The Iran war is wildly unpopular. It's been a disaster both economically and politically, as it just cost Republicans both houses of Congress. That’s entirely on Donald Trump. He started it. He hasn’t found a way out of it.

Democrats want it over, and a lot of Republicans do too. Even his own vice president blamed it for the midterm rout. But the most f…

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Friday, November 6, 2026

The midterms are mostly over, and the Blue Tsunami has a raft of Democrat leaders trying to get on the same page about what it all means. Sen. Chuck Schumer is likely feeling very good about the candidate selection that led to the historic results, but a growing chorus within the Democratic caucus says this is not the time for him to return as Majority Leader. That’s just one facet of what’s not quite a Democratic Civil War, of course, but a big-tent party searching for the best takeaway from an election that saw both Adam Hamilton and Abdul El-Sayed win their races with notably different positions. Is woke back? Or is it still the economy, stupid? Centrists vs. progressives is a persistent narrative, while the more populist haves vs. have-nots is a less convenient story for members of Congress who have done very well looking after the haves.

01. Prices or Vibes? Democrats Start Fighting Over Why They Won as the 2028 Calls Begin

[Gaining Traction]. Clyburn fields calls from 2028 hopefuls, and Van Hollen and Booker keep powder dry in backing Schumer. Are the Democrats already in disarray?

Rep. Jim Clyburn fielded four phone calls the day after the midterms. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was one of them. Clyburn told Playbook the next Democratic presidential nominee must “demonstrate the ability to manage” and should not “get carried away with sound bites and how many followers you got on the internet.” Wise words.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear told CNN the next nominee “needs to be a Democratic governor.” Senator Chris Van Hollen weighs his own run and has not yet endorsed Chuck Schumer for leader, and neither has Cory Booker. Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed wants Van Hollen in the job.

Fox & Friends presented this as a Schumer revolt montage Friday morning. Lawrence Jones said Democrats “just elected a bunch of articulate gangsters” and predicted Schumer goes first. Greg Gutfeld argued that the ballot measures prove Republicans are “right in ideas even if our candidates are dorks.” Dorks! CNN spent a segment on “woke 3.0” memes, which led to one panelist noting that memes aren’t votes (but here we are talking about them!) Morning Joe counted the Republican House districts James Talarico carried and astutely left the memes alone.

TAKEAWAY: The Democratic introspection is an uncomfortable yet important post-election process, as it is also with the GOP, especially in a post-Trump political landscape. Given the low approval ratings of Trump, the Dems, and the GOP, maybe the old partisan spectrum construct is what’s becoming outdated.

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Just days before the midterms, an interview between James Talarico and Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO was released. The Democratic Senate candidate was asked whether he loved his opponent, Republican candidate Ken Paxton.

“Yes,” he replied. “Ken Paxton is a child of God. He is my brother in Christ.” He went on to explain that loving someone requi…

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Fox News is losing viewers. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched Donald Trump lose the country’s approval at a similar clip.

Network executives have been here before, and are assuredly thinking about how best to engineer a ratings comeback in a post-Trump world. Honestly, all networks engage in a post-election debrief to figure out how best t…

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Thursday, November 5, 2026

Tracking narrative movement in the weeks before an election can become laboriously redundant as parties and candidates harden into familiar talking points. As such, newsletters that track narratives can sometimes feel similarly repetitive. Well, good news, dear reader. We’ve reached the oasis of new ideas and narratives to discuss! Huzzah! For example, fascinating new throughlines are just emerging, like JD Vance openly criticizing the Iran War and, ostensibly by proxy, Donald Trump’s decision to lead us into a conflict that spiked gas prices and caused an existential threat to the Republican Party, at least according to Ron DeSantis. Also, conservative media are actively searching for a new leading man, as the nation, and its audience, has grown tired of the old guy. And “woke is back!” is a thing that was actually said on CNN following the midterm results, an idea that was so predictable and tired that Republicans did the thing they do so well… they pounced, and deservedly so.

01. Et Tu, JD? Vance Blames Trump’s War for the Midterm Wipeout

[Gaining Traction]. The vice president blamed a disastrous Iran war for the GOP blowout. Trump called it largely true before saying Vance may not run.

Vice President JD Vance posted about 600 words Wednesday morning following a Blue Tsunami and repudiation of his party, and named the cause. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote. “The president himself said so last night.” He told anyone who thinks it was worth it to argue that “losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it.” Donald Trump Jr. added THREE 100 emojis in his reposting it on X.

President Trump was asked about it during a press tour of the construction of the White House ballroom. He was remarkably chill in calling the post “largely true” and took a principled approach in saying he’d do it all again. Asked about 2028, he said, “Maybe he won’t run.”

Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called the post “disloyal to the president” on Special Report. Bret Baier’s clear answer was “He wants to run for president.” Fox & Friends opened its first hour Thursday arguing with Vance. MS NOW never quoted the post in five hours of prime time. Axios quoted a source close to the administration who said Vance “acted like he wanted to become” president. Ya think?

TAKEAWAY: It’s not just that JD Vance made a remarkably early play for 2028 and basically broke the 11th commandment of speaking ill of a fellow Republican (even if by subtweet). The larger issue is that the Republican Party is basically auditioning for its next leading man, and the reaction to this very early play is doing Vance no favors among his own party in terms of getting cast in the role he so sorely wants.

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I watched Democrats win big Tuesday night, and before I’d gone to bed, I was watching them lose the narrative by thoroughly misreading what it all meant.

It wasn’t all Democrats, but enough for Republicans to proverbially pounce. The biggest example was Rep. Ro Khanna, who was so quick to celebrate the historic midterm victory by posting a video with the…

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Rahm Emanuel visited the set of Fox & Friends Wednesday morning following the midterms and refused to let Brian Kilmeade make anti-Semitism solely a Democratic problem.

