so, let me summarize.

michigan

michigan hasn't elected a republican senator in a long time but this race might have been closer. el-sayed ran about 5 points behind the governor, who won by a much larger margin. it indicates he was less popular than the governor. concerns about the viability of his candidacy were legitimate, but they were offset by low turnout amongst white republicans. the former congressman justin amash is on record criticizing mike rogers for not being very conservative, and suggesting el-sayed was a more conservative candidate. ads with tucker carlson were contemptible and they didn't swing anybody but they might have contributed to voter suppression. el sayed is highly vulnerable for the next cycle, and i'd like to see him primaried and thrown out of congress asap.

kansas

IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR ME YOU'RE ALL GOING TO HELL.

danzig? rollins?

mr garrison?

no, it's adam hamilton, the new democratic party senator from kansas! i hope that's his next campaign slogan, and i'd love to see the ads for it.

the democrats ran a more republican candidate and it worked, but it was still more suppression than swing. i suspect the democrats will never get rid of this guy and that he'll be a pain in the ass for years.

texas

the republican candidate was attacked for adultery and the democratic candidate ran as the baby jesus. i didn't imagine that would matter, but i guess i forgot it was texas. it didn't hurt clinton next door in arkansas. the absence of a woman on the ballot also made it easier for hispanic catholics to vote for the democrats. regardless, the factor that flipped the seat in favour of baby j was low turnout for republicans, who chose not to vote for this cirque-de-soleil of a ticket. there was also a nasty storm. he's going to run for governor or something very soon (when his numbers instantly cave) and he'll be replaced by a republican.

ohio

i may have to give sherrod brown a little bit of credit, for handing jon husted his ass to him, and not commenting on it in the process. that can't have helped boost evangelical turnout. this was the only seat i thought might flip and it was maybe the closest.

iowa

i've looked at iowa closely and the results make less sense. ashley hinson should have won iowa, even with everything else going against her. the democrats did not run a strong candidate against her, like they did in kansas, nor did she identify herself as a bad candidate except in the opposite sense. i suspect that hinson misread the electorate and in the process exposed herself as a phony. ashley hinson really doesn't come off as the hard right republican that she ran as, until she decided to backtrack and admit she's not that candidate at all but a bipartisan and a moderate. she undercut her own argument and you can't unsee it when she did, because everything she said instantly becomes cynical and politicking, and it becomes intuitive that she was gaslighting voters and would again. she pretended to be the maga conservative until she decided it wasn't going to work and then swiftly became the democrat in disguise instead and the makeover was jarring in it's suddenness. it just made her look fake to the core. in kansas and texas, the democrats won because they ran more conservative candidates. in iowa, the republicans lost because the candidate they ran wasn't conservative enough. it was again due to low turnout and not to high swings. the democratic senator that was elected is a gross loser and i hope he gets primaried. this seat is highly vulnerable.

maine

i'd like to congratulate maine on electing it's first republican senator since 1997.

south carolina

in some electoral districts, they'll vote for the wife of a deceased politician and that will be ok. not in south carolina. nope. in south carolina, you earn your own keep, or they take you out behind the shed. this is a fluke result and it won't hold up.

donald trump has run for president three times. he beat two women and lost against a man.

and he's the one attacking "men" for playing women's sports, by claiming it's unfair?

it seems like trump does a lot more poorly when you take the women out of the equation and run him against men.

do we have any numbers yet?

turnout (as a percentage of voter registration):

2018: 79%

2022: 69%

2026: 63%

that's straight down.

some news reports might claim turnout was up or even that it was some kind of record. this has to do with total number of votes. you would expect the number of votes to constantly go up because population is constantly increasing. every election should have record turnout, if calculated via total votes, due to constant growth. 

but the percentage of the population that votes has been steadily falling since 2016.

evangelicals as a percentage of total votes:

2022: 24%

2024: 23%

2026: 17%

that's pretty hefty.

percentage of evangelicals that voted republican:

2022: 83%

2024: 84%

2026: 82%

there was no swing but there was a hefty abstention.

trump approval rating amongst evangelicals

after 2024 election: 78%

before 2026 election: 58%

so, it's easy enough to see what happened.

other demographics like blacks voted in higher numbers and percentages, but that wasn't what created the results. that is a false narrative. the results were the result of low turnout in key white demographics.

none of the polling projected that, it just suggested that democrats had high enthusiasm.

i'm sorry, but i don't really know who eminem is. i have a vague perception that he was some kind of boy band singer in the 90s, like the backstreet boys, or justin bieber, or something. but i've never heard any of his records, i don't know any of his songs and i wouldn't be able to identify a picture of him that wasn't labelled as "eminem".

i don't, broadly have very much interest in pop music forms, i'm not very interested in Manliness Culture and i don't have much interest in black culture.

i suspect i would be critical or dismissive of his music because it's probably macho and dumb (from what i can gather), but i really consequently don't have much to say about him, because i don't know anything about him.

i own a couple of white stripes records and i know who the mc5 were (although i don't own any records). that's closer to where my head and heart are in terms of detroit culture.

i have a fair amount of music from chicago in my collection, but i wouldn't identify detroit as an important musical centre, in terms of music i like. i was at one point looking for punk drummers in detroit and i walked away largely disappointed. the best one i found ended up in jail, i'm told (i don't know why).

immigration is a different kind of political issue in the united states than it is in europe. you will never get the kind of opposition to immigration in the united states that you can get in europe.

