Linked List: November 4, 2026

Wednesday, 4 November 2026

This Election Will Not Look Surprising in History 

This striking map from Apple News tells the story of the magnitude of the shift since 2024.

The late Lindsey Graham, on Twitter back in May 2016 (punctuation sic):

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

The wheels of history grind slowly, but they do grind. By the time of his death, Graham was amongst the lickspittlest of Trump’s GOP toadies. Graham’s idiot sister ran for his vacant Senate seat in South Carolina and lost.

Former representative Liz Cheney, at the January 6 hearings in 2021:

I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

Winston Churchill, perhaps apocryphally:

Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Abraham Lincoln:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

‘Political Reckoning Shatters Trump’s Grip on Washington’ 

Aaron Zitner, reporting for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal:

Rarely in American politics has a president traded away so much political support so quickly.

The losses that Republicans suffered on Tuesday marked one of the most decisive repudiations of a president in modern history. President Trump had re-entered the White House with advantages he lacked in his first term: a victory in the popular vote, a cadre of aides eager to expand his authority and cultural currency that had NFL players doing the “Trump dance” in the end zone.

Only two years later, his political standing has collapsed, all because of a dramatic miscalculation of his power to shape events. A war of choice with Iran and tariffs imposed on U.S. trading partners betrayed his promise to avoid foreign entanglements and tame inflation. His extraordinary interventions in his party’s primaries left Republicans with a set of unusually weak candidates.

The Democrats went from out of power in Washington to a massive majority in the House and an apparent 55-45 or even 56-44 majority in the Senate. Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected the first black woman governor in history — in Georgia. By a 9-point margin. Texas elected Democrats to the Senate and governor’s mansion. Kansas elected a Democratic senator for the first time in 94 years.

The fever, finally, well and truly broke.