Normal Americans punished MAGA

Normal Americans punished MAGA

Normies exist, and there’s only so far you can push them before they get mad.

Noah Smith

Nov 04, 2026

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Art by GPT-6

The MAGA people appear to have been laboring under a number of delusions.

First,

they seem

to be

genuinely

surprised

by the fact that they

suffered a crushing defeat

in the midterm elections. In fact, polls, forecasts, and prediction markets had all been calling a Democratic victory for months now. But a lot of MAGA types appear to have believed that America always has some big hidden reservoir of shy Trump supporters out there that everyone always misses, and that this silent majority would ride to the GOP’s rescue and prove all the pollsters and forecasters wrong, as they did in 2016.

To put it mildly, that did not happen. The election night surprise actually favored the Democrats, who won a far more extensive and decisive victory than almost any of the pollsters and forecasters had anticipated.

Ron DeSantis

@

RonDeSantis

Dems will get 55 Senate seats and 250+ House seats. Looking at the Senate map and considering such a massive House margin, it is very unlikely Republicans will recapture the Congress in 2028. Might not have a shot at Senate control until 2032.

6:42 AM · Nov 4, 2026

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David Wallace-Wells

@

dwallacewells

The 2010 margin was 6.8 points, an election remembered as a generational wipeout. Tonight is expected to almost double that. 2008 was 10.5 and 2006 was 8.0. A thirteen point win would be the biggest congressional margin in fifty years.

4:16 AM · Nov 4, 2026

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Even Trump’s traditional demographic support base — white voters without a college degree — abandoned the GOP in droves this time:

Hunter📈🌈📊

@

StatisticUrban

Non-college white voters, theoretically THE bread and butter, the special sauce, of MAGA, shifted sharply towards Democrats in virtually every state tonight.

6:46 AM · Nov 4, 2026

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Trump could try to challenge this electoral verdict — to cry that the vote was rigged, to

declare a state of emergency

and suspend the Constitution, to abuse the powers of the presidency to nullify the popular will. But my gut says that he won’t, and here’s an important reason why:

Peter Hamby

@

PeterHamby

Democrats won young white men tonight by 17 points, per CNN exits

Trump won them *28 points* in 2024

5:24 AM · Nov 4, 2026

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As long as the MAGA people could tell themselves that Trump’s opponents were a bunch of old people and women, they could fantasize about prevailing in the street confrontation that would erupt in the wake of an autogolpe. But if young men — and especially young

white

men — aren’t on Trump’s side, then starting some sort of civil war would likely not go well for MAGA.

Anyway, as of this writing, here’s what the Senate election map looks like:

Source: Google

Kansas is colored blue. So is South Carolina. So is Iowa. Mississippi will probably end up blue as well.

And most of all,

Texas is blue

. Not just the Senate race, either — the GOP governor, Greg Abbott, has been unseated by Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa. Bo French, who

tweeted alarm at seeing Indian American football fans

at a University of Texas game two months ago, lost his bid for Texas Railroad Commissioner to Democrat Jon Rosenthal.

The fall of Red Texas is an epochal, era-defining event. Growing up in Texas, I saw Dems win statewide office occasionally, but these were always old-school conservative Southern Democrat types. Yesterday’s election saw Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico, both staunch progressives, win the governorship and one of the Senate seats. In fact, the only Republican now holding a statewide office is…Ted Cruz.

How did

that

happen? Part of it was bad candidate selection — MAGA primary voters tossed out the popular mainstream Republican Senator John Cornyn for not being slavishly loyal enough to Trump, and replaced him with Ken Paxton, a man who has been

repeatedly indicted and investigated

for financial crimes and corruption. But Abbott was a popular, mainstream Republican incumbent governor with a strong economic track record, and he still lost to a progressive upstart challenger.

Rightists were simply unprepared for a world in which this was possible. Here was Jonathan Keeperman, whom I

recently debated

about Indian immigration, just yesterday:

1

Jonathan Keeperman

@

L0m3z

What model of the American electorate has Texas voting for a guy who says God is trans?

Someone steelman this for me. I’m having trouble getting there.

1:38 AM · Nov 3, 2026

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The only possible interpretation of this huge wave election is that it was a referendum on Donald Trump. Trump is now

among the least popular presidents

in living memory, rivaled only by George W. Bush at the end of his presidency. I wrote about why most Americans despise Trump, and my analysis hasn’t really changed:

The second Trump presidency is a world-historic failure

Noah Smith

·

Oct 3

Read full story

Trump was elected to tame inflation, but he raised taxes on almost everything Americans buy from overseas, and raised gas prices by attacking Iran. When people complained about the cost of living, he

told them to buy their daughters fewer dolls

. Trump was elected to stay out of Middle Eastern wars, but he plunged us into an expensive quagmire. He has relentlessly

promoted the interests of Vladimir Putin

, whom normal Americans hate with a passion. His antics — threatening to invade Greenland, trying to bully people into renaming the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and artificial intelligence, and so on — seem dangerously unhinged.

Then there’s the corruption. Trump has

relentlessly looted the country

to fatten the pockets of himself, his family, and his close political allies:

The Washington Post

@

washingtonpost

Exclusive: A list reveals all the major donors to President Trump’s White House ballroom, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member.

wapo.st

Secret documents reveal donors behind $330 million for Trump’s ballroom

4:30 PM · Oct 15, 2026

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Robert Faturechi

@

RobertFaturechi

New: A top White House aide intervened to get a $620 million Pentagon loan for a company tied to Donald Trump Jr.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” said one person involved.

propublica.org

The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.

