My oh my. It’s been less than a week since federal agents raided Donald Trump’s Florida beachhouse in search of classified documents that Trump stole from the White House, but Republicans have come up with a truly dizzying number of excuses and smokescreens trying to cover up his wrongdoing—often several each day. Honestly, it’s been somewhat hard to keep track of them all, especially as many contradict one another, but we’re here to help. Below, please find our day-by-day catalog of every b.s. pretext Trump’s defenders have tossed out there.

Monday

Excuse: Everyone is corrupt except Trump—says Trump himself.

In fairness, if anyone can recognize vintage caudillo behavior, it would be Donald Trump.

Excuse: This warrant and raid business was uncalled for. Trump would have turned over everything had the government simply asked politely.

Oh, wait, they did subpoena him? Nevermind!

Tuesday

Excuse: It’s totally fine that Trump took all of those documents. The only issue is that he racked up some library fines for failing to return overdue government secrets.

Since Trump has never borrowed a library book in his life, he probably doesn’t know the penalty for returning one after the due date, so he can probably be convinced it’s very serious, like they take away one of your golf courses.

Excuse: The FBI put it there!

Trump watched the raid of one country club on closed-circuit television from his other country club, so of course he’ll be releasing the tapes of all this planted evidence (“P. Tapes” for short) immediately.

Wednesday

Excuse: This is all the fault of the Deep State FBI, headed up by ultra-liberal Christopher Wray.

Reminder: Christopher Wray is a member of the Federalist Society and was appointed to his post by Donald Trump.

Thursday

Excuse: #Whatabout Obama? Obama did it, too. He did it worse, in fact. Also, he’s a secret Muslim.

So true. As the National Archives explained, they maintain Obama’s classified materials “in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area” and noted that Obama “has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.” You can think of this facility as Obama’s version of Mar-a-Lago, albeit with a vibe that’s a bit more Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Excuse: LOL, like, the only thing that would justify this would be, I dunno, nuclear secrets.

Narrator: It was nuclear secrets.

Excuse: They didn’t raid Trump quickly enough!

Warrant was issued on a Friday, the seizure took place Monday. Everyone knows that most unlawful sharing of nuclear secrets happens on the weekend.

Excuse: Trump declassified all of this stuff with the power of his OWN MIND.

Just call him President Kreskin.

Friday

Excuse: Maybe it was aliens.

Maybe it was aliens.

Excuse: But her emails!

Damn, where was that frenzy?

Excuse: Oh, please, all you need is a smartphone to find the same nuclear secrets Trump took.

Even, like, an iPhone 6 will do!

Excuse: Trump only took a tiny bit of super-duper-classified stuff, and don’t worry about all the other documents.

A standard bankers box holds some 2,500 pages, or around 1.2 million words. It’s a well-known fact that even the smallest nuclear secret needs at least 1.3 million words to describe it.

Excuse: My fellow Americans, when you are busy fomenting a violent coup to overturn the results of an election you’ve lost, it is quite simply inevitable that you will also steal classified secrets in the confusion of it all.

In fact, it should be noted, one crime simply cancels out the other. That’s how it works.

Excuse: They’re only investigating Trump because he might run for president again.

This is definitely how it works. And if Trump follows this advice but changes his mind and does decide to run after all, that’s just tough noogies for the feds.

Excuse: Trump was just trying to prevent World War III. I think this was more or less the plot of Sneakers: Too many secrets!

After all, Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk, right, MoDo?

Excuse: Trump installed an Autodeclassifierbot 3000™ at the threshold of the Oval Office.

This is obviously why his attorneys signed a sworn statement telling the feds in June that all classified materials had been given back to the government—because there were none to return!

Excuse: Trump didn’t take those documents intentionally—the General Services Administration just stashed them in boxes that got moved to Mar-a-Lago when Trump exited D.C.

Guess these guys never heard that warning at the airport about accepting items from strangers.

Saturday

Excuse: This has happened to you: Your landlord gives you three months’ notice that you’ve got to move out, but you just don’t really believe them. Every week they keep telling you until, at long last, you finally realize they mean it, so of course your departure turns into a haphazard mess.

