Billionaire investor Peter Thiel said he feared Republicans were too focused on bashing liberal states such as California, when they should instead be offering a “positive agenda” for the future of the party, Insider reports.
Thiel said during his remarks that his “intuition” told him that Republicans’ “nihilistic negation” wouldn’t suffice in creating an alternative vision.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) — who has called Senate frontrunner Don Bolduc (R) a “conspiracy theorist type” and not “a serious candidate” — told the Washington Post that he’ll endorse Bolduc nonetheless against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) if he wins the primary.
New York Magazine: “It is hard to think of a single living individual who has experienced as total an annihilation of digital privacy since our devices became extensions of our consciousness. A suite of executives and thousands of employees were victimized by the Sony hack. In the iCloud hack known as ‘the Fappening,’ nude photos of dozens of celebrities ended up on Reddit and 4chan. The 2016 hack of DNC servers and John Podesta’s Gmail exposed the private communications of a major political party.”
“But in terms of the vastness of the data breach, the narrowness of its target, and its capacity to be deployed as a political weapon, none of those compare to the exposure of Hunter Biden’s entire virtual life.”
“Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman,” CNN reports.
Said Trump: “I’m just not going to leave… We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?”
“Trump’s insistence that he would not be leaving the White House, which has not been previously reported, adds new detail to the chaotic post-election period in which Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat and numerous efforts to overturn the election result led to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by pro-Trump rioters.”
Nate Cohn: “Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Mr. Biden in 2020 and Mrs. Clinton in 2016.”
David Leonhardt: “In each of these states — and some others — pollsters failed to reach a representative sample of voters. One factor seems to be that Republican voters are more skeptical of mainstream institutions and are less willing to respond to a survey. If that’s true, polls will often understate Republican support, until pollsters figure out how to fix the problem.”
“This possibility offers reason to wonder whether Democrats are really doing as well in the midterm elections as the conventional wisdom holds.”
Washington Post: “Control of the Senate will affect items critical to Biden’s legacy including the confirmation of more judges; the elevation of a Supreme Court justice, if a vacancy emerges on the high court; the unfolding of high-profile investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden; the confirmation of top Biden officials; and potential Republican efforts to impeach Biden Cabinet officials and possibly the president himself.”
“What is less clear is whether Biden’s visits actually are boosting the Democratic candidates whose campaigns he hopes to promote. His approval ratings remain relatively low, although they have risen in recent weeks as he has racked up legislative accomplishments.”
Donald Trump’s unannounced return to Washington, D.C. was captured on YouTube and set off a flurry of social-media speculation about why he might be there.
“A lightning Ukrainian offensive in the country’s northeast has reshaped what had become a grinding war of attrition. In a matter of days, Russian front lines have buckled, Moscow’s troops have fled and one village after another has come once more beneath Ukraine’s yellow and blue banner,” the New York Times reports.
“Ukrainian officials said on Saturday that their troops had taken the eastern city of Izium, a strategically important railway hub that Russian forces seized in the spring after a bloody, weekslong battle.”
“Russia’s Ministry of Defense — which a day earlier had said it was moving to reinforce its defensive positions in the region — confirmed on Saturday that it had pulled its forces out of Izium to ‘regroup.’ While the statement sought to portray the withdrawal as a pre-planned move, the military equipment left scattered about pointed to a hasty retreat to avoid encirclement.”
“The far-right Sweden Democrats party was the big winner in the country’s election on Sunday, increasing its share of the vote by two to three percentage points and becoming the second largest party, but the overall result was too close to call as counting continued,” The Guardian reports.
“Brazil’s presidential front-runner Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is likely to appoint his centrist running mate to a key cabinet position to reinforce his commitment to a moderate political and economic agenda if elected in October,“ Bloomberg reports.
“Geraldo Alckmin could helm several important ministries, including Finance or Agriculture… In the past few weeks, his name became stronger to lead the economic team, according to one of them.”
“Women are the reason we can win. Let me say that again: Women are the reason we win. Don’t piss women off.”
— Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman (D), quoted by The Hill.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) cited a need for legislative changes and altering the structure of American elections to prevent people from “seizing” the presidency post-Trump, Axios reports.
Said Raskin: “We have to look at the way that the electoral system itself is vulnerable to strategic bad faith actors like Donald Trump. The electoral college is an accident waiting to happen and we have to deal with that at some point in American history, and why not now?”
President Joe Biden touted the U.S. killings of Osama bin Laden and his successor Ayman al-Zawahiri in a fiery speech commemorating the 9/11 anniversary on Sunday,” the Daily Beast reports.
Said Biden: “We will follow them to the gates of hell.”
“Supporters of former president Donald Trump have swamped local election offices across the nation in recent weeks with a coordinated campaign of requests for 2020 voting records, in some cases paralyzing preparations for the fall election season,” the Washington Post reports.
The Atlantic: “Over the past six days, Ukraine’s armed forces have broken through the Russian lines in the northeastern corner of the country, swept eastward, and liberated town after town in what had been occupied territory. First Balakliya, then Kupyansk, then Izium, a city that sits on major supply routes. These names won’t mean much to a foreign audience, but they are places that have been beyond reach, impossible for Ukrainians to contact for months.”
“Now they have fallen in hours. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are said to be fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that Russia has occupied since 2014.”
“Many things about this advance are unexpected, especially the location: For many weeks, the Ukrainians loudly telegraphed their intention to launch a major offensive farther south. The biggest shock is not Ukraine’s tactics but Russia’s response… Russian troops are not fighting back.”
“The Biden administration plans next month to broaden curbs on U.S shipments to China of semiconductors used for artificial intelligence and chipmaking tools,” Reuters reports.
“Raising concerns about security threats at Mar-a-Lago, members of one of the Senate’s most influential committees say they will press national security leaders for more information about the woman who posed as a banking heiress and visited the sprawling estate multiple times while boasting of her family fortune and infiltrating former President Donald Trump’s entourage,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
“The trips to Mr. Trump’s Florida home last year by Inna Yashchyshyn, a Ukraine immigrant and a subject of an FBI investigation, underscore the challenges of protecting a 17-acre compound where she was allowed to enter at least five times with no security checks of her background.”
“Vice President Kamala Harris said anti-democratic forces that have emerged in the mainstream of American politics have made the nation weaker at home and undermined our legitimacy overseas, joining President Joe Biden in describing it as a major threat,” NBC News reports.
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.