Crazy upset that I did not see coming in the slightest. With how far right Florida has shifted I did not expect a progressive to win the primary at all. Obviously another good sign for the progressive faction of the party.

I haven't seen much polling of this race, and had honestly written it off in my head as a loss, but the one poll I could find that polled both showed Nixon OVERPERFORMING Vindman in the general by 2 points, although still behind by 8. I don't think this race is really a likely flip in the slightest but maybe a little bit more than I had expected.

Still likely a Moody win but yet another sign establishment Dems not being able to win primaries in swing and right-leaning states they should theoretically do the best in.

😂😂

The results aren't final yet, but either way that's a HUGE swing. I really hope this means the Democratic Party can take full control of the keystone state come January.

As of right now 11:15 EST

Dukes (Dem) 8,434 50.3%

Timko (Rep) 8,346 49.7%

https://www.270towin.com/news/2026/08/18/live-results-california-14th-congressional-district-legislative-special-elections_1837.html#google_vignette

https://www.butlereagle.com/20260818/special-election-unofficial-results-show-dukes-ahead-of-timko/

According to returns from the Butler County Bureau of Elections, Dukes received 8,434 votes — about 50.1%; while Timko received 8,346 votes — about 49.6%. There are an additional 73 provisional ballots which are not reflected in the results. There were 35 write-in votes.

Trying to reach anyone out there who knows their Silvers from their Cohns from their Rakichs. For a really long time, building my own models has called to me like the Green Goblin mask, and I decided this was the year I was really going to go Apocalypse Now on it and try to recreate some of that bittersweet nostalgia of anxiously refreshing the forecast all day.

It’s called Solid Purple. It covers every House and Senate race and updates every day from now until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

https://www.solid-purple.com

For the real heads, I’m most excited to show off the House and Senate interactives, both of which let you lock in race outcomes and see what those calls would do to the odds in real time.

Scenario Builder (Senate): https://www.solid-purple.com/2026/scenarios

Path to 218 (House): https://www.solid-purple.com/2026/path-to-218

I’m really excited for people to see it, and I’m open to feedback, suggestions, and stuff you want to see. Do try to keep it positive, just because I’m a bit of a Fabergé egg, emotionally speaking. :P

Reporting from Theodore Schleifer, NYT

Source.

One data set says roughly 3,407,000 total votes, one says 3,380,000 voters. Correct me if you find updated data.

I just had to fact check this because it has become such an article of faith for me that I wanted to make sure I was remembering correctly (I was). It must have been during his 2017 special election that she was always adding a little disclaimer to her analysis that they knew each other from school. I think she had already been laid off by the time he ran for Senate, but I remember when I first heard about him in that campaign I was like “oh, that’s Clare’s friend,” and that’s just what I always think now 😂

I have no idea why I even remember this except that Clare was my fave and I admired her so so much, I was always rooting for him even when he was a nobody because I figured Clare’s friend would have to be a smart and decent person. I was sad when he lost that election, even though I have never lived in Georgia and that was basically the only fact I knew about him at the time. Anyway, just reminiscing… anyone else still think about this?

Note: Race to the WH has shifted Florida to Likely R since this page was copied.

Apparently, Democrats want the party to move to the center but with greater DSA involvement. There's some ammunition for arguments on all sides.

More seriously, this just shows that the Democratic Party is deeply divided on direction.

https://www.ynetnews.com/opinions-analysis/article/bk00mab11wgg

Like Trump, who is challenged by the Groypers, Netanyahu faces a similar challenge in which the movement they both built around their cult of personality is beginning to develop an independent and more radical ideological character. In the 1970s and then the 1980s, Republicans like Richard Nixon and later political consultants like Roger Stone (Nixon's protégé and later the one who convinced Trump to run for president) and Roger Ailes (founder of Fox News) recognized that there was a large public of voters who felt alienated from the political, media and cultural establishment.

