Ep. 2096 - Full Election RECAP And What Happens Next

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Download Prize Picks and use code SPOTIFY to get $25 instantly in bonus packs when you buy your first $5 pack. Prize Picks. Run your game. 18 plus eligible areas. Terms apply. Collect responsibly. This episode is brought to you by Cardiff, America's favorite small business lender with over $12 billion funded since 2004. Applying under three minutes for same-day funding up to $500,000 at cardiff.co slash Knowles. Republicans get clobbered in the midterms. Many of us predicted that they would. I often say, I hate to say I told you so when I actually love to say I told you so. But in this case, I truly profoundly hate to say I told you so. Most of us knew the Republicans would lose. No one predicted that they would lose by quite this. Abdul wins Michigan. Tallarico wins Texas. The Democrat is currently leading in a too-close-to-call Senate race in Mississippi. And yet, amid all of the lamentations and wailing and gnashing of teeth, there are, in fact, two silver linings for Republicans that almost no one is talking about. One in the form of the ballot propositions that won last night, and the other in the form of a brief trip down midterms. Memory Lane. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. Another one of those predictions I made, and I was certainly not the only one making them. Probably many of you intuited this as well, is that the Democrats, assuming they won Capitol Hill, would spend the next two years just subpoenaing and investigating and persecuting everyone within a 100,000-mile blast radius of Trump. The incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative Robert Garcia, had a two-word response to the election results. Lawyer up. So looks like that prediction came true as well. Here are the facts as we have them. Don't forget, we're kind of a banana republic now, so we don't get all of our election results on election night. Even in massive, massive blowout elections, what we have so far is Democrats certainly taking the House by a huge margin, 228 to 139. Again, there are a lot of House races that have been too close to call that have not been announced yet, but Democrats certainly have a majority in the House and in the Senate. Right now, it's 54 to 44. We will see how the other races turn out. Really, really bad Democrats winning. Forget for a second about Abdul El-Sayed in Tallarica. We've spent a lot of time talking about them. People like Peggy Flanagan. Peggy Flanagan, who's running in Minnesota. Peggy Flanagan is probably most famous for wearing a transgender terrorism T-shirt. She posed for a photograph wearing a shirt that said, protect trans kids with a knife because there have been so many terror attacks perpetrated by trans-identifying people. And rather than calling this out and trying to give these people mental help, she says, no, I'm on their side. I'm on the side of the trans terrorists. So she wins in Minnesota. This is brutal. We have the exit polling. The biggest shifts here, white women. White women swung Democrat by 11 points. And this is something that conservatives should take to heart because one of the safest sort of jokes that you can make as a conservative is that liberal white women are the craziest people out there. You know, they're awfuls, affluent white female liberals. They're Karens, which is a racial slur. It's a racial and sexual slur. And we all make these jokes. But I have cautioned for years now at this point. I say, hey, don't just go after the white liberal women. That's a cop out. That's easy. You want to do that because, you know, there's no social cost to that. If you make fun of black women, there's a cost to that. If you make fun of other races, there's a cost to that. But for white people, it's just a free pass. So you have conservatives who go after them. The white liberal women do deserve it, but they do it, I think, because it's safe. Well, OK, we've turned off those white liberal women. They've shifted. Not only do they favor Democrats. They've now shifted in the last two years, 11 points. White non-college educated voters shifted Democrat, 14 points. Black men, President Trump did very well relative to other Republicans with black men. They shifted back Democrat without Trump on the ballot by 16 points. Hispanics, Trump made huge inroads with Hispanics. Going back to 2016, Hispanics generally really liked Trump. They've now shifted Democrat by 28 points. But we haven't gotten to the worst shifts yet. Young voters, who so many of the genius pundits told us, oh, they don't really matter. They don't really turn out that much. OK, well, 18 to 29-year-old voters shifted Democrat, 32 points. How about men, ages 18 to 29, shifted Democrat, 38 points? In part, that is because those men liked Trump. They don't necessarily like other Republicans as much. In part, it's because they don't like some of the things that Trump has been doing. In part, we would be remiss not to point. Now, the organizer who was speaking most powerfully to that group of people was our friend Charlie Kirk, and he was murdered. And the assassinations work. That's why people do them. And so the left largely celebrated when Charlie was assassinated, took credit for Charlie's assassination, had previously for years called for the assassination of Charlie and other conservatives. They finally pull one off. Never really. Repented of it. And they got what they wanted electorally. Now, there are a lot of factors. People are going to be pointing their