Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my second cup of coffee, because this week I’m in a really good mood.
To our paying subscribers: thank you. This was the week it mattered. When the White House locked out our correspondent Brian Karem, we didn’t need a corporate parent’s permission to fight back. We only needed you. And you showed up.
If you’re reading for free, make today the day you show up. Just like in politics, only people who show up can make a difference. We have no billionaire owner and no boardroom. For 22 cents a day, you keep reporters in the fight that this White House would rather leave outside the gate.
The organizers of Friday night’s “Hands Around the Kennedy Center” were hoping for somewhere between 400 and 800 people. 950 signed up online; more than 6,400 showed up.
The group behind the rally is a coalition of artists, laid-off Kennedy Center employees and neighbors. They’ve stood outside the Center every Friday since December, when Trump’s name first went up on the facade. One of them is Tara Hoot, a D.C. drag performer. On Friday she emceed for a crowd of thousands and reminded them what the building is.
“This stands as a memorial to an assassinated president,” she said.
Kerry Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter and JFK’s niece, spent the week urging Americans to join. She told CNN the money to fix the building exists, and Trump is “just withholding it because he wants his name on the building.”
Tearing it down, she told CBS, would be like leveling the Washington Monument because nobody will call it the Trump-Washington Monument.
In between speeches, the crowd turned toward the tarp that still hangs over the entrance. They chanted, “Take it down.”
One former employee told CNN she still hasn’t received her final paycheck. Another, old enough to remember the day JFK was shot, worked the ticket counter for 15 years before she was let go.
Laura Steinberg, who volunteered at the Center for a decade, said the crowd made her think of the man who faced down the tanks in Tiananmen Square.
“I’ll stand in front of the wrecking ball,” she said.
Protesters then joined hands around the building. One man, Davis Elliott, described what it felt like “to hold hands with somebody you don’t know for something you believe in.”
They ended the night singing “America the Beautiful.” Thousands of voices, outside a concert hall the president has locked.
Trump gave his own review of the Kennedy Center from the Oval Office earlier in the day. “The place is a dump,” he said. Sixty-four hundred people would like a word.
On Friday, Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. On Saturday, their badges stopped working.
You probably remember who Trump turned away first: Brian Karem, from Raw America. That happened Friday, September 11th.
Here’s what’s happened since. The Secret Service didn’t just turn reporters away. It confiscated their passes. And in the Oval Office, Trump described his own policy as a ban on the free press.
The White House Correspondents’ Association is now led by a correspondent for Fox News. She said the association stands with colleagues “who are being singled out for doing their jobs.”
Courts have twice found Trump’s White House violated the Constitution by pulling a reporter’s pass. One of those cases was Jim Acosta’s.
The other was Brian Karem’s. Karem is our White House reporter, and that case was Karem v. Trump.
Veteran editor Bill Grueskin argued that if the ban holds, the entire press corps should walk out. Pentagon reporters gave up their desks rather than sign Pete Hegseth’s rules.
We’ve been outside the gate for nine days now, and Brian hasn’t stopped working. We’re planning our own fight to get back in. The White House can take a reporter’s badge; it can’t take his courage.
Brian is preparing to sue. CNN, MS NOW and Politico have corporate parents and legal departments. We have you. That’s not a complaint. But we can only fight back if we have paying supporters. Will you join our fight with the White House today?
If you’re a political junkie like me, you know that polling accuracy has been pretty bad lately. In Michigan, one poll had Abdul El-Sayed winning by 19 points. He won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million.
More accurate have been the prediction markets (and I should note here that Kalshi is a sponsor). The markets have turned heavily toward Democrats, and that’s exciting.
On Kalshi, traders put the odds of Democrats winning both the House and the Senate at 59 percent. Early last year, those same markets gave them an 18 percent chance.
Let’s look at the key Senate races to get a sense of how things may play out. Kalshi’s state-by-state markets score the races as follows. As of this morning, traders there favored:
Democrats need a net gain of four seats, on a map that runs through states Trump carried by double digits. The polling averages match the markets by winner, but the races are tighter.
North Carolina: former Gov. Roy Cooper leads Trump’s candidate by about eight points.
Texas: James Talarico leads scandal-soaked Attorney General Ken Paxton by about three.
Ohio: Sherrod Brown is up about three on Republican Sen. Jon Husted.
Alaska: Mary Peltola holds a narrow lead over GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan.
Maine: Troy Jackson is a nose ahead of Susan Collins — who has a habit of outrunning her polls.
And in Iowa, Republican Ashley Hinson leads Josh Turek by about a point.
Jon Ossoff is solidly ahead in Georgia, though Democrats still have real fights on their hands to hold Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire.
Why? The answer is clear. Trump’s approval is 37 percent at best; Democrats are up 54 to 41 among likely voters. Oil is above $100 a barrel and gas is over $4 a gallon, courtesy of the Iran war.
Now the cold water. A betting market isn’t a ballot. Republicans have more money, and the AP reports that voter-turnout groups on the left are running short of cash just as voting begins. Sixty percent means it doesn’t happen four times in ten.
Election Day is 44 days away.
I’m actually feeling very positive today.
Protesters are fighting Trump’s plan to demolish the Kennedy Center. Reporters are marshaling lawyers to beat him in court. And polls show that Democrats have a path to win both chambers of Congress.
We need more people like you — readers who believe their individual voice can make a difference. If you value journalists who actually show up, join our community today. Take a second and update your subscription. You’ll be glad you did.
Nobody is coming to hand this country back to us. We have to show up and take it back, one protest and ballot at a time.
Thanks for spending part of your Sunday with me. I’ll see you tomorrow.
—John Byrne, Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
