Election Day, 2026

You're voting, right?

We cast our ballots two weeks ago Monday, "opening day" for Ada Co. early voters, ready to be pollworkers today. But there were ample volunteers* and so we were not called. Then we were asked to work early voting at Meridian City Hall for the last two days of the 10 "early" days, and then unasked for last Friday, after we put in a full day on Thursday.

It's been 50-some years since I first pulled a lever, back in Wisconsin, and I can count the elections I've missed on one hand with fingers left over. I can't imagine not voting, which makes the weeks-long GOTV effort slightly surreal. But necessary, I know.

Thom Hartmann's "DAILY TAKE" email starts by reporting
"58.6 MILLION OF YOU voted in advance ahead of today’s official midterm elections," part of his "tracking the lead-up to today, reporting on the dirty tricks Trump and his cronies are planning."

The question of the day: Are GOP Voter Purges the Hidden Reason Pollsters Keep Getting Elections Wrong? Starting with a bit of recent history, as "the modern Republican purge machine got up to speed,"

"after the 2000 election showed how Jeb Bush’s purges of Black Florida voters just before the election handed the presidency to his brother. (Heavily Black Leon County’s election supervisor later testified that over 50,000 legal voters were disenfranchised by Jeb Bush’s voter purges, and Bush “won” by 537 votes)."

The Brennan Center for Justice's Voter Purges project "works to ensure that [cleaning up voter rolls is] nondiscriminatory and [does] not disenfranchise eligible voters." And they have more than a dozen state-specific articles on Limits on Voter Eligibility Challenges.

The Southern Poverty Law Center offered a "weekend read" 7 years ago with the punch line that's still punching, in the hed: If your vote didn’t matter, they wouldn’t fight so hard to block it.

If you ain't done it yet, DO IT TODAY, for democracy's sake.

2.Nov.2026

'Twas the night before election day

And I had a lot going on today, none of it election-related, all of it unplanned. My outing on the day was a dark-early walk, with the waning crescent moon high in the sky, accompanied by Mars, Jupiter, and Regulus. I was out without glasses, and my phone's "night mode" was blown out by the sun bouncing off the skinny moon.

And now it's gone late, but too early for tomorrow's pins and needles, so I'll just close with Joyce Vance's "Civil Discourse" post: SCOTUS Tells Trump No. It's about damn time!

"There is no opinion, so we don’t know what the Court’s reasoning was. We don’t know whether the decision was unanimous or split, and if it was split, who voted which way. But we do know that the Supreme Court declined to let Trump interfere in the election in California at this late date. It rejected DOJ’s request, which would have forced the state to deal with the junk list of voters the administration thinks might not be citizens....

"The Yiddish word “shanda” comes to mind. It means a shame, a disgrace, a scandal, and an embarrassment—all rolled into one. Scandalously bad behavior. Shanda aptly captures Donald Trump’s efforts to interfere with the election, and I’m relieved that the Supreme Court didn’t let Trump get away with the stunt he tried to pull in California."

1.Nov.2026

Stop me if you've heard this one

After the New York Times threw a bombshell into the Alaskan senate race, they are providing a little fair and balance for someone not on the ballot (but says he wants you to pretend he is) with today's Vol. CLXXVI, No. 61,055 top headline:

Trump's Speech Becomes More Vulgar and Muddled
"His Appearances Onstage at 80 Are Raising Questions About Age and Stability."

Just now, really? But they're not wrong. It's not BREAKING NEWS, even though his vulgarity and instability have been breaking the country since before his horrific second term. It's also not at the top of their home page on the web, but scroll down to the "NEWS ANALYSIS" by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman, Threats, Gaffes and Men’s Posteriors: Trump’s Talk Gets Wilder.

"A Times review of the president’s public speeches finds that he is more profane, more absolutist, longer-winded and less coherent than he was in 2016."

The lede:

"As he opened his speech at a recent campaign rally in Greenville, N.C., President Trump told the story of the Willie Horton crime case that helped sink the presidential campaign of the Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in 1988.

"And then, 30 minutes later, still speaking at the same rally to the same audience from the same lectern, Mr. Trump told the same Willie Horton story all over again, using some of the same language (and getting the facts wrong both times)."

