11/4/26: GOP Suffers Total Wipeout In Midterms, BP Reacts To Historic Dem Victories

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Don't have time to listen to the show? Catch up on Breaking Points with our free daily newsletter. You'll get our breakdown of every daily story. And lots of links in your inbox every day. So head over to BreakingPoints.com. You can sign up for the newsletter at the top for free today. Good morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have? Crystal. Indeed we do. We got a bunch more results. We're going to do our big takeaways. We're looking at data centers. We're looking at Texas, Michigan. We're looking at a little Republican crash out. I'd like to see a little more of that. Yeah. I only regret from last night is that I couldn't just watch Fox all night. I know. Yeah, that would be amazing, wouldn't it? I'll go back and watch. Actually, I mean, it's a historic artifact now. Should go to buy it, right? Should go on the Smithsonian. Put it in a time capsule. Thank you, by the way. There's a lot of you who signed up last night. This is currently. This is currently live for our premium subscribers. Seriously, very, very much. Thank you for being here. Also, crazy. We had one of the biggest streams in the entire country. Yeah, we were looking just yesterday. Bigger than mainstream outlets. Like, Kornacki and Hassan beat us. Yeah. And Hassan was on Twitch. So, technically, I think we were second on all of YouTube. On YouTube? Yeah. So, number two on all of YouTube is pretty good. So, thank you. Seriously. I'll take second to Steve Kornacki. He is kind of the big official. We can't beat Kornacki. He's a national brand. It's all good. I believe he can. He made it 10 hours straight before he crashed out. Really? Yeah. Congratulations to Steve. We don't have your stamina. Although, we are live here this morning. I don't have his brain. First time ever. No, I worked with him at MSNBC. We were co-hosts together on the cycle to start with. And the way his mind works, you could say to him a date, like June 5th, 1992. And he can tell you what he had for breakfast. He can tell you what the headlines were. Like, he has that kind of recall. It's fucking freakish and amazing. That's awesome. Wow. Yeah. So, anyway. Props to him for that. All right. Should we start with. I can't even remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I literally just. I remember what you had for breakfast this morning because I watched it happen. Oh, yeah. Fair. Yeah. You saw us at Ollie's breakfast. Okay. So, since part of this clip, I apologize, premium subscribers, because some of this is going to be posted publicly. Guys, if you missed out here on our live stream exclusively after hours or our premium live stream here, of course, we still have our free month trial going on. So, breakingpoints.com, you can go ahead and take advantage. But we're going to start with some of the results. Ryan, I got to kick it to you on this one, guys. Bliss Mississippi. Bliss Mississippi. Is it happening, Ryan? It's happening. It is happening. It is happening. Gents in the control room, can you guys go ahead and pull the DDHQ results up for the state of Mississippi while Ryan talks a little bit about what we know? And it's happening for the reasons we talked about last night, that they were estimating that Cindy Hyde-Smith was likely to end up with a roughly two-point lead. Yeah. But they were making that estimate in good faith based on historical voting trends in the past. Yeah. Maybe moving the. Needles a little bit here or there, the knobs. But black turnout, in reaction to Trump gutting the Voting Rights Act, exploded. That, plus the kind of national wave, is enough to have him up by, like, what's 21 plus 20? 43 votes. Is that right? Now, what's left appear to be mostly kind of provisional and affidavit votes, which historically. have very heavily leaned Democratic in Mississippi. Because you can imagine why Democrats are more working class in Mississippi and are more likely to not have their ducks in a row compared to the guys who own the auto dealer. And they've lived there for 20 years. So the expectation is that even though this is extremely close, the remaining votes are going to lean Democratic. If it's within, what, 0.5, there's a recount? No, actually, no. At least what I saw is that Mississippi has no automatic recount. Oh, that's Florida. That it can be judicially mandated, but that it has to go through a court before it's required. This is from what Zachary Danini was saying, both about the provisional ballots, but he was also saying the fact the numbers haven't really moved, that's a good sign. Because you can't look on its face and know whether all the vote is in, but the fact that no more vote has been counted means you're likely talking about those provisional ballots. So at this point, I think you have to say it's, you don't know, but you would rather be Scott Column than Cindy Hyde-Smith. And that's wild. To your point, Crystal, Mississippi is one of the only states in the union that actually doesn't let candidates or voters even request a recount either. It has to come from a judge. That's right. And so they say Mississippi and Tennessee are one of the only ones that don't have the automatic function. Apparently, lawmakers tried to change this in the past and had anticipated a potential result like this one. So absent some. Crazy judicial intervention, which I guess we shouldn't put entirely off the table. They're going to fight like hell for this seat. I would presume. This is going to be crazy. If Cindy Hyde-Smith comes out one vote ahead, then that's going to stand. If it's Scott Column that comes out a couple dozen votes ahead, they'll probably go to a recount. But that is a wild one. Two, where there was a narrow miss, that Democrats have to, you know, go back and say, gosh, we could have even competed in more states. Florida ended up being very close. A couple points, three points, I think, with Angie Nixon. And Louisiana ended up being. 1.8 right now. Super close. Probably closer. And, you know, these are places. As soon as Angie Nixon won in Florida, the National Party said, okay, we're not going to compete in Florida. Forget about it. And there was even, you know, there was even rhetoric about like, okay, well, this is low-key good because now we don't have to pretend we're going to compete in Florida. And Bernie Sanders came down and did rallies. Angie Nixon, of course, worked her tail off. Incredible, incredible candidate. And now you've got this near-miss year with people saying, well, what could have been? Could Florida have actually flipped both there and at the governor level if there was more national investment? And then Louisiana is the one that you really have to look at and say, wow, this was a missed opportunity, which is a crazy thing to say. Yeah, look right there. We have most of the results in front of us. So, you know, we're talking about 25,000 votes right now, which I think you're actually right. You know, sometimes it's cope to talk about money. And obviously, I mean, I think one of the big picture takes from this election will be how little Republican money ended up mattering. And we're talking about literally billions of dollars. Elon Musk put half a billion dollars into this election. Yeah, it basically lit it on fire. And by