| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | | With help from Myah Ward FOLLOWING THE MONEY — There are 480 days to go before the 2022 elections. With control of Congress on the line, House and Senate candidates are already raising staggering sums of money. Nightly reached out to House campaign reporter Ally Mutnick, Senate campaign reporter James Arkin and senior campaigns and elections editor Steve Shepard over Slack today to talk about the fundraising reports for the second quarter and what the latest round of fundraising numbers tell us about who will control Congress after Biden’s first midterms. This conversation has been edited.
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A woman jogs past the U.S. Capitol. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | We keep looking for signs about the direction of the Republican Party in the post-Trump era. What can we tell from these fundraising numbers? James: No definitive signs, but some pictures are starting to emerge . One interesting thing I noticed in Senate reports is that Trump endorsed three non-incumbent Republican candidates in Senate races: Rep. Ted Budd in N.C., Rep. Mo Brooks in Alabama and Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska (who is challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski). All three of those candidates got outraised by other Republicans. That may be an early sign that Trump’s endorsement isn’t necessarily a fundraising driver on its own, or at a minimum that running without the endorsement doesn’t prevent good fundraising. The ones who outraised Trump’s candidates all benefited from previous networks. Murkowski has been in the Senate since 2002, so she can turn out the fundraising when need be. And Pat McCrory in North Carolina has a built-in network from his time as governor. Katie Britt in Alabama is a former chief of staff to Sen. Richard Shelby and ran the business council in the state prior to her run. Which party has the fundraising advantage so far? Ally: On the House side, the big takeaway is that Republicans are seeing a fundraising revival . For much of the Trump era, Democrats have enjoyed an army of small-dollar donors who funneled millions into their campaigns and Republicans were stuck figuring out how to match it. But in this quarter GOP incumbents have been getting the hang of digital fundraising, are seeing more energized donors and are reaping the benefits of their new WinRed fundraising platform. They are able to keep pace. That doesn’t bode well for Democrats who are trying to protect their narrowest House majority in 20 years. Steve: To me, the reports we got this week really underscore that the battle for Congress in 2022 is really being fought on two distinct battlefields. There’s the House — where, as Ally said, Republicans have all but eliminated the Democratic financial advantage that buoyed the party to majority wins in 2018 and 2020. But the 50-50 Senate is a different story . The vulnerable Democratic seats all have incumbents who are continuing to stockpile money, while the GOP fields to face them remain muddled. And Republicans are defending a bunch of open seats with potentially costly and messy primaries, which they’ll have to monitor even as they try to go on offense to get that net pickup of one seat that could restore Mitch McConnell as majority leader. These elections — along with races for governor and state offices — may all take place at the same time, in the same political environment. But don’t be surprised if they end in a split decision. Do you expect in 2022 that the candidates who raise the most money will win? Ally: Not all money is equal in the campaign world. Candidate money is better than money raised by super PACs because candidates can purchase TV ads at a cheaper price. Republicans used to rely more heavily on super PACs but are now seeing more candidate money come in. That’s another good sign for them. James: Money is helpful but not decisive. Democrats outraised Republicans basically across the board in 2020 Senate races. In some cases, like in Arizona and the Georgia runoffs, it helped them flip seats. But Democrats in swing states like North Carolina, blue states like Maine and red states like Montana and Kansas all outraised Republicans and lost anyway. What are you looking for three months from now, in the next round of fundraising reports? James: Both parties have crowded Senate primaries in some important states. I’ll be watching GOP primaries in Ohio, Missouri, Arizona and North Carolina to see whether anyone stands out or whether the fields remain competitive and balanced. Same goes for Democratic primaries in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Democrats have strong candidates but not runaway frontrunners. Ally: I’ll be looking to see if more of the GOP House challengers see the green wave. Republicans need their members to hold on to their seats but they also need to flip blue ones. They’re going to need well-funded challengers because the Democratic incumbents have had a huge head start. Quite a few of them have $4 million+ in the bank. Katie Porter, for instance, has over $12 million, which is truly impressive. James: The amount of money in these elections is becoming harder and harder to wrap our minds around. My sincere apologies to anyone who lives in a swing state or district TV market and wants to watch any TV in the year 2022. Well at least I can watch “Never Have I Ever” on Netflix in peace. Steve: Don’t be surprised if political campaigns and outside groups find you on streaming, too! It’s a very big growth area. I’ve started to get some issue ads while watching out-of-market baseball games on the MLB.tv service lately. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author directly at rrayasam@politico.com or @renurayasam.
