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Goodguy  1d ago (text post)   Edited 21hr ago   6856 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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https://x.com/JDVance/status/2118004988433641835

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

  1. End the war
  2. Focus on cost of living/inflation
  3. Put America First
  4. Change our relationship to Israel

In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

How will the “Israel is our ally” crowd handle this admission from the VP? By the results, Israel is only the ally of the Democrats: they handed the country over to them by instigating a stupid war through the ears and advisors of Trump. They chose their own petty Middle Eastern feud over what’s good for America and American conservatism.

Joe Kent, as the Chief of Staff at the DNI in 2025 and early 2026, was one of only a dozen or so Americans with access to the totality of America’s intelligence across all 18 agencies. He knows things we have never and will never hear of. He resigned from his role in order to call out this dynamic:

Israel knew the war on Iran would not be quick or easy, they just knew they had to get President bought in by killing Ayatollah Khamenei. President Trump he was aware of all these risk factors, but he chose to listen to Benjamin Netanyahu and he chose to listen to very pro-Israel voices within his inner circle. The President was aware of it, but again, he had a very small circle around him saying, “No, no, Iran’s a paper tiger. They didn’t hit you after Operation Midnight Hammer. You were able to, you know, just slide into Venezuela, kidnap the President, There’s already protesters on the street.” This whole thing’s going to be over in three or four weeks. That’s what the Israelis told him. Meanwhile, getting him to sign on to killing the Ayatollah, The Israelis, when I would interact with them, they were always very clear-eyed. They knew that this was not going to be a quick war, but for them, getting us involved in this slog to take out the regime was always their primary objective. And they sold it to President Trump as something that was going to be very easy, knowing that all they had to do was get us bought in.

Further,

When Dubowitz says “for the next two & a half years” he is basically admitting that the initial goal of the pro Israel lobby was to get us into this war knowing that once we were in, it would be very difficult for us to get out. Dubowitz & the Israelis alway knew this would be a very long war, but lied to Trump & the admin with tales of a decapitation strike leading to a popular uprising, resulting in a quick victory. They knew this was a lie. They will continue to lie to get us to do their bidding, regardless of what it costs our nation. Rooting out foreign influence starts with cutting off access to Israeli surrogates like FDD.

And…

Traitors are people who lie and get our troops killed in needless wars that don’t serve our country. The Israeli lobby knows this war has been a disaster for public support, and they are panicking. It’s advocates are working overtime to try and justify the mess they got our country into.

Manipulating & inflating intelligence is how we got into the disastrous Iraq war—we should know better. Unfortunately, thanks to the Israeli lobby & its paid influencers, we’ve ended up in this situation yet again, this time with a much more consequential country and a war that is shaping up to be an even bigger mess.

I know a lot of people here still consider Israel an “ally” or at least a neutral country in the grand scheme of things. Do these midterm results change your opinion? Do they shift you toward seeing Israel as a dangerous “enemy within”?

In all my time of paying attention to politics, I don't remember ever seeing a Vice President so boldly question one of the President's core policies (Iran war in this case). Maybe I'm forgetting some examples, but this seems quite unusual to me.

I don't know what Vance truly believes about Iran. My guess is that he genuinely has no interest in waging the war. I remember some news that Vance was skeptical of the war before Trump launched it. But this is definitely good politics one way or another, if Vance wants to stay a major player.

Wild to see Vance rushing to put forth the optics that he basically agrees with Nick Fuentes on major aspects of where the right should go from here. (And these are actually some of the main things that Fuentes has been excoriating him for.)

Didn’t Trump announce cutting funding to Israel yesterday? This looks to me like the admin together admittedly a mistake. Which shows the ability to adapt.

Netanyahu has been floating that idea for over a year now. He then told Trump to stop sending them those 3.6-4bn that they've been receiving annually. Point being that, whatever it is, it's not Trump or the admin dumping the Israelis. At best it's Israel recognizing that they're becoming a drag on their own horse, and are trying to lighten the load so it doesn't collapse. But if that were a serious position, the timing is certainly awful and made completely irrelevant by the Iran war.

A much simpler explanation is that Netanyahu is making his own play for his own politics in Israel, and its effect on America is irrelevant to the decision being made.

There's been a long-running conspiracy theory on /r/politics that Vance would oust Trump after the midterms so he could get 10 years as president. Of course, they thought that would happen after the 2018 midterms.

??? Vance wasn't VP in 2018...

I assume he means

Of course, they thought Pence would do that after the 2018 midterms.

In all my time of paying attention to politics, I don't remember ever seeing a Vice President so boldly question one of the President's core policies

Cheney being pro gay marriage comes to mind. Though gay marriage was just barely within the overton window at that time so I'm not sure how core that was to Bush's platform or if the electorate even cared what Cheney thought.

I don't know what Vance truly believes about Iran.

He was shilling it in a live TV interview the day he was announced as Trump’s running mate. Unprompted!

Oh, what did he say?

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