The New Neo

Most post-election analysis is an attempt to understand why a defeat happened and how to overcome those factors next time. A lot of it is hot air, although some is useful. But this time I’m not sure how useful; it depends what the Democrats end up doing in the next two years and how the public takes it.

And by the phrase “what the Democrats end up doing,” I don’t just mean on the national level although I do mean that. But on the national level – as I wrote recently – the Democrats in Congress will blame any failure of theirs to make things more “affordable” (to take one example) on Trump’s veto. Get rid of a Republican president and all will be well. So they won’t have to face many of the consequences of their actions at the national level and will be well-positioned to win the trifecta in 2028.

I hope I’m wrong about that. But that’s the way I see it.

It’s at the state level that the Democrats will be able to implement a lot of their dream agenda. And it’s at the state level that people might feel the negative consequences. Of course, once Democrats institute their usual voting “reforms,” it may make it harder to change things even at the state level even if voters would like to do so.

But I’m nevertheless curious to know exactly what happened this past Tuesday. I doubt fraud was much of a factor at all; the blue wave was too widespread and affected too many previously red areas and ones in which cheating was made more difficult. No, something very real was happening. And no analysis I’ve read so far seems to explain its intensity. That probably is because it was due to a great many factors rather than just one or two.

The biggest one is the perception of hard economic times. I’ve read over and over again that exit polls indicate that.

Another is Iran, but my guess is that affected people mostly for two reasons. The first is high gas prices and the second is that people on the right, and Independents who might have otherwise been leaning right and did so in 2024, were annoyed with the indeterminate conduct of the war rather than the war aims themselves or the initial weeks of the conflict.

Another is that Tucker et al did make inroads on the right, especially among young men, and I suspect those people stayed home or voted for Democrats (like Tucker told them to).

Another is something I’ve written about over and over again: as more cohorts of young people reach voting age, more leftist-indoctrinated people make up higher percentages of the voting population. The same is true of immigrants-turned citizens from Muslim countries, and their natural born citizen children – obviously important in states such as Michigan and Minnesota. This combination fuels the red-green alliance. Nor is it just the Muslim demographic; it’s other blue-voting demographics as well that have increased (such as, for example, East Indian).

Then of course there’s Trump fatigue, which I’ve written about before.

I’m probably leaving something out, but I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks.

I’ve long thought that despite moments when the leftward direction of the nation seems to have been halted or even reversed, that it feels like a finger has been put in the dike only for a bit and that some day soon the water will be rushing in. Was that day last Tuesday, November 3, 2026? I freely admit I don’t know. I suspect it was, although I strongly hope it wasn’t.

NOTE: One small ray of light is that even in states where voters put Democrats in power those same voters were more conservative on certain social and economic issues on the ballot, such as whether female-identifying biological men should be able to play in women’s sports, or concerning the so-called the billionaires’ tax.

There is a sort of split-personality quality to that sort of voting. But I think it can be explained by saying that in 2024 the trans issue was up front and center and helped the GOP win, whereas because they improved things in that regard in the interim, present-day voters aren’t as driven to elect Republicans to deal with it. As for the billionaire’s tax, I guess enough people in California didn’t want to kill the goose that lays the golden leftist egg.

Here are a bunch of blog comments I found at Ace’s that I think are interesting although I don’t necessarily agree with them and certainly not totally.

In no particular order:

It has little to do with never Trump. It has to do with human nature history.

The border is sealed. The economy is booming. China is out of Venezuela and Cuba. Iran is a no longer a threat and is now a failed state.

We wanted all of these things. And we got them. So why vote Cause they can’t possibly be reversed.

The Party in power always loses in midterms. Not hard to look up. Cause why vote when you are winning? Human nature never changes.

This makes no sense to me. Dems took the evil side of every 80-20 issue, R registrations far outpaced D, people have been abandoning woke, Dems have been threatening their fellow Americans, Trump has reversed the Biden administration’s abuses against Americans, Dems have lost funding for their riots and other nefarious doings, crime is down, inflation is down, employment is up …
What is going on?

People are upset over everything being expensive, so they are putting the people who caused it back in power?
Make it make sense!

I’m not going to analyze the results in detail today. Maybe some other time, when we learn more about what blocs of voters voted for what.

My initial impressions are that Hispanic voters – who voted for Trump and the GOP in 2024 – veered to the left in this election. I’m not sure exactly what the motive was. Also, the Democrats’ emphasis on “affordability” was brilliant and they hammered it home. They didn’t have to explain what they would do to fix it; it was enough to talk about it and hope that people’s short memories would mean they had forgotten the Biden years (and the gas prices and sky-high inflation during some of those years, as well).

Calling Iran a “forever war” about a month after it started was another factor, and the Tuckeresque right was very instrumental in disseminating that message as well, despite the fact that it’s been a war in which there have been very very few American casualties and pretty much no boots on the ground, against an implacable enemy that’s done much damage all around the world for almost fifty years. No matter. A lot of people on the right feel that Trump broke one of the promises on which they had relied, and that it’s the fault of his listening to the nefarious Jews.

As I wrote last night, the results are even worse than expected. And what was expected was already bad.

The whole debacle reminds me somewhat of the 2024 British election, the one that put Keir Starmer in the driver’s seat because the voters were mad at the conservatives who’d been in power. Afterwards voters had some buyer’s remorse but they couldn’t do very much about it except substitute another PM of the same party.

For years the left has been foaming with rage at everything Trump does, but a large number of voters on the right are also angry at Trump and the GOP for this or that or the other thing, whether it be the war in Iran (despite the very low number of US casualties), the high price of gas and real estate, or the failure to pass the SAVE Act.

And when in doubt, blame the Jews. As Tom Lehrer sang long ago:

Trump is still president, though, since we don’t have a parliamentary system. If we did, he’d be out. He also will have veto power for the next two years. However, the Democrats will do what they can to stymie and undermine everything he attempts: his war efforts in Iran, his support of Israel, his judicial appointments, you name it.

Will they try impeaching him once again? Of course. But as with previous impeachments, I don’t think there’s much chance there will be the requisite 67 Senate votes for removal. That would require a lot of Republican cooperation.

It’s not just that Democrats won yesterday. It’s the large margin of victory by which they won, even in some red states. Talarico, for example, in Texas, seems to have won by twelve points. Paxton was a weakened candidate, to be sure. But twelve points? In Texas? Democrats have been saying for years that they will turn Texas blue; have they finally done it? Was it an influx of Californians?

And even Susan Collins, who usually manages to defy the polls, could not win against Troy Jackson, who was far from a stellar candidate. The quality of the Democrats didn’t matter, for the most part. All that mattered was having a “D” after their names.

Some people are saying it will be good for voters to experience the awful things Congressional Democrats will do. However, it occurs to me that, because Trump is still president and will veto the leftist bills Congress passes, the Democrats will not have to take responsibility for much of anything they try. They can say they would have accomplished wonderful things but evil Trump thwarted them, and so if voters elect a Democrat for president in 2028 all will be well.

And then – watch out if they get both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2028. Maybe it won’t work out that way because life is unpredictable. But right now I’m not seeing anything that’s cause for optimism.

I think the most basic problem is that the Gramscian march through the institutions has been successful, and the internet and especially social media have helped it along tremendously. Younger voters in particular are affected by this.

This feels like the worst election of my lifetime, by far. Maybe I just don’t quite remember the others. But this feels irreversible, I think in part because the Democrats of today are different than the Democrats of the past. They intend to make it impossible for the right to ever win elections again. They’ve done it in states like California, and they intend to do it on a national level now.

I certainly hope they don’t succeed. But so far we have failed to heed this admonition: