November 8, 2026
“When you look voters in the eye and tell them you will lower prices and improve their lives, they will expect you to do that. If you don’t, they will vote against you in the next election. Last night, that’s what happened to Republicans across the country.”
– Frank Luntz, Pollster
“The American people were angrier over their own pocketbooks than they were worried about socialism or Islam. They wanted to send a message and boy did they ever. This was a failed performance election and that reality overwhelmed virtually everything else.”
– Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House
“The scale of the Republican defeat is so great that it makes the race for the GOP presidential nomination wide open. If the administration had won a big victory, Vice President J D Vance would have had an enormous argument to be the inevitable nominee. Now, with this go-slow strategy blowing up in Iran and his defense of Vivek Ramaswamy’s horrible, inhumane ad featuring his opponent’s mother attacking her own daughter, a good bit of the luster has come off the bloom. The number of people who want to draft Secretary of State Marco Rubio is staggering. In addition, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, Pete Hegseth, Glenn Youngkin, and a surprising number of people may decide this is their chance to take advantage of the chaos of the shocking defeat and seek to be the champion who can rescue the party and the country.”
– Newt Gingrich, Former Speaker of the House
“Our voters who stayed home, they stayed home because they were frustrated with the lack of productivity…Last night was, should be a wake-up call for our party.”
– Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida
“Tonight was a night of the long knives. If it was Valentine’s Day, it would be a massacre…since it’s only November, let’s just call it an annihilation.”
– General Mike Flynn
“I don’t think Democrats won. I think Republicans lost this race for themselves.”
– Nikki Haley, Former UN Ambassador & SC Governor
“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” – Thomas Sowell
Why?!?: A whole lot of different reasons ALL added up. The results of which being the blue wave ended up being a Tsunami… truly catastrophic. Exit polling shows some troubling trends and challenges ahead.
I don’t think voters cast their ballots for the Democratic agenda. Instead, they expressed anger over rising gas prices, the Iran war, food costs, health care costs, and a perceived indifference coming out of Washington, D.C.
Democrats kept 98% of their 2024 vote.
Republicans kept 68%.
See the chart at the end of this email under ‘Fun Facts’: the GOP’s voters just vanished. 4.7 million fewer Republican votes across 6 states than Trump got 2 years ago, while Democrats held almost every single one of theirs.
If Republicans can’t even turn out their own voters in toss-up Senate races when Trump is off the ticket, they’re reducing the party to a cult with a very temporary leader.
We lost younger voters like it was the 1970’s, but remember Reagan came back, as did the younger voters, in the 1980’s when we had a conservative leader with a conservative message of hope and opportunity!
And then, in 2024 alone, roughly 77,000 people moved from California to Texas. That same year, about 53,000 moved from California to Nevada. They escaped their liberal state’s policies and brought their voting patterns with them… polluting red states… while not remembering why they left. Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and now Texas have moved out of the safe Republican column into battleground status if not now leaning blue!
The Iran war was a disaster. Instead of a decisive victory, we allowed it to drag out and onto the electoral stage, turning off many voters, especially swing voters and “soft” Republicans.
And yes, candidates matter. While many good candidates lost, many bad candidates were anointed and dragged down others around them. Quality and character still matters.
The phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” still resonates. People are suffering, there is a lot of uncertainty on main street, and the President and Republicans didn’t deliver and, in some cases, were tone-deaf. From ‘other protein’ to the new White House ballroom and helipad… conversely, what much of America saw was rising gas prices, rising grocery bills, and the inability for many to buy their first home.
We lost the Latino vote that had come over in the last election, while the Jewish and Black vote didn’t cross over as many expected.
In a focus group, Pollster Frank Luntz says 2024 Trump voters told him they made a mistake, something that never happens in his focus groups.
“These voters acknowledged that they made a mistake, and that never happens in these focus groups.”
“They believed him. They absolutely bought into him in a way that voters don’t normally do.”
“I see this as profound disappointment that they expected him to be able to do this and that he didn’t deliver.”
Luntz says it was a vote against Republicans over the war, higher prices, and affordability, not an embrace of Democrats. I think for conservative Republicans, this is an opportunity for a great reset… give me a little more Reagan!
Read more below and follow me on X & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Saul’s News Weekly Rewind Video
Topics Covered: Governor Byron Donalds, House Speaker race, President Trump veto
5 takeaways on a midterm rout for Democrats
Tuesday saw seismic results in the midterm elections as Democrats virtually ran the table of competitive races, and voters delivered a powerful rebuke to President Trump and the GOP.
The bottom line is that Democrats have won control of the Senate and the House. And while the precise tally in each chamber remains unclear, the party will have bigger majorities than many were projecting just weeks ago.
Trump sought to pin the blame on Republican candidates — a case he made on social media and in a midnight interview with Fox News.
But plenty of people in his party are murmuring about his role in the debacle, given his low approval ratings and the fact that his preferred candidates in key Senate races went down in defeat.
There are other questions only time will answer, including what Democrats will do with their newfound power, and what impact the results will have on the 2028 race for the White House.
