What the voters care about

The above graphic -- right-click and open link in new tab for full-size -- shows which issues were most important to the voters right before the election (source).  No one should be surprised to see that grocery prices, fuel prices, and health-care costs top the list of things that the public most wanted to hear candidates address.

The problem for Republicans was that they couldn't address those issues coherently because it was mostly Trump's tariffs and Iran war, and the Republican Congressional majorities' failure to rein him in, that have been making the first two problems worse, while the Republican cuts to ACA subsidies have been driving up health-care costs.  So they fell back on a campaign of name-calling -- denouncing Democratic candidates as socialists, communists, vegans, and what have you.  The problem is that "look how bad my opponent is" turns out not to be a very effective message, even when the opponent is genuinely awful -- it didn't work for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and it has rarely worked for anyone since.  Voters want to hear what you are going to do about their problems.

The Republicans also kept bringing up transgenderism, because it's one of the few actual issues on which they, rather than the Democrats, are best aligned with the vast majority of Americans (and notice how the Democrats desperately tried to change the subject every time the issue came up).  But while the polls, and the success of ballot initiatives against males in female sports even in blue states, make it clear where the voters stand on trans ideology, the issue was simply not very salient in their minds at a time when the rising prices of basic necessities were crushing them.  Even "AI" and data centers, which 56% of voters said had a major effect on how they voted, ranked lower than kitchen-table issues among what people wanted to hear candidates discuss.

Many politicians have fallen into a top-down mind-set in which they get to decide what is important, set the agenda, and then harangue (although they prefer words like "mobilize") voters to support it.  Voters rightly punish this attitude.  It's for the voters to set the agenda, and for politicians to represent them.

Link round-up for 7 November 2026

Various interesting stuff I ran across on the net over the last week.

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You can get an OnlyFans calendar.

I want this cat as my manager.

This was the worst possible place to put the entrance.

They're messing with the wrong guy here.

Some people just can't get thihgs right.

I guess they're not speaking the same language.

Yeah, that's a big one.

Blogger Mr Shife is being sued by his dog.

Here are a few unfortunate oddities.

What if real life was like a computer?

Apparently the Armenian Parliament is completely silly.

English terms for nationality are weird.

Drive a car that stands out from the crowd.

Here are a last few Halloween decorations, from blogger Lady M and photographer Ginny Hartzler.

These witches know their moves.

Admire the proud parents.

Keep your hands to yourself.

This is the future, if the tech-bros win.

Shadow of a Doubt blog remembers Patrick Stewart.

Sometimes even animals need emotional support animals.

This is what bad weather looks like.

Here are some upside-down icebergs.

Who the hell left all these jars here?

This is Madrid.

Trade and cultural connections between India and the West go back much further than most people realize -- even to Roman times.

Renewing your passport may be easier than you think.

Watch out for this scam that uses a fake Cloudflare verification (this post has some large blank areas in the middle of the text, so keep scrolling until you really reach the end).

Here's how to get rid of, or at least limit, "AI" on various devices and programs.

At least some "smart" TVs spy on you even when they're turned off, even if you've opted out.

"The work is what happens within you."

There's now a wave of "AI" image fakery targeting men, though it's nothing like as degrading as all the "AI" fake porn targeting women.

".....lube up your backsides and put on some lipstick because a lot of you are on your way to the slammer."  Charming.

A former Meta executive denounces the company's Muse "AI" agent as a dangerous privacy risk.

Same old shit.

The Catholic Church's "International Association of Exorcists" (yes, there is such a thing) wants to replace Halloween with more of their dreary same-old-same-old saints-and-processions stuff.  Their pathetic ignorance is shown by conflating Satanism and Wicca, two totally different things.  It's mind-blowing to me that the Catholic Church still has exorcists in the twenty-first century.

Blogger Carol Seidl compares experiences of healthcare in the US vs France.

A record number of scientists, engineers, doctors, and nurses were elected as members of Congress this week.  That's got to be an improvement.

".....look at the way they react when a woman is sexually harassed."

Individualism is an important positive value.  Do not allow the collectivists to change the meaning of the word.

Here are some things you should not do.

