The Republican Blame Game Begins

Voters Are Not Stupid

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

It has been two glorious days since Democrats delivered a sweeping victory in the midterm elections, taking control of both the House and the Senate by very large margins. We do not yet know exactly how large those margins will be, and Democrats continued making historic gains deep inside traditional Republican strongholds. The good news may not be over, because the Senate majority, which now stands at 54, could grow to 56. Two Senate races remain undecided, and Democrats are looking at both Mississippi and Alaska. Some of these results could take days, possibly more than a week, but that is okay. Let’s check in with NBC’s Steve Kornacki, who has the latest on where things stand.

Kornacki: NBC has called 242 seats so far for the Democrats, with a lot of races still left. Our decision desk thinks that when all is said and done, that number should be about 259 for the Democrats. You have to go back to 1990 to find a House election where Democrats had that many seats. Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Democrats currently hold 54 seats that they have won again, with two uncalled races. This could be as high as a 56 to 44 majority for Democrats if they win those two remaining seats.

As for the Senate, it would actually be 55 Democrats plus Fetterman, but that is okay, because whether it is 53 plus Fetterman or 55 plus Fetterman, Fetterman becomes irrelevant even if he decides to live his dream and become a Republican. Now, as for those Senate seats, Democratic prosecutor Scott Colom is currently leading Republican incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde Smith in Mississippi by about 1,100 votes.

The New York Times reports that the Mississippi secretary of state says approximately 3,600 mail in absentee ballots are still outstanding, along with an unknown number of affidavit ballots. Meanwhile, in Alaska, former Democratic congresswoman Mary Peltola is leading her Republican opponent, Senator Dan Sullivan, by roughly 650 votes with about three quarters of the vote counted. Because there is only one congressional seat in Alaska, this is a statewide race, and Peltola has already won statewide before.

Alaska could take a while. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the state will begin its ranked choice tabulation on November 18. Both states remain very much in play, but in Mississippi the trend is clearly toward Colom. And just because it is fun to point this out, Joe Biden nominated Scott Colom for a judgeship, and Senator Cindy Hyde Smith took what they call a blue chip option and denied Biden the ability to nominate Colom. Now, because he is not a judge, Scott Colom looks poised to unseat her.

Here is another remarkable number from Tuesday’s election. Democrats received a record breaking 66.2 million votes in House races nationwide, shattering the previous midterm record of 60.6 million set in 2018. That is nearly six million more votes than the previous record and roughly 15 million more than Republicans received this year. So please do not let anybody tell you that Donald is not really good at getting out the vote.

Those numbers are still climbing, because millions of votes are yet to be counted. The results coming out of Texas are among the most surprising yet, though. Here is a short list of some of the major Democratic victories there. James Talarico won the US Senate race, while Gina Hinojosa came presumably out of nowhere to defeat incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, who was running for, I believe, his third term. Vicki Goodwin, a Democrat, defeated Dan Patrick for lieutenant governor, the first Democratic victory for that office in 27 years. Nathan Johnson, also a Democrat, won the attorney general race, which is huge for 2028. Democrats also flipped the Texas House of Representatives, ending 24 years of Republican control. Democrats won the state comptroller, agriculture commissioner, land commissioner, and railroad commissioner races, along with all four contested Texas Supreme Court seats. Republicans still retain a narrow five to four majority on the court, but that is okay, because look at the rest of this.

I know you are thinking railroad commissioner, who cares? Well, guess what? The railroad commissioner has control over the gas and oil industry in Texas, so that is massive. The results are equally stunning in another area. The Texas State Board of Education, which Republicans have dominated for decades on a mission to destroy public education in the state, is now on the verge of flipping to Democratic control. According to the Texas Tribune, Democrats dealt a major blow to Republican control of that board by winning four new seats. Before this election, Republicans held an 11 to four majority.

Now the board is tied seven to seven, with Democrat Dana Vander Walker leading Republican incumbent Audrey Young by fewer than 600 votes in the final undecided race. This is significant. This is the same Republican controlled board that approved mandatory Bible readings, pushed anti Islamic changes to social studies lessons, and downplayed the horrors of American slavery in classroom instruction.

The Republican controlled board of education did enormous damage to the education Texas children received, and that will hopefully change, not just in Texas but across this country. Meanwhile, just as we are having a difficult time processing this stunning result, so too are Republicans. One way they are processing it is by trying to figure out who to blame for this crushing defeat.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis referred to it as a near extinction event for Republicans. I love that. I would not qualify it as an extinction event for Republicans, though. But first we have some good news. Speaker Mike Johnson, soon to be former Speaker Mike Johnson, soon to be just Mike Johnson, told reporters yesterday that he will not seek to become the Republican minority leader. That could set up a leadership battle, and this is where the good news ends, between Steve Scalise and the vile Jim Jordan. They both seem very eager to take the job. It is hard to say which of them is less qualified and which would be worse, although I think Jim Jordan is always the worst person in any room Donald isn’t in.

Meanwhile, the Republican blame game, as I mentioned, is going strong. Vice President Baby JD Vance is blaming the war in Iran and the resulting surge in gas prices for the Republican losses.

When Donald was asked about that yesterday, he largely agreed but insisted on his position:

If I had to do it again, I’d have to do it again.

So apparently not a lot of lessons were learned there. What is troubling, and what is certainly present in Vance’s assessment of all of this, is that it was very cold blooded. It was not at all about concern for putting American troops in harm’s way. It was not about the awful conditions on the ground in Iran or the Iranian people, and it was not about how Americans are suffering because the economy is so bad and prices are so high. This was all about political calculations, and very little, if any, lesson learned.

Then there is Republican senator, soon to be former senator, Susan Collins, whose nearly three decade career in the Senate is coming to an end after her opponent, Democrat Troy Jackson, defeated her in Maine. This is how Collins explained her loss to the New York Times:

I was caught up in the Donald tsunami.

Well, that is one way of putting it. She does not want to take responsibility for her loss at all, and like many other Republicans, she is simply chalking it up to anti Donald sentiment. That would be a woeful misreading of what happened on Tuesday. This was a repudiation of Republicanism. Whether you want to call it Trumpism or MAGA, it was Republicanism, or at least this latest incarnation of it, that voters rejected. Collins voted with Donald more than 90 percent of the time. She made much of the fact that she voted to convict him after his second impeachment, while completely ignoring two facts. She practically always votes with him, and she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. You do not get to survive the kinds of political miscalculations she has made.

Every single Republican who lost on Tuesday, generally speaking, lost because voters are not stupid. They know that a vote for Susan Collins, Mike Rogers, or Ken Paxton was a vote for Donald, a vote to keep allowing Donald to have his way with America. And guess what?

That is not going to happen anymore on our watch.