Can Bibi Netanyahu hang on? Israel’s six-term prime minister faces a stiff challenge in Israel’s elections today. Polls show the bloc led by Netanyahu’s Likud party neck and neck with the bloc led by former military chief Gadi Einsenkot’s Yashar party, and voters are turning out at levels not seen in Israel for half a century. Meanwhile, Yair Golan of the Democrats party faced an apparent assassination attempt at an election-day campaign stop just hours ago. Happy Tuesday.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)

by William Kristol

We’re a week out from election day, and things continue to look good. In fact, I’ve got to say, they’re looking a little bit better every day. The early vote—

[I INTERRUPT THIS NEWSLETTER TO KNOCK ON WOOD, TOSS SALT OVER MY SHOULDER, AND, YES, PULL ON MY EARLOBE (THAT ONE’S NEW TO ME, TOO, BUT APPARENTLY THEY DO THAT AS WELL IN SOME PARTS OF THE WORLD). I DO THESE THINGS OF COURSE TO PREVENT BEING JINXED AND TO WARD OFF THE EVIL EYE AFTER MAKING SUCH A HOPEFUL OR CONFIDENT STATEMENT. I WANT TO ASSURE ANY AND ALL JEALOUS DEITIES READING THIS NEWSLETTER THAT I’M NOT TRYING TO BE PRESUMPTUOUS. REALLY! I’M JUST TRYING TO TELL IT LIKE IT IS.]

Anyway, as I was saying . . .

Insofar as one can read the entrails of the early vote—and more than 30 million Americans, roughly a quarter of the likely overall turnout, have already voted—they seem to confirm the polls, which continue to signal a big blue wave.

For example, Reuters/Ipsos, which collected responses as recently as yesterday, has President Trump at 35 percent approval and 65 percent disapproval among registered voters, with 15 percent strongly approving and an astounding 53 percent strongly disapproving. Democrats lead the generic ballot among both registered and likely voters by 9 points. And Democrats say they’re more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll is no outlier. In the FiftyPlusOne polling average, the generic ballot now has Democrats ahead by 9.2 percent, up from 7.7 percent at the beginning of October, and 6.3 percent at the beginning of September. The trend remains Democrats’ friend, and the Republican spending onslaught hasn’t done much if anything to stop it.

Meanwhile, Trump’s election subversion schemes have so far proven ineffectual (which doesn’t mean we won’t see lots of desperate efforts over the next week, and then perhaps after the votes are counted). And it’s hard to see any great surprise emerging in these last few days for the Republicans.

[I INTERRUPT THIS NEWSLETTER ONCE AGAIN TO KNOCK WOOD, TOSS SALT, MUTTER HEARTFELT IMPRECATIONS TO THE GODS . . .]

Okay, back to business.

So the House is almost certain to flip, and the Senate seems likely—I’d say very likely—to do so. [WOOD KNOCKED, SALT TOSSED, IMPRECATIONS MUTTERED, ONCE AGAIN.] Since 1954, there’ve only been two occasions on which both chambers have changed hands in a midterm election: 1994 and 2006.

The 2006 precedent could serve as something of a warning. That midterm wave was followed by a big Democratic presidential victory in 2008 and further congressional gains. But the financial crisis of 2008 was so severe that the Obama administration had to spend an awful lot of time cleaning it up. The administration also made some political miscalculations. And the midterm elections of 2010 changed the country’s political momentum decisively.

In an economic and geopolitical environment as fraught as the one we’re now in, it’s going to be a real challenge not just to follow up a midterm victory with a presidential electoral victory, but then to govern in a way that succeeds in actually reversing the nation’s course and changing the country significantly for the better. As I suggested last week, the 1930–1932 sequence, which cleared the path for the New Deal, is probably the best precedent for that. But that was a long time ago, in a different nation and world. “Hardly a man is now alive” who remembers that era. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn lessons from it.

So spend the next week obsessing over the reports from the various states and studying the polls and analyzing the early vote reports, and doing what you can to help to squeeze out every possible victory. But you might also begin to pull out your books about FDR and the 1930s. And you might want to take a look at an ever greater president, as well: Abraham Lincoln, who said in his second annual message to Congress, in December 1862:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Next Tuesday, Democrats will likely be given a chance—

[KNOCK ON WOOD, TOSS SALT, PRAY TO THE GODS]

—to begin to save the country. To do so, they’ll have to learn from, even rise to, the examples of Roosevelt and Lincoln.

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump really wants to see James Comey go to jail, and he’s not about to let a little thing like “Comey never committing any crimes” stop him from trying. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed criminal charges against Comey for a preposterous third time, now over threadbare old accusations that he ordered his staff to leak information to a reporter while serving as FBI director in October 2016.

The filing, called a “criminal information,” isn’t the same thing as an indictment. To indict someone, prosecutors typically need to get the approval of a grand jury convened for the purpose. And while that’s usually a trivial barrier—prosecutors, they say, can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich—the DOJ hasn’t met it yet here. Instead, the “information” is DOJ’s attempt to get around a deadline: The ten-year statute of limitations for the crime they want to charge Comey with, which expired earlier this month.

