On this day in 2023, Hamas launched an air and ground offensive against Israel, the deadliest attack in the country’s history, killing around 1,200 and taking hundreds hostage. Three years later, Israel’s genocidal response has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and reduced Gaza to rubble.
Happy Wednesday! It’s Swin. Election Day in the United States is less than a month away. If the public polls (as well as the private Republican polls) are right, it looks like we’re headed for an electoral slaughterhouse for the GOP and Team Trump.
Last week, ‘First Draft’ brought you news on how Republican consultants and pollsters are waking up to the idea that their party’s big, anti-Hasan Piker midterm strategy is one giant, very expensive failure. In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll fill you in on yet another dose of pre-2026-elections panic emanating from the elite ranks of Donald Trump’s Republican Party – and boy, is this one a doozy.
Blowback
“Fuck a duck,” one close Trump adviser told me this month. “It’s looking bad.”
That’s how one source summed up the mood coming from so, so, so many national and state Republican Party officials, political operatives, GOP candidates, and Trumpland bigwigs.
Standard caveat: Who knows what will happen in November, but for now, what you’re hearing isn’t liberal wishcasting. The pervasive and deepening freakout on the American right is extremely real, in part because their own internal polling is telling them to be afraid of losing the House and quite possibly the Senate too. And it’s largely due to the gross unpopularity of their infallible god-king, President Donald Trump.
But this adviser wasn’t just talking about the overall doom and gloom within their party. They were specifically bemoaning the distinct possibility that their side’s election-corrupting schemes are going to fail this time around.
All the Republican Party wanted to do this year was rig the midterm elections after Trump told them to launch a mid-decade gerrymandering war, then walk away scot-free with some extra wins under their belt. Turns out, life may have other plans for them. Several prominent GOP operatives and Trump advisers I’ve spoken to lately point to their side’s own private polling, as well as public data and sentiment, that indicate that Republicans in Texas may have (in common political parlance) “dummymandered” themselves into some Democratic congressional wins this cycle. The primary reason this could conceivably (maybe even likely) occur is because conservatives, acting under President Trump’s explicit call to action, redrew the Texas congressional map in ways meant to lock in Trump’s significant gains with Latino voters in 2024. But the weight of Trump’s malaise-filled economy – as well as his party’s dedication to attacking and kidnapping as many Hispanic Texan voters’ friends and family as possible – has greatly eroded those gains, and leaves many of those voters in redrawn districts swinging towards the Dems.
Who could have foreseen that intentionally making a crucial voting bloc poorer and less safe would cause those voters to get mad?
But it’s not just Texas.