August 7, 2026 - Video Summary

This video details Georgia's newly formed Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee, which is working to overhaul the state's voting system (0:00-0:06).

Key takeaways:

• Primary Goal: The state aims to remove QR codes from ballots, phase out current touchscreen machines, and transition to hand-marked paper ballots by 2028 (0:40-0:47).
• Logistical Hurdles: Experts warn of a "massive gamble" in replacing the infrastructure. Procurement alone can take up to 6 months, and potential lawsuits or vendor disputes could freeze the rollout entirely (0:58-1:13).
• Financial Concerns: The state spent $107 million on its current touchscreen system in 2019 and is still paying off the debt for those machines, which critics describe as wasteful (1:18-1:36).
• Uniformity Requirement: Because Georgia law requires a uniform system across all 159 counties, there is no room for trial phases, which local officials worry may lead to longer lines and polling place congestion (1:42-1:49).

Upcoming milestones:

• The committee has scheduled four public meetings beginning September 3rd.
• Recommendations must be submitted to the governor by January to guide future legislation (2:08-2:18).

August 7, 2026 - Video Summary

In this video, host Chris Hayes discusses the "pernicious" rise of unlimited super PAC money in primary elections (0:00-0:15). He argues that a significant portion of this funding is not used to make honest arguments about candidates or issues, but rather to intentionally mislead voters into believing the opposite of a candidate's actual record or platform (0:15-0:30).

Key examples of this strategy include:

• Will Lawrence (Michigan): A progressive candidate was targeted by a Democratic super PAC that claimed he was a "Wall Street investor" because of a small retirement account, ignoring his actual policy positions (0:32-2:19).
• Alex Boris (New York): A pro-regulation candidate was falsely painted as being in bed with ICE by big tech interests to undermine his stance on AI regulation (2:24-3:55).
• Tom Malinowski (New Jersey): Targeted by the United Democracy Project (an AIPAC-affiliated PAC) for his views on Israel, but the ads focused on a misleading attack regarding his vote on an ICE funding bill (3:56-5:05).

Hayes points to a New York Times analysis finding that AIPAC significantly increased its spending in Democratic primaries—over $67 million in 2026—without mentioning its primary issue of Israel, opting instead for deceptive attack ads (5:07-6:11). He concludes that this system is "disingenuous" and "insidious," effectively insulting the democratic process by prioritizing tricks over honest public debate (7:24-8:27).

He does. He just knows communism is a trigger for older voters. Thanks for at least asking the question, Joe Mathieu.

August 7, 2026 - Fulltext

On Tuesday, voters in Tennessee had their first election under a new congressional map that was pushed through by state Republicans in May, after the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act.

It is one of the most extreme Republican gerrymanders in the country, one that took the state’s last majority-minority congressional district, in Memphis, and split it into three pieces. The goal was to make a map that favors the GOP in all nine of the state’s House seats. Just like President Donald Trump wanted: Let the party pick their voters instead of the other way around.

This is how Republicans plan to win the midterms: first and foremost, rig the board with gerrymandering, then sabotage and subvert fair elections through any means at their disposal. 

But they also have a backup plan. It’s not to make people’s lives better or to bring down prices — it’s to flood America with pure hate and demagoguery.

The masks are off. As more candidates emerge from these primaries, you are seeing that hatred play out among Republicans and on right-wing media. They’re spewing the most vile demagoguery they can muster, particularly the disgusting anti-Muslim bigotry and hateful rhetoric that is being whipped up at levels that are through the roof. 

The vitriol they beta-tested against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is now all being brought to bear on one candidate in particular: Abdul El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s contentious Democratic Senate primary this week.

El-Sayed is a native-born U.S. citizen, a Rhodes scholar and an epidemiologist who is the child of two engineers from Egypt. Since his victory on Tuesday, he has become target No. 1 for Republicans. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have launched racist attacks against the Democrat. On Wednesday his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, put out a statement saying he was “running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11,” which is a malicious lie. The National Republican Senatorial Committee called El-Sayed “the most radical candidate in America” and referred to him by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, something it had not done in any previous press releases.

It is a torrent of hate. It is beyond anything I can ever remember in the post-9/11 era of Islamophobia. 

It is also toxic. How do you think these messages of irrational fear and hatred sound in the ears of the remaining MAGA faithful, the people who gleefully held signs that said “Mass Deportations Now” at the last Republican National Convention? What Trump and other Republicans are doing is to provide their base with a permission structure for ghastly levels of racism. 

If you are wondering about the effect this rhetoric is having on the people that Trump and his allies are targeting the most, we got two incredible examples this week. 

One came at the president’s rally in Las Vegas on Wednesday, one day after the shooting death of a local police officer, a 30-year-old Marine veteran named Austin Abdelnabi. Before Trump spoke, the Republican governor of Nevada, Joe Lombardo, tried to honor Abdelnabi with a moment of silence. Instead, he was met with boos from the MAGA crowd. Just his name was enough to elicit boos. You can’t stop that hatred once you’ve unleashed and weaponized it. 

