I wasn’t going to say or write anything at all about the midterm elections in 2026.
But since Tuesday evening, my feed has been filled with everybody’s hot takes about what it means for America, the long-term implications, what comes next, etc.
Many are wrong. Most are dumb. Almost all are not worth reading.
If you’re annoyed by this kind of crap like I am, here are eight real takeaways from this year’s midterms that are not wrong, not dumb, and definitely worth reading.
Today, don’t turn on the TV, don’t turn on the radio, and don’t open your podcast app.
Instead, pour yourself some coffee, sit down with me, and let’s review this together. If you’re an average reader, it will only take you exactly 30 minutes, and then you can ignore all the ignorant tripe you see and hear later. I promise you, this is better.
Got your coffee? Okay, let’s go.
#1: The “midterm effect” is very real, and it’s a long-established precedent
The sitting president’s party almost always loses the House in midterm elections. Since WWII, this has happened in 18 out of 20 elections (90% of the time).
The pattern goes back well into history, too: the president’s party has lost House seats in the vast majority of midterms for nearly 200 years.
What President Trump was trying to do was impossible (and he even admitted it)
Zooming out and generalizing just a bit, Trump’s first election win was really an anomaly.
He’s still the only man ever to win the office that wasn’t already:
A military veteran
An experienced political office holder
All of our presidents before—without exception—had at least one of these.
Almost all of them had both.
Trump had neither. That is an enormously significant “first,” and he has never gotten the credit for this that he rightly deserves.
He lost control of the House of Representatives during his first midterm election. That is very, very normal.
His third presidential run (and second win) was also a huge anomaly. But losing the House, again, is very normal.
That’s why he made such a big deal at the Republican National Convention this summer in Dallas, saying, “Let’s defy history”—because he knew the odds were stacked against him.
Defying history once (which he did in 2016) was hard to do.
Defying history twice (which he did in 2024) was even harder to do.
Defying history thrice (which he tried just now) was impossible.
The “Trump Sandwich” is an extreme outlier, and people keep forgetting this
Trump’s two presidencies are like a big, weird sandwich.
As president #45 and #47, he’s like the outer layers, with the weird, mushy Biden mystery meat in between. That is a variable that makes everything so hard to measure, and people are constantly forgetting this.
We’ve only had one president ever before that was elected twice non-sequentially.
You have to go back over 140 years, to Grover Cleveland, to find the only parallel to what happened in the 2020s.
(Funny enough, Cleveland’s case was the exact opposite of Trump’s: instead of Republican-Democrat-Republican, it was Democrat-Republican-Democrat.)
Unfortunately, most Americans probably don’t remember that Cleveland was even a president in the first place. If they do, they probably don’t remember that he was a Democrat. And they almost certainly don’t know what Cleveland stood for that got him elected to office in the first place, what got him unelected in the second place, and how he regained office on his third try.
So, just as many Trump critics love to point out that Trump is not a “normal” president, and the Trump administration(s) is/are not normal, that is true. But what’s strange is that we had a case where an unusual candidate did something unusual by winning in the first place, then did something even more unusual by winning again.
To recap, President Trump is:
1 of 6 presidents who ran for office three times
1 of 2 who won, then lost, then won again
1 of 1 to lose a term to a puppet candidate who turned out to be an autopen
That is to say: Trump is unusual by almost every measure. We know this. Everyone knows this. So stop expecting him (or anything around him) to be normal.
We’ve definitely been here before (both sides have)
The prognosticators using apocalyptic language like “carnage,” “bloodbath,” and “extinction-level event” are historically ignorant, and they’re also doing as much performative hysterical nonsense as the politicians themselves during the election.
I was born in 1985. Let’s review all the presidents in my lifetime.
Ronald Reagan
1982: House -26. Lost seats.
1986: House -5. Lost seats and lost Senate control.
George H.W. Bush
1990: House -8. Lost seats.
Bill Clinton
1994: House -54. Lost seats and both chambers. Classic shellacking.
