Who else gets to use those new rules? Turns out, it's everybody.

In New Jersey's 3rd District, the Congressional Leadership Fund has bombarded Democrat Andy Kim for taking "an illegal 70 grand tax break" on a condo. In Missouri's U.S. Senate race, Republican Josh Hawley has demanded that Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) release her husband's taxes to answer "serious questions about how she has profited from her seat." In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has urged Republican nominee Scott Wagner to release his tax returns; Wagner has shrugged that off.

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But the tax attack hasn't shifted the momentum in any of them. That, pollsters say, is surprising; attacking candidates over their unpaid taxes or mysterious tax history has typically been effective.

That was before a Republican president, supported by the vast majority of Republican voters, survived that attack. The Chicago Tribune published an inspector general's report on how J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic nominee for governor, dodged hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes by letting a property go to waste and then get reassessed at a lower value.

“I am being challenged by an individual who inherited billions, has never had a real job in his life, has cheated the tax system to dodge taxes, may well come under criminal investigation," said Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner in a debate the next day.

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Democrats simply don't see the attack connecting, in large part because Rauner, who nearly lost his primary this year to a conservative challenger, is unable to apply the same logic to President Trump, and Democrats are in no mood to punish their candidates for behavior the president has gotten away with.

The Pritzker story, for example, came hours before the New York Times published a story about the origins of the president's wealth. The White House called it "false," while Trump-watchers predicted that his base would not be moved. When Democrats cited it as fresh evidence to probe Trump's tax records, House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) jumped in to decry transparency.

"Once Democrats abuse this law to make public [Trump's] tax returns, what stops them from prying/making public YOUR tax returns for political reasons?" Brady asked on Twitter.

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Opinions of scandalized candidates has become increasingly polarized. In New Jersey, polling has found Sen. Bob Menendez (D) recovering since the summer and building a lead, even with a majority of voters viewing him unfavorably after a lengthy investigation of favors he did for a donor ended with a mistrial.

Republicans say that incumbents have proven more resilient to scandal attacks and that a few Democrats, like Aftab Pureval in Ohio's 1st District, have dipped in polls following a series of ads warning that he could "land in jail" over a possible misuse of campaign funds to pay for an early poll of his chances.

"With a first-time candidate, the most important thing is to attack and define them," said Corry Bliss, the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund. "If they're defined as dishonest and unethical on one thing, voters won't believe them on anything."

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But in plenty of cases, even with first-time candidates, the attacks aren't sticking. Florida Republicans have spent a frustrating month trying to make an FBI probe of corruption in Tallahassee stick to Andrew Gillum, the city's mayor and the Democratic nominee for governor. Gillum has consistently pushed back by noting that Rep. Ron DeSantis, the GOP nominee, had spent more than a year accusing the FBI of political bias, all to defend the president.

"I’ve welcomed their investigation to get to the bottom of any corruption that might exist," Gillum said in August. "He and Donald Trump have done everything that they could to undermine the FBI."

Plenty of races with crisscrossing corruption allegations remain close. But the president has complicated all of them. In a few states, candidates have declined to release tax returns, in part because of the evidence of 2016 — you can swerve around a scandal by being less transparent. There's no easy way of applying one set of rules to the president and a harsher set of rules to everyone else who runs.

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AD WATCH

Minnesota 01. Last month, the National Republican Congressional Committee took some flak for portraying Democratic nominee Dan Feehan, an Army veteran and recipient of the Bronze Star, as an anti-military extremist, based on a comment he'd made about other branches “complaining” about getting less funding. Act two: An ad continuing to portray Feehan as anti-American, noting his support for Colin Kaepernick's protests and his work at a think tank “bankrolled by George Soros, chief financier of the global left.”

Montana Senate. Republican Matt Rosendale resurrects the moment that his party first started to re-engage in this race — when Sen. Jon Tester (D), who had received damaging information on a nominee to run the Department of Veterans Affairs, released it to the media. It was, says a narrator, an example of the “liberal smear” that is currently making life so difficult for Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Nevada Senate. Is Sen. Dean Heller (R) a flip-flopper or a brave centrist? In 30 seconds, the Democrats' Senate Majority PAC retells the story of how Heller flipped from a hard no to an enthusiastic yes on repeal of the Affordable Care Act — the core of every anti-Heller message here. In his own ad, Heller taps Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), who consistently opposed repeal, to say that the senator is a bipartisan legislative slugger and that “anybody who tries to tell you something different is wrong.” Sandoval has pointedly declined to endorse Attorney General Adam Laxalt, his would-be Republican successor.

