This Washington Post story is full of examples of how extreme rhetoric turns on the spigot of small donations. This isn’t surprising; as I’ve noted, in the days of direct mail, consultants also understood that extreme rhetoric was a key to unlocking donations (Richard Vigurie, the architect of direct mail fundraising, told Jimmy Carter it would never work for him because he was too moderate).

The incendiary emails are part of a concerted strategy that has allowed the campaign to erase a financial lead that President Biden’s campaign had opened up in recent months, according to people close to the former president who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the campaign. But experts in small-dollar fundraising say the solicitations are aggressive even by the standards of Trump’s frequently hyperbolic and inflammatory language.

“I think those are clearly an escalation over and above some incredibly heated rhetoric and some irresponsible rhetoric we’ve seen over time,” said Matthew Hindman, a professor at George Washington University who studies digital emails. “The fact that those messages continue to be sent out tell us about something. The rhetoric has been driven by user response and user donations. If this extreme rhetoric continues to generate funds, it’s going to be rewarded with an even more extreme response next time.”…

Aides are planning an aggressive push around the sentencing, advisers said, betting his supporters will be especially motivated by a potential prison sentence….

One person with knowledge of the pitches said donations increase any time Trump seems to be under attack or argues that he is being treated unfairly. That’s particularly true when he is generating wall-to-wall news coverage during an event like the hush money trial in New York.

Some recent pitches have raised eyebrows even among longtime Trump observers and advisers. Emails falsely claimed that the FBI wanted to shoot Trump during a court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida for classified documents he allegedly unlawfully retained after leaving office. “Put Biden on Trial,” one read…

“Rhetorical gimmicks like this poison the well for every other Republican trying to raise money online,” one GOP consultant said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It burns out small-dollar donors. The Trump campaign is printing money on this, but when you’re already talking about the death penalty in June, what are you going to say in October?”

Hindman said the campaign is unlikely to dial back its rhetoric as long as the money was flowing.

Nevada Independent:

 A Clark County judge has dismissed the charges filed against the six Nevada Republicans who submitted an invalid slate of electoral votes for former President Donald Trump in 2020, ruling that the county was not the appropriate jurisdiction for the case. 

At a Friday morning hearing in Clark County District Court, Judge Mary Kay Holthus said she was unconvinced by state prosecutors’ arguments that Clark County was the appropriate county in which to hear the case. The electors’ attorneys had argued a more appropriate venue would be in Carson City, where the illegitimate signing ceremony took place, or in Douglas County, where the fake elector documents were originally mailed from. 

Clark County is more Democratic, meaning a jury could be less favorable to the Republican defendants.

“You have literally, in my opinion, a crime that has occurred in another jurisdiction,” Holthus said. “It’s so appropriately up north and so appropriately not here.”

Immediately after the ruling, Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said the “judge got it wrong” and that his office will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court. A trial set for January has been vacated pending the high court’s ruling.

The state is unable to refile the case up north because a three-year statute of limitations expired in December.

WaPo:

Arizona delegates to the Republican National Convention gathered this month in a Phoenix suburb, showing up to get to know each other and learn about their duties.

Part of the presentation included a secret plan to throw the party’s nomination of Donald Trump for president into chaos.

The instructions did not come from “Never Trumpers” hoping to stop the party from nominating a felon when delegates gather in Milwaukee next month. They instead came from avowed “America First” believers hatching a challenge from the far right — a plot to release the delegates from their pledge to support Trump, according to people present and briefed on the meeting, slides from the presentation and private messages obtained by The Washington Post.

The delegates said the gambit would require support from several other state delegations, and it wasn’t clear whether those allies had been lined up. One idea, discussed as attendees ate finger foods, was for co-conspirators to signal their allegiance to one another by wearing matching black jackets.

The exact purpose of the maneuver was not clear — and left some delegates puzzled and alarmed. People familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said perhaps the intent was to block an undesirable running mate. Most of the dozen GOP officials or activists interviewed by The Post even ventured that the aim may have been to substitute former national security adviser Michael Flynn for Trump if the former president is sentenced to prison time. Among some on the far right, suspicions have intensified that the former president has surrounded himself with too many advisers beholden to the “deep state.”

New Common Ground Democracy essay with this subtitle: “The likelihood that extremist parties on the right and left will gain at the expense of the middle illustrates with hyper-polarization necessitates electoral reform.“

The essay begins: “France is facing a political crisis that it could have avoided if it had adopted an electoral system of the type advocated by its most prominent theorist of electoral system design, the eighteenth-century mathematician and philosopher Marquis de Condorcet.”

WaPo roundup.