So, What's Next?

Greetings, and welcome to Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. The election dust is starting to settle, and the recounts and lawsuits are just getting warmed up. Take the weekend off from the news if you can. It will all still be there on Monday.

My calendar says it's Bittersweet Chocolate With Almonds Day, Hug a Bear Day, and Notary Public Day. Break off a square of the bittersweet stuff, which goes nicely with the post-election mood in a lot of households. Hug a bear, though I'd recommend the stuffed kind. And thank a notary. They're the last people in the country who still insist on seeing proof of who you are before you sign something important. Washington could learn a thing or two.

Today in History:

1805: The Lewis and Clark expedition first sights the Pacific Ocean, as recorded in William Clark's journal.
1811: William Henry Harrison's troops defeat warriors of Tecumseh's confederacy at the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana Territory, a victory that later helps carry Harrison to the White House.
1874: Thomas Nast's cartoon in Harper's Weekly uses an elephant to symbolize the Republican vote for the first time.
1885: Workers drive the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway at Craigellachie, British Columbia.
1916: Montana elects Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in Congress.
1917: Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin seize power in Petrograd, launching the Russian Revolution and more than 70 years of communist misery.
1940: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed "Galloping Gertie," twists itself apart in high winds and collapses into Puget Sound.
1944: President Franklin Roosevelt wins a fourth term, defeating New York Gov. Thomas Dewey.
1962: After losing the California governor's race, Richard Nixon tells reporters they won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
1967: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Public Broadcasting Act, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
1973: Congress overrides President Nixon's veto to pass the War Powers Resolution.
1991: Lakers star Magic Johnson announces he has HIV and is retiring from the NBA.
2000: Election night ends without a winner as the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore comes down to Florida, starting 36 days of recounts and court fights.

Birthdays Today include: Marie Curie, physicist and two-time Nobel Prize winner; Leon Trotsky, Bolshevik revolutionary, born on the same date as the revolution he helped lead; Albert Camus, author of The Stranger; Billy Graham, evangelist; Al Hirt, trumpeter, "Java;" Mary Travers, singer with Peter, Paul and Mary, "Leaving on a Jet Plane;" Johnny Rivers, singer, "Secret Agent Man;" and Joni Mitchell, singer-songwriter, "Big Yellow Taxi."

If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.

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Yeah, just about everyone on the planet jumped all over Vice President JD Vance for breaking with the President on Iran. The day after the election, Vance went on X and blamed the wipeout squarely on the war: "The reason we lost is the war." 

President Donald Trump's answer to that, more or less, was that Vance had a point and he'd do it again anyway. Reader response went off the scale everywhere — on the web, talk radio, and the opinion pages, this column included. A record number of readers both read the piece and took the time to respond with their own thoughts. But with Vance's political suicide committed and dutifully written into my daily column, we have other subjects to cover.

Like, for example, what we do now.

Here's my answer, and I'll give it to you up front: Before Republicans do anything else, they need to get the GOP establishment under control. Not in 2028. Now. 

Let's look at the wreckage first. Seven Senate seats flipped from Republican control: North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Maine. Texas. Kansas. If you'd told me a year ago that Democrats would take a Senate seat in Kansas, I'd have asked what you were drinking and whether you'd brought enough for everyone. NBC reports that not since 2006 has the minority party flipped control of both chambers on a single night.

There's a fair number of folks who will place the blame on Donald Trump. That's understandable, but not quite right. I suggest the failure is more directly on the shoulders of the GOP establishment.  I railed loudly against Peg Noonan the other day, and I firmly believe her thinking is in line with the establishment GOP. 

And how did the GOP establishment explain it? Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told supporters that holding the House "would have to defy more than a century of midterm history." History — that's the excuse. The same people who spent two years telling you they had a plan now say the calendar beat them.

Forget the calendar. Instead, look at what they did with the majority while they had it.

Let’s take as an example the vote to approve Pete Hegseth. Who refused to commit to approving his nomination?

Sen. Susan Collins, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. John Curtis, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Sen. John Thune.

Pretty much GOP establishment critters one and all, and every one of them suffering from butt hurt over Trump. Collins was just voted out. John Curtis is up for reelection in '31. McConnell is done, of course. Obviously, Graham is gone. Thune faces reelection in 2029. In the meantime, he plans to be minority leader. Those plans should be ended. Murkowski isn’t up for reelection until 2028. She said back in February that she wouldn’t run for governor. She did break ranks again, though. She and her father, former Sen. Frank Murkowski, endorsed the Democrat candidate for Alaska governor, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. Says a lot all on its own.

One of the axioms I use quite a bit in this column is that this country faces two enemies: the Democrats and the GOP establishment. Of the two, the establishment GOP is by far the more treacherous, if only because the Democrats don't pretend to be on your side. You know where a Democrat stands. He stands on your neck, and he tells you so. The establishment Republican shakes your hand at the Lincoln Day dinner, takes your check, and then lets the bill you sent him to Washington to pass die quietly in committee or on the floor, all while blaming the "math."

Recommended: Your Honeymoon Is Over, Democrats. Look Who's Here.

