SELF GOVERNMENT: We were glad we got to see...

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026   

...what Senator El-Sayed said: The best thing we saw this morning we saw on Morning Joe. 

Thanks to Mediaite's David Gilmour, part of what we saw and heard can be seen and heard by you.

Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-Michigan) was interviewed at some length around the start of the eight o'clock hour. We the people are lucky when we get to hear a bright public figure saying such things as this:

QUESTION (11/5/26): ...What is your message, now that you've won this election, to Jewish voters in the state of Michigan, and frankly national voters who have been watching you very closely and want to know what you will do to protect them in this era of antisemitism?

SENATOR-ELECT EL-SAYED: Growing up, I was really privileged to grow up in a community where about forty percent of my high school class were Jewish. I grew up going to synagogue, going to Seder, going to bar and bat mitzvahs growing up.

I have so much respect for the Jewish faith and Jewish contributions to American life. I also know what it’s like to be discriminated against for how I pray. And I want an America where nobody is discriminated against. Under our Constitution, you can pray as you choose to pray or not pray at all.

The idea that anybody should feel unsafe in their synagogue or their day school, to me, is anathema. I know what it’s like to drop off my kids to a mosque and wonder if they’re going to be safe, and I’m going to be able to pick them up safely afterwards.

I think we are all united in the work of making sure that no matter who you are, you are safe in this country, and I’m committed to the safety of Jewish children like I’m committed to the safety of my own children.  

The question was asked by Willie Geist. To see this part of the interview, and for Gilmore's fuller report, you can just click here.

El-Sayed has said these things many times. Last night, his very name was still being mocked and ridiculed by the eternally brainless Jesse Watters on the brainless Fox News Channel program brainlessly known as The Five.  

Later, on the Gutfeld! show, the astoundingly brainless demonization and slander only got worse. These are the garbage cans which get rolled out by the Fox News Channel each weekday night.   

This afternoon, we'll offer a thought about the remarkable sweep of Tuesday's election wins. At this site, we were impressed by El-Sayed's lengthy interview, but we were especially glad we got to se him make those familiar remarks again.

(Yes, we do believe that he means what he says. We realize that some people don't.)

Briefly, a personal note:

We were lucky as a kid, in the summer of 1960, when our family moved from the more hidebound segregations of the Boston suburbs out to the freer air breathed in San Mateo. To us, our friends were all just Aragon kids, with one Hillsdale kid thrown in, but they were allowed to present with different identities, with no one much seeming to care. 

That includes the Jewish kids who became some of our most treasured friends. That sort of thing still wasn't allowed in the previous locale. On our way into eighth grade, we were very, very, very lucky when our family picked up and went west.

We're glad that we got to see what El-Sayed just said. Last night, we'd seen the garbage cans rolled out. Before the week is done, we'll link you to what was said.

SELF GOVERNMENT: Here's who won those Senate seats!

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2026

On Fifth Avenue, shot in the foot: It's one of the sitting president's most famous statements. 

He was still just a candidate then. NPR reported this in January 2016:

Donald Trump: 'I Could...Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn't Lose Any Voters'  

With less than two weeks to go until the Iowa caucus, Donald Trump remains characteristically confident about his chances. In fact, the Republican front-runner is so confident, he says his supporters would stay loyal even if he happened to commit a capital offense.    

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible."

The businessman, whose Trump Tower stands on the major Manhattan thoroughfare, cracked the joke Saturday to a receptive audience at the Christian college.  

Back then, it all seemed possible. For better or worse, much of it actually was! 

Despite losing the popular vote, the imaginary shootist was elected president that year. Just last month, on October 11, the sitting president made a somewhat similar statement:   

Trump Tells Cheering Crowd: ‘I Could Say the Stupidest Things and You’d Clap’   

President Donald Trump spoke before an adoring crowd in Tennessee Saturday, telling his fans, “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.”

Trump questioned why he was even in Tennessee since Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) were doing so well in their U.S. Senate and governor races, respectively.

“What am I doing in Tennessee?” Trump asked. “So, three times I won the election, the big election three times. I got screwed the second time because they cheated. They cheated. We cannot let that happen again."   

[...]

“It’s like, like, I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s just like, the love,” Trump marveled. “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap. ‘Oh, I love you so—’ It’s true.

“But we don’t say the stupidest things, we say things of common sense. We say things that make sense..."   

So the gentleman said. He could say the stupidest things, he said. He then proceeded to prove it, saying for the ten millionth time that he was cheated out of his win in 2020, when he sought re-election.