the way, Tesla stock down. Hundreds of millions just in Texas. Yeah, just Tesla stock down pretty dramatically. To lose every statewide seat by a lot. But, you know, on the Democratic side. Probably because, just quickly on this, but James Tallarico was talking about Elon Musk in the closing days of the election. Despite his millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, he won. He was a vulnerability. He was a liability for Republicans. So, what's very important also to understand on the money front, because some of this will get teased out a little bit in the future, is that what we see now, as we saw in 2024 and in many other elections, the money can help you when you have the wave on your side. So, if you have the, like, it can't buy you votes, but what it can do is it can give you a ground game, it can give you an operation, and it can bring people out. I think you guys are absolutely right. I think Florida, I think both Florida, Louisiana, are real misses for the Democratic Party. And in the Florida case, it's almost certain because they just didn't believe Angie Nixon had a chance. I mean, you just cannot look at the gubernatorial. She barely ran behind Jal. And they didn't like her. I was going to say, you can't look at the gubernatorial margin. You cannot look at the Senate margin and tell me that, you know, $20, $40, $50 million would not have made, at the very least, you know, kind of a racer type race. Even a few million can move, you can move a point or two. Yeah, that's right. It's also a real narrative violation. Like, she was, David Jolly was expected to perform way, way better than her. And I think he performed maybe, maybe two points better than her. I mean, it was close. And that's a former Republican. And she's part of the DSA in Florida. So it's a real narrative violation there. We're going to talk more about Michigan later. I think when we closed up shop here last night, Michigan looked very likely but hadn't been called. It's now been called. Abdul is going to win by some eight plus points. Not close. All of the media narratives ahead of time about, oh, my God, black voters don't like him. Jewish voters don't like him. Oh, there's going to be all these Democrats for Rogers defections. Nope. Not remotely the case. He outperformed Kamala in, you know, in Detroit. He outperformed her in some of the most Jewish parts of the state. The defections were, as was the case in every other state in the entire country, the defections were from Trump voters in 2024. So Mike Rogers ends up doing worse than he did against Alyssa Slotkin when he came quite close, actually. Again, not a surprise. you've been listening to this, but I don't know how many times Republicans And, you know, the establishment needed to learn the lesson that maybe Hassan Piker is not the place that you should be focusing your energy. But that was their closing message was all about Hassan Piker, Islamophobia, Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, voters are going, hey, gas is really expensive and I hate this war. And you're not saying anything to me about any of that. You know what's actually fascinating? And, you know, this this pre I guess previewing kind of the takeaway section is Abdul wins Michigan by around eight. Penny Flanagan only won Minnesota by like five point five. I mean, in terms of the shift, that's what I would shift from. Trump was about five something five point five. I was just looking on DDHQ for Penny Flanagan. I think for Abdul, it's around eight point six. But the real shifts of the night, the historic shifts is the entire Sunbelt. So Texas, we're talking about twenty five points. Mississippi. What is it? Actually, I don't even have it in front of me. It must it's got to be a tight. It's got to be like twenty three. So Ossoff wins the entire state of Georgia here. I believe he's up by eighteen points and it's a twenty point swing there. The entire Sunbelt moved almost twenty point Democrat. If you look across the board, including Florida, by the way, even though they did end up winning because they win by fifteen, sixteen, something like that in the state. It's the upper Midwest that actually stayed a little bit more in not necessarily in the Republican column because all the Democrats are in there as well. But the shift there is not as dramatic. That actually spells entire new questions for the Electoral College. And that is where I mean, if you want to talk about flashing red lights like for years now, we've been talking about blue wall states. We got to start. I mean, Sunbelt, Sunbelt conservatism is dead as of last night. Well, and just actually, as you were saying that, I have a message here from a source who said Trump's great asset bringing in new voters is how he dazzled the polls. Right. But long term, the realignment was a bad. Electoral trade. And what's interesting about that is this is in the context of the suburbs. We were talking about suburban voters. So that's where you see huge swings in places like Georgia Sunbelt states. Basically, it's where you're going to see these huge swings from R to D. And what that gets to, I think, is going to be a couple of different takeaways Republicans can have. On the one hand, they can say, well, you know, we've already seen the cope come in from Dana Lash and others saying, oh, the Qatari propagandists won because they poisoned the well. They made the Iran war look up. Look unpopular. On the other hand, you can say you actually don't even look truly, truly. That's multiple, multiple people saying that right now. Unfortunately, Emily and I are swimming in this bowl. Yeah. This morning, Tucker. We did. Meg Kelly. People like people like us. Yes. She's telling us to enjoy our Doha vacation houses, which is not going to find me in Doha. Let me tell you that much. All right. But anyway, the point is, actually, there's a really easy way to look at this, which is suburban voters and Rust Belt voters. Don't want four dollars a gallon gas. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants it. And that is simple. Yeah. And a dumb war. But, you know, to be honest, I mean, this is almost counter to my own brand is like it's not just the war because it's not like you don't just have. Because, you know, the story that they're going to try and come up with is like you were talking about the candidate quality cope, which is true. I mean, it is. But you can't look at a map of blue arrows in every county in the entire country and go candidate quality. And it's also it's not just the Iran war. It can't be. It's just not like that, because if we take a look, you know, at the end of the day, Texas, yeah, gas was expensive. It was 380. All right. I mean, 380 sounds not that crazy at the end of the day on Election Day. Yes, it's diesel. That does not account for a 10 to a 12 point swing. I actually think this is a deep multi like it's it's a poly crisis, I guess, would be the best way to describe it, because we're talking about, you know, losses on every front. You do not regime change the eighth largest economy in the world. And lose every single statewide election seat just because of gasoline. It is not the only reason. Well, when he started really losing altitude with his approval rating, which remember, guys, at the beginning of the term, he had some of his highest ratings. He was like right at about 50 