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Kilmeade and Lawrence Jones pressed the Democratic presidential hopeful on it for nearly six minutes, repeatedly insisting that the rise of hate crimes against Democrats is a result of t…

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Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Well, that was interesting. Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate during a historic midterm election that clearly repudiated Donald Trump’s administration and the failed candidates he personally selected. How big was the rout? We don’t know yet, since Alaska and Mississippi (!) are still very much up for grabs, though prediction markets should give Democrats reason for optimism. So what next? Can a newly elected Democratic majority legislate with Trump running the executive branch and do anything beyond providing the constitutional checks and balances that’s been missing? And what do we make of the sudden identity crisis both parties face in a post-Trump political world? I’m not sure there is any clarity yet on what the winning message was, other than a massive vote on Trump, and that’s not something anyone can run on in 2028.

01. Blue Tsunami: Trump Told Voters to ‘Pretend I’m on the Ballot.’ They Sure as Hell Did.

[Going Mainstream]. Why did at least seven Senate seats flip, and Kansas, for the first time since 1932? Trump has the worst midterm approval number any president has posted.

Have you heard the news? Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats last night, and the House majority will likely clear a whopping 250. Kansas elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1932. Texas elected a Democrat statewide for the first time in 32 years, and did it twice. South Carolina, Iowa, and Maine all went blue.

Trump spent the last month insisting that crowds vote like he was on the ballot. Voters heard him and did that, especially in the battleground states he aggressively campaigned in over the past month. CNN's exit poll put Trump’s net approval at minus 24 among midterm voters, which is the worst midterm number for any president in the exit poll era. Non-MAGA Republicans gave him 60 percent approval. Those two numbers likely explain why Kansas and Texas both went blue better than any other hot take.

Fox’s Chad Pergram accurately reported the election results as “an unpopular war, gas prices, President Trump not being on the ballot, Republicans staying home.” The New York Post’s front page headline screamed “BLUE TSUNAMI,” placed over an image of a wide-eyed Trump. Ainsley Earhardt previewed a raft of cable news segments to come when she asked Rahm Emanuel, “What happens now with your party? Do you go the El Sayed-AOC route or a more moderate route?”

TAKEAWAY: Last night was an undeniably massive win for Democrats, but next up in the national discourse? Diagnosing exactly what this big win means, beyond a clear repudiation of Trump and his policies. “Woke is back!” was the takeaway from a CNN political analyst, which I’m not sure everyone agrees on, but it is a clear signal of the looming debate within both parties as they try to figure out what voters want in a post-Trump political world.

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Donald Trump may be the only Republican in America who can afford to lose tonight, and that’s not because he’s reportedly earned well over a billion dollars since he took the oath of office in 2025.

According to most reliable polls and prediction markets, his Republican party stands to lose Congress and two years of its own agenda. And if the blue tsunam…

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President Donald Trump seemed to stun the Fox & Friends host with a surprise announcement that $4 billion in US military aid to Israel will end in December.

He did it so casually Tuesday morning that the Fox & Friends hosts had to interrupt him multiple times to ask if they’d heard him right. They had. And Trump's reason for ending the aid? Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed keeps bringing it up.

“We were giving them 4 billion; it gets cut off at the end of the year because they don’t need it,” Trump said just after 8:20. “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It is a bad talking point.”

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A bad talking point is the reason for ending military aid to Israel. There has never been a more effective talking point in midterm election history. Trump just gave El Sayed a massive win.

Trump clarified and claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu asked for the US to end its military aid, which seems …odd? “Bibi brought it up. He said, I think it would be appropriate if we do not receive aid.” Asked whether the $4 billion was weapons or cash, Trump said, “Any way you want to define it, consider it barter, military aid or cash.” Israel can still buy American weapons. “Oh, yes, they can buy whatever they want, so can Europe.”

Watch a portion of his interview below:

Fox & Friends hosts were clearly caught off guard. Brian Kilmeade broke in to clarify: “Are we to understand we cut off aid to Israel?” Then, “Sorry for not knowing this, 4 billion in military aid, actually hardware or 4 billion as in a check?” Lawrence Jones tried to sum it up. The left had “weaponized” the aid against Republican candidates, and Trump was taking “this talking point off the table.” Trump agreed. “Great word usage, talking point. The best talking point that these lunatics have on the left.”

El-Sayed’s closing line Monday night was that it shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know the money is spent on you “instead of dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids.” Trump mentioned him twice. “When you see this lunatic running in Michigan, he talks about money we pay them all the time. He says, why are we giving Israel 4 billion dollars. Take that off the table.”

The current agreement provides $3.8 billion a year through 2028, and Congress appropriates it. Reuters reported it was unclear which funding Trump meant. Netanyahu’s office had not commented. Polls in Michigan close at 8 PM.

Watch above via Fox Nes.

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Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Happy Election Day for those who observe. You may be surprised to learn that the top news narratives of the day are all midterm election-related. I know that’s the salient, keen insight you come to the Morning Frame for every day, and I aim to deliver! Donald Trump’s closing argument next to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was largely derided as a hot mess of commentary about pipes, algae, and Bermuda grass. Overlooked was his apparent concession that the Midterms will not go well for the Republican Party after he repeatedly insisted voters see it as a referendum on Trump. In related news, a massive “Blue Tsunami” result is now expected, which very well might happen, but also strangely feels like Democratic hubris of 2016. Managed expectations are the key to happiness, and it's starting to feel like anything less than D Sen 54 will be a disappointment. Oh, and we bombed Iran yesterday, and while appearing on Hannity Monday night, President Trump seemed unaware. So there’s that.

