Welcome to the Madhouse
by Andrew Stiles
‘It’s worse than anyone thought’
From the river to the sea. Blue tsunami reckoning.
Americans won’t be getting those $5,000 checks after all. The polls weren’t wrong. If anything, they understated the carnage awaiting Republicans on Tuesday.
As of midnight, Democrats were projected to comfortably retake control of the House and Senate. By the time all votes are counted, they could control 55 seats in the upper chamber.
“It’s worse than anyone thought,” one GOP strategist told Mark Halperin. Others described the results as follows: “Bloodbath.” “Cataclysmic.” “Massacre.” “This is f—ed.”
And so it was.
Republicans didn’t just lose a U.S. Senate seat in Texas to James Talarico, a baby-faced avatar of insufferable wokeness who can name his favorite drag queen in less time than it takes most men to remember their own birthdays. The three-term governor, Greg Abbott (R.), was defeated.
They lost Lindsey Graham’s old seat in South Carolina, a state Donald Trump carried three times by double digits. They lost in Iowa and Kansas, a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
So much for the concerns about Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) switching parties or becoming a nuisance to his fellow Democrats as the decisive 51st vote in a narrowly divided Senate. And, for that matter, the previously widespread Democratic fears that Trump would cancel the midterms or attempt to overturn the results.
“I am absolutely willing to accept those results,” Trump told the New York Times. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them. We’ll probably work something out.” (Fact check: They probably won’t.) He followed up on Truth Social, writing: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
In any event, the opposite happened. Most observers—including some Republicans eyeing a run in 2028—will view the outcome as a sweeping rebuke of Trump’s presidency. The post-Trump era of American politics has finally arrived. The lamest of ducks, floundering in the wreckage.
To put the results in historical context, the GOP’s midterm performance was roughly as calamitous as that of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War.
On a related note, Abdul El-Sayed was projected to win the Senate race in Michigan. A left-wing radical with extensive antisemitic affiliations, El-Sayed will become one of the shortest men to serve in the U.S. Senate since Israel’s founding in 1948. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University activist who said Hamas “couldn’t avoid” the Oct. 7 massacre, was in Detroit to help him celebrate.
El-Sayed’s victory is sure to embolden the Democrat extremists eager to shape the party’s ideological trajectory heading into the 2028 primary. He was the only swing-state Senate candidate endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), a likely presidential candidate who preemptively touted her influence in a memo to allies.
“The Congresswoman has emerged as one of the most powerful endorsements in the United States,” the memo reads. “Over the course of the past two years, she has proven herself to be one of the most effective voices in the country for America’s working class.”
El-Sayed was also the only Democratic Senate candidate to campaign with Hasan Piker, the anti-American influencer who has praised Hamas, Mao Zedong, and Luigi Mangione. On his livestream Tuesday, Piker urged El-Sayed and other radical Democrats to “get back to work” and “immediately hard pivot [left] once the elections are over.”