Coverage of the Democratic primary for the highly important Michigan governor's race -- including here at The Intercept -- has portrayed it as a two-way contest between centrist Gretchen Whitmer and a progressive, Abdul El-Sayed.
Yet a third candidate has come from nowhere, having spent millions of his own money on TV ads calling himself the Bernie Sanders of the race. And all of a sudden he started polling first in the race!
So we took a closer look at the candidate, whose name is Shri Thanedar, and what we found is just completely bonkers. When he met with consultants early last year before launching his bid, he was still trying to figure whether he should run as a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent. He told them he'd take whatever positions they thought would help him win.
It's everything people assume about politicians, multiplied a 1,000 times over.
This story, by Zaid Jilani, is just wild.
It also, I suppose, tells you something about the energy on the left that he decided to cloak himself in Bernie garb and is first in the polls as a result.
A story that we reported at the end of December is taking on new relevance now that Scott Pruitt is in the barrel over his ethics problems. If you remember, we busted him taking a sweetheart mortgage from a banker friend, and then later hiring that friend at the EPA when his buddy was banned from the banking industry. If you're an assignment editor or cable producer, go ahead and just re-do this story.
Speaking of re-doing a story, the Daily Mail published an "EXCLUSIVE" this week that was mostly a rewrite of a previous Jared Kushner story of ours. In some cases, they didn't even rewrite, and used the exact same language we did. Erik Wemple at the Washington Post caught them.
A postmortem on the Marie Newman-Dan Lipinski race: No Labels, an avowedly centrist group backed by wealthy donors, dumped a million dollars into the contest at the last moment. I got ahold of private emails explaining the rationale for the intervention: Bernie Sanders had endorsed Newman, which proved she was a fringe candidate who had to be beaten.
I interviewed her for the Young Turks to get her reaction. You can watch that here.
And
Cynthia Nixon, along with a slew of other primary challenges, is already making a mark in New York.
Andrew Cuomo, hoping to salvage his career, engineered a flip this week of a bloc of Democrats who had been caucusing with Republicans.
But as Dave Dayen reports, not only was it cynical, it comes too late for student lending reform this year.
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