Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, your favorite media product. You know how they used to say that Seinfeld was a show about nothing? Well, the Surge is a newsletter about politics.

This week, another dangerous hurricane hit the mainland—and because we live in a normal and healthy country, this was a major part of the political discourse. Tim Walz got upbraided by his campaign for saying that the Electoral College sucks (KEEP AT IT, BUD), and a new book had details about the beloved friendship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Let’s begin, though, with this friggin’ guy, right?

By Jim Newell

We expect a swirl of misinformation from Trump and his usual courtiers. They had plenty to offer during the hurricanes of the past few weeks, playing games with relief efforts to test-run their rumor dissemination efforts ahead of the election. But these hurricanes also drove home to the Surge how irritating Elon Musk—a person so unfortunately wealthy that he can purchase whole communication platforms—is capable of getting in early November. It’s one thing when he reposts, say, a fake video of a dog whose head is where its tail should be with the commentary “Wow.” It’s another when he offers the same commentary in the heat of rescue and relief efforts following a natural disaster. And it will be quite another when Musk, an in-real-life leaping and whooping Trump surrogate, is amplifying every little rumor out there about patriotic Americans supposedly being turned away at polling places. Musk’s conversion of Twitter from a publicly traded company to a personal plaything could kick up so much more bile than we saw in 2020, and 2020 sucked.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, whose reelection chances weren’t of particular concern to Democrats, was only up a couple of points on her Republican challenger Eric Hovde in her internal polling. That’s the impression that the Cook Political Report analysts have, too, and they shifted their rating of the race from “lean Democrat” to “toss-up” this week. But who really cares about one measly Tammy Baldwin? (A lot of people; her seat is very important for Democrats.) Of even bigger concern was that the same internal polling showed Kamala Harris down 3 points in Wisconsin, a critical state in Harris’ Electoral College math. In general, the murmurs coming out of........

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