fingers at all sorts of things and all of their own hobby horses. I think it's a relatively simple election when it comes down to issues. But just before we get into the silver linings, we have to point out just how brutal this was. I almost can't take credit for getting this right. You know, I was on Nigel Farage's show in the UK earlier in the day yesterday. And I go on. And Nigel, who is terrific. Nigel was looking on the bright side. And he gives this whole monologue. He said, you know, I actually don't think it's going to be so bad for Trump and the Republicans. I think the polls are going to be off and conventional wisdom is wrong. And he said, but Michael disagrees with me. Let's bring him on. I said, Nigel, I know it's later in the UK. Are you already in the pub? Have you already been drinking? And he started laughing. I said, I don't know. I think this is going to be brutal for a couple of reasons. One, just structurally, the Republicans had basically nowhere to go but down. The party. The party that is in the White House loses the first midterm election that has been playing out for over half a century now. So that was already baked in. It's not just that Republicans control the White House. They control the White House, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. So that dynamic of a pendulum shifting back was already going to be far more pronounced. And then you have an unpopular war that lasted too long, that came at a brutal time, and that had the downstream consequences of affecting the issue people most care about in these kinds of elections, which is the economy. The oil prices, which, when they spike, raise the price of everything. On top of the trauma, the kind of immediate recollection of the war in Iraq, which was disastrous for the Republicans. So however you want to slice it, if you want to say it was just economic issues, it was just gas prices, it was just inflation, it was this or that, all of that is basically traced back to this one, the single issue, which is the Iran war. I think that's it. I think you just have the structure of the midterms baked into that as the fact that Trump is not on the ballot. Trump connects with voters much better than other Republicans do. But you have the structure of it, and you have the unpopular war. That basically explains all of it. But I want to provide a little context, because everyone is just doom and gloom and lamentations and whining and complaining. And fair enough, it was a brutal election. But I do want to be fair here, and I don't just want to look on the bright side, because otherwise it's depressing. I want to look on the bright side, because that is realistic. And I think I have a little credibility here, folks, because, as I have mentioned, I was one of the people who was predicting that it was going to be brutal for the Republicans. And I thought, yeah, I didn't think we'd have to be fighting our way out of Mississippi. But I did think that certainly the Democrats were going to take the House, and I thought they were going to take the Senate. And I did think the war was going to drive a lot of discontent. And I did. So I was, we were joking about it on the show last night, but I was uncharacteristically doomer about the midterms. I was, of the Daily Wire, I may have been the most black-pilled person, which is so rare, because I'm usually fairly chipper about these things. So anyway, all of that is prefaced to say, I think I have some credibility here to look on the bright side. And there were a few silver linings that no one's talking about. The first one for the Republicans is, this was not the worst midterm loss ever for a party in power. That's how it's being reported. They're saying this is historic, it's never happened before, a profound once-in-a-lifetime time rebuke of, of of the president and blah, blah, blah. That isn't true. Not only was this not the worst midterm loss ever in American history, this isn't the worst midterm loss in my lifetime. The worst midterm loss in my lifetime was 1994. Bill Clinton gets elected in 1992. Two years later, you have this historic Republican wave led by Newt Gingrich that ended Democrat domination of the House of Representatives for 40 years, not two years, four years, six years, eight years. Democrats had controlled the House for 40 years. Gingrich comes in and takes, what was it, 54 seats? 54 seats in 1994. Right now, it's unclear how many seats the Democrats are going to gain because there are a lot of toss-ups and because we can't conduct elections efficiently anymore. But let's say the Democrats gain at the very, very lowest end, what, 25 or 30, could go as high as 40 seats. That's still not 1994. The Republican loss, the troubles for President Trump still don't really compare to the Democrat loss in 94 and the effect on President Bill Clinton. How about the Senate? Right now, it looks like Democrats gained seven seats in the Senate. Again, there's some things to be sorted out. 1994, the Republicans gained eight seats. So it was comparable. It was actually a little worse for the Democrats in 1994 when the Republicans picked it up. So the reason I point to 1994 is you say, okay, well, there was a bad midterm 30 years ago too, but that's not the case. That's not the case. That's not the case. That's not the case. Well, actually it is because after the brutal drubbing, brutal drubbing that Bill Clinton took in the 1994 midterms, he went on to have a successful presidency. He went on to win a second term, actually, two years later. He went on to be hailed as a great