Friends, just a quick note up top. Yes, gas and diesel prices are high and the war with Iran has a lot to do with it right now. But so too does the Ukraine war when it comes to diesel.
The reality, however, is that Democrats want higher gas prices. They want smaller cars. They want you out of your car and into public transportation. You may be unhappy about gas prices, but remember Democrats want them even higher so that you are forced to give up your SUV. They want farmers driving battery powered combines too heavy for fields. They want truckers to drive battery powered 18-wheelers.
Gas prices will come down, but not if the Democrats get power back. Just remember that.
The United States House of Representatives is gone for the GOP. In fact, I suspect we are going to see some of the GOP’s clever redistricting come back to haunt them as some otherwise safe GOP seats flip to the Democrats because the Republican strength was weakened.
As Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Index notes, it is not so much a blue wave as a red undertow. The Democrats are not loved. But the public is angry with the President and the GOP that refuses to push back on him.
I talked to a friend yesterday who is a three-time Trump voter who is so angry about gas prices and tariffs, both of which are negatively impacting his small business. “I voted for him,” he said, “but I did not vote for this.”
Voters, including a lot of Republican voters, are unhappy. But I do think enough of them will still come home to the GOP that the Senate stays in Republican hands.
Right now, I think the GOP is going to lose both North Carolina and Ohio, but I think they'll pick up Michigan. I think the GOP keeps Texas. Between now and Election Day, that could all change, but I think the Senate is safe, though reduced. The House is going to flip and could just as easily flip back in two years.
As we head into next month, I’ll update you. Right now, there are some relevant points to keep in mind:
Polling is still undercounting Republicans, and we need to be careful about that, which is why polling averages are better than individual polls, of which there are many.
MAGA is now fully engaged. The problem remains the non-MAGA Republicans who feel increasingly alienated from the President’s core supporters. Independents are leaning heavily toward Democrats.
A lot of Republicans will probably vote for the GOP when the reality of insane Democrats really dawns on them.
Farmers, truckers, and a lot of blue collar voters, not to mention small businesses, remain deeply upset about the economic situation, gas and diesel prices, and tariffs. The President and his defenders need to not antagonize them for the rest of the campaign season.
I am increasingly of the mind that Islam and the United States are incompatible. Islam, like Communism as an ideology, is more than religion. It is a socio-economic system and we’re starting to see enclaves of Islam in the United States that are deeply hostile to Western values and not just refuse to assimilate, but demand special treatment and exemptions.
So this is good.
I have a number of Muslim friends who have fled the Islam of the Middle East. They have integrated into American society and they agree with me. They fled the ideas that are now spreading to the West.
But the media and the elite will scream racism as this becomes a bigger issue. Right now, Islamic radicals in this country are co-opting the Left, as they did in Iran during the revolution. It won’t end well for any of us.
Again, there are plenty of peaceful Muslims who also abhor the brands of Islam beginning to spread in the West. The problem is the West lacks the capacity to discern between the two.
When the University of Texas upset Ohio State, students poured out to celebrate in burnt orange and Stetsons. Bo French, a Republican running for the Texas Railroad Commission, looked at a picture of that celebration and saw too many people who were not white. He used the photo to attack Indian immigrants.
Those students were overwhelmingly American citizens. They were wearing the colors of a Texas university and the hats of Texas cowboys while cheering a Texas football team. They had assimilated exactly the way immigration hawks insist new arrivals must assimilate, and French still found them wanting because of the color of their skin.
When conservatives criticized French, the white right turned on the critics. French is on the ballot, they said, so criticizing him only helps Democrats. Besides, they added, he is right, and there is too much immigration from the Indian subcontinent. The rule, apparently, is that a Republican candidate who says something boneheaded about race is beyond criticism because he is running for office.
That rule lasted only a couple of weeks. Arkansas Governor Sarah Sanders, who is also running for office, has a new ad on welfare reform. It opens with a young white guy on the couch eating chips and playing video games while collecting welfare. By the end, he is wearing a tie and going to work. Sanders makes the case that the state’s welfare-to-work program has moved able-bodied Arkansans off public assistance and into jobs.
The casting was not an accident. In Arkansas, more white people are on welfare than black people, so the ad used a white guy because the ad was telling the truth about Arkansas. The same people who said French could not be criticized because he was on the ballot are now furious at Sanders, an incumbent Republican on the ballot, for putting a white man in her ad. They insist she should have used a black woman, which would have been less accurate and would have traded on the very racial stereotype conservatives have spent decades rejecting.
The white right wants to play the victim. Its members have decided the world is aligned against them, and they have concluded that the future of conservatism is to adopt the identity politics of the left and run it on behalf of white people. They want to be Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones with a different complexion.
They have picked a strange moment to claim oppression. President Trump and Vice President Vance run the White House. Republicans run Congress and most of the states. The GOP got there by building a coalition that is not all white. In 2024, President Trump won roughly a third of Indian-American voters, a better showing than his Republican predecessors, and he won more Black and Hispanic voters than any Republican nominee in a generation. The white right now wants to shatter that coalition of America First voters in the name of a grievance that does not match reality.
Victimhood gets clicks, and clicks pay. The socialist left is filled with the downwardly mobile children of the progressive elite. The white right is filled with the downwardly mobile, clickbait-addicted clout chasers of the right. Both have decided their own disappointments are someone else’s fault, and both have found an audience willing to pay them to say so. The socialists will doom the Democrats if Democrats follow them off the victimhood cliff, and the white right will do the same to Republicans.
White Americans are a shrinking share of the population, and racial grievance politics will be as much a loser for the right as it has been for the left. More importantly, it is wrong. A Christian cannot look at a crowd of young Americans celebrating a football game and sort them by skin color. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, and there is certainly no quota on Indians in a Texas student section, particularly when they got there on the merits of their academic achievement.
Republicans have long had a better message than grievance. We have shown people that work beats welfare, that the free market lifts families out of poverty, and that anyone who truly embraces this country and its values can become fully American. The kids in the Stetsons already believe that message, and the young man in the advertisement from Sarah Sanders who put down the chips and picked up a tie is living that success.
Sarah Sanders retold a story Republicans have long told and targeted a demographic that largely chose to give up on work. The story ends in success, and the white right should learn from her ad instead of playing the victim card.