We aren't here to beat up on President Trump today. In fact, though, he has insisted on saying the dumbest possible things—such as his endless claims about getting cheated in elections—and the things he says have been getting been dumber and weirder and stranger as the past year has struggled along.

Presumably, that's because of the "serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders" and the "obvious cognitive declines" attributed to him by nis niece. Presumably, those syndromes help explain his increasing volume of weird statements and erratic behaviors.

As a general rule, people who are seriously disordered or cognitively impaired haven't chosen to be so diminished. But as the president's statements got dumber and wilder, he was in effect shooting himself in the foot—and the statements got so dumb, and became so numerous, that he did shed millions of votes from millions of voters in the process.

He was now shooting himself on Fifth Avenue—shooting himself in the foot. As he did so, our journalists kept refusing to cover the medical possibilities, and the possible future dangers, involved in this state of affairs.

We start by saying that Scarborough's analysts were largely on target yesterday with respect to the Senate races. On yesterday's Morning Joe, these were their predictions about the number of Senate seats with which Democrats would emerge:

Senate seats to be held by Democrats:
Jonathan Martin: 53 seats
John Heilemann: 54 seats
Mark McKinnon: 55 seats
Claire McCaskill: 53 seats  

Yesterday, those predictions seemed quite upbeat. In fact, Democrats are currently in line to hold 54 Senate seats, with Alaska and Mississippi still undecided. The number could go as high as 56!

Let us say it again. Joe Scarborough should be honored for having created the most intelligent discussions in American broadcast news. 

This morning, Scarborough was trying to sort through all the victories produced by Democratic candidates. His favorite win was recorded by Gina Hinojosa, the new governor-elect of Texas. He saw her seven-point win over Greg Abbott, the incumbent Republican governor, as payback for all the mayhem aimed at Hispanics by ICE. 

For ourselves, the wins we most love were those recorded by a pair of doctors named Annie and Amy—Annie Andrews in the South Carolina Senate race, Amy Acton in the race to serve as Ohio's governor.   

We loved the messaging those savvy candidates presented. We think of Jim Burden, Willa Cather's the gender-flipped narrator of Willa Cather's My Antonia. We think of his admiration for the moral greatness of the immigrant women who came into Nebraska and managed to build the greatest and most prosperous farms in that emerging state.

Acton and Andrews and Bottoms oh my—and we pray that Candidate Peltola will find her way through in Alaska. In the face of the frequently ugly "masculinism" of MAGA World, we Blues turned to some brilliants messaging by some highly skilled female candidates to show us how to win in the states where Democrats struggle to win.

There's a great deal more to say about the various types of wins. We'll expect to go there tomorrow. For today, we'll flash back to this:   

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled, perhaps reasonably, against the creation of certain "safe seats" in House elections—"safe seats" built upon racial gerrymandering. When that happened, we suggested that we Blues should stop complaining and do this instead:

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!

Dare to Struggle Dare to Win! Go out and win some freaking seats! In Mississippi, Scott Colom undertook to do just that on the Senate level. 

As we type, Colom is ahead of the incumbent Republican senator by 43 votes, with some votes still being counted. We're hoping he scores a win. We're glad he decided to try.

At any rate, the sitting president has been shooting himself in the foot with dangerous gusto of late. In the process, he did manage to lose a very large number of voters! 

A vast assortment of Democrats won. As he kept making his very strange comments, quite a few folks didn't clap.

Tomorrow: Key presentations from Talarico, Hamilton, El-Sayed and such

SELF GOVERNMENT: "The Texas Senate race is cooked!"

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2026

Morning Joe, sanguine assessments: We Americans no longer vote on Election Day. We've made it easier (and better) than that.

Back in 1960, Americans did all vote on Election Day, if they chose to vote at all. (Or if they were allowed to do so.)

In the opening pages of his iconic book, The Making of the President, 1960, Teddy White described the way the electorate rolled on that famous Election Day—in the famous presidential election pitting Senator Kennedy against Vice President Nixon.   

We don't vote this way today. With a focus on the candidate destined to win, White's famous book starts like this:

CHAPTER ONE
WAITING

It was invisible, as always.

They had begun to vote in the villages of New Hampshire at midnight, as they always do, seven and a half hours before the candidate rose. His men had canvassed Hart’s Location in New Hampshire days before, sending his autographed picture to each of the twelve registered voters in the village. They knew that they had five votes certain there, that Nixon had five votes certain—and that two were still undecided. Yet it was worth the effort, for Hart’s Location’s results would be the first flash of news on the wires to greet millions of voters as they opened their morning papers over coffee. But from there on it was unpredictable—invisible.    

By the time the candidate left his Boston hotel at 8:30, several million had already voted across the country—in schools, libraries, churches, stores, post offices. These, too, were invisible, but it was certain that at this hour the vote was overwhelmingly Republican. On election day America is Republican until five or six in the evening. It is in the last few hours of the day that working people and their families vote, on their way home from work or after supper; it is then, at evening, that America goes Democratic if it goes Democratic at all. All of this is invisible, for it is the essence of the act that as it happens it is a mystery in which millions of people each fit one fragment of a total secret together, none of them knowing the shape of the whole.   

What results from the fitting together of these secrets is, of course, the most awesome transfer of power in the world...  

Given the way we do it today, many millions of people have already voted in weeks. No president will be elected today, but at least as a matter of theory, Democrats are trying to create that "awesome transfer of power" within the legislative branch of the federal government.

They're doing so in an attempt to rein in the sitting president, whose conduct now seems to become stranger with each passing day.   

In Sunday morning's New York Times, an attempt was made to describe that behavior. In print editions, that "News Analysis" piece sat right there, at the top of page one. 

Of course, given the way we do things today, most subscribers to the New York Times now read the paper online. 

Tomorrow, we'll start to discuss the problems which existed with this latest front-page report. For today, we thought we'd show you what was said on today's Morning Joe program—what was said about the likelihood that the Democratic Party—known as the "Democrat Party on our largest "cable news" channel—might take control of the Senate.   

On MS NOW's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough routinely presents the most intelligent conversations in American broadcast news. Today, a gang of analysts went way out on several limbs concerning the likely outcome of some key Senate races.   

Example:

Who's going to win the Senate race in Texas? At 6:58 a.m. Eastern, Politico's Jonathan Martin offered this striking assessment about the race between the Democrat, James Talarico, and the Republican, Ken Paxton:

MARTIN (11/3/26): I can't find any Republican in Texas who thinks Ken Paxton is going to win. I think the surprise could be if Ken Paxton does win at this point.   

I mean, Talarico, in the early voting—

It's pretty clear where this is going in Texas. I think Greg Abbott will hang on for governor. But I think the Texas Senate race is pretty clearly cooked at this point.   

Say what? According to Martin, he can't find a single Republican insider who thinks Talarico is going to lose. And when Scarborough threw to John Heilemann in Austin, this is part of what Heilemann said about what he has found in Texas:

HEILEMANN: I couldn't find any Democrat or Republican who doesn't think James Talarico is going to win that Senate race.

Those were rather bodacious assessments. Meanwhile, Scarborough himself was soon saying this:

"Kansas is gone!" 

According to Scarbrough, Kansas is gone for Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent. Scarborough said it's been gone for a week—and that Kansas insiders all know it.

Those predictions are subject to error—but they're remarkably definitive. And when Scarborough sked his panelists for their overall view of today's Senate races, this is what they said:   

Entire Morning Joe Panel Predicts Democrats Win AT LEAST 53 Senate Seats...

Morning Joe is calling its shot. An entire panel on the MS NOW morning said Democrats will not only win on Tuesday night, they will romp.

At the end of a segment kicking off the program’s 7 a.m. ET hour, host Joe Scarborough went around the horn to solicit predictions from a quartet of his regulars: Politico’s Jonathan Martin, John Heilemann, Mark McKinnon and Claire McCaskill.

All four predicted that Democrats will not only take control of the Senate, but they will do so by a healthy margin.  

“I think 53-47 is probably the safe place [to land],” Martin said.   

And so on from there, with Mediaite providing tape of the predIctions. 

Once again, the pundits were spotted on limbs. Their predictions ran like this:

Senate seats to be held by Democrats
Jonathan Martin: 53 seats
John Heilemann: 54 seats
Mark McKinnon: 55 seats
Claire McCaskill: 53 seats

To our ear, those were surprisingly sanguine predictions. Starting tonight, we'll see if those stars knew their stuff.

In the larger sense, no one knows the way this national challenge is going to turn out. Yesterday, down at the Reflecting Pool, the president's behavior was very strange—and whatever becomes of his party tonight, he'll be in charge of many government functions for the next two years and two months.

 That strikes us as a dangerous state of affairs. Ho is it being reported?

Tomorrow: Highly visible on page one (unless you're reading online)