My wife and my kids, they browsed up and tab me, Darling, she said, I was yours to be linked …
NEW: Mary Peltola’s campaign denies rigging the Senate election: “The Alaskans for Mary campaign has no involvement with either Sullivan campaign,” an Alaskans for Mary spox tells @realDailyWire. “Like Mary, our campaign is focused on lowering costs and fixing the rigged system in DC.” Story to come.
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 28, 2026
Ed: John wrote about this earlier, but it’s worth noting here too. Peltola and her campaign are lying through their collective teeth. They got caught red-handed attempting to defraud Alaska voters. The NY Times actually delivered in this case and made clear the extent of the fraud.
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NY Times: “Alaskan voters need to know,” said Elisa Rios, Ms. Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, who was fired amid a staff shake-up in August, and agreed to a series of interviews with The Times since then. “There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”
Ms. Peltola was not directly involved in the project, Ms. Rios said, but she was “definitely aware.”
The operation had impact. On Tuesday, Ms. Peltola will be the only Democrat on the ballot, facing off against the two Mr. Sullivans and a long-shot candidate named Gerald Heikes who was also recruited into the race, according to The Times’s reporting. Polls give Ms. Peltola a strong chance of winning.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit in federal court at President Trump’s behest last week seeking to block certification of the election results if votes for the other Mr. Sullivan cost Senator Sullivan the win.
Ed: When I first commented on the lawsuit, I expressed considerable skepticism about the chances for success. Now, perhaps things may have changed, although it’s far from clear that any federal judge would throw out election results on this basis. What is certain is that this is not a fishing expedition, and that the campaign itself committed the fraud. That may matter.
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.@nytimes reporting reveals that operatives aligned with Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola spent months quietly recruiting a spoiler candidate with an identical name to peel votes away from Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. When you can’t win on the issues, Democrats cheat. https://t.co/lrxZidpg6Y
— Scott Jennings Show (@JenningsShow) October 28, 2026
Ed: Everyone talks about cheating, but rarely do we see election fraud on this scale. It’s not entirely unprecedented, however …
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Have a seat and set a spell I have a story for you that has to do with name confusion at the ballot box; while it’s not as eye popping-ly devious as what the Democrats have pulled off with the Dan Sullivans’ its still worth your time. During the late 1970s and 1980s, Pennsylvania ballots suffered from an absolute epidemic of “Bob Caseys.” Voters were so confused that completely unknown candidates won major state party nominations and even statewide office simply by sharing a name with the “Real” Bob Casey Sr. of Scranton, who later had to campaign under the slogan “The Real Bob Casey” just to clear up the mess. In 1976, seeing that the famous Bob Casey was sitting out the election, this completely unrelated Robert E. Casey threw his hat in the ring for State Treasurer. He spent virtually no money and did almost zero campaigning. Voters went to the polls, saw the name “Bob Casey,” assumed it was the highly respected outgoing Auditor General, and elected him. Then an ice cream parlor owner and schoolteacher from Allegheny County in 1978 employed the exact same strategy; he ran for Lieutenant Governor in the Democratic primary, spent no money, didn’t campaign, and won the nomination because voters thought he was the Scranton politician. He was paired on the ticket with gubernatorial nominee Pete Flaherty. The Flaherty/Casey ticket narrowly lost the general election to Republicans Dick Thornburgh and William Scranton III. By 1986, the real Robert P. Casey of Scranton was ready for his fourth run for governor. To combat the identity theft at the ballot box, his campaign (led by then-unknown strategists James Carville and Pauli Begala) explicitly leaned into the confusion. They branded him heavily as “The Real Bob Casey”.
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) October 29, 2026
During the late 1970s and 1980s, Pennsylvania ballots suffered from an absolute epidemic of “Bob Caseys.”
Voters were so confused that completely unknown candidates won major state party nominations and even statewide office simply by sharing a name with the “Real” Bob Casey Sr. of Scranton, who later had to campaign under the slogan “The Real Bob Casey” just to clear up the mess.
Ed: Click through to read it all. It’s a fun stroll through history.
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WSJ: Vice President JD Vance is engaging one of Iran’s most powerful hard-liners to revive peace negotiations even as President Trump threatens to restart the war after next week’s midterm elections, U.S. officials and people familiar with the matter said.
Vance sent a letter to Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s top security body, the Supreme National Security Council, and previously Iran’s longest-serving commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the people.
The letter was sent at Trump’s direction, one person said, and Trump is aware of the outreach. Vance is testing whether Tehran and Washington could find enough common ground to persuade Trump not to give a final order for a short, intense attack on Iran in the coming weeks.
Some U.S. officials say talking to Iranian hard-liners, who have amassed power in Tehran since the U.S. and Israel killed regime leaders at the war’s outset, might yield a better diplomatic result.
