I can’t count, apparently; but I know today is 3 weeks out from the election, so we must be at Day -21, even if three days ago I had thought we were at Day -20…
This morning the Trump administration requested the resignation of Ambassador Guilfoyle–the former fiancee of the President’s son–due to the burgeoning corruption scandal discussed in my last post. Some say the lesson here is that Trump can’t tolerate people who are inept at their corruption; others say the lesson is that only the female Trump administration figures are ever made to pay for their sins (following in the footsteps of Bondi, Noem. Gabbard, and former Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer).
Speaking of “female Trump administration officials who may not be long for their jobs,” today marked the White House Briefing Room debut of Trump’s brand new Press Secretary, former TMTG executive Katie Zacharia; and it did not go well. Besides her poorly received debut at the podium, things got worse for her with new reporting today questioning whether she has been lying for years about being a lawyer, as opposed to merely possessing a law degree. There is apparently no record of her having passed the bar in any U.S. state (or the District of Columbia). I saw a tweet today of a picture of Zacharia next to a head of lettuce.
The President has come under fire for a number of actions and comments in recent days relating to the Russo-Ukrainian War. As Ukrainian tactics in recent months have included offensive strikes on various Russian targets including oil refineries, Trump has grown increasingly critical of Zelensky, claiming (very dubiously) that it is Ukrainian attacks on Russian facilities, not the woes around the Strait of Hormuz, that bears primary responsibility for the current high price of diesel. Last week Trump announced a deal to allow modest amounts of Russian diesel to be sold in global markets, even though that would violate a law that Trump signed just last month, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. He then claimed that Russia and Ukraine had agreed upon a mutual “energy ceasefire” and, when both parties denied it, basically asserted that the ceasefire was real because he said so.
Trump has been doing a series of rallies lately, all in red states; today he is flying to Alaska (actually, to Palin’s home town of Wasilla) in an effort to shore up Senator Sullivan there. It’s hard for me to believe that a Republican President would ever feel the need to travel to Alaska three weeks before an election, but these are the times we live in. It is also hard to believe that the Republicans have pulled ad money out of a Senate race for a seat they currently hold in North Carolina in order to re-allocate it to defending their seat in Kansas, but again, these are our times.
There has been reporting recently that Musk, despite last year’s apparent break with Trump, has been spending somewhere in the range of $275 to $350 million on Republican campaigns in this election. There does appear to be vast amounts of money in play this cycle, based on the volume and nature of TV ads I’m seeing here in Minnesota. It has been commonplace in recent weeks to see TV ads about a state-wide race (in a non-adjacent state) during college football broadcasts, in situations where one of the teams involved is from said state. I don’t remember seeing that in prior cycles. There was even an NFL broadcast involving the Vikings and Dolphins in which we were shown ads for races in Texas; apparently the national ad buy was more efficient than trying to do 20 different local ad buys within Texas markets.
To close today, I wanted to run through the Senate races from the standpoint of which seats are most likely to flip to each party, per Silver’s model. I’ll ignore states for which the odds of a flip are less than 3%. Starting with the Democrats, the punch list goes:
- North Carolina (95% to flip)
- Texas (74%)
- Ohio (72%)
- Maine (72%)
- Alaska (62%)
- Iowa (59%)
- Kansas (47%)
- Nebraska (27%)
- South Carolina (23%)
- Florida (10%)
Whereas for the Republicans, the flip punchlist goes:
- Michigan (19%)
- Minnesota (11%)
- New Hampshire (8%)
- Georgia (3%)
The map is a far cry from what it looked like 18 months ago, when it was hard to imagine what Republican-held seat the Democrats could reasonably pick up this year, apart from Maine. The fact that Republicans are seen as having almost no chance to defeat Senator Ossoff in Georgia is one of the reasons why Ossoff’s stock is rapidly rising as a Democratic Presidential candidate in 2028.