Spot the Spin: 2026 Election Edition

0:00Here is our special Spot the Spin election edition today. In our conversations, we're going to talk about the human element of it, the human element coming from the response. That's what I want to focus on.

0:19There are pundits abound. Yesterday, today, still talking about what happened. But in our community, spotting the spin is what happens in the results, you know, like what people are saying in the results. Here's the theme. Before the votes were even counted, and if we look back yesterday, we know who these people are. We know exactly what's being said. So I'm not here to say who should have won or why we needed a blue tsunami. I mean, that's not what we're going to talk about today. Let's just talk about what we've learned from the responses. You know, we can even start, you know, from the day before, what was happening, the rhetoric that we were hearing from the administration, that we were hearing from Trump, that we were hearing in front of Trump standing in front of the reflecting pool.

1:11And Heather Cox Richardson, she noted how ridiculous it was that Trump, the day before the election was speaking in front of the reflecting pool with all the signs. But she had compared it to narcissists, like narcissism and the reflecting of the reflection in the pool. Oh, my gosh, that's brilliant from it. But what an interesting take right there to even have the day before the election, to have the rhetoric and the messaging around how he fixed a reflecting pool, something that no one was discussing. No one brought up any concern about it, but that's what he wanted to highlight, what he changed there.

1:55That is a message within the message showing he likely was aware of what was going to happen. So let's talk about some of the, let's just do the scoreboard real quick here. Some of these races, you are joining us from these areas. Gina Hinojosa defeats Greg Abbott. I got to be honest with you. I was not familiar with this race. I was shocked when I saw that Greg Abbott lost for Texas governor. In our community, we have discussed Greg Abbott in the past. I did a whole podcast during the floods last year in July that Greg Abbott was in a pinch because Trump wanted to get rid of FEMA, my former employer, And then that tragedy happened at the Mystic Camp.

2:44All those young girls, other people, you know, all those people who died at that camp were just in that flash flooding. And Greg Abbott, all the emergency managers needed FEMA to come in. So you already knew. It's not surprising. I'll tell you what Trump said about Greg Abbott in a minute. So that was interesting. Here we have in Texas, the money, the machine, the name recognition could not outweigh. you know, how the voters felt. We also had, I know we have our Mainers in here, Troy Jackson over Susan Collins. But what was interesting about Susan Collins, she didn't come out on stage. We saw her earlier in coverage.

3:25You mostly, you know, she was wearing her red. She was up on stage. But she did not concede on stage. She made the phone call to Troy Jackson to concede. And that's it. And then made a statement there where she said, I called him tonight to congratulate him and assure him that my staff and I will work to ensure a smooth transition. Also, we have Tom Keene Jr. in New Jersey, a New Jersey swing district, our community. We talked about him. You'll remember when he disappeared for four months and he it came out in the you know, when he came back, he said he was being treated for depression. but there was no, no truth telling, no accountability.

4:09And again, we talked about that, that it's okay to keep personal medical things private, but he went beyond the lack of transparency and he never bounced back from that. Of course, we also have Annie Andrews defeating Darlene Graham. And Annie Andrews lost badly to Nancy Mace in 2022 and now Annie Andrews comes roaring back. That is an incredible comeback story for Andrews. Richard Ojeda defeated Richard Hudson in North Carolina's 9th District. What's interesting about this is Hudson wasn't just an incumbent. He was also, he chaired the National Republic Congressional Committee and he lost. So the person who's responsible for protecting the House Republicans, he gets ousted.

4:57Also, Katie Badia Stout defeating Brenda Herrera in the Texas 23rd District. Also, that being a Republican who is a guns right activist being defeated, I think that's interesting as well. These are less familiar names in Texas, but you see that wave that happened in Texas, which is incredible. Of course, we have James Tallarico, who defeated Ken Paxton. The amount of money that was poured into Texas, specifically in Paxton's campaign and Tellurico comes out. And also, we discussed this last week on our live, Amy Acton over Vimmick, Ramaswani as the Ohio governor. I think it was a shaky campaign anyway, but we discussed that ad where he brought out her estranged mother who remained married to Acton's stepfather who abused Amy Acton.