president. I think that's overstated because he was inheriting the Reagan economy and this post-Cold War peace dividend and a once-in-a-century economic boom because of the internet. But whatever you want to think about it, whatever you want to talk about the motivations and the causes, it is simply the case that after a more brutal midterm drubbing, Bill Clinton went on to have a successful presidency. So everyone, I think a lot of people who have hated Trump for 10 years or 12 years, I think what they're going to try to do is take this midterm and say, well, Trump is totally dead. He's going to take this midterm and say, well, Trump is totally dead. He's going to and even beyond Trump being totally dead, the issues that Trump was talking about are dead in the water. Immigration restriction, reindustrialization, critiques of free trade, so on and so forth. They're going to say, well, that's all over and we need to go back to the way things were before Trump. I think people are going to conveniently be trying to do that. It is far from decided that President Trump is a lame duck president at this point. President Trump is this Napoleonic figure. He just, he came in on basically his first shot, took over the GOP, dominated American politics now for going on a dozen years. And I don't see any world in which Trump loses that grip on the Republican Party, even after the midterm drubbing. And I don't think it's just because I like Trump or I see virtues in Trump that some other people perhaps miss. But I just think even in recent historical precedent, that's not what happened with Bill Clinton. Now, some things will have to change. I think Trump is going to have to get the lessons of this midterm. And I think he is getting them. He's giving some statements that we'll get to in just a moment. But that's the first silver lining is just the history of it. It was always going to be brutal for Republicans. And on top of that, you have this unpopular war. So you have to put that into context. Now, the second silver lining for the Republicans here, it's not the Senate, it's not the House, it's not the governor's races. Governor's races went horribly as well. I got to give credit to Mr. Davies. He made this point. We lost not only the Texas Senate seat, we lost the Texas governor's race. So, Governor Abbott, who's a good candidate. I don't really want to hear talk about candidate quality and, you know, Ken Paxton was a bad candidate or this Republican or that Republican. It's not just the rougher candidates who struggled or lost. It was the really good Republican candidates, the ones that pass all the checks for all the elites who say we have good candidate quality. It's guys like Greg Abbott. It's guys like Byron Donalds in Florida. Byron Donalds is a very attractive candidate. It's all of these Republican House members, Annapolina Luna barely winning her seat. Annapolina Luna attractive in multiple ways, but, you know, that's a good candidate. And so you can't just point to candidate quality. I think you have to point to issues and the main issues, the Iran war and all of the downstream effects of it and the historical circumstances. But then let's get down to some of the other issues beyond the economy, beyond foreign policy issues that hamper the economy. Have voters really dramatically shifted 18 points, 20 points, 38 points and so on? Are there any other issues that have defined our politics on abortion, on immigration, on voter ID, on transgenderism, the probably the biggest social cultural issue? Well, we actually have an answer for that because there were ballot propositions in all of these states. And there is some good news for Republicans there. We'll get to that in a second. Then we'll get to President Trump's statements. Then we will get to the timeline on which we will all be sent to the gulags. First, though, I want to tell you about Pure Talk. There's a lot more to say. First, they'll go to pure talk dot com slash. Knowles, Canada, WLAS. 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An issue that mattered not because anyone cares about women's sports really, but because it's that's a referendum on what we think about human nature. That's why the transgender issue actually is one of the most important issues. Because if we cannot decide on the difference between a man and a woman, we're totally cooked. We're not going to figure anything out. Our country's over. If a political party doesn't know that a man is different than a woman, they can't do anything. You can't trust them on tax policy or anything else. So let's get down to what those ballot props look like. The voters who go out, a lot of liberal voters sided with reality on the trans propositions. Right now we have results that are coming in. I don't think it's still totally decided. Seventy five percent of votes in sixty percent of votes in in Colorado, in Washington on the the trans sports issue. But I think in all of those states, including Arizona and Nebraska, voters are going to say, no, we don't want this transgender nonsense. In other words, they haven't changed their opinions on one of those core issues. What about another social issue? Abortion? Horrible result last night in Virginia, where now abortion up until the moment of birth or beyond. Virginia, thanks to the former Governor Ralph Northam. Abortion is just totally legal in Virginia as a hardcore matter of law, and it will be practiced without any limitations. That's brutal. Again, this also was predicted because you had the governor, Abigail Spanberger. She runs as a moderate