King: Party Politics With A Nervous Eye On Southwest Asia

Chuck Todd: “The biggest difference between the successes of Clinton and Obama, who got re-elected, and the failure of the Biden-Harris team to win four more years was their midterm experiences. Both Clinton and Obama got clobbered, forcing them to rethink some of their policies and how to sell them.” “Biden and the party as a whole took the Democrats’ ‘better than expected’ performance in the 2022 midterms, when they still lost the House but gained a Senate seat, as a sign that they were on to something and that they didn’t need to course-correct as much as polling was actually telling them to course-correct.” “Democrats did well in the 2022 midterms despite Biden, not because of him or his pro-democracy messaging.” “The reality is that Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterms for two reasons: backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and the GOP’s disastrous collection of candidates in swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin.”

“Bomb threats sent to polling places and ballot-counting locations in at least five battleground states across the U. S. Tuesday targeted mostly Democratic counties,” NBC News reports.

“The Justice Department unsealed criminal charges Friday in a thwarted Iranian plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump before this week’s presidential election,” the AP reports. “A criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan alleges that an unnamed official in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed a contact this past September to put together a plan to surveil and ultimately kill Trump.”

“Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) officially announced today that he will run for chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Hill committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate,” NBC News reports.

Josh Barro: “By electing Donald Trump again, the American electorate has made a bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse — budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people.

“Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday included two surprises: Elon Musk was also on the line, and Zelensky was somewhat reassured by what he heard from the president-elect,“ Axios reports. “The new details of the call underscore how influential Musk could be in the second Trump administration, and the uncertainty over how exactly Trump will approach Ukraine.”