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A message from AstraZeneca: Through COVAX, we are working with partners GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance), WHO (World Health Organization), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and SII (Serum Institute of India) to ensure people around the world have access to safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines, wherever they live and regardless of income level. Learn more here. | | | | | — Pentagon: 70 percent of service members have received first dose of Covid vaccine: Seventy percent of U.S. active duty service members have received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine , the Pentagon announced today, and 62 percent of the force is now fully vaccinated. In February, members of the top brass testified before Congress that roughly one-third of troops had declined to get vaccinated. — Psaki excoriates criticism of Biden administration work on vaccine misinformation: White House press secretary Jen Psaki forcefully defended the Biden administration’s growing offensive on vaccine-related misinformation spreading on Facebook and other social media platforms. “Our biggest concern, and frankly I think it should be your biggest concern, is the number of people who are dying around the country because they are getting misinformation that is leading them to not take a vaccine,” Psaki said during today’s daily press briefing. “Young people, old people, kids, children … a lot of them are being impacted by misinformation.”
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| — Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist killed during clash between Afghan forces, Taliban: Danish Siddiqui, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for Reuters, was killed today while covering a skirmish between Afghan security forces and the Taliban , the media outlet confirmed. Both Siddiqui and a senior Afghan officer were killed in what an Afghan commander described as Taliban crossfire, according to Reuters, during efforts by Afghan forces to retake the main market area of Spin Boldak — a border town in the southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. — Texas federal judge blocks new DACA applicants: A federal judge in Texas today blocked the Biden administration from approving new applications for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — but current DACA recipients will remain unaffected for now. In a 77-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen, appointed by George W. Bush, found that DACA is unlawful and that the Department of Homeland Security can no longer approve new applicants into the program. He also ruled that DHS could continue to process DACA renewals for now as the issue continues to move through the courts. — Caitlyn Jenner heads to Australia as recall campaign intensifies in California: California gubernatorial candidate Caitlyn Jenner has flown to Australia just two months before the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom , a crucial stretch in which candidates are buying airtime and campaigning before mail balloting starts next month. A spokesperson for Jenner’s campaign confirmed the trip abroad with POLITICO after Australian tabloids reported that she was in Sydney to appear on “Big Brother VIP.” — Chinese law threatens U.S. firms doing business in Hong Kong, federal agencies warn: Four federal agencies warned U.S. companies today that operating in Hong Kong puts their employees and business at the mercy of an increasingly authoritarian Chinese government. International firms have long relied on Hong Kong’s market-based legal system separate from mainland China. But the new business advisory warns that the Chinese government’s national security law for Hong Kong, imposed a year ago, has “led to major structural changes that significantly reduced Hong Kong’s autonomy.”
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| | SUBSCRIBE TO "THE RECAST" TODAY: Power is shifting in Washington and in communities across the country. More people are demanding a seat at the table, insisting that politics is personal and not all policy is equitable. The Recast is a twice-weekly newsletter that explores the changing power dynamics in Washington and breaks down how race and identity are recasting politics and policy in America. Get fresh insights, scoops and dispatches on this crucial intersection from across the country and hear critical new voices that challenge business as usual. Don't miss out, SUBSCRIBE . Thank you to our sponsor, Intel. | | | | | | | IT’S OK TO ADMIT YOUR MISTAKES — Secretary of State Antony Blinken is telling U.S. diplomats to make the promotion of human rights and democracy a priority, even in countries with abusive governments that happen to be U.S. allies. Along the way, Blinken says, it’s fine to admit to America’s own struggles — a point that could trigger blowback from Republicans, Nahal Toosi writes. Blinken’s instructions are contained in a lengthy cable sent today to U.S. embassies around the world. The document, obtained by POLITICO, is a Blinken attempt to turn into specific objectives the pro-human rights and democracy rhetoric from himself and President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign and since taking office. The cable is strikingly frank in acknowledging America’s internal challenges, a risky political move given current conservative anger over educational and other attempts to highlight U.S. failures on sensitive issues such as race. And while Blinken includes some cautious caveats about how to deal with abusive allies, the message overall is a break from the strategy of former President Donald Trump’s administration, which largely avoided criticizing the rights records of governments, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose cooperation the U.S. needed on various fronts.