Democrat in the election last year. She wins. She immediately proposes the most radically leftist agenda. We knew the Democrats were going to have that playbook in the 2026 midterms. And they did good on that. There was a ballot referendum, and Virginia votes to to legalize abortion. But it's a mixed bag on abortion. Republicans were at least able to step in the tide a little bit on some of the radicalism there. So what's the takeaway? The takeaway is Americans remain divided on abortion. Issues like voter ID. California shot down voter ID in a ballot referendum. OK, we knew that was going to happen, but voter ID still remains a very popular issue around the rest of the country. You had a ballot initiative in North Carolina, North Carolina, which, again, Republicans got obliterated in. But it amends the state constitution to require all voters, including those who vote by mail, to present photo identification with 95 percent plus of the votes in. You get 60 percent of the electorate there saying, yeah, of course we want voter ID. So it's a it's a mixed bag on on some of those issues on and on and on. Some of the most radical measures seem to have have failed in California, the billionaire wealth tax, one-time so-called 5% tax on individuals to steal their wealth. Now, of course, a one-time wealth tax is never a one-time wealth tax. They're just going to keep going back to that well. It's just robbery. I'm not saying feel bad for the billionaires necessarily, but the problem is it's going to have downstream effects on you. It's going to kill business and they're going to come for your property too. That gets shot down even in California. So on the actual issues, the country has not polarized too radically. It was just the electeds. Trump was not on the ballot. He said, vote as if I were on the ballot, but you can't because he is not. And so one lesson we've learned over the last dozen years is Republicans do better when Trump is on the ballot than when he's not. He was not on the ballot. The Republican Party, especially in a Congress that for both parties now can't really produce much of anything at all, that is a structural issue in Congress. It's a structural issue. It's a structural issue in Congress. It reminds me of the prime minister issue in the UK. The UK has had, what, 11 prime ministers over the last 20 years, and they've had it because voters vote for one party and then they can't get the job done. And then they vote for the other party and the other party can't get the job done. And the reason the parties can't get the job done is in part because of the incoherent demands of the people. The people want to deport the migrants, but the people also want to maintain their welfare programs, but the people aren't having any babies. Guess what? You got to give on one of those. It's not possible. And so you get these pendulum swings back and forth. I think you see a similar dynamic playing out here. It was largely a punishment of Congress itself, which means the pendulum could swing back the other way. All eyes are going to be on what happens in Iran right now. As President Trump understands, he's got to finish the war in Iran, and he can either do that through a peace deal, or he can do that with a lot of bombs or potentially even ground troops. And tensions will run very, very high on how to resolve that. But there is no question at this point in time that we're going to have to deal with this. And so the question is, who is to blame? Speaking of the Iran war, who or what is to blame? President Trump has given a bunch of statements, both last night and this morning. He's weighing in on what this means. We will get to Trump's finger pointing in a second. First, I want to tell you about Policy Genius. First, though, go to policygenius.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Even with all the bad things in the news, I'm still happy to be alive, especially because of my family, but for so many other reasons. Life is good. Okay. You want more of these great moments in your life. 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With Policy Genius, you can see if you can find a 20-year life insurance policy starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. Go to policygenius.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S to compare quotes now. That is policygenius.com. Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Okay, President Trump, right off the bat, says on Truth Social, I wasn't on the ballot, and if I was, we would have won in a landslide. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. Perhaps a little hyperbole as we New Yorkers want to engage in here, but I think the core part of this issue is right. I think Republicans would have done better with Trump on the ballot. There are going to be a lot of people, especially those who have never really liked Trump, who are going to say, no, no, no. It's all Trump's fault. We had these really good candidates running for Congress and Senate, and it's all just Trump's fault. Trump dragged them all down. I think just if you can't test it, it's a counterfactual. But I think if you were able to A-B test it, I think an election with presidential turnout and enthusiasm, even with whatever hits Trump has taken, if Trump's on the ballot, I think the Republicans do better. And I don't really see a strong argument otherwise. Then President Trump spoke to the New York Times. He said he was, quote, those results. So there are no claims of voter fraud. There were shenanigans in my old district. There's another weird