☕️ REPUKED ☙ Wednesday, November 4, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Well, that happened. Let’s grieve a little and then try to find the pony. It’s got to be in here somewhere. A post-election balm.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Blackpill Wednesday! Democrats and the blackpill brigades will be unbearable today. Everyone’s pet grievance will be elevated to master-theory status explaining why this happened. So gather ‘round. Let’s lick our wounds and compare scars.

I will not try to round this up yet. It’s too soon. I won’t promise anything especially smart, since yesterday I was busy lauding Republican strengths and mocking the polls, which —though in fairness, even the Times was questioning its own polls— is a plate of crow pie that somebody will have to eat.

Daily blogging isn’t easy. You should try it sometime. In November 2020, the morning after President Trump lost, after going to bed secure he’d been re-elected, I did not want to blog. But I knew I had to do it anyway, for lots of reasons. Duty called. There was other important news to discuss. The same is true this morning— but this is nowhere near as awful.

Welp, let’s rip off the band-aid. Here’s one of about a million giddy headlines in the New York Times this morning:

It was bad. Texas now has a Democrat governor and a clown-like “god is nonbinary” Senator. But let’s get one thing straight: this is not the apocalypse.

We're grieving for our dashed hopes. It’s annoying and painful and the Times will be impossible to live with for months. I’d rather have had covid twice. But remember what everyone has been saying all year: since the Civil War, the president’s party has shed House seats in every midterm but three (1934, 1998 and 2002). The pendulum keeps swinging.

“Rebuke” is obviously media’s vocabulary word of the day. It rhymes with “puke.” But something that almost always happens can’t be a “rebuke” to anybody. It would have been a rebuke had Republicans defied the trend.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

To be fair, yesterday the GOP got walloped, shellacked, and beaten like a drum. But let’s begin with the odd bits of good news. Alabama readers, for example, can take pride in a momentous political achievement. (‘Pride’ as in the pride movement.) 1819 News reported, “Dem transgender candidate defeats Republican incumbent in HD25 race, the first in Alabama’s history.”

Alison, born male, is a first-timer. He’s never held an elected office before, not even codes enforcement or animal control. But Alison easily manhandled his Republican incumbent— earning himself a muscular four-year term in the Alabama House of Representatives (base salary $66,659). Four years will allow Huntsville Republicans time to reflect on how this happened in Alabama. (We have a clue! Alison got 12,456 votes; the Republican incumbent got only 10,929. We’ll return to this ‘mathematical’ point soon. Believe me.)

I started today’s roundup with Alison because the handsome new lawmaker is a perfect metaphor for last night’s Great Shellacking. It’s grotesque, cuckoo, inherently deceptive, and gives you acid indigestion and a headache if you think about it for too long.

Reading this morning’s news was like finding out a neighbor who hates you and your RV was just elected as HOA president while you were on vacation. Or hearing that your ex just got their law degree. Or maybe it’s like when the dentist says, “this might take a few visits.” You suddenly have a sinking feeling that you are in for two years of constant irritation and probably some expensive bills. Trans Alison also reminds us that “Woke 1.0” is still right there, sitting on the bench and winking at the children in a disquieting, sinister way.

But mostly, and this is Alison’s important lesson, it seems impossible that any Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for a trans candidate because they were upset about gas prices, the Iran war, or anything else. I simply don’t believe it.

No, what caused last night’s shellacking was shockingly simpler.

🪖 At 3am this morning, in a spasm of creativity, the Washington Post celebrated with a headline almost word-for-word identical to the Times: “Voters punish Trump with historic swing to Democrats.”

WaPo’s article contained everything we need to understand what just happened. It was expressed in a single sentence. As I have urged all year, Republicans needed to do only one thing to beat the “normal” midterm result. They didn’t do it. It’s that simple. Here’s the single line you can copy and paste on social media, if you like.

President Trump reached the same conclusion. Yesterday, he explained to CBS that too many Republicans “stayed back.”

Ta-da! Behold, the magnificent majesty of math. I don’t want to be that guy, but a “collapse in turnout” is the opposite of what the GOP needed to do to prevent this from happening. Avoid the temptation to carelessly assign blame. Republicans did whatever they could think of to get out the vote. They redistricted. They held a midterm convention. They outspent Democrats. The President held daily rallies for the last month. The DOJ pursued illegal votes in every imaginable way— far beyond anything any previous Administration has ever done. No electoral stone was left unturned.

It wasn’t enough to prevent a “collapse” in Republican turnout. We didn’t even match 2022 numbers. So we definitely failed to make it too big to rig.

We expected Democrats to turn out big, since that’s the midterm baseline. Plus, they’ve been exceptionally furious about losing their DEI benefits and pride flags outside federal buildings and SNAP giveaways and learing centers and everything else. We needed to beat that surge of Democrat ire, but too many Republicans stayed home. Consequences naturally follow.

If anyone deserves blame for this, it’s the blackpill brigades, who suppressed turnout and right now are drunk and doing undeserved victory donuts on the front lawn. Congressional Republicans also deserve a share of the blame.

But maybe there’s a pony somewhere in this pile of manure.

🪖 You know what would’ve been a terrific sales pitch? Save Congress because it’s been so important and effective. But this lazy and unproductive GOP Congress gave the base nothing to show up for. If anything, they constantly aggravated us.