Dukakis and 1988 were 38 years ago, so you need to be in your mid-40s to have any of that in your own experience. (ICYMI, George Herbert Walker Bush rode Ronald Reagan's coattails to win his first and only term as president, and sort of won the "first" Gulf War without decapitating Iraq, but then sort of reneged on his "read my lips, no new taxes" schtick, and lost to Bill Clinton and Al Gore in '92.) The NYT piece has a link to the whole bloody transcript from Roll Call, which starts with this:

"Thank you very much. I said do I need a coat? Do I need an overcoat? They said, well, it's very marginal, sir, very marginal. So, I said, you know, I'd rather not wear one. I gotta show I'm all man. We're all men. We're all men. We're women. We're whatever the hell we are. But -- But I know one thing. There's only two of us, right? There's not seven of us. There's not six of us. Hello, North Carolina. This is great. I hope -- I hope that you saw the plane fly right over your head. Did anybody notice? Some people aren't quite with it and they might not have noticed it."

Low AF1 flyovers being his latest personal thrill. He hasn't scraped bottom yet, but he's definitely on the way!

The word cloud of the word cloud includes "forgetful and repetitive" (did I say that already?), long-winded, more profane, absolutist (and don't forget prevaricative), more all-or-nothing words like “always,” “never,” “everything” and “totally,” angry, vulgar, garbled, abnormal, inappropriate, "his baffling fixation with admiring men’s posteriors," outrageous, the "freaking genius" who keeps clearing the low bar of the quick test to screen for Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive impairment that he's weirdly taking over and over and over. Did I say long-winded? He's doubled his average stumper, now stem-winding close to an hour and a half. And really, he should have said much, much less.

"Even Mr. Trump seems astonished at times by what comes out of his mouth — and by how much his supporters embrace him nonetheless. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap. ‘Oh, I love you so,’” he marveled [in Clarksville, Tennessee]."

Hallowe'en 2026

Nightmares

Where to begin? Since it's the end of the month, and I've gone quiet for a week, the question should be where to end? Joyce Vance's closer was the year-ago to-do item she made for herself: "[R]emember, heading into the midterm elections[] that GOP senators & reps asking you to vote for them were willing to starve their constituents—your friends, family, maybe even you—for Trump."

Not actually something I need to be reminded about here in ruby red Idaho. But I did not immediately recall what was happening a year ago.

"We were in the middle of a government shutdown. Congress had failed to pass a spending bill for the new fiscal year. When the old one ended on September 30, 2025, funding ran out, and the government largely shut down except for essential work. It became the longest government shutdown in history, continuing for 43 days until November 12."

And the "starving" was more than figurative, as SNAP (aka food stamps) were to be frozen on Nov. 1. "SNAP helps keep food on the table for 1 in 8 Americans."

"...Democratic governors and attorneys general headed into court [and] the government lost, spectacularly, with judges in two separate cases ruling against the administration."

My other substack paying subscription is Heather Cox Richardson, and her 22 hours ago Letter from an American started with a "Stop Fraud: Vote Republican" sign she saw in Maine, "especially audacious in light of today’s news from Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times that last summer the Department of Homeland Security paid more than $495 million for a 1,600-bed prison the state of Minnesota declined to purchase a year ago for the asking price of $75 million—or even “a fraction of that price.”

Not that a casual waste of $400 mil is the worst of it.

"On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump asked oil executives to donate a billion dollars to his campaign, calling it a “deal” considering how much money they would make from the regulatory cuts and new permits Trump promised. That investment seems to have paid off. At a rally on October 24, Trump commented to attendees, “I wonder if I should say this,” then went on to say that “our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.” He continued: “My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir,’ because people are paying a little higher. But what we’ve done for this country, we’re making money like this country has never made before.” He finished: “I don’t give a damn: I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune.”

The joke's on us: the "we" in that sentence is not you and me. NBC News reported that BP’s profits are at an 18-year-high and Chevron’s earnings are up more than 180% from a year earlier.

If you want to get more specific about election fraud, I can recommend the saga of Tina Peters, former Colorado election official who was found guilty by a jury of her peers of three misdemeanors and four felonies, as retold by 60 Minutes last Sunday. I used to watch regularly, but fell off the wagon when Bari Weiss screwed it up in obeisance to thug. Happy to see that it's not dead yet, actually. There were sound bites from the judge, as he sentenced Peters to 9 years in state prison.

"You are no hero. You abused your position, and you're a charlatan." And, "I'm convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You're as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen."