1998: House +4. Gained seats.
Barack Obama
2010: House -63. Lost seats and the House. Self-admitted shellacking.
2014: House -13. Lost seats (and lost the Senate).
Donald Trump (#45)
2018: House -41. Lost seats and the House.
Joe Biden
2022: House -9. Lost seats and the House.
Donald Trump (#47)
2026: Lost seats and both chambers.
Now, I can hear someone saying, “Aha! But wait—These midterms were really, really bad! Like, horrifically bad!”
Nope. You’re wrong.
Bad? Yes. Really, really bad? No.
As of this writing, at least, without final vote counts certified, it appears he lost ≈ 30-40 House seats and control of the Senate, which he barely had in the first place.
#2: Yes, Republicans definitely, absolutely, positively will “survive this”
Memories are short. Pundits are idiots. And people have clearly forgotten Watergate.
But you don’t even have to go back as far as Richard Nixon to see this: just look at Trump’s first term: he lost the House in 2018, then lost the presidency in 2020. And he still came back, winning all three just four years later.
But if we do go back to Watergate, Nixon’s reelection in 1972 had the biggest popular vote win for any Republican ever. Two short years later, in a truly unprecedented move, America became unpresidented when he resigned.
What happened next? Democrats, of course, spent years painting all Republicans as Nixonian Watergate crooks. It wasn’t true; it wasn’t fair; it wasn’t ethical.
But it worked.
I’m sure at the time it looked like Republicans were done for, especially after Ford lost his own unprecedented and highly unusual “only unelected president ever running for re-election” campaign.
Then, the story changes: Jimmy Carter gets into office, hobbles his own presidency so badly with a self-inflicted “misery index” wound and refusal to play ball with Congress as a Washington outsider, that the backlash sparks the Reagan Revolution.
With eerily prescient Biden vibes, Carter serves just one term, and in 1980, Reagan storms the Capitol with the greatest electoral win by a non-incumbent president ever.
Reagan was a Republican. Nixon’s party… and he won it ALL back… just 6 years, 5 months, and 16 days after Nixon resigned.
#3: Iran loomed large; Israel loomed larger
Trump originally ran for office in 2016 with a promise not to start any new wars, and he shocked us all by not starting any new wars for his entire first term.
This was an incredible feat. Only Carter can claim the same in recent memory.
Most presidents say “I will not do (insert bad thing here)” and then get to work immediately doing exactly the very bad thing they explicitly promised not to do.
Bush #41: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Immediately introduces new taxes.
Clinton: “We must provide tax relief to the middle class.” Immediately raises all kinds of taxes that hurt the middle class.
Bush #43: “I don’t think our troops oughtta be used for what’s called nation-building.” Immediately invades… the entire Middle East and commits America to two decades of using our troops for nation-building.
Amazingly, Trump actually pulled off his promise the first time. That was also unprecedented.
But for reasons not worth outlining here, he just couldn’t resist in his second term.
(Although it is clear that our country has an absolutely insatiable thirst for endless wars overseas, no matter who’s in the White House.)
So, war with Iran? Averted the first time, but not the second time.
Ouch. That’s a major betrayal.
Also, I suspect something about our conflict with Iran is being missed: Trump isn’t telling us what he knows. I’m not saying it’s fishy or underhanded. I’m saying I think Trump knew it would be total political suicide for him, and did it anyway.
Many people have suggested Israel pressured him and he caved. I don’t think so.
Trump can be annoying. He can be rude. He can be nasty. He can be weak. He can make mistakes… But not a mistake this big. I suspect he was backed into a corner at one point and told—by people who actually know what they’re talking about—that he had no other choice but to bomb Iran, repeatedly.
Trump is not dumb. His instincts are incredible: he was the only person who saw that he had a chance at winning in 2016. Nobody—nobody on planet Earth except him—thought he could do it.
But he did, and proved he was right. Everybody else on Earth was, in fact, wrong.
So it’s very unusual to see him not fight back in Trumpian fashion about striking Iran now. He’s calmly accepting the unpopularity of that decision.