"Kauft nicht bei Juden!"

Last week, tech stocks continued the previous week's plummet.  No one knows for sure, but it certainly looks like the "AI" bubble collapse could be imminent.

The right-wing news site NRO offers a surprisingly honest post-mortem on the Republicans' huge election defeat.  On the right-wing sites I read, I've seen almost none of the usual "Democrats stole the election" nonsense.  I think the margins were so large in many cases that such claims are obviously implausible.

Ted Cruz has a simpler explanation -- the economy stinks, people are hurting, and Republican politicians showed no sign of giving a shit.  That was almost certainly the biggest single issue.

Tesla is apparently discontinuing production of the godawful Cybertruck, an irrecoverable flop with buyers.

The election included forty-one ballot measures about data centers, across ten states.  On all but one of them, the anti-data-center side prevailed -- and the margins were large.  56% of voters said data centers were a major factor influencing how they voted.  Anti-data-center Congressional candidates also won big.  It seems there was a populist message in this election -- reject "AI", hate "AI", stop "AI".

Many localities passed initiatives to ban or restrict surveillance cameras, or voted out local politicians who weren't fully on board with getting rid of them.

This week Google announced that schools that ban its "AI" would also lose access to its search engine.  Within a day, after a huge backlash, the company was frantically backing down.

Emptywheel blog makes the case for why even the progs should support Hakeem Jeffries for speaker of the House.

Montana has passed initiative 194, banning corporations from making campaign contributions, with 65% of the vote.  If the law survives Constitutional challenges, and other states adopt similar measures, it would mean de facto cancellation of Citizens United.

In Tampa FL, a security guard shot and killed a gunman who was storming a bank and had already killed a woman in the parking lot.  Without this armed guard's decisive action, there would have been a massacre.  This is Leanne Selman, the woman who was murdered.  The dead murderer, like all such, was mere garbage who doesn't deserve to be remembered or named.

The new Congress may be able to do more than you expect -- Republicans now have far less reason to slavishly toe Trump's line.

Some voters were getting political information from chatbots, which got things completely wrong as usual.

Les Leopold assesses Dan Osborn's defeat.  It's absurd to claim he would have done better running as a Democrat -- Republicans relentlessly painted him as "really" a Democrat, and that's a big part of why he lost.  The key need is a new, truly working-class party, neither left nor right, which will be clearly differentiated from both Democrats and Republicans.

"What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican?  Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?"

Buzzfeed's stock has collapsed, from $2.09 earlier this year to $0.57 now, as its embrace of "AI" led to disaster.

Democrats now control enough state governments to enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would nullify the Electoral College and bring about election of the president by popular vote.  In this post from 2024, I explain how the Compact would work and why it would not be a good idea, however tempting it sounds.

"His mental health required another person to publicly pretend that reality was an error."

Over the past two months Fox news has gone heavy on pro-data-center propaganda -- and its viewership has plummeted.

California governor Newsom has taken a huge, steaming dump on crime victims by commuting the death sentences of every death-row prisoner in the state.  As the article notes, this will please "wealthy, white and college-educated voters", but "more moderate blue-collar voters..... are not in line with him on this".  Nationally, two-thirds of voters support the death penalty for murderers.

Donors to likely next House speaker Hakeem Jeffries include several tech-bro billionaires.  The amounts cited seem small by the usual standards of billionaire influence-buying, though, so I don't know how much of a corrupting effect this will have.

"AI" enables Trump to live in a fake alternate reality and shields him from the truth.  This post was written before the election, but it helps to explain why he believed that he and the Republicans were more popular than they really were.  Time will tell whether the election result will shock him to his senses.

Several police officers in Charlotte NC engaged in a competition to see who could arrest the most black people.

This huge planned data center in Alberta will produce staggering amounts of waste heat (though I'm skeptical of the nuclear-bomb comparison) and greenhouse-gas emissions equal to four percent of those of the whole country of Canada.

Yeah, these are just students protesting funding cuts, right.

Small drones destroy a Russian tank.  I'd hate to be inside that thing.

