RIP Hal Malchow

Takeaways from GOP primary exit polls, Biden Hispanic underperformance, voter registration shifts, Trump's rising popularity, questions about ballot access, experimenting with TV ads

No. 308 | March 22, 2024

🗳️ Elections

Sasha Issenberg: Hal Malchow Is Going to Die on Thursday. He Has One Last Message for Democrats. (Politico)

“On Thursday, March 21, one of the Democratic party’s most accomplished campaign consultants will die.

In a sense, Hal Malchow has been planning for this day ever since 1987, when a genetic marker test revealed he was likely to develop Alzheimer’s. At the time, he was barely 35 years old, a hustling political operative who had recently come off managing Al Gore’s first Senate campaign while overcome with worry about his mother’s early descent into dementia. (Around her 50th birthday, she was discovered wandering lost in a parking lot in the Mississippi town where she had lived her whole life.) After his mother’s untimely death, in 1990, Malchow was intent on never letting himself endure the same thing. If he showed symptoms for Alzheimer’s, Malchow resolved at the time, he would take his life before he became too diminished — and became a burde…