Talking Points Memo

TPM is shipping up to Boston! For our final on-the-road event of 2025, we're joining our friends at STAT News for an evening of conversation and drinks at Lamplighter Brewing Cambridge Crossing.

The night will begin with a discussion between TPM Founder Josh Marshall and STAT News co-founder Rick Berke. After that, there will be an open bar and a chance to chat with staff from both TPM and STAT.

We hope you'll join us! Capacity is limited so please get your tickets as soon as possible if interested. 

Date 

September 25th, 2025

Time 

6:30 - 9:30pm EDT

Discussion will begin at 6:45

Open bar all night. Behave yourselves.

Location 

Lamplighter Brewing Co. - CX

110 North First Street Cambridge, MA 02141

Ticket Information

$28.52 (inclusive of tax and fees)

From time to time we hear feedback that takes the following general form:
 

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You get the idea. We're approaching our 25th Anniversary here at TPM, and something we're very cognizant of is adapting to the times and meeting our audience where they are, without abandoning what works. The Editors' Blog — akin to TPM's evolutionary brainstem, the forerunner, the OG — is still going strong. Complementing the incisive, original analysis and commentary in the Ed Blog is the original reporting from our editorial staff — something that has differentiated TPM from so many other digital media outlets over the last two-and-half decades. 

But not everybody clicks over to websites these days, which is a lamentable fact but a fact nonetheless. So we have newsletters like David Kurtz's Morning Memo, a morning round up of all the most important political news you'll need to start your day, and Nicole Lafond's Where Things Stand, a nightly evaluation on the day that was and where it leaves us. Because in our heart of hearts, we all long for the days of outlandish magazine budgets, we publish The Weekender, which is has more of a leisurely, laid back magazine vibe to get you from Saturday to Monday, when we all get up and enter the Terrordome that is American Politics once again.

We're told that in 2025 media thrives off parasocial relationships, so every Wednesday The Josh Marshall Podcast featuring Kate Riga gives TPM aficionados the opportunity to hang with Josh and Kate who analyze and comment on the important goings-on in the political world. (After a summer hiatus, the pod returns August 20th—great time to check it out!)
 

There are people for whom the site, newsletters and podcasts are not enough. They crave even more. It is for these folks that we launched our events series. This year, we had live podcasts in Washington D.C. and Chicago. We have an event coming up in Boston, where we'll be partnering with STAT News. We've hosted a couple happy hours in New York and one in DC. And later this year, we'll be celebrating our 25th Anniversary, which is sure to be our biggest and best event yet.
 

You can read most of the site for free. You can sign up for the Morning Memo and Where Things Stand without being a member. You can listen to the podcast anywhere you get podcasts. But even though so much of what we offer is available to everyone, it is all made possible by members and reader contributions. We try not to be a strictly transactional operation. We hope people will support us because they can and because they want to, not because we force it. (We like to think we're doing a good job because our renewal rate is around 90%) So, we hope you'll support us and all the things we do. 
 

Here we go again.

Texas Democrats have fled the state to thwart a highly unusual mid-decade gerrymandering maneuver that state Republicans are attempting to pull off to increase their party's share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives ahead of next year's midterm elections and … stop me if you've heard this one before? Because nearly the exact same thing happened 22 years ago.

Referred to by TPM Editor-at-Large David Kurtz as the Great Texas Skedaddle of 2003, the story of how then-U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay broke with over a half century of precedent in spearheading the re-redistricting of Texas in a blatant Republican power grab for a handful of U.S. House seats (and mostly got away with it) is something of an ur text for TPM. As Josh Marshall explained in a 2021 blog post about yet another Texas legislative standoff: "What happened in 2003 in Texas was a preview, prologue to almost everything that would happen over the subsequent two decades. It presaged the debt ceiling hostage taking; it presaged Merrick Garland; and it presaged Donald Trump." Without an actual law mandating when redistricting must occur, precedent proved an insufficient bulwark to the ascendent view among Republicans like Delay that power was all that mattered.

Of course, when Democrats tried their own norm-breaking scheme — hightailing it out of state to block the redistricting measure — Delay called for them to be arrested and "insist[ed] that the Constitution be upheld." Using an early TPM coinage, all the way back in 2003, Josh Marshall called this a classic example of "up-is-downism."

