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There Was an Election Last Night

Those crazy kids in South Carolina actually held an election yesterday, just 2 days before Christmas. Of course, 165 years ago, the state seceded from the union just 5 days before Christmas. Must be something in the water. Which, come to think of it, might also explain Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Actually, there were several elections in the Palmetto State, all of them to fill vacant seats in the state House. But South Carolina is very red, and most of its state House districts are very red, so most of the elections were uncontested. The exception was the one for HD-88, a seat vacated by RJ May (R), who got caught with child pornography, and so is in the process of moving from the state House to the Big House. In last night's election, John Lastinger (R) rode to an easy victory, taking 62.3% of the vote to 37.7% for J. Chuck Hightower (D).

We have to write this story up, because we are an election-focused site, and this is an election. And we always put election results at the top of the page, when they happen. That said, we recognize that an election that was never going to be competitive, was held in winter, took place right before a holiday, and therefore only attracted about 2,000 voters is not a great case study. Any conclusions that one might reach from the result should be taken with many grains of salt (which can then be used to de-ice the driveway in front of your residence).

With those caveats out of the way, Donald Trump won this district by 35 points last year. By contrast, Lastinger won last night by 25. That's a 10-point shift toward the Democrats, which is about what we've seen across all elections this year. And while this seat is not often contested (given the aforementioned redness of the state and the district), the one time it WAS contested in the last decade was 2022, when May won it by 41 points (70.1% to 29.8%).

Those kinds of shifts, in this kind of district, are not going to be powered by Democrats showing up to vote in a hopeless election. They are going to be powered by Republicans deciding it's just not worth it to get to the polls and vote. Obviously, if that feeling is widespread on November 3, 2026, it will be a bad night for the GOP. (Z)

DoJ Drops another Tranche of Epstein Files

The Department of Justice drip, drip, dripped another set of Epstein files late on Monday—a group of more than 11,000 files, totaling about 30,000 pages. The website the DoJ put together to share the files is here, but it is poorly organized and is not indexed, which are presumably both features, not bugs. CBS News has put together a much more accessible database here.

Here's a list of the most important storylines/takeaways resulting from the second dump:

We must say, we are not entirely sure what the administration's strategy is. Our best guess is that they are going to release enough documents so that Bondi can say "See! We did what Congress told us to do!", and they are primarily going to do so over the holidays, in an attempt to bury the story. It would appear that casting doubt on the documents, by claiming some/many of them are fake, is also part of the plan.

Maybe that will serve to bring an end to this story, but we doubt it. The DoJ is still on pace to release just a small fraction of the overall total and that, plus the overall clumsiness of the DoJ, and its obvious partisan interest here, have countless people across the political spectrum asking "Who are they protecting?" That is not a question that the White House wants people asking, we would imagine. (Z)

Supreme Court Hands Trump a Major Loss

Yesterday, the Supreme Court denied Donald Trump's emergency application to put a hold on a lower court ruling stopping Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Illinois. The application has been on the shadow docket since early November and since then, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut in Oregon has issued a permanent injunction prohibiting Trump from deploying the National Guard in Portland.

The ruling is significant for a couple of reasons. First, it was 6-3 against Trump, and is one of the few times the Justices have not given him what he wanted on the shadow docket. In doing so, the Court went back to its normal process for evaluating these emergency applications. When Trump is not a party, these applications are rarely granted.

Second, they expanded the issues in play to include a question that was not raised by the parties but came up in a friend of the court brief. The law that allows a president to federalize National Guard troops specifies that it can only be used if he is "unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States." The question the Justices wanted answered was "What is meant by 'regular forces'?" Is that the U.S. military or does that term refer to civilian law enforcement like the police? In its 3-page order, the Court concluded that "regular forces" means the regular military. Given that definition, the next step would be an assessment of whether the regular military would have been unable to execute federal law—in this case, federal immigration law. But that can only be in cases where the use of the military would be lawful. The Court noted that "such circumstances are exceptional," because of the Posse Comitatus Act. Thus, the Court concluded that the president must first "identify the source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois." Because Trump has "not invoked a statute that provides an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act," he is not entitled to relief here.

