Republicans Counted On An Empty Room. Whoops.

A Texas county tried to erase 140 polling places, Missouri killed the governor’s tax scheme, and Kansas buried Kobach by 24 points

Happy Thursday, friend.

There’s a reason so much of this good news lands in August. A party that can’t win an argument in October is betting it can sneak one past everybody in the middle of summer. That calculation has been made about you, personally, by people who assumed you weren’t going to be paying attention this week.

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THEY BLAMED FOUR PEOPLE FOR A PAINT JOB

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a rush paint job in June because there was a UFC cage fight booked on the White House grounds—the place had to look good for it. Two days after the crew finished, a National Park Service engineer found the new lining peeling and emailed Interior to say it had been sprayed wrong.

Interior had that email when four people were charged with wrecking the pool.

One was Davey Hearn, 67, who paddled for the United States at three Olympics. He stopped his bike and reached in to feel the water, as a loose piece of lining floated near his hand. The National Guard held him five hours, and US Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged him with a felony carrying up to ten years in prison.

To get that felony, Pirro had to convince a grand jury, and she called a single witness to do it. According to Hearn’s lawyers, that witness told them the pool had been leaking a million gallons a week and the liner already had a rip in it, and that none of it could be tied to Hearn. The grand jury indicted him anyway.

Not one of the four who were charged is going to prison. Pirro moved to drop all four cases and put it in writing that the contractor wrecked the pool, which is exactly what Interior’s own engineer told them in June. Hearn is back in court in September to make sure they can never come at him again.

They picked the wrong 67-year-old.

THEY PACKED THE ROOM AND FORCED A RETREAT

Tarrant County, Texas, has 1.3 million registered voters and had 316 places to vote in the last midterms. The plan on the table would have shut 140 of those doors before November. County Judge Tim O’Hare said it would save a million dollars, in a county sitting on more than eighty million in reserves.

So people showed up in force. Enough to fill an overflow room, and they stayed nearly seven hours. O’Hare cleared the chamber when the room dared to clap, and had Lon Burnam, 73, who served eighteen years in the Texas House, carried out by four deputies and booked into the county jail.

It never came to a vote. O’Hare moved to shelve it himself and admitted the cut was too large, which is what people had been telling him all day.

A hundred and forty polling places are still open in Texas because ordinary people gave up a Tuesday. He’ll try again in September, and now they know what it takes.

MISSOURI KILLED BOTH OF THEM TUESDAY

Mike Kehoe won the Missouri governor’s race by twenty points, the biggest Republican blowout in an open race there since Reconstruction. Tuesday, those same voters buried the thing he wanted most. Eighty-three percent said no.

Amendment 5 would have wiped out the state income tax, which is the biggest source of money Missouri runs on. Lawmakers could have replaced it by taxing whatever they chose. Kehoe promised in January they’d never touch farming or health care or real estate, but the amendment didn’t protect any of them. The Missouri Budget Project found the swap would raise taxes on four out of five Missourians.

Republicans put it on an August ballot, which is generally when a thing like that slips through quietly. Amendment 4 went down with it. That one would have forced any measure regular people put on the ballot to win in every corner of the state separately, which almost nothing does.

Missouri politicians can’t raise the sales tax unless voters say yes, and voters still control the ballot.

KOBACH WANTED THE COURT AND LOST

Kris Kobach is the attorney general of Kansas, and he has been after his own state’s Supreme Court since 2019, when it ruled abortion is protected under the Kansas constitution. Tuesday’s ballot carried his fix: throw out the panel that screens who can sit on that court and make the judges run political campaigns instead.

Kansans set that panel up for a reason. In 1956 a Republican governor lost his primary, so on his way out the door he arranged to be handed a seat on the Supreme Court instead. The next year, more than 70 percent of Kansans changed their constitution to make that impossible.

The state GOP chair, who used to work for Kobach, spent Tuesday morning warning in a video that the vote was the difference between Kansas becoming Detroit or Kansas becoming a land of prosperity.

Roughly 62 percent said no.

Kobach doesn’t get the court. The same judges are still sitting on it, and abortion is still legal in Kansas this morning.

They counted on empty rooms and a summer when nobody was watching. Tarrant County filled the room. Missouri and Kansas showed up in August. Nobody stayed home.

None of that happens if people don’t hear about it. That’s our job.

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Onward!

Scott

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Do you feel more locked in and engaged than you have in previous midterm elections?

Do these wins translate to a blue wave in 89 days? I think it’s only going to pick up momentum, but I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments: