Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes

Five days to November 3rd. Mark Blumberg spent 30 years in the criminal section of the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. He wrote the FBI's guidebook on voter suppression enforcement. He investigated and prosecuted constitutional violations, hate crimes, human trafficking, and public corruption in red states and blue states, rural areas and cities, for six different administ...

Seven days to November 3rd.  32 million people have already voted. Democrats have an 80% chance of winning the House and a 57% chance of winning the Senate. Only 53% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 say they're enthusiastic to vote this time, essentially a coin flip. The "give them more Trump" strategy has failed. So the administration is trying something else: pulling votes fr...

11 days to November 3rd.  Cisco Aguilar is the Secretary of State of Nevada and the Chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State. He is one of the people most directly in the crosshairs of everything this administration has thrown at state elections this cycle. This is his first extended public conversation about all of it. The short of it: there's frustration. "We're...

Over the course of the last week, Trump has had a remarkable number of incidents that raise serious questions about his mental state and physical health. He walked past his open limousine door and was turned around by a Secret Service agent while waving at no one. He tapped his right leg repeatedly in a pattern documented as a technique used by stroke recovery patients. Something visible below his...

14 days to November 3rd. Today is a deep dive into the most important Senate race in the country: Michigan. JD Vance spent the weekend in Michigan campaigning for Republican candidate Mike Rogers. While he was there he sat for a CBS town hall that was, by every political measure, his first real audition for a presidential run. He got questions about gas prices, corruption, and the Iran war. Grant...

17 days to the midterms. Eric Zuleger is reporting live from Tirana, Albania, where violent protests have been building for 139 days and escalated this week into what he calls the most violence he has ever seen in five years of living there. The backstory: Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama made backdoor deals with Jared Kushner's private equity firm Affinity Partners and Saudi royal money to s...

18 days to November 3rd. Two stories today, both of which tell you exactly where we are. The DOJ sent letters to California's Secretary of State and the head of elections in Los Angeles County demanding they purge more than 190,000 alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls in 48 hours, with 18 days to the election and millions of ballots already sent. The list was on a flash drive. The passwor...

21 days to November 3rd. This week started with DHS raiding the Washington DC home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. Grant has investigated the claims behind this raid personally. Here is what he found. The DOJ says the warrant is judicially approved but won't say by which judge or court. The stated justification is an investigation into Omar's immigration and naturalization proces...

The number one issue for voters heading into November 3rd is the economy. The cost of everything is too high. Groceries, gas, housing, healthcare. Inflation is outpacing wages. And most of the economics coverage sounds like it's in a foreign language by design. Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist, Bloomberg columnist, co-host of the Optimist Economy podcast, and one of the clearest tran...

25 days to the midterms. Trump knows what's coming. And he's telling us what the last stretch looks like. First: a mea culpa on Tuesday's episode. In trying to contextualize what Trump said about Iran and LA, it came across like Grant was defending it. He wasn't. This episode explains why accurate context matters, why sanewashing is different from journalism, and why getting it...

27 days to November 3rd. Here's where things actually stand. In the House: 49% of Americans say they're voting Democratic compared to 41% who say Republican. Decision Desk HQ puts Democratic odds of winning the House at 75%. The Cook Political Report now projects Democrats winning a 15-seat majority, somewhere between 230 and 235 seats. That's not just a wave. That's a tsunami....

The Supreme Court's new fall term starts Monday. Melissa Murray, NYU law professor, co-host of Strict Scrutiny, and New York Times bestselling author of The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader — is back on the show to break down what's coming and to give her verdict on the Jack Smith hearing. Her verdict on the hearing: "The political equival...

Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for the first time since the January 6th prosecution was shut down. Republicans had hours to ask questions about one of the most consequential legal investigations in American history. Here's what they chose to do with that time. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana went after Smith's wife for a documentary she made about Mich...

In May, Dr. Henry Abraham and about 30 colleagues published a letter saying medical professionals have a duty to warn the public about what they are observing in the president of the United States. Five months later, Grant brought him back to ask one question: has anything changed? The answer is no, it's getting worse.  Everything they warned about has been consensually validated by new examp...

Two things happened today that don't add up when you put them next to each other. At 1 am, a federal judge ordered Trump to immediately reinstate CNN, MSNBC, and Politico's White House credentials. The order specifically said the national security justification was invented, "simply put, the record lacks factual support." The White House did not comply immediately. It waited un...

Three things happened today that, on any other day in American history, would each be the only news story anyone talked about. At the UN General Assembly, Trump addressed 130 nations with what sounded like a campaign rally, was met with silence where he expected applause, threatened to wipe Iran off the face of the earth for the sixth time during this war, and struggled visibly to read while threa...

Only 18 of 435 House seats are genuinely competitive in 2026. That means 95% of Americans go to the polls for their House race with functionally one real option. It's not because the country is that divided; it's because politicians have been drawing their own districts in a nuclear arms race of gerrymandering that has no natural end. Michael McNulty is the Policy Director of Issue One,...

Today is National Voter Registration Day. Go to vote.gov right now. Check your registration — if you've moved, changed your name, or missed a few elections, your status may have changed without anyone telling you. Find out your state's deadline. Make a plan for November 3rd. Vote.gov. Do it before you forget. Last night the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration its biggest electi...

Twenty-five years ago today, Grant was eight years old, watching the second plane hit the second tower before walking to school. He didn't know what he was seeing. He just felt the fear coming off every adult around him. Steve Cash felt it too, but from the inside. He was Senator Dianne Feinstein's lead staffer on the cluster of legislation that followed 9/11: the Patriot Act, the creati...

Night one of the first-ever Republican midterm national convention in Dallas is in the books. Grant was watching so you didn't have to. The arena was half full for most of the night and about 75% full during Trump's speech. Trump posted that it was sold out and beat the NFL season opener in ratings. The NFL numbers haven't been released yet. Tim Scott delivered one of the most bizar...

Something that has never happened in American history is underway in Dallas right now: the first-ever midterm Republican National Convention. Past midterm conventions have been about righting the ship, the party coming together, figuring out its message, getting organized. This one is about Trump. He is the keynote speaker both nights. The topics on the schedule are his policies, his accomplishmen...

EDITOR NOTE: This episode was recorded before a federal judge in Massachusetts issued her ruling blocking the mail-in ballot rule.  North Carolina and Delaware started sending out mail-in ballots today. Two weeks from now, most other states will follow. And the USPS mail-in ballot rule that a whistleblower says was built to "catastrophically fail" is still being fought over in federal co...

The 2026 midterms are on track to be the most expensive in American history, $12 billion in ad spending alone, before counting what's sitting in PACs and super PACs. 100 billionaire families are contributing over 20% of total election spending. Most of it is dark money: you don't get to know who donated, why, or what they're asking for in return. Tiffany Muller is the head of End Ci...

A USPS whistleblower, protected by Whistleblower Aid, came forward today with allegations that in order to meet the September 1st deadline for the new mail-in ballot rule, the Postal Service violated a federal court order, developed an untested screening system under what insiders called a "shit show" timeline, and implemented a zero failure protocol that could mean millions of American...

This week has been one of the most chaotic and fast-moving weeks in the fight over how Americans will vote in November. The USPS mail-in ballot rule went final. A judge blocked it. The Supreme Court lifted that block. Another judge put it back in place. All in the space of four days. And through all of it, Common Cause has been in the middle of the legal fight. Virginia Kase Solomon is the preside...