This article was written in a Shwarma shop in Columbus, Ohio just before a final 10-hour drive to New York City and home. No revisions, no proofread: we die like men. Please forgive the lack of proofreading, the typos, the inevitable spelling errors, and know that audio is coming.
The question isn’t whether the Republicans are about to suffer the kind of loss typically reserved for those who attempt land war in Asia, which they are. It’s not even about whether the Republicans will mount a full-scale effort to overturn those catastrophic results, which they will.
-Me, 3 days ago
Technically, I was half right, but in truth I was significantly less so. When I said I thought the Republicans were about to experience a devastating loss, I meant that the Democrats would win both House and Senate with a comfortable margin in both. I did NOT mean that James Talarico would beat Ken Paxton by 12 percent. Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think goddamn Mississippi would be in play. This is batshit fucking bananas, this is the best case scenario, this is a beautiful moment and it’s good to be alive.
What do we even call this? “Blue Wave” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Blue Tsunami is closer, though “Blunami” feels too cute by half (and also reminds me of watching anime after school circa 1999). How about a blue downpour? A blue flood? I mean, look at this trend map:
There is no election theft narrative. You can’t blame this on illegal voters or ballot stuffing; imagine the paper cost alone. You can Stop the Steal in a few close battleground states, but this? This is beyond salvaging for the GOP. This is total humiliation. The only person I saw even attempt to claim fraud was Chaya Raichik, who has always been one of the stupidest people on the Internet and shows no sign of stopping. Everyone else got it immediately. My Halloween prediction from 3 days ago is not going to come to pass. Other bad things could happen, but that one’s off the table.
None of which is to say we’re out of the woods, or that everything went perfectly on Tuesday. As people keep reminding me, Florida remains red, winnable races were lost, and many anti-trans bills passed across the nation. I don’t want to minimize the impact these things will have on everyday people, but here’s the thing: we are looking at a result so far beyond ANYONE’S imagined best-case scenario that I struggle to take any despairing leftist seriously as a person. November 3rd was never going to fix everything, and if you’re waiting for everything to be fixed before you celebrate a win then you’ll crumble to dust before knowing any semblance of happiness. I know our celebration muscles have atrophied over the last decade or so, but there’s never been a better time to hit the emotional gym than right now.
So, you know, let’s do that for a second. We’ll get to the caveats afterwards.
I spent Election Day listening to Steve Bannon and TPUSA cover the election while driving through the midwest, starting at 9 AM and ending at midnight. It was one of the best nights of my political life. Here you can see the moment that Bannon’s soul leaves his body as he realizes just how bad this shellacking is about to get:
I have watched this clip at least 20 times and I will watch it many more.
Bannon is not a stupid man. He learned from 2022, when dire warnings of election theft depressed Republican turnout at the polls. The line, all day, was that this was going to be a close election and that Republicans needed to Pokemon Go to the polls. The Steal was mentioned casually a few times, but not emphasized.
As the day went on, the crew began to express cautious optimism: the numbers are looking good, they said, as long as Republicans continue to show up. As the first polls closed, a Bannon guest dropped what was supposed to be a mighty indicator of a Republican victory: Kalshi’s prediction markets for Iowa, Alaska, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, and Texas all swung from blue to red within 10 minutes of each other. Totally organic move, no doubt. Bannon made his guest explain like five times that Kalshi is a site where very smart “professional degenerates” bet real money on outcomes, then talked about it for 15 minutes. Everyone was very excited.
And yet, already, there were signs of trouble. Any time Bannon called on his team to deliver actual stats, stuttering set in. It sounded like they were sweating through their vocal cords. Then, they started to talk.
God, it was beautiful. First they realized the Hispanic vote was breaking for Democrats: a fact that seemed to surprise them. There was much talk about why that might be. Apparently the problem is outreach, and also the economy. Hispanic people love violent arrests without due process and adore the concentration camps, apparently. If anything, they want more deportations. It’s very important to Bannon and friends that you believe this, for reasons we’ll get to later. And yes, they know they’re full of shit; why else would they have claimed that the Northern states would be fine because there aren't as many Hispanic voters there. Is the economy better up there? Scholars remain divided.
And then, as shown in the above clip, they realized they’d lost the male voting block. Specifically, they lost young men, who shifted towards the Dems by a whopping 40 percent. To be clear: this swing does not mean all those young men like Democrats now. A significant number believe Trump has not gone far enough. Trump lost the Groypers, and we can’t forget that as we move forward.
Regardless, this is when things began to truly go off the rails in the most delicious way imaginable. Here are some highlights:
The Texas correspondence, Grant Stinchfield (whom Bannon calls “Stench”) started drinking as soon as results started coming in and kept drinking as the night went on. By the end, he was laughing manically at the absolute devastation. The words “bloodbath” and “Waterloo” were used.
Around 11:00 PM ET, Bannon asked Ben Bergquam in Ohio how that election was going. “It’s over.” Bannon, sure he’d misheard, asked him to repeat or explain. Again, shortly: “It’s over.”
Bannon’s voice dropped in register, tone and volume over the evening until he sounded inches from ending it all on-screen. “Agency. Grit. Courage” he muttered to himself darkly as the show cut to commercial break
Towards the end of the night, Bannon quoted DeSantis, who on the night of November 2nd accused Trump of “gaslighting” voters on the War in Iran. The Bannonites are anti-interventionists by nature, and they vehemently opposed the war for the first few days before finding a way to grudgingly support it. Those days are over, and not just for this faction.
The Future of the GOP
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump posted on Truth Social as the dust began to clear. That’s a lie. In his infinite hubris, Trump explicitly made this election a referendum on these last two years, and the people made their opinions very clear. After over a decade of domination, Trump’s power within the Republican Party is broken.
