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.