None of Tuesday's Results Are Good for Republicans

After Tuesday's disastrous election results for Republicans across the country, some in the GOP are simply dismissing the results, others are calling Democrats communists, while others continue to push for more gerrymandering.  None of these response address the reality of millions not receiving SNAP benefits, including roughly 16 million children, those about to see health insurance premiums double, or those recently laid off.  The Republican disconnect is underscored by Elon Musk receiving a $1 trillion salary package and the Felon's regime which continues to act as if it's the roaring 1920's with seemingly no concern about the issues that prompted Tuesdays voter revolt. For Republicans it's all about restoring the Gilded Age while millions suffer.  The New York Times notes:  

President Trump’s [The Felon's] Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, set to the theme of “The Great Gatsby,” reenacted the decadence of that story’s licentious era: befeathered flappers shimmying in the crowd; gilded and onyx décor; scantily clad women posing in an enormous champagne coupe. The revelatory moment says so much about where we stand today — and what we could be lurching into next.

Published a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” captured the culture of an overheated economy on the brink of demise. Just as Jay Gatsby fell from the height of fortune to an ignominious death, the 1920s roared with financial overindulgence until the markets drowned in the Wall Street crash of 1929. The Great Depression followed, and the consequences for the global economy proved calamitous.

Today we find ourselves again dancing toward new highs in the stock market. Speculative money is once more pouring into risky investment schemes, with staggering sums of money being thrown at artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. But rather than heed a century of hard-won lessons, the Trump administration’s financial regulators are embracing dissolute policies to keep the punch flowing. The parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s are numerous — and ominous.

Again, the total disconnect of most Republicans and most certainly the Felon is shocking. Equally bad is the refusal of most Republicans to admit that the Felon is viewed as toxic by growing numbers of Americans - including those who swung Republican in 2024 only to see the Felon's campaign promise on the economy being broken and unfulfilled.  As another column in the Times notes: 

The scale of the Democratic wins should be a flashing warning sign to the Republican Party. Not just that the national environment is very favorable to Democrats, but that voters have ceased making distinctions between Trump and other Republicans. They’re treating other Republicans like they would treat Trump. And that is the nightmare scenario. It makes it much more difficult for incumbents next year to distance themselves from the president.

Yet, seemingly most Republicans continue to fear the Felon's wrath or the hint of a primary challenge by MAGA cultist more than a potential general election wipe out.  A piece in The Atlantic continues this theme and how the Felon and the self-prostituting members of the GOP are ignoring the flashing warning signs.  Here are column highlights:

President Donald Trump’s [The Felon's] gerrymandering war has never looked riskier for his party.

Prodded by Trump, Republicans earlier this year launched an audacious plan to entrench their congressional majority by redrawing House-district maps to squeeze out Democrats—anywhere and everywhere they could. The gambit was an exercise in political power and, coming outside of the traditional decennial redistricting process, without precedent in modern history.

Yet if Democrats feared not long ago that they would be locked out of a House majority, their decisive victories across the country last night have made them, arguably, the favorites heading into next year’s midterm elections.

In California, an overwhelming majority voted to redistrict, essentially canceling out the five House seats that Republicans had thought they gained through redistricting in Texas over the summer. The GOP’s steep losses farther east cast even more doubt on the wisdom of its redistricting push. Voters repudiated Republicans virtually across the board, handing Democrats convincing victories for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, important judicial and legislative races in Pennsylvania, and, for the first time in two decades, a pair of statewide elections in Georgia. In Virginia, the breadth of the Democrats’ win gave them their largest majority in the state House of Delegates since 1989.

For Democrats, the results were reminiscent of—and in many cases stronger than—the victories they posted during the 2017 elections, in Trump’s first term, which presaged the wave that delivered them the House majority a year later. Even if the GOP’s gerrymandering advantage nets the party a few additional seats, Democrats will have a narrower gap to overcome next year than they did eight years ago.

Among the constituencies that swung the hardest toward Democrats yesterday were Latinos, who helped power Trump’s presidential win last year and were key to the GOP’s redrawn congressional map in Texas. The Republicans’ chances of flipping five additional House seats there rest in part on their holding Trump’s gains among Latino voters. That was a questionable assumption from the start, the longtime GOP strategist Mike Madrid told me. It appears even shakier in light of Tuesday’s election results . . .

“None of this is good for Republicans. It’s all their own doing, though,” Madrid said. Latinos in Texas border towns may vote differently in 2026 than Latinos in New Jersey did this year. But the anti-GOP shift in this week’s elections could boost the Democrats’ chances of winning two and possibly three of the five Texas seats that Republicans redrew in their favor, Madrid told me. It could also open up even more opportunities for Democrats, because to create the additional red-leaning seats, Republicans had to cut into previously safe GOP districts.

Yesterday’s election results could complicate both parties’ plans to escalate their gerrymandering tit-for-tat across the country. In addition to their Texas effort, Republicans have enacted newly drawn congressional maps in Missouri and North Carolina that could yield them an additional House seat in each state. . . . . Internal opposition, however, has slowed the GOP’s drive elsewhere. Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats on revised districts that are more favorable for the GOP but not nearly as aggressive as some party leaders had advocated for. In Indiana, Republicans remain short of the votes they would need in the state legislature to gerrymander both of its House Democrats out of their seats, despite an intense pressure campaign from the White House. And just as polls were closing in eastern states last night, Kansas Republicans announced that they lacked support to call a special legislative session to redraw the House seat of Representative Sharice Davids, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation.

Some Democrats, meanwhile, were emboldened by the success of California’s Proposition 50, the ballot measure devised by Governor Gavin Newsom that temporarily redraws the state congressional map to target five Republican-held House seats and strengthen five additional swing districts represented by Democrats. With 75 percent of precincts reporting today, the referendum was leading by more than 25 points. . . . . The GOP’s “biggest strategy for trying to steal the 2026 election is falling apart before their eyes,” Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters on a conference call trumpeting the party’s electoral wins.

Even before Democrats swept Virginia’s elections last night, the party’s state legislative majorities began a two-year process to gerrymander two or three Republicans out of their House seats in the 2026 elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pushed Democratic leaders in Illinois and Maryland to similarly redraw their state’s congressional maps. But the effort has met resistance from some Democratic lawmakers.

Martin said he hoped Tuesday’s election results, and especially the Prop 50 vote in California, would “send a chilling effect to Republicans” who are trying to gerrymander more states. “It’s not going to net you enough seats to guarantee that you’re going to control the U.S. House next year,” he said. “So knock it off now.”

There was no signal from Republicans that they planned to abandon their efforts. Although Trump voiced disappointment in the election results, other party leaders dismissed them. . . . . One GOP strategist, who was granted anonymity to candidly assess the party’s performance, told me that yesterday’s results were “a wake-up call.” But the strategist said Republicans remained “full-steam ahead” on their redistricting push in Florida.

Madrid said the elections should send each party a message on redistricting. Republicans should “pause and stop and contemplate. Say, ‘Wait a second. Maybe we made a mistake here.’” At the same time, Democrats should understand, he said, that they can win elections at the ballot box without sacrificing the moral high ground on gerrymandering. Madrid wasn’t optimistic, however: “There’s a lesson for both parties in this, and neither one of them will learn it.”