Hey everybody. Happy Monday. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today. Election Day is tomorrow, and things are looking really good for Democrats. Not only in the House but also in the Senate. The final polls have Democrats ahead in every competitive Senate race, and Republicans are spending their last day defending seats they never should have had to worry about. We’ll walk through where things stand and what to watch for tomorrow night.
We’ll also get into the knives coming out for Trump inside his own party, the president promising to become “Mr. Veto” if the Democrats take over, the search for someone to take the fall for the Iran war, and the Justice Department getting caught with a fake voter list.
So do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Let’s get to it.
1. Blue Wave Builds in Polls
Times and Siena just came out with their final poll before tomorrow. And it’s all good news for Democrats in battleground Senate races.
In Michigan, El-Sayed is up 53 to 42, an 11 point gap. Talarico has a 7 point advantage over Paxton in Texas. Jackson leads Susan Collins by 6 points in Maine. Democrats lead by a similar margin in Ohio and even Kansas. And they have an edge in Alaska.
So where does that leave us?
Well, here’s Nate Silver’s midterm model, which draws on polls like the one we just talked about, plus a bunch of other data points. The forecast gives Democrats an 80 percent shot at taking the Senate, with an average of 53 seats. And it gives them a 96 percent shot at the House, with an average of 243 seats.
Obviously, I like those odds. But these are polls and models, not results. We’ve been burned by predictions before, and a lot of these races are still coin flips or within the margin of error.
This data is reassuring. But it doesn’t mean anything if people don’t show up tomorrow. The only one that can turn these predictions into reality is you. So if you haven’t voted, make a plan. If you have, reach out to your friends and your relatives.
We won’t get out of this mess overnight. It’ll take a few cycles to root out this movement for good. With these polls, we’re getting our first glimpse at a future without MAGA. It won’t be a short path, but it will be worth it. So get out there tomorrow, and let’s take the first step.
2. Republicans Turn on Trump
Politico talked to about a dozen Republican candidates, operatives, and lawmakers. Almost all wanted to remain anonymous. That’ll make sense once you hear what they had to say.
One House Republican: “There was a point earlier this year where we really felt like we could defy history. And then Trump bombed Iran. And it was just one thing after another.” A second GOP rep said that “At least when Barack Obama was president, he only screwed his enemies.” A GOP strategist made another good observation: “He cares more about the ballroom than he cares about Republicans winning the midterms.” Asked about what happens to Trump’s stranglehold over the party if he hands them a loss tomorrow, one senator was blunt: “He’s in trouble.”
They’re angry about the same failures we point out on this show every day: the fuel and fertilizer costs. The tariffs that sent Susan Collins begging for an off-ramp. The desperate purchases of foreign beef behind the backs of farmers. And the president who seems more focused on John Husted’s butt than cleaning up his own mess.
Republicans talking trash about Trump behind his back is nothing new. Over the last few years, a lot of the GOP have become experts in thinking one way and voting the other. For those without the courage to quit, that’s been the only way to survive. Politicians are calculating. But that cuts both ways. When there are no coattails to ride, and Trump becomes more of a burden than a gift, those private comments will start to become public as more and more Republicans turn their back on MAGA. Some of them have already seen the writing on the wall. After tomorrow, anyone in the caucus who still has their seat won’t be able to deny it.
Honesty has never been MAGA’s strong suit. But after tomorrow, I have a feeling we’ll be hearing some pretty candid assessments of the big man in charge. I can’t wait.
3. Trump Promises to Veto Everything
Trump sat down with the New York Post’s podcast this weekend. He was asked what his agenda would look like if Democrats took Congress. As usual, he didn’t have many ideas, saying he would become “Mr. Veto,” shooting down everything Congress sends him. Nothing about the good of the country or issues to cooperate on. It’s Trump’s way or the highway.
He’s probably more focused on what’s coming for his friends. The host asked about Elon Musk and the staffers that may face investigation under a Democratic majority. Here’s his response.
Let’s address the comparison he just made, because I was on that “unselect” committee he’s talking about. When we investigated the attacks on the capitol Trump instigated, we did it in public. 10 hearings with witnesses from Trump’s own White House. Thousands of pages of documents and an 800-page report, signed by 9 lawmakers and 2 Republicans, including myself.
Compare that to the DOGE staffers that Trump is talking about in that clip. This was a group of unqualified teenagers and Musk fanboys who ransacked the federal government, firing 250,000 civil servants, cutting off lifesaving aid programs by mistake, and lying about the money they saved. The president is comparing a congressional committee to a group whose most famous member goes by “Big Balls.” You can’t make this stuff up.
Trump will do his best to obstruct justice. But even if he successfully shields Musk and his flunkies from the legal consequences of the DOGE disaster, it’s a target-rich environment for oversight Democrats. Not even Trump can put a lid on the corruption that’s about to come out. When it does, we can only hope it’s the nail in the coffin for this movement.
