Dems Sweep as Voters Take MAGA To School

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1:12their election lies, this sweep that began Tuesday is so clear and decisive that MAGA leaders are not trying that route. Instead, they're facing the voters' rebuke as they sift through the wreckage. And Republican politicians like Ted Cruz clearly know their party will face this similar electorate in one year. And he also knows something very simple. Winning campaigns tend to address voters' realities, which right now are very negative on MAGA, rather than denying those realities. How are you feeling this morning? Like, yeah, I can relate. Look, last night was a disaster. Last night was a total and complete disaster.

1:59It was an electoral blowout. The results in New Jersey were disastrous. The results in Virginia were terrible. The margins are so large and Republicans lost across the board everywhere in every race. There's really no good news. You destroyed you, destroyed the Republican Party for a generation. The Republicans like to lose. They enjoy losing. Republicans did not have a good day. So anyone says, well, not really that, but no, it was bad. Republicans don't know how to win. They don't know who to run. They don't know what to do when he's not, when daddy's not there to fly them across the finish line.

2:37I don't think it was good for a Republican. The Republican Party needs to get it together. A-S-A-P. Get your blank together, quote unquote, because they don't know what to do when daddy's not there, quote unquote. There you have it. The emphasis, though, in whatever colorful language you hear, on the right is facing their troubling reality in order to change it while they still have a chance. Republicans are not just concerned that they lost those couple states or the races we've told you about. They're concerned about something much larger, something national, something that could wipe them out in future election or elections, plural.

3:19They are worried that these trends are real and will continue and wipe them out. In Congress, the Republican Party, remember, as I showed you earlier, is defending this tiny, narrow margin. That's all they got out of Trump on the ballot last year. He did win by a point and a half, but over in the House, he won so narrowly, and they've since hemorrhaged further in special elections, they can only afford to lose two seats. And this week, they lost races by double digits. Some Republican partisans first were trying to deflect, sort of on Tuesday night, a little bit Wednesday morning we heard this.

3:56They would argue that those governor's races were in blue-leaning states. Well, that talking point didn't have a very long half-life. It has now died by Thursday. Because the data comes in and people take a minute to sift through it. And the headlines you see that we go through on TV and the newspaper, underneath those headlines is a lot more data. And we will synthesize it for you. But it shows that basically the Republicans have a big problem. And that Democrats are doing much better with voters than they did just one year ago, specifically with the voters that decide national races. Democrats winning with dramatic gains among the people who have drifted back to the Republican Party last year.

4:40And that includes, as Axios points out, black, Latino and young voters. Dems also won a majority of women voters and nearly half the men who voted. Okay, so you take half plus more than half. Well, that's everybody. Okay, but it also is important because it cuts into the gender gap that had hurt them last year. Megyn Kelly talks about whether the Republicans have their, quote, daddy. That's the way she phrased it. Well, without their, quote, daddy, as she would put it, or without, as I would put it, the president on the ballot, they have a gender gap that's going the other way. Now, the other thing that we saw was while there were some select races, like I told you about the race in Mississippi, local races, the other thing about anything statewide is it matters more than a house district or a special election.

5:30We've had, remember, everyone said, oh, this week is the first big set of races, but we've had some other races across this year, but they were in specific districts. districts, as you know, are drawn. We have these debates about gerrymandering and redistricting. It's a small pocket. When you get statewide data, though, that's a whole other thing. And the night of, we're telling you about the wins. We tell you double digits. But as the days go on, everyone, the politicos, the data nerds, the journalists, everyone starts going in. And statewide races give you a ton more information. They explain why someone like Ted Cruz is so panicked because here's some statewide information.

6:10Almost every single county in Virginia went more blue. Now, this is one of those charts that's a little wonky, right? It's not as dramatic as a red-blue map of the whole country, but the arrows that are blue are good news for the Democrats. And in a different year, like last year, we would have had a lot more red arrows and it would have been a balance. What you see here, if you don't want to call it a blue wave, you can call it a blue shift in that state in just about every county. You can see those shifts across the terrain. They say numbers don't lie. But in electoral politics, maps don't lie either.

6:46Now, if this map were replicated in other states or around the country next year, it would be lights out for MAGA and the Republicans in the midterms. That's if the trends hold. Now, White House Republican veteran Karl Rove notes that the voters' decisions Tuesday were certainly a result of their disapproval of Trump. Several people close to him had been saying privately the warning signs are everywhere, Axios reports in their behind-the-curtain coverage. Before the election, polls showed a clear, consistent backlash against almost everything Trump is doing. Politico reporting it bluntly, Trump enters his lame duck era.

7:34Oh, snap. If the term lame duck is familiar, we have reported on the perils of lame duck Trump on this program, On the Beat, for weeks. And the reason we've reported on that is based on the evidence. There were signs that he was fading. There were signs that Republicans, including we saw Steve Bannon, were nervous about this. And there were signs in the way that our constitutional system works, much as Donald Trump might not like it, there will be no third term. It's unconstitutional. So he is a lame duck who's not going to be on the ballot again. And our constitution breaks up all of these different races on purpose.

8:16So senators serve a longer term than the president. They serve these six-year terms. which means they are incentivized to look at their own job security and careers for what politics will be doing not just this week or in the midterms but in the years ahead beyond this term of this lame duck president and what they're seeing from Ted Cruz to Megyn Kelly to Steve Bannon to everyone I showed you is it's going down and it may not have bottomed out yet then there are Trump's broken vows he didn't campaign on masked ICE agents he talked about going and getting criminal immigrants, but he didn't campaign on mass dice agents or troops in the street or a lot of the other stuff he's been doing.

8:59It's only been a year, but it's almost forgettable that he spent last year in the home stretch, September, October, and this ending month of November, promising to get prices under control to fight inflation. And a year in, voters think he failed. Grocery prices even jumping NPR reports, that frustrates consumers. You can't hide that. You can't spin that. Gas prices, just as high as they were about a year ago. Trump is out making false statements about all that, and I'm not airing those in this report, but even his rush to mislead on those topics tells you those topics are important, and he wants to change the narrative around the truth that high prices matter, and the mass ICE agents and the federal troops, with all the attention they get, they don't make people think the prices are lower.

9:47I told you numbers don't lie. I showed you where the prices are. Now back to why they don't lie. 71 % of people say they're spending more on groceries and utilities than a year ago. By definition, that includes a ton of people who voted for Donald Trump last year. 59 % more specifically blame him for the rising prices. Remember, he came in at about 49, 50%. 59 % blame him for the prices. They lose the midterms if that number is even 52 or 53 nationwide against Republican policies a year from this week. Now, when Trump saw that Republicans lost, he bemoaned the shutdown. And we're now seeing growing delays, lines at the airports, that grinds on.

10:28Trump administration planning to further reduce flights by about 10 % at the major airports in the country. Utility bill prices may go up further. Federal funding is on hold for a$4 billion program that helps people pay heating bills. And when you look at how they want to play the shutdown, Trump was trying to only release a minority, if any, of the food aid. So more people might go hungry. Well, late news, late in the day today, a federal judge rebuking Trump, ordering them to fully fund those benefits, at least for this month. MAGA leaders who thought they were on the rise or they had some new permanent alignment, who thought Democrats were going to continue to shut down, who thought even that the autocratic efforts by Trump to censor and change how people learn about the news from gas prices to mass agents, who thought that they could silence or scare the comics, cancel some shows, buy some media, and all of that would change the fundamentals to say nothing of the law firms and universities.

11:28Well, here we are a year later, and suddenly they're learning a Ferris Bueller rule over at the Trump White House and beyond. Life moves pretty fast.

11:44Yep. I said it before and I'll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

12:01Oh, yeah. Life moves fast. The young Mr. Bueller may have been talking about appreciating what's going on and why sometimes you got to take a day off and enjoy yourself. Well, right now, Democrats look like they're going to be taking a lot of days on because they have a new formula and blueprint that even the biggest MAGA voices say could wipe them out sooner rather than later. We'll be back with our guests and you. I'll be back with you in just 90 seconds.

12:34The Democrats swept all the major races across. Let's just say for Trump, it was a huge kick in the ballroom. You know what I'm saying? Today, Democrats are walking around with a spring in their step like a divorced mom in her 40s whose new haircut just got her carted at two different bars. That's the vibe. Late night on the election results. We're joined by Molly Dongfast from The New York Times, an MSNBC analyst and host of the Fast Politics, podcasts talk about life moves pretty fast. Yes, it does. You see? That's right. It all fits in. I mentioned the talking points that died quickly this week because there was a little, you know, stutter step in politics.

13:14Sometimes people say, well, you know, you want to act like you're winning at the end. You want to act like if you lost, it wasn't that bad. That's not what Megyn Kelly and Ted Cruz are saying. They're acknowledging this is a problem they got to fix for their party. They got shellacked. You know, it's funny because I was in New Jersey covering the Mikey Sherrill race and I was talking to a national political reporter who was saying, well, you know, the polls are tightening. She's just not an effective candidate. And I said, well, the polls show her up seven to 10 points. So where are they? But you did see some like and you see this with sort of these Republican, more Republican leaning pollsters.

