I've been watching elections since 1972 – yeah, I was that second-grader who cared that Richard Nixon won, even though Justin Poe assured me it was because Nixon voted for himself 20 times. I've had great nights – Reagan 1980, the 1994 midterms, Trump 2016, and Trump 2024 – and bad nights. This was a bad night, really bad, bleak without a single ray of light through the clouds, an electoral abortion of Roe v. Wade levels. But here's a hard truth about elections from a lot of these nights. Some election nights are good, some nights are meh, and some nights suck. Tuesday night sucked.
But it didn't super suck. While we lost everything, the end result was not a disaster of Obama 2012 proportions. Well, except for NYC, but they can live with that. The election was the equivalent of walking down a Scat Francisco sidewalk barefoot after a hobo chili cook-off, but it did not illustrate any great new truths that doom us in one year in the midterms. It illustrated old truths. It just sucked, and it's important that we learn what we can from it and get ready for 2026.
I predicted it, as did most observers. In Virginia, New Jersey, California, and New York, Democrat jurisdictions voted for … wait for it … you're not gonna believe this … the Democrats. I'm a great believer in Occam's Razor – the simplest explanation is probably the explanation. And the most likely explanation for Democrats winning in Democrat jurisdictions is that they were Democrats.
But it still sucks.
And sucking is part of politics. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. We had a pretty good run, and this time the basics were not in our favor. The basics matter. The venue. The candidates. Historical trends. Procedural factors. The economy. Events. Motivation. These are not always determinative, but they tend to be. They were against us here. They don't all have to be next year.
We talked about venue. The big Democrat wins were big Democrat places. It would have been shocking if we had won – we were fighting for upsets. We were likely to lose – not necessarily by as much as we did, but lose nonetheless. We can't choose where the elections are, but next year they are everywhere.
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Candidates matter. Winsome is a nice lady, but a terrible candidate for Virginia. In a place like VA, a super-conservative black lady who takes pictures with rifles is not going to sand off the sharp edge of NOVA blue vote totals. You need a Glenn Younkin —a calm, reassuring, competent businessman who gives off the vibe that he'd happily give you a 6:00 a.m. ride to the airport. But even that may not be enough. Jason Myares was mellow and competent, and the wine women still chose the sociopathic murder onanist because he is a Democrat.
At the best of times, for a Republican to win in Virginia, you need to have a very normie Republican who's aided by political tail winds, like a human eggplant in the White House screwing everything up, as well as advantages like not having hundreds of federal workers blaming Republicans for how the Democrats stopped paying them. You have to get lucky. Winsome did not get lucky. She got creamed.
But they did elect a communist in NYC. He was charismatic and hopeful. Andrew Cuomo was entitled, lazy, and also Andrew Cuomo. Curtis Sliwa is a nice guy, but just no. As one person told me, "He should take off that hat once in a while." Again, great guy, great New Yorker, but nostalgia for the Guardian Angels' heyday of 40 years ago won't cut it against a political superstar like Mamdani.
We need to nominate good candidates.
Then there are historical trends. They are not determinative—look at the 2002 midterms, when the GOP won with W in the White House. But they are a pretty solid indicator – look at how I had to go back a quarter century for an example. Historically, these off-year elections should have sucked for us, and – surprise! – they sucked for us.
There are procedural factors at play. There is redistricting—California's initiative to do it passed 2-1. Several Fredocon Republican states are balking at following suit. The GOP traitors need to be nuked from orbit. Further, forever elections where you vote for weeks on end mean last-minute revelations – like murder fantasies – may come out after people cast their ballot. Also, we got crushed in early voting – the GOP (and especially the president) need to stop sending mixed messages on early voting and voting by mail and turn people out long before the nominal election day. We have to win elections as they are, not as we want them to be. How many times do we have to learn this lesson?
Also, look at the ranked-choice voting scam that will play a role in places like Maine and Alaska. In Minneapolis, the frigid leftist stronghold of the north, this socialist Omar Fateh (D-Mogadishu) guy may end up beating the normal pinko Jacob Frey because of ranked-choice; the scam is to add several other socialists to the ballot to drain away second-round votes. The GOP needs to be hip to this okey-doke where it is actually playing in an RCV jurisdiction.
James Carville, before he gave up and started trying to maintain a grasp on his fleeting relevance by spewing MSNBC gulag slop, famously observed, "It's the economy, stupid." Yeah, it is. The economy is coming back, but you don't feel it yet unless you own a lot of NASDAQ stock. The driver of the economy is negative – people vote on it when it is bad. People think it's bad today. And there are serious disruptions that come from fixing the failures we have experienced over recent decades. Is it fair that the GOP gets blamed? No, but only teenage girls and journalists whine about fairness. The Republicans have to get this economy cooking – fortunately, they can do it.
We have a year. That's got to be job one. Trump is doing a lot. His administration's dispersed efforts keep the Democrat opposition off its game, but also can give the impression of chaos and lack of focus. Maybe pare down on foreign policy and other stuff.
Events will be key, of course. The Democrats played their shutdown well. It helped in VA and to some extent NJ, not just by depriving lazy civilian government slugs of their grossly inflated paychecks but by creating an atmosphere of crisis and chaos. While Israel is calming down, Venezuela and Nigeria are heating up. The regime media is still plucking the violin over every child-raping Third World peasant ICE ships back to Scumbagistan. The GOP needs to reassert control over the narrative.
And there's motivation. The Left had it, we didn't. Part of it is that our coalition includes people who came in because of Trump. Trump was not on the ballot, and the fact is that Trump is a huge motivation to the other side. Going into Virginia and New Jersey would have been a net loss, considering that so many of these blue degenerates have replaced faith and family with a bizarre hatred of the president and all of us who support him. The fact is that they will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump, and too many of our folks just sort of shrugged.
We have to motivate our folks in 2026. We did not this time. We'll have money. We have a growing alternative media. We also have Trump himself. But we have not cracked the code on turning our people out in an off-year, and the Democrats have.
Yeah, this sucks. These days after a loss are the worst. But they happen. Nothing is written. We are not doomed. We have real problems and challenges, but dooming won't address them. Hard work and providing results will. Just remember: You Winsome – if you pardon the expression, Virginia – and you lose some. And Tuesday was one of the some we lost.
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Editor’s Note: Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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