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New York 19. Democratic nominee Antonio Delgado has faced weeks of attack ads claiming that he backs a "$32 trillion government takeover of health care” — even though he doesn't actually support the House's single-payer health care bill, the only one estimated to cost that much. (The Fact Checker today took on this common line of attack.) His counterpunch includes an attack on Rep. John Faso (R) for backing an “age tax” by voting for the American Health Care Act last year. That claim is popping up in a lot of Democratic ads, because it was AARP, an organization with a strong cross-party brand, that coined the term. But it's also a whopper. It's October, so expect to see a lot of such Mutually Assured Destruction.

North Carolina 02: There are much flashier ads, but the DCCC's latest blast in this district is reflective of what you're seeing in most Democratic messaging — a hit on Rep. George Holding (R) for taking “special interest PAC” money, tying that to his votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

West Virginia 03. Democratic nominee Richard Ojeda has built a following with in-your-face Facebook Live chats and town hall meetings, where he seems to be two or three seconds away from ripping his shirt open. In a new negative spot, Republican Carol Miller portrays Ojeda as a “crazy left-wing" politician who makes "personal attacks" against President Trump. "Put your cellphone down," Ojeda says in the clips, which are packaged like WWE wrestling promos. “Kick your kids out of the Oval Office.” In his own spot, Ojeda stands before a veterans' monument and asks how Miller “dares attack.”

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POLL WATCH

California 45 (LA Times, 519 Likely Voters)

Katie Porter (D) - 52%

Mimi Walters (R) - 45%

Republicans believe the race to be closer than this but don't deny that Porter has a chance of unseating two-term Rep. Mimi Walters (R). That may reveal something about what works and what doesn't in suburban districts. Walters has tied Porter to the state's gas tax increase, which Porter now opposes, and has blasted her connections to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Neither attack has landed hard on Porter — most importantly, because the ballot measure to repeal the gas tax looks to be failing in Orange County, a bad omen statewide. Warren may one day become a Republican bogeyman, but she is not there yet.

New Jersey Senate (Quinnipiac, 1,058 Likely Voters)

Bob Menendez (D) - 53%

Bob Hugin (R) - 42%

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A poll from the lesser-known Stockton University this week showed Menendez up 2, leading to a small wave of liberal panic that the decision to stick with Menendez could cost Democrats a safe seat. Then came this poll — a 5-point gain for the Democrat since the summer, powered by voter anger at the Kavanaugh nomination. Hugin, who began the race with ads reminding people of Menendez's criminal trial, also tried to define himself as a moderate Republican. But the double whammy of his donations to Donald Trump and his support for Kavanaugh will, say Democrats, keep this seat out of the upset zone.

North Dakota Senate (Fox News, 704 Likely Voters)

Kevin Cramer (R) - 51%

Heidi Heitkamp (D) - 41%

The most important crosstabs here: President Trump's approval rating has moved up into the mid-60s in North Dakota, and, by a 17-point margin, voters did not want Heitkamp to oppose Brett Kavanaugh. She went on to do so today. Cramer, who has made national news for his dismissiveness of the Kavanaugh allegations, is running as a presidential ally, and Democrats have not found a way around it.

Pennsylvania 01 (Monmouth, 353 Likely Voters)

Brian Fitzpatrick (R) - 50%

Scott Wallace (D) - 46%

Republicans thought they hit the jackpot when Wallace won his party's nomination, calling him the worst Democratic nominee in the country — a wealthy philanthropist who'd bankrolled left-wing causes and looked awkward on the trail. But even after Fitzpatrick secured the nominations of several local labor unions, and even after a run of ads portraying Wallace as a borderline lunatic, the incumbent is up by 4 in a race he won by 9 points last cycle. Democrats wonder if a stronger candidate would be ahead right now but also think the Republican campaign has done more to rally its base than to alienate voters from Wallace, in a district where the president's approval rating is underwater.

MEET A PAC

THE PAC: The Swamp Accountability Project

PARTY: Republican-ish

FOCUS: To defeat a handful of Republicans seen as personally corrupt or as misusing their power to help the Trump administration avoid legal scrutiny, starting with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)

BUDGET: It's a 501(c) 4, which means it doesn't have to reveal much about donors. But it's aiming to raise at least $2 million to challenge and embarrass Nunes and perhaps Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.).

PLAN: To message voters across Nunes's district — seen as safely Republican — on how he has gotten richer in Congress. A 60-second ad is a compilation of every hit on Nunes; it is supplemented, says SAP's Liz Mair, with ads in Spanish and Tagalog, to reach nonwhite voters.