A fully-loaded rocket launcher makes an impressive explosion.  Here's another one -- notice how the drone homes right in on the fuel tank for best effect.  This ammunition depot made an even bigger blast.

These Russians were having a bad day.

One of Russia's biggest oil refineries burns spectacularly after a drone attack.  This is a different one, fire all over.

Here, drones destroy a couple of more conventional military targets.

How's that supply route to Crimea looking these days?

If the Russian army can't beat Ukraine, maybe sacrificing camels will work.  #@%$!*@ superstitious dumbasses.

The Economist estimates that Russia has suffered between 1,400,000 and 2,100,000 military casualties in the Ukraine war, including 374,000 to 770,000 deaths.  The higher figure for deaths would exceed American losses in the Civil War, the deadliest war in our history.

Good fucking riddance.

The Iranian regime has declared that if Trump attacks again, there will be "no geographical limits" on its retaliation.  We should be prepared for, say, strikes against military or nuclear facilities here in the US, using drones either smuggled in or obtained and modified here.

Taiwan has learned a great deal from Ukraine on how to resist a possible future Chinese invasion.

More links at Red State Blues, Legal Mama Reviews, and Comedy Plus.

My own posts this week:  some truths and inspirations, and my assessment of the election.

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Despite all of Trump's threats and bluster and bungled efforts at sabotage, despite all the nightmare scenarios that have been circulating on the internet, the election proceeded normally and essentially problem-free.  There is not and never was any "threat to democracy" -- except from gerrymandering by both parties.

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A landslide, but no revolution

Well, the polls in many cases were wrong -- they understated the size of the blue wave.  The Democrats will have at least 54 Senate seats, and possibly as many as 56, since (as I write this) Alaska and Mississippi are too close to call.  They might end up with around 250 House seats.  It's a massive rebuke of Trump and the Republicans.

However, it doesn't offer much hope for real change -- for any progress against the country's fundamental problem of growing concentration of wealth and power in the oligarchy's hands and deepening impoverishment of the masses.  Osborn lost by about six points in Nebraska (independents also lost in South Dakota and Montana), and while barely over half the vote has yet been counted on the California billionaire wealth tax, it is currently losing by 56% to 44%.  So, as I anticipated on Thursday might happen, even this very large win is just an ordinary alternation of power between the two parties, such as we've been seeing back-and-forth for decades while the parasite class kept getting richer at everyone else's expense.  There is no sign here of an economic-populist revolution breaking through the increasing stagnation of our politics in the stranglehold of two parties both dominated by billionaire donors.  As I said on Thursday, we'll probably have to wait another two years for the next opportunity to push for real change within the political system, whatever form that might take.

Moving on down my list of the most important issues, the news on abortion rights is mostly positive.  Virginia and Nevada passed initiatives protecting the right to abortion in most cases; in both states the vote was almost two to one.  Missouri voters rejected an initiative to ban most abortions, 55% to 45%, even though it also included a ban on trans surgeries for minors (which are already banned in Missouri anyway) as a smokescreen.  Idaho, however, rejected a repeal of its abortion ban, 56% to 44%.

Tucker-Carlson-endorsed jihadist sympathizer Abdul El-Sayed won election to the Senate in Michigan.  The miasma of 1930s Germany which has been hanging over the country since October 2023 just got a little thicker and more poisonous.  The continued hysterics about Haley Stevens are astounding.  She's being called things like "traitor", as if a politician owed loyalty to a political party rather than to her constituents -- a graphic example of how the very existence of parties corrupts and perverts politics.

Troy Jackson, running on an economic-populist platform (though much less radical than Osborn's), won in Maine.  This is definitely a positive, but as a member of one of the two major parties, his freedom of action will be much more constrained than Osborn's would have been.

In Texas, Talarico and Hinojosa both won, by twelve and seven points respectively -- not even close.  Most pundits had them winning by a couple of points at best.  Democrats also won other major statewide offices and made gains in the state legislature.  Hispanic voters' anger over the abuses of ICE probably played a big role, but such large wins in a state that has been solidly red for three decades suggest a fundamental shift.  Hinojosa's victory is good news for the anti-data-center resistance, since she made this a major issue.