Also, in this case, you live in the White House and your landlord is the people of the United States of America. Very relatable!

What excuses will the coming week bring? Stay tuned! The bullshit never ends.

P.S. We miss any? Lets us know in comments!

Note: This post has been updated with even more nonsense excuses!

The NRCC announced its first batch of fall TV ad reservations on Wednesday, making it the last of the "big four" outside groups that spend by far the most on House races to do so. We've added the bookings, which total $52 million across 28 different media markets, to our tracker, which also includes reservations from the committee's allies at the Congressional Leadership Fund, as well as their Democratic counterparts: the DCCC and the House Majority PAC.

Unusually, the NRCC also listed the specific districts it says these reservations will be used for; typically, only media markets are included, and we're left to figure out which districts are the likely targets. The listed districts differ very little from our previous guesses for the same markets booked by the other three groups, though, and reservations such as these can be used for any applicable races, regardless of whether they're mentioned in a June press release.

Some may be aspirational. For instance, the addition of the Democratic-held 1st and 3rd Districts in New Mexico alongside the vulnerable, GOP-held 2nd, might fall into that category, since Republicans lack notable challengers in both. (All three are covered by the Albuquerque market.) But of course, an election that turns into a wave can bring along all sorts of flotsam.

There is, however, one absence that is telling. Following far-right extremist Sandy Smith's win in the GOP primary for North Carolina's open 1st District last month, the NRCC has pointedly refused to acknowledge her, despite the fact that Republicans would very much like to flip this potentially vulnerable Democratic seat. The reason for this silence? It’s almost certainly not because of Smith's politics but rather because two of her ex-husbands have accused her of physical abuse.

That cold shoulder has now extended further, since the committee reserved TV time in the Raleigh market, which makes up more than half of the 1st District, but only listed the swingy 13th District as the reason for the booking. The NRCC sent out a press release on Thursday outlining its latest nationwide target list and did include the 1st, but money, it hardly needs saying, speaks louder than words. Again, Republicans could always change their minds, but it would have cost them nothing to simply add "(NC01)" to their reservations announcement. The fact that they didn't is noteworthy.

Yeah, I couldn't believe it either. My girlfriend, a political junkie just like me, charged into the kitchen just the other day to ask me, "Did you know that Kyrsten Sinema spent two weeks doing an internship at a winery in California during the pandemic—and got paid for it?"

My response: "What. What!" Yes, said Kaili. She'd just heard about it during a comedy sketch on Jon Lovett's podcast. "How," I asked with extreme incredulity, "could we not have heard about this before?" She wondered the same thing. We're media professionals who follow the news obsessively, and it's not like we've had a whole lot else going on lately, what with COVID-19 and all. So W, we both marveled, TF?

Now at this point I'm guessing the story is probably news to you as well—and that in and of itself is a story. The gossipy D.C. media really has no lower bar when it comes to elevating stories about politicians behaving bizarrely, and a sitting U.S. senator taking time off in the middle of a global pandemic to make wine surely rates. But there has been virtually no coverage.

Credit to reporter Dave Levinthal at Insider for breaking the story … all the way back in May. (Again, I'm gobsmacked that I only learned of it in October, but that's the whole genesis of this piece.) Levinthal cracked the case thanks to a single line item in a new financial disclosure statement Sinema filed that month showing she'd earned $1,117.40 at Three Sticks Winery in Sonoma County.

Insider put the piece behind its paywall, so that may have slowed its uptake, but newsrooms all have subscriptions to one another's sites, and anyhow, there's always Twitter. How did this not light Twitter on fire?

Friend, it didn't. The next time anyone wrote about Sinema's wine country moonlighting wasn't until two and a half months later, when Paul Bomberger at the Press Democrat—the local paper in Sonoma—picked up on Insider's story. Bomberger's calls to Sinema's offices were ignored, but he did narrow down the timeframe of her internship to August of 2020 and was able to score a few quotes from a winemaker at Three Sticks, Ryan Prichard. ("She was full-in and a great asset to the team.")

