Welcome back, I’m Abby Livingston, anchoring The Best & The Brightest in the wake of a surprisingly bad election night for Republicans. Of course, it shouldn’t have been a surprise: Despite the relentless polling on the gloomy national mood, and the rising dissatisfaction with Joe Biden and Democrats, it turned out voters weren’t particularly thrilled with their Republican options, either—especially when abortion access was on the ballot.

In fact, as Democratic strategist and data consultant Tom Bonier told me, it’s incredible how much the Dobbs backlash has been underweighted by the media, and by Republicans, in their predictive models and political analysis. (You can read the toplines from that conversation, below, or the full interview here.)

Plus, for tonight’s main event, don’t miss my partner Teddy Schleifer’s remarkable reporting on Sam Altman and the Silicon Valley billionaires feeling out Dean Phillips as their potential Democratic alternative to the man in the White House. If they open the floodgates, his fledgling campaign could be fully funded overnight.

But first, a note from Tina Nguyen in Washington…

• Climbing Johnson’s Ladder: When we last checked in with new House Speaker Mike Johnson, he had been revealing his proposals to keep the government open by offering moderate Republicans their priorities, but with hardliner twists: funding Israel aid by slashing the I.R.S. budget, say, or tying Ukraine aid to increased border spending. His latest proposed magic trick is to pass “laddered” continuing resolutions, by passing four individual appropriations bills instead of a clean CR that tabled the ongoing debate to January. Johnson may have thought he was being slick, but nobody seems fooled by him crushing moderate pills and putting them in Freedom Caucus ice cream. (And, like everything else, it’s dead on arrival in the Senate.) Anyway, so far, the tactic hasn’t shaken his constituents’ faith in him. “Mike has some leeway and a nice honeymoon,” said one Republican lobbyist close with the Freedom Caucus-plus members. “There’s a pretty high level of feeling of goodwill towards him for now.”

  But it’s not clear whether indulging in so-called “based” tactics will sustain the goodwill with moderates or whether the hardliners will accept any perceived concessions in order to keep the government functioning. As of Wednesday, the two wings are deadlocked, not just over the different approaches to the CR, but even over basics like a housing and transportation funding bill, hardly a positive sign for a conference that has much harder work ahead. —Tina Nguyen

The full interview is online, but here are his top-line thoughts on what went down last night:

• Dobbs, Dobbs, Dobbs: Bonier told me that last year’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has had a stunning impact on voting patterns, and the trend only improves for his party as the reality of this decision sets in. “I don’t see anything close to it,” he said. “There’s no issue you can point to that has had this direct and significant of an impact on candidate performance, and on the outcome of partisan races more so than abortion rights.”

• Don’t rely just on polls: Bonier noted that there is too much reliance only on polls, whereas there are other measures of voter enthusiasm that are predictive. “We over-calibrate the polls. We don’t pay enough attention to some of the data elements that focus on actions taken, like voter registration data, early vote, actual turnout data from the campaigns, that sort of thing, fundraising data.”

• Polls are not election results: The recent New York Times-Siena poll, which shows Trump beating Biden in a series of swing states, has unsettled the entire Democratic establishment, and for good reason. Bonier told me had no issue with the methodology or quality of that poll. But he did admonish that the political class stop treating polls as actual election results. “If we were taking it only in the context of what it is, that would be one thing,” he said. “But the reaction to these polls in general, is as if we are looking at actual election results and as if the race has already been won or lost,” he added, “that’s a problem.”

• Trump is an agent of analytical chaos: Bonier pointed out that the shocking election nights began in 2016, when Trump confounded the hell out of the political class and won the presidency. Only a few elections since then have matched prior predictions. “The extent to which he has broken so much of our ability to analyze and predict electoral outcomes is based on our ability to compare to past precedent. And Donald Trump has broken so many of these precedents. And not just him as an individual but the outcomes of his presidency—the Dobbs decision being one of them—where we are operating largely without precedent,” he added. “Or at least without a precedent that hews closely enough to what we are experiencing now to be particularly useful in accurately predicting electoral outcomes.”

Altman, over the last 18 months or so, has ascended from mere Silicon Valley celebrity into a new stratosphere in the culture, cheerily proselytizing the A.I. revolution to regulators in Washington. All the while, he has refrained from speaking publicly about his own political plots. But behind the scenes, the baby-faced former Y Combinator chief has recently made it clear to friends and Phillips aides that he is considering playing a major role in supporting Phillips’s presidential run over the next few months. (Altman, who is not yet ready to discuss his involvement publicly, declined my interview request.)

All throughout 2022, in conversations with friends in tech and politics, Altman became convinced that Biden could not win reelection—and, perhaps, might not even run. And so Altman convened a series of private gatherings, none of which was previously reported, centered on identifying and recruiting a viable Biden alternative who could prevent Trump’s return. Altman, I’m told, used some of his own money while also raising a little from like-minded friends in Silicon Valley, to finance focus groups and polling to ascertain how voters felt about Biden and Trump. It was a fairly small, informally organized effort, but it spoke to Altman’s brewing concerns—a sentiment that was validated over the weekend when The New York Times published a set of polls showing Biden losing to Trump in five key swing states, setting off another round of bed wetting in Washington.

