Harbingers?

 The news from overseas elections is pretty good, actually. Brazil rejected a second generation Trump clone and Serbia ousted their long time pro-Russian government at the polls. Brazil got more coverage, because Brazil is a huge country and represents one of the few rejections in Latin America recently of Trumpist style politics. I remember talking to people in both Buenos Aires and Santiago that they needed a Trump-style president. Brazil had one, ejected him and have now rejected his son.

Krugman notes that Meta has been up to some serious fuckery surrounding first the recent No Kings Rally and now the Brazilian election. We've obviously seen Musk throw hundreds of millions to elect Republicans, and he has been openly supportive of Orban and Putin. Zuckerberg apparently looked at Elon destroying any institutional goodwill among people to the left of Dick Cheney and decided he wanted in on that action.

I've said before and I will say again, the intellectual ecosystem among the Broligarchy is fundamentally barren. They have about three ideas on how the world works, and they are going to ride those three ideas into the ground. Any smart business leader - think Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase - would be very careful to hedge their bets between the two political parties. The Lords of Ones and Zeroes think that they have no need of a party that might criticize them and hurt their fee fees by pointing out that their products have enormous societal costs. 

There is absolutely no reason for Democrats not to haul Musk and Zuckerberg before Congressional committees and grill them, with an eye towards either changing their behavior or punishing them the next time they have a trifecta. 

This week, Israel has an election and if Netanyahu's coalition loses, that would be a massive boost to the hopes for peace in the region. Whether these elections mean anything for the US midterms is entirely up for debate. Everyone seems to concede that Democrats will win the House. 

Many of the marquee Senate races are entirely within the margins of error. Some Republican analysts have suggested that they are seeing a wipe out election, but that is based at least somewhat on early voting, which figures to favor Democrats regardless. Early voting is great; it's votes in the bank. It allows Democrats to target their voters who haven't voted and get them to the polls.

Still, it does not predict what the electorate will look like in a week or so. All the signs - foreign and domestic - point to a strong midterm, but...damn, does anyone feel confident in the sagacity of the American voter?