☕️ ELECTION DAY ☙ Tuesday, November 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Gas panic, push polls, and prediction markets that missed Brazil and Wisconsin. Plus: what really happens if the House flips, and dots nobody’s discussing. It’s finally Election Day— Go Vote!

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday, Election Day! It is finally here, and thank goodness. We’ll begin with a C&C address to the troops and then a special election day roundup: why the “record” gas-price panic is the same price corporate media yawned at in 2022; what Obama and Clinton did after losing their Houses (hint: whatever they wanted); the White House’s quiet plan to govern if Congress flips; Democrats’ disorganized wish list of nuisances; why, either way, we persevere; and final encouraging facts that nobody else has mentioned. Now go vote.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

Somewhere along the line, shrinks and spooks concluded that fear motivates the masses more than desire. It’s been non-stop doom-and-gloom ever since. Except for the pandemic, the American public has not been subject to such intense media manipulation as during this election cycle. All sides have been winding us up emotionally, till social media has reached a fever pitch, a shrill alarm that won’t stop pinging even if we take the batteries out.

But remember: None of this fearmongering is real. It’s all fake, top to bottom, but many of us have still fallen for it. Even Governor DeSantis has been fretting about “skyrocketing” gas prices. Headline from yesterday’s Huffington Post:

This is a psyop, people. It’s a good one. Even super smart conservatives like Ron DeSantis are taking the bait. But the trickery should be so obvious. Come on— gas? Like methane? Like what squeaks out of a teenager after he ate too many nachos? It’s too perfect.

So let’s take some Beano.

The national average price of gas is currently around $4.17 a gallon. Meanwhile, back in June 2022 —approaching Biden’s midterms— the price of gasoline passed $5 a gallon. Then it stayed near $4 a gallon through that election. Yesterday, the Washington Post even described Biden’s 2022 price as “the previous record for an Election Day.”

Yet in 2022, despite the “record high” gas price, corporate media sang the Biden economy’s praises. Four years ago, inflated gas prices —basically the same price as they are now— were unremarkable. Pollsters did not design models around them. Governors did not wring their hands about it. And it wasn’t even like nobody’d thought of it: MAGA was happily pasting “I did that!” stickers to gasoline pumps, while the media studiously ignored the entire controversy.

It’s true that Democrats then lost the House— but only barely, by 9 seats, and they clung on to the Senate (by a single seat). Remember: that was during the pandemic. People were fired up. Biden officials were practically chasing us around CVS parking lots with giant needles and holding eye-bleaching drag shows on the White House lawn on Easter.

The point is, nobody was crying about gas prices four years ago. But today, the same gas price has literally become the Democrats’ strongest election argument. Here’s the ridiculous headline from yesterday’s WaPo story that I mentioned above:

“Recent polls show voters blame Republicans for the elevated costs,” the subheadline blared. Polls! Polls show. Oh, please. Shove those stupid polls up Jeff Bezos’s ample assets. And WaPo’s cover picture —included above— was of a BP station offering gas at $3.85. Moronically, the story’s cover photo showed a price only five cents above Biden’s figure.

This type of psychological manipulation is how the polls and the models have manufactured a blue tsunami, as Axios trumpeted in its overheated headline of just yesterday:

Even that wild-eyed forecast came with caveats. “Expectations for the midterms have soared so high that some Democrats fear disappointment is inevitable,” Axios conceded. “Even the pollsters forecasting a Democratic landslide are haunted by the possibility that they’re still missing Trump voters.” As for the prediction markets, which currently favor Democrats by a lopsided 73% chance to take both chambers, Axios pointed out that they’ve failed before.

Just this summer, in Wisconsin, the markets gave DSA-backed Francesca Hong a stunning 96% chance of winning the Democratic gubernatorial primary the day before the August election. She lost anyway to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who’d dropped out and then got back in. (Polymarket shamefully deleted its post describing Hong as a “near-lock.”) In Brazil, Kalshi gave Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro an 84% chance of beating President Lula last week. Lula won.

So much for the ‘wisdom of the market.’

Sounding just like a C&C column, House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday, “They’re trying to create this idea of a blue wave, and they’re using the poll numbers to do it.” Indeed. The polls cite the markets, which follow the polls, which add them to the models. Round and round it goes.

Don’t buy this ridiculous “gas price” psyop. Not for a minute. It is all psyops, all the way down the stack of turtles.

🪖 Don’t get me wrong. If Republicans hold the House, we’ll enjoy a historic chance to lock in a giant list of conservative wins that we can enjoy for decades instead of just the next few years. It’s like the difference between renting and owning. And if we can keep Congress today, we’ll avoid an immeasurable amount of painful annoyance. It’d be like arranging a fault-finding mother-in-law a better place to stay for the next two years.

So vote! And encourage every other Republican in your orbit to vote, too. We have no time for blackpilled whining today. Secure that stuff, Hudson.

🔥 As I’ve argued several times now, even if the worst-case scenario manifests in all its deplorable inglory, we shall persevere. Rather than reheat my argumentative leftovers, I first offer you yesterday’s terrific column from conservative intellectual Victor Davis Hanson of the Daily Wire, who wrote in American Greatness: “Midterm Election Incoherences, Misadventures, and Paradoxes.”

In 2014, Barack Hussein Obama coined one of history’s most famous (infamous) presidential quotes after a stinging loss earlier in his term. Here is his defiant promise, straight from a CBS headline:

And guess what? He did just that. He signed 276 executive orders in eight years. (Trump has already signed 292 since January 2025. Imagine if Obama had an Autopen.) Democrats lost an eye-watering 63 House seats in 2010, the worst midterm shellacking since World War II, and then lost 54 in 1994— and then got impeached. Both men still won re-election after their House losses.

Nobody is talking about Republicans taking a loss in the 50-60 seat range, though you’d never know it from the overheated rhetoric flowing out of prestige papers like effluent from a broken sewer main. The last three Democrat presidents lost their Houses and nobody’s citing them as comparisons to what might happen to Trump.

🪖 Why not? Probably because it doesn’t help their argument. “In some ways,” VDH explained in his column, “Obama became even more radical—and more emboldened—once he lost Congress.” Remember that line. “He became defiant, acted unilaterally, and committed to the Paris Agreement, the Iran deal, and normalization of relations with Cuba.” He also passed DACA —his appalling immigration package— through a DHS memo.

Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create the Grand Staircase–Escalante, 1.7 million acres in Utah, without even asking Congress. “Stroke of the pen,” Paul Begala, a senior Clinton aide, said in summarizing his approach. “Law of the land. Kind of cool.” In 1996, Clinton passed his signature welfare reform bill.

Not only that, but both Clinton and Obama became more popular after they lost their Houses. “Were they done for, for the next two years?”, VDH asked. “No. Bill Clinton had at one point been at a 39% approval rating. He left office over 60%. Obama had been down to 37% at one point. He left office at near 60%.”

Even during Trump 1.0, after Democrats took over the House in 2019, President Trump declared a border emergency that moved about $8 billion toward the wall. The House also passed his trade deal with Mexico and Canada 385 to 41 the day after it impeached him. 234 federal judges were confirmed to lifetime appointments in Trump’s first term, including three Supreme Court justices and 54 circuit judges. Most were confirmed by the Republican Senate after the House flipped.

Absent a global pandemic and the mail-in disaster, Trump would have crushed Basement Joe in a landslide.

🪖 But what do we hear about in the prestige media? Any of this helpful history? No. Just polls and gas prices and Trump rallies. Nor do the nation’s biggest papers report that the Administration is not just sitting around wishcasting. It is planning. Carefully and meticulously. Two days ago, the Spokesman-Review (Reuters) ran this headline:

Since April, Stephen Miller and budget director Russell Vought have been charting planned executive actions on tariffs, visas, housing and spending. “Trump has been briefed on the preparations and has taken part in discussions about them,” an anonymous official said. On Sunday, Trump said, “I guess I’ll become Mr. Veto... And then at some point, we’ll probably make deals.”

In short, very little will change from the first half of his term. “President Trump in the last two years has basically ignored Congress and tried to do as much as possible through executive orders and executive power,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor at Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political think tank. “I think ⁠he will only continue if there are Democratic majorities.”

AFP ran a similar story this morning. Here’s the headline:

“Trump as a lame duck president,” AFP reported, “could be the most vengeful Trump of all.” Peter Loge, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, told AFP, “I’m skeptical that President Trump will go quiet into that good night… Every time Trump has been backed into a corner, he has shouted more and come out fighting.” True.

“If we don’t win, I veto everything,” Trump promised the New York Post. “They’ll probably go after me, and I’ll go after them,” he warned Time. “We have a lot of great things planned for Washington,” he said yesterday in a speech at the Reflecting Pool.

