The strategy did not "wreck Republicans". They still control majorities in the Texas and ohio state houses and congressional delegations despite receiving far fewer votes in each. Strategy was very effective and will be more so in 2028 if the election is even a little bit closer

you know what was in retrospect a huge story that the political media mostly missed? no kings. the savvy take was that the protests had no juice because so many of the protesters were old. seniors are by far the highest voting propensity age cohort.

That the GOP could suffer a generational tide-wave wipeout but STILL hold the NC State Senate is intolerable. Gerrymandering works to thwart the will of the voters.

Also of note is how clustered these polls were around the presumed narrow Abbott victory

it seems like the new popular centrist take is that Abdul El-Sayed "underperformed" relative to other Dems, which is apparently proof socialism doesn't work rather than the result of $200M of negative ads being constantly run against him over the last year.

Trump remembers that Stephen Miller was one of the only Trump Term 1 guys who unequivocally stuck with him after his coup failed and it looked like he was going to be impeached and go to prison or something. He picked him because he's going to try to do something like that again.

HEADLIGHT BRIGHTNESS REGULATION

The power of gerrymandering is that Republicans came within a few hundred votes of holding the GA Assembly (and will hold the GA state senate) despite suffering a catastrophic landslide popular vote loss

they just called this race for Killin:

There's 500 things like this but: in Trump's first term he mailed a bunch of huge checks to farmers to make up for the tariffs or whatever and in the second term they just forgot to get around to doing that.

its fucking wild to try to pivot from loudly declaring "Republicans whining about the Vivek ad are disgusting" at a rally to whatever this is in a week but the media will attempt to pivot to vance for '28 so may let him get away with it

this is because the reason they reshaped these things after 2024 is because they like Republicans and wanted to help them win.

One of the underrated storylines of 2026 will be that the Dem polling operation lead them to allocate their resources really well (including last-minute plays for seeming-longshots in SC and MS that wound up working) and the GOP's did not.

My analysis of the Texas Senate race? The thing where Ken Paxton let a pedophile out of jail after one day was bad for him. Free advice: if you're running for election, don't let any pedophiles out of jail.

Texas Republicans will try to concentrate power in the last section of government they still control, the state Senate that they kept (via effective gerrymandering)

data about turnout, early votes, exit polls etc are notoriously unreliable. Best advice is to ignore everything. We will go from knowing basically nothing to knowing with a lot of certainty how the night is gonna go when we start getting Virginia results in at 7 ET

in a different media environment this would be considered one of the 3 or 4 biggest scandals in DOJ history but the one we're actually in it rates lower than the Barack Obama Cheesecake Factory joke in terms of the amount of coverage it will receive.

this is part of the Trump administration's scheme to make sure Americans are the buyers-of-last-resort for otherwise stranded oil assets. We will get stuck with the expensive, polluting cars to make sure the Saudi Princes get paid while the rest of the world goes electric