On this Veterans Day, to those who served, and those who supported those who served, we say: We remember.

House Republicans Choose Jordan as Their Next Leader

In a move that can only be described as very good news for the Democratic Party, House Republicans yesterday chose Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) as their leader for the 120th U.S. Congress. In the secret balloting, which was not so secret, the final tally was 106-73.

This result was entirely unsurprising. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who probably could have had the job if he wanted it, announced he was stepping down. Current House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) presumed the job was his for the taking, but he's a prickly SOB who has stepped on more than a few toes. Further, because he was a part of Johnson's leadership team, he inherits some of the toes that the Speaker stepped on over the past few years. And, in the ultimate sin, Scalise said he would try to work with Democrats to achieve some conservative priorities in the next Congress. This is not Ronald Reagan's Republican Party. In today's GOP, you do not reach across the aisle, ever.

Meanwhile, while Jordan is a gasbag and a bomb thrower and a first class show horse, he's actually spent the last couple of years rolling up his sleeves and acting like a serious political operator. By that, we mean that he's toned down some of the most ridiculous stuff, so that he doesn't give the Party needless black eyes. He's also done a lot of the behind-the-scenes, unglamorous stuff, like fundraise for other Republicans and make campaign appearances in districts where his presence might be useful. Ironically, his recent path bears a striking resemblance to that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has also been doing the things necessary toward achieving real power.

Also important, the 120th House Republican Conference is going to be pretty different from the 119th House Republican Conference. Nearly all of the moderates are gone, having chosen to retire, or else having been swept up in the blue tsunami. The remaining members, at least at the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future, are a wounded elephant. They are mad and they are extremists. Of course they chose one of their own—recall that Jordan is a leading member of the Freedom Caucus—as their new leader.

So, how is this good news for the Democratic Party? Well, to start with, their majority is so large, they aren't going to need the Republicans for... anything, really. Maybe for the occasional attempt at a veto override, we suppose, but those GOP votes are probably still there, since there are certainly some Republicans who hate the Iran War, or who know that their constituents dislike gerrymandering. Outside of that (rare) scenario, though, it will be much easier for the Democrats to figure out what makes 218 of their roughly 260 members happy, than it will be to do what it takes to get Republican votes.

That means that the main thing the GOP minority will do, since they clearly have no interest in compromise or governance, is engage in bomb-throwing, and in trying to create meme-worthy moments at committee hearings. The Republicans' dysfunction and inability to govern is a big part of the reason that the Party just took it in the teeth at the polls, and Jordan & Co. are about to deliver more of the same for 2 years.

And the icing on the cake, perverse as it is, is that Jordan has a serious sexual misconduct scandal on his résumé. He is not directly guilty of any penis crimes, but he stood by while nearly 200 Ohio State wrestlers were molested by Dr. Richard Strauss. Jordan has consistently denied awareness of what Strauss was up to, but it's nearly impossible that he could actually be ignorant of abuse that rampant. Certainly, in the documentary Surviving Ohio State, wrestler after wrestler looks at the camera and says that of course Jordan knew. So, he's going to be Exhibit... what, we gotta be at something like Exhibit ZZ at this point, that the Republican Party does not take sexual misconduct seriously.

Not long after Jordan was tapped, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was re-hired by acclimation to continue leading his party in the Senate. So, on Jan. 3, 2027, he will become Senate Minority Leader John Thune. It's not a bad gig; you get security and a luxe office, you get more money than the regular senators, and the minority party actually has some power in the Senate, unlike in the House. And Thune is nowhere near as obnoxious as Jordan is, and is not likely to say anything that aggravates half the country. Still, his re-election makes clear that the plan for the GOP is to stay the course, and not to do anything to shake things up. That should work out just peachy for them. (Z)

A Few More Election Updates

There wasn't quite as much news, in terms of ballot-counting, as we expected yesterday. A few more House seats have been called by at least some outlets, with the result being that nearly all the media outlets that make calls have the Democrats with 255 to 259 seats. Most of the uncalled seats look to favor the Republicans, so a good guess is that the blue team will end up with something like 260-262 seats.

As expected, Alaska released some more vote totals yesterday. Mary Peltola (D) now stands at 49.0% of the vote, with a total of 118,926 ballots currently being counted for her. That gives her a lead of 4,250 votes over Sen. Dan Sullivan, who currently has 47.2% of the vote and 114,676 ballots being counted for him. Nobody has called the race yet, but the math is getting daunting for Sullivan.

The math is even worse for the three Republicans who aspire to be Alaska's next governor. In that race, Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins now has 49.9% of the vote and 119,860 ballots, so he's right on the cusp of the promised land. The odds of any of the Republicans surpassing him, even with the ranked choice ballots, are looking to be slim and none, and slim just left town.

Over in the Kansas governor's race, Democrat Cindy Holscher has extended her lead; she has 551,467 votes, which is good for 50.3% of the total, and puts her about 7,500 votes ahead of Republican Ty Masterson. The final result will come down to an estimated 23,000 provisional ballots that have yet to be approved and counted. Assuming that all 23,000 are deemed valid, Masterson would need about two-thirds of them to pull ahead. If a few thousand of them are tossed, then he'd need more than 70%.

And finally, the Mississippi Senate race is still chugging toward the finish line. In the latest release, with about 97% of the votes counted, Democrat Scott Colom extended his lead a little bit. He now leads by 2,607 votes out of 953,547 votes counted. There is much talk, from both Colom and from Mississippi news outlets, that the final result will be known sometime this afternoon. We cannot tell how certain that is, but we'll certainly have it tomorrow if it's true. (Z)

Winners of the 2026 Midterms

Sorry, this is a little bit of a cliché format, but we want to run down a list of the 10 biggest winners of the midterms, as we see it. We'll do losers on Friday:

1. Democracy: Donald Trump and his goons are fundamentally both anti-Democratic and anti-democratic and did many things to put their fingers on the scales to swing the election to Republican candidates. That said, the administration did not pull out all the stops. For example, there was no attempt to declare martial law, or deploy troops or any of that. We don't know if courage was lacking, or if Trump couldn't find enough people willing to break the law, or if they just aren't competent enough to pull something like that off. In any event, the elections were about as fair and as smooth as was possible, under the circumstances.
   
   Beyond that, however, the two most anti-democratic institutions in the government in the past decade have been Trump himself, and the Supreme Court—with its shadow docket, and its unsigned rulings, and its gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Trump, and in particular his underlings, will now be subject to a lot of oversight. And there's an excellent chance that the two most anti-democratic members of the Supreme Court, namely Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, will not keep their seats long enough to avoid being replaced by much more moderate judges. The Democrats might also have the momentum and the mojo to implement some Supreme Court reforms. A ban on accepting RVs and other such lavish gifts would be a strong starting point.
   
   
2. Centrist Democrats: "Centrist Democrat" has become something of a four-letter phrase in the minds of many members of the Party, primarily due to folks like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, not to mention Sen. John Fetterman (D?-PA). Now, the party is going to have a whole bunch of centrists in the Senate and in the House.
   
   Our gut feel is that they won't be quite the impediment that Manchin and Sinema were, and Fetterman is. First, because there are plenty of policy issues that the Democrats can embrace that really shouldn't be a problem for the centrists—regulation of data centers, anti-gerrymandering, restoration of food aid, anti-corruption, etc. Second, because there are a bunch of them. A skilled whip can ration the "no" votes, so that a handful of centrists can avoid being on the "wrong" side of an issue when doing so would not play well back home. Also, any one of them will have considerably less power to derail the whole agenda, and thus considerably less motivation to grandstand, in contrast to the way Manchin/Sinema/Fetterman have behaved when they were trying to achieve... whatever the heck it was they were trying to achieve.
   
   
3. Progressive Democrats: There are going to be 25 new members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, most obviously Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI), which will bring the size of that Caucus to at least 105 members. Most of them campaigned on Medicare for All, and they might soon get it. We have noted several times already, and will note many more times, that support for single-payer healthcare is now above 60% among the members of the voting public.
   
   
4. Black Democrats: Black Democrats have been the backbone of the Democratic coalition for multiple generations, and they showed up in force for this election. One result, of course, is a dramatic increase in the number of Black officeholders, including four newly minted Black governors. Another result is that Black voters in Southern states have seen that if they show up, big things can happen. South Carolina just elected a Democrat on the strength of Black votes, and Mississippi could be on the cusp of doing the same. The road to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 runs substantially through Black voters, particularly Black Southern voters, and they've earned the right to have a major voice in the process.
   
   
5. Never Trump Republicans: You would not be too far off to refer to 2026 as the "Bulwark" election. A whole gaggle of the kind of shady Republicans that are hated by the still-conservative folks at The Bulwark were washed away by the blue tsunami. MAGA is still with us, and is digging in (see above). But this is surely the first time that normie Republicans can see a potential light at the end of the tunnel.
   
   
6. Texas Voters: This may seem an odd, or perhaps partisan, inclusion, but democracy tends to work best when both parties are putting up good and viable candidates. In single-party states, you tend to end up with candidates who are either extreme or who are bland and unexciting. In Texas, Ken Paxton should be a convicted felon, but instead, he was elected the state's top law enforcement officer three times. In California, nobody seems to know what Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra (D) is going to do, because he never had to say much about what he stands for or what his priorities are. Once he overcame the mediocre primary field, he was a shoo-in, and really didn't have to campaign at all.
   
   In the new, blue Texas, Republicans will (hopefully) have to moderate, and stop putting up candidates who are corrupt sleazeballs, like Paxton and Greg Abbott (Abbott is not a crook like Paxton is, but he most certainly abused his powers). Meanwhile, promising Democrats will be willing to run for statewide office, since that will not be a guaranteed loss, and probable end-of-career. If all goes well, voters in the Lone Star State will have a lot better choices on their ballots than they've generally had for the last 20 years.
   
   
7. Mike Johnson: Being speaker is a tough job. That is even more true when you've got a very small majority. It's even more true still when a fair chunk of that majority is the Freedom Caucus. Johnson has generally looked pretty miserable the past 2 years, and the only part of the job he's really good at is saying, "Yes sir, Mr. Trump." We don't know if he'd admit it publicly, or even privately, but he's gotta be relieved that he is giving up his gavel, and that herding this pack of wild hyenas is now someone else's responsibility.
   
   
8. Canada: The tariffs are likely on life support, and will be gone, probably sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, the absolutely overwhelming victory of anti-MAGA forces has to send a message to Canadians that, just maybe, their southern neighbor hasn't completely lost its mind, and that there may be a day when the two countries can be true partners and friends once again.
   
   
9. Sen. Jon. Ossoff (D-GA): Jon Ossoff said that he is not interested in running for president in 2028. Maybe that is true, maybe it's not. But the magnitude of his win, in a Southern swing state, has everyone else thinking about him mounting a bid. And it surely has to have him thinking about it, as well. We tend to believe that Barack Obama, circa January 1, 2007, did not know for certain that he was going to throw his hat into the ring. But eventually he did, of course, because he realized the time was ripe, and that the road to the White House is littered with the bodies of would-be presidents who decided to bide their time to the next election, and then never got a shot.
   
   If Ossoff does jump in, he'll have instant frontrunner status. He has all the upsides of someone like Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY), but now with greater name recognition, thanks to Thursday's results. The election also aided Ossoff in one other very important way. Because Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms (D-GA) would pick his replacement if he had to resign to become president, an Ossoff presidential run would no longer put a Democratic-held Senate seat at risk.
   
   
10. The Democrats' 2028 Presidential Hopes: We're going to do a full item about this eventually, but we need to at least mention it here. Every cycle, there are a bunch of those "road to the White House" maps, that show the various plausible state combos that would put the Democrat or the Republican over the top. With all the states that just went blue, the Democrats now have a veritable cornucopia of "roads to the White House" they might pursue, depending on the candidate they end up nominating. Most obviously, if Texas actually goes Democratic in 2028, it is near impossible for the GOP to win. Meanwhile, the Republicans are going to have to defend all kinds of territory they did not previously have to work hard or spend much money to defend. They will have to choose very wisely which baskets they put their eggs into.
    
    On top of this, the Democratic presidential bench, which was already deep, just got a bit deeper. Meanwhile, the Republican bench is shockingly thin. We could probably name 25 Democrats who would not shock us if they were nominated in 2028. For the Republicans, we might be able to name half a dozen such candidates.

Our 10 biggest losers will be unveiled on Friday. (Z)

Project 2027, Part I: Impeachment

We will begin this item, and this series, by sharing our 2026 Republican Party "autopsy." Here it is:

Your party is led by a sociopath who cares nothing for the country or for the Republican Party, and is only interested in enriching himself, in stroking his own ego, and in doing battle with his many and varied enemies, real and perceived. Nearly all of the other officeholders in your party enable this person, but without being able to channel any of his electoral mojo.

Until something in the previous paragraph changes, you will continue to lose elections where he is not on the ballot.

That concludes our autopsy.

In other words, post-election, there really isn't very much interesting to say about the state of the Republican Party. Especially since the immediate post-election maneuvering—the promotion of Stephen Miller to White House Chief-of-Staff, the election of Jim Jordan as the GOP leader in the House, the retention of John Thune as the GOP leader in the Senate—makes clear that there will be no change of course (at least, not anytime soon).

