Recriminations

Unlike the Iran War, the GOP Civil War will not be won in the first hour. As noted over the weekend, the Vice President of the United States, the Governor of Florida and the Susan Collins of the new Texas blame the midterms on the unpopularity of the war and its domestic consequences. In his appearance on Sixty Minutes last night, the President cast his net more widely:

(Mr Cortes was a Trump campaign spokesman in 2016 and 2020 and an advisor to Vance's 2022 Senate campaign. Back in the Covid era, he quit Newsmax because of the company's mandatory vaccination policy. So, unlike Mark Levin, he is not a NeverTrumper with no principles.)

As you know, I have argued for a sod-bollocking quarter-century that demographics explain more or less everything - and not just in the reductive sense of American political consultants observing that in this or that district a formerly rock-ribbed redoubt of bluecollar millworkers became infested by NPR soccer moms worried about climate change. In response to Saturday's column, several Texan readers pointed out that what happened in the midterms owed as much to shifting demographics as to any "affordability" concerns. Over nineteen million persons were registered to vote in the state on Tuesday, which is a near eight per cent increase on the 2022 midterms - or close to a million-and-a-half new "Texans".

How many of them voted for the Democrats? Answer: all of them. Compared to 2022, Governor Abbott got the same number of ballots - approximately four-and-a-half million ...but the Democrat nominee improved the party's vote haul by 1.7 million, and thereby won. You do the math.

In the first eighteen months of the Trump Administration, just shy of one million "migrants" were deported or "self-deported". But how many invaders had Joe Biden let in? Estimates vary from close to seven million (per the Heritage Foundation) to twenty million (per Trump's new chief of staff). So, for every migrant deported, between two and seven get to stay.