| | |  | BY DAVID SIDERS | With help from Joanne Kenen
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A yard sign for Liz Cheney in Laramie, Wyoming. | Alex Wong/Getty Images | ‘PURE SPOILER’ — Every indication is that Liz Cheney is about to lose her seat in Congress tonight. If the polls are right in Wyoming, Cheney may end up with as little as 30 percent of the vote. The real question, then, is what comes next for the Wyoming Republican — a presidential run, as some speculate? The idea is not as outlandish as it sounds. Sure, she would be the longest of longshots. Republicans are still all-in for Donald Trump, and there isn’t a single state where Cheney, his most prominent critic in the GOP, would seem likely to gain any traction with the party’s rank-and-file. But winning the nomination might be beside the point. If stopping Trump — or a Trump acolyte — is the goal, Cheney could do some real damage. If Trump doesn’t run — or if he is weakened, as appeared possible earlier this year, before the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago rallied his potential opponents around him — there is a scenario in which an entire raft of Trump-ian Republicans will be seeking the party’s presidential nomination in 2024. Cheney’s lonely crusade against Trump has generated a donor base and a political network that could keep her competitive if she chose to run. And in a big field of Trump-ers, Cheney has a lane. It’s the one she’s been cornering every time she ripped into Trump this year, and it’s the inverse of the one Trump himself used to win the nomination — and ultimately reshape the GOP — in 2016. Against a big collection of establishment candidates that year, Trump finished second in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, with about 24 percent of the vote. He won New Hampshire and South Carolina with only about a third of the Republican electorate pulling for him. There were just too many more traditional candidates splitting the rest of the vote. That kind of dynamic could exist for Cheney if she can quickly clear other traditionalist Republicans, like Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, out of the way. There is also one other way Cheney could prevent Trump from becoming president again. She could run against him as an independent.
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Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney during the Jan. 6 hearings. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | Cheney has suggested she’s not interested in party-switching. But if Trump becomes the nominee in 2024 and Cheney wants to stop him, there will be intense pressure for her to. Cheney herself has said she’ll do “ whatever it takes ” to keep Trump out of the Oval Office. Unlike some other independent candidates, Cheney’s family name, conservative voting record and opposition to abortion rights would likely render her more likely to pull votes from Trump than President Joe Biden, or whoever Democrats nominate in 2024. That sliver of the electorate that Cheney will win in Wyoming tonight? In a presidential election decided at the margins, that might be enough in some swing states to keep Trump out of the White House. Not enough for Cheney to win, but enough to drag him down. “The pure spoiler candidate” is how Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, put it. “To me, that would be the smartest tactical move,” he said. “Clearly that’s what the math says. That’s the best way to stop him from becoming president.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com or on Twitter at @davidsiders. Keep up with tonight’s election results on POLITICO’s live pages for Alaska and Wyoming. You can also tune into our live chat to follow along with our politics team’s minute-by-minute analysis.
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| | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | — Biden signs landmark domestic bill: Biden today signed a historic climate, health care and tax bill , saying his administration is in “a season of substance” after the legislation lingered on his domestic agenda for more than a year. In a speech, Biden ticked off a list of provisions he said would accelerate the nation’s clean energy push, lower health costs and bolster the economy. And he argued the sweeping reforms represented the latest evidence for keeping his party in power come November. — First lady tests positive for Covid: First lady Jill Biden today tested positive for Covid-19, coming down with the virus roughly a week after the president ended isolation for his own rebound case. Biden had tested negative for Covid on Monday during her regular testing cadence, her communications director Elizabeth Alexander announced in a statement today. But the first lady began developing cold-like systems later Monday evening, when she checked again and a PCR test returned positive results. — NBA won’t play on Election Day: The National Basketball Association won’t host games on Election Day this year in an effort to increase voter turnout, the organization announced today. In the months before Election Day — which is on Tuesday, Nov. 8 — teams will distribute information about the voting process and registration in their respective states. — Former Rep. T.J. Cox arrested by FBI in California: The FBI arrested former one-term Democratic Rep. T.J. Cox on dozens of charges related to financial fraud , according to public records with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. The arrest took place around 8:30 a.m. at the federal courthouse in Fresno, Calif. A statement from the Justice Department said the former congressman was charged with “15 counts of wire fraud, 11 counts of money laundering, one count of financial institution fraud, and one count of campaign contribution fraud.” Cox came to Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave, defeating Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) in a battleground district. He lost his 2020 rematch with Valadao by about 1,500 votes.
