Our Best Stuff From the ‘Bluenami’

Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore. Hello and happy Saturday. Two years after Donald Trump swept back into the White House by promising lower prices, $2 gas, and “no more wars,” voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a Republican Party that sat by as Americans endured a tariff-driven higher cost of living and gas prices that shot past $4 a gallon thanks to a war begun by the president. Not every race has been called—California takes its sweet time counting, and Alaska counts ballots that arrive as late as November 18—but we knew before midnight on election night that Democrats were en route to a historic victory. As it stands, Democrats have a 54-44 advantage in the Senate, with tight races in Alaska and Mississippi. In the House, NBC News projects the Democrats will have an 83-seat majority. The most surprising shift came in Texas. Before Election Day, polls showed a close race in the high-profile Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton, the state’s scandal-ridden attorney general, and Democrat James Talarico. Given how many times Democrats have gotten their hopes up over the possibility of winning a Senate or gubernatorial race only to fall short, few would have been surprised if Paxton had squeaked out a victory. But not only did Talarico win, he beat Paxton by 12 points. And he had plenty of company: Gina Hinojosa upset incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott; Democrats won races for railroad commissioner, land commissioner, and agriculture commissioner; and Democrats are poised to take over the state Board of Education. Ryan Rusak, a longtime Texas political journalist, chalked up the losses to bad candidate selection, a focus on the wrong issues, and a bad national environment. He wrote: Even the better politicians campaigned as if head colds prevented them from hearing voters beyond the MAGA base. To hear Republican candidates, the top issues in Texas were transgender policies and the potential imposition of Sharia law. Gov. Greg Abbott made a half-hearted effort to campaign on cutting property taxes. But if longtime officeholders had ideas to reduce Texans’ skyrocketing health and home insurance costs, bring down the price of gas, and make housing more affordable, they didn’t emphasize them Similar scenarios played out elsewhere. Here in Ohio, Democrat Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy in the governor’s race, and former Sen. Sherrod Brown beat Sen. Jon Husted in a special election for the seat Vice President J.D. Vance vacated in 2025. I noticed a remarkable stat from the New York Times: Nearly every county in Ohio, even those that voted for Ramaswamy and Husted, shifted left by more than 10 points, often up to 20. And it wasn’t just the aforementioned economic issues and specific examples of bad candidates like Paxton and Ramaswamy, who sunk his own campaign with an attack ad featuring Acton’s own estranged mother. John McCormack took a look at the exit polls and found that the economy was a big deal, but so was corruption and concerns about our governance. He wrote: Asked to identify the most important issue facing the country, the economy came in first among 39 percent of the electorate (with the state of democracy in second at 33 percent, and immigration third at 14 percent—no other issue cracked double digits). Just 27 percent of voters said Trump’s policies have improved economic conditions, while 66 percent said his policies have worsened economic conditions. The election was about much more than just the economy, of course. Fifty-five percent of voters said government corruption was “crucial” to their vote, while 49 percent said the same about the cost of living. Thirty-six percent cited immigration, 34 percent the Iran war, and 23 percent data centers. In light of the thorough beating, Michael Warren asked an obvious but important question in his newsletter, Next Right: Where do Republicans go from here? He wrote: A less devastating loss in the midterms might have allowed the recalcitrant MAGA dead-enders to convince the party to stay in line behind Trump. That seems nearly impossible now, given how much capital—monetary and political and reputational—Republicans spent on behalf of the Trump project, and with so frustratingly little to show for it. Trump’s days as a troublemaker for the GOP may not be quite over, but his relevance to a party suddenly grasping for it in this new political landscape has waned considerably overnight. Another relevant question, of course, is “Where does the country go from here?” In one of our rare staff editorials, we wrote that it’s time for a return to principles. Instead of swinging widely between right-wing populism and left-wing progressivism, how about a return to the basics? What America needs is a return to the principles the Founders enshrined in the constitutional order Trump and his allies have sought to undermine—the principles the conservative movement used to champion. We’ve pointed out many times before that America no longer has a limited government party. It needs one. … Yes, times have changed. And, yes, the policy implications of limiting government will be different, in no small measure because there’s a lot more government to limit these days. But the thing about principles—the thing that the president and the motley band of grifters and opportunists around him, unsurprisingly, do not understand—is that they’re timeless. On that note, thank you for reading and have a great weekend. If you didn’t get a chance to check out the Dispatch Live coverage on YouTube Tuesday night, you still can. Watch Sarah Isgur discuss Texas’ shift from red to blue in real time, and don’t miss the conclusion, where the panel discusses whether this is the end of the MAGA movement. Of course Democrats have a mandate to not be Trump, however the election turns out. In a sense, everybody has a mandate to not be Trump: Trump’s approval numbers are down there with hemorrhoids. But the mandate to not be Trump is not the mandate to be Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—figures who are, in important ways, more like Trump than unlike Trump. The proper response to right-wing populism, extremism, vendetta politics, hysteria, etc. is not more of the same from a new group of newly empowered jackasses, old policies applied to a new enemies’ list. There are better and worse ways for the Democrats to proceed with whatever newfound power they have come January. Because I have a very strong preference for boring government, let’s consider the case of taxes. At the moment, the Democrats talk about taxes in almost exclusively moralistic—and punitive—terms. This is an exercise in pure magical thinking: “If we do the thing that makes us feel morally satisfied, then the math will take care of itself.” But the math never takes care of itself. The purpose of a tax policy is not to pursue fairness, morality, social justice, or anything like that: The purpose of tax policy is to raise sufficient revenue while minimizing the inevitable damage and distortion that all taxes impose on an economy. The 1946 election was the first national vote after World War II, years of sacrifice, and four terms of FDR. If war is hell, peacetime in America was still a struggle. As wartime price controls were coming to an end, inflation soared to double digits. Meat vanished from butcher cases as ranchers held cattle off the market. Weeks before the vote, President Harry Truman gave in and lifted controls on meat. Prices shot up anyway, and he got no credit for the move. Labor was in revolt, too. Almost 5 million workers walked off the job in 1946, the most in American history. When a railroad strike nearly shut down the country, Truman asked Congress for power to draft strikers into the Army, angering labor and satisfying no one. International crisis also cast a shadow on top of the nation’s economic woes. In March, Winston Churchill, who lost his own election in Britain the previous year, visited a small college in Truman’s native Missouri to announce that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. In the Middle East a terrorist bombing at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killed 91 and injured 45, helping to stoke antisemitism in the United States and complicate support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Trump launched his trade war against Canada just as the midterms were heating up, imposing draconian tariffs of up to 50 percent on a range of Canadian goods that took effect in August—and promising more to come on cars, auto parts, and steel. The Great Lakes states that trade most heavily with Canada—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—incurred the hardest hits. According to one estimate, Ohio faces $2.3 billion in tariff exposure from its annual exports to Canada. Pennsylvania faces another $1.8 billion in exposure. Michigan will likely incur the largest single-industry hit because of its extensive cross-border trade in automobiles and auto parts. How did the White House miss this so badly? The answer is simple: It clung to tariffs for ideological reasons, despite a mountain of emerging evidence of their ballot-box toxicity. Chief among these reasons was the false claim, pushed by Trump, Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and several White House spokespersons, that foreign countries would pay the costs of the tariffs. The empirical evidence conclusively demonstrated otherwise. Best of the Rest Want to see more of The Dispatch in Google search? Add Us as a Preferred Source Rachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.