After that, basically nothing. Politico's Playbook, which normally loves these sorts of tales, gave Bomberger's piece a one-sentence aside in a parenthetical a couple of days later. Perhaps that offhand treatment is why the many reporters who read Playbook each day somehow were not piqued, but come on. The story is as juicy as the grapes Sinema supposedly spent her days sorting.

A few smaller sites rehashed the original story, but John Gorgola at The Nation was just about the only person to really pick up the thread, wondering last month why Sinema chose this winery out of the 8,000 or 9,000 across the country. As Insider's Levinthal noted, one of the destinations listed on an invitation for a $5,000-a-person Sinema-headlined fundraiser the same month as her vineyard gig was Three Sticks.

And as Gorgola in turn pointed out, Three Sticks is owned by private equity titan William Price III. (His generational suffix—those triple vertical lines—is also how the hyper-exclusive winery, with a product that's seldom available for purchase, earned its name.) The investment firm Price founded, TPG Capital, has spent more than $10 million on lobbyists over the past decade. What's an extra $1,117.40 for another friendly ear to a man like that, especially for the target of a last-ditch persuasion campaign aimed at preserving a tax loophole beloved by Wall Street?

There, though, the trail more or less goes cold. Even the notoriously gabby Maureen Dowd only tucked in a brief reference to the story at the very end of her most recent column. But Kaili has many, many questions, and so do I—questions that reporters might like to start asking. Consider this a collaborative list from two political fiends burning with a need to know:

1. A Sinema spokesperson told Insider "that the Senate Ethics Committee preapproved Sinema's work." Could we please see a copy of that letter?
2. If Sinema, who makes a fetish of her love of wine (a fawning Axios piece recently described her as a "wine-drinking triathlete," as though quaffing vino were some unique trademark), were proud of her work, why didn't she announce her internship at the time?
3. Relatedly, Sinema's a pretty regular Instagram user but didn't post a single photo from Three Sticks last summer. Beautiful wineries are inherently Instagrammable, so why no pics?
4. There were extremely important races for president and Senate in her swingy home state last year. Why did she hie off to another (deep blue) state for two weeks not long before Election Day when Democrats were killing themselves to get out the vote in Arizona?
5. Related to that, did Sinema spend any time during the August congressional recess meeting with constituents? That's what members of Congress claim they do, anyway, during their totally-not-a-vacation breaks.
6. Did Sinema skip the Democratic National Convention to play winemaker? We don't know the exact dates of her internship, but the DNC was from Aug. 17-20 last year, and her high-dollar fundraiser in Sonoma was a three-day extravaganza running from August 21st through August 23rd. Did she wrap up work at the winery and then go mingle with rich donors?
7. Did someone flag Sinema's financial disclosure for Insider, and if so who—and why?
8. How many people applied for this internship? Did Sinema take a slot from someone else without her income ($174,000/year)? Someone who might actually be interested in a career in wine-making?
9. Did she keep the money she made?
10. This all went down during a pandemic (let's not forget), and before vaccines were available. What safety precautions did Sinema take? Did she think that risking exposure to COVID-19 while working a completely unnecessary side-hustle was worth it?

And above all else: How in the hell has this not been a bigger story? Every technicolor wig, every empty pronouncement, and every snide dig at fellow Democrats from Sinema merit endless attention from the Beltway press corps. But, somehow, not this—the story of the plucky senator doing a jus' reg'lar folks internship at a salt-of-the-earth winery.

Is this a Watergate-level scandal, just waiting to be blown open by a 21st century Deep Throat skulking down in the wine cellar? Of course not. But it's a really, really weird story, and given the outsize power Sinema holds as a highly disagreeable member of an evenly divided Senate, something this far out of the ordinary merits greater scrutiny. Now, let's see some.

In a very strange development, Ohio's Republican-run legislature has ceded control of congressional redistricting to a so-called "backup" commission by missing a Sept. 30 deadline to pass new maps set in the state constitution.

Given how jealously lawmakers everywhere protect their power, it's necessary to ask why Buckeye Republicans have voluntarily relinquished it in this case. And while state Senate President Matt Huffman claimed that staffers had been too preoccupied with legislative remapping to draw up new congressional lines, there's a likelier explanation that's far more cynical.

