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It appears that Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) might be trying to run for attorney general of his home state. “Might be” and “trying” are the key terms here.

Some stories perfectly typify the larger stories they are a part of. Journalists sometimes call these stories too good to check. But sometimes they seem in fact to be true. Which brings us to Evan Neumann, 48, one of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol complex on January 6th.

He was no bit player. He made it to the FBI’s Most Wanted list for assaulting Capitol Police officers during the storming of the Capitol. Over the weekend Neumann showed up on state-run Belarus 1 TV channel seeking asylum in the former Soviet republic, as a victim of persecution in the US.

Guest hosted today by TPM reporter Kate Riga.

In an election post-mortem, the Terry McAuliffe gubernatorial campaign in Virginia highlighted some of its findings in the immediate wake of Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory.

The outcome of elections in 2022 and 2024 are tied in large part to events the President can influence but not control: the state of the COVID pandemic, the health of the US economy and in particular the mix of price hikes and supply shortages amidst COVID exhaustion we’ve seen increasingly in 2021. But there are already steps Democrats can and really must start taking to lay the groundwork for strong showings. One really critical one comes out of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan Biden Infrastructure Bill passed late Friday evening. It goes without saying that Democrats should run on the contents of the bill. There’s tons of funding for repairing roads and bridges, replacing all the country’s lead pipes, broadband and much more. But just as critical is using it as a cudgel against Republicans – something GOP fury at the 13 representatives makes crystal, crystal clear.

To understand this you don’t have to go any further than looking at the announcements Republicans put out announcing their decisions to vote against the bill.

Let me explain.

It’s a predictable move for the red state governor with 2024 aspirations and one who has built his national profile on, essentially, pretending that COVID is just Not A Thing in Florida, despite the state’s staggering death rates from the virus.

Just hours after the White House’s new vaccine mandate officially went into effect – formalizing the Biden administration’s earlier promises to require that employers with 100 or more workers must mandate vaccines or ensure their workers undergo weekly COVID testing – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his intention to sue over the new rule. The vaccination and weekly negative testing rules for 100-plus employee workplaces will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and will impact about 84 million employees around the U.S., according to the White House.

Yesterday CNN headlined that President Biden returned to a Democratic “nightmare”. The Times Peter Baker said Biden was returning to a “different country”. There’s no doubt Democrats had a rough night. They lost a close governor’s race in Virginia, a state they have come to see increasingly as home turf. They also narrowly lost control of the state House of Delegates which they first took control of in 2019. And while Democrat Phil Murphy won in New Jersey, Republicans made a very close race of it, in large part by a big drop off in Democrats showing up to vote.

As I wrote Tuesday night, this isn’t a surprising result. The President’s popularity is underwater. Polls say the public sees the country going in the wrong direction – a reality regardless of whether you or I think it is an accurate perception. But let’s also get real: the incumbent President’s party has consistently lost these two governorships every cycle for more than 30 years. The one exception was Terry McAuliffe in 2013. Murphy’s victory in New Jersey sees the first Democrat reelected governor in that state in 44 years.

In a blow to Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the method through which bans on mask mandates and other coronavirus-related mitigation measures were passed in the state was illegal.

Nearly all of the Democratic members of the North Carolina state House staged a walk-out on Monday evening to protest the seating of a new Republican state lawmaker who has not only dabbled in COVID-19 conspiracy theories, but who was present at the Jan. 6 Trump rally that became the insurrection.

The new state House member Rep. Donnie Loftis (R) has drawn the ire of North Carolina Democrats since his appointment. Loftis is a former county commissioner in the state and resigned his position on a local hospital board last year after he was criticized for posting coronavirus conspiracy theories on Facebook. In some of the posts, he referred to stay-at-home orders, enacted in the deadliest days of the pandemic to slow the spread, as a form of tyranny, according to The Charlotte Observer.

But it was Loftis’ presence near the Capitol while the attack unfolded that drove Democrats to walk out during his swearing-in this week, the state Democratic Party said in a statement.

While the percentage is significantly higher among Republican voters (and deeply influenced by where said Republicans get their news, which I’ll get into below), the percent of Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump has remained relatively steady for (almost) an entire year.

The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute put out the staggering results of a new poll today, the highlights of which my colleague Josh Marshall lays out here. The results of the poll shed light on Americans’ perceptions on a number of topics, including revealing a concerning uptick in GOP voters being increasingly on board with acts of political violence as a necessary tactic for preserving their take on the country’s founding ideals. But one statistic was particularly striking to me, especially when juxtaposed alongside the same survey’s findings on Americans’ voter fraud concerns.

About three in 10 Americans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, approximately 31 percent. On its face, the number isn’t that surprising. The more unsettling part lies in this segment of the data: That number hasn’t shifted much, and has actually grown, albeit minimally, over the course of this year — even after countless courts have tossed out Big Lie-related litigation for lacking sound evidence to back up the Trumpy claims and even after politically-motivated election “audit” results have left much to be desired for the far-right proponents of the cause. Nonetheless, from PRRI: “This share has remained steady throughout 2021, in August (29%), June (30%), and March (29%).”

A lot happened today, and, at the end of it, it’s not clear how far we’ve come from where we were when we started.