SELF GOVERNMENT: Hinojosa, Talarico emerged oh my!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2026

But can we steer clear of the backslide? In the wake of Tuesday's rout, Ron DeSantis was pulling no punches.

On Wednesday morning, in Tallahassee, the governor spoke to the press. In her report for Mediaite, Stephanie Kaloi provides videotape of what the governor said:

Ron DeSantis Goes Scorched Earth on the State of the GOP After Party’s Election Debacle: ‘Extinction-Level Event’

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) delivered a strong speech against the state of the GOP following the results of the 2026 midterm elections on Wednesday.

After first acknowledging that Florida, unlike many states previously considered safe by the Republican Party, managed to pull gains and retain power, DeSantis lit into other states and the GOP as a whole.

That's the way the report began. Here's what DeSantis said: 

"Let's just be clear about what happened last night. This is as close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country as we have seen probably in the last 100 years. In January, when everyone in office leaves, who were either term-limited or voted out, of the ten largest states in this union, only one state will have Republican control of their state—the state of Florida.    

"If you look at our chief rival—in a healthy sense, the state of Texas—and I would say over my lifetime, Texas has been the crown jewel of Republican politics. I think we’ve been the leader for Republicans and conservatives since I’ve been governor, but you go over the whole generation, no one holds a candle on the Republican side to the Lone Star State. And yet, not only did they lose a highly publicized U.S. Senate race, they lost everything. The governor, attorney general, all the other statewide [offices]...   

"Let's just be clear. That is going to hurt, not just for the next two years. That's something that can reverberate for the next decade or more—and if the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor, we won’t be viable nationally going forward." 

It was (almost) "an extinction-level event," the Florida governor said. He described the way the GOP had been wiped off the map in Texas, the party's anchor state.

And sure enough! In Florida, the GOP had managed to hold on. But in Texas, the rout had been total. In Texas, it had been Hinojosa and Talarico and many others oh my! 

Across the country, new talent had emerged. In Texas, it was the endlessly slandered young seminarian, and it was this gubernatorial emergence:

Gina Hinojosa   

Regina Inez Hinojosa (born December 8, 1973) is an American politician and lawyer who is the governor-elect of Texas. A member of the Democratic Party, she has represented the 49th district in the Texas House of Representatives since 2017...

Before becoming a state legislator, Hinojosa was a labor and civil rights lawyer. She worked for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and for the law firm of Kator, Parks & Weiser. In 2005, she was part of the legal team that sued U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. She was also a member of the Austin Independent School District's school board and has worked part-time for Catholic Charities USA, Texas Rural Legal Aid, and the Equal Justice Center.

Hinojosa was elected governor of Texas in the 2026 election, defeating incumbent Republican governor Greg Abbott and becoming the first Democrat to be elected governor of Texas since Ann Richards in 1990...   

[...]

Hinojosa is the daughter of politician Gilberto Hinojosa, a former chair of the Texas Democratic Party, and Crisanta Guerra Lozano, a legal aid attorney. She is of Mexican descent.   

Whatever a person might think of his policies, Abbott has always been highly capable. This year, it wasn't enough. Hinojosa beat him by more than seven points. Talarico beat Paxton by twelve.

Across the country, life rafts of new political talent emerged on this new morning. That said, it's important for us the people of Blue America to understand who and what we (finally) put to rout.  

Miscalculation is a basic part of our flawed human wiring. It's important for us Blues to understand that this is the profoundly malfunctioning person we finally did turn back:

BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?

MARY L. TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.

But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.

That's who we seem to have bested. The president who was put to rout has long been seriously disordered, in ways which went untreated. And in part due to the "obvious cognitive declines" which were also cited, his behavior has become more and more visibly nutty all through the course of this year.   

He's been putting his name on every structure. He tore down part of the White House after swearing he wouldn't.  He staged UFC fights on the White House lawn. He won't stop talking about that freaking ballroom of his, along with that freaking arch. 

He flies around on the plane which he's going to steal. He was down at the Reflecting Pool again on Monday, yammering in ways which everyone knows to be nuts.

As this year has stumbled ahead, his disordered thinking and his weird behaviors have become stunningly obvious. On a personal level, that vast disorder, which seems to stretch back to his childhood, is an obvious human tragedy. But it made it possible for lunkheads like us to finally turn him back.   

Mary Trump described the history of this vast disorder in her 2020 best-seller, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. It's the report of a human tragedy—a human tragedy which gets its start when the subject is two years old, or perhaps as a matter of physiological inheritance.  

For extended passages from her book, you can just click here.

We Blues! That book was over our press corps' heads. Our "press corps" chose to disappear the bulk of what it said. Last Sunday, at the top of page one. the New York Times was still playing dumb about this state of affairs, even as it pretended to offer its latest report on this struggling man's endless behaviors.

(More on that front-page report to come.)   

It was (almost) "an extinction-level event," the Florida governor said. And of course, it always seems, at times like these, that the millennium has arrived—that there will be no going back to the mess from which we seem to have escaped. 

In fact, we Blues are capable of miscalculation as we move forward from here. It will fall to newly emerged talents like Hinojosa and Talarico—and Acton and Bottoms and El-Sayed and Hamilton—to show us the way past that backslide.

A whole lot of voters voted our way. Where do we go from here?

Tomorrow: The garbage continues at Fox

THURSDAY: El-Sayed as former Rhodes scholar!

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026

Democratic numbers grow: Preachers and healers and a logger oh my! In the various fields of play, the Democratic Party's numbers seem to be increasing.   

As we type, the New York Times says the 435 seats in the House currently break down as shown: 

Allocation of House seats 
Democratic winners to date:  247
Republican winners to date; 153
Seats still undecided: 35

Did any major entity predict a split this large? With 35 seats still undecided, the Democrats could end up with a three-digit advantage in the House.   

(Or not! We have no way of knowing.)

Meanwhile, this:

Candidate Colom's lead in the Mississippi Senate race has ballooned from yesterday's 43 votes up to "a little more than 1,700 votes, while in Alaska, former Representative Mary Peltola was leading Senator Dan S. Sullivan by an even smaller margin." 

We'll guess that neither number tells us much, given the number of ballots which will end up getting counter. Regarding Colom, we'll say this again:

He dared to struggle, dared to win! 

He went out and chased that seat. In the process, he may end up defeating the Republican incumbent.   

Finally, though, we refer you again to Abdul El-Sayed's interview segments on today's Morning Joe.  At 8 a.m. sharp, this 17-minute segment started. It was followed by this second, 11-minute segment. 

A first thought. It seemed to us that El-Sayed comes across as the obvious Rhodes scholar he actually was. We've been struck by how rarely that academic distinction was mentioned along the way to Tuesday's seven-point win.   

Second, we suggest that you might click ahead to the final minute of that second segment. Here's part of what you'll hear and see from the (American born and raised) Senator-elect:  

EL-SAYED (11/5/26): Win or lose on Tuesday night, I was just so grateful to be able to do this. My family comes from a place where there is no democracy. So I don't take it lightly that we get to do this, and I'm just really honored that ten [sic] million people in my state gave me the trust to be able to serve.   

MIKA: So before you go, Senator-elect, we want to play a video that has resurfaced online of former president Bill Clinton praising your valedictory speech in his 2007 commencement address at the University of Michigan...  

You'll see Clinton praising the college senior's address and noting the lesson he drew from it.  You'll also see El-Sayed's reaction.

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