Compare the Trump Team’s careful planning to the Democrats, who are practically already leading with pre-emptive excuses. Yesterday, the Hill reported Democrats in disarray:

Democrats, the Hill reported, have “little consensus over what to prioritize, according to Democratic strategists and aides.” They can’t even agree on whether to go for Impeachment 3.0. Some say yes, some say no. “Senators and leaders in the House are generally opposed to advancing a third impeachment of Trump that has virtually no chance of picking up 67 votes in the Senate — the number of votes needed to convict.”

What then can we expect? Nobody’s sure. The Hill listed a long series of nuisances. Pressing Trump to end the Iran war, delving into withheld Epstein documents, investigating awards to companies related to Trump’s family, his pardons of a Hong Kong crypto financier and a Venezuelan banker, and “a lower-key strategy to hamstring the Trump administration by tying up Cabinet and other senior officials in oversight hearings.”

It sounds like a bunch of Lilliputians scheming about how many places they should stab Gulliver in the ankles. It’s hardly revolutionary.

🪖 Losing the House is not my first choice. Like me, VDH allowed that if Trump does lose the House, things will get sticky. But that was also true for Clinton and Obama, and “it didn’t bother them a bit.”

VDH projects a 70% chance that Republicans will hold the Senate, mostly because to win, Democrats must hold all their seats and flip four Republican ones. I think the chance of holding is higher than that, but there’s no point in sharpening the forecast pencil now, since we’ll soon know for sure. (I think we’ll also hold the House, but that’s harder to argue coherently since there are so many races to handicap.)

“In 2026,” VDH wrote, “the media have lectured us for months that the impending blue wave is the inevitable electoral payback for Trump’s crippling inflation, soaring gas prices, and war abroad—despite the fact that similar conditions did relatively little electoral damage to Democrats in 2022.”

Victor’s point is that Republicans are hardly this year’s Bad News Bears. Even if the Cook Report’s overheated predictions of Democrat gains of +15 House seats come true —which I doubt— that would be less of a loss than either Obama or Clinton suffered. And neither president was stymied.

So this is hardly a “blue wave,” even though that’s all we’d be hearing for the next two years.

🪖 I’ll leave you with this— the part nobody is talking about. Let’s say the House does go blue. President Trump will continue reindustrializing and reviving the country through executive orders, memos, and agency action. The risk, of course, is that Democrats would vacate all his orders in January 2029, as Biden did in January 2021, and they’d probably reopen USAID and tear down the border wall for good measure. But that’s not even close to guaranteed.

They have to win the White House first.

In other words, we’ll get another bite at the political apple. If Marco Rubio, JD Vance, or even Ron DeSantis wins the presidency in 2028, then we get another four or eight years to lock in the Trump revolution. Four or eight more years of final agency rules that went through notice and comment cannot be undone by a pen and a phone.

Even without Congress turning Trump’s executive orders into laws, the next president will get to run a whole new round of rulemaking and defend those rules in court, which takes years to do— and years to unwind. Add more judges confirmed, more contracts, more manufacturing plants, nuclear reactors and data centers, and more jobs on the ground —more stakeholders— and it all becomes very difficult to unravel.

Meanwhile, Democrats’ 2028 prospects will suffer even more from new USPS ballot rules and two more years of election litigation, which the DOJ has now teed up in ways the courts can’t easily dismiss. Their finances will continue struggling, what with ActBlue and SPLC under continuing investigation and the corpse of USAID rotting in its grave. Nor will Trump be on the 2028 ballot to run against, so they will have to come up with something.

Good luck!

With those encouraging words uttered, go vote! Today is the day we’ve been waiting for. Forget about invisible gas. This election depends on nothing more complicated than turnout. Winning is easy; it might cost each of us an hour (or less). If your polling place does have a ‘hiccup,’ wait or ask for a provisional ballot. Call your local GOP and report any ‘irregularities.’ We turned out and beat the polls in 2024, and we can do it again. Voting in even moderately decent numbers will eliminate having to down a nasty jug of two years’ frustration and aggravation. Trust me. Then thank me later.

Tomorrow we’ll take a realistic but optimistic survey of whatever we have wrought and muse about what it means for the next two years. There will be ups and downs. Lawsuits will probably be flying like fur in a blender— but we also expected that in 2024, and the lawsuits weren’t necessary because turnout made them unnecessary. It’s going to be entertaining either way.

Have a terrific Election Day Tuesday! We’ll return tomorrow with another special edition rounding up one of the nation’s most dramatic election seasons— since the last one. Now go vote, and let us all know how it went in the comments.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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