Under state law, if lawmakers fail to approve a congressional plan, responsibility is handed over to a panel comprising the governor, state auditor, secretary of state, and four legislative appointees, one from each chamber's party leader. That commission, which has exclusive jurisdiction over legislative redistricting, has a 5-2 Republican majority, which already passed an extreme set of gerrymanders for the state House and Senate.

So why punt to the backup commission when Republicans are already in charge of the legislature? Under a feeble reform passed in 2018, congressional maps passed by legislators require a three-fifths supermajority and the support of at least half the members of each party. There's a way around this, though. The commission must also muster bipartisan support for any such maps, but if it fails to do so by Oct. 31, the task reverts to lawmakers, who can then pass a map that's good for a full 10 years with the backing of just one-third of Democrats—or they can approve one without any Democratic support that will last for four years.

That final option may be the most desirable. It would allow Republicans to fine-tune their gerrymanders after just two elections. In fact, that's exactly what transpired when the commission drew up legislative maps: The GOP majority failed to win the votes of the two Democratic members, likewise leading to a four-year map under a similar provision of the constitution.

And even if Republicans don't exercise the chance to go it alone, the mere fact that they can gives them leverage over Democrats to pressure them into accepting a slightly more modest but still durable 10-year gerrymander. Whatever winds up happening, it's advisable to be very skeptical of the GOP's motives.

A month after Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings' death on April 6, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced on Tuesday that the special election for Florida's 20th Congressional District would not take place until Jan. 11 of next year, meaning the seat will remain without representation for 280 days. That's almost twice as long as the gap that proceeded the state's two most recent special elections: In 2014, specials were held in the 13th District just 144 days after Rep. Bill Young died and in the 19th District just 148 days after Rep. Trey Radel resigned. Both were Republicans.

Local election officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties initially proposed the dates that DeSantis wound up choosing, including a primary on Nov. 2. Soon after, however, they suggested the primary take place on Sept. 14 and the general on Nov. 9, with one official saying, "People would like it to be earlier."

DeSantis disregarded that advice in a move that Democrats are certain to attack as motivated by a partisan interest in depriving the party's narrow congressional majority of a key vote. (The governor's long delay in waiting to schedule the election was also hotly criticized, with one candidate, Democrat Elvin Dowling, filing a lawsuit late last week demanding a date be set.) The decision further means that the majority-Black 20th District will have no voice in the House for the better part of a year.

It's not yet clear when the filing deadline will be, but in a press conference announcing the dates, DeSantis said, "I think that puts qualifying towards the end of the first week of September."

he Conservative Party in Onondaga County, which makes up most of New York's 24th Congressional District, says it won't endorse Republican Rep. John Katko next year, putting the congressman at risk of losing a ballot line that's played a key role in sustaining his political career. Katko had previously lost the support of Conservatives in the other three counties in the district—Oswego, Cayuga, and Wayne—though the ultimate decision will fall to state party chair Jerry Kassar, who previously said Katko is "in trouble" and reportedly plans to defer to local leaders.

Katko has received a great deal of attention—and, from Donald Trump loyalists, scorn—for his vote to impeach Trump in January, but that's not the only issue putting him at odds with the Conservative Party. Die-hards are also pissed that he backed the Equality Act, which would protect LGBTQ rights, and that voted to boot Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments due to her violent rhetoric. However, Katko also voted for the Equality Act in 2019 and still retained the Conservative Party's support the next year, so there may be time to repair the relationship.

Katko will certainly hope so: In 2018, he defeated Democrat Dana Balter by 13,694 votes—fewer than the 16,972 he received on the Conservative line. While his victory wasn't dependent on that line in his 2020 rematch with Balter, Katko might not be so lucky next year, especially if Democrats target him in redistricting.

Onondoga Conservatives say they'll ask Kassar to either leave the party's line blank or endorse someone else in 2022. The latter option could prove particularly self-defeating, but it's a tack not unfamiliar to right-wing extremists in New York: Republicans lost a special election in 2009 in what was then the 23rd Congressional District after the GOP and the Conservative Party nominated different candidates, allowing Democrat Bill Owens to flip a seat that had been red since the 19th century.

