Is an October surprise even possible these days?

Polls, election news from up and down the ballot, plus a dispatch from the docks

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

This morning, a videographer and I took the first of what is likely to be a number of trips down to the Port of Newark to cover the dockworkers strike. While rank and file longshoremen were instructed not to talk to press, it’s fair to say they were in good spirits at the outset of the strike.

Here’s some footage I captured on my iPhone of a memorable three or so minutes:

The union has been receiving some blowback from Democratic voters who believe the strike is a ploy to help Trump win the election, as well as from people who think the workers make too much money.

The latter argument is bunk, as the workers start at $20-per-hour and top out at $39-per-hour, which is the equivalent of about $81K per year. It’s only with massive amounts of overtime that they hit the six figure incomes that have been regularly cited. The shipping containers represented by industry group USMX made $400 billion between 2020 and 2023, having jacked up prices during Covid.

It’s objectively true that the union president has met with Trump in the past, but I don’t think that he’s manipulating 45K workers into striking as a ploy to move the election needle a point or two. These workers seriously lag behind their west coast colleagues in pay, and more importantly, they’re trying to avoid the huge job losses that come with automation.

Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll I sent out on Monday night — by popular demand, more news roundups and analysis are on the way for paid subscribers, starting tonight. There’s lots to discuss, including new polls, swing state drama, a far-right takeover of a western state, a Midwest uprising, a hypocrite homophobe, and an admirable member of Congress doing the unthinkable.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.

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“So what?”: Donald Trump is a lot like one of those inflatable clown punching bags that pop back up no matter how hard you slug them. Scandals and failures that would sink any other candidate seem to knock him down in the polls for a few days at most, and at this point, it feels as if that disturbing resilience is influencing the way that the press covers him.

The egregious slurs and otherwise offensive comments he makes don’t even get reported as such most of the time, and the most obviously cynical excuses are printed verbatim by publications that should know better. Take this New York Times headline from earlier today, for instance:

Imagine taking what Lara Trump has to say about her father-in-law’s insults to mentally disabled people — he hasn’t just been saying that VP Kamala Harris isn’t intelligent — with anything approaching good faith. It’s outrageous.

With this in mind, I’ve been trying to game out what kind of October surprise might be coming and whether there’s anything that could doom Trump to anything more than a close loss in November. Well, Judge Tanya Chutkan delivered an early contender today when she unsealed a significant part of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump, which has some very damning evidence.

The case details just how far Trump went in trying to overturn the 2020 election, including his encouragement of alternate electors and the violence he and his operatives tried to stoke at polling places. His commitment to Mike Pence’s safety really doesn’t come off as ironclad, either.

In any other universe, this would mortally wound a presidential campaign, but we live in the darkest timeline, so I really don’t know how much of an impact this will make. My hope is that the coverage of these new details isn’t determined by presumptions of impact made by newsrooms around the country.

Pennsylvania: Voting is officially underway in the Keystone State, where polls have remained obnoxiously tight due in large part to the Democrats’ increased struggles with white working class voters, even ones who have largely supported them up until now.

That being said, this video, of a right-wing twerp trying to stir shit over the under-fire Haitian immigrants in the town of Charleroi and getting his ass handed to him by local residents, will fill you with some hope:

The funny thing abut that video is that it’s from a much larger video, posted by the little idiot himself. Sadly, he’s the kind of moron that too many young men are drawn to these days, as I wrote in depth on Sunday. Now that Trump is threatening to deport Haitian migrants who are here legally, the harassment that these communities are facing is only likely to get worse. Let’s hope the elected officials stick up for them the way those in Springfield and Charleroi have thus far.

OK, back to the election: Ongoing litigation over mail-in ballots continues to cloud the process, so this taking advantage of this early start is even more imperative than usual. There have already been 150,000 ballots mailed out and 15,000 returned in Philadelphia. Over 1.45 million people applied for mail-in ballots across the state, and many more will vote early at special polling places.

Pennsylvania’s election administration rules are front and center because it’s the most important swing state, and there are some really important down ballot elections — with some wild twists — happening statewide and down ballot as well.

These races could determine the fate of the minimum wage, public schools, and more, and wind up impacting the presidential election, too.

The rest of this newsletter is for paid subscribers — there’s a whole lot of news and analysis to check out, and it’s the Substack-minimum $5-a-month!