10:30 AM · May 28, 2026

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unusual_whales

@

unusual_whales

BREAKING: Companies whose federal cases were dropped under Trump have given or pledged $210.5 million to his super PACs, per a new Public Citizen report.

Crypto,com: $37 million, after the SEC dropped an investigation

Gemini: $20 million, plus $10 million each from founders…

4:26 PM · Oct 16, 2026

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Scott Lincicome

@

scottlincicome

"Trump Administration's Equity Portfolio Reaches 34 Deals"

cato.org/blog/trump-adm…

via

@CatoInstitute

@DeHavenTad

2:08 PM · Oct 3, 2026

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Jay in Kyiv

@

JayinKyiv

US energy company execs have resigned in disgust as the Trump family is caught secretly expediting the funneling of $25 billion from a sanctioned Russian energy giant in exchange for allowing Russians to obtain a natural gas project in Alaska.

According to investigations by The…

7:24 AM · Oct 24, 2026

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The American people noticed.

This is from last week

:

Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices, according to the final

CNBC All-America Economic Survey

before the

Nov. 3 midterm election

…[T]he results nevertheless align with other recent polls showing corruption has shot to the top of voters’ list of pressing worries…A Fox News

poll

published last week found 60% of registered voters are extremely concerned about government corruption, surpassing concerns about inflation and high prices. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos

poll

released Sunday found some two-thirds of respondents think Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, up 10 percentage points since September 2025.

Gallup

recently found perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. have hit multi-decade highs. And an August

poll

from Reuters/Ipsos found nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump’s businesses influence his presidential decisions.

And here’s their chart:

Source:

CNBC

Republicans seemed to somehow labor under the delusion that regular Americans were going to just

ignore

all this. Perhaps they thought that Trump’s charisma, which allowed him to bounce back from the January 6th coup attempt, made him invincible. It’s possible they reasoned that Americans had simply become so jaded about corruption that they would ignore dozens of scandals that each would have ended any other presidency. Perhaps they believed that no matter how bad Trump got, Americans’

dislike of woke culture and progressive governance

would always make the Republicans the lesser of two evils.

Maybe they believed that Americans never really cared about inflation in 2024, and that worries about the cost of living were just people’s way of expressing their worries about immigration and wokeness. Or maybe they believed America would

blame Dems for the assassination of Charlie Kirk

, and reject them at the ballot box accordingly. Perhaps they thought they could scare Americans away from the Democrats by calling them “communists” and screaming about “Western civilization”:

Matt Walsh

@

MattWalshBlog

I am not here to tell you that Republicans have done a wonderful job. I am here to tell you that the Democrat Party has been fully captured by communists who want you dead and seek to destroy western civilization itself. Go vote against them. It’s the only choice.

6:31 PM · Nov 3, 2026

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This was MAGA’s greatest delusion — the idea that the average American sees things similarly to the rightists on X. The truth is that the average American does not see “Western civilization” as a fortress under siege. The average American

does not spend all day in a state of panic

that brown immigrants and their children are invaders bent on subjugating the white race.

One gets the sense that the MAGA people believed that the average American doesn’t even exist. For decades, ideologues and extremists in both parties have shouted — often in direct contradiction of the evidence — that swing voters don’t exist, that polarization rules everything, that moderation and appealing to the center are useless, and that electoral victory goes to whichever party mobilizes their base to come out and vote.

That was always probably wrong, but MAGA seems to have taken this flawed logic one step further, convincing themselves that the country consists only of “the left” and “the right” — that every voter is either a blue-haired trans communist or a chisel-jawed defender of Western Civilization who spends all day posting memes on X about

gender-swapped Draco Malfoy

. If you have no idea what the heck gender-swapped Draco Malfoy is, or why on Earth anyone would think it’s politically important, rest assured that

you’re not alone

.

Texas and Kansas and South Carolina have been turned blue by a coalition of voters who aggressively, emphatically neither know nor care about gender-swapped Draco Malfoy, or

Anakin Skywalker memes

, or any of the other nonsense that bounces around the rightist echo chambers on X and 4chan. It was a coalition that never read Elon’s

never-ending stream of tweets

about James Talarico wanting to “trans your kids and destroy the border”. It was a coalition that does not know or care whether it’s white French people or brown French people

burning down Paris this week

.

It turns out that normal Americans

do

exist — in great numbers, in fact. It’s possible to keep them divided with relentless partisanship. It’s possible to drive them to jaded apathy with relentless he-said-she-said accusations and manufactured scandals. It’s possible to get many of them to stay home on election nights, simply by ignoring their wishes for long enough. But if you push them hard enough — if you step on their face again and again, with corruption and mismanagement and disdain for their daily struggles — they will eventually bestir themselves and rise up and smack you down. They will remind you of who won the Second World War, and why.

So the Democrats, ideologically divided as they are, took a well-deserved victory. The risk now is that they don’t learn their lesson from watching Trump’s implosion. Just as MAGA convinced themselves that the average American was a meme-spouting rightist, Democrats might marinate in their own echo chambers, egged on by leftist activists and progressive pressure groups and Bluesky cancel-culture warriors.

Democrats might convince themselves that what Americans really care about is Palestine rather than the cost of living. They might embark on a borrowing binge in order to throw more money at health care, resulting in rising interest rates and rising prices. They might try to halt inflation with

price controls

, with predictably terrible results. They might spend their political capital on billionaire taxes of the type that

California’s electorate just rejected

. They might forget the lessons of 2024 and try to admit as many illegal asylum-seekers as possible.

And if so, I’ll be writing another version of this post in 2030 or 2034, explaining why a Democratic president got hit with a red wave in the midterms.

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In fact, Talarico said that God is “nonbinary”.

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