Ed: Ahem. It might result in another deal that the IRGC will never honor and which will tend to keep the Iranian people in slavery to the regime. The IRGC has never honored an agreement, not even for a short period of time. Besides, we don’t need to conduct another round of high-kinetic attacks; we just need to keep the embargo in place while the IRGC’s financial position collapses. I suspect this is just a sop for our Gulf state partners, because I cannot imagine why anyone would think this would work.
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🚨 NEW: Fox’s @BretBaier on midterm polling: “If this doesn’t turn out how we think it’s gonna turn out, is this the end of polling? Are people just PO’d about polls?” Alex Castellanos (Republican consultant): “There are a lot of pollsters, I think, who are trading in all their interview mechanism for crockpots right now because it’s so unpredictable.” “But, for example in Iowa, I’m hearing from pollsters that it is polling hell. It is incredibly difficult to get Republicans to respond to a text or a phone call.” “What does that mean? Does that mean that they don’t trust pollsters and the establishment and the media? They think they’re on the other side? Or does that mean they’re upset at the president and they’re not gonna say? I mean, you could read it both ways. I could, and right now we don’t know,” adds @alexcast. Bret: “The president looks at the people showing up at the rallies and reads it the latter. But, you know, we don’t know yet.”
— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) October 28, 2026
… who are trading in all their interview mechanism for crockpots right now because it’s so unpredictable.”
“But, for example in Iowa, I’m hearing from pollsters that it is polling hell. It is incredibly difficult to get Republicans to respond to a text or a phone call.”
“What does that mean? Does that mean that they don’t trust pollsters and the establishment and the media? They think they’re on the other side? Or does that mean they’re upset at the president and they’re not gonna say? I mean, you could read it both ways. I could, and right now we don’t know,” adds @alexcast.
Bret: “The president looks at the people showing up at the rallies and reads it the latter. But, you know, we don’t know yet.”
Ed: If people haven’t noticed it yet, I’m spending much less time on horse-race polling in this cycle. I don’t trust it at all, and the summer’s wild polling misses are just one reason why. Pollsters are not producing results that have any reliably predictive value. At this point, the early voting data and historical trends are almost certainly more predictive for future results. Issue polling is somewhat better, but even then, I wonder whether pollsters are getting answers from the people who matter in this election.
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Detroit News (via Dennis Lennox): Jason Turkish, a Jewish Democrat and disabilities and civil rights attorney from Huntington Woods, is engaged to be married to U.S. Rep. Stevens of Birmingham, whom El-Sayed narrowly defeated in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary.
“I’ve just seen an escalation in his rhetoric since the primary, and it makes folks unsafe. Every time he talks about genocide (in Gaza), Jews get death threats,” Turkish told The Detroit News about El-Sayed, a long-time critic of the Israeli government.
“We have never seen a candidate for U.S. Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have seen from Abdul.”
Turkish, a Democratic donor from Huntington Woods who has also given to GOP candidates, described his decision to back Rogers as “putting country before party.”
Ed: This follows the same declaration from Elissa Slotkin’s major fundraiser, David Kramer. Stevens herself claims that she’s still supporting El-Sayed, but one has to wonder how long that will last. Speaking of which …
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NEW from me: With under a week to go in what many polls are showing as a still tight Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed hasn’t called his former primary opponent Haley Stevens in months — and there are no plans for them to campaign together before election day. https://t.co/E1iJ8i2lfm
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) October 28, 2026
Ed: The silence is deafening in this case, and in both directions. El-Sayed is desperate to convince Stevens’ primary voters to turn out for him, and yet he hasn’t bothered to call Stevens? El-Sayed is revealing himself as arrogant and thin-skinned, especially recently, and one has to wonder if he resents Stevens for coming as close as she did in derailing his primary bid. And her fiancé’s statement probably originates in large part from that silence.
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NY Post: A gun control nut vandalized the 9/11 Memorial Reflecting Pool with red spray paint in a broad daylight political stunt.
Jonathan Andrew Tijerina, 31, was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and making graffiti for tagging a section of the North Tower reflecting pool with the name of his website Monday evening, police said, according to CBS News New York.
“Juststopkillingkids.com,” read the red spray-painted markings written across the names of dozens of victims engraved into the memorial at the footprint of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack. …
“On October 26, 2026, Jon Tijerina was arrested for spraying red paint on Freedom Tower in NYC. He is demanding that Trump and Mamdani enforce common-sense, highly popular demands with respect to guns such as Universal Background Checks and a National Gun Registry,” Tijerina’s organization wrote in a follow-up post.
Ed: Please please PLEASE tell me that there is an applicable federal statute that would allow the DOJ to prosecute this in federal court. Alvin Bragg will drop this, Kathy Hochul would pardon him, and Zohran Mamdani would appoint him to the police commission. Maybe a white-hat hacker can do to his website what this utter narcissistic tool did to the 9/11 Memorial.
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@RepRashida Ah, here we go. The move from “Bibi is the devil” to – “it does not matter which leader Israel’s has”… The propagandist’s trick before every Israeli election. https://t.co/K3DsfnGWGv
— David Collier (@mishtal) October 27, 2026
Ed: Tlaib wants the annihilation of Israel. Full stop. This is the tell.
