Today’s notice: Talking about the polls with pollsters. A scoop about chaos at the IRS. Senate Republicans punt Trump’s Pentagon reconciliation request. How battleground Democrats talk about trans rights now. And: A follow-up to our scoop from last year about Lindsey Halligan’s security detail.
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THE LATEST
We’re doing that polling thing again. “First of all, the polls are fake,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House yesterday when asked about the myriad surveys showing his party’s candidates struggling in red places like Iowa. (Polling errors in Iowa near the end of a closely watched national election? Impossible!)
Trending
In the D.C. universe, this midterm has entered foregone-conclusion land. The question on everyone’s minds is now, how much do Democrats win by? Many think the answer is, at least, a lot. Why is everyone so sure? The polls! The same things everyone was looking at in 2024 when Trump beat the prognosticators, in 2025 when Democrats in New Jersey beat the prognosticators and throughout 2026 when primary voters confounded the prognosticators on a regular basis.
Pollsters say: We got this. “I think that there were some total overreactions to polling relative to some of the primary results,” Matt Taglia, senior director at Emerson College Polling, told The Washington Sun’s Manuela Silva. “There are always going to be instances where the margin is off, but polling primaries is a lot harder than polling general elections.”
People who do polling do not just say stuff. They try very sincerely to back it up. “There’s nothing that we’ve seen in the polling that is positive for Republicans,” Taglia said. He is not the only pollster saying this. Basically every pollster is saying this. Hence the confidence in the numbers.
But numbers that say what, exactly? “People tend to look at the overall bad numbers for Trump and the economy and think that automatically carries over to big Democratic margins or big Democratic gains relative to 2024,” Charles Franklin, who runs polling for Marquette Law School in Wisconsin, told Manuela. “I think there’s plenty of evidence that these toss-up seven or eight Senate races sure look like toss-ups.”
Could Democrat James Talarico break the mold and win a Senate seat in Texas? Polls say: Sure! Could Republican Ken Paxton do what Republicans always do in Texas and win? Quite easily! That’s literally what the polling says. Same story in many Senate seats across the country.
“Everybody needs to get off their high horse,” says Crystal Ball’s Larry Sabato, who puts together election predictions from a long list of detailed factors. “It’s interesting, and you know I retweet a lot of the polls, you know, because people are interested in that. But it’s not gospel. It is not handed down by Moses … The numbers can be wrong.”
But even those on the bad side of the polls say they can’t argue with the bottom line. “I don’t think people believe polling fully because they’ve been so wrong so often,” a MAGA operative told The Sun’s Jasmine Wright, “but I think the vibes, if you just take a good look at that, don’t look good.”
More: The Senate Passes Its College Sports Bill, Setting Up a House Fight • Four Jan. 6 Defendants Sue for a Payout From the Trump Administration • Contradicting Trump, Pope Leo Says AI Safety Concerns Are Not ‘Fake News’ • Trump Disputes He Asked China’s President About Buying U.S. Arms
Open tabs:
- OpenAI Scraps Release of New AI Model Over Safety Concerns (WSJ)
- Embarrassing Breach at F.B.I. Fuels Fears of Harm to Its Employees (NYT)
- DOJ probe into Trump foes sees another prominent departure (WaPo)
- Alito bows out of blockbuster Supreme Court climate case (Politico)
FROM THE IRS
Scoop: Everyday they’re reshufflin’: Leadership at the IRS tried to reassign around 1,500 employees with no relevant experience to help process tax returns. But that effort failed, The Sun’s Eric Katz reports. Now, staff are being reassigned again, this time to a new internal consulting office. Several workers impacted by the changes told The Sun that staff are being moved to new teams without any indication of what work they will perform.
The changes have been orchestrated by Joe Ziegler, the official the Trump administration promoted after he alleged to Congress the IRS had mishandled Hunter Biden’s taxes. Eric has stories from inside the IRS about a workforce that is beleaguered and nervous amidst the ongoing chaos.
FROM THE HILL
Pentagon funding request punted: The White House is hoping to push through a $350 billion additional package for the Defense Department through reconciliation. But Republicans remain divided over how to finance the buildup, The Sun’s Joe Gould reports, and there is no immediate path for the reconciliation package before the recess.
More: Susan Collins Says Challenges to Trump’s Latest Spending Cuts Are Coming
FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Democrats got comfortable moving right on trans messaging: Democratic candidates are pushing back on versions of Trump’s famous/infamous “they/them” ad with their own ads touting their votes to “to keep transgender ideology out of our schools,” as an ad for Rep. Marcy Kaptur in Ohio put it. “I think you’ve seen a willingness from some of the groups, when in the past you might not have seen it as much, to give people in the red states more space and grace to have these conversations. Even if it’s not 100% the ideal ACLU position on trans issues,” a Democratic strategist told The Sun.
The Sun’s Alex Roarty and Oriana González take a deep dive into these politics, and find Democratic candidates using more anti-trans language. Despite what that strategist said, there are still plenty in the party wary of this shift: “It is simply unacceptable to use the Republican framing that ‘boys should not play in girls’ sports’ because you’re calling trans girls ‘boys.’ It’s deeply disrespectful and it’s actively harmful,” a House Democrat told The Sun.
First on The Sun: Democrats barn dance in NC’s 11th. Hurricane Helene remains a defining issue in western North Carolina two years after the storm ravaged the mountainous region. Fresh off a recent race rating move to “toss up” by the Cook Political Report, Democrats are focusing on their nominee Jamie Ager’s local ties with a new six-figure buy featuring a spot filmed at his monthly “mountain hoedowns,” our Christa Dutton reports. In the spot, Ager tells viewers, “I’ll fight for our Helene recovery funds.”
More: Drunk Driving Incident Roils the Wisconsin Governor’s Race
NEW ON THE WASHINGTON SUN
Follow-up: Lindsey Halligan’s million-dollar detail. During her four months as a White House-appointed federal prosecutor last year, the Department of Justice spent $1.1 million on an unusually large security detail for Halligan, The Sun’s Jose Pagliery and Derek Hawkins report. Last year, Jose was first to reveal the phalanx of U.S. Marshals that shadowed Halligan at all times. “They follow her around the building, even in our office on the various floors. Insane waste of money,” a source told The Sun at the time.
More: Second Lawsuit Filed Against Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Rules • Homeland Security Rejects NFL Request to Remove Brian Dawkins Video • D.C. Is Seeing the Rise of a New Kind of Getaway Vehicle: E-Scooters
NOT US
- The Untold Origins of Trump’s Plan to Sharply Restrict Mail-In Voting, by Jen Fifield and Peter Elkind for ProPublica
- The Babies Left Behind in America, by Caitlin Dickerson for The Atlantic
- The Moves That Backfired on Trump and Drove Interest Rates and Inflation Higher, by Nick Timiraos and Meridith McGraw for The Wall Street Journal
- Proud Boys Convicted Over Jan. 6 Go From Prosecutions to Pardons to Premiere, by Alan Feuer for The New York Times
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The newsletter was produced by Thomas Burr and Andrew Burton.
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