So, in essence, the Court has added an additional hurdle to the deployment of National Guard troops that even the plaintiffs didn't raise. This suggests to us that, while we appreciate that reading tea leaves can be a fool's exercise, even this Court draws a firm line at the military being used on American soil, except in the most unusual of circumstances. It will be interesting to see if this changes Trump's strategy with respect to the National Guard going forward. Notably, the Court did not suggest that a governor's acquiescence to the federalization of the Guard would constitute sufficient authority. This has implications for the lawfulness of the deployment of National Guard troops to Louisiana, which were sent there with that state governor's blessing, and began arriving in New Orleans just this week. (L)

Kennedy Center Honors Are Absolutely Magical

Take a look at the group picture of last year's Kennedy Center honorees:

11 people, among them Francis Ford Coppola, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Bonnie Raitt, wearing medallions with rainbow ribbons

Now take a look at the group picture of the Kennedy Center honorees who were recognized last night:

7 people, among them Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor and Gene Simmons, wearing medallions with blue ribbons

Notice a difference? The rainbow ribbons are a longstanding tradition, and were chosen to represent unity, and the broad diversity of the creative arts. Of course, the current presidential administration doesn't do unity, doesn't do diversity, and is suspicious that any rainbow is secretly a message about "the gays." So, the ribbons are now blue—apparently nobody noticed that's the color of the Democratic Party. At least it's not yet the Trump-Kennedy Honors (though keep reading). We presume that, and red ribbons, will be on tap next year.

Anyhow, the ceremony was televised on CBS last night, and it was, perhaps, the finest 2 hours of television programming in the history of the medium. Better than the other 47 Kennedy Center Honors. Better than any sporting event could ever be. Better than any final episode of a scripted program—The Sopranos, M*A*S*H, The Fugitive, Breaking Bad, Cheers, etc., were all left in the dust. In fact, we are not sure why we are limiting ourselves to television programming, as it really was the finest bit of filmed entertainment, regardless of medium, that the world has yet seen. It was more innovative than Citizen Kane, more gripping than The Godfather, more exciting than Star Wars, more moving than Casablanca. Needless to say, the lion's share of the credit for this—nay, ALL the credit—goes to the host, since they are the glue that makes the show work.

Why, specifically, do we have such high praise for the broadcast and its host? Well, it might have something to do with this:

A Donald Trump social media message that reads 'THE TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER HONORS will be broadcast tonight, on CBS, and Stream on Paramount+. Tune In at 8 P.M. EST! At the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America, I am hosting the event. Tell me what you think of my 'Master of Ceremony' abilities. If really good, would you like me to leave the Presidency in order to make 'hosting' a full time job? We will be honoring true GREATS in the History of Entertainment: Sylvester Stallone, Michael Crawford, KISS, George Strait, and Gloria Gaynor.

We would say that, if he's going to create that kind of magic, it is Trump's patriotic duty to change jobs, and to make hosting this ceremony his full-time vocation. Imagine the heights of greatness that will be achieved if he spends a whole year preparing! And we are absolutely certain that we would not change one word we have written here if we had actually watched the broadcast.

And as long as we are on the general subject, the latest Economist/YouGov poll is out, and they think they have identified the single most unpopular thing Trump has done during his second term in office. It's not the tariffs, or the undeclared war on Venezuela, or even the snotty message about Rob Reiner. Nope, it's the hubris of arranging for the Kennedy Center to be renamed as the Trump Kennedy Center. Among respondents, only 18% approved of that choice, while 66% disapproved, which puts the renaming 48 points under water.