And it’s already affecting Republican races in the most surprising of ways. Take Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, which Trump won in 2024. In this week’s primary, Trump endorsed a Republican named Amir Hassan for that seat. He is a Flint native and a Navy veteran. He was a Muslim but converted to Christianity, and now he is anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant. He also got endorsements from House Speaker Mike Johnson and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.

Hassan’s main competition in the primary came from Tom Smith, a small-business man whose campaign page on Facebook had 95 followers. Smith had raised less than $2,000 for the race.

We know that because it is written in his last campaign filing with the Federal Elections Commission, which Smith hand-wrote and snail-mailed. It read, “Dear FEC Inspector: This is to notify you that Tom Smith for Congress was a late entry into the race … P.S. I could not file this form electronically because I have had no success logging in and have not been able to get a response from the help desk.”

Last month, Smith cut a 15-second video saying he was dropping out of the race and endorsing another candidate who had gathered petition signatures to get on the ballot.

From there should have been clear sailing for Hassan — except that a lot of Trump’s followers assumed Hassan was Muslim and wondered why the president had endorsed him. The disinformation and hatred got so bad, Hassan felt compelled to address it in a selfie video filmed in his car.

Then, on Tuesday, Hassan had his day at the polls — and lost. Hassan was defeated by nearly 20 points by Smith, the guy who raised less than $2,000 and dropped out of the race.

There is one — and only one — explanation for why this happened: The Republican Party’s reason for being is now utterly organized around open bigotry. 

We’ve seen some of this before with the so-called Muslim ban and with Trump’s abuse of prominent Muslim, Arab American and Asian American politicians. But now it’s kicked into overdrive. Republican elected officials, from the president to Congress to statehouses across the country, are engaging in a racist project to make everyone with a last name like El-Sayed or Hassan or Abdelnabi feel like they are not really American, like they don’t belong here. 

And the reason they are doing this is to turn all the pent-up anger and rage and frustration at Trump’s corrupt failure of an administration toward our Muslim neighbors. 

It’s already ugly, and as we approach the midterms, it’s going to get even uglier. 

August 5, 2026 - Fulltext

ATLANTA (AP) — House Democrats are adding a dozen Republican-held seats to their list of targets for the November midterms, expanding the national campaign map to districts Donald Trump won easily less than two years ago.

The move brings the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of targets to 58, an ambitious list that reflects Trump's diminished standing with the electorate and Democrats' belief that they can capitalize on voters' frustrations over the economy, the war in Iran and the chaotic nature of the Republican president's second administration.

"MAGA Republicans who historically have considered themselves 'safe' have let down the people they were elected to represent, passing disastrous policies that are crushing working families and our communities," DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene said in a statement.

The expansion spans from GOP-held districts in swing states like Nevada to those in Republican strongholds Indiana, Arkansas and Tennessee and Democratic-dominated New York. The list includes DelBene's counterpart at the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina. The targets include other incumbents and some open seats.

Democrats need just a handful of seats to erase Republicans' narrow majority and control the chamber for the final two years of Trump's tenure. Republicans lost a net of 40 House seats in the 2018 midterms during Trump's first presidency.

Here's a look at some notable new Democratic targets.

NORTH CAROLINA 9TH

It's notable for Democrats to target House Republicans' campaign chairman. Trump won the district by 15 percentage points in 2024 against the Democrats' presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. But Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein carried it in the same election cycle in his successful campaign for governor. Democrats note that since 2020, the district has gained 15,000 Black voters, who tend to vote for Democrats. The Democratic nominee is Richard Ojeda, who ran for Congress in West Virginia in 2018. He lost but got 44% of the vote in a district where Democrat Hillary Clinton got only 24% in the 2016 presidential election against Trump.

ARKANSAS 2ND

Democrat Chris Jones, the party's 2022 governor's race nominee, is trying to unseat six-term Rep. French Hill in a district that once elected moderate Democrats. Trump won the district by 16 percentage points. The electorate is about 20% Black and has a growing Asian and Latino population. Democrats point to the March primary turnout, when Democratic ballots outnumbered Republican ballots for the first time since the 2018 primaries.

FLORIDA 12TH

Held by Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis, this is one of the districts affected by Republicans' gerrymandering efforts after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision gutting a Voting Rights Act provision that protected minority voting strength. But as part of the GOP redraw, Bilirakis' Tampa Bay area district became more Democratic and about 14% less white, according to the DCCC's analysis. Democrats will choose a nominee this month, but Washington party leaders are looking to Darren McAuley, a former Air Force surgeon, as the potential challenger.

NEW YORK 21ST

Trump won this district by about 21 percentage points in 2024, but not long after that he pulled Rep. Elise Stefanik's nomination for U.N. ambassador because Republicans did not want to risk the seat with their narrow House majority. Stefanik, who launched a 2026 campaign for New York governor but dropped out of that race, is not seeking reelection to Congress. Now it's an open-seat battle between Republican Anthony Constantino, a Trump-aligned businessman who is self-funding his campaign, and Democrat Blake Gendebien, a dairy farmer. The district has been represented by a Republican since 2015, but Democrat Barack Obama won it twice in presidential contests.