That’s a very unusual move for him.
A harsh reading of this would be to say that it was wrong, that he knew it was wrong, and that he did it anyway because he’s stupid and has no defense for it.
A charitable reading would be that he knows something very big and very bad that we don’t, and he is choosing to fall on his sword because he knows good presidents do hard things that don’t sell well during two-year election cycles, but that it will make sense in the long run.
I’m not sure.
But it is very interesting to me that every president since Carter has threatened direct action against Iran (Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump) and only Trump #47 actually ordered direct strikes on Iranian soil.
Only him. It’s puzzling.
But Iran is really just a minor setback overall: the conflict we have with them now isn’t even a declared war; Iran has kinda-sorta been at war with almost every country on Earth (including us) since 1979, but nobody really takes them seriously; and we’ll either finish the job and move on or get bored and people won’t even remember “The Iran War” in a few years.
Israel, though, is a different matter altogether. Our alliance with Israel (or our “entanglement,” depending on your views) has been going on for the better part of a century. We’re deeply intertwined, joined at the hip, and intricately connected in many delicate ways that are impossible to extricate ourselves from easily.
It is now undeniable that “Israel” (as a concept, if not the actual nation itself) has become a significant—and permanent—election issue.
Voters on both the right and left increasingly feel that America is controlled by Israel, works at the behest of Israel, fights Israel’s wars for them, or all the above.
To be very frank: “Israel” is becoming a massively contentious topic within US politics.
(Of course, Israel is a massively contentious topic for Israeli politics, too! Just look at the election they had a few weeks ago! What a mess!)
Now, it’s certainly true that both parties have varying degrees of antisemitism within their ranks. But it is also true that “Israel” and “Jews” are not the same thing in everyone’s mind, and this is a far bigger, far more complicated topic—one with real consequences that is being talked about openly in ways it never has before.
To wit: see JD Vance admitting that private polling data provided to him showed that “Change our relationship to Israel” was the #4 most important election-year priority for voters in 2026.
First of all, that is an astonishing admission.
Second of all, I don’t think any sitting Vice President has ever uttered those words—or anything like that—aloud before.
That is an enormous sea change for US politics. Expect Israel to be standard fare on all political candidate surveys from now on—as they always have been, but there will be much, much closer scrutiny.
With the rise of an entirely new crop of rabidly antisemitic left-wing DSA-adjacent politicians taking office next year, we are now looking at seven—SEVEN—Muslim members of Congress. One Senator (the first ever) and six Representatives.
Israel is and will continue to be a huge lightning rod of controversy now and in the future.
(Note: It’s just anecdotal, so I don’t have hard data to back this up, but a gigantic number of comments I have seen online from people who claim to normally vote Republican gave “Israel” as the #1 reason they chose not to support Trump or any Republicans this time around and instead sat out and didn’t vote at all.)
#4 This whole election cycle was a referendum on Trump, which was always nonsensical
Politically, it’s brilliant to paint all Republicans as Trump clones.
Logically and logistically, though, it’s entirely nonsensical.
President Trump isn’t running for any office. He can’t. He’s term-limited and essentially a lame duck already.
So it was a farce to essentially tie the entire election to Trump as president anyway, because that doesn’t have a lot to do with what happens for the next two years: He’s just going to keep doing what he has been doing.
Also, you have noticed that he hasn’t been that effective even with the House and Senate, right? He has a majority in both houses right now, but he’s gotten very little done via legislation, like the SAVE Act, which should have been a total slam dunk.
So, imagine Mr. Bill saying: “Ooooh noooo!! Here come the Democrats to make sure that now they’re REALLY, REALLY NOT going to pass the SAVE Act now!”
Another devious reason for this was that the Senate Democrats have clearly been very calculated this session, making sure that nothing good is ever allowed to leave the chamber because… it would make Trump look good, and that’s bad!
The SAVE Act: A bipartisan bill to make America better, safer, and more secure in our elections, passes the House. BLOCKED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS.
SAFE Cities Act: A bipartisan bill to make America better, safer, and more secure in our cities passes the House. BLOCKED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS.
The Ratepayer Protection Act: BLOCKED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS.
Stop Insider Trading Act: BLOCKED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS.
It’s all so tiresome. Are you seeing the trend? Why are they doing this?
They don’t want to allow Trump to claim credit for anything that people actually like.
Prediction: Watch how quickly all of these bills come back (or the exact same bills just with different names) are “introduced” under this new Congress, just so they can say: “Look, see what happens when you elect Democrats? Look at all these great things we care about! Good thing we’re in charge now, right?”
The gaslighting is off the charts, to astronomical levels.
And here’s the most frustrating part about this midterm election in particular: Republicans had all kinds of substantive debate about all kinds of issues.
Taxes, educational choice, Israel, Iran, Second Amendment rights, religious freedom, the freedom of speech, DEI discrimination, COVID-era emergency powers, retirement funds, oil reserves, Supreme Court packing, and more.
The Democrats have used only one thing: a Trump card.
They play it all day, every day.
They whip it out and wave it around as the answer to every question, no matter how irrelevant it is.
Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
I can’t wait until Trump is out of office and they can’t play the Trump card anymore.
lol, j/k — you KNOW they’re going to keep using it. It’s the new Watergate.
Since 2016, Democrats all have the same religion under one, unifying creed: “Orange man bad.” This will eventually lose its power, though.
#5: This was death by a 1,000 spoilers
Okay, so not 1,000, but some of the most crucial races where the vote came down to just tens of thousands, thousands, or even hundreds of votes were ruined by spoilers.
It will take a while to sort them out all formally, but there were several meaningful races that were determined by the presence of an additional candidate in the race.
Third-party spoilers ruined a bunch of races
At least until there are official results with recounts where needed, the data currently show that many of the tightest races in the country were spoiled by third-party candidates. For no good reason.
Getting single-digit percentages is obviously not enough to win any race, so there’s no good reason to run such a pathetically anemic candidate at all, EXCEPT in order to purposefully spoil what would otherwise be a clean race.
Several races that came close to 50-50 were ruined by someone that almost nobody had ever heard of pulling a few hundred or a few thousand votes away from both sides.
In races like these, two out of three lose in the end:
The winner wins
The loser loses (because of the spoiler)
The spoiler loses (by design, because that’s what spoilers do)
This is infuriating, but strangely, it’s legal.
Some third parties exist for the sole purpose of ruining elections they can’t win.
The national Libertarian Party, for example, has never had a winning candidate for any national office, ever.
In the party’s entire 55 years of existence.
Every single Libertarian Party candidate running for a national office has lost.
That’s a 100% failure rate.
Where I live, in Wyoming, the “Constitution Party” exists for the same reason. Thus far, they didn’t spoil any races in 2026, because Wyoming is a very Republican state (Cook PVI score of R+23, as of 2024 at least).
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) also ruined some races
Just look at this insane race in Alaska.
There are four candidates running: three Republicans and one Democrat.
When you have multiple Republicans running, and each one of them gets a fraction of the vote, and there’s only one Democrat, you have a guaranteed Democratic win.
Of course, only Republicans are dumb enough to play this game and send multiple candidates into a ranked-choice election.
Democrats are way, way smarter than this—they would never do this.
That’s why Democrats always win these elections.
RCV is the secret to success for Democrats in California, and now, this idea has spread to shockingly remote and tiny states like Alaska.
Plus, in what will hopefully be a major legal battle, it looks like the Democrats performed one of the most breathtakingly corrupt race heists imaginable by actively searching for and recruiting a second candidate in Alaska with the exact same name as the Republican candidate just to confuse voters.
Mary Peltola, a Democrat, finds out her Republican challenger is a guy named Dan Sullivan. So she coordinated with the DNC to actively recruit another man—any man anywhere in Alaska willing to run against her—who had precisely one qualification: he must also have the name “Dan Sullivan.”
So voters went to the polling locations on Tuesday looking at their choices:
Mary Peltola
Dan Sullivan
Dan Sullivan
If you’re a Dan Sullivan voter, uhh, which of the TWO “Dan Sullivans” were you going to vote for again? And AM I LOSING MY MIND?!
Of all the demented, power-hungry moves I’ve ever heard of in politics, cooking up a “Fake Dan Sullivan” scheme is so grievously crooked it should make LBJ sit up out of his grave and applaud.
#6: The Democrats didn’t win. The Republicans lost. That’s very different.
The single biggest mistake for Republicans to take away from this election would be to say:
“Wow, people really don’t like Republicans and Republican policies.”
The first conclusion is true.
The second conclusion is demonstrably not true, and it would be a HUGE mistake to assume so.
Almost all the policies Republicans support won, even though many of the candidates lost
There are, strangely, huge distinctions between A) parties, B) candidates, and C) policies.
In theory, there shouldn’t be. But in practice, there is.
Voters don’t like Republicans. They do like Republican-backed ideas and legislation. This was true in 2026, even in blue states where Democrats hold (or now will hold) a majority or even a supermajority.
Colorado (now, sadly, a very blue state) just passed Prop 134 and Prop 135, banning males in women’s sports and banning the genital mutilation of children, respectively.
North Carolina (a Democratic stronghold) just amended their constitution to limit property taxes and require voter identification.
Washington state (basically a Democratic theocracy by now) passed Initiative 638, also banning males in women’s sports.
These are entirely, utterly Republican-owned policies, passed in an election where Republicans got walloped. So why does this happen?
Republicans have a winning message; voters don’t like the messengers
Voters in general do not support ideas like referring to God as “nonbinary,” putting sexualized adult performers in front of children, letting schools hide the “transgender status” of children from their parents, and (again), putting males in female sports.
Yet in Texas, they sent James Talarico to Washington, who LOVES all these things.
Why?
Because they hated Ken Paxton more.
It’s literally that simple.
Paxton, as Attorney General, just did the world a huge favor by suing the Texas Children’s Hospital for performing genital mutilation surgeries and won. Now they have actually opened the first-ever gender “Detransition Clinic” to try to undo the horrific damage of medical experiments recently inflicted on innocent children.
This is a massive win for parents, for children, for Texans, and for all Americans.
And yet he was absolutely demolished by Talarico in his race for Senate.
Both things can be true at the same time. Confusing as hell, but that’s politics, baby.
Put another way, many voters liked a lot of what he did (and said he would do), but they hate him.
The media bias for Democrats will always be a headwind for Republicans
Democrats enjoy almost unlimited free publicity from the monopolistic media, celebrities, influencers, and Hollywood. They also have incredible brand recognition.
In almost every survey I’ve ever seen or heard of, there’s a massive delta between pollsters’ results when asking about generic Democrats and generic Republicans versus actual candidates running for office.
Amuse yourself sometime by watching “man on the street” interviews where the man with the mic says, “Do you agree with this quote from the president?” then, upon hearing that the interviewee despises every despicable thing they’ve just heard that the rotten, scoundrel, scumbag president said, hears the man with the mic reveal, “What would you say if I told you it was President Biden who said that, and not President Trump?”
You can see their brains meltdown in real time as they try to process what they’ve just heard. This happens all… the… time. Not just on the street, either.
Democrats have the benefit of the doubt, and they have brand equity. Even if their policies destroy the states people live in. They’re like Kurt Cobain or other “rock stars” who became massively popular and influential through no real skill or talent, and whose lives eventually end in death and destruction, and they aren’t people you’d ever want to look at as a role model.
But they look cool.
Republicans are like your parents. They’re smart, they care about you, they tell you things you need to know even if you don’t want to hear them, and they actually want to see you succeed. They are exactly who you should look to as a role model.
But they seem so uncool.
The good news is that with a few truly open social media platforms like 𝕏, Republicans can really get their message out without being blocked, throttled, banned, or hindered by the news media in some way.
And in that sense, there is hope for Republicans (as evidenced by the fact that they keep winning)… but they’re always doing it with one arm tied behind their backs.
#7: The “$5,000-for-your-vote” bribery scheme didn’t motivate anyone
Not a single person went to the polls this week thinking, “Gee, if I vote the right way, I’ll get a $5,000 check from Donald Trump. Whoopee!”
The cash-for-a-majority-win promise was a canard.
Trump didn’t expect anyone to fall for it. If he did, he was truly a drowning man grabbing at straws, showing us The Art of No Deal.
It was a smart move to play in one weirdly Trumpian way: he can now say, “Well, look at what I offered voters! I tried to give them their money back, and they chose not to do what I suggested! Now they get nothing, and it’s their own fault.”
But it was a stupid move in another sense: nobody cared about it. None of the polls showed that people voted the way they did to get five thousand dollars in their pocket.
That is partly because Trump’s blustery announcements of refunds are old and boring by now. He has promised checks many, many times in the past. Aside from COVID-era “stimulus checks” (which do have precedent), it’s never happened before.
So he has zero credibility when it comes to promises like that. (Looking at you: DOGE Refund, Tariff Dividends, etc.).
Trump’s only real mistake with the pay-for-your-vote scheme was being too open about it
Career criminals and the Democratic Party have something in common: they know that you can’t just outright say “I am going to pay you for your vote.”
That feels sleazy and gross.
But they know that you can literally pay people for their vote—you just can’t say it out loud like that.
Trump is kind of dumb in that he often announces what he’s going to do. That’s why he’s not a polished politician, never has been, and never will be. His big mistake here was admitting publicly what Democrats do all the time quietly.
They hide it under an artificial veneer of feel-good dogooderism by saying things like: “We just want to make the rich pay their fair share.”
In other words, “We are literally going to give you money to buy for your vote. It just won’t be YOUR own money coming back to you. It will be someone else’s.”
Whose money? Those dirty rich people, that’s who. Those rotten, successful people who have earned a lot of money. THEY will pay for your vote.
And that makes it okay. Really.
This is Economics 101: ALL social welfare programs and transfer payments are literally bribes for votes. But when you call them things like “Basic fairness for underprivileged children,” It’s more digestible.
That is something you CAN say out loud.
“We just want healthcare for children” is really just forcing rich taxpayers (who are in the minority) to subsidize poor people (who are in the majority) to the tune of at least $5,000/year.
This is immoral, flagrant bribery, but it doesn’t feel like it is.
“I just want you to share in the success of this great economy by sending you a check with my name on it” is really just promising to redistribute wealth blindly to everyone.
This is also immoral, flagrant bribery, but it does feel like it is.
Trump is not good at understanding nuance like career criminals and politicians.
That’s why Trump will be out of office in two years, never to return. And people like Joe Biden, who bribed a hell of a lot of Americans with other people’s money, spent 36 years in the Senate doing this exact thing every single election.
One of his favorite phrases is “it’s basic fairness.” It isn’t, but it works.
He got six terms as a Senator, two terms as Vice President, and a term as President because of it.
#8: Republican-majority states destroyed themselves by being too successful
That’s not hyperbole—it’s the literal truth.
States that have Republican majorities have been attracting migrants from California for years. Nobody moves from red states to blue states; they move from blue states to red states.
For decades now, a blue trickle has been flooding into many other states, all of them being mostly or deeply red, Republican-dominated states.
This one-way outflow from California and New York has slowly been turning those states into mini Californias.
(Note: I know this from personal, hard-won experience. My whole extended family escaped California when I was a teen in 1999. We went to Colorado. That lasted until 2020, when I escaped Colorado with my wife and children to Arizona. That lasted until 2026, and we escaped Arizona and went to Wyoming. We’ll see how long this lasts. I’m getting tired of escaping states falling to communism.)