Eight States Elect Dems – and Overwhelmingly Pass Voter-ID, Citizenship Laws
As we have detailed over the last several hours, Republicans and Donald Trump suffered a major rebuke in the midterms. Voters clearly expressed their deep dissatisfaction, especially younger voters, who turned out in higher numbers than expected. From Texas to Maine, from South Carolina to Kansas, Republicans got the boot in their worst midterm cycle since 2006.
But what does that really mean? Did we just see a normal midterm rebuke, or a genuine political realignment? Democrats and the media will argue the latter, and not without legitimate justification. Losing Texas was perhaps the greatest shock to the GOP last night, not just in the Senate race but also watching Greg Abbott lose what looked like a very safe seat until Election Day.
Still, evidence exists that the results may have less to do with ideology and more to do with a failure to deliver. And that evidence relates directly to Donald Trump’s own priority on election security in eight states that flipped Senate and gubernatorial seats last night to the Democrats.
In Ohio, voters rejected Vivek Ramaswamy and John Husted, choosing to send Sherrod Brown back to the Senate and hand governance of the state to Amy Acton. However, two-thirds of voters also chose to harden the state’s voter-ID requirements by creating a constitutional amendment, ensuring Acton can’t undo it:
Some of the midterm numbers are bonkers — here’s how Democrats won
In a night chock-full of big stories, a few stand out.
In Texas, Democrat Leticia Gutierrez, a lobbyist and former city council aide, upset Republican Alex Mealer by almost 16 points in a district that voted for President Donald Trump by almost 20 points in 2024.
In a district in the Rio Grande Valley, Democrat Bobby Pulido beat Rep. Monica de la Cruz by 25 points in a district that Trump had won by 18 just two years ago.
In North Carolina Richard Ojeda, who famously ran for (and lost) a district in southern West Virginia a few years back, won a district Trump had won by 16.
LaKesha Womack, a business consultant who raised less than $50,000, defeated GOP Rep. Tim Moore in a district that he had specifically drawn for himself.
Perhaps most notoriously, in Tennessee’s 4th District, Rep. Scott DesJarlais lost to Victoria Broderick, a “customer support specialist” who lost to DesJarlais four years ago by 40 points — in a district Trump had won by well over 30 points.
Ted Cruz calls midterm election results a ‘Watergate-level repudiation’ of the GOP, warns ‘Americans will be hurt’ by radical Dems
Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories amounted to a “Watergate-level repudiation” of the Republican Party, Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday, after becoming Texas’ last remaining statewide GOP lawmaker.
“2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation,” Cruz wrote in a lengthy X post.
The senator, who has previously floated making another run at the White House, argued the disastrous outcome of the election for the GOP must be “reckoned with.”
“When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead,” he continued.
“Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas,” Cruz said of his state, which had long been a GOP stronghold.
The Fight for the Right Starts Now
Voters rejected Trumpism in Tuesday’s historic midterms.
It ended with a whimper, and then a bang.
Less than 24 hours before polls opened in Tuesday’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump released a slick video with a last-minute pitch to voters that was at once banal and novel. Vote for my party, he urged, just as any sitting president might. But Trump offered an additional incentive: an open bribe to keep the GOP in power, repeating his September promise of a “Trump dividend” of $5,000 for every American—but only if Republicans win the midterms.
It was an idiotic and dishonest wheedle, of course—the president couldn’t do it, and Congress wouldn’t fund it. But even if the gambit was possible, explicitly bribing Americans with their own money is—call us old-fashioned!—banana-republic stuff that would have been shocking before Trump’s relentless disfigurement of American politics. Earlier this year, Trump told the New York Times that the only constraint on him was, in his words, “my own morality,” which, it ought to be plain, amounts to basically nothing.
But there is one other constraint, it turns out: voters.
The Democratic ‘Civil War’ Is Over. The Crazies Won.
“If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,” goes the Frank Sinatra classic, “New York, New York.” For socialists, that adage came true on election day in a big way. Five House members who are either DSA or DSA-aligned will sit in the august halls of Congress next January.
Even if Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates didn’t win, they didn’t embarrass themselves either.DSA endorsed 25 candidates for the House. And while he claims he’s not a DSA member, newly-minted Senator Abdul El-Sayed was able to win the demographically diverse state of Michigan with a decidedly pro-socialist agenda.
What’s going on?
It’s tempting to read far too much into the results. Democrats are already proclaiming “realignment” is upon us. Not so fast. Let’s have a couple more elections, including a national election, before using the “R” word.
Meanwhile, the radical Left, which has virtually taken over the Democratic Party, is claiming a mandate to govern. The leadership of the party doesn’t represent the heart and soul of Democrats, but they still run the show.
That’s the biggest problem facing Democrats. The civil war is over, but the old guard refuses to step aside.
Republicans Need a Plan to Fight the Left’s Long-Term Strategy
Republicans plan for the next election. Democrats plan for the next 10 elections and beyond.
