The wind is now at the Democrats' backs. The "red wave" everyone's been predicting for November may turn out to be no more than a pinkish ripple... or perhaps it won't even occur at all. Of course, we're still more than two months away from the election, and unexpected events could intervene, but right now everything seems to be moving in the Democrats' direction.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress have been chalking up a lot more wins than expected, which certainly helps. From finally getting serious about climate change to lowering prescription drug prices to boosting competitiveness with China to helping veterans sickened by burn pits, Congress has been on a roll of late. Gas prices have dropped $1.20 over the course of the summer, and are continuing to fall. Inflation may have peaked. And today, Joe Biden announced that up to $20,000 in student loan debt (for students who qualified for Pell grants) will be forgiven. Biden promised a lot during his campaign, and he's now delivering on major portions of his agenda. Democrats aren't seen as powerless to get much of anything done anymore, which is a big shift in attitude from where we were at the beginning of the summer.

Democratic voters are motivated, too. Turnout has been up in key races. Rather than being lackluster, Democrats are voting in droves. The trend is the exact opposite of what was expected -- that Republicans, being the "out" party, would be far more motivated to vote. So far, that just isn't happening. The opposite is.

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President Joe Biden has always been a rather reluctant reformer of higher education, which is somewhat odd considering his wife works as a community college teacher. For example, during the 2020 Democratic primary race progressives such as Bernie Sanders were arguing for tuition-free college at all state-run colleges and universities. Biden was far more restrained, and said he favored only tuition-free college for two years of community college, which would have left out state university students entirely. The tuition-free community college idea was later included in Biden's Build Back Better plan, but that was before it hit the brick wall named "Joe Manchin." The concept didn't survive in the limited Inflation Reduction Act at all. Also during the primary campaign, the progressives were pushing for either outright cancellation of all student debt or forgiving at least $50,000 of debt per student. Biden was never on board with such sweeping proposals, and countered with his own idea of perhaps forgiving $10,000 in student debt. Which is what might just get announced tomorrow.

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There's a special House election happening tomorrow in upstate New York that many are closely watching as a possible indicator of the strength of the abortion issue in the 2022 campaign season. The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has shifted the political landscape for the midterms, but nobody really knows to what extent this shift will manifest itself. The New York special election is going to be a test of this.

It won't be a definitive answer, though, much like the surprise vote in Kansas to preserve abortion rights wasn't definitive either. In most places, abortion won't be directly on the ballot in such a fashion; the voters will instead be voting for candidates for Congress and statewide office, and abortion will only be part of the puzzle.

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President Joe Biden had a very good week the previous week, and he followed that up with another good week this week as well. A bill which is going to become one of the signature pieces of his presidential legacy passed the House last Friday, and on Tuesday Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Perhaps we should call it "Biden's Obamacare," because it really is just as impressive a piece of legislation.

We'll get to touting the individual reforms and new projects this bill will usher in later, though (down in the talking points), so we're only going to briefly mention it here at the top of the column. Biden -- wisely -- has scheduled a much bigger celebration of the new law for early September, after Labor Day and when more people are paying attention to the midterm campaign, so he'll have one more victory lap to take soon.

The news from Trumpland continued to spew forth this week, both fast and furious (in both senses of that word) -- so much news that we're going to just quickly run down this week's developments in shorthand fashion here:

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I've resisted writing about it until now (mostly because everyone else was doing such a swell job of it) but it now seems almost obligatory to chime in on Liz Cheney's next move. What everyone's been talking about, of course, was her concession speech after spectacularly losing the Wyoming Republican primary to keep her House seat. In it, Cheney promised she wasn't done on the national stage yet, which most people interpreted as at least dipping a toe in the waters of a presidential run. Which brings us to the question of what purpose she would hope to accomplish by such a run.

She's not going to get elected president. That much is just about absolutely certain. She could run as a Republican against Trump (and the rest of the field), and she would lose in the primaries -- again, probably pretty spectacularly. She could run as an independent, and she would again lose (in the general election), although she may prove to be a "spoiler" who throws the race in one direction or another (such as H. Ross Perot or Ralph Nader). That would be the most she could even hope to achieve. Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote, which won him exactly zero electors, after all.

But maybe that's the point. Because Cheney's campaign would be nothing short of an all-out crusade. She would be running not to win but for the specific purpose of denying Donald Trump the presidency. That would really be the only plank in her campaign platform. Oh sure, she'd stand foursquare for all the things Republicans used to deeply care about (or at least say they did) and she'd give lots of optimistic statements about her chances of winning, but all this would be largely immaterial. Her campaign slogan would still essentially be: "Stop Trump!"