13:52Sometimes they'll flood with junk polls. And some of the polls had her up just one point or two points. Now, you'll remember in New Jersey, Harris won by six. Cheryl added seven points to that, winning the state by 13. Yeah. And look, polls are a prediction about who's going to turn out. Right. So if you have a national approval poll, I always remind people, and we don't show a lot of these horse race polls because we don't find them to be very reliable. If you have a national approval poll of all Americans, then you have a relatively small margin of error. And you're saying Americans are against, for example, this current president.

14:27He's mired below 40. As soon as you start polling the state of Virginia and then you say, let's sample it, meaning change the numbers for who we think will turn out. Now you're basically in a statistical prediction. It's not the same as someone making it up, but it ain't, like I said, a pure poll. And so you're pointing out that the reason Democrats here were under credited in those polls was most pollsters didn't think that youth turnout and and some of the other women turnout, et cetera, would be as high. Yeah. And the youth turnout. And I think this is really important because when we talk about the New York mayors, there's he has a huge youth coalition.

15:05But when you look at actually Virginia, New Jersey, we had that, too. We had a lot of youth turnout. And the story of the night, of course, is we spent so much time focusing on young men and young men going to the right. And and but young women are a force to be reckoned with. And they do not like Donald J. Trump. They don't like Trump. People don't like the Trump second term. That's quoting the numbers we showed. And then you have this sort of reaction thing. You know, Trump has been under polled in the past. But boy, when there's a mistake, he sues the pollster. People freak out. You look up three months later and on your algorithm, you still got people complaining about it as if he was wronged by this poll.

15:46Are we going to have three months of that for these Democrats? Because they were underpolled. Right. Well, and I also think it's important to realize, like, Donald Trump came in like he had some kind of huge mandate and he started doing stuff that was remember, he ran. He said, I'm going to make things cheaper. I'm going to run on affordability. I mean, that was his message. Bacon. Remember the weave? He would do this weave on bacon. And what did he do? We love the weave. Right, the weave. But what did he do? He came in and he put tariffs on, which made everything more expensive. And then, I mean, and it was like, and just from there, he went on to, you know, bombing boats in the Caribbean.

16:20These are things nobody wanted from him. You know, he had said he was going to run on affordability. And I think that, you know, then demolishing the East Wing, you know. Didn't help. Didn't help. Didn't help. Hang with me. I want to bring in from the Washington perspective here, Democratic Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts. Good evening. How are you? Great to see you. Thank you. Great to have you. How is this playing in Congress? In our in our report tonight, we showed that it's a big if and a year is a long time. But Republicans seem panicked that if these trends from Tuesday held, they would be wiped out in Congress.

17:01they would be totally wiped out. We would not only win the House of Representatives overwhelmingly, we could very well win the United States Senate as well. That's what happened on Tuesday night. There's a complete underestimation by the experts of how angry the American people are right now. Their health care prices are skyrocketing. Their electricity prices are skyrocketing. The price of food is skyrocketing. The price of clothing is skyrocketing. People went to the ballot box, but they voted with their pocketbook. These are kitchen table issues. And Donald Trump and his economic policy were completely repudiated on Tuesday night across the country, across all demographics and across all of expert opinion.

17:47They just did not see this happening. And so, yes, this is a preview of coming attractions for the Republican Party. if they refuse to come back and talk about health care, talk about affordability, talk about the issues that the American people really care about. And so far, what Donald Trump is saying is we have to talk about affordability more. That's what he said yesterday. Yeah, he's talking the talk, but they're not walking the walk. And the American people can see that. And that's how they voted on Tuesday night. Yeah, and affordability is sort of the big stuff, the macroeconomics. There's also just straight up what the government can do.

18:23and we saw what voters kind of wanted on that. This is now going to be the longest shutdown ever. He was fighting, the president was fighting to have more hunger, not less, to have food insecurity rather than food security. He's now lost this court battle. I have a headline, could change because people know there's appeals, but a federal judge ordering Trump to fully fund the food benefits and rebuking the administration for trying to basically do partial benefits. What do you see as the outlook on the shutdown? And what do you say to your Democratic colleagues who might waver? Because Trump himself seems to think it hurt them on Tuesday.

