Recovering blogger. Data entry monkey. Poster of @QuestTheDog pics
Eagleton by way of Indy
Joined August 2009
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The replies to this tweet are... enlightening – at North Crows Nest, IN
I've seen a lot of bad takes from elected officials since Tuesday. Too many are trying to explain away the election results rather than confront the real problem staring back at them in the mirror.
Let's get something straight. Hamilton County is not a blue county. Neither are Hendricks, Boone, Madison, or Delaware.
Republicans didn't lose ground in these communities because of population growth or changing demographics.
We lost because of bad policy, divisive politics, and a failure to deliver REAL results that make people's lives better.
Did national politics play a role? Absolutely. The war, inflation, and tariffs have all contributed to rising costs at the gas pump, grocery store, and on utility bills. Voters are frustrated, and rightfully so.
But let's not pretend our own Statehouse hasn't contributed to that frustration.
Anyone who spent time knocking on doors and actually listening to voters heard it firsthand. People are tired of the divisiveness coming from some of our leaders. They're frustrated by the lack of meaningful action to make life more affordable. And they're tired of politicians picking fights with suburban communities and the very things that make them great, especially our schools.
We need to stop treating the suburbs like the enemy and start listening to the people who live there.
The answer isn't to double down on the same failed approach or blame voters for rejecting it. It's to recognize what isn't working and change course.
Less partisanship. More action. Less talk. More results. And for once, let's stop talking long enough to actually listen.
These counties aren't lost. They can absolutely be won back with strong leadership, common-sense policies, and a relentless focus on making life better and more affordable for Hoosiers.
Voters aren't asking for more political bullshit. Many aren’t wearing a red or blue jersey. They're asking us to do our jobs. It's time we started listening.
Yes, Carmel, Fishers and Westfield are very famous for their affordable apartments.
I live in Hamilton County. It was great for a long time. It's lost now. Thanks to the do-gooders from Indy, and who knows where who left their crime ridden cities and brought their terrible voting habits here.
Then came in the "revitalization" and "affordable housing" and a crap ton of apartments. You know those common buzz words that mean you can't have nice things any more. In come the people who can't invest in the community and take care of it.
Now a lot of the nice places we enjoyed are met with the roaming "teens" walking around in packs. Loud music in cars driving by all times of the night, the endless sirens of police, fire, etc.
But do go on. How do you fix that?
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Sue won in 2023 when Carmel went for Biden in 2020 and even bigger for Harris in 2024. I think she has a good chance (and I campaigned for Dems in 2023).
Your boss, though, definitely couldn't win in Carmel. But that's because his policies suck and hurt Carmel.
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What if I told you about...trains
Atlanta needs a second airport somewhere north of the city.
Major cities all over the country have at least 2 airports.
Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is gigantic. Parking is often times full. Security lines can be long. The trains to the terminals are crowded and it can take up to 40 minutes if you just walk all the way to the last terminal.
And one of the biggest problems is the never-ending terrible traffic in Atlanta if you are driving from anywhere on the north side literally whether it’s down 75, 400, or 85.
I agree that Hoosiers aren't stupid. They've just finally expressed their frustration that 20+ years of Republican rule have made this state poorer while expenses climb and utility rates, data centers, and billion dollar sports giveaways run rampant.
Hoosiers aren’t stupid. We lived through Biden’s open border, $5 gas, empty shelves, and record inflation. Things are better now, not worse. A sudden blue wave wiping out ordinary Indiana Republicans isn’t “the price of gas” or “data centers.” It’s the same machine that always cheats when the numbers don’t add up. America 1st means saying it plain: Democrats didn’t win Indiana fair. They never do.
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Dude spent this whole election cycle and hasn't heard about Talarico in Texas – at Rocky Ripple, IN
Damn. El Sayed is doing Chuck dirty! Wow.
I know I’m fantasizing that some level of sanity has a chance of emerging. I don’t see a single prominent Democrat anywhere talking about taking a more reasonable approach. I mean…how can you compromise and negotiate with a nazi/facist, right?
It’s too far gone at this point.
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Hey Jonathan, just FYI, Spidey is now Dock Ock in Spider-Man's body.
Next comic: Spidey eats someone else's salad.