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I try not to write about the same subject two days in a row as a general rule, but sometimes circumstances demand it. Yesterday, I wrote a speculative article about the Alaskan primaries and special election for their sole House seat, and in it I made a pretty obvious assumption that turned out not to be true. So I thought the subject needed revisiting.

I wrote about three of the races in Alaska yesterday -- Lisa Murkowski's Senate race, and the two elections (one special election for the remainder of the term, and also the primary election for the full term beginning next January) for the state's sole House seat. Senator Murkowski not only easily made it onto the general election ballot (the top four vote-getters will advance) but actually is in first place, beating the Trump acolyte by over five points (note: all results here are "as of this writing," with only an estimated 70 percent of the vote counted). This bodes well for her in November, obviously.

But the truly stunning results came out of the two House races (for the same seat). In the "top 4" primary, Democrat Mary Peltola currently stands four points ahead of Republican Sarah Palin, and over eight points up on Republican Nick Begich. Tara Sweeney is currently in fourth place, but she has such a small percentage of the vote (3.7 percent) that it's conceivable (although admittedly unlikely, as the fifth-place candidate only has 0.6 percent) that she might not make it onto the November ballot. The upshot of all this? Yes, you heard that correctly -- a Democrat is leading the race for Don Young's House seat in Alaska.

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Alaska is trying out two new ballot innovations today, which is further complicated by the fact that voters will be using each new innovation once -- for the same office. Representative Don Young died suddenly earlier this year, which means a special election to fill the remainder of his term is happening today as well as a primary election for the term which begins next January. There was an earlier primary for the special election, which was the first time Alaskans used their new "top 4" open-primary system (sometimes called a "jungle primary"). And today's special election will be the first time they'll vote using a "ranked-choice" ballot, where voters don't just get one static vote, instead they get to list the candidates in whatever ranking they wish: first choice, second choice, etc....

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Rudy Giuliani, one-time self-styled "America's mayor," is now the target of a criminal investigation in Atlanta, Georgia. He's not alone in this either, since already at least 17 other people have been informed that they too are targets of the investigation into exactly what happened after the 2020 election. Included in those 17 are two Republican state senators and the head of the state's Republican Party. The investigation is fairly wide-ranging, looking not only into Donald Trump and his minions trying to get every Georgia Republican holding office from the governor on down to somehow throw out enough votes for Joe Biden to allow Trump to proclaim he won, but also into the "fake electors" scheme where a group of Republicans tried to defraud the United States Congress and the American people into believing that Georgia had officially gone for Trump (when it hadn't). That's a lot to cover and it is why so many people are now targets.

Rudy played a principal part in the fake electors scheme, as he devilishly went down to Georgia (sorry, couldn't resist that one...) to push already-debunked conspiracy theories about suitcases stuffed with illicit votes for Joe Biden and the supposedly-suspicious behavior of the vote-counters. He presented this information (which, again, had by this point already been fully debunked by the release of the full and uncut video footage of the room in question) to Republican members of the state legislature, in an effort to get them to vote to just completely ignore the election's actual result and instead declare the fake electors were the real ones. Rudy wasn't just in on the fraud, he was a prime instigator of it, in other words.

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The irony is delicious, we cannot deny it. A man who rose to power by leading chants of: "Lock her up!" against his political opponent (for mishandling classified documents -- a man who later signed a law making the offense a felony with up to five years' prison time) is now in the process of being hoist by his own petard. So it's been a rather schadenfreude-y kind of week.

We have to admit we were a little taken aback at what seemed to be an invasion into the regularly-scheduled start of the August "Silly Season" in politics (where Congress scarpers off to sunny shores while political reporters are left scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with something to write about) by a week that seems to have been taken straight from the middle of Donald Trump's presidency and plonked down now, just to liven up August of 2022. Remember those agonizingly-long four years? When one week's news contained so many revelations and outrages that it was just hard to keep up with it all? That's what this week felt like, at least, to us. More than a little déjà-vu-esque in other words.

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Sorry, there will be no column today. Our power was off from 8:30 in the morning until the end of the day, so I had no internet access at all. I'll be spending tonight getting tomorrow's column ready (by raking through the week's news) so check back tomorrow when (hopefully) regular service will resume. My apologies for the interruption....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant