You win some, you lose some, am I right? Last night was...brutal. The polls were right that Republicans were due for a shellacking, but they actually understated the magnitude of it. We got hammered, as it turned out. We'll lose the House by a big margin, the Dems will pick up 55 or 56 seats in the Senate, and our hold over governorships and state legislatures will diminish significantly. These are losses on a scale that will be hard to make up, so, even if we win the presidential election in 2028, we won't necessarily recover our footing in Congress or in the states. And, if we lose the presidential election, we'll be the minority party pretty much everywhere except in the dank halls of the Supreme Court, so...take comfort in SCOTUS, at least until the Dems decide to pack the court.
Now, I don't want to depress you unduly, so let's remember that Trump is still president, and he's got vast executive powers that Congress can hardly match in this day and age. They'll investigate and impeach him to their hearts' content, but, unless they're willing to shut down the government to get their way, even the power of the purse will seem pretty feeble. Note the markets' reaction to the Dems' big win too. The markets are up today, because investors tend to like divided government. I guess they think that it prevents either party from making too much mischief, which is true, to a point. Plus, the markets clearly don't buy the notion that a Dem majority in Congress means an emaciated communist chicken in every pot. Yes, there were some genuine, full-bore socialists in the mix in this election, and a few of them will now be sitting in the House and Senate, but the vast majority of Democrats in Congress are Trump-hating moderates, who can talk a good game but have no practical solutions, or diabolical stratagems, to offer at the end of the day. I expect the Dems to do little in the months ahead except criticize Trump, which, it turns out, is very easy to do, and quite satisfying for many of our countrymen, but it doesn't change the fact that he's still president and still doing a pretty good job as president, objectively, as we've discussed before. Perhaps most heartening in this situation is the fact that a Democratic Congress probably makes it more likely that Americans will vote for J.D. Vance, or whoever the Republican candidate for president happens to be in 2028, because they will want a check on those kooky Dems in the House and Senate.
So, in conclusion, all is not lost! The Dems' followed the classic playbook for a party out of power: they pretended to be moderate and blamed Trump and Republicans for every gripe that the voters have. Not surprisingly, it worked. It worked extra well because a whole lot of Republicans stayed home. You thought gas prices were too high, huh? Well, try living in a deep blue city or state. You'll find that gas, and everything else, costs more, not less. But hey, no one ever said the voters were perfect... They make mistakes, and this was one of them.
In other, perhaps equally important, news, President Trump has announced that we will be ending aid to Israel this year! Oh my!!! Aid to Israel has always been a sacred cow in American politics, and "the lobby", i.e. the pro-Israel lobby, could essentially dictate terms to Congress and the president. Well, things have changed, and apparently even Israel can see the writing on the wall: militarily and financially, the time is coming when the Jewish state may have to go it alone. We'll see if Trump's prediction about aid to Israel comes to pass, but if it does then this will be a major shift in American foreign policy.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/03/politics/trump-election-day-israel-aid