We're now awash in up-is-downism and the notion that institutional norms can prevent abuses of power seems quaint if not naive. But in watching nearly the exact same scenario play out in Texas this week that we saw in 2003, there's something normalizing in the predictability of the playbook. We've been pointing to the direction the Republican Party has been trending for over 25 years. We not only understand this moment, but how we got to this moment. We think that is pretty valuable these days. We hope you do too!

NOT ALL HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

LAST CHANCE FOR 

If you've been reading TPM for awhile, you may already know that our organization can shift on a dime. We typically have around five reporters. (A few of our editors also write.) That means, unlike larger news organizations, we don't have people with particular beats. We don't have people who author a particular kind of story — no one who just writes breaking news or just writes features or just does a newsletter or a podcast. Everyone, at any moment, can pitch in with anything on any topic. 

Though it wasn't always the result of a conscious decision on the part of the editors, TPM has made use of this flexibility during this unprecedented time. We've reinvented our approach to the news repeatedly since August 2024, when our last Journalism Fund drive concluded, with our reporters working in different modes and in different styles across a wide range of topics to contend with a historic moment in American history.

As we reflect on the many ways TPM is unique during the journalism fund drive, I thought readers might enjoy a glimpse of how we see the journey we've traveled over the last year — in terms of what we understood ourselves to be providing to readers, and what we understood readers to need from us

Ahead of the election, we felt it was important to make clear the stakes. That meant less horserace-style journalism and more about what the Trump administration was making clear it intended to do. We warned about the coming attempt at denaturalizations, of military crackdowns against protesters, and of a Republican effort to lay the groundwork for claiming undocumented immigrants stole the election — a conspiracy theory the GOP didn't end up needing to make use of, given their comfortable margins in each swing state. We didn't totally eschew breaking news either — we, for instance, did exclusive reporting on the Trump campaign's anti-Haitian attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio and chronicled such daily occurrences as QAnon memes posted by Trump — but our focus was on making clear the ways in which we could already see Trump II would not simply be a repeat of Trump I. 

With Trump's November 2024 win, our understanding of what readers needed changed entirely. No one needed to know what could happen. It was happening. And it was happening extraordinarily quickly. We shifted to be an organization focused less on analysis, more on breaking news. We broke stories on the extremists and ideologues streaming into government; DOGE's attacks on the IRS, independent agencies and the courts; and Trump's flouting of Supreme Court precedent with waves of illegal firings. We chronicled individual developments as Congress and the Supreme Court acquiesced to Trump's efforts to elevate the executive branch over the others; Republicans' telegraphed (and ultimately realized) plan to cut health care after promising not to; and the administration shipped immigrants without due process to countries with which they had no connection. 

Now, another shift in how we approach our coverage is underway. Around May, we started to get the sense readers might be overwhelmed with the rapid-fire drumbeat of headlines. We can't blame them. DOGE, Trump's firings, the Supreme Court's carveouts for the administration on the shadow docket, the abuse of the immigration system, Congress' giveaway of its own power, the scandals du jour — there was a lot going on each day, and it was nearly impossible to keep track of it all. We haven't stopped trying to, but we've also made room, again, for pieces that step back and contextualize this moment — not warnings of the type we were publishing in late 2024, per se, but stories taking note that many of those things we warned about are now coming to pass — helping readers not to miss the forest for the trees. Many of our most-read stories capture moments that, in a way, are the tip of the iceberg. They describe something small that is indicative of something big, like JD Vance's speech to a right-wing think tank outlining his thoughts on who has "claim over America," or the ways in which the administration might spend Congress' dump truck of money for Trump's immigration policies, or the DeSantis administration's use of disaster preparedness resources for its new, performatively cruel immigrant detention camp. Each is a narrow story that speaks to a broader theme. 

When you support TPM, you are supporting a news organization that is small, but nimble. We can't cover everything. (Increasingly, nobody can.) But each day, we remain committed to providing readers with stories that can help them understand what's happening in a way that, we hope, meets their current need for information, satisfies their curiosity, and helps ground them in our member community. Over time, what readers need might change. But we pride ourselves on our ability to intuit, and adapt to, those changes.

- John Light (Executive Editor)