But she did it in service to thug, so he calls her a hero, and extorted the whole state of Colorado to get her out of jail early.

Hey – don't forget to VOTE on Tuesday, if you haven't got it done yet.

24.Oct.2026

The Kushner files

As mentioned below, expanded by Steve Schmidt in his The Warning blog: The Kushner files: foreign billions, Russian spies and a betrayed oath. "What would you think if you opened a review of a new television series and read this plot?" he asks at the top. I won't spoil it for you, go read.

"For years, I have asked what Kushner did to obtain the separate $2 billion Saudi investment in his firm after leaving office. In February 2023, I demanded scrutiny by Congress, prosecutors, counterintelligence officials and the press. In September 2024, I explicitly called for coverage “as an espionage story.”

It's been a long time coming. This: "In February 2018, The Washington Post reported Kushner requested more intelligence than any White House employee outside the National Security Council."

In 2018! Schmidt concludes, above an invitation to "tell me what you think in the comments":

The Warning: your turn

An ordinary American suspected of compromising national security would face an investigation. Jared Kushner is still conducting diplomacy on America’s behalf.

Should Kushner be immediately removed from every diplomatic assignment and stripped of access to classified information pending an independent investigation?

Yes, he absolutely should. (As should Witkoff.) Thug and his enablers don't do "independent investigations," though. We need that Blue Wave, people.

Postscript with the top comment after the blog post, from John D.:

"As a New Jerseyan of five decades, I know the Kushner Family is an Organized Crime Family. Actually, it is not just my opinion. There are convictions to prove it."

How's that global instability working out for you?

So, Mr. thug didn't end the war in Ukraine on "day 1" and he started a for-realio new war in the Middle East, goaded by the forever-hawk Bibi Netenyahu, and now the "breaking news" is that Iran in ‘Advanced Stages’ of Planning Attacks Against Americans, Officials Say.

Can we trust them? I have no idea, but plenty of suspicions, given the desperation to turn the Titanic around (as J.D. "JD" Vance so eloquently put it), and somehow stop the Blue Wave that is now 10 days from impact.

Vote like I'm on the ballot, thug says, while his approval hits a new low—"disapprove" by 25 points! and more than two-to-one "independents"—in the latest poll. You know, "driven down by broad disapproval of his handling of the economy, the war in Iran and high gas prices."

Always the price of gas. (Which in my neighborhood has eased off about 10% from recent highs. Is that enough for the short-memory crowd?) Oh, and the price of diesel, which is still north of $6/gallon.

"Regardless of how you might vote, please tell me which party you trust to do a better job" of just about anything is running D+4 (on immigration!) to D+20 (on health care). But voters... we'll have to wait and see (and navigate the violent howling of the losers).

They got a pull-quote from retired nurse Sheila Murdock of Shelley, Idaho (I had to look it up; pop. 5k-ish, home of "Idaho Annual Spud Day"), so there's that.

“People are upset, ‘Oh, Trump put these tariffs on people and now our food costs go up.’ Well, yes, but if you look at the bigger picture and what it eventually does, it makes things better.”

Isn't that sweet and dreamy? She's "already voted absentee for Republicans this year," so solid for the status quo. And the NYT also tells us that Democratic voters are unhappy, too, more unsatisfied with their own party than Republicans are about theirs. (Trust to do a better job about Corruption is D+11, and the Oct. 12-19 polling was done before the latest bombshells—so many bombshells—of Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a "humanitarian," and Jared Kushner's secret negotiations—including more than $700 Million in Transfers. Azerbaijan, Dubai, Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Six years ago. Just imagine what it would be if it were up to date!

That same Saudi Arabia where "the U.S. government has now ordered diplomats and other federal employees to leave." And "rising threats [] go beyond the Middle East, one official said."

Here, eight months into a war first forecast to go "four to five weeks." At levels that people have never seen before. Pete "Mr. T" Hegseth, war criminal, buffed up on March 5:

“Our munitions are full up, and our will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control as long as it takes to ensure the United States of America achieves these objectives.”

That was before our "short excursion" got lengthened by Iran started controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Victory! thug declared on March 7. The next day Hegseth said on 60 Minutes “What I want your viewers to understand is this is only just the beginning.”

Yes, indeed. Politifact's tracking on that page was updated through April 20—half a year ago now—when thug assured us he was “under no pressure whatsoever” to make a deal, “although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!”

All things are relative.

raveling

Tom von Alten