u/DriftlessDairy

Median Strategies, the company that released polls showing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) and former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong ahead with wide margins in their respective races, announced Monday it has closed.

A message on the company's website reads that it has "concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls."

"All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data," the message read. "Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."

The company first released a poll showing Bass with a 12-point lead over Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman, who will face off against Bass in the November election. The poll in question cited the responses of 560 Angelenos, with a 4.1 percent margin of error. The next poll showed Hong with a 20-point lead in her race, which she lost last week.

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Glenn Grothman has argued that Congress “should do a little more” to help wealthy Americans.

The six-term congressman, 71, a Donald Trump loyalist, spoke up for neglected U.S. elites Thursday during a panel discussion on the economy in Troy, Michigan, with that state’s GOP gubernatorial candidate Rep. John James, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other officials.

As the conversation pivoted to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in July 2025, Grothman insisted the mammoth tax and sending initiative was intended to benefit “the average guy.”

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Spoiler: The wealthy got the lion's share of the BBB tax breaks, and their tax cuts are premanent while the rest of us got a temporary cut.

Temporary Tax Cuts (Expiring 2028)

• No Tax on Tips: A limited income-capped deduction for qualified tipped wages.
• No Tax on Overtime: Premium pay deductions for overtime hours, capped up to $12,500 per person.
• Senior Tax Boost: An additional temporary deduction/write-off framework aimed at older Americans.
• Structure Expensing: Specific temporary accelerated depreciation rules for certain factory and building structures. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Permanent Provisions (For Comparison)

• Income Tax Brackets: The individual income tax brackets (10% to 37%) from the 2017 law were made permanent.
• Standard Deduction: Retained at higher levels and indexed continuously for inflation.
• Estate Tax Exemptions: Permanently elevated high thresholds (rising to $15 million per person by 2026). [1, 2, 3]

Alfonso is only 26 years old and was endorsed by President Trump. He’s also a family member of a Trump cabinet member.

The Trump-endorsed son-in-law of U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy will be the Republican candidate in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District.

Michael Alfonso will represent the GOP on the November ballot. He hopes to take over the seat his father-in-law held before he left Congress in 2020.  The mostly rural northern Wisconsin district heavily favors Republicans.

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Yes, he's registered to vote in Florida. He apparently has no job, no experience, but is said to be willing to do anything Trump wants, including diaper changing.

Yee Leng Xiong, a Marathon County school board treasurer and county board member, will face Republican State Treasurer John Leiber in November in the only race for a statewide office held by a member of the Republican party.

With 90% of ballots counted, Xiong had 57% of the votes cast in the Democratic primary for the office Tuesday. Dylan Ray Helmenstein, of Black Earth in western Dane County, had just under 43%. The Associated Press called the race for Xiong at 9:18 p.m.

Xiong is the treasurer of the DC Everest School District board in Marathon County and a member of the Marathon County Board. He is the former executive director of the Hmong American Center.

Xiong was endorsed by Sen. Tammy Baldwin and several other Wisconsin Democrats, including former Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton and state Reps. Christine Sinicki, Jodi Emerson, Lori Palmeri, Andrew Hysell, Tara Johnson and Brienne Brown.

The worst Democratic candidate is far better than the best Republican candidate.

Whether your chosen D candidate prevails or not, we must all rally behind the winner.

The race among Democrats to pick a candidate to run in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District for 2026 grew to a record crowd.

The district stretches from Lake Michigan to South Central Wisconsin, anchored by Racine, Kenosha, Beloit and Janesville. It has been in Republican hands for 32 years — 20 years represented by Paul Ryan, and since 2018 by U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a former Ryan aide and corporate lawyer.

Democrats have gone in virtually every direction in the last three decades in their efforts to recapture the seat — once reliably blue from the 1970s until 1994. For most of the races against Ryan, Democrats only rarely received more than one-third of the vote. Since Steil took over, the margins have been narrower, but still solidly in favor of the GOP.