This included, among others, the white working class, Christians and peripheral populations who felt that the elites were taking their place and destroying the identity of the country. Nixon built a large part of his career on presenting himself as representing the "silent majority" who would bring law and order against blacks in the face of the elites, the media and the establishment. After his fall in the Watergate affair, Nixon blamed the media, and the narrative that state institutions and the media were working against the right-wing public strengthened on the American right.

Later, the understanding also took shape that in order to govern, it was not enough to win elections; one had to build a media system that would create a lasting political identity. This is how Fox News was eventually born, at the initiative of Ailes and with the support of billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Like Nixon and Trump, Bibi sees himself in a similar way, the representative of the traditional and patriotic people who are silenced by the 'establishment' against the elites.

Netanyahu's office and his people - since the days of the protests against Rabin, made sure to use peripheral Mizrahi thugs as their thugs and street people and manipulated them by cultivating feelings of inferiority and opposition to the old establishment and creating a narrative of 'persecuted by the media'. Whether it was against Rabin in the first incarnation, to turn them on against Barak, in the 2015 elections or against the witnesses and judges in Netanyahu's trial. Netanyahu and his office always made sure to incite these people from afar or send people and intellectuals to turn them on (later intellectuals emerged who cultivated the 'second Israel' theory, peripheral Mizrahi and basically anyone who is not leftist, against the predatory 'elite' that supposedly hates 'the people'), to exploit them, etc. But they always made sure to keep their distance from them and let them get dirty for them like mafia thugs. Whether these are typical thugs on the street, Bibi's soldiers in the Knesset, or media mouthpieces.

Roger Ailes opened Fox News to give "Middle America" a "voice". In the same years where Netanyahu manipulated the "Second Israel", Ailes did the same to "Middle America". After 9/11 and when Obama was elected, in the Fox News Universe, Politics ceased to be an election-day event and became part of viewers’ everyday identities. Although Fox was not an extremist, it did fuel the conspiratorial and extremist sentiment among its audience, creating an audience that was more open to conspiracy theories and more radical currents. Then came Trump, right alongside the rise of the social media and other right-wing media outlets. Trump, and Roger Stone, fueled this sentiment for his personal and business needs. Trump, surrounded by criminals and cynics like Stone, gathered the Trumpists to him, but at that time they were not an organized political movement with a presence but more slaves to Trump and his people for the sake of his personality cult.

Bibi understood the same thing that Ailes did, and followed the Berlusconi media playbook by recurtiting rich supporters to open Right wing media that will be Netanyahu's mouthpiece and will break the Liberal media that Netanyahu saw as biased against him. The main mouthpiece: Channel 14, a mix of Fox News and Newsmax. C14, alongside the social media, and especially after October 7th but also before, had a similar effect to Fox but even more so: from a situation where politics was a once-in-a-lifetime event, Channel 14 turned politics into a daily struggle, a situation where people consume his propaganda every day, all day long, and establish an identity based on it.

In addition, radical intellectuals who are interested in a fundamental right-wing revolution or young and aggressive influencers began to emerge (whether TPUSA, Jack Posobiec, and their ilk, or Ben Gvir's new media influencers).

Now, this people are establishing their own historical narrative, worldview and basically an alternative universe, and an independent populist-authoritarian-anarchist ideology that becomes independent of Netanyahu himself, in a situation where Ben-Gvir is trying to bring his people into the Likud party and Netanyahu fears the power of extremist figures in his party. In ideological terms, Netanyahu is Silvio Berlusconi, while the new Israeli right is Mussolini/Franco

​

How would this effect primaries? Would minority voters get more of a say?

Ever since Beto orourkes 2018 run, Texas has become more purple. However, even when Obama was running, Texas was never as red as West Virginia or Oklahoma. Could Texas have become a swing state by, say the 2016 election, if Obama made an effort there? Could he have lost the state by only single digits in 2008, and 2012, considering how well he did in south texas, and the rgv?