Trump must take some of the blame here.  If he hadn't imposed the godawful Paxton on Texas as a Senate candidate, the race would at least have been closer -- although given the size of Talarico's margin, even Cornyn probably couldn't have won this.  The same can't be said for South Carolina, where the grossly unqualified Darline Graham lost by barely four points.  If Trump had kept his nose out of it and let the state Republicans nominate a proper candidate, they might have held that seat.  I expect the party's fear and deference toward Trump to decrease quite a bit going forward.  This is also a defeat for arch-oligarch Elon Musk, who spent hundreds of millions to support Republicans in Texas.

Arizona passed a measure banning men and boys from women and girls' sports.  Similar measures are leading in Colorado and Washington, but not enough of the vote is counted yet to be sure of the final result.  The same is true of Colorado's initiative banning trans surgery for minors.

I can't find any results yet for Montana's initiative to prohibit corporations from making campaign contributions.  David Crowley won handily in Wisconsin, defeating Tom Tiffany, who had supported Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election.  Kansas elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1932.

Here in Oregon, Tina Kotek was re-elected as governor (sigh).  Like Abbott in Texas, she was a big data-center booster until she realized that stance could cost her the election and suddenly changed course.  Unlike in Texas, here it apparently worked.  I guess Oregonians are more gullible than Texans.

It's important to remember what this win doesn't mean.  It doesn't mean that the country as a whole is suddenly OK with identity politics, general woketardia, illegal aliens, or putting male sex criminals in women's prisons.  It means the voters are punishing Trump for his abuses of power, his focus on personal vendettas and quarrels instead of the kitchen-table issues that afflict the masses, and his actually making those problems worse with his tariffs and his Iran war which have further inflated prices -- and they are also punishing the Republicans generally for going along with all this.  Yesterday voter anger outweighed the toxicity of the Democratic party brand, but that does not erase it.

So there you have it -- a landslide, and definitely a win for the country, but no revolution.  The larger-than-expected Democratic majorities in Congress, and the clear mandate they represent, offer a real chance to curb some of Trump's abuses.  There is talk of impeaching the embarrassingly godawful Hegseth, and in his case (unlike Trump), it's conceivable that there might be 67 Senate votes to get rid of him.  Congress might even be able to pass legislation to do some actual good for the people on fuel and grocery prices, "AI", data centers, and so on -- if handled properly, Trump might be persuaded not to veto such measures, or enough Republicans might be brought on board to override his vetoes.  But I see little chance of any serious challenge to the power and wealth of the billionaire parasite class.

Truths and inspirations for 2 November 2026

Normally there would be a non-political image round-up this week, but (a) the election would be too much of a distraction, and (b) I've got too many of these memes accumulated that need to post.  So here is another collection of them.  The usual schedule will resume next week.

If an image is hard to see or read, right-click and open the link in a new tab for the full-size version.

We're getting close to the big day -- there are only 363 days left until Halloween!

[For the link round-up, click here.]

Concerning tomorrow, here's another reminder that polls often are not reliable predictors of what will really happen.  Yesterday Electoral-Vote posted a Nebraska poll showing Osborn losing by 43% to 49%.  The previous poll they found worth including, from October 18, had him winning by 48% to 41%.  I don't think voting intentions really fluctuate that much in less than two weeks, in the absence of some dramatic event or revelation.  The polls you are seeing all over the country could be accurate, but they could be way off.  Anything could happen tomorrow -- don't take your expectations for granted.

Here's a reminder that prediction markets don't mean anything either.

Haley Stevens, it seems is that rare politician who actually has principles as opposed to mere blind loyalty to a political party.  The woketardosphere is predictably enraged, as are party leaders, and her career in Democratic politics is probably over (so long as the party remains the craven Islam-coddling thing it now is) -- but acting on principle instead of running with the mob always carries costs.

Only two of the magnificent seven now remain.....

Here's the source of the data.

I found this on a far-left blog.  The blogger actually said he was offended by it.

This mentality is pervasive in politics these days.  "If you're not 100% on board with our side's program, that means you're the enemy!"  It's setting up a litmus test that only robots can pass.