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| | | | | THE NEW PANDEMIC GRADE: INCOMPLETE — Covid cases are up in all 50 states, but testing is down: Just 569,059 people’s noses were swabbed with Covid tests on Thursday, down 14 percent from two weeks ago. The real case numbers are probably much higher, Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Outbreak Observatory at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security, told Nightly’s Myah Ward. In late fall, states began transforming mass testing sites into vaccination sites to roll out doses. As a result, we’re in a much better place than we were last fall, and even six months ago, with 68 percent of Americans partially vaccinated. But that doesn’t mean states should abandon testing and contact tracing, Nuzzo said. Testing data provides reassurance that the U.S. is on the right track as restrictions are lifted and Americans walk around maskless, she said. It’s not that health officials decided testing was no longer important, she said, but that states “only have so many nurses” and resources to administer both tests and vaccinations. “Administering vaccines probably takes priority over swabbing noses for tests,” Nuzzo said. “That’s really unfortunate that we had to choose between two very essential interventions, because obviously testing remains essential even now.” Hospitalizations and deaths are also trending up, according to the New York Times Covid tracker. Hospitalizations are the most important metric and will remain so going forward, Nuzzo said. Some experts have argued that only hospitalizations matter, and that we shouldn’t be concerned with case loads at this stage of the pandemic. But Nuzzo said we’re not ready for that yet, given the large population of unvaccinated Americans and rising hospitalizations in some parts of the country. Even so, state testing and surveillance efforts are slowly dying out. Florida now reports only test positivity and excludes the number of tests it administers each week. Other states report data only once a week and skip weekend data all together. “I am a firm believer that having more data enables us to get back to normal more quickly,” Nuzzo said. “I think there’s a false perception that if we just hold back all the numbers and don’t understand and don’t make the trends public, we will get over it. And unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen.” She pointed to California’s L.A. County as one example. The government reinstated an indoor mask mandate on Thursday, regardless of vaccination status. Las Vegas health officials today advised everyone to wear face coverings in crowded indoor spaces. “That must be so defeating. I can imagine how frustrating that must feel for people living there,” Nuzzo said. “And that’s what we’re trying to avoid. I don’t want us to go backward.”
| | FEELIN’ HOT, HOT, HOT — Agriculture reporter Ximena Bustillo has spent weeks reporting out the impacts of Western heatwaves, fires and droughts on agriculture from crops to workers. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, she explains the sometimes deadly effects of the record-breaking heat.
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| | SUBSCRIBE TO "THE RECAST" TODAY: Power is shifting in Washington and in communities across the country. More people are demanding a seat at the table, insisting that politics is personal and not all policy is equitable. The Recast is a twice-weekly newsletter that explores the changing power dynamics in Washington and breaks down how race and identity are recasting politics and policy in America. Get fresh insights, scoops and dispatches on this crucial intersection from across the country and hear critical new voices that challenge business as usual. Don't miss out, SUBSCRIBE . Thank you to our sponsor, Intel. | | | | | | | | |
| | | AIR BALL — Here’s a first look for Nightly readers at Derek Robertson’s essay on the politics of Space Jam, coming Saturday in POLITICO Magazine: The original Space Jam, crass as it may have been, was harmless ’90s fluff. Its successor, arriving in 2021, borders on a moral affront. Over the past decade, the NBA has become the world’s most aggressively activist major sports organization. Its players have stumped for voting access, put the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on NBA courts, and nearly boycotted last year’s playoffs en masse amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd. It has been a dramatic and socially significant evolution from the days of Michael Jordan, the famously apolitical uber-jock who once quipped that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” So to watch LeBron James in 2021, the league’s standard-bearer both as a player and political activist, traipse through the sealed-off virtual landscape of “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” it’s impossible to think of anything but what the league and its players aren’t saying. The film is carefully neutered to appeal to an apolitical global cinematic marketplace dominated by China. You spend its 115 minutes not recalling the lightweight delights of the 1990s, but of the moment in 2019 when NBA front-office guru Daryl Morey expressed support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, and a clearly peeved James slapped him down, accusing him of harming NBA players “financially … physically. Emotionally. Spiritually,” saying “we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.”
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A message from AstraZeneca: The COVAX initiative is an unprecedented effort to ensure fair and equitable global COVID-19 vaccine distribution. Through COVAX, many more shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine, including our own product, are planned over the coming weeks and months to low- and middle-income countries as the fight against the virus continues.
We have always understood vaccination as a global, no-profit, equity-focused undertaking and were the first pharmaceutical company to join COVAX in June 2020. Through COVAX and other global initiatives, we have supplied more than half a billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to 170 countries; 300 million of which have gone to low-income regions. Learn more here. | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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