Undoubtedly, those kinds of numbers are a product of some of the wonky aspects of this particular situation. First of all, JFK is still a pretty popular fellow, and stepping on his toes is not a good look. Further, presidents slapping their names on things isn't a partisan issue like, say, foreign policy or abortion or economic policy, and so even MAGA voters might feel OK freestyling a bit. It's also not a particularly consequential issue, so pro-Trump voters can express their disapproval without having to worry that they will help prompt a wave of "Trump is in trouble" stories. All of this said, when we first wrote about the renaming, we proposed that this could be a few of the thousand cuts that will bring down Trumpism. The Economist poll makes us think we might have been on to something, and that for some (small) number of Trump voters, this might have been the bridge too far.

Meanwhile, given the smashing success of last night's telecast, and the absolutely mesmerizing performance of the host and master of ceremonies, the White House (and its lackeys on the board of the Kennedy Center), will have to get to work on next year's ceremony. The list of available MAGA artists is not too long, but you can't be too surprised if James Woods, Kid Rock, Lee Greenwood, Scott Baio and/or Dean Cain makes the cut. These folks are all legends in their fields. Yep, absolute legends. (Z)

Grift, Ego or Revenge? - The Follow-Up

Yesterday, we had items about the proposed "Trump-class" battleships, Bari Weiss spiking a 60 Minutes story about CECOT, and Donald Trump's grifty alliance with a fusion-energy company. Remember how Ron Popeil (RIP), in his infomercials, had "But wait, there's more!" as his catchphrase? Well, Trump really oughta appropriate that, because it seems there's always more to the story, and it's rarely good.

We are going to start with some follow-up on the battleship story, because that got the most attention in the media (both general and defense-centered), and also in our inbox. We were pretty skeptical that the U.S.S. Defiant, or any other Trump-class battleship, will ever be built. As it turns out, we should have been even more skeptical than we were. Here is a rundown of some of the problems that people who know what they are talking about (i.e., not Trump and Secretary of Playing Battleship Pete Hegseth) foresee:

And then there's the biggest issue of all, which we hinted at yesterday: Battleships (although this ship would barely qualify as a battleship) are yesterday's news. They are not well suited to modern naval combat, and do not perform a function that cannot be better performed by existing ships (for example, aircraft carriers are a better choice if you want to bombard land-based targets). We got a solid analysis from a reader who is in a position to know; we're going to give them anonymity, for obvious reasons:

One thing seems oddly absent from the commentary on the proposed "Trump-class battleship": It isn't even a battleship (not that any modern navy needs battleships anyway—those were already close to obsolete by World War II).

Ignore the name and compare the specs on draft, beam, and crew to an actual WWII battleship. Metallurgy and armor have improved since the 1930s, but we still don't have Unobtanium alloys, and physics still applies. A long hull with relatively low tonnage, shallow draft, and a small crew is a thin, lightly built ship, not a capital one. Historically, that points less to Yamato and more to Northampton: state-of-the-art for its day, yet fatally vulnerable, as Tassafaronga demonstrated.

Numerically, the proposed "Trump-class" ship (≈840–880 ft long, >35,000 tons, 24–30 ft draft, ~650–850 crew) matches the length of the Yamato-class battleship (862 ft) but has barely half its displacement (65,000-72,000 tons), a much shallower draft (36 ft), and less than one-quarter its crew (3,233), underscoring that it is nothing like a true battleship in mass or survivability.

The renderings reinforce the point. This isn't a revived battleship concept; it's a scaled-up LCS. Given how the Littoral Combat Ships performed (their sardonic nickname did not arise by accident), it's hard to see this lineage as reassuring.

Worse, the platform would be exquisitely vulnerable to drone saturation. Stopping 99.5% of attackers isn't enough if the remaining 0.5% can mission-kill the ship. Trying to "fix" that with improvised overhead protection—the way tank crews now do in Ukraine—only deepens the problem. Tanks don't capsize; ships do. Making a top-heavy ship even top-heavier is not a survivability plan.

