Morning all. Let’s start with some data. Here’s a summary of encouraging new YouGov polls of the Senate battleground:
A new Suffolk poll of Iowa shows Turek making major gains and leading:
The early vote is picking up. Here’s the current national early vote via TargetEarly (10/6/26 758pm update). This comparison is 27 days before Election Day in each of the last three cycles:
2022 D+22
2024 D+23
2026 D+29
Here’s what we are seeing so far in New Jersey:
2022 D+37
2024 D+45
2026 D+48
Here’s what we are seeing so far in Pennsylvania:
2022 D+48
2024 D+49
2026 D+58
Here’s what we are seeing in Virginia:
2022 D+29
2024 D+15
2026 D+31
I want to stress that it is very, very early, and that it will take a few days in every state that turns on the early vote for the data to become something worth diving into. There is going to be incredible noise around the early vote and my role will be to cut through the noise and try to make sense of the data as it becomes available. So far, so good. Keep calm, carry on peeps, and keep working the early vote in your communities as hard as you can.
Here’s the generic ballot from the high-quality Economist/YouGov poll this week. Double digit leads in two cuts of likely voters:
As we discussed yesterday all the data available to us right now suggests that we are on the cusp of having the election we all want to have and just need to keep working it all……
Other things we’re tracking this morning…….
From Politico: Republicans enter triage mode as their election hopes continue to dim:
Republicans are flooding the electoral map with a deluge of advertising to defend their House and Senate majorities. But their once-towering financial advantage is starting to show its limits.
In recent days, Republican campaign groups began to make concessions to the punishing political environment, shifting money away from races they no longer believe to be winnable and falling back to reinforce another tier of seats in solidly red states that no longer look safe.
After abandoning a GOP-held Senate seat in North Carolina — a state President Donald Trump won three times — the outside groups began spending money to defend a seat in South Carolina. And they’re intensifying their advertising in Kansas, where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in nearly a century.
In the battle for control of the House, national Republicans gave up on defending a blue-leaning seat in Nebraska held for a decade by retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon.
Those dispiriting setbacks signal that the party’s defensive position is weakening with a month still left in the campaign.
One national Republican strategist, granted anonymity to speak freely about the party’s predicament, said the GOP could wind up facing even worse losses than in President George W. Bush’s disastrous second term.
“If the bottom continues falling out like it has been,” this operative said, “this will be worse than 2006.”
The NYT has a bit of a shocker this morning - Amid Midterm Crunch, Trump Advisers Took Time to Help Russia-Aligned Government (gift link). As Putin commits war crimes in Ukraine and escalates in Europe Trumpworld rallies for him, not our European allies:
As President Trump crisscrossed the country last week trying to help his party avoid a blowout in next month’s midterm elections, two of his top political advisers were in the Balkans helping a pro-Russian government looking to tighten its grip on power.
James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are leading a big-money midterm advertising campaign for the Trump political operation, spent some of the past few days in a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina called Republika Srpska ahead of elections there on Sunday, according to four people familiar with their travels who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the Balkan work.
The engagement is the latest example of Trump advisers profiting from far-right politicians abroad who have sought favor from the U.S. president while bucking the international community.
Mr. Blair and Mr. LaCivita were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each through a Washington-based law firm that was retained by Republika Srpska’s government to provide counsel on voting issues, according to two of the people familiar with the engagement. They said the work was for the government and not the nationalist party that controls it, though they are essentially one and the same.
Last night Maine saw the first of four debates between Susan Collins and Troy Jackson. From what I am reading and hearing Jackson held his own against the more experienced Collins, while also winning the viral clip of the night, below, when he said “we can’t eat road salt.” When watching just listen to how ridiculous Collins’ arguments are about her persuading Trump to do marginally less harmful things. These arguments are simply not persuasive:
The NYT also has this story this am: Trump Officials Ramp Up Investigations Into Voter Registration Groups (gift link):
As the Trump administration promotes doubts about the integrity of the voting system ahead of the midterm elections, homeland security officials have investigated more than 150 organizations as part of its effort to scrutinize nonprofits that they say may be helping noncitizens illegally register to vote, according to internal government documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The documents also reveal that the department has considered deploying undercover agents to investigate the organizations. If they were found to be actively recruiting noncitizens for voter registration, the agents could gather evidence and “disrupt activities,” the documents said. The findings could then be used to initiate prosecutions and “dismantle illicit facilitation networks,” according to the documents, which were shared with The Times by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization that received them through a public records request.
The details were included in a June memo providing status updates on the Department of Homeland Security’s “election integrity investigations,” an effort by the Trump administration to find and root out noncitizens who illegally voted or registered to vote.
The problem of noncitizens voting in the United States is a rare one, and there is no credible evidence that it has swayed an election. But the administration and its allies have been aggressively seeking data to back up assertions that Democrats could benefit from the support of noncitizens in the Nov. 3 midterm elections, in which Republicans are at risk of losing control of one or both chambers of Congress.
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