So the Republicans took a beating in Tuesday’s midterms. They lost the House, and they lost the Senate. Democrats are calling it a historic wave, and the networks are happy to agree. Now, look, nobody’s denying it was a bad night for the GOP. But before we all start writing Republican obituaries, some history is in order, because what happened Tuesday is less unusual than you’re being told.
The party that holds the White House almost always gets hammered in the midterms. In the last hundred years, the president’s party has gained House seats only three times: 1934, 1998 and 2002. Every other time, voters showed up two years in and fired somebody. It’s practically an American tradition, like fireworks on the Fourth or overpriced airport food.
So why did voters fire the Republicans this time? I spent a good part of the last day arguing online with people who told me they voted against Trump, and I kept asking them the same thing. The answer kept coming back to the gas pump.
The exit polls back that up. In NBC’s exit poll, the economy was the top issue, and when voters were asked which costs worried them, gas and diesel led the list. Eighty-seven percent said they were concerned about fuel prices, and 57 percent of those voters went Democrat. CNN and Fox found the same thing. You can see NBC’s full exit poll here: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/exit-polls
And they blame Trump. Honestly, on the price itself, they have a point. I agree with why Trump went into Iran. Keeping Ayatollah Gonecrazy from getting a nuclear weapon is a fairly reasonable goal, unless you enjoy the idea of a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv. But Iran choked off the Strait of Hormuz, oil couldn’t get through, and prices at the pump climbed. We all know that part. People were mad, and they voted like it.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELNow, some perspective on the size of this. As of Wednesday evening, NBC News has Democrats flipping 35 House seats, and it projects they’ll end up with around 258. That’s a big number. It’s also about what happened to Trump in 2018, when Republicans lost 40 seats. Barack Obama lost 63 in 2010. Bill Clinton lost 54 in 1994 and handed Republicans both chambers for the first time in 40 years. Thanks, Bill!
???? US presidents have faced major midterm setbacks throughout history.
??Obama (2010): Democrats lost 63 House seats.
??Clinton (1994): Democrats lost 54 House seats.
??Trump (2018): Republicans lost 40 House seats.@grok, how does 2026 compare? https://t.co/ifH5pEBZic
— Dr.Doom (@tn_sanatani) November 4, 2026
So presidents take midterm losses. Why does this one sting so badly for MAGA? I’d suggest it’s because of who won. A lot of these Democrats aren’t moderates. They’re out of their minds.
Take Texas. James Talarico, the man Ken Paxton liked to call Tala-freako, stood on the floor of the Texas House in 2021 and said, “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” Plenty of Christians believe God is beyond male and female, and that’s fine. That isn’t what Talarico was doing. He said it in a debate over boys playing in girls’ sports, which tells you which tradition he was drawing from, and it wasn’t the Book of Genesis. He has also said there are six biological sexes. Then Texas, of all places, elected him to the United States Senate by 12 points. If you’d told me that five years ago, I’d have checked you for a head injury.
So maybe the exit polls are onto something. My own unscientific estimate is that about three-quarters of Democratic voters were angry about gas prices and also suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome at levels 7 through 10. The rest were just angry about gas prices.
Which brings me to the question I kept asking, and nobody could answer. You were furious at Trump because gasoline got expensive. So your solution was to hand Congress to the party that has spent years promising to get rid of gasoline? Can someone please make sense of that for me?
Here’s Joe Biden campaigning in New Hampshire in September 2019. He walks up to a young woman, takes her hand, and says, “Look me in the eye…” and then, “I guarantee you, we’re gonna end fossil fuel, and I am not going to cooperate (unintelligible).”
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On his first day in office, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, and liberals celebrated like they’d finally beaten Big Oil. Here’s what nobody told them. Canceling Keystone XL didn’t keep a single barrel of Canadian oil out of the country, because the pipeline was never finished. That oil keeps arriving by existing pipelines, by rail and by truck, and rail and trucks carry a higher risk of spills and accidents. So the big environmental victory was swapping a pipeline for oil trains. Way to go, Democrats.
Here’s Biden again, on the campaign trail in February 2020: “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period. Period.”
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And here he is in the final 2020 debate with Trump, telling the country he’d transition away from the oil industry and replace it with renewables that, as anyone who has priced a solar farm knows, aren’t ready to carry the load.
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Next is the March 6, 2016 debate in Flint, where Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were both asked about fracking. I’ll spare you Hillary’s answer, which comes with enough conditions that she’d ban fracking in practice without saying so. Bernie’s answer is shorter. Bernie talks forever too, but this time he gets to the point.
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To my friends on the left, please pay attention to this next one. Here’s Bernie promising that if elected president, he will take on the fossil fuel industry, with climate alarmism as his justification.
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Here’s Kamala Harris, the word salad queen of the West, explaining that she has changed her mind on fracking. It’s the same trick John Fetterman pulled in his 2022 debate, when he insisted he had always supported fracking after years of saying the opposite. This is the Democratic playbook. They say what the activist base wants to hear in the primary, check the polls when the general election gets close, and then walk it back, hoping you won’t remember what they said before.
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Here’s Biden’s Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, describing the administration’s work as “making sure that we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.”
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And here she lays out the actual agenda: 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, cutting carbon emissions roughly in half by 2030, and net zero by 2050.
How exactly do you get there? Do you really believe gas would stay cheap while Washington is trying to push you out of your gas-powered car? Of course not. Expensive gas isn’t an accident in that plan. Expensive gas is how the plan works.
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Finally, here’s Chief Crazy Bitch Elizabeth Warren being asked about nuclear power, the one energy source that is clean, reliable, and could actually replace fossil fuels at scale. If you’re serious about phasing out oil, it should be an easy yes.
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Her answer was no. She won’t build more nuclear. So you can’t have oil, you can’t have nuclear, and you’re left with windmills and hope.
There are enough cranks on the left who think oil will destroy the planet that the party will never stop chasing this. So I’ll ask one more time. If a large share of Americans voted Democrat this week because they were angry about the price of gas, why did they give power to the party that wants to end fossil fuels as fast as it can, no matter how much it costs them personally? Can anyone make sense of that? I’ll wait.
