“I don’t know that young man and things he’s said I’m discouraged about, but I can tell you, if character means anything, you can’t vote for Ken Paxton, if character means anything, because he has none.”
— Former Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), quoted by NewsNation.
“Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) triggered a wave of laughs at a speaking event on Saturday after mistakenly referring to himself as a ‘lifelong Republican,'” Fox News reports.
“Fetterman made the statement while on stage at the Texas Tribune Festival, going on to quickly correct himself and assert that he has no reason to abandon the Democratic Party.”
“This is not going to be a win. And it’s not going to be a wave. It’s going to be a wipeout.”
— Democratic strategist Paul Begala, quoted by the New York Post.
“President Donald Trump asked Chinese leader Xi Jinping if he would like to buy American weapons during the communist politician’s three day trip to the States last week, according to U.S. Ambassador to China David Purdue,” Mediaite reports.
Said Purdue: “President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world.’ He actually asked President Xi if he would like to buy some, at one point.”
“Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Sunday criticized Donald Trump, his fellow Republican, for the president’s support of Ken Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Senate Republican primary,” The Guardian reports.
Said Tillis: “He made a colossal mistake.”
He added: “John Cornyn’s a great member of the U.S. Senate. Paxton has his challenges. We would not be spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Texas if Cornyn had won.”
“I don’t think any public official, including President Trump, or Kristi Noem, or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves. Now, the White House sees it differently. But I think there oughta be a rule — well, there probably is a rule — you can’t spend public money to promote yourself.”
— Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), quoted by Mediaite.
“Voting records in Georgia and Nevada show Georgia House candidate David Dillie (D) cast ballots in both states in the 2026 primary elections,” the Atlanta Journal-Consitution reports.
Jonathan Chait: “In February 2024, according to a former staff member who told the story to The New York Times, Rep. Mary Peltola, an Alaska Democrat running for the Senate, pushed an aide. As the Times put it in a report published yesterday, Peltola ‘shoved a male employee in the chest with one hand, causing him to stumble backward.'”
“You might wonder why the paper of record is reporting this detail. Did the employee then tumble off a cliff and die? The Times does not mention any bodily harm, beyond the backward stumble. The encounter is instead offered as evidence of what the Times calls ‘a campaign and congressional office marked by chaos.’ Chaos.”
“The attempted exposé of Peltola is the latest installment in a familiar genre. Democratic staffers (they are almost always Democrats) complain off the record about the private behavior of their boss, who is almost always female, toward them. The behavior in question ranges from inappropriate to, more often, somewhat inappropriate to completely appropriate.”
New York Magazine: It’s not just Peltola: how Congress treats its serfs.
“President Donald Trump’s long-term bromance with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has scrambled Republicans’ collective effort to make the democratic socialist the boogeyman of the midterm elections,” Politico reports.
“GOP candidates across the country have sought to tie their opponents to the 34-year-old mayor, his anti-Israel views and his brand of socialism — a bet that American voters will reject the Democratic Party’s leftward tilt.”
Deadline: Saturday Night Live’ opens with riff on Donald Trump’s need for more time with Zohran Mamdani: “I really, really like you.
G. Elliot Morris: “Voters aren’t confused about the motive, either. 62% say Trump made the promise mainly to win votes in November, and only 13% think he genuinely intends to send the money.”
“Moreover, 71% of adults say it is inappropriate for a president to promise government payments that depend on his party winning an election, including 53% of Republicans.”
“If you bring a problem up to the president, and it’s not exactly in your lane, and it’s really not in anybody else’s lane, but there’s a problem, you will inherit that problem. Because the president will listen to you, get your opinion, and he’ll say, ‘Well, go fix it.'”
— Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, quoted by Politico.
“With less than six weeks to go until Election Day, the sentiment among Republicans is shifting from nervous to fatalistic, as a pileup of bad news has many convinced they are heading toward an electoral disaster,” Time reports.
“The warning signs are coming in quickly from across the map—much on it from red states where President Trump won comfortably just two years ago.”
NewsNation: Trump’s polls sink further in warning sign for GOP.
“Donald Trump on Saturday condemned reports that Florida’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds distanced himself from the president by pulling prominent reference to his endorsement from the campaign’s website — and touted upcoming rallies in Florida to boost Donalds,” Miami Herald reports.
Said Trump: “Two Rallies are already scheduled in Florida for Byron and, will be, as always, ‘SOLD OUT!.'”
Mediaite: Fox News presses Florida Gov frontrunner Byron Donalds on voter fears of data centers.
Politico: “As the Kennedy Center drama prepared to shift into a new phase, Trump realized he lacked someone there who could do his bidding. Loyalist Ric Grenell had left the post of executive director two months earlier, replaced by a longtime District of Columbia official who had been the Kennedy’s Center’s vice president of facilities. Trump barely paused to consider his options.”
“The president looked around the room, and zeroed in on the man who was 10th in the line of presidential succession, whose department had been founded in 1903 with a mandate to ‘foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce, the mining, manufacturing, shipping, and fishery industries.’ It now had nearly 50,000 employees working toward those aims. Not a single one of them had been hired for his or her expertise in performing arts administration. It would now be Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s job, Trump declared, to ‘fix’ the Kennedy Center. One of the country’s oldest government posts had been redefined in an instant.”
“The White House has launched another taxpayer-funded television ad before the midterms, this time featuring imagery of President Donald Trump walking down a hall as audio plays of him saying ‘this is the final battle,'” CNN reports.
Said Trump: “We will cast out the communist, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
“The State Department is ‘assessing’ how to share passport information with state and local governments, as well as some nonprofit groups, ahead of the midterm elections,” NewsNation reports.
“According to a department spokesperson, the goal is to share the information in a way that ‘protects Americans’ data, deters fraud and supports the integrity of U.S. citizenship.'”
“President Trump plans to host Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at a private White House dinner on Sunday evening, sources familiar told Axios,” Axios reports.
“The dinner —the first one-on-one meeting between the two— is an indication of thawing relations between Anthropic and the administration, whose officials and allies have had longstanding tensions.”
One day after he rejected an Iranian proposal to end the war, President Trump told Axios in a phone interview that he expects U.S. negotiators to engage in more talks with the country this week.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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