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Lionel Shriver at The New Criterion: To the extent that I can speak with authority, it’s because I grew up in a household that was “progressive” before the tag became a thumbnail for the modern American Left. My parents were lifelong liberal Democrats. Moreover, my own baby-boomer generation is abundantly responsible for where the Democratic Party, the charity sector, the public sector, the churches, the universities, the arts world, and even many corporate boardrooms have ended up. In our naiveté, vanity, arrogance, historical ignorance, provincialism, psychological cluelessness, entitled prosperity, and political gullibility, my peers and I sowed the seeds for both “woke” and democratic socialism—the dsa being a seemingly separate case, but still of a piece. As a teenager, I wore beads and bell bottoms, I went to protests, and I dutifully deplored my own country. The state of the American Left is partly my fault.
So what is the nature of what detractors uncharitably slag off as the “prog-tard”? Despite their paying endless lip service to protecting the “vulnerable,” progressives’ driving emotions are negative. These people are striving less to realize a Shangri-la than to destroy what, and more particularly whom, they revile. Those hippie-era origins are embarrassing, but at least the Sixties’ love-not-war cliches, the era’s experimental sex and better living through chemistry, did project a credible glint of sunlit uplands. Late-stage radicalism has lost the paisley headbands, the Laugh-In goofery, the lazy Timothy Leary early retirement of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” The last decade-plus of cancel-culture progressivism has proven vastly more vicious, more predatory, more punitive, and definitely more dangerous. It’s obsessed with the concept of power, and therefore obsessed with attaining it.
So while progressives are often accused of credulous optimism about human nature, their rabbling in the streets sponsors little passing of the peace, few reedy renditions of Kumbaya. The texture of left-wing protests is typically hostile, resentful, vengeful, accusatory, aggressive if not murderous, vituperative, and furious. Organized anti-ice operations have entailed spitting and cursing at officers, the kicking of their vehicles, the burning of cars, the chucking of chunks of concrete, and the screaming of obscenities. Check out the transgender-activist placards targeting “trans exclusionary radical feminists”: The only good TERF is a hanged dead TERF; One TERF, one bullet; Save one trans, kill one TERF. Wearing T-shirts sporting homicidal hang gliders, pro-Palestine protesters chant “There is only one solution: intifada revolution,” “By any means necessary,” and “Death to Israel, Death to Zionists.” For this lot, more positive emotions such as cheerfulness, joy, and celebration only emerge after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the murder of a United Healthcare ceo, the slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 250 more, and attempts on the life of the U.S. president.
Ed: Be sure to read this all. Progressives are nihilists, and their alliance with Islamists, the Queer Movement, and trans activists all have this in common: the utter destruction of the status quo. They want to watch the world burn, but only so that they can seize power in the rubble and impose their will on captive populations by force.
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My opponent cannot cherry-pick what she is responsible for and what she isn’t. Peggy Flanagan has been attached to Tim Walz for eight years. After years of failure by the Walz-Flanagan administration, Peggy does not deserve a promotion. She deserves a pink slip. https://t.co/GvNawI07rb
— Michele Tafoya (@Michele_Tafoya) October 28, 2026
Ed: This may be the biggest surprise in the 2026 cycle. I am cautiously optimistic about Tafoya’s chances in Minnesota, especially with all of the acute scandals in the DFL establishment’s governance of the past decade or more. Flanagan is an utter clown. Still a long shot, but not quite as long as I would have thought in the spring.
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NEW: LA County says a sample of the Trump admin’s 200 names of suspected non-citizen voters showed that 38.9% attested to being born in the US. But in a new sworn statement under penalty of perjury, a DHS official says its investigation shows NONE of LA County’s 200 names were born in the US. “After a thorough review of the immigration records of all the individuals on the County’s Sample List, it was determined that none of the individuals USCIS matched to the County’s Sample List were born in the United States according to USCIS records,” -Nicolas Bartell, Associate Director of Fraud Detection at USCIS.
— Matt Finn (@MattFinnFNC) October 27, 2026
… shows NONE of LA County’s 200 names were born in the US.
“After a thorough review of the immigration records of all the individuals on the County’s Sample List, it was determined that none of the individuals USCIS matched to the County’s Sample List were born in the United States according to USCIS records,” -Nicolas Bartell, Associate Director of Fraud Detection at USCIS.
Ed: So much for the “it never happens here.” This is what Bill Clinton wanted when he pushed Motor Voter in his first term. Joe Biden and his handlers wanted to scale it up by opening the borders and hamstringing ICE, and that is precisely why Democrats want to go back to those policies as soon as they regain power.
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Abdul El-Sayed Promises To Any Jews Who Vote for Him That He’ll Kill Them Last https://t.co/kSKoNByn6n
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 28, 2026
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Last night’s lyric: “You Might Think” by The Cars. Tonight’s might be tricky …
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