Greetings, and welcome to Monday, Nov. 2, 2026. Tomorrow is Election Day, so today is your last chance to find your polling place, check your registration, and remind everyone you know who still thinks the polls have already decided it. More on that below.
My calendar says it's All Souls' Day, Día de los Muertos, Deviled Egg Day, and Plan Your Epitaph Day. Light a candle for the loved ones you've lost, whip up a plate of deviled eggs for the election-night crowd, and while you're working out what goes on your tombstone, make sure it's not "Meant to Vote, But It Was Raining."
Today in History:
1783: Gen. George Washington issues his Farewell Orders to the Continental Army.
1889: North Dakota and South Dakota join the Union as the 39th and 40th states. Benjamin Harrison shuffled the papers so nobody would ever know which was admitted first.
1917: British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issues the Balfour Declaration, backing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
1920: Pittsburgh's KDKA broadcasts the Harding-Cox election returns, widely considered the first commercial radio broadcast.
1930: Haile Selassie is crowned emperor of Ethiopia.
1947: Howard Hughes pilots his giant H-4 Hercules flying boat, the "Spruce Goose," on its one and only flight, a single mile over Long Beach Harbor.
1948: President Harry Truman upsets New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, defying nearly every poll and pundit in the country.
1959: Quiz-show contestant Charles Van Doren admits to a House subcommittee that "Twenty-One" fed him the answers.
1963: South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem is assassinated during a military coup in Saigon.
1976: Jimmy Carter defeats President Gerald Ford
2000: The first crew arrives at the International Space Station.
2004: President George W. Bush wins reelection over Sen. John Kerry.
2016: The Chicago Cubs beat Cleveland in 10 innings in Game 7 to win their first World Series since 1908.
Birthdays Today include: Daniel Boone, frontiersman; Marie Antoinette, queen of France; James K. Polk, the 11th president; Warren G. Harding, the 29th president; Burt Lancaster, actor from From Here to Eternity and Elmer Gantry; Pat Buchanan, political commentator and presidential candidate; Stefanie Powers, actress from "Hart to Hart"; k.d. lang, singer from "Constant Craving"; David Schwimmer, actor from "Friends"; If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here. Two presidents share your birthday, so you're overqualified for the job.
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On Friday I wrote here that the GOP establishment has started openly rooting for defeat, with Peggy Noonan leading the cheer from the Wall Street Journal. I figured it would take at least until Wednesday morning for an actual Republican officeholder to join her.
Of course, I underestimated the establishment GOP's fervor. It took 48 hours. These people can’t even wait for the polls to close before writing the autopsy. Or maybe they're doing their best to swerve us into their desired outcome.
On Sunday, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) went on CNN’s “State of the Union,” and Jake Tapper lobbed him the softest pitch in Washington: Would a bad Tuesday signal “the beginning of the end for the MAGA movement”? You could almost hear Tapper’s producers holding their breath.
Bacon didn’t duck it. He swung.
“I do think there will be a debate in the party, and I think we need it,” Bacon said. “I support the long-held Ronald Reagan principles,” he continued, listing “free trade, free markets, economic freedom, standing up to bullies like Russia and China.” And then the money line: “I believe [President Trump], in many of these cases, or many of the specifics here, has backed away from those principles. And I surely would like to see a debate, and I know I want to be a part of it.”
Yeah. Of course he does. Nobody in Washington ever volunteers for a debate they don’t plan to moderate. I think we can take as a given that Bacon will be trying to get nominated for a 2028 run.
How do I know? Well, that's easy enough. Notice what’s missing. Bacon doesn’t say Republicans should win on Tuesday. He says that if they lose, he has a plan for the wreckage. That’s not a party leader talking. That’s a guy circling the projected crash site with a clipboard and a business card. Noonan said the same thing last week in prettier prose and a nicer zip code.
Here’s what Bacon and Noonan both keep getting backward: Ronald Reagan wasn’t the establishment’s guy. He was the establishment’s nightmare. They literally hated the man. The only reason that loathing was under any modicum of control was the sheer numbers of voters supporting him. .
I wrote back in the day with no small amount of disdain about how so many of the GOP establishment who in reality couldn't stand Reagan or his policies were trying to claim the mantle of the man. I rode Romney particularly hard for that, writing a full column blast at the time which I may rerun here at some future point. What Bacon is doing here is more of the same as the RINOs of old did.
As I pointed out Friday, George Will spent 1976 explaining why Reagan couldn’t win. The party’s grown-ups preferred Gerald Ford, who was electable right up until he lost. Then came Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, each of them electable and each of them a loser. If “electable” were a stock, the SEC would have delisted it decades ago. The two Republicans the smart set called "undetectable," Reagan and Trump, won in landslides and won the working voters the party’s donor class never understood and never bothered to meet. Once Regan's second term was over, that same group spent the next 40 years trying to expunge Reagan from the nation's memory, and reversing most of his efforts.
So when Bacon invokes “Ronald Reagan principles” to argue for going back to the country club, he has the history upside down. The fact is that Reagan was the insurgency. And by extension, MAGA is the closest thing the party has produced since to the coalition Reagan built: blue-collar voters, the forgotten middle, people who drive the trucks and work the shifts and never got a seat at a Davos panel. Bacon's claiming Reagan for the establishment is like claiming General Patton for the NAZIs.
Now consider the messenger. Bacon is retiring from Congress. He has represented a swing district around Omaha since 2017. He was one of six House Republicans who voted in February to repeal the president’s tariffs on Canada, because apparently the Ottawa lobby needed a friend. He backed Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) in his push to oust Pete Hegseth. In October, he called Trump’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine war “disgraceful.” And in September, he told a podcast that he “would love to” run for president.
So this “debate” comes from a man on his way out the door who has already auditioned for 2028. Bacon isn’t offering a diagnosis. He’s pitching himself as the candidate the debate should produce. It’s a job application wearing a lab coat.
The voters, meanwhile, have already held this debate several times, and the establishment lost every round. Trump’s endorsement record in 2026 primaries sits at about 98%. In 2022, 38% of Republicans called themselves MAGA, according to Economist/YouGov polling. By May of this year, 62% did. The Bacon wing hasn’t just lost the argument with Trump. It has lost the argument with Republican voters, and it keeps mistaking the voters for the problem.
To be fair, Bacon isn’t a bad man, and he may well be sincere. Plenty of Nebraskans like him, and he's worn the uniform for quite a while. But sincerity didn’t make Ford, Dole, McCain, or Romney electable either. What those campaigns had in common is what Noonan’s column and Bacon’s interview have in common: they treat the party’s own voters as a problem to manage rather than the very reason the party exists. The base, in their telling, is a pet that keeps getting into the garbage.
The establishment wants Tuesday to go badly so it can say “we told you so” on Wednesday. Noonan wrote the script, and Bacon auditioned for the lead. CNN, naturally, provided the stage.
The rest of us should vote like we intend to win, and then remember, as I said Friday, who was rooting for us to lose.
Thought for the Day: Polls don’t vote. People do. Just ask Thomas Dewey.
VIP members: I think we're going to see a lot of the establishment GOP holdovers trying to regain control of the party. What do you think? Tell me in the comments. Your voice matters.
Take care, people. I'll be here tomorrow, and I hope you will be too.