01. Blue Tsunami or 2016 Again? Polls and Prediction Markets Now Say the Senate Goes Blue Too

[Gaining Traction]. The House was never in doubt, but now most polls and every prediction market give Democrats the Senate.

The House has been written off to Dems for months, but the new and growing consensus is that the Senate will go blue as well. The final New York Times/Siena polls put Democrats ahead in all seven battlegrounds. Nate Silver puts the Senate at 80 percent for Democrats, Sabato has them at 53 seats, and Kalshi projects 53 to 46, with a Democratic sweep of both chambers at 79 percent. Iowa, the one battleground Republicans still led on Kalshi Monday morning, flipped overnight.

Fox News’s power rankings were read on Fox & Friends this morning and give Democrats the House 223 to 195, with 13 of the 17 toss-ups in Republican hands. The pollsters that Republicans book won’t call it for them either. Robert Towery told Sean Hannity, “I’m not going to tell you right now that the Republicans are winning these races.”

The New York Times provided an important caveat. Nate Cohn wrote that white Democrats were about 30 percent likelier than white Republicans to answer its final polls. That’s a wider gap than existed in 2020 when the polls overstated Democrats. Hannity read that on air and pointedly asked why the paper would release it.

TAKEAWAY: I am not in the prognostication game; however, ten years ago almost all of the very same forecasters had Hillary Clinton winning. If this blue wave doesn't materialize, the anger at the polls and legacy media will make 2016 look mild.

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President Donald Trump stood before the recently renovated Reflection Pool next to the Lincoln Memorial on Monday afternoon, held up a length of rusted pipe, and asked, “Does somebody have those pictures for me?”

That was the most bizarre closing argument in the history of closing arguments, given less than a day before the polls open in the morning.

For 23 minutes, the president talked about leaks, algae, granite, Bermuda grass, and the lawn where somebody burned 8647 into the sod. When he finally said, “as you know, this is the last day before the midterm,” the main thing he had to say was that sitting presidents don’t win them. I mean.

It was sort of the perfect ending for what’s been a very strange two weeks. During a Greenville, SC rally, he told supporters he was “studying” Jon Husted’s body, “his ass is like, it’s like a pile of muscle.” He opened his Sunday rally in Dubuque on Ashley Hinson’s weight, “a little bit heavier,” while she stood under a banner that read Trump Endorsed. And of course on Monday, the eve of election day, he closed on caulk, and he did it looking older and sounding slurrier than at any point in the campaign. It honestly felt more like an argument about the benefits of the 25th Amendment than a midterm vote.

The last speech of the midterms ran 38 minutes, and the first 23 were a renovation update. He opened by announcing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool might become “the Trump Reflecting Pool,” then said, “I’m only kidding,” to assembled reporters all too familiar with his failed effort to rename the Kennedy Center in the same way.

He went into excruciating detail about the Reflection Pool, talking about how “granite will have a million year life.” He held up photos of the adjacent lawn where someone had burned 8647 into the grass, explained that 8647 “was a Comey phrase” meaning “kill 47,” called it “a mob expression,” and called James Comey a “dirty cop.” He then said, “Like the human being, grass has a life,” that Bermuda grass in Florida gets replaced every 12 years, and that Scotts did the White House lawn for free. He gave the new helipad a “rave review.” He explained why red spray paint is worse on limestone than on granite.

It wasn’t a bit, and SNL can’t even satirize it because it’s already too bizarre.

This wasn't typical for a crowd of adoring rally-goers eager to see The Trump Show come to Salina. He was reading pipe specifications off photographs to a seated audience of park employees. His words came slowly, ran together, and he even seemed to forget Doug Burgum's name. Twice.

A president with any sense of how he looked, or a staff with the temerity to give him honest feedback, would never have scheduled this on election eve. How the hell does a 38-minute monologue about algae, given on the day before a midterm his own party is bracing to lose, read as anything but an advertisement for the 25th Amendment?

Twenty-three minutes in, he finally got to the election, and he played the hits from his recent rally tour. He promised "every adult" $5,000 if Republicans win, provided they spend it in America. He said Democrats had nominated "jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood members," said Abdul El-Sayed got on the Michigan ballot "at radical mosques," and said "we're not looking to have a jihadist be in our Senate." He called the Alaska Senate race "really a fraudulent election" a day before it was held.

And he conceded. "Usually whoever the sitting president is, Republican or Democrat, good or bad... for some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms. We gave this a very strong shot." That's past tense, even though the polls haven’t even opened yet.

He then closed by returning to the memorial he was standing next to. “Reflecting pool is great. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to watch... Pipes have just been changed.” I suspect somewhere there IS a faction of voters moved by the new pipe messaging, but I’m not sure it’s that significant. Trump then asked the Park Police to watch for box cutters, thanked everybody, and handed the microphone to Doug Burgum.

Republican candidates who kept him out of their campaign ads this fall got grief from his own people. On Monday, Trump showed precisely why they did it. He prattled on for nearly 40 in a voice that kept fading out. The one thing he said about Tuesday’s midterms was that he’d already lost.

You know the meme. A young girl grins at the camera while a house burns behind her, and the joke implies that the impish, cute girl is the arsonist.

That was Haley Stevens on Sunday morning, in a pew next to Mike Rogers, before calling herself a “proud Democrat” who “can’t stand with Hasan Piker.” Everyone read the picture the same way. Some will see fire in my ham-fisted Photoshop version above as burning Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign, and the grin belongs to the woman he beat. But I think it’s worth looking again at what exactly Stevens burnt down, beyond her own political career.

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On late Saturday evening, Stevens reportedly told her fellow Michigan representative Debbie Dingell that she wouldn't endorse Rogers. By 11 AM Sunday, she had, on camera, with the Republican nominee beside her. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had spent 25 minutes on the phone with her earlier in the week trying to talk her out of it. Her chief of staff and many other aides quit in mass protest hours later. The state party chair said she "lied to me."

By Sunday evening, she appeared on CNN to explain her decision. Anderson Cooper prompted a simple explanation, and she sat in silence for about seven seconds before answering, "Was that a question, Anderson?" It was one of the most public acts of political career suicide ever committed on live television, and she came across as petty, impulsive, and, frankly, full of shit. Three months ago, she went on Fox News to say she'd back El-Sayed because "that's called democracy" and you don't join a party to "hold a grudge."

But everyone is looking at the wrong mistake. Sunday ended her political career, and that's what people are talking about because it’s so rare to see self-immolation unfold, live and in a stunningly satisfying way. Rarely do we see something schadenfreudetastic™.

The much bigger mistake is what she did to her own side's argument, which was the whole reason she was in the race in the first place. The Michigan primary was the cleanest test the Democratic establishment had of its theory of the party. Stevens made this argument back in March, when El-Sayed scheduled rallies with Piker at Michigan and Michigan State. "We have to be serious here about who's going to be the best general election candidate," she said, and argued that a Democrat who campaigned with Piker couldn't win the state.

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That was a large part of her campaign. She was running as much to prove that a far-left candidate like El-Sayed would lose in November. And as uncomfortable it may be for some to read me mention it, she ran with AIPAC-aligned money behind her, in a purple state, with the Senate on the line. But her establishment Democratic argument lost the primary to the progressive by 13,792 votes.

Tuesday's election would theoretically settle whether she was right, but then she impulsively mean-girl’d her endorsement of Mike Rogers. If El-Sayed loses, nobody will be able to say with clear confidence whether he lost because a progressive couldn’t win Michigan … or because Haley Stevens made sure he didn’t.

The argument that progressive Dems cannot win general elections in battleground states is the argument every centrist in the Democratic Party has been making since 2024. Michigan became the laboratory, the one place to get the cleanest answer. Stevens's bizarre pivot effectively removed the clean answer her centrist Democratic coalition desperately needed. And if El Sayed still wins despite her backstabbing? The progressive candidates will have achieved a much more important win than it would’ve been just two days ago. Oops.

The headline says everyone is missing it, which isn’t quite true. Nate Silver made a similar point Sunday. “It will now be much harder to blame his progressivism since people can just blame Haley Stevens instead,” he wrote. She went to church Sunday morning to sink him. Within four hours, El-Sayed raised $1.2 million off her heel turn.

What’s most revealing is who is actually angriest, and curiously it’s not the progressive who raised a ton of money. The fury is coming from Dingell, who called her appearance on CNN “one of the most painful interviews I have ever watched.” It's coming from Jamie Raskin, the state party chair, and her advisers who quit. Yes, the effect on Senate math plays a major role here, but that doesn’t entirely get you to “painful.” The “grown-ups” in the party just watched one of their own prove the left’s point about the establishment, on election eve, in the very race they picked to prove the opposite. Stevens didn’t just reopen the primary debate she and centrist Dems lost in August, but she made the eventual result worse for the establishment either way.

Stevens’ grin in the picture above is taken from Sunday morning. The seven awkward seconds with Cooper last night had everyone seeing an ill-prepared politician bad on television. But if you watch it again, you might see someone turning around to find out that the house that’s burning behind her isn’t just her own, but she just lit the centrist Democrat's house on fire too.

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Monday, November 2, 2026

In what might be the most unique form of political suicide, Rep. Haley Stevens single-handedly undermined nearly everything she’s stood for in her career in one stunning moment Sunday when she decided to endorse Republican candidate for Senate Mike Rogers. It was a fittingly bizarre coda to a remarkably weird midterm election season, particularly in her home state of Michigan, where Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed remains a favorite. Will Stevens’ emotionally impulsive pivot change the shape of the race, just one day out? Not according to Kalshi, which initially showed El-Sayed down eight points, then surged back up after what feels like a very outlier-ish New York Times Siena poll dropped, putting him up 11 points. The good news for everyone weary of this political narrative overload? Our national nightmare is set to mostly end Wednesday morning (looking at you, Alaska and your ranked-choice hijinks), though it will almost certainly be replaced by more nightmarish narratives of election denialism, bad polling, and Democratic Party dysfunction!

01. Career Suicide? Haley Stevens Endorses Mike Rogers Hours After Promising Debbie Dingell She Wouldn’t

[Gaining Traction]. She told Debbie Dingell at midnight she’d never endorse Mike Rogers, but by the next morning she was sitting in a church pew next to him.

Rep. Haley Stevens sat through Sunday service at Perfecting Church in Detroit beside Mike Rogers, then told reporters she’s a proud Democrat endorsing the Republican for Senate because Abdul El-Sayed told her she wasn’t welcome in his campaign and because “We can’t stand with Hasan Piker.”

Around midnight, she’d told Representative Debbie Dingell she wasn’t doing it. Last Wednesday Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spent 25 minutes on the phone talking her out of it, and Stevens texted back “thank you so much for talking to me and hearing me,” according to Politico. Justin German, her chief of staff of eight years, resigned by Sunday afternoon and took much of her staff with him. Michigan Democratic chairman Curtis Hertel said she “lied to me” and is no longer a member of the party.

She then performed a strange form of political self-immolation on live television when she went on CNN and let Anderson Cooper‘s question sit for about seven seconds, then asked, “Was that a question, Anderson?” She did not come off as particularly prepared. Dingell, on next, called it “one of the most painful interviews I have ever watched.” El-Sayed raised more than $1 million in the hours after.

TAKEAWAY: It’s hard to imagine where Haley Stevens goes from here. If she joins the Republican Party, she really looks like someone who only wants the spotlight. Move over Christine O’Donnell, who became temporarily famous for her bizarre “I’m not a witch” campaign ad, there is a new political punchline.

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Friday, October 30, 2026

Donald Trump canceled weekend plans to campaign in both Iowa and Kansas, where hotly contested Senate races could determine Congressional majority. Just hours before the announcement, a new poll showed Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton up four points over incumbent Roger Marshall in a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932. The White House said Trump will continue with “tele-rallies,” a fancy word for phone calls, but the clear narrative emerging is that Trump’s 32-day campaign rally tour, designed to lift GOP candidates, has backfired so badly that it was canceled early. Vice President JD Vance muffed a Fox News town hall question on affordability, and Democratic hijinks in the Alaska Senate race may cost them the seat, as the Republican governor has threatened to withhold certification.

01. Trump’s Rally Tour Backfires on His Own Candidates as He Cancels Kansas and Iowa Four Days Out

[Gaining Traction]. Trump told voters to pretend he’s on the ballot. After 25 rallies in 19 states, he’s phoning it in during the last weekend.

Trump opened his rally tour in Oklahoma on Oct. 1 and gave a clear instruction for voters: pretend he’s on the ballot. Twenty-five rallies and 19 states later, the Senate map is much bluer than when he started. Fox News power rankings moved Ohio from toss-up to lean Democrat this week and deep red South Carolina from lean Republican to toss-up. CNN’s new polls have Republicans trailing in Michigan, Kansas, and Texas, three states he visited multiple times.

Trump scrapped his last two stops, Salina, Kansas, for Senator Roger Marshall, and Dubuque, Iowa, for Ashley Hinson, and swapped them for phone-in rallies in at least 19 states. He then explained how Marshall “is doing very well.” When a Reuters reporter asked whether he was sick of traveling, Trump called him “sick” and “disgusting” and said, “You look like hell.”

Republicans talking to reporters aren’t backing him up. A top Republican official told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, “Thank God he hasn’t moved the needle anywhere.” The chairwoman of the Kansas Republican Party told CNN she urged the RNC to take the race seriously months ago and “People laughed in my face.” Adam Hamilton, the Democrat, told a Wichita station that “maybe the president has given up on Roger Marshall.” Kalshi moved Hamilton from 44 cents to 49.

Senator Tim Scott runs the Republican Senate campaign arm and appeared on Fox & Friends Friday morning and said, “Good news for America, President Trump is on the ballot.” Fox News gave the cancellations one package on Special Report and one sentence in two hours of Fox & Friends, and never aired the Reuters exchange Thursday night or Friday morning. CNN and MS NOW led with it.

TAKEAWAY: It’s impossible to know this definitively, but Trump’s rally tour appears to have done more harm than good with candidates he rallied with. And questionable polling data isn’t the best evidence of that argument; his cutting the tour short is.

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Donald Trump’s rally tour was built to save the Republican majority in the coming midterms. Five days before the election, it’s doing far more for Democrats than any ad buy they could afford.

The tour opened in Oklahoma on Oct. 1, and Trump’s pitch has been remarkably consistent at nearly every stop since: pretend I’m on the ballot. “We win when I’m on the ballot,” he told a high school stadium in Vandalia, Ohio. It makes sense if you’re prioritizing one voter profile. Low-propensity MAGA voters have typically skipped the midterms, so if you put the man they turn out for in front of them, you hope they remember to show up.

Unfortunately for Trump and Republicans, it seems like everybody else heard the same instruction. The final NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found likely voters saying that their ballot is a vote against Trump rather than for him, by a 2-to-1 margin. Only half of Republicans say their vote is about supporting him, and Democrats lead among the most enthusiastic voters, 71% to 61%. Trump got the referendum he was seeking and is learning the bad reviews in real time.

Four weeks in, almost every race he’s visited has moved the wrong way. Ohio got one of the first stops. Jon Husted trailed Sherrod Brown by a single point in an InsiderAdvantage poll taken days before the Vandalia rally. By mid-October, the Cook Political Report’s poll had Brown up 6, and last week’s Fox News poll had him up 5. This morning, Fox News Power Rankings moved the race from a toss-up to Lean D.

Deep red South Carolina was supposed to be safe. No Democrat has won a Senate race there this century, and Darline Graham, appointed to the seat after her brother Lindsey’s death in July, led Annie Andrews by 4 in Rasmussen’s early-October poll and by 3 in Trafalgar’s in mid-month. This week’s New York Times/Siena poll has them tied at 48%, with Andrews taking 57% of independents, and Fox News Power Rankings now calls it a toss-up, down from Lean R.

Trump returned to the Palmetto State for a second rally this week, raising as many questions as it answered. One doesn’t rally in South Carolina twice in two weeks because things are going well. Mississippi, where he also stopped to campaign, slid from Solid R to Likely R in the same update.

Republicans are trailing in three more Senate races, according to CNN’s most recent polls. Abdul El-Sayed’s lead over Mike Rogers is up to 7 points from 3 in CNN’s early-September survey. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, but Democrat Adam Hamilton is ahead of Roger Marshall by 4. And in Texas, CNN puts James Talarico up 6 on Ken Paxton, a week after a Fox News poll had them tied. Trump has campaigned in Michigan, Kansas, and Texas multiple times this month. Is the polling dip a correlation or causation? Either way, it’s not good.

Trump called El-Sayed a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” again and again during a Port Huron, Michigan, rally this weekend. He claimed the Democratic candidate would have to pass through a metal detector to get into the Senate, and told Jewish voters who back El-Sayed they should be ashamed of themselves. Bishara Bahbah, who founded Arab Americans for Trump and ran the outreach that won Trump real ground in Michigan two years ago, condemned the clearly Islamophobic comment. Rogers spent that same morning on Meet the Press explaining that he’s never called his opponent a terrorist.