5:58He never recovered from that as well, so did the add, sink them. I don't even know if we can even say if that's so, but there is a trend that we see. Now, our first spin category that we're going to see is blame the calendar. This is something that I saw in a lot of the Republicans discussing the calendar aspects. So Monday, November 2nd, President Trump gave a closing midterm speech. We are talking about the reflecting pool. Heather Cox Richardson referring to the narcissist in the pool. More than 20 minutes was spent on the renovation, which, oh my gosh, I mean, God, it was so fun watching the presser.

6:48It was incredible. But then he said, quote, for some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong shot. November 2nd, he said this. So they knew this is now a mindset for Trump and the White House, knowing what they were headed into. Mike Johnson, who's the House Speaker from Louisiana, he was in Shreveport at the time speaking. And he said, this is yesterday, he said this, quote, from the first day of this election, we knew that to keep the House and sustain our majority, we would have to defy more than a century of midterm history. So in the administration, the main messaging was the calendar.

7:36It was about midterms. It was about historically, this is what happens anyway. He also added that it looks like history will be kept. So here we have the administration with the narrative of, It wasn't us. It's just the clock. It's history. This is how it goes. This is a classic move of lowering expectations. They knew going in that this was going to happen. This is so the loss reads as completely normal. We're not surprised. It's not a verdict. And that's what's important. The opponent isn't the voter. The opponent is the calendar. And that's the move that was the November 2nd, November 3rd reasoning.

8:25But then that dropped. Now, for context, when we heard that again in or in the past 2010, November 3rd, Democrats just lost 63 House seats. The president at the time, Barack Obama, gave a press conference the next day and said his party took a, quote, shellacking. That's the same situation. But one administration blamed the calendar. The other one looked in the mirror since we're talking about mirrors. So if you think about in your own life, the last time someone handed you an excuse, when was the excuse like some outside excuse? When is the last time you actually heard someone blame it on what it is?

9:12So that's something that we can look for there. Part two, I'm sure you guys saw this and I could ask you in the chat, which one is your favorite one? And that is blaming the commentator. I noticed that last night. I found Fox interesting because Trump did go on Fox. But if you looked at Trump Social, which I did, I do not have an account, so it's not easy to get in there. But Trump said on True Social he was watching Fox News, but couldn't stand the voice of Jessica Tarloff. She's a Democratic strategist and co-host of the Fox Five. But this is what he said. He called her, quote, dumb as a rock and a loser and said he had somewhere else to go until she was off the air.

9:59What? OK, what is the move there that we've seen plenty of times before in a crisis? You attack the person. You're going down. So you attack the person, not the point. He did not like what what Fox News was saying, which we were commenting on that. Like, wow, look at Fox showing the polling and what's happening there. So it's not surprising that Trump was getting a little antsy there. So, and also, what does Trump love to go after? He loves going after women. He loves going after women. So he goes after her voice. Instead of the argument, he has to rip her voice. How many women hear that about themselves or their voice?

10:45They have to apologize for their own voice. also, I don't know if anyone has someone like this in their life, too. The all cappers, Trump bringing out the all caps. We were getting all caps on that one. And so in this case, the caps is the emotion and the frustration that Trump was feeling them. And yes, Laura, the contempt that he felt. But what did he say when things get hard? What does he do? He leaves the room. So he had to leave Fox as it happened. Now, another person who I saw on Fox, Caroline Lovett, so she was on Fox. And I saw this clip. She said, quote, I think the American people forgot about the good policy.

11:30Maybe listen to the lying media on the other side that is definitely in the backseat of the Democratic Party. She's saying that on a media channel. She's saying that on Fox. But here she is, the former press secretary. She just left the White House in August. That's her job. She is knocking down her work. She was the press secretary. That was her job to get that messaging out. But what does she do? Blames the media. And not just the media, the lying media. To blame it on lying media and the information failing you, it's her own information. Now, the comparison there, I wanted to draw a comparison in terms of the rhetoric that we're seeing.

12:20And if you go back to the 50s, to the peak of the Red Scare and communism and the Cold War, And you go back to Joseph McCarthy and the Army McCarthy hearings. The Cold War dominated the rhetoric back then. And we have seen and heard a lot of Cold War type rhetoric from the administration. And one of the quotes that came out, so this was Army Counsel Joseph Welsh, because McCarthy was attacking the younger lawyer who was representing the Army. And this is what he said, quote, Until this morning, Senator, I've never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no decency, sir, at long last?

