For us political junkies who crave not only a Harris-Walz White House victory on November 5, but keeping the Senate and winning back the House, I offer below an analysis of “Punchbowl News AM” published this morning (August 23) about the critical races being run by Democrats Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana. I’ve met both Senators and they are worthy of our financial support. They must win for Democrats to keep the Senate.

I have given financial support also to Colin Allred in Texas, Jackie Rosen in Nevada, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego in Arizona and, though he doesn’t really need it, my friend Adam Schiff in California.

My family and I are taking Michelle Obama’s inspirational advisory to heart – for everyone to do something going forward until election day – and that means giving financially to those campaigns that will be critically important to Democrats on November 5: phone banking, visiting Nevada or Arizona (for Californians), or other swing states to do whatever those state campaigns require of volunteers, and to be certain that everyone we know of voting age (family, friends and colleagues) are registered to vote and vote by mail or at the polls on election day.

Thankfully, the DNC and the Harris-Walz Campaign have hired thousands of lawyers in the swing states and across the nation to combat in the courts the MAGA Republican legal efforts to subvert the election by changing state election rules to favor Trump and Republicans, denying the vote to black and brown registered voters, and preparing for the day-after election Trump’s and his minions denial of Kamala’s victory, assuming that Trump loses the election, again.

Democracy and freedom really are on the ballot, and I hope that Democratic voters plus Independents and traditional Republicans, who have come to realize what is at stake and recognize Trump for the snake oil salesman and would-be autocrat that he is, will defy predictions of a close presidential election and produce a landslide for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz not only to keep the election-deniers to the minimum but to vanquish the criminal-Trump and Trumpism once and for all.

The following is the Punchbowl News AM report today of a conversation with Chuck Schumer at the convention:

“With West Virginia already flipping to the GOP, Republicans just need to win one more seat to retake the Senate majority. Their best pickup opportunities are in Montana and Ohio. But Republicans are also pouring millions into presidential battlegrounds like Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Democrats are defending seats.

Ticket-splitting: Democratic Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio can’t win their races without a massive chunk of so-called “ticket-splitters” — voters who choose former President Donald Trump in the presidential race and Tester or Brown in the Senate race.

As we’ve written before, this is an increasingly rare phenomenon. We asked Chuck Schumer how Tester and Brown could possibly win enough ticket-splitters to overcome the massive edge Republicans have in those states. Schumer said it’s up to the candidates themselves — and Harris — to not veer too far to the left:

“There’s a good chunk of Republicans — those who voted not for Trump but for Nikki Haley, and even before that [Ron] DeSantis — who really don’t like Trump. So as long as our presidential candidate, but also our Senate candidates, can convince them that they’re mainstream, not too far left, and they care about their state above all, they can get a lot of those votes.”

Plato warned that passivity and withdrawal from the political realm carry terrible risks: “The penalty that good [people] pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by [people] worse than themselves.”