In February 2024, I wrote here on PJ Media, “Some experts are warning that, thanks to Joe Biden’s ongoing border crisis and a 2021 executive order, Democrats could permanently bloat congressional representation in their favor.” I noted that the number of illegal aliens brought in by the Biden administration already outnumbered the population of many states. And the Biden administration was deliberately pushing many aliens to red states. But Biden was certainly not the first to try this gambit. Barack Obama did it, and so did other Democrats. They wanted to rig both Congress and the electoral college.
While Republicans kept telling Americans that this year was about lower prices, lower taxes, and more jobs, Democrats were building up systems to protect fraud and importing millions of foreigners who almost entirely favored Democrats. Republicans sadly don’t have an organized long-term plan. We keep expecting we will stay in power because Democrats are crazy, forgetting that anywhere from a third to half of the country at any given time is also crazy. We also forget that the demographics of America have changed drastically, even just in the last few decades. New York City has a socialist Muslim mayor because Muslims now outnumber or equal Irish, Italians, and Jews there…
… And Republicans still, more than a century later, have not come up with a really effective strategy for countering the racial, sexual, and immigration rhetoric tearing our country apart. That’s a lesson Republicans truly need to learn, and an outreach strategy we need to develop…
… Spencer Pratt warned the GOP we need to completely rethink our messaging. But we also need to understand that Democrats build up policies aimed at winning elections years from now, while we keep focusing just on the next election. That also has to change.
(A good/fair description of Trump Team’s thinking…)
The Trump Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Without Illusions
Rejecting the idealistic crusades of his predecessors, Trump has embraced a pragmatic, America First approach to diplomacy, national security, and great-power competition.
s there a “Trump Doctrine” that describes or explains the foreign policy of the Trump administration? Yes. It is best described and explained as a foreign policy shorn of illusions — the illusion of perfect peace; the illusion of human progress; the illusion of the march of democracy; the illusion of the “end of history.” Trump’s team of realists have approached the world as it is instead of embarking on crusades to transform it in America’s image. It is a foreign policy that is nationalistic, pragmatic, undoctrinaire, unsentimental, and flexible.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Trump’s foreign policy is the downgrading of “values” as a determinant of policy. This may be the greatest illusion that Trump has discarded.
Trump deals with dictators and autocrats because they rule the world’s other great powers (China and Russia) and predominate in the energy rich Middle East. He expects our allies in Europe and Asia to share more of the burden for their self-defense because they can, because the United States does not have unlimited resources, and because the United States is not the world’s policeman. He has substantively pivoted to the Asia-Pacific because the threat to our security interests is greatest there, but he has been careful to avoid provocative rhetoric and actions that could ignite a global war in Europe or Asia. He is waging a limited war in the Middle East because an Iranian nuclear weapon would threaten U.S. security interests. He is using economic statecraft, not as a substitute for diplomacy and deterrence, but as a complement to them.
Abdul El-Sayed: The Gerry Adams of the Muslim Brotherhood
The Senate candidate’s denials of ties to that Islamist movement follow a familiar playbook.
Those who followed the Troubles in the mid- to late 20th century may remember Gerry Adams as the apparent leader of the Irish Republican Army — president of Sinn Féin, functionally the Provisional IRA’s “political wing” (the two organizations insisted that they were separate despite overlapping memberships and objectives). Adams appeared in every way to be an influential member of the movement, to project himself as its spokesman, to be prominent at all the important meetings, and to be consulted in all the important negotiations. Yet he vehemently denied that he was a member of the IRA, the organization in which his father was a member, his paternal and maternal uncles were members, and his mother’s family (the Hannaways) were active for years. He was even interned a couple of times in the 1970s as a suspected senior IRA official — released between stints to join secret talks with the British government. But no sirree, Adams maintained he had nothing to do with the IRA — crazy talk, terrorism smear!
With this in mind, on our podcast last week, I couldn’t help but suggest to Rich Lowry that Abdul El-Sayed, the hard-left Democrat running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, is “the Gerry Adams of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Questions about El-Sayed’s ties to modern history’s most successful Islamist movement persist. As was the case with Adams and the IRA, this partially owes to El-Sayed’s family’s connections: The Washington Free Beacon has reported that his sister, Eman Abdelhadi, has publicly acknowledged that her family had “long been” active in the Brotherhood’s mothership — its Egyptian branch. Also mirroring Adams, however, entirely rational inferences about El-Sayed’s ties to a sinister movement — ties he denies but never quite disavows — stem from his own conduct, rhetoric, and affiliations.
After defeat, Republicans need to reclaim their party
Tuesday’s resounding defeat, a generational extinction-level event that swept Democrats into power not just in Washington but across the country in state capitals, needs to become the starting point for rebuilding a Republican Party that owes its voters, nominees, volunteers, and donors something more than personal loyalty.
Republicans need an honest accounting of what went wrong and a credible plan to fix it.
I remain a Republican because I believe center-right principles are the principles of a national majority.
We are the party of Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan, both Bushes and, yes, Trump. That inheritance belongs to all Republicans.
Rebuilding must begin with the Republican National Committee.
Its 168 members represent 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five territories. They have a responsibility to exercise independent judgment.
Final Thoughts
Fun Facts