It’s not just the House and the Senate. At least six governorships flipped (Kansas is too close to call), which provides a bulwark against federal policy and will also make 2028 shenanigans a lot harder to pull off. The effects will last long after Trump leaves office. Trump did that, with his stupid war and stupid tariffs and flaunted grift and Epstein association and clown-car candidates like Darlene Graham and Ken Paxton and architectural mania and obsession with ending “transgender for everyone,” not to mention the ongoing unconstitutional public brutality of ICE and ERO. The Republicans know this. Lip service to Trump may continue, but his iron grip on the party just became aluminum at best.
MAGA—or at least, the ideology behind it—is not over. The GOP is coalescing around the message that the Iran war is at fault for what happened on Tuesday—not the deportations, not the tariffs, not the hyperfocus on children’s genitalia1 while people struggle to afford groceries, and certainly not the racism. The Iran war is not a load-bearing pillar for this party. The rest of these things absolutely are.
The GOP civil war has been raging behind the scenes for a while, but it is about to become an inferno. Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson collectively represent a not-insignificant wing of the far right that wants more racism, more brutality, and Nazi levels of antisemitism. The Bannonites and elements of TPUSA are adjacent and have already loosely aligned themselves with this faction; I expect that alliance to deepen in the coming months. JD Vance, backed by TPUSA, will attempt to join this faction as well. He’s done his best to keep distance between himself and the Iran War since the day it was declared, and he’s already doubling down on his condemnation. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Vance is a savvy political operator who knows which way the wind is blowing—he has to be, to overcome his total lack of charisma and the black hole he has for a heart. The fact that he’s publicly splitting from Trump says everything you need to know about Trump’s current fall from grace.
My money, unfortunately, is on the Carlson/Owens/Fuentes faction—though Lord knows I’ve been wrong before, and recently. Whether the American people will appreciate these freaks and their freak-show values if they triumph remains to be seen.
Don’t Fumble the Bag
No one is better at squandering a win than the Democrats.
Already, debate is raging about what kind of a mandate the Dems have just been handed. Are they here to fix the economy and nothing else? Are they here to prosecute Trump and the other criminals in his administration? Dismantle ICE? Enact Full Luxury Trans Sharia Space Communism?
I could not possibly put it better than Abdul El-Sayed put it on NBC’s TODAY. Read to the end, this is important:
Craig Melvin: What about investigations? What about using the subpoena power to investigate this president and this administration? How much time should Democrats in the Senate focus on that?
El Sayed: Well, the issue is not political retribution. The issue is: can we address the challenges that people face in their lives. You know, one big challenge we had over the summer is that people were dodging lettuce in my state because we had a cyclospora outbreak…there’s a reason that happened: because they DOGE’d away the FDA’s key role on inspecting our food supply. We couldn’t count the number of cases because of the DOGEing of key personnel at the CDC.
We could address that challenge. We could make the FDA whole, and CDC, to make sure we don’t have a number of recalls anymore, and investigate the decisions made that led to this in the first place—because people got sick, and in fact two people in my state died. There’s the example of the kind of role we can use the subpoena power: to understand why decisions were made that affected the American public’s pocketbook in such a real way.
I love this quote because it perfectly encapsulates something radio host Arnie Arnesen posted yesterday: prosecuting the Trump administration isn’t about “getting even,” as inveterate invertebrate Hakeem Jeffries alleged immediately after the Blue Tsunami. It’s about justice for the American people, who have been genuinely hurt by the crimes of the Trump administration and who require protection from such predation in the future. All investigations, all prosecutions, all impeachments must find their base in the material harm the Trump administration has done over the past two years. We must frame it that way to the American people, loudly and often, so that they understand that the Senate and House is prosecuting these criminals for their sake, not personal vengeance.
The people who claim the Democrats have received a mandate to fix the economy are not wrong. This presents an issue, since Trump maintains veto power and the Democrats lack a 2/3rds majority in either chamber of Congress. They may not be able to pass the legislation necessary to improve things. That’s OK: they should vote on those bills anyway. Let the Republicans torpedo them. Force them to expose themselves as grifting, grasping enemies of the people—and make sure the people know that’s what’s happened.
The Stephen Miller prediction I made a few days ago will not come to pass, thank God, but I stand by the conclusion of that article:
The most successful Democratic candidates this cycle have been progressives—again, in the most literal definition of that word. They have presented a vision for progressing beyond our untenable status quo: big, controversial proposals like Medicare for all and raising taxes on billionaires. I was lucky enough to live in NYC during Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, and that man spent almost no time talking about Trump. Instead, he presented a positive vision of what New York could be under his leadership, and that vision took him from polling at less than 1 percent to winning in a landslide within a year.
That’s the Democratic mandate. We have to take big risks for the people, lock down democracy, and use this two-year window to the hilt.
Trump still controls the military. He will continue to grow his secret police force. He will continue to sideline Congress with executive orders and straight-up unconstitutional defiance. Still, we have a chance I never dreamed we’d have. We are in a better position than we’ve been in since 2010, and we can do something real here if the Democrats don’t Democrat it up. There are some real good people in Congress now, and there’s an unprecedented mandate for change. Here’s to a better future. Here’s to hope.
Alabama and elected Allison Montgomery, a trans woman, to the Alabama state legislature. Alabama! Christ! Transphobia is simply not a winning issue long-term unless the Democrats totally capitulate, which they should really stop doing.
We will lead the GOP to paradise.
Loved your essay, Laura! We’re back to feeling like it’s a good time to be alive. Much work lies ahead, but the signs are pointing us in the right direction. Thank you for fighting the good fight!