Well, so much for trying to blog more regularly in the run-up to the election…
The overall landscape has not changed much in these past two-and-a-half weeks. Silver’s model has the Democrats at 78% to take the Senate, with the median having ticked up from 52 to 53, and at 96% to take the House with the median ticking up to 241. His prognostications have generally been a little more favorable to the Democrats than other sources out there, but those sources have been starting to come into line; for instance, the Polymarket implied probability of Democratic Senate control is now up to 71%, having been only 59% three weeks ago (at which time Silver’s model was already at 75%).
One notable change from the last time I talked about the Senate races is that Silver now has Hamilton as a 61% favorite to beat Marshall in Kansas; he actually has the chances of flipping Kansas as being very slightly better than Iowa or Alaska. Silver also sees improving flip chances in Nebraska (37%) and South Carolina (31%); interestingly, a NYTimes poll this week had Andrews and Graham in a dead heat in South Carolina, at 48-48.
Three Senate races I haven’t previously mentioned could also break the Democrats’ way on a very good night: Montana (now 7% in Silver’s model), Louisiana (6%), and Mississippi (5%). Montana is an odd case in that the Democratic establishment there wanted to pull a Nebraska, which is to say, have the party primary winner withdraw so as to create a two-way race between a Republican who was in effect hand-picked by the retiring incumbent, and a compelling Independent who would caucus with Democrats if elected; however, in Montana the nominated Democrat wouldn’t play ball. As such, it seems likely that vote-splitting could lead to the Republican, Alme, winning with a vote share in the low 40s.
Let’s do the rounds of some recent developments:
Press Secretary. As foreshadowed in my previous post, the tenure of Katie Zacharias as White House Press Secretary was not long: It lasted 5 days, or half a Scaramucci. No replacement as of yet.
East Potomac Golf Links. We haven’t talked about this one before… In D.C., there is a century-old public golf course not far from the Mall, called the East Potomac Golf Links. Trump being Trump, he is not only intensely interested in the notion of renovating this course into something that resembles one of his many high-end golf properties, but also intensely disinterested in complying with any relevant laws or processes that might interfere with those plans.
Back in December 2025, the Department of the Interior revoked the lease held by the nonprofit organization that currently runs the course, only 5 years into a 50-year term. That led to a federal lawsuit called D.C. Preservation League vs. Department of Interior, which had been proceeding at a very measured pace, due to government representations that no actual plans to remodel the course yet existed. Judge Reyes had, however, told the government it would need to provide notice before taking any irreversible actions. However at 4:55pm on the Friday before the Columbus Day holiday weekend, the government indicated that it would immediately remove several hundred healthy trees from the course. As the judge put it in an emergency hearing held over the weekend, after most of those trees were already gone: “I have given the government every single benefit of the doubt that it would not do precisely what it has done.”
While the judge was considering what action to take, Trump muddied the waters with an announcement that the golf course was definitely closing for massive renovations and work was scheduled to begin on November 15th. Today, Judge Reyes took the unusual step of appointing a special master to investigate whether the administration and its attorneys have made misrepresentations in her court.
World Elections. There have been a number of noteworthy elections in recent weeks, and they have generally gone in a direction contrary to Trump’s interests. In Alberta, the referendum on whether there should be a second, binding, vote on secession failed miserably, 25-75 (on 70% turnout); in Serbia, the right-wing nationalist party in power since 2012 were voted out; in Israel, Netanyahu’s bloc looks to have gained only 53 seats out of 120, with Arab parties controlling a record 19 seats, leaving the future extremely unclear as of yet; and finally in Brazil, right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsinaro (son of former President and Trump ally Joao Bolsinaro) lost 48-52 in the two-candidate runoff after having led in the multicandidate first round 47-45 over the incumbent.
Although Brazil immediately cancelled Flavio Bolsinaro’s passports, fearing he would flee to avoid prosecution once his parliamentary immunity expires, he and his family made their way this week to Miami, where the Trump administration granted them entrance (and are widely expected to grant him permanent residency on an expedited basis, having previously done the same for his brother). Bolsinaro then released a statement declaring himself the true elected leader of Brazil. Fun times.
Russo-Ukrainian War. Quoting Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, from an article written almost two weeks ago: “In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation. Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.” So, yeah, fun times.
Iran War. There are a number of reports that Trump intends to escalate military action against Iran immediately after the midterm elections. Did I mention these are fun times?
Metrics. Gas prices are down slightly from their recent peaks, with the current national averages being $4.20 for gas and $6.32 for diesel. The Personal Consumption Expenditures measure of inflation, which includes energy costs, just ticked up from 3.4% to 3.6%; this metric had been at 2.4% when Trump was elected, and at 2.8% before the start of the Iran War. Despite a very bad day today, the S&P 500 is still up 10.7% for the year. The 30-year Treasury yield has subsided somewhat from recent highs, sitting today at 5.31%, which is still a level that until September had not been seen since 2002.
Weaponization of Government Against Political Opponents. A big news story in recent weeks was the administration’s decision to raid the D.C. house of prominent Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) within a month of the election, reportedly in connection with an ongoing investigation of immigration fraud. It is not completely clear whether the alleged fraud relates to her own naturalization, which occurred at the age of 17 as a derivative of the naturalization of her Somali immigrant father, or instead to rumors that her former husband was in fact her brother and allegations that she had married him for immigration-related purposes. The DOJ filing also appears to allege that the surname Omar is an alias.
Vance had stated in an interview several months ago that Omar had definitely committed immigration fraud–a remarkable statement for a sitting Vice President to make about someone who had not, and still has not, been charged with anything. I don’t know what happened here, if anything, and I’m pretty sure neither does VP Vance. I do know that it is incredibly unseemly for the government to raid a political opponent’s home very close to an election in which she is running (not that she is in any risk of losing the election) and for senior officials to openly call for her deportation.
In other weaponization news, this week Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, won her wrongful termination lawsuit against the DOJ. At around the same time, it became known that earlier this month Comey the elder had been indicted for a third time, with the new charges relating to alleged transmission of classified information way back in October 2016.
Finally, the administration had recently opened a grand jury investigation into Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide who became a key witness to the January 6th Committee, arguing that she lied to Congress in that testimony; however this week the grand jury declined to indict.
Corruption. I’ll close today with two new stories about alleged corruption in and around the Trump administration, noting that government corruption is now the 2nd-most-cited top issue by voters in the latest Gallup poll (at 12%, behind the cost of living at 36%).
First, there are some shocking allegations about Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in a new book, to the effect that during Trump’s first term Kushner was granted access to billions of dollars in foreign bank accounts by various Middle Eastern powers, including a story that the UAE paid Kushner $50 million as a success fee when Trump finally fired Secretary of State Tillerson. The reported source for these stories is a Russian intelligence service hack of Kushner’s iPhone circa 2017. As one wag put it this week: ‘Jared Kushner’s iPhone’ is the real ‘Hunter Biden’s laptop’.
Second, recent reporting indicates that former Trump attorney Alina Habba received a 5-year, $50 million contract to be general counsel for what appears to be a shell corporation set up by a Venezuelan billionaire, shortly before Trump granted said billionaire a pardon for a conviction on campaign finance charges. Today, a follow-up story claims that Trump was livid when he learned about this, believing that Habba ought to share some of her largesse with Trump’s “future presidential library or another Trump-related entity.” Obviously it would be really bad if Trump had already gotten a payoff from Habba in exchange for granting a pardon, but it feels almost as bad that Trump’s reaction to learning of the situation is to complain about having not gotten a piece of the action?