Just like the way Muslims from Somalia, the war-ravaged and poorest country on Earth, move to Michigan and have zero intention of assimilating into their new culture, these blue-state émigrés who left California’s toxic politics have been moving to other states that don’t have California’s toxic politics, and once they get there, they vote for California’s toxic politics, turning that state into Nueva California.
(See: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and soon, Idaho and possibly Montana soon.)
Also note that this does not happen in reverse in nearly the same proportion.
The biggest shock of the night was Texas, but not really
This one will be studied for years, maybe even decades. Texas, formerly the anti-California, has had a shocking transformation overnight from extremely Republican to now extremely Democratic. Every executive office in the state flipped to Democrats. But it’s actually not shocking at all, and it didn’t happen overnight.
Texas has been absorbing California transplants for many, many years. Texans have actively bragged for decades about how many Californians have left California and come to Texas.
Did they really think they weren’t going to bring their failed California politics with them?
Apparently? Yes. Yes, they did.
But they were wrong. Even Greg Abbott, an exceptionally powerful and influential Governor of an exceptionally powerful and influential state, lost his bid for re-election. This is shocking, but again, it shouldn’t be.
Abbott has eagerly welcomed people and companies from all over California (and foreign countries, like India) into the welcoming embrace of Texas. They have returned the favor by eagerly welcoming him out of the Governor’s Mansion.
In Conclusion
To tie it all up with a bow and let you get back to your life, I leave you with the following conclusions about what it all means and what happens next.
For Republicans, this was a blessing in disguise
Losing this election—wittingly or unwittingly—Republicans may have stumbled into a winning gambit: they have a better chance of winning in 2028 now, and that election includes the White House.
Republicans can go back to doing what they always do best: begging for money while complaining about how ridiculous and insane Democrats are with their incompetent governance and out-of-control spending.
Republicans love to be the losing party anyway. They prefer it.
Republicans say they want power, but when they get it, they don’t know what to do with it, and they’re afraid to wield it. They’re too worried about people thinking of them as “mean” and wanting to come across as “nice.”
Of course, this is perverse: Republicans will never be given the benefit of the doubt or organic media support, so they should stop worrying about it. That’s what Trump’s wins in 2016 and 2024 proved. Mean Republicans win. “Nice” Republicans lose. Both will be called racists by the left anyway, so why even pretend to care?
It’s weird and masochistic but true: the GOP loves to be the whiny underdog, perpetually fundraising off of the alleged corruption and malfeasance of Democrats, then when they get into power, they don’t do a damn thing.
John Thune is the perfect example: it’s unimaginable to have a more impotent Senate Majority Leader. He frittered away a trifecta on Capitol Hill for two years when he could have done what the people wanted him to do, which was:
Pass the SAVE Act
Eliminate the filibuster to pass their agenda if needed
Strip the Senate Parliamentarian of all or most power
Codify the DOGE Cuts
He did none of these. He merrily twiddled his thumbs, like he was a powerless baby at the mercy of the whims of the passing winds.
“We just don’t have the votes,” said the only man in the world with the authority to call for a vote but chose not to.
A tragic tale.
For Democrats, this is a curse in disguise
Winning feels good. It feels very, very good.
But that good feeling disappears very quickly when you realize that the people who gave you the win expect you to do more than that.
Democrats are now the dog that has been chasing a car for the past two years, and they finally caught one.
Well… now what do they do with it?
They have no idea.
Republicans lost because they didn’t act like Republicans.
Republicans lost because Republican voters chose to punish them by not voting at all or voting for Democrats.
But as soon as Democrats get in office, they’re going to do exactly what Democrats do and shoot themselves in the foot (again)—meaningless side quests and diversions that are a gigantic waste of time and taxpayer money.
On election day, when I saw the returns, I thought about tweeting something like this:
“I look forward to seeing just how calm and rational the Democrats will be as they carefully focus on unity, bringing us together and lowering prices for the average voter.”
I didn’t need to. Loads of other people were already saying it, because that’s a hilarious joke that everybody knows isn’t true.
