Editors’ Blog

No doubt it will come as a great surprise to you. But Marco Rubio’s story of a Rubio canvasser (who turned out to be a notorious white supremacist) who was viciously beaten over his political beliefs continues to fall apart. Cell phone videos of the incident have now emerged (seemingly from the assailants’ defense attorneys) which undermine the political attack storyline and actually show one of the assailants (just before the attack) telling Christopher Monzon to go about his business and keep canvassing.

Before we head into a chaotic midterms election next week, Josh Marshall sat down with journalist Steve Clemons and political strategist Adam Jentleson to unpack a few theories about what Democrats did right and wrong ahead of this crucial election, and what we can expect to see unfold in Congress over the next several months. Josh digs deep into one layer of the conversation here, but you can access the full discussion below.

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Dark times call for great journalism. That’s why we’ve decided to beef up and expand our original reporting team going into 2023. Building on the great work of our rising star reporters Josh Kovensky and Kate Riga we’ve just added Hunter Walker and Emine Yücel to our team. This comes on top of the recent hire of Kaila Philo who joined us in August.

We believe in a battalion approach to journalism. See where the important, kinetic stories are and run toward them. Our goal is to break a lot of stories in 2023, make a lot of light and heat around our work. In the tradition of our organization we will also be the narrators of the key stories, not only publishing new facts and revelations but helping you piece together the whole story as it is emerging and evolving through the whole political news ecosystem.

Thanks to our subscribers and our TPM Journalism Fund contributors for making this possible. There’s a lot to do going into next year. So keep your eyes open for more.

One question that comes up a lot when we talk about the debt ceiling is whether there might be some extraordinary executive branch action to get around the problem. These range from outlandish theories about minting trillion dollar platinum coins to much more reasonable things like simply declaring that under the 14th amendment the whole debt ceiling law is unconstitutional. On the merits, I think this latter argument is valid, indeed almost unquestionably valid. But I think this is largely besides the point. The point of the “full faith and credit” is that United States debt obligations are beyond any question. That is why the US is able to borrow money freely and at very low rates of interest. Indeed, the whole global monetary system is significantly underpinned by that commitment.

In several recent posts I’ve told you that most of the near-term (pre-2024) dangers of a GOP House majority are manageable. I don’t mean “no big deal.” It’s disaster after disaster. But I mean manageable in the sense of things the country can get through. With one exception: a debt-limit hostage-taking stand-off in 2023 in which House Republicans force the first U.S. debt default in U.S. history. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election it will be within Democrats’ power to prevent this crisis in advance by settling the debt limit issue during the lame duck session of Congress. Whatever the political complexities, it is straightforward as a technical matter. Pass a bill in the House raising the debt limit high enough to take the issue off the table for years to come. Then take one of the remaining “reconciliation vehicles” on the Senate side and pass the law with 50 votes. Done and done.

But here’s the thing. We had a great TPM virtual event last night with two of the most knowledgable people about the U.S. senate, Adam Jentleson and Steve Clemons. Both agreed that there’s virtually no chance Democrats are going to do this.

TPM is holding a virtual event this evening and you should sign up to join us 🙂

Josh Marshall will lead a panel discussion tonight at 6 p.m. ET digging into various theories of Democratic messaging over the last few months leading up to the midterms.

He’ll be joined by two friends of TPM: journalist Steve Clemons and political strategist Adam Jentleson. Clemons is the editor-at-large for Semafor, a one-time blogger for TPM, and an old friend of Josh’s. Jentleson is the editorial director of the Battle Born Collective, an influential voice for filibuster reform, and a former chief of staff for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

To attend please RSVP. The event is free, but consider a $10 donation to the TPM journalism fund. Readers like you make TPM possible.

I heard from a reader last night who thanked us for the latest episode of the podcast because of how it focused on possible scenarios after a GOP win on Tuesday. Then I heard from TPM Reader FT who essentially said, Okay, there’s all the polls and the election in Israel. And basically it looks like the right is winning and will win everywhere. What then? What comes next?

I’ve always been unashamedly into polls. As longtimers know, we ran PollTracker for years and only really stopped it because the other aggregators had such a total focus on polls that we simply couldn’t keep up with the state of the art when it was only a side assignment. People who read TPM are political people. And we’re interested. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I take FT’s point.

I have been giving this quite a lot of thought and there aren’t easy answers. There aren’t a lot of pleasant answers. Let me kick off the conversation with a bit of big picture and then some specific points about how I see the next couple years.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Paul Pelosi attack, an influx of GOP partisan polls and what to expect in various permutations of congressional control.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

President Biden and his team have reportedly been planning to have the President deliver a speech on protecting democracy ahead of the midterms for some time. But the recent uptick in threats and political violence as we get closer to the election — including the very high profile attack on the husband of the woman second in the line of secession — expedited the urgency of the message.

Until today, there was a dearth of quality polling over the last 10 days on the congressional generic ballot as well as in key Senate races. That changed today. Multiple, high quality polls confirm a significant shift in the national race in favor of Republicans. Sometimes there is systematic polling error across multiple pollsters. Indeed, it’s happened a couple times in recent years, albeit in the opposite direction. But if these polls are broadly accurate they tell a clear story.