50, which for him was quite extraordinary. It was Liberation Day. That's right. That's when the approval rating starts to plummet off a cliff because it's it got directly to that his long term strength on the economy. People said this is not this is unintelligent. This is insane. This is we're being run by a madman. And, you know, at a time when inflation was our number one reason we put you in here. You're doing this. And so after that breach of trust, then it was almost like he was going out of his way to, like, piss off and fuck over every different demographic group in the country. And, you know, any way that he could, because you layer on top of that people not doing well. And then here he is with this meme coin. And here he is with his with their insider trade. Trading and surrounded constantly by billionaires. I mean, it really is a reckoning, certainly on Trump, but on the billionaires that have been out front running the entire show, which I think we'll get to more when we talk about A.I. and data centers. Progressive's accident response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident, because the only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So get peace of mind. Knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's accident response. It's the rage bait. We got clear facts. Maybe we can calm down a little. NBC News. Reporting for America. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world. And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example. Music we're listening to. Underground music. Trending music. Drama in music worlds. Yes. Sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives. Like the cool Uber driver we just had. Or the food we just ate. That was surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Met Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen to Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. I do want to quickly get to some of the other results that we haven't talked about yet. Alaska hadn't come in at all, if we could put Alaska up on the screen. I mean, it looks to be going the way that you would expect it to be going. It's fairly close right now. Mary Peltola has about a.7 lead. I'm not sure. What is this that we're looking at here? Oh, there we go. Up at the top. Yeah. So she's got a narrow lead. She's got a lead here, less than a point. Or actually, in these results, he has a lead. But what's expected to be still remaining out there is supposed to be Democratic. Scroll down so we can see the other Dan Sullivan. I don't think too many people were fooled here. We got 3,000 votes for the other Dan Sullivan. So it doesn't look like that's going to be a factor unless it really comes down to the wire, according to people who are looking at this. And they have ranked choice voting, so. Yes, exactly. That's the key here. If they did both Dans, it doesn't matter. The key right now is that because of ranked choice, guys, we actually will not know the full. election results in Alaska until November 25th, apparently. So it's going to be a long time. So the New York Times has slightly more updated numbers that has Peltola at 48.2 and Dan Sullivan at 47.9. And like I said, they expect it to be a Democrat win. And I think at this point, just given that every state has gone in that direction, it would be pretty surprising to see anything else. You know, if you look at the margins on these races, we started to do that a little bit. Tallarico winning by 12. Winning by 18. Freaking Roy Cooper won by 20 points. 20 points. And that's a flip. We should not forget. Yeah, that's a flip. That's a flip. That is a flip. South Carolina, tell us out. Yep. Annie Andrews wins by four. I mean, it's comfortable, you know, Sherrod Brown by five in Iowa, Turek also by five. The if we could actually put up there the polls under overestimated the GOP. We've got some numbers on that in every single Senate race. Except for Nebraska, the polls understated Democratic support. The biggest miss was in Texas, North Carolina, these states that had, you know, huge swings, Mississippi. And I think you can look at that and say, guess what was happening there? Pollsters were getting these results in Texas and going, that can't be it's Texas. James Tallarico is not going to win by 12 points. Correct. And then they messed around with their likely voter models or their screens or their weightings or whatever to get a result that they. Thought was more plausible and more comfortable for them. Yeah. And we thought that might be the case going in when you look at this much of a miss. And this is going to end up being, you know, a miss probably larger than the presidential misses for Trump when you average them all together. This appears to me to be pollsters were scared. They were scared. They did not trust their own data. I get it. Trump had literally sued and sells are forgetting Iowa wrong. That's going to put the fear of God in a lot of pollsters. who recognize that all of the risk is on the side of underestimating Republicans. There is really no punishment for getting Texas wrong by almost nine points or getting New Hampshire wrong by six points. There's really no price to be paid there. But yeah, in every single race except Nebraska, and there is something to be said in the Nebraska race, we were talking about this. I wonder if it would have been better for Dan Osborne if he did just run as a Democrat. I think you're right. I actually do. There were other independent candidates who tried the same strategy in Idaho and Montana and South Dakota. It didn't work out for any of them. Or at least just say, I will caucus with the Democrats and I align more with the Democrats. I've been a lifelong independent, so that's where I'm going to stay. But I'm going to caucus with the Democrats and that's mostly what I am. I disagree with him on this X, Y, Z, but he wouldn't even say, he wouldn't tell you who he was going to caucus with. And everybody kind of just knew you're going to caucus with the Democrats. Right. And so when you come back, you're going to say, I'm going to caucus with the Democrats. And so when you combine that and, you know, I'm relying on Julian's reporting on the ground and what he was seeing there, when you combine that with those leaks, where he's basically admitting like, yeah, I actually low key and like kind of lived down on these issues, but I just can't say it. Then you get a picture of someone who's just not being straight with the electorate about who he is, what he believes. And so, you know, next door in Kansas, where you have Adam Hamilton, who runs very much as himself, feels comfortable in his own skin, is running as a Democrat, also separating himself from the national party in ways that I think were effective for him. That was a much more successful strategy at the end of the day. And he wins by five points in Kansas. You're exactly right. So Dan actually loses roughly by the same margin that he did in twenty twenty four, which is honestly crazy because and that's one of the reasons I picked him to win. And that was in a twenty twenty four wave election. I go, how can that be possible? He did not obviously have the National Democratic Party behind him. He didn't have the D next to his head. And more importantly, he wasn't actually as explicit of an anti-Trump vote as he needed to be, because that's the story. That's