4. Trump Seeks Iran Fall Guy
When the strikes on Iran began in late February, Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine were among the loudest voices promising a fast, decisive win. Trump was happy to believe them. I mean, this is a man who thinks he could have won Vietnam in a week.
We’ll have to take his word on Vietnam, since the bone spurs kept him home. But his war with Iran has been raging for eight months, with no end in sight. Trump has tried to declare victory a few times but we’re essentially right where we started. It has cost taxpayers 47 billion dollars. And it has cost the lives of 20 service members.
According to The Atlantic, Trump is now trying to shift the blame. He believes that the war is part of the reason Republicans are about to get stomped in the midterms. Go figure. So he’s been asking advisers how Hegseth and Caine are performing. One of them, maybe both, could take the fall as he weighs a new round of strikes.
Hegseth is making sure it’s not him. One adviser said, “Hegseth is good at telling the president what he wants to hear.” He’s also good at passing the buck. He has fired or pushed out more than two dozen generals and admirals. Earlier this year, he reportedly blamed his own deputy for the munitions shortage. Not once has he owned a single failure of this war.
And listen, we’ve seen this movie before. In 2006, voters punished George W. Bush over Iraq. He fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld right after the election. Two months later, he ordered the surge. One of the deadliest stretches of the war followed.
Firing a defense secretary didn’t end that war. A bad night for Republicans won’t end this one either. But a new Congress can ask the hard questions nobody in this administration has been willing to answer. Which is more important now than ever.
5. Judge Blocks DOJ Voter Purge
The Justice Department has worked closely with the White House to sow distrust and chaos into elections. California, a deep blue state, is now ground zero.
The DOJ recently ordered the state to set aside 20,930 names it flagged as possible noncitizens. Then the president weighed in. He said that the department found “20,000, but potentially Hundreds of Thousands, and maybe even Millions” of fraudulent votes.
But the list quickly fell apart. A judge handed it over to researchers at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, who ran it against the state’s voter file. 8,880 of the names aren’t even on California’s voter rolls. That’s 42 percent.
It gets worse. The researchers found nearly 7,500 naturalized citizens on the list who had been wrongly flagged. Some people on the list are confirmed U.S. citizens.
In fact, the government had actually stripped out voter ID numbers before sending the list. Those numbers are the easiest way to check who’s actually on it. But the point wasn’t accuracy. It was to generate mistrust.
Now the DOJ is going after the researchers who exposed it. The department asked the judge to hold them in contempt and refer them for criminal investigation. Their offense? Checking the math on a list the court gave them.
The courts are pushing back. On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco barred the department from demanding that officials remove anyone from the voter rolls or set aside any ballots. The judge also barred the DOJ from threatening officials with prosecution.
So what’s the bottom line? The DOJ says it’s protecting our elections. It’s actually building a story to undermine them. Right now, the last line of defense is the courts and ordinary citizens willing to verify its bogus claims. They’re defending our democracy from its own government.
And tomorrow, the rest of us get our turn. Vote!
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Trump administration wants Russian gas flowing back into Europe through Ukraine’s pipelines. U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff floated the plan during trips to Moscow and Kyiv in September, the Wall Street Journal reports. The gas would be sold through an American intermediary to get around European sanctions. That setup could also mean a payday for U.S. investors. The White House has pitched the plan as a reason for Putin to agree to an energy ceasefire before winter. Officials have proposed holding the proceeds in an escrow account in a third country, so the Kremlin can’t use them to fund the war. Europe isn’t buying it. EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen put it simply: “I certainly would not trust Russia.” EU law bans all Russian gas purchases by the end of 2027. Russia supplied 45% of Europe’s gas on the eve of the war. Today it supplies 11%. The plan is also a sharp reversal for Trump. In his first term, he sanctioned Germany’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline and warned it would leave Berlin dependent on Moscow.
Big Law firms that cut deals with Trump have mostly disappeared from the fight to protect the midterm elections. A New York Times review found that few of the nine firms that settled with the administration in 2025 are publicly involved in major efforts to check election meddling. Together, those firms pledged nearly a billion dollars in free legal work for causes Trump supports. Paul Weiss, once a go-to ally for voting rights groups, took down its voting rights page and 30 related pages after its deal. Paul Weiss and seven of the other firms did not respond when asked what voting rights or anti-administration work they are doing. But the chill has spread beyond those eight. Even top firms that never cut deals have also backed away from politically sensitive cases. The Advancement Project, a civil rights group, says so many firms have turned it down that it now keeps a tracker of them. This fall, it had to sue over the Justice Department’s election-monitoring plans without a private partner. Norm Eisen, who leads a coalition of lawyers preparing for election disputes, insists his side is still ready: “The muscle is still there.”