Even this is a major procedural stretch. “Typically an information must be agreed to by a defendant—and Comey did not consent here,” former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN yesterday. “It therefore likely cannot extend the statute of limitations.” Not that the charges would be likely to stick anyway: If Trump’s DOJ mooks thought this was a more promising route to jailing Comey than the “86 47” charges that were already laughed out of court, they would have gone with this one first. But the mooks don’t want to be the ones who have to tell Trump it’s a ridiculous prosecution; they’d much prefer to leave that task to a judge.

The new case, Comey said in a video posted online, “would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to.” His lawyers have already asked a judge to dismiss the charges.

Trump himself denied knowledge of the case. “I don’t know much about it. I just heard about it,” Trump said, adding a minute later: “I know nothing about it.” Not all of these statements can be true at once; in all likelihood, none of them are.

Meanwhile, other Comeys keep slipping through Trump’s fingers. A federal judge ruled yesterday that Comey’s daughter, former federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, was unlawfully fired by the Justice Department last year.

The younger Comey, who has since taken a private-sector job, will not return to Justice. But Judge Jesse Furman granted her a retroactive reinstatement anyway, ordering the administration to give her back pay covering the period from her firing last summer through the end of last year. The court also declared that the government had violated her Fifth Amendment due process rights in firing her, as well as some other laws.

MISSISSIPPI CHURNING: The Senate race that has gotten the least amount of attention relative to how competitive it could be is almost certainly the one in Mississippi featuring Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith against Democrat Scott Colom.

Conventional wisdom holds that Colom simply doesn’t stand a chance, regardless of how big the state’s black population is. There are simply too many Republican voters. And that very well may be true. But in an eleventh-hour gambit, Democrats are making clear that they believe there is a contingency of Republicans in the state who will cross party lines.

A new ad by Government That Works PAC, a group supporting Democratic candidates across the country, is launching this week in Mississippi featuring Hyde-Smith’s Republican primary challenger, Sarah Adlakha, attacking Hyde-Smith. The ad isn’t a leftover of the primary, either. It’s a newly recorded spot, meant for a general election audience, with six figures behind it.

In the ad, which was first shared with The Bulwark, Adlakha calls herself a “lifelong Republican” who ran against Hyde-Smith because she believed Mississippi deserved a “true conservative.” Adlakha says Hyde-Smith “is just part of the club, paying for fancy trips with your money and taking hundreds of thousands from lobbyists” and accuses her of taking “reckless vote after reckless vote to expand the national debt.”

“This is what Nancy Pelosi would look like if she was from Mississippi,” Adlakha says. Notably, Adlakha doesn’t encourage voters to back Colom in the ad, nor does she say she will herself.

Still, Democrats are hopeful that if they can peel off enough GOP votes (or simply encourage a fair number to sit the election out) they might be able to score a major upset in Mississippi. The party’s main Senate super PAC announced last week that it would start spending money on the race. And a number of high-profile party leaders—including Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg—have visited the state to campaign for Colom.

Republicans, too, seem to believe that the race is competitive. Trump held a campaign rally in Mississippi on Monday night and the principal Senate Republican super PAC is spending more than $1 million to defend Hyde-Smith.

Whether voters will be moved by Adlakha’s ad is an open question. She isn’t a well-known figure in the state. She moved to Mississippi from Illinois thirteen years ago. And there were questions about her motivations for running in the GOP primary. The Magnolia Tribune reported during the primary that “some Republican insiders have speculated that Adlakha is a ‘Democratic plant’ or ‘coordinating’ with” Colom’s campaign” in the hopes of forcing Hyde-Smith to spend money that she otherwise would have saved for the general election.

Still, in the Republican primary, Adlakha received 19 percent of the vote.

PREPPING FOR CLAUDE’S CLOSE-UP: Are we still living in an AI bubble? Will it burst at some point, and if it does, how much of the U.S. economy will it bring down with it? Even if it doesn’t burst, will AI ultimately crash the economy anyway? These are just several of the fun and interesting questions tied to the upcoming IPO of AI giant Anthropic—in advance of which the company laid out a remarkable financial prospectus yesterday. Bottom line: They’re making a ton of money, and spending it way, way faster than they’re making it. Here’s the New York Times:

Anthropic’s revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of the year and its net loss was $80.7 billion, driven largely by a one-time charge. Stunningly, the company has committed up to $807 billion in contracts for data centers, chips and computing power, many of which cannot be canceled, over the next 10 years, according to a tally by The New York Times. Many of the contracts span different lengths of time, and the terms have yet to be finalized for some.

The numbers underscored how much Anthropic is betting that its future business will justify its outlays. Even its public offering, which could raise more than $100 billion, may not provide the company with enough money to fund its intense infrastructure needs, as it warned that it might need to seek additional financing sooner than anticipated.

Hey, what’s another trillion or so among friends? Read the whole thing.