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Let’s start with the amusing and delicious loss of Mike Lindell.
Lindell (R-Batshit Junction) lost the Republican primary for governor in Minnesota by 11 points and by 45,000 votes. Before the results had been fully counted, he was on his own network refusing to admit defeat, talking about the irregularities in the voting and promising that his supporters would stay up all night checking the figures.
When asked if an AP statement would settle the matter, he replied, “Why on earth would I take the AP’s word for it?” Clearly, we ought to wait for the result from the CyberNinjas or some other section of the Election-Denial-Industrial Complex. As Corey Lewandowski, the political philosopher, put it, “Womp womp.”
Campaign war rooms have a certain atmosphere. There’s always a point at about 10:30 when either a bright intern, an experienced political insider, or the candidate’s brother-in-law begins to work out the numbers for the remaining precincts, and the room falls silent since everybody already knows.
Lindell built a second career after his pillow business out of never having that moment. The man who spent six years insisting American elections are stolen by foreign software and bamboo-paper-infused ballots has concluded that the rational target of this evil global electoral cabal was a low-turnout August primary in Minnesota. Well, clearly.
He was defeated by the Republican Lisa Demuth, who won the election through the use of money, discipline, and the inventive campaign trick of not being freaking Mike Lindell.
Trump endorsed him, and not casually: the “complete and total” came in July, then a primary-morning post that “Mike Lindell deserves a BIG WIN IN MINNESOTA today.” Lindell got 32 percent.
Last Thursday, Andy Ogles, who on the third day of Trump’s second term filed a constitutional amendment to hand him a third one, lost his Tennessee primary by six and a half points to a former state agriculture commissioner. Two days before that, Trump’s pick in Michigan’s Eighth lost to a man who had suspended his own campaign. Trump’s endorsement is a depreciating asset.
Certainly, Tom Tiffany secured the Republican nomination in Wisconsin with Trump’s support behind him. The endorsement isn’t a crane, it’s a floor and it won’t lift a madman pillow seller or most of the other debris in the MAGA Republican Party above a decent candidate.
A Word From Our Sponsor — And Watch How These Results Actually Get Covered This Morning
Small experiment before we keep going. Open Fox News right now. Then Newsmax. Then the Daily Wire. Count the mentions of Mike Lindell, Andy Ogles, and Michigan’s Eighth.
I’ll save you the suspense. You will find approximately zero, and any coverage that does exist will be a soft paragraph about “grassroots enthusiasm” that carefully forgets to mention the eleven-point margin. Because on the half of the American media ecosystem where Trump’s endorsement is treated as a divine mandate, a story about Trump’s endorsement becoming a depreciating asset does not exist. It is being professionally, deliberately, in-real-time disappeared.
This is exactly why I read Ground News every single morning before I write a word.
Ground News pulls the same news event together from across the political spectrum — left, center, right, foreign press — and lays it out side by side. Who is covering it. Who is not. How they are framing it. What facts each outlet is leaving on the cutting room floor.
Their Blindspot feature is the killer app. It surfaces the stories one half of the political media is essentially refusing to cover. The Trump-endorsement losing streak. The Renee Good and Alex Pretti murders in Minneapolis and the fact that no one has been charged. The DSA framing wars, where both sides need a threat that doesn’t quite exist for opposite reasons. The Byron Donalds versus Jay Collins knife fight brewing in Florida. You can see, in cold clean visualizations, exactly which outlets are silent and which are screaming.
For a recovering Republican strategist who used to build the exact message-discipline machine that’s now burying the Lindell result — and who now spends his days dismantling the disinformation apparatus I helped construct — Ground News is not a luxury. It is a defense system. It is how I make sure the numbers I’m writing about are the actual numbers, and that I’m not being played by the outlet that told them to me first.
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If you want to know what really happened last night, and last week, and next Tuesday in Florida, the first step is to escape the newsroom that’s decided in advance what you’re going to be told.
Now, back to the numbers.
Now, on the other side of the political fence, we saw what I’ve been telling donors, activists, and candidates about for months now: the words “DSA” are the same as a Trump endorsement for a GOP candidate: nice in the right places, but the candidate’s quality and their campaign still come first.
In the race, which wasn’t announced until 2:30 a.m., David Crowley won by a margin of 39.8 to 39.4 after 28,000 people from Milwaukee had arrived late. Having withdrawn from the race a month before, Crowley had then reentered it with Tony Evers supporting him, while Hong, who was supported by the Madison and Milwaukee DSA chapters, had led the Marquette poll by double digits in July.