Two days later in Corpus Christi, while stumping for Paxton, Trump spent a long stretch on his false claim that Talarico is a vegan who throws up after eating meat. He called him “Tala-Freak-O,” floated mental illness as an explanation for Talarico’s bout with the flu, and acted out Talarico at a barbecue with a hand-to-mouth pantomime (”I love the meat!”) that a good chunk of the internet took for a blowjob. Seriously.

Trump reminded the same rally crowd of his promise of $5,000 checks to every adult if Republicans hold both chambers. He then invited them to spend it at Mar-a-Lago as his guests, and said $5,000 would buy maybe a hamburger and a small dessert at his club. He wasn’t sure it would cover even that. “That’s not a good place if you’re price-conscious,” he added. The White House had spent the previous week calling Barack Obama a snob over a Cheesecake Factory joke. Only twenty-six percent of the country currently approves of how Trump is handling the economy.

Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini argued the Grand Old Party’s case this week when he noted that the people who get offended at a jihadist smear or wince at a blow job slash meat pantomime were never going to vote Republican anyway, so these rallies cost the Republicans nothing. Makes sense for its effect on Democratic voters, but the crucial independent vote is an entirely different matter. Annie Andrews is getting 57% of them in South Carolina, Sherrod Brown has a 15-point edge with them in Ohio, and James Talarico is winning them by anywhere from 28 to 38 points depending on the poll. None of those people are at the rally, but the clips still find them.

Somebody in Trump’s orbit seems to have noticed. On Thursday, after 25 rallies in 19 states, Trump scrapped his weekend stops in Salina, Kan., and Dubuque, Iowa, and swapped them for tele-rallies.

“I’m not going to Kansas because he’s doing very well,” he told reporters during a tarmac gaggle, while the senator he’s talking about is trailing by 4 in CNN’s latest poll. Asked whether he was feeling all right, Trump answered that the reporter was disgusting and looked like hell. Jamal Simmons offered a likelier reason for the scrapped rallies on CNN’s Outfront: the latest internal poll came back, and “Trump is not helping. In fact, probably he’s hurting,” and the campaigns are keeping him away.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot” is Trump’s open admission that the MAGA movement is his and his only. His most loyal voters still show up for him, but they don’t show up the same way for Darline Graham or Jon Husted. But the voters who absolutely can’t stand Trump turn out against whoever is sharing the rally stage with Trump. He might be able to deliver the hardcore MAGA set to Roger Marshall for one Saturday in Salina, but the net effect is getting more anti-Trump voters to turn out for Adam Hamilton.

Trump was convinced that he was the salve to GOP midterm woes, but it sure looks like he’s the poison.

As I walked my dog, Frank, this afternoon, I found myself thinking about how sour the nation's mood is right now, then trying to think of another time in my lifetime when shit was as bad as it is now. And I landed on 1980.

I was a thirteen-year-old eighth grader in Overland Park, Kansas, just one year after moving from the small city of Hutchinson to the Kansas City suburbs. It may not surprise you that I was raised in a home obsessed with the news. 1980 was tough for a bunch of reasons, many of which are similar to today.

The nation was mired in a foreign relations debacle, though not one directly of the government's choosing, in terms of the Iran hostage crisis. The economy was in bad shape, though in a different way than it is today. And the president, Jimmy Carter, was largely considered a failure. The peanut farmer came across to many as not ready for prime time.

Today, gas prices are nearing record levels, largely due to a foreign policy morass also in Iran, but this time of the government's own choosing. The economy is not in great shape for the vast majority of Americans suffering through a significant affordability crisis, though, to be fair, the asset-owning class is doing wonderfully under Donald Trump.

This is a prelude to the epiphany I had with my dog on a beautiful Autumnal day in Brooklyn: Donald Trump is the new Jimmy Carter. I said what I said.

Returning briefly to Overland Park in 1980, the sentence I heard most at home was “We can’t afford it.” My mother said it about whatever I’d come home wanting to buy something that week from Spencer’s Gifts at Oak Park Mall. My father had bet on himself with a food ingredient business that wasn’t paying off yet, and the financial stress was palpable even for an eighth grader. My mother had been a Carter delegate, and she stayed loyal to him while she stretched the grocery budget he was being blamed for. My dad was a Rockefeller Republican who was less than impressed with the Carter administration’s weird focus on noise pollution, the metric system, and what kind of candy bars were in the White House vending machine.

Cut to today, and consumer sentiment is remarkably similar to then, and don’t just take my word for it. The University of Michigan has tracked it since the early 1950s, and in 1980, with inflation near 14 percent and the prime rate around 20, the index bottomed out at 51.7. It actually fell to its lowest reading in its history just five months ago, coming in at 44.8, and it now sits at 48. The one metric designed to capture how Americans feel about their money reveals quite plainly that the mood is darker today under Trump than it was the year Carter lost 44 states.

But the hard numbers can’t explain the dark mood entirely on their own. Inflation is 3.7 percent today, and unemployment is 4.2 percent; had Carter had that data, he’d have run for reelection and expected to win. But people judge the economy by what eggs, rent, and car insurance cost compared with six years ago, and almost none of that has come back down. Then Trump struck Iran in February, and the price of gas went up along with nearly everything else. The most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump’s approval at 31 percent. Carter’s Gallup low was 28.

There are key differences between then and now, namely how the two presidents addressed what was self-evident. In July 1979, Carter addressed the nation in a televised prime-time speech and told Americans the country was suffering a crisis of confidence. His approval rating rose briefly after his speech, but he then pushed out five cabinet secretaries, and the address sort of hardened into a narrative about a president who’d lost control. Whatever the speech became later, Carter looked at the national mood and said what he saw. It ultimately didn’t raise anyone’s spirits.

Trump would never admit that things aren’t anything less than a “Golden Age,” which he may very well believe because he sees gold-leaf reliefs on White House plaster every day. He plays the part of Ronald Reagan while presiding over Carter’s national mood.

“Worse than Carter” has been the Republican insult of choice for 45 years, and Trump used it on Joe Biden constantly. Carter’s reputation has improved with the remarkable example he set in his post-presidency. And he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for appointing Paul Volcker in 1979, whose brutal rate hikes eventually broke the stagflation. Carter had returned to his peanut farm in Plains, Georgia by the time they worked.

Reagan collected the credit after his own “morning in America” slogan that accurately read the room and saw the need for a mood-lifting national pride so sorely missing after a decade of Watergate, Vietnam, gas rationing, and Iran hostages. Carter took the political pain for a cure that worked. Trump has spent his second term pressuring the Fed to cut rates.

The complaint against Carter focused on the malaise the country felt under a president who couldn’t fix it. People felt stuck and poorer than they should, and Americans feel that way again. Trump’s approach is to simply insist that they are wrong, over and over again.

Reagan won the White House in 1980 with a campaign that simply asked voters whether they were better off than they’d been four years earlier. Voters will answer a similar question next Tuesday while Trump insists they’ve never had it better.

They feel differently.

Fox News has been putting Donald Trump’s rallies back on the air for the past two weeks, including nearly 90 minutes of prime time on Wednesday night. The people who cover the network are almost certainly going to misread it.

Three weeks ago the story was that Fox News had cut Trump off. This morning’s version is that the Murdochs are planning for life after him.. But what’s actually happening is that a news network is covering a president who’s saying wild things six days before the midterm election, and right now every hour of his rally they air ends up hurting the man in approval rating death spiral, as well as many of the Republicans running with him.

Status reported Tuesday night that Fox News’s October ratings slide tracks along with Trump’s collapsing approval. If that story sounds familiar, it’s likely because I made the very same comparison on Oct. 1, nearly point for point. On Sept. 10, I called Trump’s convention speech a “ratings disaster” for Fox News after he had the network to himself for two hours and couldn’t beat a normal Wednesday’s programming. The case I made was accurate, and I’m flattered that others imitated what I wrote.

What’s wrong, however, is the conclusion that got attached to it. Three weeks ago Brian Stelter reported that Fox News had tuned Trump out. This morning he and Andrew Kirell went further, casting the rationed rally coverage as the Murdochs pivoting to a post-Trump era, with the opinion hosts as better Republican messengers than the president.

But the rallies returned. The top-rated cable news network has carried live portions of seven Trump rallies since mid-October, which adds up to more than six hours of airtime. Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters provided nearly 90 consecutive minutes of prime time to Trump’s rally in Ohio just last night, which inspired this column. Viewers who wanted to see every single Trump rally could watch it streamed on Fox Nation and Fox News Digital.

CNN’s reporting runs the other way, with the network carrying only nine of Trump’s 24 fall speeches live after taking 12 of 14 earlier in the year. The cutback was real. The question is why.

I’m guessing that nobody at Fox News needed an edict from anyone to make that decision. Trump is finally featuring new rally material, though with questionably broad appeal. In Port Huron, he went full Islamophobe in calling Abdul El-Sayed a jihadist and said he’d have to pass through a metal detector to get into the Senate. In Youngstown, he told the crowd he’d taken a good look at Jon Husted’s ass. In Texas he mocked James Talarico by making what clearly looked like blow-job motion with his hand. He spent the first two days of this week defending his tacky gold-leafed reliefs he installed in the White House in response to Barack Obama’s Cheesecake Factory dig. A president talking like that in the final week of a midterm leads every newscast in the country. Fox News would’ve been the strange one for skipping it.

Airing a Trump rally in ‘16 or ‘20 effectively accomplished two things. It drove ratings and sold the candidate to viewers who already liked, or at least got a kick out of, him. Cut to ’26, and those two jobs are no longer symbiotic. The GOP midterm convention showed that Trump can no longer lift Fox News ratings. The network carries these rallies now because they’re happening, not because they rate. News network gonna news network.

With an approval rating that’s dangerously sinking to the high 20s, it’s entirely reasonable to conclude that live Trump rally coverage actually hurts him. The Fox News viewer who’s drifted away over gas prices and grocery bills isn’t coming back for the jihadist riff. Nor can they be impressed with his “let them eat cake” boast about $5,000 hamburgers at Mar-a-Lago. A suburban Republican watching the clip the next morning is more likely to be left shaking his or her head than sold on Trumpism. Why did most GOP strategists try to keep Trump away from their candidate’s campaign trail again?

When the next round of coverage claims Fox News is back on the Trump train, keep those ratings in mind. Fox News gets zero benefit by airing him, and Trump doesn’t seem to get anything out of it either, apart from his beloved airtime and attention. The network’s simply covering a president in an approval death spiral who won’t stop talking, for the same exact reason everyone else is. He’s the story.

Note: This post was updated to include CNN’s reporting, which I discovered only after I’d published the prior version.

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Thursday, October 29, 2026

“You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts.” That’s the chorus of the great Radiohead song Just (off their second, and criminally underrated album, The Bends), and it comes to mind as Democratic hijinks in Alaska is the wrong sort of October surprise they were looking for. The New York Times reported Wednesday what most people already assumed: that a Dan Sullivan on the ballot was recruited by state party officials to confuse Alaska voters (unable to read “incumbent” on the ballot). The Dans Sullivan gambit rarely works, and it looks like it might backfire here in a manner that could cost Democrats the Senate majority. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has turned to defending his Cheesecake Factory aesthetic following Barack Obama’s remarkably effective dig, and Vivek Ramaswamy’s disgusting rape victim exploitation ad continues to backfire on the GOP.