Forecasts from national oddsmakers have so far kept it in the GOP column in 2026. The Cook Political Report rates the seat as “Likely Republican” — but hasn’t updated that assessment since February 2025.

https://www.wpr.org/news/senate-district-17-marklein-democrats-primary

Wisconsin Democrats’ efforts to flip control of the state Senate runs through just a handful of districts — and the most competitive of those will be in a newly-drawn district in southwest Wisconsin.

Democrats will need to flip two Senate seats, in addition to holding all of their own, if they want to take that chamber’s majority for the first full session in more than 15 years. It will be the second round of Senate elections since districts were redrawn in 2024, when Democrats flipped four Republican districts.

The 17th Senate District was redrawn from long and thin to something squatter and wider, in a way that could give Democrats an edge for the first time in many years.

The district always leaned gently Democratic when it came to statewide races, supporting Tammy Baldwin in her US Senate races and Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in their presidential bids, according to political scientist Anthony Chergosky of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

No punchline, just fun to write.

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/the-walls-are-closing-in-on-musk

On July 9 the Wisconsin Elections Commission, three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 that there is probable cause Elon Musk violated Wisconsin Statute 12.11, the election bribery felony this article names, when he repeated the giveaway during the 2025 state Supreme Court race. The commission referred the case to Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, and his office owes the commission a report by mid-August. Two citizens and a complaint form started the process that produced a felony referral. Let’s keep getting after it.

In the closing weeks of the 2024 election, Musk spent roughly $290 million on Trump’s behalf, a figure documented in Federal Election Commission filings. About a quarter billion of that went through America PAC, the super PAC he founded in May 2024. Another $20.5 million ran through a vehicle called RBG PAC, funded by his revocable trust and structured to hide his connection until after the votes were counted. More than $50 million of the America PAC money paid for a giveaway program: a million dollars a day to one signer of an online petition, with the petition restricted to registered voters in seven swing states. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. No other states eligible. More than a million people signed. The first three winners came from Pennsylvania in the days leading up to its October 21 voter registration deadline. Musk personally announced the winners at public events, holding cardboard checks the size of a person.

He told the public, in his own words, that the selection was random.
On October 5, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk told the crowd: “President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America.” Two weeks later, on October 19, at a Harrisburg town hall with Trump’s campaign, he announced the giveaway program: “We’re going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition every day from now until the election.” That same day, he posted on X to his then-200 million followers that the prize would be “randomly” awarded. The next day, October 20, he posted again that signers had “a daily chance of winning $1M!”

Random. Daily chance. Sweepstakes language. The kind of language that, if accurate, describes a lottery. Sixteen days after Musk first used the word “randomly,” his lawyers told a Pennsylvania state court, under oath, the opposite.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had filed against Musk and America PAC on October 28, 2024, seven days before the election, in Krasner v. Musk, case number 241003509 in Philadelphia’s main trial court. The civil filing was the move available on that timeline. Criminal charges require grand jury work that cannot happen in a week. What was not available in those seven days has been available in the eighteen months since.

The hearing was on November 4, 2024, the day before the election. Judge Angelo Foglietta presided. The PAC put two witnesses on the stand. Christopher Gober, the PAC’s lawyer and former treasurer, and Christopher Young, its executive director and current treasurer.Gober’s words on the record: “There is no prize to be won. The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance. We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”

Young testified that he personally vetted the recipients ahead of time, that the petition functioned “like a job application,” and that signers were screened for political alignment with the PAC’s mission before they could be selected. He confirmed that recipients signed nondisclosure agreements about how they were actually chosen. Asked about Musk’s use of the word “randomly,” Young conceded that it was “not the word I would have selected.” The judge denied Krasner’s preliminary injunction the same day on narrow Pennsylvania-lottery-law grounds, finding that because the recipients were preselected, the giveaway technically did not meet the legal definition of an illegal lottery.