A ballot measure in Culver City, California, would lower the voting age for some elections from 18 to 16, allowing teenagers to participate in the decision-making process on many issues that directly affect their lives. The measure would only apply to certain elections within the Los Angeles suburb’s city limits, including races for school board, elections for city officials…
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The final tally of Republicans’ midterm electoral carnage wasn’t even close to being counted Tuesday when it became the proverbial Night of the Long MAGA Knives.
As Democrats took decisive control of the House and Senate, flipping numerous “safe” Republican seats along the way and even turning Texas — Texas!! — blue by winning every statewide office up for election, President Donald Trump’s heretofore powerful MAGA coalition took to the internet, and its “thought leaders” began lashing out at anyone they could blame for the historic electoral collapse. Often the targets were one another.
Chaya Raichik — the far-right operator of the Libs of TikTok X account — blamed Democrats, who she falsely claimed “imported millions of foreigners, handed them a bunch of free shit, and then registered them to vote,” adding, “If we ever want to win again we need deportations and denaturalizations ramped up on steroids or our country will forever be lost to the communists.”
Laura Loomer — the self-described “pro-white nationalism” influencer known for pushing false, racist conspiracy theories and for being Trump’s McCarthyite loyalty enforcer — spread the blame around too. She said it “would have been best to ban Tik Tok,” called out Christian nationalists (“Where was your God last night?”) and blamed the GOP’s humiliating defeat on America’s racial diversity (“America was always intended to be a majority White country. Not a cesspool for third world minorities”).
Surging fuel prices, exacerbated inflation, financial instability and apparent failure to achieve any of the administration’s oft-shifting goals for the war cannot be hidden from the American public.
“Pizzagate” propagandist Mike Cernovich blamed the post-Charlie Kirk leadership of Turning Point USA,
As the tide recedes on the Democrats’ “Blue tsunami” this past Tuesday, before the votes were even tallied, the internecine fight over The Narrative among the US center-left began in earnest. Centrist ideological curators, as is their function, came out strongly to paint the historic drubbing of Republicans as evidence that centrists are more electable than progressives. And progressives, likewise, have made the opposite argument, buoyed by the 7-point swing state victory of progressive and strong Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
This piece won’t litigate the empirical question as such (though pollster G. Elliot Morris does an excellent job debunking the “centrists overperformed” conventional wisdom), but will highlight instead how many of the “El-Sayed is toxic and can’t win middle America” narratives completely evaporated Tuesday night, and how those pushing them will, of course, never be held to account nor asked to explain why so many outright lies were advanced about the Democratic nominee. El-Sayed won by roughly 340,000 votes despite being subject to nonstop intra-party, intra-liberal attacks emanating from everyone from the president of the most influential liberal think tank in the US, to key Democrats in Congress such as House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to influential liberal media outlets The Atlantic magazine and The New York Times, to his largely Republican-funded primary opponent Hayley Stevens, who––unlike the others––at least had the courtesy to break kayfabe and come out in support of Republican Mike Rogers explicitly. Unlike genetic white media darlings Roy Cooper and James Talarico who, the centrist wonk expects insists, Covered The Spread, El-Sayed was subject to one of the most
On Nov. 5, 2024, I sat in the back of a ballroom at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Houston, covering Sen. Ted Cruz’s victory speech. Results from the majority-Hispanic Rio Grande Valley caused a political earthquake, as these ancestrally Democratic counties along the border with Mexico shifted hard right to Donald Trump.
Cruz, ever the sports fan, could not help but spike the football six years after he nearly lost to Beto O’Rourke.
“Tonight, we are witnessing incredible results, especially with Hispanics, across the state of Texas,” Cruz said.
Ever since Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats had dreamed of a blue Texas; Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley were the linchpin in this strategy.
What a difference two years makes. The Democratic blue wave that swept over the country Tuesday would not have been as tall without the backlash from Latino voters against President Trump. Between his draconian immigration regime (crafted by Stephen Miller), his tariffs making daily goods more expensive and his Iran war driving up the price of gas, Hispanic voters had enough. Nowhere did that buoy Democrats more than in Texas, where Hispanics in the state moved 32 points to the left.
That swing didn’t just send James Talarico to the Senate and Gina Hinojosa to the governor’s mansion. It powered Democrats to win every top statewide office, flip the four state Supreme Court seats on the ballot this year and capture the Statehouse. And it decimated Texan and national Republicans’ plans to shore up the GOP majority in the House of Representatives by creating five Republican-leaning seats in Congress in heavily Hispanic parts of the state.
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Latino voters boost Dems in Texas
Earlier this year, longtime Republican Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada unexpectedly announced his retirement, though his party wasn’t too concerned about holding on to the seat. Not only is this a congressional district that Donald Trump carried two years ago by 14 points, but voters in Nevada’s 2nd District have also quite literally never elected a Democrat.
That is, until now. The Nevada Independent reported:
Teresa Benitez-Thompson became the first Democrat ever to win Northern Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District as a nationwide blue wave slammed into Nevada.
The social worker, former pageant queen and former Assembly majority leader defeated small-business owner David Flippo (R) in a district President Donald Trump won by double digits.
With roughly 93% of the ballots tallied, Benitez-Thompson appears to have prevailed by a roughly 6-point margin, and MS NOW has called the race.
The results come a few weeks after Amodei, the outgoing congressman, reiterated that he would “absolutely not” vote for Flippo, his own party’s nominee.
Why not? As it turns out, Flippo has been accused of repeatedly exaggerating his military record — he’s said he received a Bronze Star for valor, for example, which did not happen — and falsely having claimed to have served during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s. (Flippo denied any wrongdoing and blamed his claims about his military record on clerical errors.)
Mother Jones also reported last month on Flippo having been fired as a financial adviser two years ago, after his employer accused him of “willful misrepresentations and/or omissions of material fact” (Flippo’s campaign did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment about his firing).
Amodei nevertheless called his own party’s nominee to
Michigan voters were clear in 2022 when they voted by a 13-point margin to codify the right to abortion care in the state constitution, and the state’s Republican US Senate candidate, former Rep. Mike Rogers, claimed two years ago that he had no interest in “going back to Washington, DC to undo what the people of Michigan decided to do.” But a recent campaign contribution from the National…
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