflation already hitting the world, because Britain’s a net importer, and now has to pay for its imports in pounds worth far less than a few weeks ago. Financial ruin on an historic scale is about to unfold — and that’s in a country in which people were already told to go to “warm banks,” aka public libraries with the heat turned on, because they couldn’t afford their bills anymore.
Here’s the practical problem for Truss:
NY Times: Inflation in Britain Hits 10.1 Percent, Driven Higher by Food Prices
Run on it.
ICYMI, your triple threat “Trump legal jeopardy” stories:
- WaPo: Steele dossier source acquitted, in loss for special counsel Durham
- WaPo: New Woodward audiobook shows Trump knew Kim letters were classified
- NYT: In Documents Review, Special Master Tells Trump Team to Back Up Privilege Claims