prediction, because I said the race I was most closely watching was New York 17, mostly because I know that district. I've worked multiple campaigns in that district. And that was the district in the country where the ballot machines didn't work. So they've stuffed all the ballots into orange bags. Even so, the Republican there, who's a moderate Republican, he lost. And the reason I was watching that race was because it's a swing district. Well, guess what? When you're trying to duke it out to keep a Republican in power in Mississippi, the swing district is not going to go your way. So Trump says, yeah, yeah, I'm willing to accept the results. Quote, we'll, you know, look forward to working with them. We'll probably work something out. So Trump is demonstrating here that I think something that is very important, which is he's keeping his cool. Do not, kind of like Bill Clinton kept his cool in 1994. Nobody gains anything by freaking out. At the highest level, at the religious level, we know that God is some weak consolation. I say this is the ultimate consolation. This is the sort of thing that you need to remind yourself of when you suffer an election loss, when something bad happens at work, when you suffer a personal tragedy. You do have to remember, God knows the hair is on your head before you're born and a sparrow doesn't fall from the sky without his knowing it. That's real. That's not just like a Hallmark card trying to make you feel better. That is like a fact of the world. And so the Christian understanding of what happens when there are bad political results is that sometimes God is punishing us. Sometimes God is testing us. Sometimes God is punishing us. But we don't put our faith in man and princess. We put our faith ultimately in God. And so Trump says, okay, well, then there it goes. Not going to spend my time crying about it. I guess we'll just have to figure out a way to work with the Democrats. He gave an interview to Wall Street Journal and he said, yeah, the Iran war was a piece of this. He said the Iran war, that's actually a direct quote. He says the Iran war was, quote, a piece of it, of the losses. Though he says he has no regrets. He said, quote, I did the right thing. I would have done it again. So President Trump is not viewing his actions in Iran as some kind of betrayal. And I think it's very important. A lot of people were pitching the Iran war as a betrayal of Trump's principles or of MAGA. And you can't say that. You can say, as I did, that the Iran war was imprudent. Again, I think I have a little bit of credibility on this issue because I was in the minority in certain quarters. Before, during, and after the bombs dropping in the Iran war, I said I wouldn't have done it. Not because the Iranians don't deserve it. Not because it's a betrayal of MAGA. President Trump has been very tough on Iran since the 1970s. President Trump, you'll recall in the first term, did provocatively kill the top Iranian general, even beyond Iran, just elsewhere in the Middle East. Trump is dropping the Moab. Trump is not some peacenik, okay? Trump just wants to, he recognizes countries and certainly global empires need to conduct wars sometimes, but he wanted to do it in a more efficient way. I think that's why he got hit is because of the prudence factor. The efficiency with which the war was carried out, the Iranians knew they had a lot of leverage and they really pushed those pain points, especially on gas and diesel prices right before the midterm elections and the Republicans couldn't stop it. So he says, look, I remain committed. I think I did the right thing. You can disagree with the prudence of going into Iran at this time in this way for this purpose. You can do that. I did that too. But what you cannot do is accuse President Trump of betraying his principles. He's been pretty open about this from the beginning and he's sticking by it. He says, quote, I think we will work with the Democrats. We will get along very well with them. If we don't, we'll be very tough on them. They'll be very tough on us. So he's not delusional about this. A lot of people thought Trump was going to be totally delusional about the results, deny that they mattered, not accept the loss. He is accepting it. And it's just, this is another one where I think people really underestimate Trump. They don't know how to interpret New Yorkese. They don't know how to interpret some of Trump's jokes and hyperbole, but he's accepting this. He's saying, no, no, no, we'll be tough on them in as much as we can be, but they're going to be very tough on us. And so I'd like to work with them, but I don't really have any illusions that that's going to be easy. And yeah, I do think the Iran war was a big driver of this. And yeah, yeah, yeah. President Trump is acknowledging all the things that even his most vociferous critics were saying before the midterms. And he's saying, look, I have reasons for doing it. And I stand by my decisions. That's a serious grappling with what happened and he's not denying reality. Then to Fox News. And to other outlets, President Trump congratulated the Democrats. He said they did a good job. And he said, I don't view it as a hit on me. Republicans have had the greatest two years of any presidency. Here you have, you know, more of the kind of typical confidence and hyperbole. He said that the shortfalls are basically because he was, he was not on the ballot. Okay. Historical circumstances and the Iran war. This is something that the people who were predicting this result were saying, we're going