Clay Travis Show: GOP Midterm Bloodbath, JD Vance's Warning & College Football Playoff Chaos

Clay Travis (0:01)

Welcome in Clay Travis Show. As you all know, none of my predictions are ever wrong. I tend to get everything exactly right. Having said that, I got everything wrong yesterday. Welcome, let's dive in. The 2024 election reaction shows were a lot more fun. I got every one of my predictions right. I got every one of the swing states right. And I was correct that Donald Trump was going to win a landslide election. Most people disagreed with me at that point in time. I am an obsessive data guy and I don't trust polls. And so here is what I did as the midterms inched closer and closer. I actually looked at the way people were voting. And if you looked at all the early votes that were out there, 50 million some odd plus of them cast. And if you compared the Democrat Republican share in states that consider Democrat Republican shares, there was virtually no difference between how Democrats and Republicans were voting in 2026 in the early vote compared to 2022

The problem with that analysis was which I then paired with Florida, which has amazing by our data that they post about who is voting for whom, Democrat, Republican, Independent, is I squared that. And I looked at it all through yesterday. And the overall vote in Florida, I believe, William, you can look this up because I haven't checked it in a while now. I don't know if they've added more votes since. But 700,000 more Republican voters voted in the 2026 midterms yesterday, both early and in person, than Democrats. Over 700,000 of them.

Yet, Byron Donalds ended up winning the governor's race. Congratulations to Byron Donalds, next governor of Florida. Byron Donalds ended up winning the governor's race by only around 100,000 votes. What happened there? Well, what happened was, evidently a lot of Republicans ended up voting for Democrats and a lot of Independence broke in a way that favored Democrats substantially. And what often ends up happening is that unlike in a parlay, right? I love and I'm going to give you some College Football parlays where each game is distinct. All of these results are interconnected by which I mean this. If Notre Dame beats Miami this weekend, it will have no impact on whether LSU beats Alabama or not. Those individual games stand distinct. In politics, the overall outcome tends to run together. So Trump won all seven battleground states in 2024 And that didn't surprise me because if Trump were going to win, all of those would come together. Democrats won all of the battleground states in 2026 doesn't surprise me either. I got the tide correct in 2024 I got it completely wrong in 2026 Now, why did voters behave the way that they did? Well, I think this is interesting. JD Vance just posted a really long tweet in the last several hours. And he said, one of the things the data analyst on our side obsessed over was composition. Whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story. In some states, turnout was merely okay. In other states, it was downright amazing. And in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team. Our people were showing up. And look, I think that echoes the data that I was talking about. JD Vance continues, So I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? No, he told me. We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us. Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was nine points more Republican than Democrat. Just a couple of points worse than 2024 Again, what I'm referencing. Undoubtedly, there were places we could have done better on turnout. The main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026 There will be a lot of in-fighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me our economic messaging wasn't sharp enough down the stretch. I'm sure that's true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster, one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we lose the generic ballot by 13 points.

I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us, what would cause them to come back to our team? The top four answers, accounting for nearly all the responses were, in the war, focus on cost of living inflation, put America first, change our relationship to Israel. Our voters showed up and the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea we should change enforcement by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next six years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost, and any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I remain hopeful about our country to the people who are pissed off and want to say, I told you so, you're right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview to the people who are just pissed at the results you should be. Let's take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country. Okay, that is Vice President JD Vance. Extraordinary post. I agree with the vast majority of it.