Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of November 2

Just wanted to wish all Americans here best of luck tomorrow, even as I've been absent the past few months.

Regardless of outcomes, the chance is high things will get ugly afterwards.

So, I assume that anyone that would open this thread already knows this by now, but in case you were in a coma or deep in the woods yesterday, Haley Stevens endorsed Mike Rogers and the media lost its fucking mind. Christmas came early and, uh, so did the media, so to speak.

Anyway, it was a massive story and her decision, predictively, backfired in spectacular fashion. Her career in Democratic politics is almost certainly over and she is getting chastised from basically every corner of the big Democratic tent, even from the more "moderate" talking heads that backed her in the primary and had been taking potshots at El-Seyed throughout the campaign. It seems that if your rationale for leaving the Democratic nominee is due to his "hate and vitriol" then you might want to look somewhere else and not cling to the guy that just ran one of the most openly racist campaigns in recent memory.

From what I've seen so far, it seems that the competing theories as to why this woman strapped a bomb to her chest and detonated it nowhere near any of her enemies are, (1) she's unbelievably petty and/or having some sort of breakdown, or (2) she took 30 million dollars from the Israel lobby and another 30 mil from right-leaning donors and orgs and wants to make sure they get their money's worth. I don't know if we'll ever get the full story, and honestly, I don't really care. What I do find interesting, and the reason why I am posting about this is because I want to know how a woman who was backed by the Democratic establishment and who was a few thousand votes away from securing the nomination could have such horrible political instincts. I have my own hypothesis that I haven't really seen anywhere else and I figured I would throw it out there. I call it the "high on your own supply theory."

I genuinely believe that Haley Stevens thought that she would get more support for her decision. If you watch the news or read the articles and op-eds in the NYT/WaPo/Atlantic/etc. then you might've noticed the steady stream of pieces about how 'Democrats are divided on Israel' and how there are Jewish Democrats in Michigan who are too racist afraid to vote for Abdul El-Seyed, and at this point there are probably hundreds if not thousands of hours of talking heads on CNN and MSNow pontificating about whether Abdul is too radical on Israel. It creates the perception that this is a big split in the Big Tent and that AES is further to the left than the base of the party. Unfortunately, none of that is real. Right now among Democrats, Israel's popularity sits somewhere between "having a stranger shit on your face" and "sticking an icepick into your genitals." For Haley Stevens, her most passionate and dedicated supporters were probably from that 5% who think we should send more weapons to Israel, and every time she turned to the news, she was sold a story that those 5% of Democrats were closer to 50%.

There's a good chance that in 48 hours we'll wake up to some news that gives us a small thread of hope, but Ms. Stevens's story should serve as a giant red flag about the state of our media environment and about Democratic leadership, because it is still way too easy to win as a selfish, careerist Democrat that doesn't represent the interests of the voters and would rather support a fascist than turn their back on their biggest donors.