19:05So you are right. A federal district court judge in Rhode Island ruled today that Donald Trump must feed the 42 million Americans who need the SNAP benefits. and Trump so far has been refusing to do that. If you kick him in the heart, you're going to break your toe. The same thing is true on healthcare. That was completely repudiated on Tuesday night, the healthcare policy of Donald Trump. There are 22 million Americans who are going to lose their healthcare coverage or see dramatic 25, 50, 75 % increase in their healthcare premiums that they have to pay without the tax credits that are still out there with the Republicans refusing to negotiate on.

19:48The House of Representatives, under Republican leadership, they've been in a witness protection program for six weeks now. They refuse to even come to Washington to talk about this health care crisis that's looming. I talked to a man in Natick, Massachusetts on Saturday. Right now, he pays$30 ,000 for his drug coverage for his cancer. He will pay$300 ,000 a year if the Republicans don't come back to Washington And there's 22 million other Americans just like him. So that's what they're facing right now. Anger across the board because of the Republicans' refusal to deal with the real issues that affect real people in their kitchens.

20:26So, Senator, you sound committed. You sound energized. And from what I can tell, these are a bunch of the topics you want to talk about tonight. This is the beat. So sometimes we ask politicians about topics they don't want to talk about. But your leader, Chuck Schumer, never endorsed a Democratic candidate in New York City. You know, that's unusual. That candidate is now mayor elect and changed the turnout model. Young voters, highest turnout in the city since 1969. We know it's a big 10 and people disagree. But what do you say to Chuck Schumer and the parts of the Democratic establishment at this point who seem to be resisting what is part of the process.

21:08In other words, you might disagree with him on a bunch of issues, but if a candidate wins the primary, they're the nominee. Then they become mayor-elect. And it seems like Schumer and perhaps others, you tell us, are kind of behind the step of the voters here. Does that need to be sort of right-sized? Well, I endorsed mayor-elect Mondami myself. Sure. I congratulated him on his victory back in the primary, and I've endorsed him in the general election. But do you think your leader was... I'm all on board. But you think your leader... And I will say this. Do you think Chuck Schumer... I'll refine it.

21:42Do you think Chuck Schumer was out of stats? Look, we're united. The Democratic caucus is united. We're taking on the Republicans on health care, on affordability, on the tariffs, on electricity prices, on every one of these issues. We are united. We are taking it to them. And when John Thune brings that vote out tomorrow morning to open up the government without dealing with the health care crisis, we are going to vote no once again. We are united in our opposition to Trump, Trump, Trump economics. We are going to get to tariffs. I'll get to tariffs as well. Division. But we run out of time. I have to say, fact check.

22:26I don't think Chuck Schumer and the mayor elect are united. They're from the same state. And that's gotten some attack. I mean, this isn't a media thing. That's like a real thing. But we got your answer on that. Before I lose you, I know that you and others are fired up about the tariffs. I want to play what sounded like skeptical questioning. Take a listen of the Trump plan in the Supreme Court. We have never applied it to foreign affairs, but this is a tariff. This is a tax. It is a it is a if I may, it's a foreign facing regulation of foreign commerce. The vehicle is imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been the core power of Congress.

23:04What would prohibit Congress from just abdicating all responsibility to regulate foreign commerce, for that matter, declare war, to the president? So in the minute we have left, your views on that hearing, and is the White House wrong? Is this a tax? Is it a bad idea at this point? A revolution began in Massachusetts 250 years ago. And what the colonists were saying was no taxation without representation. We want to have a vote. We want our congressmen, our senators to have a vote. We don't want King George deciding what the T-tax is, what the SAMP tax is. So that was the revolution. And we are now having a latter-day revolution against Donald Trump's attempt to illegally usurp power from the Congress to tax.

23:54And I was over there in the Supreme Court yesterday. I sat there. The arched eyebrows of some of the Republican-nominated justices, they were going so high they were hitting the ceiling, their arched eyebrows. So the skepticism towards the Republican Solicitor General was absolute. No, this is a tariff is a tax. Only Congress can impose taxes. And Donald Trump does not have the legal right to do so. So he should be ready to get a kick in the behind from the Supreme Court because it's arriving in the very near future. Yeah. Senator Markey, on more than one topic, thanks for joining us tonight. Great to be with you.

24:36Thank you. Absolutely. Appreciate it. Molly Jong-Fast stays with me. We turn to Nancy Pelosi's historic career as she finally takes a bow.

24:48Best speakers, the House of Representatives of Everhead, Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That's by the end of the hour. But up next, we turn to that same friction, that excitement, call it even a tension that you saw with the senator there. This man, he may not be the face of the Democratic Party, but he's the mayor-elect of New York, one of the youngest politicians in the country to lead a city. We're going to talk about him and his playbook for young voters that could help the Dems in the midterms next.

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