There were supposed to be three big political stories this week, but in the end two of them turned out to be duds. Donald Trump testified at his New York fraud trial, but without video or audio recordings of him answering questions under oath, the impact was significantly lessened. The other Republican presidential candidates (the five who qualified, at any rate) met for their third Republican debate, but it mostly turned out to be a snoozefest.

Tuesday night, however, more than lived up to expectations. The off-year elections which were held ended up as a big night for Democrats almost across the board. Put quite simply: abortion rights won. Big time. Everywhere.

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So last night we got the third Republican debate and it wasn't even worth taking notes for. I kept thinking to myself that it was the most pointless exercise in politics around, really. To be fair, with fewer candidates on the stage, they each got plenty of screen time to talk, there were only one or two dustups where people talked over each other (when Vivek Ramaswamy tried to bully Nikki Haley, to no avail), and the subjects they discussed were indeed substantive ones. It was a real presidential debate, in other words -- nowhere near as much of a circus sideshow as the previous two.

But the most notable aspect of it was the sheer meaninglessness of it all. Donald Trump was not on the stage, and he is consistently polling in the high 50s among Republican voters. This means at this point he's got an absolute lock on the Republican nomination, with roughly two months to go before the first caucus or primary is held. Unless one of the candidates from last night catches fire in a big way, it's hard to argue anything other than that it is all but inevitable that Trump will win the nomination. And nothing anybody did last night seemed like it was nearly enough to catch any kind of fire with the GOP base voters.

So instead of a microanalysis of sheer meaninglessness, I decided to write today about the rest of the field, which grew in two significant ways today. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced he would not be running for re-election (which just about guarantees a pickup for the Republicans in the Senate). And Jill Stein announced she would be the Green Party's presidential nominee this time around.

Manchin is not exactly being coy about his plans, either. He is making his bid for the presidential nomination from the "No Labels" effort -- which has tens of millions of dollars behind it and is already getting itself on state ballots in multiple states. Manchin wasted no time in making this pivot, as evidenced by his statement of retirement:

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What was previously merely obvious has now become downright undeniable: the right to have an abortion is the most potent political issue around right now. When women's reproductive rights are on the ballot, it is a winning issue. Every time. This is going to help Democrats and continue to hurt Republicans for as long as women's rights are not universally protected in every state in the Union.

Looking back, it is rather amusing now to remember that right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many political pundits were predicting that the issue would fade so quickly in the public eye that it probably wouldn't even resonate in last year's midterms (held only a few months after the decision was handed down). "Voters have short attention spans," they told each other, "so by November everyone will have forgotten all about it -- or it won't change their vote, at the very least."

They were wrong.

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And then there were six... or five, really. The Republicans just announced who will be allowed on their debate stage tomorrow night, and they have once again winnowed their field. This time around, only six presidential candidates made the cut: Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, and Tim Scott. However, Trump has already said he's not going to show up, which will leave only five on the debate stage. Asa Hutchinson did not qualify for his second straight debate (making me wonder why he's still in the race), and this time around Doug Burgum also got shut out (which he is not happy about). Mike Pence completely took himself out of the running last week, so the debate field has shrunk down to manageable proportions. Each candidate should get a decent amount of speaking time with only five of them on the stage, to put this slightly differently. And the moderators won't have to waste time on the longest-of-the-longshots.

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This week is going to be chock full of big political stories, including Donald Trump testifying in his fraud trial in New York today and the third Republican debate on Wednesday. But today I thought it was worth taking a look at the other big political story of the week, since tomorrow's elections have several interesting possibilities that could reverberate beyond the borders of the states where they are held. Three states in particular are going to be impactful, no matter what the outcomes may be: Mississippi, Virginia, and Ohio.

Mississippi

While there are other governor's races worth paying attention to tomorrow night (Kentucky in particular, where a popular Democratic governor is being challenged by a Republican who is trying to paint him as Joe Biden's best buddy), the one in Mississippi is likely going to be the most interesting.

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Republicans are in disarray. Let's start with that this week, shall we?

This week in the Senate, Republicans spent five whole hours ripping into one of their own. A group of GOP senators tried to force the hand of Senator Tommy Tuberville over his petulant hold on fast-tracking all military promotions, but to no avail.

The House, meanwhile, voted for an Israel military aid bill that is going nowhere in the Senate because (among other reasons) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is diametrically opposed to the strategy.