They can’t resist it. They’re going to take the bait and fall for the trap. It’s just too tempting not to.
The soon-to-be officeholders are already promising outrageously stupid, illegal and pointless boondoggles: jailing Elon Musk, banning all AI immediately, investigating Trump’s family, “nationalizing” SpaceX, and more.
Yes, Anti-Fascists are out there proposing a bucketload of totally-not-fascistic moves, like nationalizing private industry, arresting opponents, confiscating wealth—oh, wait, whoops.
So, we’re going to see a reprise of the past few years: endless kangaroo courts, trying to arrest their opponents, lots of pleading the fifth, angry tweets, torrents of toothless congressional hearings that go absolutely nowhere but make for good TV.
They might even be dumb enough to try to push the insane policies that are actually very unpopular with voters—yes, even the very same voters who voted them into office in 2026.
Get this: Prop 42, the crazy wealth confiscation effort, AKA “The Billionaire Tax,” went down in flames, AND voters approved outlawing ever bringing a wealth confiscation scheme in the state ever again. And that was in California.
Will the new lunatic-fringe DSA faction of the Democratic Party take a look at that, pause, and calmly reflect before trying this again, in every state, and nationally?
Not a chance.
And the reason why they keep trying to confiscate private property in the first place is that Democrats have absolutely no idea how to lower any prices, anywhere, for anyone.
Unfortunately for them, they own that issue now.
The best they can hope for is to slightly reduce the cost of gas by stopping the barrage of attacks on Iran… But that could only potentially return gas prices to somewhere closer to what they were under Biden, which was INSANELY more expensive than before.
If you like analogies, America was already a morbidly obese patient. Under Biden, she gained 400 pounds in one presidential term. She gained an additional 150 pounds under Trump. The Democrats are now promising they’ll help her lose 15 pounds.
If you gain 550 pounds and lose 15, have you “lost weight?”
Yes… but no.
Only in the opium den that is a Democrat-controlled Congress can you claim that as a success.
Also, you thought lawfare was bad during the Biden administration? They’re in control of both houses now, and Trump is on the throne—they will stop at nothing to exact revenge up to and including impeaching Trump… a third time. Maybe even a fourth while they’re at it.
Plus, they’re going to try to ban everything under the sun, including AI, which is the one singular pillar holding up the entire American economy right now.
I’ve got popcorn for anybody who wants to watch the circus unfold with me at my house. I can’t wait. This will be one wild, dramatic reality TV show… and we already have a White House on the defensive, which is a battle-tested reality show host.
This was American democracy working as it should
Love it or hate the outcome, this was our country doing what it was designed to do.
We are “a democracy in a republic.”
It hurts, but it’s healthy.
Also, as a reminder, if Trump is a dictator, like Democrats keep insisting he is, he’s the worst dictator of all time, because he didn’t cancel the elections that prevented him from running his agenda.
He had all the control and could have done so, but didn’t even try.
Because he’s not a dictator. Duh.
Also, as another reminder: Donald Trump threatened to put Hillary Clinton in jail during his 2016 run. Almost immediately after assuming office, he dropped it and said we should all just move on.
During the Biden years, though, angry left-wing extremists actually arrested Trump.
That has never happened before.
Who’s the tyrant? The one arresting presidents… who happens not to be Trump.
We should all be thankful that Republicans lost—nobody is going to riot, loot stores, and burn cities
I could stop right here. This obviously true statement doesn’t even need any qualification… at all.
When Democrats lose, their supporters smash windows, vandalize public property, flip over police cars, threaten to kill people, actually kill people, light things on fire, and stop traffic.
When Republicans lose, their supporters get mad, sad, sing songs, hug, pray, and “vow to work harder,” and… usually, all of the above.
So, you can sleep well tonight, no matter what city you’re in, and no matter which party you belong to.
Because Republicans—not Democrats—lost this election.
Your children are safe. You’re welcome. You don’t even have to say thank you.
Now get back to work.
See you in 2028.