The vanity of the name is the least interesting part. The platform logic itself looks like a trap.

Every analysis we read yesterday echoed this basic assessment: The Navy needs drones, the ability to resist drones, and small, fast, maneuverable ships. It does not need a new semi-battleship, particularly one that surely will be a boondoggle. Either Trump is delusional, or he's just using military chest-thumping in place of Viagra, or he's trying to look "strong" for the base or for some other entity (China?).

Next up is the spiked 60 Minutes story. There are a few things to note from the last 24 hours or so. First, as we expected, Bari Weiss did know about the story, and allowed it to remain alive until just hours before airtime. She claims that she finally put her foot down because her "concerns" were not addressed. She says she is now going to completely overhaul CBS News' Standards and Procedures. That's an announcement that surely gives one confidence in the division's coverage, going forward.

It also turns out that the Trump administration WAS asked to comment, and did provide a statement to 60 Minutes, but the show's journalists decided not to use it. Here it is:

60 Minutes should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump are removing from the country.

That is not a statement on a story about CECOT, it is propaganda that is only very tangentially related to the story. Excluding it was entirely correct, no matter what Weiss thinks. 60 Minutes is not in the business of giving free commercials to the White House. And if the White House was smarter, it would have come up with a statement that advanced its messaging AND was related to CECOT. This is what Ronald Reagan and his team were smart enough to do; hard to understand why there isn't someone in THIS White House who can figure it out.

Also, CBS is trying desperately to shut down all streams of the story, and filed hundreds of copyright claims yesterday. The problem is that if you try to keep people from seeing something, they want to see it all the more. And there are plenty of places on the Internet that are beyond the reach of CBS and its lawyers. Anyone who wants to see the item and hasn't already, this link looks like it will be evergreen.

And finally, just a couple of comments about the DJT/TAE Merger. Again, this whole story is flying under the radar, so there isn't all that much coverage for us to link to. Fortunately, it covers subjects in the wheelhouses of many of our readers. So, we got several messages yesterday like this one from L.S. in Bellingham, WA:

It should be noted that this is basically a merger between two badly over-hyped entities, not just a profitable company constructing an elaborate "questionable recompense" by purchasing a moribund social platform.

The fact is that ANY promise by ANY company that they are going to build a fusion power plant should be taken with the entire year's output of the Mont Belvieu, TX, Salt Dome.

A quick read of the Wikipedia page for fusion power shows that TAE and the rest of the industry are still a LONG way from being viable commercial power producers. The longest sustained reaction (by a FRENCH company, not TAE) is 22 minutes. This is a "not looking good" long-shot company figuring out how to "monetarily encourage" the U.S. government to throw lots of $$$$$$ at them, regardless of their actual promise.

We should also notice what dog is not barking. TAE management basically just devalued the original investors' stakes by 50%. The fact we are not hearing ANY squawking from them can only mean those investors had already given up on TAE succeeding, so... it's a grifter, grifting grifters, with the U.S. taxpayers left holding the bag.

That item was written by (Z), who knows enough to know that fusion has long been a holy grail in energy production, but is not up to date on the latest scientific literature, particularly the portion that deals with the current state of fusion research.

There's also another part of the story that was pointed out by many readers, including B.G. in Palo Alto, CA

There may be more to this story. TAE has connections to the Russian government. You can read about it here or watch an investigative video here.

TAE has existed since 1998 but has never built a working reactor or even made any revenues. One of their major investors is RUSNANO, a Russian state-funded investment company. Probably needs more scrutiny.

So, the grift gets griftier, the fantastical battleship gets more fantastical, and the shady behavior at CBS gets shadier. We told you there's always more to the story, and the more usually isn't good. (Z)

Hageman Makes It Official

The sudden retirement of Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) last week caught everyone by surprise, such that no aspiring replacement candidate immediately announced a run. That will happen when a vacancy occurs around 7:00 p.m. on a Friday.