where the energy was. I think what people really need to what needs to be hammered home tonight or this morning, tonight, whatever, for me, whatever time it is here, what needs to be hammered home here is that the D becomes representative of a middle finger for a variety of reasons. And I'm talking about up and down the ballot because we legislatures flipped, you know, nine out of the 10 most populous states in the union will now be governed by a Democrat, including out of the 10, including the state of Texas. So two of the world's largest economies, I believe, I think California governor element up on the screen. Yeah, please. Because this is honestly, for a lot of you watching, this is going to have more impact on your life than anything. I mean, I'm thinking about just where I came from in Texas. I mean, in terms of oil, in terms of clean energy, in terms of the grid, in terms of, many of the property tax, by the way, education, this was a massive rebuke of governor Abbott and Texas school choice. So basically they say Friday night lights as a result of this election. Gina Inosa last night immediately came out and said, I am firing the head of the Texas education system. The way that curricula, remember all this DEI anti-woke stuff at UT and the board of directors on both of those universities, UT and Texas A&M and Texas tech are going to change dramatically. I'm just speaking to what I think. I know right now, but you need to extrapolate this at the gubernatorial level for every single one of these states. So Keisha Lance Bottoms, I believe, what did she win Georgia by? I think it's like 10 points, maybe something like that. I mean, just these have huge, huge impacts in terms of the way that this is going to interact these governors and those state legislatures. And now what's even crazier is they have comfortable margins in the United States Senate. You have 50, what are we at now? 55. Is that right? Or Democrats? Is it 55 or 56? Depending on, I think it's six on Mississippi. So, okay. So 56, the amount of Democratic pork and others that they're, that these people are going to be bringing back to their states, it's going to be unbelievable. Like, I don't think that we can just say this is a one-off. I think this could, this is the real one. Like this is the shift. We could be going back to that era where a lot of these people, especially considering their new change on economics and the way that they talk, the amount of dollars in working with, the state governors to hand in hand like this over the next couple of years, man, I would love to live in Georgia. You're about to go for every bridge in this, in the, in the, every bridge and every road is about to get repaved. It's going to be unbelievable. I have the numbers on the state legislatures that we know of right now. This is from some random person on Twitter. Dems appear to be on track to flip 13 state legislative chambers and win eight new trifectas in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska. This is so far beyond expectations, the person says. And then there's a bunch of really red states, including Florida, where Republicans had super majorities and they don't anymore. So I mean, there was a lot of that going on. Texas is another one where I know there were huge gains for Democrats in the state legislature. I do want to, you know, I want to shout out Zoran because we've been talking about how material politics were really front and center and Democrats didn't have a unifying. National platform. There was no like equivalent of the contract for America. Yeah. However, however, after Zoran ran on affordability. Yes. Yes. Every Democrat looked at that and went, ah, yes, that's the thing. Yes. It's not democracy. It's not fascism. It's not generic resistance. Yes. It's, it is affordability. And not to say they didn't talk about those other things, not to say those other things aren't money in your pocket, but every single, yes, money in your pocket, every single candidate across the country, it was against the billionaires and it was focused on affordability. And that playbook was really rolled out by Zoran. And immediately, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger picked that up in Virginia and New Jersey. Again, outperformed the polls by a lot, win both of those states by easily by double digits. And the national party says, okay, this is the model. And so I do think, you know, this is to, we'll get into our takeaways more in a minute, but I do think this is a glimpse of what it can look like if you have a clear contrast on economic issues. Republicans ran billions of dollars on culture war, trans in particular. That's all they had. That's what they had in Virginia and New Jersey too. It didn't work there. Tallarico had hundreds of millions of dollars spent against Tallarico, God's non-binary, all of that. And also, by the way, and some of them actively lying about his positions, it didn't move the needle an inch. If anything, I mean, he, exactly because, because it became so disgusting, the amount of billionaire money that was being spent on these ads. And so he is the best performer in Texas statewide in a state he, he won it by 12 points. And that's a state where every single Democrat won the place that was the epicenter for this culture war message is the place where we saw probably the biggest backlash against Trump and the Republicans. Yeah. You know, we were looking at the numbers from Wesleyan last night that studies ads and they, they said in the last part of the campaign, most of the Republican ads were focused on taxes. Like they were doing a lot of no tax on tip stuff, but it's undeniable. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on trans advertising and that was trans issue advertising. And one of my theories all along was that that was actually going to piss some people off because when you're paying $4 a gallon for gas and you're getting bombarded with ads about Annie Andrews, who has already come out and James Tallarico, who have already come out and said, this is not my position. If you're talking about Hassan Piker, when gas is $4 a gallon, it is going to make people hate you. Some people, not everyone. I think that, I think that did happen. It's offensive. It's actually offensive. I was talking about this. I mean, with the NFL, I remember just every ad and there's been memes across this actually, even amongst like just football people who are just like, man, can I watch an ad without hearing about transgender surgery? Just trying to watch the game, man. Show me some chicken wing. It was just, yeah, it's like, I'd rather watch the beer calci ads than I would any of these political ads, but they got so bombarded with it. And then they also, you know, the explicit Trump thing. Last thing, you know, I guess we'll get to takeaways, but the corruption angle, I think we can't underestimate that. Corruption was one of the top issues in exit polls above even immigration in many of the surveys. And so these stories, they've been going viral on TikTok, all of these oil trader stories, the Trump stories, crypto, the pardon scheme, Jared Kushner. Ryan, I'm sure you've seen this. You're Mike Rogers, his wife story that, I mean, it's one of those viral stories you guys did of the entire campaign, right? Yeah. The reason why is it hits a nerve. They're getting filthy rich. I'm