Normally Podcast: Republican Midterm Meltdown: Trump's Reckoning, Democrat Blue Wave & 2028 GOP Civil War

Mary Katharine Ham (0:01)

Hey, guys, we are back on Normally, the show with Normalish takes for When the News Gets Weird. I'm Mary Katharine Ham.

Karol Markowicz (0:07)

I'm Karol Markowicz. And the news is very, very weird.

SPEAKER_3 (0:10)

It's not a normal day out there.

Mary Katharine Ham (0:13)

Not a normal day out there.

Karol Markowicz (0:15)

No, it's not great. It is Wednesday, the day after election day, and everything feels dark and kind of sucks.

Republicans lost everything that could possibly be lost. Ben Dominich had this great write up of this in his transom newsletter. He wrote, bad candidates lost, good candidates lost, candidates who tried to nationalize their elections lost, candidates tried to localize their elections lost, candidates who needed national money lost, candidates who self-funded lost, candidates who supported the Iran war lost, candidates who publicly broke with the president on it lost, long-serving incumbents lost, brand new outsiders lost. So that's how things are going today.

Mary Katharine Ham (0:57)

I mean, that's about the size of it. The repudiation is very large and it's interesting. I imagine that watching this, because I thought it could be bad. I don't think I thought it could be South Carolina. Gone bad.

I think watching this, I know a lot of people are comparing it to midterms as you should. That's more of an apples to apples. But I think emotionally, watching South Carolina and Texas fall probably felt very much like watching the blue wall crumble as a Democrat in 2016

Karol Markowicz (1:31)

Right. You're like, what's happening? We always win Wisconsin.

Mary Katharine Ham (1:34)

Yeah. So there's got to be an extraordinary reason for that level of rejection. And I kind of feel like the, much in the way that Trump was a sort of belated backlash to 2020 insanity in 2024, I feel like this is the somewhat belated final backlash to Trump where people are like, the shenanigans are not working for us.

So we want to make that very clear.

Karol Markowicz (2:06)

Yeah.

It's a tough time for Republicans. A lot of pieces are reminding people that, so in Ben's piece, he also mentions, if you just got into politics in 2016, this kind of loss has happened before, and welcome to losing, welcome to being in the wilderness. This is a thing that does happen, and you have to accept it as part of the process. Other people have pointed out, Ronald Reagan lost eight Senate seats in 1986, and then George HW. Bush, who was Vice President, won over 400 electoral votes two years later.

It just, it's a cycle. For me, I know South Carolina was bad, but it's, I wasn't as shocked as the one race that blew my mind yesterday was Governor of Texas going blue. Everything else, the Senate seats across the country, even Susan Collins losing, I feel like, I didn't, it wasn't the shocker. To me, the shocker shocker. The disappointment, to be sure, yes. Yes, of course, of course. But the shocker shocker to me was Greg Abbott losing his election. I thought, like that's when I was like, all right, time for bed. Like, this night is not getting any better.

Mary Katharine Ham (3:30)

Well, I knew it was going to be an early night when those Florida returns came back and they were not large margins. And I thought, oh goodness, here we go.

Karol Markowicz (3:40)

So it's interesting because the Florida numbers throughout election day were so good that I kept not understanding what the stress was from Republicans who watched these things closely and they were saying that it's going to be tighter than we think because Democrats have banked so many early mail-in votes. The other thing, and we talked about this on Monday's show, but it cannot be overlooked that Florida's had the kind of rain that we just don't have in November.

It's getting to where it's like stifling. We just needed to stop raining now. But I was very worried when we recorded our show on Monday that night, like I usually had been feeling so confident about Florida and that night I had trouble sleeping. Okay, that's a thing that happens to me, but I had trouble sleeping because I was like, the Democrats are so motivated and this rain just won't stop, and they're going to swim across highways to go vote. And I'm not sure Republicans are going to do the same. And that's kind of the vibe that I'm feeling in Florida right now, that a lot of Republicans did not vote, even though the numbers went up from the last election.

The population of the state also went up. And the sense in Florida is that Republicans just didn't turn out in the same kind of numbers because of the weather. And it's crazy to imagine that something like that can have an effect, but it does, and I really think it did.