It was really only a matter of time, however, until Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) announced a run, and yesterday, she jumped in. If you would like to watch her announcement video, it is here. Our three takeaways: (1) Hageman is pretty terrible on camera, with a cadence almost as unnatural as that of Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) or former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal; (2) However, her cross is bigger than YOUR cross and (3) A lot of people in Wyoming own very large belt buckles—they could probably give Texas a run for its money, on a square-inches-of-belt-buckle-per-capita basis.

We are hardly dialed into Wyoming politics, but reader R.L.D. in Sundance, WY, is, and assures us that Reid Rasner, who ran for the other Wyoming U.S. Senate seat in 2024, is going to mount a bid. Rasner is a billionaire, though we can't find anyone willing to estimate how many billions he actually has. According to Forbes, he is NOT the richest person in Wyoming—that's John Mars, at $39 billion. And so, we have a range of somewhere between $1 billion and $38.9999 billion for Rasner. Wherever he is on that spectrum, he's certainly got enough to buy every commercial slot in Wyoming from now until the election, and to hire half the population of the state to knock on the doors of the other half.

In other words, Hageman is going to lose the money race, bigly. On the other hand, she has won elections, including statewide elections, in Wyoming before, and Rasner has not. Further, Wyomingites do not have a history of sending inexperienced politicians to represent them in the Senate; every newly-minted U.S. Senator in the past half-century-plus either served as representative, as a member of the state legislature, or as governor (and sometimes more than one of these).

Hageman also has Donald Trump's endorsement, which could help. That said, he's developed a habit of endorsing EVERY candidate who is MAGA enough, so we'll see if he's able to control himself in Wyoming. Also, Wyoming is more populist than MAGA, and Hageman had a high-profile incident back in March where she was booed off the stage during a town hall, after she listened to complaints about DOGE, tariffs, etc., and decreed: "It's so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government... I'm sorry, your hysteria is just really over the top." Yes, what could these people who showed up to a town hall WITH A UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE be thinking? That is not the time and place to be discussing what the federal government is doing, right? They really should have limited themselves to questions about Fourth of July desserts and what is going to happen in the final season of Stranger Things.

The point here is that the mood in Wyoming might be ripe for a Washington outsider. That, plus his money, might make Rasner competitive. However, we would guess that the person who would really be a problem for Hageman is Gov. Mark Gordon (R). He doesn't have boatloads of money, but he has also won statewide, while being a Washington outsider. That combination of experience and distance might be what Cowboy State voters are looking for. He is considering a bid, but hasn't made a decision yet. There's been no polling of the race, in part because Lummis just jumped ship, and in part because Wyoming is rarely polled because nobody wants to pay for it, so we might have to wait a while before we have anything more than guesses about what's going to happen in that race (other than that a Republican will win, which is not a guess, but a certainty). (Z)

Twelve Days of Christmas... Games, Part XI: Scrabble on Steroids

One more game to go, after this one. Today, we will be leaning a bit on Scrabble, and on a concept we toyed around with once before. Here's the game. We're going to give you 12 categories, and the job is to come up with ONE answer, the answer that would produce the highest Scrabble score if you were to play that as an answer in Scrabble (you can ignore the usual tile limit).

For example, if we give you the category "TV Show That Has Done at Least One Christmas Episode," you might choose M*A*S*H as the best answer you can think of, earning 3+1+1+4, for a total of 9 points. Or, maybe you remember that How I Met Your Mother did a Christmas episode (several, in fact) and submit that as your response. That would be worth 33 points.

Here are the 10 categories:

For this one, there is no problem using whatever Internet resources you can think to use.

And, as this one will probably take some time, it works best for submissions to go to comments@electoral-vote.com. That way, you can open up a document or a blank e-mail and work, off and on, at your leisure. Don't forget to include your initials and city/state or city/country.

When we announce the results, we will announce the top overall scorers, and also the top scores in each individual category. (Z)


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