getting more. Yes. Mortgage rates are 7.2%. Home prices are completely unaffordable for me, my family. That's it. At the end of the day, because it's not just gas. Gas feeds into the general inflation and affordability of everything in our economy, which has been destroyed by the Trump administration. I just want to pick up on that point because I think Republicans, this gets into the candidate quality debate we're having as well. Democrats won because of the war. Democrats won by massive margins because of everything else. Because when you start a war, gas is $4 a gallon. And you have these ridiculous meme coin rug polls, all of the petty corruption stories surrounding Kimberly Guilfoyle and all the serious corruption stories surrounding Jared Kushner and others, the things that Ryan has reported on. It all adds up. Data centers, that is a big tech backlash. That is the tech right backlash. It's Elon backlash. That's why Tallarico is talking about Elon. And because we were talking about state houses, I also wanted to zero in on Wisconsin for one reason, which is that- But everyone remembers, we were all being told Wisconsin was on the cusp cusp of becoming a red state during the Tea Party years, during the Scott Walker years. Scott Walker loses in 2018. A lot of people in Wisconsin were shocked by that in 2018. And it was a close race, but it wasn't what people were expecting. Last night, again, I think put this up on the screen, Democrats, quote, flipped the majority of the legislature, taking 18 seats, leaving Republicans with 15. They also took a 50th assembly seat, securing a majority in the lower chamber with several races yet to be called as of midnight. Your homestay, my homestay. I'm told their plan is to undo Scott Walker's union busting. They're going to. I don't know how they and actually they might even get Republicans to vote for it. And that Scott Walker's kind of union busting was like the beginning of Trump in some ways. It's like, yes, 29, 2010. A couple quick results before we go to go to takeaways. Yeah. So on Friday, we had Angela Gonzalez-Torres and May Vang on on breaking points. Looks like. Looks like Gonzalez-Torres. She's up by 17 points against Democrat Jimmy Gomez. So she looks comfortably ahead. May Vang is behind to Doris Matsui. Doris got a ton of APAC money through shell packs at the end. She spent like eight million or something of her own money. She's 82 years old and she was running ads aimed at Republicans targeted around Hassan Piker. She's up. So Doris Matsui might survive. But. But the California vote gets more left as the ballots get counted. Yeah. So it's not necessarily over. But. Oh, and Randy Vegas, who. Yeah. Oh, what happened with Nicole? Florida 26. That's status quo. Don't know. So. Yeah. So Randy Vegas looks like he's going to win fairly overwhelmingly. Got it. Against David Vellato, this Republican. So that's a Bernie, a Bernie-backed candidate who beat the DCCC in the primary and then flipped a red seat, which is what we've been told just can't happen. Is that McCarthy's old district? Yeah, Bakersfield. Yeah. That's Kevin McCarthy's old district. A Bernie guy is going to be in. Wow. That is wild. McCarthy's district. The last Democratic senator from Kansas was born in 1873. Yeah, I saw that. It was, was it 1932, I think, is the last time that a Democrat was elected in Kansas. Wow. I mean, no, it's, I mean, this is, when we say historic, I was looking. We already have Thomas Frank, by the way, for the future to talk about what's going on in Kansas. I believe this is now the biggest margin of victory since 19, what was it? The Watergate, what was the Watergate backlash? What was that? D plus 17. I mean, literally, that's what we're dealing with. It looks kind of, kind of similar, actually. Foreign war, corruption, you know, it's like in terms of complete lack of faith in, in Republican governance. So. Yeah. I mean, it looks like we're going to end up around a D plus 15 electorate. Yeah. I mean, they had it at 14. Shout out. And I think, you know, results are still coming in California. So it could shift even a little bit more, but that's the type of, and if you look at specific states, so the biggest swings were across the South and the deep South, it was, it was Texas, it was Mississippi. That was the place where you saw 20 point plus shifts towards the Democrats. And, you know, we haven't mentioned ICE. I think ICE is also a major part of the Latino backlash in particular. We, when you look at the demographic groups that moved the most dramatically, it was young people and it was Latinos. Those were the two groups. And that was what the polls were showing coming in by the way. Um, but yeah, young men have fled the Trump coalition, um, and voted overwhelmingly for Tallarico. So again, some of the issues that, you know, the anti-woke issues that moved them previously, that just didn't rate for them at all when gas is at record breaking levels and that you're in an unpopular war and, you know, all of the melange of disgusting corruption issues, put it all together. And yeah, you have young voters just running from the GOP. It's crazy you say that though, uh, Crystal, because Kristi Noem is already posting. We were too successful the first year of the Trump administration. Emily, save it. That's for the, that's for the next one. Well, we brought up ICE. We brought up ICE, so we had to bring up Kristi. All right. Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount? Give pops up. It makes your day. Sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to progressive save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all States. It's the rage bait. We got clear facts. NBC news reporting for America. I'm Hamza and I'm Martin and we're the hosts of out of character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know bold, but why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had and how nice they were, or if we tip them or not come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about. Trust me. Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama and music or TV shows, or the Met Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out. Anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uh, takeaways. You guys should go first, obviously. Well, I mean, we already did takeaways sort of, right? Like, yeah, but we need a block. It's a separate segment for the public audience. All right. Public audience. The takeaway is if you run a sex, child sex trafficking ring, you then cover it up by waging a war after promising not to wage a war. And that war drives up prices and breaks the global economy. And you spend the time getting rich and pushing money towards AI and data centers. You won't do well in the elections. All right. Love it. Crystal, what do you got? Um, my big takeaway that is different from the things that Ryan just said, which is obviously what happened here. Um, yeah. And look, it was a bit of a question because people are so partisan. You're like, I don't know, maybe they'll just like suck up the child trafficking ring and be like, I look, but I got to vote for a Republican. It shows you that nothing is static in politics. It shows you that you can't take any voting group for granted. Even, you know, white non-college rural voters, like every single demographic group rebelled in some form or