Despite all of that, Altman and Phillips didn’t actually meet each other until relatively recently, when they were connected through Andrew Yang, an early Phillips backer, and Altman’s political adviser Scott Krisiloff. (Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign manager, Zach Graumann, is now reprising his role as a top adviser to Phillips.) But during their hour-long meet-up on Friday, Phillips and Altman talked about everything, from the best messaging around Biden’s poll numbers to whether Phillips has the infrastructure, in New Hampshire and elsewhere, needed to dethrone the incumbent president.

Phillips’s people seem to have gotten the impression over the last few weeks that Altman is fully on board—one Phillips campaign adviser told me that Altman would be “integral,” even “embedded” in the operation. But at this point, that strikes me as… a little wishful thinking. Altman, I’m told, hasn’t yet committed to anything beyond spending more time with Phillips over the coming weeks and giving his candidacy serious consideration. “Sam is intrigued,” said a person familiar with his thinking. “I don’t know what it will actually pan out into. Sam is very worried that Trump is going to get elected. That’s where he’s coming from.”

I’m a skeptic. Phillips, for his part, has quietly been shaking the money tree as best he can. On Thursday, just six days after launching his presidential bid, he touched down in San Francisco not just for a last-minute public event with the effervescent political café owner Manny Yekutiel, but also, I’ve learned, a fundraiser hosted by Anne Pedrero, an heir to the Cargill fortune who has known Phillips since 8th grade and also went to Brown with him. (Another Phillips friend from Brown is Uber C.E.O. Dara Khosrowshahi.) Between 40 and 50 people crowded into Pedrero’s home in Presidio Heights for a wine and cheese mixer that was originally planned as a fundraiser for Phillips’s congressional campaign but pivoted quickly into a presidential event. Steve Schmidt, the ex-Republican political consultant behind the Phillips bid, spoke at each event as a warm-up act.

Then it was on to Los Angeles, where Phillips did Real Time With Bill Maher and held two finance events over the weekend. Impressively, the first fundraiser attracted 90 people, on just a few days’ notice, to the backyard of Phillips’s cousin, Los Angeles real estate developer Bruce Karatz and his wife, socialite Lilly Tartikoff. (The event, however, only had a “suggested contribution,” according to the invite I saw, as low as $100.) On Sunday evening, about 60 people came to a Bel Air home for a similarly donation-optional fundraiser, an attendee told me. (One invite I saw featured Schmidt’s name and photo in almost the same size as Phillips’s, as if they were running mates, which will do little to tamp down the suspicion among Phillips critics that this campaign is as much about the former McCain consultant as it is about the presidential candidate.) On Monday, he flew back across the country for another fundraiser in New York. 

Campaign aides declined to say how much these four events actually raised, although one insisted they had “eight figures in commitments across the spectrum in these fundraising meetings this weekend.” To execute high-dollar fundraisers for him, Phillips made a nontraditional choice in hiring Amanda Wurtz, a consultant in Greenwich who has worked in the family-office industry for the last decade.

Among the topics in Phillips’s stump speeches at these events has been artificial intelligence, as in: how A.I. can maybe help a scrappy candidate make a dent in the race with less money, perhaps via campaign policy research, for instance. That subject, surprisingly, didn’t come up when he sat down privately with the C.E.O. of the most important A.I. company today. 

Landing Altman would nevertheless be a coup. Altman has innumerable wealthy contacts—a Rolodex that’s a veritable who’s who of Silicon Valley—and I have no doubt that he and his friends could raise an easy $20 million or $30 million for that in-development super PAC. Altman has a reputation as a man in a hurry, famous among his peers for his responsiveness and boyish charm and good-guy reputation. He has indisputable credibility in the industry—which is why I was so interested last year when I was made aware of Altman’s flirtations with non-Biden candidates. 

Phillips isn’t, of course, his first choice. After Trump’s win in 2016, Altman famously went on a road trip to talk to Trump voters; more recently, he has also explored supporting potential Republican rivals who could primary Trump, such as Will Hurd. Earlier this year, I’m told that Altman—like a bunch of other rich Democrats—even made a last-ditch effort to call around to various, more established Democratic officeholders he knew, trying to convince them to toss their hat in the ring. None of that landed.

Alas, this might not either. Altman didn’t know Phillips before a few months ago, but Altman’s recent political advisers, Scott Krisiloff and his brother, Matt, have gotten wired into the campaign and are spending a good amount of personal time helping to organize events and donors on Phillips’s behalf. And perhaps some additional startup capital from Altman is the logical next step. After all, Sam Altman may not have chosen Dean Phillips, but sometimes in life, that is just who shows on your doorstep.