| | PLAYING DIRTY — As the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament prepared for its launch this year, it quietly contracted the public relations giant Edelman for help, write Hailey Fuchs and Daniel Lippman. The relationship, which ended in March, was never filed with the Department of Justice under foreign lobbying rules. Instead, it was done through subsidiaries — marketing agency United Entertainment Group and golf marketing firm Performance54. The arrangement illustrates the degree to which LIV Golf has been able to lean on establishment institutions and professionals even amid a controversial rollout of a tour that has roiled professional golf and captured lawmakers’ attention in Washington. Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary in the Bush White House, has done public relations work for LIV, and Trump has offered his own endorsement of the tour — by holding an event at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club in late July. Trump National Doral will also host the tour in October. In recent weeks, controversy around the LIV golf series increased after a number of family members of 9/11 victims urged Trump to cancel the scheduled tournament at his New Jersey golf club due to the tour’s Saudi backing. They noted Trump had previously cast blame on Saudi Arabia for the terrorist attacks and that it was “incomprehensible to us that a former president of the United States would cast our loved ones aside for personal financial gain.”
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Silvio Berlusconi in 2018. | Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images | COMEBACK KID — As a billionaire property tycoon, media magnate and three-time prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi’s career has already spanned decades. In recent years, however, his profile has been much diminished, writes Hannah Roberts . Thanks to illness, he has often appeared at party events by video link, and was banned from public office in Italy for four years after a tax fraud conviction. Yet now 85, when most people his age would be putting their feet up, the former Italian prime minister has decided to stand for election. “That way everyone would be happy,” he told Rai radio with his inimitable self-assurance. Bar a miracle, the election on Sept. 25 is likely to produce a triumphant right-wing coalition, with Berlusconi as the kingmaker, buying him a position of influence for the next five years. Not so long ago, it seemed Berlusconi’s political career was behind him, destroyed by the so-called bunga bunga scandal, in which witnesses described orgies at his lavish villa outside Milan, and his fraud conviction. But now, after some time on the sidelines, Berlusconi is back. Read the full story here.
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90 percent The amount of Russian visas Finland’s government will slash due to Moscow’s ongoing war on Ukraine . Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that starting from September, Finland would accept only 10 percent of visa applications by Russian tourists. This means Finland will accept only around 100 visa applications daily, compared with around 1,000 successful applications per day presently. |
| | | FROM THE HEALTH DESK — It’s no secret that people who live in low-income, largely minority neighborhoods have lots of health problems and an overlapping set of social challenges. Or that navigating health and social services is often an aggravating, alienating, bureaucratic maze, Joanne Kenen, Commonwealth Fund journalist-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, emails Nightly. The Health Hub of Virginia Commonwealth University in the East End of Richmond aims to address those problems, with an array of health, community and social services in one bright, airy space. It’s part of a growing movement to co-locate and connect various health and social services — to address “social determinants of health,” factors like homelessness, joblessness and poor education. In March, Biden pledged $50 million to pilot programs that are doing exactly what VCU has modeled — providing services in “non-traditional settings like libraries, community centers, schools, and homeless shelters.” Next door to VCU’s Health Hub is a grocery store, planted in what had been a “food desert,” that was started and remains subsidized by a local philanthropist. Above are some subsidized housing units. Nearby, a center that trains culinary workers. The hope is that this sort of one-stop shopping can provide a model for places around the country that are in need of more social services. “If someone comes along for one thing, there’s a good chance they’ll need other services too,” said K.J. Ricasata, who coordinates the Hub’s programming. “Which is why it’s very important for us to get people in the door because when we can sit down and have a conversation with you, where we can kind of suss out, oh, you might benefit from this, from this, from this.” The Hub has also become a venue for research — with the proviso that researchers have to give to the community, as well as take, said Camille Burnett of VCU’s Office of Institutional Equity, Effectiveness and Success. And it’s a training ground. So much of U.S. health care education still takes place in hospitals — even though so much sickness begins in communities. At the Hub, Kimberly Battle, who teaches at VCU’s School of Nursing, has nursing students, community health students and advanced nurse practitioners come through. Next door is The Market at 25th, a full-service grocery store with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, said Steve Markel, the businessman and Richmond native who got it built. Plus, he notes, the market has created 75 jobs — including for some people who had a long history of unemployment or had spent time in prison. He knows that healthy food and one promising store isn’t all that it will take to change a neighborhood after three or four generations of poverty and neglect. But it’s a start. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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