01. Democrats Shoot Themselves in the Foot as the Times Exposes Peltola’s Second Dan Sullivan

[Going Mainstream]. A second Dan Sullivan was supposed to be a coincidence. The NY Times found the campaign staffers who went looking for him, and now two investigations are, too.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that top aides to Mary Peltola told a staffer in the summer of 2025 to search Alaska’s voter rolls for men named Dan Sullivan. The paper reports the campaign’s lawyers and senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee took part in regular conversations about what they called the “ballot composition project.” A retired teacher with the senator’s name made the ballot. A former campaign manager told the paper Peltola “was not directly involved” but was “definitely aware.” Rios was fired in August and tried to take her interviews back last week.

The Times report relied on interviews with eleven other people, but the campaign and the DSCC deny it. Donald Trump said Peltola “should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted.” Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to agree, saying on Fox News, “They are cheating.” An investigation into whether criminal charges are warranted has been ordered by Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy.

The Dans Sullivan story was dismissed by Peltola as “Stuff to sell newspapers,” which isn’t exactly playing in Peoria. Joe Scarborough said, “Her entire campaign lied about it.” Former Biden White House aide Megan Hayes called it “such an unforced error” on CNN. Fox & Friends opened both of its first two hours on it, and Brian Kilmeade said: “A lot of the media owe [Trump] an apology.” Polymarket cut Peltola odds of winning the race from 73 percent to 69 after the story broke.

TAKEAWAY: This can be filed in the “play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” category. Or, if this costs Democrats the Alaska Senate seat and a Senate majority? It will rise to “fuck around and find out” levels of historic proportion.

Read more

Scott Jennings is arguably the most important figure at CNN. I made that very argument a year and a half ago, and it holds true today.

Not just because he’s the one contributor the network can’t replace, but also because he’s a major reason NewsNight grew in ratings while the rest of the schedule didn’t. He’s the closest thing CNN has to a conservative that its conservative or centrist viewers trust. That’s why what happened Tuesday night isn’t something CNN can hand off to somebody else.

And yet? That’s what appears to be happening. As of publication, CNN has not mentioned this story on air. Its only coverage on CNN.com is 64 words that aggregates Variety’s reporting for the Reliable Sources newsletter.

Hasan Piker sued Jennings in federal court in Washington for $72.5 million Tuesday. The complaint focuses on an episode of Jennings’s Salem radio show from August, in particular, a 42-second clip of Piker that the NRSC had posted five days earlier. Jennings told his audience Piker was “out there calling for Black voters to be lynched.”

The lawsuit alleges that the clip was misleading. It was cut from three streams that crucially omitted “He said,” which would have made clear that Piker was mocking somebody else’s argument and instead sounded like it was his own. The clip also included a captioned sentence in quotation marks that Piker never actually said. Snopes reviewed the video in August and found that the clip presented Piker's words out of context and out of order.

Nobody has proven what Jennings knew about the clip before he aired it. It seems entirely likely he just played the NRSC-posted clip without fact-checking it first, which is a mistake. And Hasan Piker is very much a public figure, so he has to prove Jennings knew the claim was false or didn’t care whether it was, for this lawsuit to win. That’s an intentionally very high standard to meet, as it should be. Jennings has not yet commented on the suit as of Wednesday morning.

This story is different than the usual “controversies” surrounding Jennings’ on-air hyperbole and critiques. He gets clicks because he knows how to troll a largely left-leaning viewership. But the alleged misrepresentation of what another person said? That’s a serious and reputation-damaging charge for a commentator whose job is arguing facts on live television.

CNN has extensively covered Piker for the better part of the last year, often as a progressive problem for Democrats. He’s unquestionably become a major political figure, as has Jennings, so the complete lack of coverage of a lawsuit Piker filed against its own contributor is conspicuous at best.

I reached out to CNN for comment on why they have not covered a significant story featuring one of their most prominent commentators. They have not replied.

CNN has been asked about this before. Status reporter Natalie Korach asked the network about the segment in August, and a spokesperson referred her to Jennings and Salem Media. Around the same time, Kasie Hunt handled a different Piker issue on her own show. After Jonah Goldberg made a claim about Piker on her panel, she returned to it on air, called it an unexpected comment, and noted that Piker denied it. This reveals where CNN draws the line. If a contributor says something on CNN’s air, the network deals with it. If he says it on his radio show, CNN refers you to the radio network.

I get it. Jennings is a CNN contributor, not an anchor, and the network pays him for the hours he’s giving click-friendly hot takes. Salem pays him for his radio show and should be held responsible for what it airs. Networks increasingly feature panelists better known from other platforms, where the incentive is to be the most provocative version one can be. Networks get livelier panels, but don’t take responsibility for what the panelists say elsewhere. Television shows are watched, and headlines are clicked.

Fox News has the same arrangement. Harris Faulkner repeated the same claim about Piker on her show in August, and Fox News didn’t respond to questions about it either. Fox & Friends mentioned Piker eight times Wednesday morning, all about Ilhan Omar, and never mentioned his suit against Jennings. Wonder why.

This situation is much harder to dismiss because Jennings isn’t just your run-of-the-mill CNN panelist. The network effectively built a show around him and relies on his point of view for every debate, convention, and major speech.

A federal lawsuit accusing one of the network’s most prominent conservatives of inventing a quote is a big deal. Entirely ignoring it on air feels like a failure.

Jennings will be back on a CNN panel soon, and before he is, the network should say whether it thinks he made up that quote.