The Democrats, on the other hand, have been handed a historic opportunity. The voters have sent a clear message (several messages, actually), and have handed the blue team the largest majorities, in both chambers, of the 21st century, along with a sizable chunk of the state-level offices. There are obviously challenges, as well—herding the cats is never easy, not controlling the White House is a rather serious impediment, and who knows where the economy is headed. If the Democrats cannot seize the moment, then this could be 1974 all over again. But if they rise to the occasion, well, it could be 1932 all over again if the Democrats get the trifecta in 2029.

That is what we want to write about in this series. We were initially going to call it "Democratic Autopsy," because that is the term often used for these post-election analyses. But because it's usually the loser that gets autopsied, and the Democrats clearly weren't the loser, that didn't seem quite right. So, we went with "Project 2027."

Project 2025, which our chosen title references, is an exercise in advocacy. It is a wish list from the Heritage Foundation, along with ideas about how to achieve their goals. The various Project 2028s, all of them with a name derived from "Project 2025," are the same thing, except with left-wing goals. Please do not interpret this series as an exercise in advocacy or lobbying; we just couldn't come up with a better name that succinctly describes what we plan to do.

The guiding concept here, in so many words, is this: We are going to imagine that a think tank, or some such organization, has come to us and asked us: "Given what you saw in the election, and given what you know of politics, what do you think the Democrats' battle plan should be for the next year or two?" In other words, we're not writing up a wish list. We are writing up a list of lessons we think the blue team should draw, based on the past few decades, the past few years, and, of course, on the election results. There will be things we think are correct lessons, and that we will lay out, that we are sure have no chance of actually coming to fruition.

Because we are talking about lessons, we came dangerously close to calling this series "The Fog of War." That is the name of the documentary in which Robert McNamara talked about the lessons he drew from his career, particularly his time as Secretary of Defense. And the title of the film is a play on The Art of War, which is also a set of useful lessons. We similarly considered "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as the title. But all of these names, while offering greater fidelity to the idea behind this series, won't make any sense to someone who did not read our explainer. Project 2027 is considerably more easy to grasp. And we'll just have to hope that either people will have read this explainer, or else they will understand that we don't do advocacy.

We have enough to say that we've already sketched out 12 entries in the series. We reserve the right to add more. Our subject today, as readers can see from the headline, is impeachment.

To start with—and we have been watching this closely and thinking about it carefully for many months—we think the Democrats simply must impeach someone. From a political standpoint, the base—both the longtime stalwarts, and many of the new arrivals—are sick of misconduct and of corruption, and an impeachment would signal in a very visible way that the blue team has gotten the message. From a good governance standpoint, the shady members of the Trump administration—and there are many of them—need to be served notice that there's a new sheriff in town.

At the same time, we are equally confident that the first target should not be Donald Trump. There is no way he would be removed, at this point, so a Trump impeachment would just be for show. It would also play into right-wing/Fox narratives that the claims against Trump aren't serious, and that impeachment is just a knee-jerk, politically motivated maneuver. Oh, and impeaching Trump would be politically unpopular. There have been several recent polls of this, but the latest from Reuters/Ipsos, which was just released yesterday, is both representative and instructive. They have Trump's approval at 32%, so this is not some sort of MAGA-friendly sample. And yet, 42% of respondents said it would be bad for the country to impeach Trump, as opposed to 33% who said it would be good for the country. Trump impeachment #3 might be politically advisable at some point, after he does something obviously impeachable (say, ignoring Congressional directives on the Iran War). But it's not advisable right now.

So, it will have to be one of Trump's underlings. And the obvious target is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) actually twice took his shot at impeaching Hegseth (you can read the articles of impeachment here). The first attempt was derailed when Mike Johnson adjourned the House until after the election. And the second attempt was derailed yesterday, when a procedural vote failed 211-204, in part because many Democrats were occupied at an event on the other side of the Capitol.

This is a little bit of a setback for Massie, although he's moved on to a new project, namely a resolution calling for an end to the Iran War under the terms of the War Powers Act. It's not much of a setback for the Democrats. They had to vote for impeachment, because they don't want a vote NOT to impeach to be held against them. However, there was no guarantee that Johnson would actually send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate before this session of Congress expired (then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, sat on the first articles of impeachment against Trump for about a month, while she negotiated to make sure there would be a real trial). Even if Johnson had delivered the articles of impeachment, John Thune might have pencil-whipped them right into the trash, without a trial.

