By the Numbers

Today’s notice: Lucky you: Polling season is back. A dispatch from the Massie vs. Trump primary. The latest on Iran. Bill & Hill sit for depositions. Tribal leaders vs. the Department of Education. Vance vs. Minnesota federal-benefits recipients. And: Guess which senator is ready to take over the annual dog parade?

THE LATEST

New polling that should worry Democrats: “They swung in ’24, they swung back in ’25, but in 2026 they have the risk of swinging again,” pollster Terrance Woodbury said, describing the takeaway from a yearlong project tracking young, Black male voters. NOTUS’ Alex Roarty has the numbers.

• Forty-one percent of Black men under 50 said Donald Trump’s policies had hurt them, which was much lower than any other demographic of Black voters surveyed (among Black men over 50, the number was 68%). Of the under 50 crowd, 17% said Trump had helped them, more than double any other group.
  

Context: The shift away from Democrats in 2024 by younger voters of color, especially Black men, was a game changer that year. Midterm polling so far is coming up Democratic, but these numbers suggest the party still has not solved this problem.

We’re back in our collective polling era now: The State of the Union is over, which means it’s officially campaign season and political junkies are back to poring over every new survey of the many races across the country.

It’s gonna be a frustrating era, friends. Next week’s Texas primaries are the first big date on the campaign calendar and the first opportunity to scratch that fresh numbers itch. If yesterday was any indication, we’re in for a long year.

• Rep. Jasmine Crockett is way up over state legislator James Talarico in the Democratic primary for Senate, according to a University of Texas poll.
  
• Actually, Talarico is winning by a little, according to a poll released by his campaign.
  
• Or maybe it’s a tie? That’s what an independent pollster, Texas Public Opinion Research, said in a release, citing a poll from just a few days earlier than the other two.
  

FWIW, basically all the polls have found Sen. John Cornyn trailing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the state’s Republican Senate primary. But the margins are so tight that this fact doesn’t really tell you much, either, beyond hey, wow, that close race is still close.

Open tabs: FBI raids LA Unified School District offices and superintendent’s home (Politico); FBI obtained Kash Patel and Susie Wiles phone records during Biden administration (Reuters); Trump’s ATF pick decries GOP-led budget cuts (Roll Call); Blind refugee abandoned by Border Patrol is dead (Investigative Post)

From the campaign trail

Kentucky battleground: “This race has come down to Trump vs. Massie,” the chair of the Republican Party in Kenton County, Shane Noem, told Alex during his travels around Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District to report on the most interesting GOP House primary.

Rep. Thomas Massie doesn’t exactly see it this way. “Where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president,” he told Alex.

Lots of others do, however. “I’d call him a Judas,” Massie’s Trump-backed primary opponent, Ed Gallrein, said. “You can’t even call him a Benedict Arnold.”

What the race sounds like: Gallrein declines to criticize the president on literally anything, Alex reports, while Massie’s crowds boo mentions of Kash Patel and cheer when the lawmaker calls Republicans who didn’t go along with him on the Epstein files “cowards.”

From the White House

Final talks? U.S. negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are set to meet with the Iranians in Geneva today for high-stakes talks. They are hoping to curb the country’s “nuclear ambitions” and find a diplomatic off-ramp to disbanding the massive armada now in the Middle East. Trump has warned that if talks don’t go well, it could trigger a forceful response.

“I hope the Iranians take it seriously,” JD Vance told Fox News yesterday.

The Trump administration has pressured the Iranians to submit a substantive proposal amid mixed messaging. On Wednesday, Marco Rubio said there’s evidence that Iran is trying to restart its “obliterated” nuclear program. Other officials said Iran could have “industrial-grade bomb-making” material in a week. Tehran has denied both claims.

Which all begs the question: What does the U.S. really want? And why now?

“I don’t think we know,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat and frequent critic of the administration, who noted that Trump oscillated his focus between nuclear proliferation and regime change. “The president, again, said all that capability’s gone and obliterated, so which one is it? It can’t be both.”

Absent from the president’s address Tuesday night was a justification for the military buildup or a plan forward.

From the Hill

Yesterday’s files, today’s fires: House Oversight Committee members are heading to Chappaqua, New York, for their first day of grilling Bill and Hillary Clinton about Jeffrey Epstein. They aren’t accused of wrongdoing, but Republicans seem to think the depositions could yield damning bombshells.

Democrats haven’t set the same expectations. “In the end, I do believe this deposition will have limited value compared to some of the other ones we’ve been doing,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat on Oversight, told MS NOW on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Democrats are leaning in on reports of missing files. The DOJ again tried to shut down cover-up allegations yesterday after multiple publications confirmed NPR’s reporting that documents related to Trump are missing from DOJ releases, saying some were pulled for review.

That’s not all the minority party is mad about. Senators warned yesterday at a forum hosted by Sen. Alex Padilla that the SAVE America Act is part of a broader push by Trump to disenfranchise voters and “take over” elections, NOTUS’ Manuela Silva reports. Several Democrats in Congress also told NOTUS’ Torrence Banks that they believe the Trump administration is sabotaging a key FEMA fund during the ongoing DHS shutdown to raise the stakes in negotiations.

“There has always been an exception with ongoing disasters,” Rep. Bennie Thompson said. “They’re just being mean.”

From the Department of Education

Tribal education, stuck in the middle: “If this is going to happen, and it looks like it’s happening, then how can we step in to make sure that the transition goes the way that we would have recommended had we been consulted in the first place?” Jake Keyes, chair of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, told NOTUS’ Adora Brown of administration efforts to delegate Education Department responsibilities to state governments.

A meeting this month to bring leaders into that process did not go well. “I feel like they were just checking a box to say that they met with tribes and they listened to tribes, but that the plan is already in motion,” said Derrick W. Leslie, education director of the White Mountain Apache Tribe of Arizona.

NEW ON NOTUS

Trump’s ‘war on fraud’ has begun, and Vance is the point man: The vice president announced yesterday that the administration would pause $259 million in Medicaid reimbursements for Minnesota over fraud concerns. Vance said that “millions and millions of people” are distributing federal Medicaid funding without confirming recipients’ validity. “We’re stopping it,” he added.

NOT US

• Sherrod Brown Is Grinding It Out, by Mark Leibovich for The Atlantic
  
• Violent Militias Stand Between the U.S. and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches, by Ian Lovett for The Wall Street Journal
  
• Online Accusations in Guthrie Abduction Leave One Family ‘Scared Numb,’ by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs for The New York Times

BE SOCIAL

The prediction markets didn’t even bother to post odds on who would take this gig.

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