- Herschel Walker describing cause and effect

With hundreds of thousands of ballots still being counted across the country, we’re hanging on tenterhooks to see how key races (particularly in Arizona and Nevada) will shake out. 
 

• Democratic candidates in Arizona maintained small leads today over their Republican rivals in races for governor and the U.S. Senate. Two days after the election, they’re still considered too early to call. About one-quarter of the total ballots remain uncounted. Arizona is unusual in that the overwhelming majority of votes are cast by mail, and many people wait until the last minute to return them, so protracted vote counts in the Grand Canyon State are nothing new. Former TV news anchor and screaming MAGA nutjob Kari Lake, who is perhaps the most profuse evangelist of the Big Lie besides Donald Trump himself, remains about half a point behind Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the governor’s race. Incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) has a slightly more comfortable but still frighteningly narrow lead over his Republican challenger (another inmate at the MAGA asylum) Blake Masters. The Democratic Nominee for Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also holds a lead over another Big Liar, Republican Mark Finchem, but like the other two races, this one is also too early to call.

• In Nevada, the fate of the vulnerable Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) hangs in the balance as she and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt remain separated by a razor-thin margin with 84 percent of the vote reported. Clark County, NV, was forced to defend its election system today following a social media tirade from disgraced former president Donald Trump, who criticized its credibility and claimed that the lengthy vote-counting process there was because “They want more time to cheat!” Clark County is home to Las Vegas, and one of the only reliably Democratic counties in the Silver State. Early tabulations show that, nationwide, more registered Republicans came out to the polls than registered Democrats, but the key deciding factor was that independents broke for Democrats across the country, and by particularly wide margins in battleground states. In Pennsylvania, for example, independents broke for Democrats by 18 points, and a staggering 30 points in Arizona. 
   

• These races are nail-biters, undoubtedly, but there is reason for hope. Across the country, even where Democratic politicians were unsuccessful, Democratic policies were. Ultra-conservative Nebraska passed a $15 minimum wage. Ballot initiatives enshrining abortion rights passed or sweeping proposed abortion bans were voted down, even by conservative voters. New Mexico became the first state to pass a universal pre-K measure after activists worked for over a decade to get early childhood funding on the ballot. Nevada decisively passed a ballot initiative adding an Equal Rights Amendment to their state constitution, and it will be the most comprehensive and inclusive ERA in the country.

Naturally, the right-wing disinformation machine is churning away. 
 

• The “red wave” looking more like a red ripple has led many already-nuts right-wing pundits and influencers to pull the crazy lever. Disinformation was already rampant leading up to Election Day, but Republicans have kicked it into overdrive now that they’ve suffered the worst out-party midterm showing since post-9/11 Democrats in 2002. Bogus claims and doctored videos were shared far and wide in right-wing social media spheres from figures like disgraced former national security advisor Michael Flynn and your average lay QAnon conspiracy theorists alike. There was also a more coordinated fix in from traditional media outlets prior to this, like the relentless campaign by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post to elect GOP gubernatorial candidate and crypto-fascist Lee Zeldin in New York, even trying to tacitly bribe at least two victims of crime if they were willing to say on the record that they were Democrats voting for Zeldin. 
   

• So where does this all leave Trump? Because the only way Republicans could have had a worse electoral result on Tuesday is if Trump had not been dissuaded from following his instincts and announced his 2024 reelection bid on Monday night, like he wanted to. Trump’s former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany even went on Fox News to say that she thinks her old boss should “pause” his 2024 announcement. David Urban, a top adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign in Pennsylvania and a longtime ally said yesterday, “It is clear the center of gravity of the Republican Party is in the state of Florida, and I don’t mean Mar-a-Lago.” Ouch!! It seems like the Republican establishment is weighing whether their best bet is to choose a new deity and move on from ole’ Donny boy. Trump, as you’d expect, is taking it all in stride. 

We’re not giving up hope on the races in Arizona and Nevada until the last ballot is counted, but Democrats should take this opportunity of disastrous GOP infighting to strategically strike while the iron is hot.

There is a lot to be surprisingly excited about for Democrats coming out of Tuesday’s midterms. How they performed in New York state is not one of them. Considering the party’s great showing in Pennsylvania, which was only a Biden +1 state in 2020, how did the New York State Democratic Party fuck it up so badly in a Biden +20 state? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) rightly characterized New York as “the glaring aberration” on the electoral map and called for the head of the New York State Democratic Party Jay Jacobs to resign. This was an underperformance so stark in a blue state that it may have cost Democrats the House of Representatives. Disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) (remember when people wanted that guy to run for president?) left a conservative infrastructure that was never dismantled, full of conservative judges he appointed and corporate lobbyists in leadership positions. Those conservative judges threw out Democrats’ legislative maps, and consequently allowed Republicans to flip four congressional seats in the state, including the one held by DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney. The incompetence of the state party leadership is difficult to overstate, but an outcome in which the head of the DCCC loses his seat should be a true moment of reckoning, and if it isn’t, we’re in serious trouble.

President Biden will meet with China’s President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next week’s G-20 Summit in Bali to discuss increasing tensions over Taiwan and Russia. 

Twitter’s top privacy and compliance officers have all resigned, and shortly thereafter the Federal Trade Commission released a statement saying, “We are tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.”

The Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee and the Justice Department have asked the Supreme Court to reject disgraced former president Trump’s bid to block the House panel’s request for his tax returns. 

A Connecticut judge ordered Infowars host Alex Jones and his company to pay an additional $473 million to families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre for promoting false conspiracies, bringing the total judgment against him to $1.44 billion

Attorney General Keith Ellison (D-MN) has officially won his re-election. Phew.

The Biden administration has proposed requiring all major federal contractors to set targets for reducing their emissions in line with the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, a significant step towards making government operations more sustainable.

One of the big stories to come out of Tuesday’s election is the Republican clean-sweep in Florida, which has largely been credited to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who sailed to re-election with a staggering 20-point lead. In the wake of their embarrassing performance in the rest of the country, Republicans are taking copious notes to figure out what DeSantis did right. It’s interesting, then, that Democrats are not following the same path, frantically grasping for the playbook the Democratic Party and its candidates used in Michigan. In the pivotal battleground state, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) posted a double-digit victory against her Trump-endorsed challenger and helped usher in Democratic control of both houses of the Michigan state legislature for the first time in 40 years. She also helped Democrats in down ballot races in the states. Whitmer’s a rising star, and the Michigan ground game and overall electoral strategy Democrats used in The Mitten should be closely studied ahead of 2024.

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October’s consumer price index shows inflation is finally cooling, which will hopefully lead Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to slow interest rate hikes. 

Montana voters rejected an extremist “born alive” abortion referendum. 

The British government said today that it has frozen more than 18 billion pounds worth of assets held by Russian oligarchs in the country. 

Attorney General Josh Kaul (D-WI) has eked out re-election against his Republican challenger, a crucial hold for Dems in the battleground state.