The SAVE Act, the simplest idea in politics (prove you’re a citizen before you vote), passed the House not once but twice, then died in a Senate that wouldn’t touch the filibuster to save it. “We don’t have the votes,” shrugged Majority Leader John Thune. What can we do? The rest of the agenda went the same way.

For comparison, by midterm Election Day, Biden’s Congress, also a one-party trifecta and working with a 50-50 Senate, had passed 214 laws. Our flaccid group passed only 121, the second-thinnest record in 40 years, per Pew. (The Wednesday after Trump’s 2020 loss, I noted that Election Day shares initials with Erectile Dysfunction.)

Meanwhile, the House stayed out for nearly eight weeks during last fall’s shutdown, took a five-week August vacation, then canceled two more weeks in September to go campaign.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can’t cry about how the republic is on the line and then take a recess. Voters noticed. They didn’t switch sides or rebuke anybody. They just stayed home. Why save this Congress? I did everything I could to prop them up, but the One Big Beautiful Bill was too long ago and not nearly enough.

Now it’s their last chance. They’ve got less than two lame-duck months to impress us with something. Well? I’m not holding my breath. Let’s see how well the filibuster works now.

So, as we hold our noses and plow into the muck, we find a thin pony leg. A long overdue shakeup of Republican leadership just started, thanks to voters. Wash it off, and we find the first silver lining.

Like people in Huntsville, Republicans now get two painful years to reflect and revise.

🪖 We should not overlook the few bright spots. The Blue Wave washed out at the Georgia border. In sunny Florida, where the largest group of C&C readers is located (just saying), we held the line. Headline from the Daytona Beach News-Journal:

It came too close for comfort. But ultimately, Democrats won no major races in the Sunshine State. Bryon Donalds became the first black governor in Florida history— a Republican. I guess Floridians aren’t white supremacists after all. Ashley Moody fended off DSA-backed Angie Nixon and held her Senate seat. James Uthmeier clung to the State Attorney General job.

Vox called Florida “a bright spot for Republicans.” We Floridians humbly accept the nation’s thanks.

There were two other curious Florida bits worth a mention. First, Democrats won all three newly gerrymandered districts, raising a perplexing question about whether the redistricting juice was worth the political squeeze, given how much that raw bit of politics energized blue voters. And then, a supermajority of voters passed a historic homestead tax-break amendment, meaning a bunch of Democrats defied their party and voted for it along with Republicans.

Thank you, Governor DeSantis.

Similarly, in California, where Xavier Becerra handily won the governorship and a voter ID initiative is losing badly, the so-called “billionaire tax” is failing. And a counter-initiative banning state taxes on assets is passing. We won’t know for two weeks, since the silly Golden State keeps counting late-arriving ballots.

Between Florida and California, we learn that Democrats like tax cuts. Who could’ve predicted that? Make of it what you will, but another little piece of pony might’ve become visible in the feces.

🪖 We’ve already discussed why a Democrat Congress won’t enjoy the same free rein it held during the second two years of Trump 1.0. And we will have plenty of time to analyze it in real time as we repent in leisure. But a couple of thoughts stand out.

Ironically, the new Democrat-led Congress might be more productive than our outgoing one was. In Trump’s second two years during Trump 1.0, the divided Congress under Nancy Pelosi was impeaching Trump but still passed 193 laws, substantially more than Trump 2.0’s Congress did (121). It is time for Trump the dealmaker to take the stage. And he knows it.

“I know a lot of Democrats. I think they’re gonna want to work with me,” he told CBS in a remarkably conciliatory call. “Otherwise I’d just veto everything, and they’re not gonna want that.” On Fox, he told Brett Baier, “They’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them. And after a couple of months of vetoes, they’ll go out, and they’ll say, ‘How do we get this stuff done?’ And we’ll work together.”

Yesterday, incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries didn’t rule out working with Trump. When asked, he said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” He waffled on impeachment 3.0, saying, “We haven’t ruled anything out… And we haven’t ruled anything in.”

It’s time for the Art of the Deal. Nobody can make deals like President Trump. And decent legislation might not be unimaginable. Trump holds leverage now that he lacked last time. For instance, visualize a bill outlawing weaponized government. We need that law. Democrats might be motivated to deliver it.

Finally, Trump’s agenda has mostly operated independently of Congress. Yesterday, for one terrific example, Greenland’s parliament ratified the new deal that Trump negotiated completely apart from Congress. It’s done.

The next two years will be different from what we’d hoped. But different isn’t automatically worse— it’s just different. We soldier on. We toughen up. Tough soldiers don’t surrender after losing a battle. History is replete with victories following difficult defeats. Take, for example, the greatest victory of all in 30 AD.

Everything happens for a reason. Usually the reason doesn’t become obvious without hindsight. Trump’s 2020 loss is one example; the incredible victories of the last two years would have been impossible without the excruciating excesses under Brainpan Biden. Trump was on the ropes, arrested, under trial, fined, struggling in the primaries, and getting shot at. Now he’s in the White House— because we never gave up. Never surrender.

It’s time to follow Florida’s example and hold the line. Keep digging for the pony. Stay optimistic. Cough up the black pills. Take a social media break. I promise: just as we did during the pandemic years, we’ll work through this together. And our time will come ‘round again. Maybe sooner than you think.

In spite of everything, have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning, for a brand-new dose of optimistic essential news and snarky, caffeinated commentary.

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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