13:11Have you left no sense of decency? That is a clip that we have seen played over and over. So I'm certain that you've heard or seen that clip, but maybe you don't know the context. But that's the context from the rhetoric. And that rhetoric is the rooting out rhetoric of communism and the red square, the red scare of the red square. But how often did we see this rooting out rhetoric in this campaign? So I looked up some of those, this rooting out rhetoric. In Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump was quoted saying, we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs, that's coded, that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

14:04So he's routinely using this rhetoric. Quote, there's now resurgence of the communist menace in our land. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both. So what McCarthy was saying during an actual era of a red scare, the administration was trying to drum up echoes of that scare and it did not work. So when you think about in your own life, and when I say this in their own life. Think about the people who kind of fall into that opponent category with you. It could be work. It could be a partner. It could be a parent. It could be just someone in your life that you're rubbing up against.

14:51You may be the truth teller. These are the moves that you might notice coming back at you, the labeling from it. So when are you critiqued for your tone or something about you or your gender or your preferences or whatever it is. Think about the times that you get mislabeled, the people who root out that rhetoric against you. The next move that we saw, and we saw a lot of this, was blaming the network. Did you guys see this on Truth Social? Did you see this on Truth Social. 7 p.m. last night, as the first polls closed, Trump posted, quote, Fox News ratings are way down 27 percent with a banger because they're spending too much time covering the Trump deranged Democrats.

15:46That was posted to Truth Social. Of course, the 27 percent in his claim. Who knows where that came from? And in the same post he wrote, it's them, not me. Okay, so we see the move here. We see the move. He slammed Fox News voter polls as, quote, always the worst. And at 1037, as the night was unfolding, 1037, I wasn't on the ballot, And if I was, we would have won in a landslide. Banger. Thank you for your attention to this matter. 11.35 p.m. He blamed, I believe, the governor who he was trying to get under his thumb, Governor Abbott, who had lost. Trump wrote, if Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, hadn't become a rhino, Republican in name only, in the last six months of his political life, he wouldn't have lost.

16:44He went back to his original formula and it wasn't pretty. Just before midnight, he said, quote, why does Fox News have Bill de Blasio, the worst mayor in the history of New York City, on the air, ranting and raving like a lunatic? The irony. The irony. Oh, my gosh. Fox News bears responsibilities for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Democrat opposition and worse, God bless America. Then he go around midnight on the phone with Brett Baer on Fox, quote, they didn't like the candidates and some of the candidates that I endorsed fought me and they didn't like that they fought me.

17:26So again, now he is deflecting everything from him being the blame. He is finding anything that he can. Also, he said, I don't think it's the war, Brett. I think it's the gasoline price. People agree with what I'm doing on Iran, but they really probably weren't willing to do the short-term consequence of paying more for gasoline. This is President Trump's way of blaming you. Oh, my favorite. This one was a good one. Who knows who said this? Quote, Larry Kuloza correct. We were too successful the first year of the Trump administration, posted to X and posted by none other than Kristi Noem. So now what we're doing is we're blaming the media.

18:17Where is there another time in history where we have blamed the media? So Spiro Agnew was President Nixon's attack dog. So the line written by a speechwriter, so this is William Safar, but also Pat Buchanan was a speechwriter to Richard Nixon is when they said, quote, nattering the bobs of negatism. That was how they labeled the press. But now, of course, Spiro Agnew, he was accused of accepting kickbacks. So he was kicked out. Isn't it interesting, the people who blame the press, what ends up to people blaming the press? But again, we know this. When you blame the press, you're done. Done. And it's not just Republicans.

19:02Graham Plattner, that's what I called it. When he started blaming the press, it was like, ooh, Plattner, you are done. I didn't think I'd ever say that, but he was done. And I'm gonna call this the three and a half, the sore winner. There is a contestant that I have been following for a while because Greg mentioned him to me. So he was the owner of a company called Sticker Mule. And Sticker Mule, okay, so it's just this company. His name is Anthony Constantino. But he was the CEO of Sticker Mule, so it's a custom sticker company. So in 2024, he put a huge sign, which you would see if you drove past it, that was a vote for Trump sign.