to be the drivers of it. This is something that Trump himself who obviously was campaigning in this indefatigable way for four weeks before the midterms. This is something that he's acknowledging too. Seems pretty strange. straightforward. So what happens now? Well, we're already hearing from the Democrats who are measuring the drapes in their brand new big offices on Capitol Hill. The incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, this is Representative Robert Garcia. He had a message that was two words, lawyer up. This was a prediction a number of us made, which is the way that the Republicans were campaigning is they said, you can't vote for the Democrats because if they win the House or the House and the Senate, they're going to trans your kids. They're going to flood the country with illegal aliens. They're going to, gosh, I don't know. They're going to pack the Supreme Court. They're going to do every horrible thing that you would predict. But that's not true because Trump still has the veto as president. So they're actually not going to do any of those things. They're going to do one thing. Two things. They're going to stop any potential legislation that Trump is going to try to do. They're going to stop any potential legislation that Trump is going to try to get through. But Congress doesn't work and hasn't worked for many years. So Trump doesn't govern through legislation. It's basically impossible to do that in these circumstances. He governs through executive order. They can't do anything about that. The main thing they're going to do is subpoena everybody within 100,000 mile blast radius of Trump. In fact, you had Alyssa Slotkin, the congressman, the senator, Democrat senator from Michigan, who warned about this and was promising this. She said, when we have power again, we're going to persecute not just Trump, not just his cabinet, every Republican who is even possibly going to support this administration, down to teenagers. Do we have the clip? So that's what I'm saying. I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him. I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity. I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself. A ton of problems that I don't want. And so let me avoid participating in that. I want that deterrence message. I want to scare teenagers who are civically minded. Yes, teenagers who want to get involved in their government and fight for what they believe in with the mainstream, one of the two mainstream political parties. Yeah, I want to scare them into silence because I will ruin their lives if an 18-year-old kid shows up and decides to support his government and his country. I'm going to ruin his life. And I want them all to know that. All the kids need to be scared of us. And that's what they're promising. That's what a Democrat, Robert Garcia, is promising. So they're pretty hampered on Capitol Hill, but they can cause a lot of damage in that one narrow path. The other point that Mr. Davies made, it was a very good point this morning. It's the first very good point I think he's ever made, certainly that I've ever heard. But it was a powerful point. And I had to say, I hadn't heard anybody else make it. One of the real killer issues, I mentioned earlier that Greg Abbott, the governor in Texas, multi-term governor in Texas, went down to a Democrat. If we have a Democrat governor in Texas, that means that that southern border is very likely going to be kind of open again. Now, the federal government controls the southern border. That's true. But it's very helpful when you have partners in the state, especially a state like Texas, to help you enforce immigration law. If all of a sudden you have a governor of Texas who wants infinity migration, totally open borders, and amnesty for all the illegals, tens of millions of illegals, all of a sudden that border enforcement, which Trump was able to do in 30 seconds when he took office, Joe Biden said, but you can't enforce the border. It's impossible. Kamala Harris was the border czar. No, we can't. We want to enforce it, but we can't enforce it. Trump says, yes, you can. Oh, we need new laws. Remember Joe Biden tried to pass a new law. He a new law, and Trump and the Republicans won't let us pass this new law. Trump comes in, doesn't pass any new laws, shuts down the border immediately. Well, now all of a sudden, if Texas is blue, purple leaning blue, all of a sudden border enforcement's going to be a little bit trickier. So that's a brutal fact at the state level. At the state level, the Republicans got wiped out as well. Brutal, brutal night. But just a little from the uncharacteristic doomer in the group for the last, night for the last weeks, brutal, brutal night, but keep it in context. Keep it most importantly in the context of God's sovereignty over history, but also keep it within the more terrestrial, more modest context of the 1994 midterm election. Keep it in the more modest context of what the Democrats can do and what they can't do. There is a lot that they can't do. Keep it in the more modest context of this doesn't mean that it's all over for the Republicans because the voters now support transing all the kids and killing all the babies and obliterating election integrity. That's not even what showed up on the ballot referenda last night during the worst drubbing for Republicans that we've seen for Republicans maybe ever. There is still a lot of good stuff. There's still a lot of good ingredients. And with the pendulum swinging so radically, as you saw from 2024 to 2026, 38 