europe is a liberal and secular society. most of the united states is not; it's really still pretty backwards, trapped in the 19th century and very conservative, rural and religious. the bible belt is on par with some backwards arab country in terms of religiosity. there are pockets of canada like alberta that are also very backwards and conservative, but canada is broadly more secular and more european than the united states.

the reason that "right-wing" european leaders can effectively run against muslim immigration is that it is absolutely correct that an influx of religious migrants threatens the secular composition of the culture. when your society goes from 80% atheist to 15% muslim over the course of a few decades, it has a gigantic effect on the way that people live their lives. indigenous europeans have every right to reject being colonized by religious middle easterners - and they have repeatedly periodically rejected these incursions over thousands of years, whether the incursions have been from carthaginians, from christians or from muslims. europe successfully decolonized itself from christianity after winning a 1000 year civil war against christian colonialism. it has good reason to be suspicious about muslim immigration, and the ruling class has good reason to want to bring muslims in to replace the defeated christians with.

conversely, the united states is a very conservative society that is not very secular at all and doesn't generate the same opposition to religious immigration that europe's secularist society does. the united states has issues with race relations, but opposition to immigration in the united states isn't about race; muslims and mexicans are mostly white. in the united states, there is no serious concept of secularism in government (jeffersonian "secularism" is a joke) and secularists have never been more than a tiny, insignificant minority. rather, the united states is culturally christian and extremely conservative in it's culturally christian reality. muslim immigration doesn't pose the same kind of threat to the conservative christian culture in the united states that it does to the liberal and socialist secularist culture in europe (they're basically the same!), and muslim immigration consequently doesn't generate the same kind of self-preservation reaction in the united states that it does in europe. if muslims took over the united states from the christians, not much would change in a lot of places; if islam conquered europe, the society and culture would be utterly destroyed very quickly.

rather, opposition to immigration in the united states is almost entirely about economics. lower income people don't want their wages undercut, or the rents to go up. they're right to be concerned about this. nowadays, this narrative comes from people that call themselves conservatives, but the narrative is socialist in origin. it's a correct economic argument, but you don't hear it in france and germany. nobody is angry about muslims stealing jobs in france, they're concerned about and upset about laicite being infringed upon, and the golden principle of state secularism being compromised on to uphold some anachronistic views from the dark ages that are, in truth, kind of american in composition. the latter is a much more powerful political force.

you're consequently not going to get the same kind of opposition to muslim immigration in the united states that you're seeing in europe because the united states is a conservative and not very secular society. large scale muslim immigration just doesn't pose the same cultural threat to american christianity that it does to european secularism. muslim migrants in north america tend to actually be a little better educated and less likely to work under the table, depress wages or steal anybody's source of labour.

trump and his cronies are missing the point if they think they can import opposition to immigration from europe to the us and if they try to do it they might just dig themselves deeper into a hole with the evangelicals that are abandoning them, and siding with the muslims, on interfaith grounds. the evangelicals may correctly look at trump and look at the muslims and decide they have more in common with the muslims and would rather invite the muslims in than try to keep them out. it's secularists that should be frightened by this developing potential alliance between christian conservatism and muslim immigration in the united states, not the dominant conservative culture in the country, which could see itself replenished with fresh recruits. 

so, is trump going to run as a socialist, then, and make the opposition to immigration about economics? well, he should call pierre polievre about that.

there's some possibility that trump may find himself consumed in the issues that the next cycle will have to work out rather than the issues in front of him right now. he is not running in the next election cycle. he should focus on finishing his term, instead.

there was a trivial swing in hispanic voters in the very south of texas (a traditional democratic area), who voted against kamala harris because they're bigoted catholics. they did not win trump the election in 2024 and they didn't win talarico the seat in 2026. it's a small, insignificant group of voters at the ass end of the country with backwards, catholic values systems that nobody should give the slightest fuck about.

in fact, it's probably not really about immigration. in this very small, isolated and alienated area, this was probably a vote for talarico because he has christian values (and isn't a black woman. the woman part is key. this region doesn't vote for women). historically, this region is extremely catholic and that's what they vote for - catholic values. they don't support secularism, they don't support liberalism, they don't support women, they continually support brutal immigration crack downs and they are not voters i would want to be in solidarity with, as a socialist.

the liberal media narrative is constantly grasping at straws. they can't find the data to suggest that the election had anything to do with immigration (except, perhaps, some data suggesting that republicans didn't see it as a replacement issue for abortion, in the end, and that it didn't get the vote out) so they just make it up.

the republicans could not get white, evangelical men out to vote for them at the levels that they did before abortion was overturned by the courts. there is a trend in this direction and it's been the cause of weakening republican results for the last several cycles.

opposition to ice may have galvanized democratic support in very blue districts, but there is no other area in the country besides a handful of counties in very south texas that flipped, and it was probably not even about immigration at all, but just a show of support for the more christian candidate, who was the democrat.

american voters would frustrate marx. but they are what they is, and they vote on social issues, dominantly, and that does make more sense in this context in real terms. neither the house nor the senate is going to do anything to cut the cost of living, and ice policy is at the executive level.

south texans angry about immigration policy - which are not going to be very many. hispanic texans generally support pretty brutal immigration policies. nobody sees their wages undercut by illegal immigrants more than texas hispanics. the illegals can't vote. - understand that they will need to wait for the next presidential cycle to cast a vote that can actually matter, in terms of affecting policy.

good.

canada should have a complete boycott on iran in place. that we don't is embarrassing and shameful.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/us-government-sanctions-canadian-businesses-iran-transactions-9.7413168