Let’s dig in, Republicans lost. Here’s the BLUF, bottom line up front. Republicans got canned because Trump did what he promised to do. Particularly, in as much as the dominant reason gleaned from sources citing polls, cited ‘the Iran war’; he did exactly as promised. Another way to put it on a broader scale: Republicans got canned because Trump was devastatingly effective across the board in subduing the myriad enemies of America First, of decimating (but not fully destroying) the Deep State, and staunching the river of money that has been flowing from the federal government (your money and debt) and straight into the accounts of our sworn enemies, countless fraudulent enterprises, and to countless pervert interest groups. In the few days now since the election, the finger pointing and internal blame game has been running red hot with most blaming Trump directly and personally. I differ from that and am in a small minority but I’m not altogether alone. The Democrats for their part, were a raging maniacal angry motivated voter bloc. They showed up as expected. A solid core of Republicans were clear eyed but some of the broad coalition that elected Trump, including a sizable schism of Republican flakes, broke rank. Very well then, I’ll demonstrate what these people voted for momentarily. Trump of course is not blameless but his real foibles have little to do with why the defectors defected. His little obsessions with renaming things for example, was a distraction and his DC building enterprises could have been handled under the radar. His approach to day-to-day consumer prices were way too little, too late, and mostly relied on long-game patience out in the hinterland, a bad miscalculation on how common people are forced to function. We can have a serious discussion about these other things but they appear to be hardly germaine to the mid-term election.
Still, it was Iran. In this regard, people did rely on an abstraction, interpreting ‘no foreign wars’ as never using the military abroad which is functionally the only place it should ever need to be used. It’s a bit irksome to me how lot of conservative adjacent pundits have their panties in a knot about what we should regard as war. When you spend a couple months in a one-sided kinetic spanking directly against the weaponry and personnel actively used in terroristic enterprise against the allies and countries directly tangential to our national interest, aka evil oil, it seems wrong to equate that with two decades of entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducted by some of your favorite Presidents by the way. So some voters felt queasy about our actions in Iran, apparently. Bombing strategic military targets for a super defined global threat over a couple months, a war – hardly makes, but not to these people, who are not bright enough to gauge the alternatives.
Very well then, here’s what you get for that vote in exchange for those eighty cents a gallon you hoped to save on gas:
Don’t count on getting your eighty cents a gallon back any time soon. You forgot that Democrats don’t like fuel, vehicles, cheap and easy transportation. But you don’t actually care about which method drives up your gas prices do you? This one in Iran, the one that sort of takes care of a major regional threat to a dozen or more allies as well as some strategic national interests; bad. But when the next Congress or whatever deep leftist decides to shut down major pipelines and refineries; good. We’re all cool with that. It kinda boils down to this; do you want to pay more for something that makes a positive difference to our national interests or do you want to pay more because your new Dear Leader(s) are checking a radical ideological box? And speaking of queasy feels, that foreign war you do support, about four years and running; as of now, Ukraine has blown up most of Russia’s refining plants which has and will now even more so, crimp global fuel cost even more and for far longer than Trump’s management of the Straight of Hormuz. Unless Trump saves your ass and is able to force the Democrats off their agenda, you will be taxed significantly more for a lot of things other than fuel. Your military will be pared back, degrading our influence and interests around the globe. In the long run, you may get a few other goodies for those 80 cents: eliminating the electoral college so that New York City, Chicago and Los Angelos will choose your President for the rest of your life, stacking the Supreme Court, maybe even nullifying the constitution. Open borders and forty or fifty million taxpayer-subsidized third world people competing for the same house your kid wants to buy, same with that job that he/she wants to get. Or maybe your younger kids will be chemically castrated or even get their bits cut off at taxpayer expense – in secret – because that’s how their school rolls; that’ll be a thing until Sharia law is allowed and then endorsed and enforced by the immigrants that were let into your community, forcing your wife to wear a hajib if she dare go out to the local country market. Maybe you get the picture here – or not, most definitely probably not.
There are numerous reasons for the Republican loss of 2026, particularly with demographic and generational shifts, but I’m going to say the quiet part out loud here: Democrats have evolved into a known evil entity, but there are a lot of Republicans (and Independents) that are patently ignorant and stupid and if you are one of them, you will be incredibly lucky if you are not forced to eat all that you just paid for.
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A helpful introduction to the author in my ABOUT