fashion, every one of them across the board. And it shows you that the era of 50, 50 politics, it's a possibility that it could come to an end. And I'll tell you, like Trump is going to be a lame duck. He's out there saying, oh, maybe I'll work with the Democrats. He's sort of, you know, going a lot more quietly than anyone thought that he would. Echoes actually Orban in the way that he sat down to in a way that was surprising to people or maybe Flavio running away to, uh, to Miami. Um, but so Trump is going to be gone as an issue. The Iran war, we'll see what happens with all of that. However, as I said yesterday, I think the issue of the AI poly crisis is potentially going to keep something like this coalition together because you have the data center back on. You have the backlash. You have the backlash just against oligarchs controlling our entire lives and the wealth and power that is concentrated. You have the specific crises of loss of control already with rogue swarms. You have the hacking crisis every day. There's a new headline about, oh my God, they hacked the freezers. Oh my God, they hacked a new government at, oh my God, you know, there's the power's out. Is that because of this, a hospital system's down that is only going to escalate and focus the mind. So, you know, immigration has really been the issue that has kept things 50 50 and has been very much at the center of our politics. When you are creating an industry that is meant to replace all of human labor, it is going to be very hard to use immigration as this central dividing line, which is part of why. And I, and I, it'll be very increasingly hard to use transgender issues or other culture war issues to distract from this very central problem of billionaires who are trying to ruin every aspect of your entire life and your children's life and the future for humanity. So my view is that this is a reckoning, obviously for Trump most directly, but it may also be a glimpse of where things are going in our politics. And by the way, the, what I just laid out is not a hopeful story. It is a terrifying story. Um, I, I think our only chance is for people who are pro-humanity to come together and form a coalition to fight back because even though the numbers will be on our side, you will have be a raid against you will be massive amounts of wealth, power, and compute. And some politicians who, you know, they got their guy in JD Vance and they'll try to get their guy on a, on the Democrat. side as well, politicians who will be in bed with them and who will be traitors to humanity. So I think we see, I mean, literally, I think we see a glimpse of that. And we're going to talk more about the AI and the data center stuff. But that's why I don't see this election necessarily as just a weird freak outlier or a blip. This could be the future direction of our politics, where you have very uncommon people making common cause and really having their minds focused around what is an existential threat to their way of life. Oh, that's a hope, actually. I'll get to that. So that's like in my takeaway, I think that the meta, obviously, and the one that Nate Silver, I think, really nailed, number one, is the Trump era is over. It is over. And by the way, it also means that MAGA in and of itself is dead. And what we mean by that is that the iron grip over certain demographics of white non-college educated voters, of rural voters, and ultimately MAGA relied on a partisan America. That was fundamentally broken as of last night. In the election, when you have dramatic swings, the idea that it's just Republicans staying home is not true. Significant amounts of Republicans in my home state of Texas voted Democrat straight ticket down the line for the very first time in their entire lives. They did the same thing in Mississippi, across the Sun Belt. They also did it in multiple different places in the country we could never have dreamed of, like Alaska, Louisiana, and all of these other states. So that's number one, right? So Trump himself, as a political force, what was able to have this iron grip on American politics is over. It is over. And the fact that he's actually reacting in such a muted fashion is evidence, actually, of that. The fact that he's not trying to say that the election itself was stolen. So there's that. Number two is also a little bit to what Crystal is saying. And this is where history is a very informative lesson. Because I would say the reason why two years ago that you and I and all of us could sit at this Republican popular vote victory is a resounding rebuke, right, to the liberal establishment of that time. And then Biden was a rebuke to the Trump establishment. And then the Trump was a rebuke to the Obama establishment, who himself was a rebuke to the Bush establishment. We have now had multiple, 26 years now at this point, of wave elections. And what I mean is a swing. It's all about thermostatic. Because what happens is that the opposing party comes in, become entrenched with their capitalist class or whatever. The interests are. And then we swing back because they don't follow through. Obama doesn't follow through on his promises that Lisa Trump. Trump doesn't follow through and just does a horrible job. And then Biden gets elected. Biden doesn't follow through. Trump gets elected. Nobody has ever actually been able to do what the greats did. FDR, Lincoln and others is to use a dramatic and crazy time in American society, actually put together not just coalition, but governance that crystallizes it for 20 years. We have not seen that since our politics, since Ronald Reagan in 1980. Prior to that, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. And so those are, that's the test. And that's, Crystal, what you're saying is your hope. Because that is the ultimate and the open question is what are these people going to do now with power? And I mean, anybody who's going to say that it's a given that they're going to go in the direction you just said. I mean, I think we all know that's not true. And in fact, recent history, you would bet against it. But I actually, that's my hope for the country. Because my hope is, is we cannot be living like this. These Latinos in South Texas swinging 75 points, depending on whatever the price of gasoline is, or, you know, or something. I mean, this is not a normal way, usually, that you live in our country. But in the same sense, it is a very hopeful story. Because for me, the main reason I could not say that I could see this blue tsunami, or whatever you want to call it, extinction level now, the blue nami coming, is I just, the modal outcome of my political life, right, has been we live in just two parties in the country. Are these people really going to vote Democrat? Remember, I kept saying it over and over and over. I just couldn't see it. I couldn't see it. I grew up with these people. I've known these people my whole life. I'm like, I just, I couldn't see these churchgoing evangelicals who were telling me about how Nancy Pelosi drinks children's blood. I'm like, I, you know, this woman's really, that actually happened. I'm like, I'm like, this woman actually is going to vote Democrat. Turns out she did. Maybe not her. Maybe not her. From what my mom tells me, yeah. Emily, can I preempt your takeaway? Because I have actually a thought on that, too. The instinct that Democrats