Hong’s record included calls to defund the police, to abolish prisons, and, memorably, to do away with Thanksgiving. She walked some of it back, rather clumsily and with a clear eye over her left shoulder.
It wouldn’t have mattered. I could cut those spots before tiffin with a junior editor and a laugh, and Tiffany’s people would have done the same.
The rising DSA tide exists mainly in the minds of the two factions who need it to. The right needs an imaginary socialist menace, the far left needs a vanguard, and what exists is bespoke and geographic, requiring young, dense, credentialed electorates. Mamdani had that in New York.
El-Sayed had had enough of it in Michigan last week, in addition to being a talented campaigner. Hong didn’t have it statewide in Wisconsin, which was supposed to be the proof-of-concept in a purple state.
Minnesota says nothing about anywhere else. Peggy Flanagan won against Angie Craig by 59 to 40 and is truly and without apology a progressive. Yet she is not a democratic socialist, and that state isn’t a laboratory.
Between the DFL’s century of prairie populism and this year’s trauma, none of it transfers to other states. Renee Good was shot dead by an ICE officer at a Minneapolis traffic stop on January 7. Federal agents murdered Alex Pretti at a protest two miles away on January 24. Both were citizens. Nobody has been charged. Minnesota, rightly, is not going to forget this.
Flanagan wants ICE torn down to the studs. Craig voted for the Laken Riley Act and a resolution thanking ICE agents. That’s not a policy disagreement in Minnesota this year. It’s a third rail, and Craig put her hand in it.
Unrelated to last night but too rich to skip: AOC, clearly beginning her 2028 campaign for President (she ought to run for Senate, but who am I to say?), went on This Week and said “Woke 1 was crazy” as the official explanation for 2020.
In 2024, Harris ran that play, distancing herself from the loudest and weirdest niches of The Valley of Woke, Where Democrats Go To Die, and Trump’s people spent nine figures reminding voters otherwise. The most prominent democratic socialist in America is doing message triage in August of a midterm year, which tells you how the internals on wokeness look with most American voters.
Florida votes next Tuesday. Byron Donalds carries Trump’s endorsement against Jay Collins, who carries DeSantis’s machine, and is widely expected to win. Ashley Moody is effectively unopposed, with Alex Vindman and Angie Nixon scrapping over the Democratic nod. Alex should, and will, win. He’s running the right campaign, tying Moody to Trump and Tallahassee’s lavish corruption. He’s a decorated and respected veteran in a state with the highest percentage of military and retired military voters. He’s raised the money, and if you can’t raise the money in Florida, no amount of grassroots handwavium will bring victory.
For you Nixon fans, the DSA flavor in the great state of Florida is generally unwelcome even among Democratic voters. That’s not an ideological judgment on my part, but rather a political one. Florida Democrats are, on an aggregate statewide basis, more center-left than far-left, particularly the large block of African-American voters north of I-4, and many Hispanic and Caribbean voters in South Florida.
The DSA’s positions on Israel are political poison in Florida. They’re not scanned as anti-Bibi or anti-genocide but anti-Israel. Fight me on it all you like, but I know my state.
Next, 8-10% of Florida’s Democratic voters are Jewish, and in the three big South Florida Democratic stronghold counties of Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach, their turnout is decisive and sky-high. You do the math.
In the Democratic Governor’s primary, David Jolly is set to win by miles. He continues to build the best statewide Democratic campaign in generations alongside his running mate, Gren Graham. (Disclosure: both are friends, and I’m creating ads for a pro-Jolly/Graham Florida SuperPAC against Byron Donalds.)
The lesson of last night, and it’s one that I’ve repeated for several decades now, is that candidate quality matters most.
Candidate fit-to-district is a very close second. Don’t run a DSA candidate in a red state, no matter how good that makes you feel. If I were advising the GOP still, the lesson would be “Don’t run a rabid MAGA screamer in a blue state or district, not that the MAGA GOP has anything left but rabid MAGA screamers.
Primary season is coming to a close. The final sprint is before us. The landscape remains strongly favorable for big Democratic wins, as long as they stick to the message of economic affordability and ending the corruption that’s causing it. They win as long as they stick to their guns on tying MAGA candidates to Trump and his deeply, wildly unpopular positions.
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I'm a leftie and always have been. Hong is too far left for me. Glad she lost. Some people are just nuts. You go far enough left, you're way the hell out in no-man's-land.
Oh Rick Wilson--You always combine important information with wonderful humor, and your attribution for My-Pillow-Mike, R-Batshit Junction is only one example. I am far more liberal and leftwing and progressive than you, but somehow your good will and affable demeanor -- and shrewd assessments make me take you Very Very Seriously. While laughing.