2024 elections

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Samuel Alito’s pricey fishing trip, the looming specter of a third-party candidate in 2024 and the newest antics of rogue House Republicans.

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

The midterm red wave that wasn’t was one thing. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race was another. 2024 Republicans’ ongoing, awkward, obvious flailing on abortion has confirmed the severity of the dilemma for the party. And the primary elections in Virginia this week bring us the latest datapoint on how potent and energizing the unpopularity of the Dobbs ruling and the passage of increasingly restrictives bans on abortion has been and will be for 2024 voters.

While former President Donald Trump makes plans to excise the so-called “deep state” that supposedly formed in the bowels of the DOJ before he took the White House in 2016, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is vowing to act against it with a blunter instrument.

Mike Pence has been tip-toeing around actually criticizing Donald Trump ever since his former boss convinced a hoard of his supporters to bust into the United States Capitol and try to overturn the 2020 election, and to call for Pence to be murdered while they were at it.

His 2024 campaign announcement wasn’t all that different.

In March, TPM reported on several years of Facebook comments by North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson that spanned an impressive range of bigotry that targeted gay people, Black people, immigrants of many backgrounds, and Jews. At one point he even seemed to question the Holocaust.

And yet, Robinson remains the leading contender to become the Republican candidate for governor of his state.

Astoundingly, a new report in the conservative publication The Dispatch suggests that Robinson himself may believe the enormous pile of damning past comments that TPM and other news outlets have surfaced publicly is just the tip of an even more enormous iceberg of toxic material contained in Democrats’ opposition research file, which has yet to drop in full.

As my colleague Josh Marshall spelled out earlier, there is one very loud voice that is notably absent from this conversation.

Donald Trump has remained largely silent on the debt ceiling ever since the Biden White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) settled a deal over the weekend to ransom the debt ceiling hostage in exchange for some GOP legislative priorities, most notably work requirements for SNAP recipients.