will have will be to just kind of bury Trump and ignore him and let's just let him veto a bunch of stuff. Obviously, I think they should investigate all of the corruption. But I actually think the muted Trump creates an opportunity to make some progress, like, immediately. Like, he's going to want to get rid of Hegseth. If you want a new president, you can. But you have to promise to end the war. We're not, we're not going to war again. Yeah. And, okay, you want the, you want money for your budget? Okay, fine. You have to end mandatory detention. Get the families, get, get the men and women out of, like, this mandatory detention. Like, you want to try to deport people? You're still the president? Fine. But go back to the normal way of doing it, where you're not keeping people in cages. Yeah. Like, you've got the ankle braces. You've got the court hearings. Like, stop sending people to third, to Africa. From Cubans to Africa, for instance. Like, so you, like, you want some stuff from Democrats? You got to do stuff to, because there's two years, and it's just not fair for Democrats to say, yeah, sorry that you're sitting in this, you know, detention center in Louisiana. Yeah. But we can't talk to Trump, so you're going to have to sit there for two years. One second, I just pick up on this. I highly recommend people go and read Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro. And the specific chapters that you need to read here is how Johnson specifically navigates Eisenhower the Senate majority. There was a huge debate in the Democratic Party at the time. Are we going to oppose Eisenhower entirely, or are we going to work with him on specific things? And by working with him, we make ourselves more popular by co-opting parts of his agenda so that we can go and win in 1916. And you split the Republican Party. And that is exactly what LBJ picked up on. He wins that fight inside of the Democratic Party and says, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're not just going to oppose Eisenhower, but we're going to force his hand to actually work with us on some of these more popular things to make ourselves look like we're the ones who can actually get some of this done. And so, Ryan, I think you're exactly right. I mean, but there's so many big questions we'll be talking about in the coming weeks. Is Chuck Schumer the man for that job? Is Chuck Schumer Lyndon Baines Johnson reincarnate? No, I think I can answer that question. This actually goes really nicely into my big takeaway, which is that Chuck Schumer and John Thune think of themselves as normal. When we say that last night was a victory for normal common sense politics for the average American voter, they're going to interpret that as a vindication of themselves. And that is just absolutely not true. This was the real normal average American who does not want foreign wars, who doesn't want to risk gas prices, who doesn't want money being taken out of their pockets, as Abdul El-Sayed campaigned on money in your pocket, who doesn't want money coming out of their pockets for a dumb, stagnant war, who doesn't want to see the chaos, who doesn't want to see the corruption. NBC exit poll said 90% of people. It's actually the exact same. It's a little higher in NBC exit polls. It's 89% of people said cost of living was extremely or very important to their vote. 90% of people said corruption was extremely or very important to their vote. This was about populism. This was a populist victory. And you are not normal, Chuck Schumer. John Thune, you are not normal. So Trump was kind of a sugar high for Republicans for the last 10 years. It's like you're going around crazy on pixie sticks and your parents don't really know how to deal with it. The establishment doesn't really know how to deal with it. But at a certain point, that comes crashing down. And that's where we're seeing the MAGA coalition shatter. That's where we're seeing the tech right become a potential vulnerability for Trump. So the culture war, very good example. Why does that work in 2024 and not in 2026? Obviously, prices, obviously, corruption, all of those different things. And Republicans didn't frame their culture war points in a class narrative at all, which, by the way, is what you and I have been taught. It's why you it's partially why you and I came down on the quote, unquote, like, I don't mean to say right in like, correct, morally correct. Obviously, we think that but I mean, the right of center side on those issues is because we were saying this is and I think Crystal and Ryan agree with this, to some extent, it is being pushed by billionaires to divide people. And they didn't make that argument. The reason we won the culture war argument in 24 is our position, which I think was correct, is that these people care literally more about this than they do about the price of gas, or that they care about, you know, the price of your home, right? It's literally about decadence. It's like, look at their priority, they care more about the word Latinx than they do about the fact that we let 10 million people illegally into our country, right? And so at least that's what they're showing. Right? Well, yeah, that's what they're showing. I mean, I mean, I do think we won that, obviously, empirically at the ballot box in 2024. Republicans then come around and actually do the opposite of that, where they say, No, we actually care more about war with Iran than whatever you happen to think at the, you know, whenever it comes to your gas price. Yeah. And then we're gonna try said that. Yeah, they did. Trump even last night, we're gonna get to this here in a second. He goes, Oh, well, I guess people were upset about gas, but they still agree with me on Iran. Like they're delusional. But he also said they don't like he doesn't. Yeah. But let me say something else about that, because I think that's true. But I also think there was such a profound overreading of the mandate. True. Because Trump won the popular vote. It was narrow. It was right against Kamala Harris after a whole mess and high inflation and Biden's like, Brayden falling out on the table during a debate in Gaza and all of these things. He wins this narrow victory. And there was this sense among Trump and his admirers and his administration that this was some sort of final victory, that it was over. The politics was over. And that they were going to, you know, if you think about the early months in particular with Doge and Elon Musk running rampant and the criminality and all the billionaires and Stephen Miller, National Guard invading cities, ICE invading cities, shooting American protesters in the head, Liberation Day, the boat strikes. I mean, they really thought they'd won this final victory and that they could do whatever they wanted. And I really think the biggest verdict from the population was, I do think part of it was, OK, border out of control. Primarily, though, inflation very high. I mean, if you look around the globe, there was a reckoning for almost every, outside of Claudia Schein, bomb dead in Mexico, every other party in power, an incumbent in power. And in fact, the backlash against Biden and Harris was less than you saw in a lot of other countries. So there's this massive over-reading of what it meant, over-reading of the mandate, attempt to secure through Stephen Miller-type tactics a