Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
A new Democratic memo shows that immigration — the very same issue that helped elect Donald Trump to a second term — may now be his biggest weakness heading into the midterms this fall. Far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos just got detained by ICE after being turned in by a fellow MAGA activist. A judge shut down Trump’s third attempt to overturn his New York felony convictions by moving them from state to federal court. And in reliably red states like Kansas and Texas, longtime GOP staffers are now jumping ship to work for the Democrats trying to beat them.
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A new memo from Democratic-aligned group Winning Jobs Narrative Action found that two specific immigration-related messages each moved support toward Democrats by roughly two points. That’s significant movement on an issue Republicans have owned for years, if not decades.
WJN Action’s executive director, Steve Pierce, told The Bulwark that working-class voters are turned off by images of masked goons grabbing people off the street and killing American citizens in Minneapolis. Even people who lean toward Republicans on immigration don’t like it.
But Pierce emphasized that outrage alone isn’t enough to win. Democrats need to not only oppose Trump but make a positive case on why immigration is a net benefit to society.
According to the memo, sticking to the economic argument is key. Immigrants pay taxes, and their labor props up entire industries like agriculture, construction and hospitality. And while ICE funding skyrockets, food assistance and health care are put on the chopping block. That contrast of billionaires fattening their pockets while working families are left out in the cold performed well with voters.
Pierce also cautioned Democrats against trying to out-tough Republicans on immigration enforcement. If voters want immigration hawks, they can just vote Republican instead of Republican lite. Democrats’ secret weapon may just be taking a economic approach rooted in compassion.
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Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor and one-time political adviser to rapper Kanye West, has now been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisiana. He was picked up at the New Orleans airport, in the same city where West is performing this weekend.
Yiannopoulos was born in England, though he’s spent the last decade as one of the loudest voices on the far right. Yiannopoulos previously worked for Republican former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and has aligned himself with neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes.
But the most interesting part of the story is that MAGA influencer Laura Loomer — who has been referred to as Donald Trump’s informal loyalty enforcer — is now taking credit for turning him in. Loomer wrote on her X account that she first alerted ICE and the FBI that Yiannopoulos was in the U.S. illegally after he allegedly called for her to be assassinated. She framed his detention as a win, and celebrated that he’ll likely be deported back to the UK.
While it’s interesting that Yiannopoulos’ arrest was a byproduct of MAGA-on-MAGA feuding, it’s still more than a little disturbing that masked agents of the states showed up to abduct someone just because they got a call from one of the president’s favorite social media personalities.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, an appointee of Bill Clinton, just rejected Trump’s latest attempt to move his hush money criminal case out of New York state court to federal court. This marks the third time Hellerstein has rejected this particular gambit from Trump’s lawyers.
Trump’s team has been trying to move the case to federal court so they can argue that the MAGA Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling should wipe out the president’s 34 felony convictions. An appeals court panel previously told Hellerstein to take another look into Trump’s request. He did. And the answer is still no.
In his ruling, Hellerstein wrote that Trump’s grounds for trying again didn’t contain any new information and were devoid of any actual legal justification. He said Trump failed to show good cause for the prolonged delay. And he added that the crux of the case — in which Trump paid hush money to cover up an extramarital affair and then falsified business records to hide it — isn’t the kind of official presidential act that presidential immunity was meant to protect.
In May of 2024, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts tied to a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. This was the only one of his four criminal cases to actually go to trial. The president has, of course, appealed Friday’s decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and his legal team insists the whole thing is a witch hunt, naturally. But so far, every single judge who’s actually looked at the immunity argument as it relates to Trump’s felony convictions has rejected it.
In two Senate races Democrats are hoping to flip this fall, veteran Republican staffers are walking away from their own party to instead help the Democrats aiming to unseat them.
In Kansas, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton just hired Austin Gilpin, whose resume includes the Kansas GOP, Republican Congressman Ron Estes and Republican former two-term Governor Sam Brownback. Gilpin said he went to work for Hamilton simply because Republican Senator Roger Marshall — who Hamilton is challenging in a surprisingly close race — chose Donald Trump over both Kansas and basic decency.
In Texas, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico has officially hired Jacob Smith, who worked for Republican Senator John Cornyn for five years up until Cornyn lost his primary to Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton (who won with Trump’s endorsement). Smith praised Talarico as someone who speaks to people who work too hard for too little. He added that Paxton was the most corrupt, self-dealing politician in Texas.
This is newsworthy as both of these are states are considered reliably red, with Trump winning both by double-digit margins in 2024. This year’s Senate races weren’t supposed to even be remotely competitive. But the president’s approval rating has continued to plummet to new lows thanks to his disastrous war with Iran and his bungling of the economy. Thanks to Trump’s historically low poll numbers, Democrats are now able to make significant headway in states that used to be off-limits.
Some of the latest polls show Texas has a real chance of flipping. Two separate polls from August show Talarico ahead of Paxton, with one showing the Democrat leading by six percentage points, and another showing Talarico ahead by three. Marshall is still in the lead in Kansas, but internal polls from both Democrats and Republicans internal polls show the race is well within the margin of error.
There’s still plenty of time before voters head to the polls. But the fact that GOP staffers are rejecting their own party’s candidates in two Republican strongholds shows there could be some significant upsets in November.
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Thanks for reading. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Have a great weekend.
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