Pritzker threatens to disqualify any 2028 hopeful who attends a convention the Senate GOP leader already skipped.

…(cont) No. The point is it's built to look like one and doesn't have to be one, and I'll admit that pitch gets harder every hour somebody else's chair sits empty on the stage.

Sen. Susan Collins isn't in that chair. A source familiar with her plans told the Washington Examiner, on August 31st, that it's long been her practice not to attend conventions. Six days later, Senate Majority Leader John Thune turned up missing from the speaker list too, one of the most notable national Republicans absent from his own party's first-ever midterm gathering.

Gov. JB Pritzker showed up outside the building to make sure everyone knew what attending costs: anyone taking part, he said, is "probably going to be disqualified" from a 2028 run. Read that back. A sitting governor is threatening to end presidential careers over a guest list that the Senate's own top Republican already declined to sign.

Byron York, writing for the Washington Examiner, called all of this — the convention, and the backlash against streamer Hasan Piker — rare bright spots for Republicans going into the midterms. He's not wrong that it's the best news cycle the party's had in a while: an approval rating in the slump, a war in Iran that just passed the six-month mark, and — hold on — the most notable headline out of the first-ever midterm convention turning out to be that its own Senate leader didn't bother showing up.

That's not what I meant to file. But it's what's in the wire.

Best news doesn't mean good news. It means the rest of the news was worse. Byron York knows that. So, now, do I.