It’s a shame Hickman left X-Men so soon. He is so good at this high stakes, big story bullshit. This Avengers run is so fucking good and he did it having to deal with so much bullshit going on with the characters in their own books.
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@grok Of Indiana's 92 counties, how many county clerk's offices are held by Democrats and how many are held by Republicans?
It’s now Friday, and we’re STILL counting ballots in several Indiana races.
If Beau Bayh is serious about election integrity and not just climbing the political ladder, he should work on making sure Hoosiers know who won every election on election night
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Complains about feel good government programs but wants feel-good policing, from a department that has been hundreds of officers short since the Ballard years.
A lot of HamCo apartments opened up post-housing crisis when single family houses were suddenly a risky bet. My old home at Sophia Square opened in 2011.
Hamilton County’s political shift over the past decade should be a wake-up call for Indiana.
We need to seriously rethink our approach to residential development. Instead of prioritizing massive apartment complexes and high-density housing, we should be encouraging single-family homeownership, strong neighborhoods, and communities where families can put down roots for generations.
Growth alone isn't success. The question is whether we're building communities that preserve the character, traditions, and values that have made Indiana such a great place to live.
Indiana shouldn't sacrifice its small-town identity and family-centered communities in the name of unchecked development.
Let's build more homes (not apartments), strengthen homeownership, and protect the Hoosier way of life! 🇺🇸
(Oh… and then DON’T TAX THE HOME!)
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Republicans want to use big government to control the free market – at Rocky Ripple, IN
Hamilton County’s political shift over the past decade should be a wake-up call for Indiana.
We need to seriously rethink our approach to residential development. Instead of prioritizing massive apartment complexes and high-density housing, we should be encouraging single-family homeownership, strong neighborhoods, and communities where families can put down roots for generations.
Growth alone isn't success. The question is whether we're building communities that preserve the character, traditions, and values that have made Indiana such a great place to live.
Indiana shouldn't sacrifice its small-town identity and family-centered communities in the name of unchecked development.
Let's build more homes (not apartments), strengthen homeownership, and protect the Hoosier way of life! 🇺🇸
(Oh… and then DON’T TAX THE HOME!)
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"Why won't she take calls from a rapist apologizer?" - Republicans, probably
Now we learn Amy Acton let Vivek Ramaswamy's concession call go to voicemail. On election night, she promised Ohio she would "work with anyone and everyone."
She ran the same play all fall. She said she was "open to any invitation" to debate. Then she refused to debate Ramaswamy even once. Ohio voters never got to see the two candidates side by side on one stage.
It only ever takes 48 to 72 hours for the lies to expose themselves. There's always a fake reason to throw out the promise. This time the reason is that he's not worth her time.
That act will go out of fashion fast here in Ohio.
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Missouri Republicans get told "no, don't do that", and they do it AGAIN two years later. And are shocked that voters keep rejecting it!
The failure of Proposition A is suboptimal. The failure of Amendment 3 is a horrific tragedy for thousands of innocent souls.
The success of Amendment 6 just made Missouri into a new ideological warzone.
The Left has deceived the state's ideological moderates into believing that what they advocate for is safe and reasonable — this is because of a clever, gradual, decades-long Overton window shift. What is now normal was unthinkable sixty years ago.
The national Right needs to treat Missouri as a desperate swing state IMMEDIATELY. We need Turning Point, we need YR/CR deployments, we need rhetorically brilliant citizen-initiated ballot measures, we need university groundwork that dwarfs the YDSA, we need to realize that Missouri was not like this before.
The Gateway Arch is the greatest symbol of Manifest Destiny and American excellence. If Missouri falls, what does that mean for the destiny of America?
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Foreigners don't know shit about this state. Republican supermajority for 20 years and what is there to show for it? giveaways to billionaire sports teams and tech companies, and corporate tax giveaways while shifting the tax burden to individuals.
Well, to my neighbors in Indiana, I hope you’re paying close attention.
When people from Blue States move in, they don’t learn any lessons. They vote to destroy their new home & turn it into the one they fled.
Don’t let newcomers (especially from Illinois) destroy your State.
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This dude is a Senator and is just now talking about ending a forever war that his party got us into
History was made last night.
For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with.
2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here?
When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead. We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate. When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats.
We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas.
Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas. In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election. For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas. Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass. Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both.
Why were the results so overwhelming? Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today.
Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, “It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.” Too many politicians forget that.
Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas.
Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters.
Corruption. Number two, 18.5%.
The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%.
The candidates are terrible, 7.9%.
The Canada trade war, 7.6%.
The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%.
Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%.
Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%.
The top issue, cost of living, is very real. Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand. They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows. Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story.
Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal. Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II. 29 percent of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year. That’s double the share just two years ago.
In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year. In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401k holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm.
And here’s one that’s really stunning. Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries.
That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care. Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high.
Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.
There’s a very real economic disconnect. Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.
Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain.
So, what do we do now? We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences.
Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.
We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk.
And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed.
Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt. Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business. Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI.
The economic results will be dramatic. Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year. If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump.
In the next two years, we need to do two things.
One, fight the madness. I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable. Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory. It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas.
So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together. But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution.
And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost.
There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America. Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics.
For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers. In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century. It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat. We have got to turn that around.
And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record.
Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism.
People voted as they did because they were angry. Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse. The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether. Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else.
But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas.
We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives. The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well.
When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense. We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America.
It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming. That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.
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My party ignored these issues, and even told voters they were stupid for even thinking about them, but am surprised we lost - This guy, probably.
You win some, you lose some. We lost a lot last night.
There is no way to sugarcoat this: There were huge swings against Republicans in almost every state, and almost every district. Indiana, unfortunately, had one of the largest Democrat over performances in the country.
Most of the largest swings against Republicans came in states that we have won overwhelmingly as of late. Texas, South Carolina, and Indiana all saw Democrat wins for the first time in a decade. When you have nothing but Republican elected officials and Republicans supermajorities in your state, and Republicans in control of Washington, it is hard to campaign on how scary Democrats winning would be.
I have traveled to, and heard many stories, of counties in deeply Republican rural Indiana where party officials and politicians do almost no door knocking, social media, or public events, and they are very unwelcoming to anyone who wants to do those things. Why should they? Republicans win in that county and in Indiana every election!
When that mindset has taken place, your reign in power won’t last long.
I talked to many voters at the door, lots of national and state issues came up that Republicans and Independents expressed deep concern about: The War in Iran (and it’s economic costs), tariffs, allegations of corruption at the state and national levels, support of data centers, solar, and wind in spite of local opposition, flock cameras, the Epstein Files, SB1 (property taxes), lack of action on the SAVE act, and continued silence or support on legal mass migration which is rapidly changing communities all around our state and country.
No single one of these cost us the election, and many of them are more nuanced than a lot of voters make them out to be, but the combination of all killed Republican enthusiasm and led too many independents to vote Democrat.
I truly believe last night will be disastrous for our state and our country. The US senate and Supreme Court could be in for long-term Democrat control.
On top of that, many fantastic candidates and elected officials didn’t make it.
@AndrewIrelandIN is our best state rep, a great guy, and someone who is a rare leader in that role. Many politicians just try to skate by and refuse to say anything that will make even one single person angry, even if it is the right thing to do. Andrew isn’t like that at all, and we need alot more of that attitude.
@MaxForIndiana had a real plan to secure Indiana’s elections, and make our roads safer for every Hoosier by ending CDL fraud. Despite knowing it would be a tough race, he jumped in anyway because he knew what would happen if we lose that office.
And lastly, @Trevor4indiana . When I moved up to Lake County 9 months ago, Trevor was literally the only person I knew, and I had met him just twice. I truly believed he was going to be the best state senator we had seen in quite a while, on top of being the hardest working campaigner I have ever met.
There is no reason why he, as a 30-year-old father of 4, should have to run for political office. He knew he would have to sacrifice his own personal finances, and time with his family, for the good of the state. That is extremely selfless, and the type of person we need running in every single primary against weak Republicans.
Straight ticket Democrat votes went from 29% in Lake County in 2024 to 40% in 2026. In any other year, he would’ve won in a landslide, but this race, unfortunately, was unwinnable.
I truly believed the election was around 50/50. I was dead wrong. To all the people in my replies on this website predicting a blue wave for years: You were right. Take your victory lap.
And I congratulate all election winners, including Scott Houldieson, Beau Bayh, and David Boyd, and hope they represent all Hoosiers.
I am going nowhere! Political winds can change quickly, and I can’t wait to keep fighting to make sure we come back stronger than ever!
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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