Astute politics observers well know that the Senate filibuster—the Jim Crow relic that requires supermajority support to pass most legislation—is a major obstacle for any hopes that Democrats have of enacting Joe Biden's agenda and righting the country after four years of wicked misrule. But because a handful of Democratic senators (as well as all Republicans) oppose curtailing the rule—for now, at least—party leaders are pursuing an alternative route that will allow them to bypass the filibuster and pass major bills with just a simple majority.

It's called reconciliation, and it's a complicated beast. If you've heard about it, you may have read that it can only be used in a limited fashion. But that's simply not so. Democrats can actually use the reconciliation process for almost anything, including an increase to the minimum wage, a current topic of contention. What's more, in contrast with filibuster reform, they don't need unanimity from their caucus to proceed. A mere 41 votes will do the trick.

Congressional experts usually say that the person who decides what can and can't be included in a reconciliation package is the Senate parliamentarian, an appointed official who advises the chamber on matters of procedure. The key word there, though, is "advises": The presiding officer—that person who occupies the big chair atop the central dais you've seen on C-SPAN, either the vice president or a sitting senator—is free to reject that advice.

So what happens if Kamala Harris (or, if you like, Jon Ossoff) does exactly that? A Republican could object, but in order to sustain that objection—that is to say, in order to override the presiding officer's decision to rebuff the parliamentarian—it would take 60 votes. In other words, all 50 Republicans would need 10 Democrats to join them. There's little chance that would happen.

And it's been done before, in the service of promoting majority rule in the Senate. The last occasion arose in 1975, when a bipartisan coalition, led by Minnesota Democrat Walter Mondale, sought to reduce the threshold for ending a filibuster from two-thirds to three-fifths. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, paved the way for the proposal to move forward by declining the parliamentarian's advice in order to allow a key vote that would buttress reformers' arguments. While pro-filibuster senators staged a revolt after the vote succeeded, the dispute ultimately ended with the filibuster requirement getting lowered to today's familiar 60-vote benchmark.

The same approach can be deployed when dealing with constraining guidance from the parliamentarian regarding reconciliation, and Democrats have no reason to fear doing so. While Republicans will inevitably complain, voters don't care about procedure—they care about results. That's especially so when we're talking about popular legislation like a $15 minimum wage, which poll after poll has shown Americans support in massive numbers.

Some have in fact already called for the Senate to take this tack. "You don't have to override the parliamentarian or get a new parliamentarian," noted one expert on Senate procedure, a likely reference to the occasion when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott fired parliamentarian Bob Dove in 2001 after Republicans grew frustrated with him. "Under the statute, it is the vice president who rules. It is the presiding officer who makes the decision. The parliamentarian advises on that question."

That's precisely right, and it's precisely the approach Democrats should take. And when Republicans howl, Democrats need only point out that the expert who advocated for a robust use of reconciliation was none other than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

During his inaugural address, Joe Biden returned to the central theme of his campaign—the message that earned him millions more votes than any other presidential candidate in history: unity. In his speech, Biden invoked the word no fewer than eight separate times. "With unity," he said "we can do great things. Important things."

Just as notable, there was one phrase Biden didn't utter even once: bipartisanship. It's easy to conflate the two, and Republicans have done so in bad faith, seeking to weaponize Biden's own mantra against him. But there's a very good reason why Biden has emphasized "unity" rather than "bipartisanship," because the two mean very different things.

So what exactly does unity mean? Biden and his team have defined it very simply: It's the act of coming together to do what the American people want. In this way, it lays out a future guided not by whatever the largest number of politicians are able to agree on but instead by the desires of the people those politicians were elected to represent. It reroots our democracy in the very soil that gives it life in the first place.

It's no surprise that Republicans resent this. Biden's priorities are very popular, while, to the extent Republicans even have any sort of affirmative agenda, their proposals are anything but. This is why they don't want to see Biden succeed, lest a president who passes popular initiatives grow more popular still.

