THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

Donald Trump is stewing about elections big time. He raged at Senator Lisa Murkowski for opposing his dumb effort to rig the Alaska Senate race, fumed over imagined voter-fraud in the upcoming midterms, and seethed that the right’s huge loss in Brazil was “rigged.” It’s no accident that this unraveling comes as the early-voting data looks so dubious for the GOP that even some MAGA data analysts seem rattled by it. One leading MAGA figure admitted she’s refraining from posting the early-vote numbers because they’ll hurt the right’s “morale.” Another acknowledged that the electorate looks far too nonwhite for the GOP and urged Republicans to “step it up.” A third fretted that Trump’s campaigning is backfiring. We talked to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who closely tracks early voting at his Hopium Chronicles Substack. He walks us through the massively encouraging signs in the data for Democrats, details what we can conclude from it and what we can’t, talks about why the Senate could still stay Republican, and ponders how Democrats should close this out.

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Donald Trump seethed wildly at NBC reporter Monica Alba after she asked him tough questions about his support for that vile ad attacking Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton for supposedly lying about her past. Alba pointed out that Acton’s childhood involved “serious sexual abuse allegations,” prompting Trump to bark “quiet!” at Alba, rage that she’s being “fresh,” and belittle her as a “horrible little reporter.” It’s notable that Alba is relatively young given her level of success, because Trump is always most vicious towards young female reporters. This all comes as even Fox News figures are growing very uncomfortable with the ad and Trump’s backing of it, as Media Matters documents. We talked to Nicole Hemmer, historian of the right-wing media and the conservative movement. We discuss how Trump uses young female reporters as foils, how he and MAGA are deploying open misogyny as a Hail Mary in the midterms, how this is rooted in older right-wing formulations, and how he’s still trapped in the cultural moment of 2024.

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In dense and convoluted remarks, Donald Trump defended that disgusting ad in the Ohio gubernatorial race. The ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy featured the mother of Democrat Amy Acton calling her a liar. But it quickly emerged that Acton was apparently raped by her step-father, the mother’s husband. The move backfired spectacularly, as numerous Republicans, including Ohio governor Mike DeWine strongly condemned the ad and GOP panic over the race erupted. Even MAGA appears divided. We talked to Jim Swift, a senior editor at The Bulwark, who wrote a good piece on this fiasco. We discuss the deeper reasons Ramaswamy decided this ad would energize the MAGA base, how it could cost Republicans the Ohio gubernatorial and Senate contests, and what this ugly saga says about the depravity of Late-Stage MAGA and the growing mainstream backlash to it.

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Donald Trump just unleashed a panicky string of posts—see here, here, here, and here—in which he frantically urged Republicans to vote by mail early. Amusingly, this comes after he told Republicans for months that mail-balloting is fraudulent to pass his SAVE America Act. Now that his efforts to nix vote-by-mail have flopped, he’s prodding Republicans to adopt it—effectively admitting his attacks on vote-by-mail were a scam to help him rig the election. Mail voting is an essential piece of pre-election-day voting, so his “fraud” nonsense could be discouraging GOP early voting, too. So what does the data say? To find out, we talked to Michael McDonald, who tracks the early vote at the UF Election Lab and on his Substack. He explains why the data suggests Democrats and independents are far more energized than Republicans, what we can extrapolate from it about the election, and how Trump screwed himself on early-vote-by-mail. We also discuss the latest New York Times poll showing Democrats leading by 11 points and Trump at a new low, which suggests the bottom is falling out for him.

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With less than two weeks until Election Day, the Michigan Senate race is more or less on a knife’s edge. Amid all this, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has had some hugely viral moments lately, tangling with a MAGA plant over a question about the Muslim Brotherhood and battling with JD Vance over the vice president’s vile attacks on him. We think El-Sayed is developing an interesting way of doing politics that seems attuned to the information wars of the Trump era. Will it work in a swingy state that’s coming down to the wire? We talked to El-Sayed about the state of the race, the affordability crisis, his high-profile viral battles, and how it all reflects his deeper theory of politics in the Trump-MAGA era.

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