Which brings us to the SAVE Act as a prime example of the inaction I’m talking about, the passive resistance to the will of the voters.

Much to the relief in the halls of The Bulwark, the SAVE America Act didn't pass. Here is an election-integrity bill that the president called his top priority, built around proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote — ideas that poll through the roof with voters of both parties. One survey had 78% agreeing that proof of citizenship should be required to register to vote, including 94% of Republicans, 68% of Democrats, and 73% of Independents. When was the last time two-thirds of Democrats agreed with Republicans on anything? I'd guess the moon landing, and I'm not even sure about that one.

And it failed anyway. Not just once. Democracy Docket, which cheered the result, counted that the bill has failed in the Senate at least five times this year. When Senate leadership finally carved it down to a stripped voter-ID bill, it failed with only 52 Republicans voting for it, well short of the 60-vote threshold needed.

The Democrats blocked it, sure. Every one of them who showed up voted no. Nobody expected anything else from a party that thinks asking for ID at the ballot box is Jim Crow but asking for it at the pharmacy counter is just Tuesday.

But somebody else made sure the Democrats' “no” actually stuck, and that somebody runs the Republican side of the aisle. When the president and conservatives in the conference pushed to go around the filibuster, the leadership balked. Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters, "It's about the votes. It's about the math." NPR noted that it was clear to Thune that there wasn't a broad enough appetite among his Republican colleagues for it.

Are you kidding me? We’re talking about a policy that 80% of the country still wants, to this day. Think about who in the Republican conference lacks the appetite for something Republican voters want at 90-plus percent and Democrat voters want by a majority. Those aren't moderates. Those are people who like the system exactly the way it is, because the system keeps reelecting them. 

That's the establishment in a nutshell. It does not lose fights. It simply and quietly declines to have them, then sends you a fundraising email about how hard it fought. There’s a reason they don’t stand up for our beliefs: the leadership. It’s because it doesn’t believe in them. And we're certainly talking about people who don't represent us. 

And now the bill is dead. Come January, Chuck Schumer runs the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries runs the House. The SAVE Act isn't getting a sixth vote. The establishment had two years and a trifecta, and it handed that trifecta back with the SAVE Act still sitting on the shelf. You don't get that kind of window often. The establishment spent it worrying about "the math." The “Damn the torpedoes” attitude Reagan and Trump share gets blunted by a group of people more interested in the next election than doing what they were asked to do with the power given to them by the voters.

So what do we do?

First, stop funding the people who fail you. Every dollar you give to a party committee's general fund ends up in the hands of the same consultants and leadership offices that just lost Kansas. Give to candidates directly. Give to the ones who voted the way they promised and said so out loud. Make the committees come to you, hat in hand, and ask why.

Second, take the party back from the bottom. The establishment's real power doesn't sit in Washington. It sits in county committees, state party boards, and precinct seats that nobody runs for because nobody shows up. Those people pick the chairmen, write the rules, and decide who gets the endorsement before you ever see a ballot. Show up. Run. It's boring, it's unglamorous, and it works, which is exactly why the establishment counts on you not doing it.

Third, primary the people who hid behind the math. The 2028 Senate class is already on the calendar. Every Republican who found reasons not to fight for the SAVE Act should have to explain that to primary voters, on camera, with a Republican challenger standing next to him. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said after the voter-ID vote failed, "We're not done. We're just getting started." Good. Neither are we.

Fourth, make them vote anyway. Republicans now sit in the minority, and the minority has one weapon left: forcing the other side onto the record. Make every Democrat who wants to be a senator from a red state vote against proof of citizenship again and again, until the ads write themselves. If leadership won't do it, make leadership explain why.

There’s no denying it. Tuesday hurt, and the pain won’t be going away in ‘28, even assuming the Democrats are ousted again. It’s going to take some time beyond that to heal the damage the Democrats are about to inflict on us. But face facts, gang: The Democrats didn't take your party from you on Tuesday. The establishment started giving it away long before that, one surrendered fight at a time. Losing to the Democrats is a two-year problem. Losing to our own side is permanent, and it's the one we can actually fix, and one we MUST fix.

And look, let’s assume the GOP wins on the backs of the establishment. What have we won? The answer is “nothing” because, as the record suggests, they’ll fail us again. With people like Thune, the party of Reagan becomes indistinguishable from the party of Obama. In a choice between liberal and liberal light, guess which way the electorate is going to go? If you need a history check on that, one need look no further than McCain’s loss to Obama.

This second election of Trump sent the message even louder and clearer than the first about the desires of the voters. The GOP establishment, far from ignoring the call, foot-dragged their way through the last two years to keep that will from becoming reality. They had two choices: They could either embrace the will of the people, which was shown so overwhelmingly two years ago, or they could go back to being a minority party with no influence to speak of. Guess which happened.

We must do better. We must make sure the people we elect to represent us actually do represent us.

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Thought for the Day: In 1962, Richard Nixon told the press they wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. Six years later, he was president. Never count anybody out the week after an election.

VIP members: Your turn. What do we do now?

Take care today, gang. Have a great Saturday.

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