Sunday, November 01, 2026
The GOP Braces for Some Once-Unthinkable Losses
Over the past decade countless congressional Republicans have prostituted themselves to the Felon and in general rubber stamped his pro-billionaire, anti-working class agenda that have showered tax cuts on the ultra-rich and large cut social programs ranging from SNAP benefits to Medicaid coverage. Many have happily prostituted themselves - think of the photos of gathering of House Republicans celebrating the "big beautiful bill" - while others have shown no spine and quietly gone along with the reverse Robin Hood agenda. Now, with the Felon extremely unpopular, his war of choice and tariffs making the cost of living soar, the bill for such blind obedience and harmful policies may be about to come due, if the polls and believed congressional seats in play in ruby red states, a number being labeled as "toss ups." It's telling that in some of these contested seats in red states that all Republicans can do is trot out ads demonizing transgender citizens since they have passed zero legislation that aids the majority of voters, especially working class voters. I am cautiously optimistic that the polls will hold and that Democrats retake control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Like others I worry what lies and extreme actions the Felon may take if his party suffers severe losses. A piece at Politico looks at the current situation:
Republicans are bracing for a brutal election night, convinced they’re set to face some previously unthinkable losses in deep-red Trump territory as key battleground races hang on a knife’s edge.
House Republicans are privately discussing not just if they’ll lose their majority, but by how many seats. Imperiled GOP incumbents in once safe districts have been begging party leaders for more money in the final few days to stem the bleeding, according to six people involved in internal conversations, granted anonymity to discuss them. Senate Republicans have found new cause to worry about contests in Ohio, Kansas and other red states.
“It could be quite a brutal evening,” said one senior Republican involved in the private conversations, who like others in this article was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Once the dominoes start falling it becomes hard to stop them.”
Some Republican incumbents made an eyebrow-raising emergency decision. They stopped doing their own polling weeks ago as they tried to save every dollar for swaying voters as they begged for the GOP cavalry to arrive from President Donald Trump’s political operation to the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to three of the people.
One Republican strategist working on midterm races simply responded to a question about the environment with a video of a dumpster on fire that was being swept away by flood waters.
Top GOP officials and lawmakers have long known the political landscape would be bad, amid voter anger over the cost of living and aspects of Trump’s policy agenda. But they’re facing a worse position than they expected earlier this year, with less than one week until Election Day.
Republicans for weeks have worried that young men who’d voted for Trump, including white and Hispanic working class voters, will stay home amid disillusionment with high costs and the Iran war.
That alone could allow Democrats to overperform in some areas after they hemorrhaged support among that voting bloc in 2024.
At a Kwik Trip in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, this week in the hotly-contested 3rd District, Isaiah Romero was filling up his silver Ram truck. The 20-year-old said he cast his ballot for Trump in his first ever presidential election two years ago. His verdict on high fuel prices? “I think they’re bull,” he said as he looked over to the $6.39 per gallon diesel and $4.29 gas at the pump. Is he voting this time? “No,” Romero responded, adding: “I didn’t vote for this.”
“Any Democrats telling you they aren’t winning the Senate [besides] a couple of seats are sandbagging expectations,” the senior Republican said.
In Ohio, the race between GOP Sen. Jon Husted and former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is still incredibly close in private and public polling. But Republicans have watched with horror as GOP governor nominee “Vivek’s [Ramaswamy’s] numbers have gone off a cliff” in the last few days after he ran an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother saying her daughter is a liar, according to the senior Republican and two others who saw the internal polling. Acton’s stepfather was charged with raping her when she was 12.
The headwinds across all of Ohio are deeply problematic for Republicans. They now believe embattled Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) — who is facing child and domestic abuse allegations that he denies — will lose in a seat Trump won by double digits.
South Carolina has become another unexpectedly nailbiting race for Republicans, where political newcomer Sen. Darline Graham is facing a well-funded Democratic challenger.
But in one of the most dire signs, once-unimaginable GOP worries have started to creep about deep-red Louisiana — where Trump announced this week he will hold an election-eve tele-rally for Senate nominee Julia Letlow. Speaker Mike Johnson, who is close with Letlow, will join as Republicans have grown wary about a surge of Black voters and other Democratic-leaning voters in early voting across the South. Senior Republicans believe Letlow will win, but they fear it will be by single digits if nothing changes.
“The cakewalk turned into a knife fight,” said one Louisiana Republican who has talked with Letlow recently. “If Democrat turnout surges on Election Day, it’ll be a long night in Monroe,” the person added, and they expect Letlow to win by just 6 points in a state Trump won by 22 points two years ago.
In another painful development for Republicans in Louisiana, GOP groups have even started an eye-popping spending war in a safe red gerrymandered seat — where a bitter Republican-on-Republican primary is unfolding between state Sen. Blake Miguez, who was formerly endorsed by Trump, and state Sen. Rick Edmonds, Johnson’s former pastor.
On the House side, Republicans are bracing for a brutal night. But they’ve long been spending in some redder GOP districts to forestall a true disaster.
Republicans still think they can unseat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Gabe Vasquez (D-N.M.), while flipping retiring Rep. Jared Golden’s (D-Maine) seat. But privately, Republicans believe North Carolina’s open 11th District is close to gone, as are several other deep-red seats Trump won by double digits, according to four people with knowledge of the situation. And they’re still not confident they’ll beat Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) in a seat the GOP thought would be an easy flip when they redrew it early this year. It’s become the most expensive House race in history.
The Republican in Kentucky’s 6th district, where Trump won by 15 points in 2024, is barely hanging on, according to the four people.
Even in the South Texas districts the GOP redrew in their favor, Republicans reached the point days ago where no amount of new money is going to change the upcoming catastrophe, said one Republican official involved in conversations about those races.
Johnson traveled to Minnesota on Thursday to headline a fundraiser for GOP Rep. Brad Finstad, who Republicans are scrambling to shore up in a +12 Trump district.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are upbeat at their prospects, but public and private polling across close to the entire battleground map is running within the margin of error — meaning those states could break either way.
“I would rather be us than them. But if anyone tells you they know what’s going to happen, they’re full of shit,” one senior Senate Democratic operative said. “Everything is close.”
And some Republicans are taking solace in the fact that at least it’ll all soon be over. “I can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” said a GOP strategist working on a campaign that is trending toward Democrats. “It might be a semi-truck, but at least I can see it.”
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Democrats Are the Populist Party Now
In the waning days of the midterm election campaign, Republicans have finally stumbled on a closing message: defending the honor of the Cheesecake Factory.
Last week, Barack Obama made a viral crack about Donald Trump’s renovations: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Conservatives feigned outrage on behalf of the humble American volk for whom the Cheesecake Factory is the height of sophistication.
The Wall Street Journal suggested that Democrats had shot themselves in the foot in their quest to win back “the working man in Middle America.” The White House posted a list of Trump’s “accomplishments” in the style of a Cheesecake Factory menu.
Republicans have been trying to brand Democrats as the party of out-of-touch elitists since at least the 1960s, but this time, it felt particularly forced and desperate. After all, it’s become screamingly obvious which party represents billionaires and unchecked plutocratic power.
On the stump this week, an increasingly disinhibited Trump scoffed at the idea of “suffering at the pump” while boasting that high oil prices have been a windfall for the energy industry. Elon Musk, the richest person on earth, is almost single-handedly funding the Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton’s campaign. Susan Collins ran a closing ad in which a retired broadcaster seemed to mock her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, for being a logger, saying, “We’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here; we’re sending someone to the U.S. Senate.”
Meanwhile, Democrats all over the country are running against the ultrarich. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” the Texas Senate candidate James Talarico says on the campaign trail. “It’s top versus bottom.” In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed is a political protégé of Bernie Sanders who accuses his opponent, Mike Rogers, of being bought by corporations. Former Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, defeated with the help of crypto dollars two years ago, may regain his seat thanks in part to widespread fury at data centers and the tech billionaires behind them.
If Democrats win big on Tuesday after running such populist campaigns, it will be more than a victory over Trump. It will be an opportunity for them to once again develop an image as the champion of working people against predatory elites. That, in turn, could realign American politics. But it will happen only if Democrats can resist the entreaties of the tech donors and lobbyists who, having realized that going all in on MAGA was a bad bet, will now spend big to rebuild bridges to the center left.
For decades now, American politics has been shaped by two very different conceptions of class. Liberals tend to view class as a primarily economic distinction: a millionaire car dealer in the Midwest has a class advantage over a Brooklyn adjunct professor on food stamps. Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to understand class as a matter of taste, culture and education.
If anything, as the two parties sorted by education, they became a kind of cultural common sense. Obama, who was still paying off student debt in his 40s, was tagged as an elitist, while Trump, who loves to brag about his wealth, was not.
The 2024 election was a triumph for the right’s conception of class politics, with Trump making gains with low-income voters while Kamala Harris won those earning over $200,000 a year. In surveys and focus groups, voters described Democrats as elitist and condescending. . . . 56 percent of respondents said the party didn’t look out for working people, and a majority said Democrats didn’t share their values. The road to winning back working-class voters looked difficult and uncertain.
Trump, by abandoning all restraint in his kleptocratic smash-and-grab, has made it easier. In a September poll from The New York Times and Siena University, voters identified Republicans as the “elitist” party by 10 points. The Times quoted a 40-year-old who’d voted for Trump two years earlier: “The people that are ‘in with him,’ who look or act a certain way, are the ones that are going to be given an opportunity.”
Few things have laid bare the president’s essential elitism like his alliance with America’s tech oligarchs. Trump ran against Big Tech in 2020, when he saw it as an ally of Democrats, but he was less interested in curbing the industry’s power than co-opting it. Now that he’s done that, tying Silicon Valley’s fortunes to his own, he can’t countenance criticism of it.
Silicon Valley was once seen as a bastion of liberalism, but a recent Politico poll found that voters across the political spectrum now associate it with the Republican Party. At the same time, Big Tech — and particularly A.I. and data centers — has rarely been more reviled. This summer, a leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee called data centers “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” and warned that public fury about them could cost the Republican Jon Husted his Senate seat in Ohio.
In Pennsylvania’s Eighth District, held by a Republican, Rob Bresnahan, 51 percent of respondents feel strongly unfavorably toward data centers. Only 5 percent feel strongly favorably. Voters see A.I., Flaherty told me, as “these guys sitting in a room somewhere cooking up technology that’s going to make your life worse, making you pay for it, and buying off the government to do it.”
Now that Democrats seem likely to retake at least one house of Congress, tech companies are rushing to hire Democratic lobbyists. Given the enormous resources Silicon Valley kingpins wield, some Democrats might be tempted to seek a rapprochement with the industry. . . . The opportunity before Democrats is about more than being on the right side of a winning issue. Democrats have a unique chance, after decades of culture wars, to wrest the mantle of populism from Republicans and thus change the terrain on which American elections are fought.
“They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in 1936 about monopolists, speculators and war profiteers. Democrats should remember his words when they retake power. A good enemy is a terrible thing to waste.
Friday, October 30, 2026
The Issues MAGA "Christian" Voters Are Neglecting
Earlier this month the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Willy Rice, called on pastors to “step up” their political activism as the midterm elections draw near. His argument is that many political issues are, at their heart, moral and theological issues that “strike at the very center of what we believe to be true and what we believe people need to know in order to flourish personally and as a culture.”
Rice named four specific issues: abortion, the redefinition of marriage, transgender identity, and illegal immigration. These are the topics that fundamentalists and evangelicals most often invoke as nonnegotiable biblical imperatives, and they are treated as tests of faithfulness.
The question worth asking is not why Rice and so many other Christians focus on these issues . . . . but why they focus on them to the exclusion of others. The answer might tell us something important about what presently stirs fundamentalists and evangelicals to political action and what leaves them unmoved.
Rice insists that the issues he prioritizes have to do with human flourishing. He believes that Christians have an obligation to speak out about political and cultural matters that intersect with scriptural truth, morality, and a biblical ethic. . . . . there are others on which Rice and many of those who share his worldview have been silent. Why, for example, have pastors and other Christian leaders who insist that they care about human life and flourishing not spoken out against the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, carried out by DOGE, and the disruption of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief?
According to modeling estimates by Boston University’s Brooke Nichols, in the first year alone these cuts had resulted in more than three-quarters of a million deaths, more than 500,000 of them children. A study in The Lancet projected that if the USAID cuts are not reversed, they could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including some 4.5 million children under age 5. Might not those who claim to be shaped by a Jesus ethic want to speak out and make global development a first-order concern rather than an afterthought?
Bono, the lead singer of U2 and himself a Christian, cited the Lancet study in a recent interview with The New York Times. “Let’s say they’re half wrong,” he said. “What Christian household, what Catholic household, what Jewish household, anyone of faith, in fact anyone of conscience, would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen as a result of these DOGE cuts? It’s unconscionable.”
The answer to Bono’s haunting question—Who would allow the hemorrhaging of human life that is going to happen?—is Christians all across America. Why the silence?
One could ask the same question about other issues. For example, since 1980, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has offered a home to people fleeing war and persecution, many of them Christians. On the first day of his second term,
PresidentTrump suspended the program. He then set the refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2026 at a record-low of 7,500, later raising it to 17,500 under an emergency determination but reserving nearly all of those slots for white South Africans, whose claims of persecution are disputed by many independent observers. Meanwhile, Christians facing some of the world’s most severe persecution, in countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan, and Burma, are largely shut out.The president of World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization, called the policy “heartbreaking.” He warned that the U.S. has “effectively abandoned” those fleeing horrific religious persecution. Yet very few Christians have said anything about this.
Silence has also been the reaction to the assault on medical research. According to Grant Witness, which tracks the federal government’s cancellations and reinstatements of research grants at agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, more than 5,700 NIH grants, with a total value of $15 billion, have been disrupted since April 2025. This includes scores of grants for research on cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, which touch countless families in congregations all across America.
Why don’t these three issues—saving the lives of the world’s poorest children, offering refuge to those fleeing war and persecution, and advancing the research that brings healing to the sick—occupy more attention of politically active Christians? After all, these are not peripheral concerns; they go to the essence of what mattered to Jesus. He told his followers that whatever they did for “the least of these,” they did for him. He counted welcoming the stranger among such acts, and he spent much of his ministry healing the sick and relieving suffering. . . . . measured by the lives that could be saved, sheltered, and healed, I do think there is a strong case that they belong near the top of any list shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus.
That they so rarely make the list at all shows how deeply the grooves of decades of political activism have been worn. Some issues command instant attention, but others barely register. If Christians were willing to step out of those grooves, even for a moment, they would see how much good could be achieved. Lives could be saved through global health programs, families could find refuge and a new beginning, and cures could come for diseases that inflict suffering on countless people.
So what explains this selectivity in deciding which political issues have a claim on the Christian conscience? The answer involves a complex mix of factors. One is the vivifying effect of being part of a culture war. Many Christians feel that they are engaged in a righteous struggle against a secular culture that they believe holds them in contempt. Some of their concerns are real and held in good faith: about religious liberty, the protection of unborn life, and the health of families. But the culture wars also offer a black-and-white, us-versus-them moral framework that is especially appealing to people who feel culturally displaced. Saving children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t carry the same drama; there is no progressive enemy to defeat. . . . Distance plays its own role too. Many people dying from preventable diseases live thousands of miles away. Global health lacks the emotional urgency of social issues that play out close to home.
Partisanship also plays a huge part. Political scientists such as Ryan Burge and Michele Margolis argue that, for many white evangelicals, party identity now drives which issues feel religiously urgent. “Politics has become the master identity,” according to Burge. “Everything else lines up behind partisanship.” Even the teachings of Jesus.
The problem runs deeper than issue selection, though. It extends to how scripture itself is interpreted. Many Christians read the Bible through a set of political and cultural assumptions and then present the results as authoritatively “biblical.” The Bible is used to ratify views held for reasons that have little to do with faith.
The same passage speaks differently to a person in the fourth century or the 14th century than it does to someone in the 21st century, and it speaks differently to every person in the same pew. In Galileo’s day, Christians read Psalm 93:1—“the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved”—as a literal statement that the Earth does not move, and the verse was invoked against the idea that it orbits the sun.
The same is true of slavery. For most of Christian history, the institution itself went largely unchallenged. Christians criticized particular abuses and particular forms of enslavement, but rarely slavery per se. The most remarkable exception, a fourth-century sermon on Ecclesiastes by Gregory of Nyssa condemning slaveholding outright, had little lasting influence. The first denomination to formally condemn slaveholding was the Quakers, in 1776, more than 1,700 years after Jesus taught his followers to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. The Southern Baptist Convention itself was founded in 1845 in part to defend slaveholding, which its founders insisted that the Bible plainly permitted. The SBC took 150 years to formally repent that history. . . .
The problem, then, comes not from our reading being shaped by our time and place, which is unavoidable, but from failing to acknowledge it.
None of what I’m arguing here means that all readings of the Bible are equally valid,or that some interpretive approaches don’t bring readers closer to the Bible’s truths than others. The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood what Jesus asked of his followers far better than did Ludwig Müller, the leader of the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church in Nazi Germany. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s views on slavery were much closer to the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount than were those of James Henley Thornwell, the South Carolina Presbyterian theologian who argued that slavery was part of God’s divinely ordained social order.A lot has gone wrong in Christian history, and a lot has gone wrong in the here and now. Christianity can be a faith of serrated edges. So many people have been wounded in the name of Jesus. And yet there remains, for those of the Christian faith, the true Jesus—himself a God of wounds, a person of incomprehensible moral beauty who came not to judge the world but to save it. If Christians are going to be active in public life, we would all do well to choose for our master identity Jesus over the gods of this world, who sanctify our political views and the hatreds that fuel them.
Thursday, October 29, 2026
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