There’s at Least One Bright Spot for Michigan Democrats This Election

The Michigan Supreme Court has flipped blue in a serious way.

Democratic nominees Kyra Bolden and Kymberly Ann Thomas each won judicial elections Tuesday night, taking over a court that Republicans had controlled for decades. Bolden is the first Black woman to serve on the Michigan Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court now sits at a 5-2 Democratic majority, with five liberals, one conservative, and one moderate.

This victory may signal optimism for Democrats in Michigan, as the crucial swing state comes down to the wire between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The presidential election has not yet been called. Issues like reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and other hugely impactful policies are now under Democratic jurisdiction.

Donald Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, on Tuesday, the first time the county has supported a Republican candidate since the 1970s, and only the second time in more than one hundred years.

Trump received 51.8 percent of the vote compared to Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent, with 91.8 percent reporting, per NBC News.

Since U.S. Reconstruction, Anson County has voted for the Republican presidential candidate just two times: the first being Richard Nixon in 1972, and now Trump, according to WFAE’s Steve Harrison.

Anson has been experiencing a rightward shift observed in other rural counties in North Carolina, according to WUNC.

North Carolina has yet to be called in the presidential race.

Bomb threats have been made against four voting sites in Navajo County, Arizona.

The threats are unsubstantiated, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said, adding, “We have no reason to believe any voters or polling places are in jeopardy.”

The threats originated from a .ru email address, but Fontes said there was no confirmation that the threats came directly from Russia.

“The motive appears to ensue chaos, not to impact any political outcome,” Fontes said.

“This is another—we believe—probing attack,” Fontes added. “We also have reason to believe—although I won’t get into specifics—that this comes from one of our foreign enemies, namely Russia.”

Also in Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a bomb threat made inside the Maricopa County Superior Court where the recorder’s office is located. The threat is similar to the other threats in Arizona and elsewhere around the country, the sheriff’s office said.

“This is a national and state trend we are seeing with bomb threats. The information contained in the threat has been the same to all the other areas in the county. MCSO and our local partners are taking this matter seriously and will investigate. At this point there is no credible information to this issue,” Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Joaquin Enriquez said in a statement.

Bomb threats have been reported in several other battleground states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. None have been shown to be credible, the FBI says.

District Attorney Fani Willis was reelected Tuesday in Fulton County for a second four-year term. Willis is most known for bringing charges against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  

Willis defeated her Republican opponent, Courtney Kramer, an attorney and former Trump White House intern.

In 2023, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office indicted Trump and 18 others on felony charges in a large-scale racketeering case for their attempted election interference. Trump and other defendants continue to delay the case, successfully pushing back the first hearing to December. One successful tactic has been to try to throw doubt on Willis’s credibility in the case.

In her time in office, Willis has faced extreme Republican vitriol and threats, but her reelection means that Trump will hopefully have to face the music down the road. 

Donald Trump’s revenge tour is underway, and he’s starting with the media.

Multiple journalists who were credentialed to cover the Trump campaign’s watch party have been barred from the event.

The first attack was toward former ABC News White House correspondent and current Puck senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri.

Palmeri was slated to provide coverage for the Amazon Election Night Special, live from the former president’s rally on his Palm Beach, Florida, property. But her credentials were pulled at the last minute.

Palmeri’s revoked credentials are likely directly linked to the way she’s covered the Trump campaign. Last week, Palmeri tweeted that “the Trump campaign has paused its premature celebration and fallen into sweat mode, as early-voting numbers indicate more women are turning up than men in must-win PA.”

Senior Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita took particular offense to Palmeri’s analysis, responding to her tweet with, “Actually this bullshit tweet is a result of the fact that ‘famed’ gossip columnist @tarapalmeri was DENIED credentials to enter Mar-a-largo to cover election night due to her ‘proclivity’ to write bullshit. well well well.”

Palmeri isn’t the only reporter that Team Trump has targeted. Three Politico reporters and a photographer also received notice Tuesday that they were banned from the same event over an accurate story they had written the day before about a Pennsylvania Trump field director who was fired for being a white nationalist. Axios reporter Sophia Cai was also banned from the election night event after publishing a story about Trump’s “anxiety.”

These petty blacklistings are indicative of what’s to come under another Trump term: a president who is openly antagonistic toward even the most standard reporting.