point swings, one of the upsides of that is you could easily imagine it swinging back. A lot of that is going to depend on how President Trump responds. Don't forget when, when Bill Clinton did have that historical route in 1994, he came out, he said the era of big government is over. He started changing the way that he was talking about politics and enacting politics. There was some shakeup in the personnel and the administration. So depending on how President Trump reacts to the midterms and specifically how he conducts the Iran war in the next 48 hours or until the war ends, the Republicans might actually have a decent shot again. If passed as precedent 94 to 96, they might have a decent shot again in 2028. Who that nominee is going to be remains somewhat open question. Okay. Did you sleep last night? I didn't sleep very much, but I did sleep well. I got home at about 1 a.m. or so, a little after 1 a.m. I went to bed. I had a TV hit this morning. I was on Fox News at central time at about 4.50 a.m. So I'm waking up a little after 4 o'clock in the morning. And then I come, I write the show. I got to be right back in this office. I didn't sleep very much, but I slept very well. It's crazy. It sounds crazy. I got three hours of sleep. I woke up feeling quite good. And do you know why? Because I have Boland Branch sheets. First, though, go to bolandbranch.com slash Knowles, code Knowles. 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Ninety dollars for six months or one hundred and eighty dollars for twelve month plan required. Fifteen dollars per month equivalent. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than fifty gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. My favorite comment yesterday has nothing to do with the midterm elections at all. My favorite comment is. Why did Mozart kill his chickens? Because when he asked them to name the best composer, they all said, bach, bach, bach. Do you get it? Bach is a composer. Do you get it? That's why Mozart. You know, I've got a related one. This is going to be my contribution to that comment. Just just for a little levity, just so that we can all have. A horse walks into a bar. A bartender says, do you want a drink? And the horse says, I think not. Poof, he disappears. You see, that is a joke. That is a joke about the French philosopher René Descartes. Who famously said, I think therefore I am. But if I had told you that part first, I would have been putting Descartes before the horse. OK, just a little. I don't know. It's apropos of nothing. I guess, you know, it kind of follows maybe a little bit from that comment. I just we just need something, folks. Because it was a brutal, brutal night. Do we have I'm going to check in with the producers. Are any other races being called right now? Do we have. the results from Mississippi yet. Last night, obviously, we're in Tennessee, and I was hoping that I could go to Marsha Blackburn's victory party. I love the Blackburn family. They're great people. I assumed this would be a very easy coronation. Marsha's very popular, very good candidate. The blue wave, the blue tsunami was so bad that we were following the race in Tennessee. I couldn't go to the victory party because I was working here. I had to do my day job. But Marsha won. It's Tennessee. But the margin of victory was much, much lower than we were hoping. No races are yet being called again. There's going to be a lot to look out for, though. I mean, there are dozens and dozens of outstanding House races that have not been called. Now, Senate races that still have not been called. Some of the ballot referenda have not been called. So it's not even over. This really, I made the joke yesterday as well. On the election coverage. But some people were optimistic. Some people were pessimistic about the election. I am always hopeful, but I like to be realistic, which is why I was predicting a route for the Republicans. And I said, you know, that the difference between the conservative optimist and the conservative pessimist is the conservative pessimist says things can't get any worse. And the conservative optimist says, oh, yes, they can. So I don't know if you're optimistic or pessimistic about the rest of these races, but I do assure you things could get much, much worse. So then the question becomes, what happens for? 2028. This again, I think you're seeing a lot of people opportunistically trying to push their own agenda on 2028. But structurally, I don't think 2028 really has changed much at all. My predictions have been pretty good recently. So I think I got some cred here. The heir apparent for President Trump is J.D. Vance. No question about that. That has been true for a long time. Some people don't like J.D. Vance. It's a very minority. It's a very minority position among especially kind of more beltway conservatives, but it exists. So J.D. Vance has his haters. And so they've been trying to push alternative candidates. One of those candidates has been Marco Rubio. But Marco Rubio doesn't really fit the bill for a couple of reasons. Three reasons, really. One, I don't see a world in the modern age in which the secretary of state is going to get the nod over the sitting vice president. It's just very, very hard to do that. Even if the White House wanted to, there's no indication that they do. Two, Marco Rubio already endorsed J.D. Vance. He said he would support him. If he runs and he would like him to run. Three, Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance agree on most everything. The knocks that some, especially