The House also took the time to vote down a censure of a Democrat that drew Marjorie Taylor Greene's wrath, but also voted to let George Santos keep his seat. On both votes, there were significant numbers of Republicans crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats.

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Senator Tommy Tuberville has never worn a uniform (unless you count a football jersey). And yet he feels he knows the United States military better than those who are serving or have served. In particular, he feels that his blanket hold on military promotions is an acceptable political-theater tactic, no matter the impact on people's lives or on the readiness of our military. Last night, members of his own party publicly took him to task for his tantrum, but they didn't succeed in changing his mind. The next step would be for the Senate to vote to essentially ignore Tuberville's parliamentary tactic and get on with what used to be a routine and non-controversial duty of the Senate: approving high-level military promotions. But to achieve this would require 60 votes, meaning at least nine Republicans would have to vote to shut down Tuberville's obstructionism.

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[I begin with a technical note. I couldn't use the obvious title for today's article, since Politico already ran this story using the go-to phrase: "Spoiler Alert?" and I didn't want to be a copycat....]

Polling for the likeliest of general election matchups this far out -- almost exactly one year until people actually get to vote for president next November -- cannot be seen as definitive, but it also cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant (since it's pretty obvious at this point that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are going to wind up winning the two major parties' nominations). But it won't actually be just a two-man contest, since there will be other names on the ballot, in what is likely to be enough states to make a big difference. Both Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Cornel West have announced they are going to be running as independents, and who knows who the Green Party or the nascent No Labels effort will decide to nominate? At the very least, there may be four names for voters to choose from. Perhaps even five or six.

Most of the polling to date hasn't reflected this -- at least not yet. But the polls which do exist so far show that Kennedy, in particular, could be a spoiler on the order of H. Ross Perot -- who, in his first third-party bid for the presidency in 1992 raked in a whopping 19 percent of the popular vote. That is more than just a marginal effect, obviously.

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Boo!

It is time once again, goblins and ghouls, to offer up some frightening political horror stories for both sides of the aisle. As in years past, we have brewed up a witches' cauldron of fearful spine-tingling tales to scare the pants right off you, no matter where you dwell on the political spectrum.

And, as promised, there will be pumpkins! We have carved two jack o'lanterns to fit each chilling tale, although we do admit that the second one was rather hard to think up an actual image for (we went with California, although upon reflection maybe we should have carved a train... or a snarling dog's face...).

As I've stated for the past few years, these days it is actually kind of hard to dream up scenarios that are both more frightening and more outlandish than what we now see on a regular basis from Washington D.C. But we did our best, so please sit back, ignore the sound of chains clanking and banshees screaming, and peruse this year's terrible tales.

Republican Nightmare -- The Curse

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson makes it through his first few weeks mainly by keeping his caucus happy by passing all sorts of far-right bills (that will go nowhere in the Senate). But then the budget deadline nears.

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Mike Pence surprised everyone this weekend, when he abruptly announced he was ending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination during a speech Pence gave in Las Vegas. The surprise wasn't that Pence's presidential ambitions were doomed -- anyone with half a brain could see that from the get-go -- but that Pence had actually realized it himself, this early in the process. Personally, I knew from the day he announced that Mike Pence was never going to win the Republican nomination -- not even if Donald Trump had suddenly decided not to run. Even without Trump in the race, Pence would still have been doomed. His flavor of Republicanism is a thing of the past, he has an incredibly bland and smarmy personality (he really deserves to have Trump hit him for being "sanctimonious," much more than Ron DeSantis), and he enraged the MAGA crowd by not following the Dear Leader's order to somehow wave a magic wand and overturn the results of the 2020 election on January 6th. Add all of that up and it equals a big defeat from the Republican voting base, plain and simple. So watching the coverage of the development on yesterday's morning political-chatfest shows wasn't any real surprise (other than the early timing of it). What was a surprise (for me, at least) this Sunday morning was to see Arnold Schwarzenegger being interviewed (for some unfathomable reason) on NBC's Meet The Press.

Since I am already in a rather fantastical frame of mind, trying to dream up two Hallowe'en nightmares for tomorrow's column (and carve pumpkins for both!), and after reading a quick review of Arnie's appearance this morning, I started pondering alternate political universes. So you'll have to excuse me for the purely speculative nature of today's column. Here is my flight of fancy in a nutshell: consider, if you will, what would have happened if Schwarzenegger had been eligible to run for president.

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