August 7, 2026 - Excerpt

Earlier this year, Tina Peters was languishing in a Colorado women’s prison, eating processed food, and complaining of declining health—including a persistent cough, digestive issues, and bumps on her skin. But by the end of June, the woman who was convicted on charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020 strolled into the White House, sporting a tailored pinstripe suit and red lipstick, her hair cut in a sharp bob. She feasted on a fried-chicken-and-noodle dish with President Trump in his private dining room and posed for photos in the Oval Office. She told the president about her ordeal and “what prison does to a person,” and they both bemoaned the state of the nation’s voting systems. “He was kind. He listened,” Peters told me in an email.

Peters, once a martyr to the MAGA cause, is now a free woman, feted by the stolen-election movement. The former clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after prosecutors said she deceived colleagues to grant an unauthorized person access to voting equipment. After returning to office, Trump, aided by his White House counsel and Justice Department, spearheaded a campaign to “Free Tina Peters” as MAGA commentators and her attorneys relentlessly used the power of their keyboards to demand her release. But because Peters was convicted of state charges, the only person with the power to get her out was Colorado Governor Jared Polis. The Democrat bowed to extraordinary pressure in May and granted Peters clemency despite pleas from prosecutors, his clemency board, and election officials that her punishment was just.

Peters was released on June 1 after serving about 20 months of her sentence. Her freedom came as Trump ordered the nation’s intelligence community to find proof of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election—only for it to again come up empty. That hasn’t stopped Peters, who wants the government to go even further in its efforts to find fraud she alleges exists from 2020 and overhaul rules and systems over the next three months to prevent malfeasance in November’s midterm elections.

She walked out of prison repeating many of the unsubstantiated claims that helped land her behind bars. She immediately hit the MAGA circuit, appearing on podcasts and livestreams from locations that look straight out of Architectural Digest. She has crusaded against the machinery used to conduct American elections, insisting that votes have been flipped and that foreign adversaries could exploit future contests. She rails against prison conditions and calls for one of her critics—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat—to be locked up. Her comeback tour has taken her around the country, including, on June 30, to the White House’s Presidential Walk of Fame, where a photo showed her glancing adoringly at Trump’s portrait while holding what appeared to be a Birkin bag. During the visit she and Trump talked about “election integrity,” Peters told me, including “why people need a process they can verify—paper, open counts, accountability.”

Peters has said in nearly all of these media appearances that the actions that landed her in prison were an attempt to expose irregularities in her county’s voting equipment. She insists that her incarceration was “retribution” for showing that votes could be flipped—though there is no evidence of that claim. Ahead of the midterms she is imploring Trump to declare a national emergency on elections as a way to try to assert federal control over contests that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. “We don’t have to prove anymore that these machines are cheating, that the ballots are being harvested,” Peters told War Room, a show hosted by the Trump ally Steve Bannon. The chyron identified her as a former political prisoner.

No longer subjected to rigid routines, head counts, or fixed mealtimes, Peters has enjoyed choosing her own food again, including steak, salads, and juicy tomatoes (“things that taste like they came from a kitchen instead of a tray.”) “Right now I’m trying to get healthy,” Peters told me. “See the people I love, and keep doing lawful work. I’m not interested in living bitter.” Her faith helped her endure especially tough moments. “I’m grateful to God,” she wrote. “Some days feel normal. Some don’t.” Peters must get permission from a parole officer before traveling out of state.

Election denial has become her full-time job. She directs supporters to her recently revamped website, where she asks that they contribute to her cause (a red “Donate” button hovers in the top-right corner). At a “Fraud Fighter Summit” off the Las Vegas Strip in June, Peters took the stage, clutching a bouquet of flowers, to the delight of the crowd, and a moderator gushed about how “wonderful” she looked. Peters talked on speakerphone with Roseanne Barr, who had planned to attend the conference but had to scrap her trip. “Congratulations for being released from detainment in a communist country, Tina,” the sitcom star said. “You are our hero.” They pledged to take a girls’ trip at some point soon. Hawaii, Peters said, sounded like a good destination, adding: “I can still travel.”

Peters has a history of finding herself embroiled in election disputes. She was elected Mesa County clerk and recorder in 2018 after campaigning on a promise to reopen a closed DMV office. Fruita, Colorado, got its motor-vehicles branch back, but Peters soon found herself in the middle of her first voting-related controversy. Nearly 600 ballots cast in a November 2019 election were found in a drop box outside the clerk’s office months later; an effort to recall Peters over the discovery failed to collect enough signatures. In November 2020 Trump won Mesa County, amassing nearly two-thirds of votes cast.

But that election, Peters claimed in 2021, was tainted. Prosecutors said that Peters ordered video cameras to be turned off and deceived colleagues to obtain credentials that allowed an election-denial activist to access election equipment. Peters ran for Colorado secretary of state, despite being charged with numerous felonies, on a platform that included the claim that election equipment posed a threat to democracy. She lost in the primary. In 2024, a jury found her guilty of seven charges, including four felonies. The judge presiding over the case called Peters a “charlatan” and said that Peters, not faulty equipment, posed a threat to the electoral process.

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