EFFECTIVENESS: Nunes is up in polls, but the group is not necessarily dedicated to beating him; it also, Mair says, is not a “Never Trump” group. It wants to encourage good behavior. “We have donors who want him to lose, but our general view is that this guy has has an opportunity to start doing a better job, and it would be fantastic if he would,” Mair said.

2020

Cory Booker. He's still slated to speak to Iowa Democrats on Saturday night at their annual fundraising dinner, though the Kavanaugh vote might throw a wrench into his schedule. Unless that vote drags past Saturday, Booker is expected to roam around Iowa next week, holding events in each of the state's four congressional districts.

Eric Garcetti. The Los Angeles mayor sat for a Q&A at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, pointing out that his travel schedule was taking him to Mississippi and Oklahoma this weekend. “Those aren't exactly presidential places,” he said. (They do have March 2020 primaries.)

Kamala Harris. She's the speaker at Sunday's Democratic Party dinner in Ohio, probably her first public event after the Kavanaugh vote.

Elizabeth Warren. She has dispatched staffers to Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina, for some reason.

EVERYBODY IS WRONG

Democrats, who wander in perpetual search of something to panic about, found it Wednesday. According to the NPR-Marist poll, Republicans had cut into the Democrats' generic ballot lead since the summer. The pollsters highlighted one possible reason: a mere two-point edge in Democratic enthusiasm. “Democratic enthusiasm edge evaporates,” read the headline that inspired countless liberals to spill coffee on the dashboards of their hybrids.

Republican pollsters, even those who don't go on TV to wave pompoms, say the trend is real. July and August were terrible months for the party. The last week, since the Kavanaugh hearing, has been pretty good in tracking. In particular, male independents, who have wavered between the parties all year, have been a bit more supportive of Republicans this week.

The “enthusiasm” discussion, however, is about the base, not independents. The going theory is that Democrats woke up a sleeping Republican electorate and that the new number to watch, because Democratic enthusiasm has maxed out, is the Republican enthusiasm.

That might be right, but it's been wrong before. Several Republicans made this point: At this moment six years ago, President Barack Obama held a small lead in polling but Republicans seemed to be building a lead among the most enthusiastic voters. In the first week of October 2012, NBC News polls had 79 percent of Republicans “excited” to vote in the election, compared with just 73 percent of Democrats.

“Republican enthusiasm, up, senior enthusiasm, up,” NBC's Chuck Todd said. “It’s a huge problem [for Obama].”

In 2010 and 2014, the enthusiasm gap was a fairly solid predictor of how each party would be able to turn out their votes. In 2012, it wasn't. We honestly don't know which year this will resemble or how badly it will shatter the mold.

But the commentary about how the Kavanaugh hearings have affected Republicans carries some echoes of the commentary before the 2012 election. There's little talk of how Kavanaugh has inspired nonvoters or independents; it's mostly about how he has energized and united Republicans. That sounds a lot like what we heard six years ago, when Mitt Romney's dominant first debate with Obama quieted a lot of conservative grumbling about his campaign. At the time, it obscured how Romney trailed Obama in overall favorability, and right now, the talk about Kavanaugh obscures how Republicans are still heading into an election with a president whose favorable numbers resemble Obama's before his midterm routs.

Meanwhile, there's been entirely too much punditry that ascribes every poll movement to Kavanaugh. The polls showing Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) in trouble both mirror what Republicans have described from internal polling and predate her decision to oppose Kavanaugh.

What might have done more damage to her is Trump's rising approval rating in her state and the simultaneous good or mixed-good news in the trade wars — a federal bailout for farmers and a headline-grabbing update of NAFTA. Consider: The same polling period that found Heitkamp slipping found Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) inching ahead. Donnelly, unlike Heitkamp, has supported Trump's tariff policies.

READING LIST

This is the first you've probably heard of Citizen Strong, a crowdsourced opposition research network populated by hobbyists with the time to dig into public records for damaging information about Republicans.

The Ellison story has lost oxygen since Minnesota Democrats released their report on his ex-girlfriend Karen Monahan's allegations, determining that she did not have evidence of physical abuse. The Intercept follows up with a report on Monahan's attorney, who has worked with Ellison's GOP opponent and who had plenty of opinions about Ellison before taking her as a client.

Fisher writes about a classic Washington tale that includes the power of wealth and the assumption of great achievements — and also reasons those charged with examining his life and character have found to pause and dig deeper.

“The cruelty is the point,” by Adam Serwer

An essay that gets at what liberals see happening on the right: a rallying around Trump and Kavanaugh because of "cruelty” and the defense of privilege.

COUNTDOWN