final victory. And I think that's what's going to happen. There are no final victories in politics. Well, that's the big takeaway tonight. Look, this is an absolute existential level risk wipeout, blue nami, whatever you want to call it, for Republicans. But this is no final victory either. Yes. It could just as easily go back the other way. And so what Democrats need to do, to Ryan's point, if they want to start to rebuild some trust, because they don't have trust, their favorability ratings are not high. They were a little bit better. That's all you could say about it in terms of their favorability ratings. This is not a popular party. But they're being given a chance. And so they have to focus on delivering for people in a way that is meaningful, in a way that people notice and they feel and they feel like you're fighting for them and not in bed with this oligarch billionaire class, which is what so much of this was a rejection of as well. I mean, arrogance from day one of Trump at his inauguration to surround himself with the rich people. I think that's what's going to happen. And I think that's going to happen. And then hand the government over to the richest man on the planet, who, by the way, was an undocumented immigrant here. And maybe that should be investigated by. Hey, you guys, it literally might take our take our rhetoric and kick his ass out. I mean, we'll be happy. Yeah, I mean, it's coming from. But I do I do think there is there is an opportunity here, because now that you have, you know, your evangelical lady who thought Nancy Pelosi. Drinks a lot of children and whatever. This is me. I was his secrets for a while. Straight to get Democrat. Once you've done that once, then it becomes less insane to contemplate doing it again. Yeah. So it does create an opening. I think the gains in rural America are really, really important and something that can't be taken for granted. It should be, you know, they should have the potential to build on it. But it's, you know, until you do those things and those things are very, very, very, very hard and there's no track record of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer doing those things. Then the whole thing is a castle of sand, just the way that Trump's apparent massive victory, what felt like this sort of cultural reckoning in the moment was also a castle of sand. Yeah. I mean, what's important is always in context, right? Because I think the point was in context is that him winning the popular vote was so shocking in the context of the lack of expectation of that. And I do think also you're obviously not wrong in terms of the overreading of their mandate and the way that they just acted. I mean, I remember I think you said this, you were like, man, these people are acting like they never have to win an election again. Yeah. Yeah. I remember you said that. Because they acted like that. And they thought that. No, they actually really did think that. Yeah. Obviously. I mean, I think you're right. What they decided to do was revel in the absolute worst parts of their coalition and not actually focus and drill down onto why exactly they won and to what people meant when they said blow it up. I mean, that's ultimately what I thought 2024 was. It was like a blow it up style election. But when they said blow it up, they didn't mean make it worse. They meant blow it up and rebuild it to make it a lot better. And that's ultimately the spirit of Doge, right? That was the spirit even of the way that immigrants, they're like, this is so chaotic. I want less chaos. And instead, you invite more chaos. In some ways, you know, they shut the border down. And by doing that, they actually remove the only reason why so many people were, you know, even, you know, upset with the Democrats in the first place. And then they start posting these Studio Ghibli videos, literally, of like, you know, Latino women in Georgia or whatever, weeping. And people were like, whoa, whoa. ASMR of them putting the handcuffs on. Psychotic behavior. And they thought that that was also popular. And this is a really interesting point. Those people thought that they were speaking to the average forgotten American. The way Emily and I, when we would dissent on these things, like after the Peretti killing or other, they were like, oh my gosh, libs, like, you guys don't get it. And I was like, well, first of all, you think we're libs. I was like, okay. But second of all, I'm like, I'm pretty sure what we're trying to react to is how, I think, not only because we have to do this show, but because it's such a, you know, diverse audience, like literally, is like, you know, you meet these people and you're like, hey man, you know, I'm voting for Trump and all, but this is crazy, you know? And it's like, I'm like, well, what are they trying to put their finger on the pulse of? And like, that ultimately is what it was. And here's the thing. I think people will accept a lot of corruption. I think they'll accept a lot of authoritarianism. Um, if they're doing well. Yes, that's correct. If the, if the trains are running on time to use the, you know, if, if there's money in their pockets. Literally look at China. They'll look the other way. Okay. He's getting rich, but guess what? I'm paying my bills. I'm able to buy a house. I have a future for my children. Do I love that? That's the, you know, I wish we would just all oppose like authoritarianism on principle, um, corruption on principle, but people will put up with a lot if they feel personally safe and secure and like their wellbeing is being taken care of. Correct. You cannot do all of the crazy shit and also have diesel be $6 and 50 cents and be in an unpopular war and have gas prices and the tariffs. You cannot do all of those things because people and then go out to the American people. And literally Trump said, I don't think about your financial circumstances at all. That was what he said. I mean, he put it in your face every time down to the closing message where he, he gathers at his reflecting pool to brag about his beautification and his ballroom in DC, which again, we were surprised initially at how much normal people cared about the ballroom. They were just because it was such a symbol of, well, I'm getting screwed. You are literally here gilding your, your residents. You are putting gold up and monuments to yourself, building monuments. Yeah. On the wall of the white house. Yes. All of that. And people got pissed off too at the renaming of random stuff. They're like, why are you doing this? Why? No one asked for this. Why are you focusing on this? And meanwhile, my life is getting harder. And so, yes, you had, you know, I think the, the big story in terms of the political reckoning that just occurred is it is the end of the MAGA cult. Yes. People who love this man. It's the end. The delusion that it was popular. Yes. Because, and this was the thing that we saw in the polls is that that lock that he had on the Republican base had already diminished where you still had relatively high numbers of approval, but it was no more of this. Like I'm with him, ride or die. He was, he became fallible. And that is the first time with his base. This is the first time that that has been the case. Yeah. Well said. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. 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