To prevent such an outcome, Republicans are pretending that unity is indeed an interchangeable synonym for bipartisanship and using it as a bludgeon to cow Democrats. By demanding that Biden only pass legislation acceptable to them, only the most watered-down measures could ever become law. More likely, nothing ever would. If Democrats were so weak-willed as to be fooled by this bullying, it would leave the party with no accomplishments to show to voters in two or four years' time—precisely what Republicans dream of.

But today's Democrats, Joe Biden included, are far tougher and savvier than their easily intimidated forebears. They know precisely what game Republicans want to play and refuse to participate. As White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, if Republicans want bills to pass with bipartisan support, then they can vote in favor of what Democrats are proposing. Republicans have agency, after all. Democrats are not the only party with the power to make bipartisanship happen.

Of course, Republicans won't do any such thing. They'd rather falsely complain that Biden isn't living up to his campaign promises. Such claims have gotten some traction in the traditional press and probably will continue to. But incomparably more important for Democrats is that they succeed in bringing about the change voters elected them to achieve. Those are the only campaign promises that matter, and if Democrats can live up to those, then they'll also stay true to the true meaning of unity.

While the 2020 exit polls have not yet been finalized, we can already say with certainty that Americans who have served in the military shifted their political preferences dramatically over the last four years. In 2016, voters who served in the armed forces supported Donald Trump by a wide 60-34 margin, but preliminary data from this year shows that this same group gave Trump a much narrower 54-44 edge. In all, that's a 16-point swing—far wider than the national shift in the popular vote over the same timespan.

The reasons for this surge are many. One preelection poll found, for instance, that active-duty service members took dim views of Trump's dismissive approach to reports that the Russian government placed bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan. These same respondents disagreed even more sharply with Trump's desire to send the military into American cities during protests against police violence targeting Black people this summer.

Trump's animosity toward those who've served in uniform, of course, is longstanding. From obtaining a bogus draft deferment for alleged "bone spurs" to calling his effort to avoid sexually transmitted diseases "my personal Vietnam" to smearing the late Sen. John McCain by saying "I like people who weren't captured," he has never tried to hide his disgust for those who would sacrifice for this country. That he's engendered a hostile response is no surprise.

But it's not only about Trump. Our military is more ethnically and racially diverse than ever before—more diverse, in fact, than the country as a whole—and the share of women serving has soared. Service members are all too often stereotyped and misunderstood as uniformly hawkish and conservative, but this election should shatter those preconceptions.

What matters most now is that the Democratic Party capitalize on this success. Organizations like VoteVets and National Security Leaders for Biden have played a crucial role in this transformation, but Democrats can't declare "mission accomplished" and move on. Veterans, according to the exit polling, made up 15% of the electorate this year. They're a group too large and too important to only court every four years.

Politically, Democrats will benefit if more and more members of the armed forces and their families trust the party. But the country would benefit, too, if our military also reflected our nation's political diversity, which is why this work must continue.

Reform Austin, a local news site, has released a giant batch of polls testing 22 different races for the Texas state House, and the numbers are eye-popping: Democrats need to flip nine GOP seats to take a majority next month … and they have the lead in 11 Republican-held seats. What's more, five potentially vulnerable Democratic incumbents are also comfortably ahead of their opponents.

That means Democrats are on track to generate the biggest political earthquake in the Lone Star State in a generation. Take a look at the poll results from those 11 Republican districts:

And several more seats are also very close. This really is possible, folks: We could break the GOP's iron lock on the largest red state in the country and bring their entire agenda to a crashing halt.

But it's also extremely possible that it won't happen. Republicans still have a cash advantage over Democrats, and their dark money allies are spending heavily to protect this all-important bastion of far-right conservatism. It's up to us to make sure our team has the resources it needs to fight back over the final weeks of the campaign.

Turning Texas blue has long been a progressive dream. We stand at the threshold of making that dream a reality. Let's do it.

As Lone Star Democrats seek their first statewide victory in more than a quarter century, their best hope may be Chrysta Castañeda, who's running for a spot on an agency many people haven't heard of: the Texas Railroad Commission.

