I don't think this explains the election debacle completely, but I think there is much truth in it: "A Contrarian View on Election 2026: Trump Was Right, GOP Was OK, Voters Were Wrong".
I do not think that anybody in Texas who voted for Trump in 2024 can give me a logical reason for voting for James Talarico in 2026, even give Paxton's personal baggage and the war in Iran. Talarico is the kind of candidate who is so completely awful through and through that he looks like a GOP plant. And don't hand me the "poor messaging" excuse. Talarico is the antithesis of just about everything that Trump has ever stood for, so his opposition to the Iran war or his concern about "affordability" cancels out his support for cultural rot and his embrace of open borders and thinly cloaked Marxism? That shows a complete lack of critical thinking ability.
In North Carolina, we had a Republican senate candidate, Michael Whatley, and the only thing the donks kept pounding away at was the fact that there was a convicted pedophile on the staff of the state GOP party, which Whatley was in charge of. The guy (not the candidate) went to prison for six years (incidentally, if he had been a Democrat, the refrain would have been that he had "paid his debt to society"). Whatley didn't appoint him (that was a lie spread by the Democrats), and maybe for the sake of optics he should have fired him, but he didn't. So, I'm supposed to be so incensed by a guy who tolerated a convicted pedophile on his party's payroll that I run into the arms of Democrat Roy Cooper, who belongs to a political party that supports the slaughter of millions of the unborn, and, furthermore, advocates medicating and mutilating children as part of its diabolical transgender fantasies? Apparently, there were plenty of people who believed this was an acceptable trade-off.
