“The Federal Reserve elected to leave interest rates unchanged at a policy meeting that concluded Wednesday, with two officials dissenting — including Lisa Cook, the governor President Trump is seeking to fire,” Axios reports.
“Fed officials have signaled that while they may well raise interest rates again by year-end, they are in no hurry and prefer to move gradually and with more data in hand.”
David Wasserman: “In 2018, during Trump 1.0, voters in what I coined as ‘Whole Foods suburbs’ — upper-income, white-collar districts that had previously elected Republicans for decades — powered Democrats’ path back to the House majority. They flipped places like Morris County, NJ (Mikie Sherill), Orange County, CA (Katie Porter), North Dallas, TX (Colin Allred), Arapahoe County, CO (Jason Crow) and Johnson County, KS (Sharice Davids), where President Donald Trump was uniquely unpopular.”
“Today, Democrats are on the precipice of another anti-Trump wave, but their route to the majority is more about reversion than new breakthroughs.”
“There simply aren’t many Republicans left to oust in heavily college-educated suburbs, where Trump’s standing has been weak for years. Instead, it’s the places that swung the hardest towards Donald Trump over the past decade — seats with lots of blue-collar, secular white, independent and Hispanic voters — that have the biggest potential to zoom back to Democrats in 2026. And plenty of GOP seats that seemed unthinkable targets at the outset of the cycle are now in deep jeopardy.”
Quinta Jurecic: “For the first time in modern American history, a sitting president is seeking to wield the force of the state to secure an electoral victory for his party…”
“Many of these efforts have made little headway—either because of the administration’s incompetence, the stubborn lack of factual evidence behind President Trump’s claims of voter fraud, the federal government’s lack of legal authority, or the refusal of courts to go along with Trump’s plans.”
“But Trump may have a different problem on his hands. Polls show Trump’s approval falling to all-time lows in the weeks before Election Day; the percent of voters happy with his performance has now sunk into the 30s. Democrats, meanwhile, appear likely to retake control of the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate, which last year seemed well out of reach.”
“The polls could be wrong—and high-profile-polling misses of the Trump era are hard to forget. But if the polling is right, the GOP may be in for what George W. Bush, after a disastrous 2006 midterm, ruefully termed a ‘thumping.’ And a thumping, as opposed to a narrower Democratic victory, could render most efforts to suppress turnout irrelevant, and make it far more difficult to implement any more dramatic effort to rig the results.”
On my reading list for after the midterms: The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 by Jon Grinspan.
“This is the origin story of the ‘normal’ politics of the 20th century.”
“With under a week to go in what many polls are showing as a still tight Senate race in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed hasn’t called his former primary opponent Rep. Haley Stevens in months — and there are no plans for that to change before Election Day,” CNN reports.
“Stevens narrowly lost to El-Sayed in August after polls showed him far ahead. She appeared with him at unity events in the days immediately after, including a hug at a state party unity breakfast, but conversations quickly dried up after.”
“He’ll still be president for two more years. But the minute the election, the votes, are counted … the 2028 election campaign begins, and if Trump has a bad night, as polls show, then he’s a super-lame duck.”
— Nate Silver, quoted by MS NOW.
“Jared Kushner was allegedly paid $50 million by a foreign government to get former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired,” the New Republic reports.
“In the new book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole reported that the United Arab Emirates paid Kushner millions to oust Tillerson, who had allegedly become extremely cozy with the Qataris.”
“Republican billionaire Rick Jackson has poured more than $200 million of his personal fortune into Georgia’s race for governor, a staggering sum that has shattered state records but hasn’t given him a clear lead over Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s (D) long-lost stepsister “has come forward saying she believes Acton’s account of her turbulent childhood, saying the candidate’s claims about sexual abuse by her stepfather and the family living in a tent are true,” the Daily Mail reports.
Said the woman, who asked that her name be withheld: “Yes, he raped her, and it was more than once.”
Wired: “ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is engaged in far-reaching spying against left-wing activists that rivals the FBI and CIA crackdowns on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.”
“A federal judge in Washington imposed a fresh block against the Trump administration’s move to use taxpayer money for television ads praising the president, expanding a temporary ban on the media spots,” Bloomberg reports.
“The ruling on Wednesday from U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan followed an order from a federal judge in New York barring U.S. officials from taking steps to air the ads or spend more public money on them through Nov. 15 — after the Nov. 3 midterm elections.”
“President Vladimir Putin said Russia is coordinating on low-Earth-orbit satellite networks with billionaire SpaceX chief Elon Musk and other U.S. partners despite political tensions between Moscow and Washington,” Bloomberg reports.
Said Putin: “Musk is a real genius.”
He added: “We are in close contact with our American partners, including Mr. Musk, because in orbit it is very important not to interfere with each other and to observe certain discipline and order.”
“Education Secretary Linda McMahon plans to spend $43,000 on new furniture for her government office, a work space makeover that comes as Ms. McMahon, a former pro-wrestling executive, lobbies Congress to shut down her department,” the New York Times reports.
“Former Vice President Kamala Harris has cautioned Democrats against impeaching President Trump for a third time if they regain control of the House of Representatives in next week’s midterm elections,” the New York Post reports.
Said Harris: “I think that going in the direction of impeachment is not a good idea, just to be honest with you, just because we have limited resources.”
She added: “I think the energy and the resources need to be put into accountability, need to be put into investigations. And that’s where the time should be spent.”
“U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz confirmed a Cuban diplomat is being expelled from the U.S. after a shouting match on the floor of the General Assembly on Tuesday,” the Washington Sun reports.
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“I think Pizzagate was really effective when people, you know, when these ads against me, these really terrible, horrible, false claims about me were running all over the internet, some with Russian money for heaven’s sakes. The people who were campaigning for me, they were on the phones, they were knocking on doors, they would have voters say, You know what? I can’t vote for her because she kills people or she trafficks children or whatever they were told and that they believed.”
— Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, quoted by Mediaite, on attacks during the 2016 presidential campaign that she ran a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza shop.
“In just a few days, the Democrats who want to run for president in 2028 can finally be honest,” the New York Times reports.
“All year, these Democrats have sworn that they are focused on helping to win races in a midterm election that their party describes as existential. But stealthily, they have been preparing for what is likely to be an extravagantly expensive primary campaign.”
“With winks and nods, they are inviting major donors to lunch, daydreaming about super PACs and recruiting top fund-raising and strategizing talent for campaigns that technically don’t exist yet.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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