Despite the name, the commission doesn't actually oversee trains, but it does have jurisdiction over something even more important in Texas: the state's energy industry (oversight of the rails was handed to the state's Department of Transportation in 2005). The panel, often known as the "RRC," is made up of three members, each elected statewide for six-year terms.

The last time a Democrat won a seat on the board was in 1990, when former Rep. Bob Krueger beat a Republican opponent by 56-40 margin. Krueger wound up resigning to accept an appointment to the U.S. Senate when Lloyd Bentsen became Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary, and Republicans comfortably beat his appointed successor in 1994.

Ever since, the GOP has held all three seats, but Republicans were already preparing for a serious battle this year—which, ironically, might have made their situation even worse. Republican Ryan Sitton, who first won a slot on the RRC in 2014, had stockpiled $2 million in his war chest for the general election, but in March, he lost his primary in an absolute shocker to an unknown named Jim Wright, the owner of an oilfield waste disposal company who had raised less than $13,000.

The 55-45 loss was so inexplicable that some political observers wondered if Wright benefited from sharing a name with the one-time speaker of the House who hailed from Fort Worth, the late Democrat Jim Wright, who died in 2015. It's not such a crazy theory: Perennial candidate Gene Kelly won multiple Texas primaries in the previous decade because voters had him confused with the beloved dancer.

Whatever the explanation, though, Wright's victory has left Republicans with a suddenly open seat and a badly flawed candidate. The RRC—the very body that Wright wants to join—fined him $182,000 for improper storage of hazardous waste in 2017, and he's been sued by his former business partners for fraud stemming from the mess.

Castañeda, an oil and gas attorney, took aim at Wright for his record in her first ad of the race, which went up last month, but the main topic she's focusing on is the issue of "flaring." That refers to the practice of oil producers burning off unwanted natural gas from their wells rather than capturing it for later use, a process that is both environmentally harmful and economically wasteful.

It's also against the law—unless a driller is granted a special permit, of which 7,000 were handed out last year. As Castañeda notes, such permits can only be granted if all three members of the commission agree, meaning she could single-handedly put an end to flaring even if Republicans still hold a nominal 2-1 majority on the board next year.

With this backdrop, The New Republicrecently called this race "this year's most important election for American climate policy." It could also finally put an end to the longest statewide losing streak for Democrats anywhere in the nation.

The Associated Press recently reported that Indiana conservatives who are furious with Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb over his statewide mask mandate are cottoning to Libertarian Donald Rainwater as an alternative, which could make this fall's otherwise snoozy race for governor unexpectedly competitive.

Normally, we'd be skeptical of a largely anecdotal report like this one, but a few pieces of evidence are tugging us the other way. One is a poll earlier this month from Change Research on behalf of the local news site Indy Politics that found Holcomb leading Democrat Woody Myers just 36-30, with Rainwater taking 24%. That's an almost impossibly high figure for a third-party candidate, so the numbers should be viewed with great caution, but it does suggest that there could be a real outflow of support to Rainwater.

More concretely, the AP says that Rainwater has enjoyed unexpectedly strong fundraising and will start advertising on cable and radio this week—something Indiana Libertarians haven't done in "many years," according to his campaign manager. Rainwater had just $6,000 in hand as of Aug. 5, but he's reported some major donations in the last few days, capped off by a $100,000 check from hedge fund manager and poker player Bill Perkins. (Perkins' father, also named Bill, was a Democratic assemblyman in New Jersey in the 1970s, though the younger Perkins has mostly given to Libertarian causes.)

Holcomb also seems to be reacting to this rebellion on his right flank, in the worst possible way: Even though coronavirus case counts in the state remain near record highs, the governor just announced the suspension of nearly all restrictions aimed at stemming the pandemic, including allowing restaurants, bars, and gyms to operate at full capacity. Public health experts, unsurprisingly, expressed deep concern over the move.

Holcomb did, however, renew his mask order, which is likely to perpetuate right-wing furor. As Paul Krugman recently put it, opposition to masks has become "a declaration of political allegiance" to Donald Trump, and if there's one thing we know hardcore Republican voters won't tolerate, it's disloyalty to Trump. We'll still want to see further polling from other outfits before concluding there's real movement in the Hoosier State, but this race bears watching.