Once the Democrats take control, they'll have more than enough votes in the House to impeach. And they'll be able to make sure that there's a real trial in the Senate. They will also have considerably more votes in the Senate (as many as 9 more) than they do now, which makes the possibility of removal from office a bit less remote. And there are plenty of arguments for impeaching Hegseth:

1. Military Morale Is Crumbling: Hegseth and his boss just love to lavish money on the military. And they love to issue forth with lots of cock talk. But this is not impressing the rank and file troops. Common Defense does an annual poll of active-duty service members. They released their latest a few weeks ago, and the numbers are pretty eye-opening. Fully two-thirds of active-duty service members believe decisions are being made primarily for political purposes, rather than readiness or national defense, and more than half of respondents say that makes them more likely to leave the military when their current hitch is up. About half don't support the war in Iran, exactly half disapprove of Trump, and 55% disapprove of Hegseth.
   
   
2. Military Discipline Is Crumbling: Naturally, the general public is not going to be privy to a lot of the information that would be needed to assess the current state of military discipline. Nonetheless, there are clues that are visible even to John Q. Public. For example, the boards that have been convened to expel trans members from the service have defied that directive in 9 of the 12 cases that have been adjudicated.
   
   
3. High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Part I: We imagine that everyone reading this knows that the Constitution is silent on exactly what qualifies as "high crimes and misdemeanors," and that Gerald Ford famously said that it is "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history." Nonetheless, by any reasonable standard, Hegseth is guilty of such offenses.
   
   To take just one example, there's the news that broke this week, about how Hegseth decides on high-level promotions. His staff keeps secret files with printouts from the Internet that speak to certain "aspects" of a candidate's résumé. Specifically, if there is evidence that a candidate supported COVID-19 vaccination, participated in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, backed DEI initiatives, or is friendly with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley (who has been critical of Trump since retiring from the military), then that candidate is out. This approach has had the feature-not-a-bug effect of discriminating against candidates who are women and or minorities, which is illegal. Further, the candidates are not able to see or respond to the files containing the adverse information. That is also illegal.
   
   
4. High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Part II: Some may feel that bureaucratic shenanigans, even sleazy ones, aren't enough to merit removal. Very well; what about something a little bloodier? Hegseth was closely involved in the strikes on alleged drug-running boats. Exactly what the authority or evidence for these strikes was has never been clear, and without such evidence then the Secretary has aided and abetted murder. Further, per a leaked report published in July, the strikes have done absolutely nothing to reduce the quantity or the lethality of the cocaine making its way into the U.S.
   
   For a second example, the U.S. bomb strike that killed 120 school-age girls happened because the U.S. had out-of-date maps. And why were the maps out-of-date? Because the Pentagon office responsible for that task had its budget cut. And who cut the budget? Pete Hegseth.
   
   The articles of impeachment, which are linked above, lay out the details for these crimes and several others.
   
   
5. Conviction Is Possible: There is, as we note above, no chance that Donald Trump will be removed from office, even if he is impeached. With Hegseth, by contrast, you can squint your eyes and say... maybe. Depending on how the races in Alaska and Mississippi turn out, the Democrats would probably need about a dozen Republican votes. We can imagine some Republicans voting for removal because they agree Hegseth needs to be removed. We can imagine others voting for removal because they want to use Hegseth as a scapegoat for what happened on Election Day, so as to avoid having to openly blame Donald Trump. There might even be a couple members who vote for removal because they don't want a vote to save Hegseth to be used against them in 2028. It's not exactly the same, but Sen. Susan Collins' (R-ME) vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh might be the single biggest reason she'll be out of a job in January.

If Hegseth is indeed impeached and removed, it could set a very interesting precedent. The whole notion of impeachment was cribbed from England, as so much of the Constitution was. And when Parliament invented this tool, about 700 years ago, it was the best idea they could come up with to check abuses of power by the king. They could not remove the monarch, but they could certainly remove his ministers, even if they were acting on the king's orders. The U.S. has never used impeachment in that way, but it could certainly start doing so with Hegseth, If so, that would be at least a partial remedy to the Supreme Court's ruling making Trump a king, for legal purposes.

So, that is our first lesson for the Democrats: Impeach Pete Hegseth.

We have a brief poll on impeachment; click here to weigh in. We'll share the results in the next entry in the series.

In that next entry, we will talk about keeping, or jettisoning, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer (both D-NY) as the Party's leaders in Congress. If readers have thoughts on the subject, let us know at comments@electoral-vote.com. (Z, V, L & A)

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