of the more beltway types, are making on J.D. Vance, that he supports a common good kind of capitalism and constitutionalism, which is contrary to the conservative movement of 1986. And we can't use this phrase common good because common good capitalism is just a euphemism for socialism. Well, guess what, guys? Marco Rubio coined the phrase common good capitalism. So there's not a lot of daylight there. I don't think that dynamic has much changed. There was a little bit of a change last night, though. I think Trump still remains the grand poobah of the Republican Party. I think Donald Trump still basically picks the nominee for 2028. And I think right now it's the vice president's to lose. I think he is the obvious heir apparent. None of that changed. However, there are other candidates who want to run. There are a lot of other candidates. There are a lot of other candidates who want to run, actually. You saw some talk from Rand Paul some months ago that he might run for president. Rand Paul could occupy the Libertarian lane. There's always someone running in the Libertarian lane, and he's probably the best guy to do it. He's one of the two or three best guys to do it, without question. Senator Cruz has indicated that he wants to run multiple times now. He obviously was the number two guy who nearly beat President Trump in the 2016 primaries. So he is a kind of a natural figure. Had the Republicans done really, really well in the midterms, or, I don't know, not really, really well, but better than they did, it would have been harder for Senator Cruz to find a lane. I think his lane has opened up considerably here, though he will still have an issue. Does he run as the alternative to Trump, the number two guy in 2016, or does he run as the true heir to the Trump legacy? He's worked well with Trump in the Senate, and, you know, in some ways you could argue he agrees with Trump more than some members of his own administration. That would be the pitch for the campaign. Those are two contrary pitches. So it's unclear. After the midterms last night, Senator Cruz running as the alternative to Trump is probably the better lane, especially if it's a fait accompli that Trump is going to endorse one of the people in his administration, most likely J.D. Vance. Okay, so the calculation changes a little bit, and I think Senator Cruz's stock went up in the primary. The other guy who had a big win last night was Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis, who really did not have much of a lane at all. We've been examining this for months now. They said that the trouble for DeSantis in 2028 is going to be the same trouble for DeSantis in 2024. Namely, the pitch for DeSantis is that he's Trump, but bigger, better, faster, stronger. Look, that argument did not carry any weight in 2024. They tried to make that argument. It did not work. But that's a different argument than Senator Cruz could make. Because Senator Cruz's argument would be, look, guys, you know, these other candidates, they're the heirs. They're the heirs to Trumpism, but I'm the heirs to Reaganism. You know, I'm a return to a more sensible kind of conservatism that is distinct both from the Beltway establishment and from the more populist elements of the last 10 years, which caught us a drubbing in the midterms. So the Cruz lane is, I'm, you know, Mr. Conservative. I'm the heir to Reagan. For DeSantis, the argument has been for his whole political career now that I'm Trump, but better. You know, with more discipline in my rhetoric and whatever. Again, that argument was never going to play when he was literally running against Trump in 2024. And obviously that primary more or less should not have even existed. Now, however, it's a little bit different because there's this big data point that DeSantis can point to, which is the Republicans got wiped out everywhere. Texas, duking it out in Mississippi. I mean, brutal, brutal stuff. But not Florida. The Florida Republican ticket swept one across the board. And DeSantis is going to take credit for that. And I think he deserves to take credit from that. Now, there are going to be disadvantages to a DeSantis candidacy, down to his retail skills, down to President Trump's continued domination, which I predict of the Republican Party. So again, I'm not saying DeSantis' stock rose 500,000% last night, but it rose. There's no question about that. And that's. That's important because, while you might think we're getting ahead of ourselves, it's not true. Last night was the midterm election, which means that today is the first day of the 2028 presidential primary. Okay, so much more to get to. We have this new segment that I kind of hate, but it's growing on me. It's called News or Noise. The rest of the show continues now. You do not want to miss it. Become a member. Use code NOLSKNWLES at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at News or Noise. We'll see you next time. Bye. Father, I used to feel Christ. I cannot feel anything here. They take me out of my bed, and they brought me here, and they tell me nothing. What have I done? Article 58, counter-revolutionary activity. That is all I know. They have to deal with so many enemies of the state, all of whom claim their innocence, who protest, who cry. There are no answers here, other than the ones they put in your mouth. Your break. Today is yours. This is your opportunity to demonstrate your loyalty to the people. I'd like to know why I'm here. Of course. But you already know, don't you? 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