19:41I was watching his speech last night, because that's one of the things that I asked. Greg stayed up a lot later and I said, Anthony Costasino, did he win? And he won. So we had to watch his victory speech. Now, he is going to be a very, very limited candidate. He's like a Boebert type of a candidate. He has licked the boots of the Trumps, of Donald and Don Jr. So he replaced Elise Stefanik. But now he's there. But in his campaign speech, he said to the voters who didn't pick him, To all the people that voted for Blake Jendebian, I can't pronounce the last name there, Jendebian, you all made a big mistake.

20:29I'm going to spend the next two years winning you over. And then he said they spent the whole time lying to the citizens of the New York 21st District. He also was talking about one of the he said one of the nicest men in politics, Roger Stone. And I said to Greg, did he just say Roger Stone, who was like a famous political trickster? So you have there. and then he starts talking about how he called Don Jr. to say that he spent$17 million of his own money to fight for that seat. He said, this is the clip that came out. There was a local television station from Watertown, New York, I think, Channel 7.

21:16He calls out the reporter and says to him, he called out Domblewski and the anchor Jeff Cole and called him expletive, expletive and then started leading the crowd When have you heard this before? And kick them out, kick them out. And then he got security guards to escort the reporters out of his speech. So he is he is trying to be as Trumpian as he can. And in that speech, which, OK, if you're ever going to do it, do it. But after that, it'll be interesting to see what happens with him. So we're going to label him as the sore winner. The sore winner. He's crazy, but I got to keep watching him.

22:04He's going to be there for entertainment. Okay, then we have the early fraud claim. We have Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller. But Katie Miller already started posting that there was issues with the election in the district. It's around Westchester, New York. that there were some problems with the polling machines there. So already she is calling out the fraud part about it, the preemptive fraud claim. But it's interesting, it's interesting that they didn't go harder on the fraud campaign, but in the beginning, but not so much because it was a complete routing. Yeah, so this was in Lawler's, this is in Lawler's area.

22:49And Lawler went in his concession speech, did not pick up on that framing at all to say that there was something up with the machines or anything like that. He just conceded. We know that Trump talked a lot about the fraud. He said, quote, we're getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. This is a fraud on the American people. This is an embarrassment to our country. He also said, so we'll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don't want them to find any ballots at four o 'clock in the morning and add them to the list. This is a fraud on the American public and this is an embarrassment to our country.

23:34All right, so now let's look at some of the messages that we saw that were a little more on the courageous side when people have the courage to admit, this may not come out how I want it to. So this is one that I polled, and it was an hour left before the polls closed in Johnson County, Kansas. Adam Hamilton was at a friend's house saying that he's writing two speeches, a victory speech and a concession speech. So he told that to CNN. He won 53 to 45 % with 93 % of the vote counting at the time that he said that quote. So, but the man he beat, Roger Marshall, Senator Roger Marshall, so for 11 p.m., he said, quote, I called Adam Hamilton.

24:27I've congratulated him. We're conceding. It's humbling, right? It's very humbling. I don't have any answers. So compare that to a Susan Collins. Granted, these things are happening late at night, but when you have someone like that who can stand up and concede that way, you know, says something. We can all go back in time to 2000, Florida, Florida, Florida, with George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Al Gore conceding. And Al Gore, even though he was winning the popular vote, the Electoral College, he lost at that moment. And then, of course, take backs when that happened. So that was another example. So all of these types of campaigns and the rhetoric from this campaign, I think, just made for an interesting messaging perspective.

25:25If you watch the messaging coming out of the administration, but out of Donald Trump, you're also watching the emotion of Donald Trump and seeing someone have to take all of this in in real time. I think, you know, this is an election where, you know, I remember, you know, Trump's election back in the Twitter days when Twitter was such an effective message. But Truth Social, which is Donald Trump's Twitter, it just doesn't pack a punch at all. Like when you look at the headlines, so little of the headlines refer back to those posts. Vance also had a very lengthy statement this morning. Did he now?

26:11J.D. Vance stated on Wednesday, November 4th, that the U.S. war with Iran was the, quote, the real reason the Republican Party suffered the sweeping defeats. In a social media post, Vance attributed the GOP's majority's loss to the February conflict initiated by President Donald Trump. I guess that's an easy way out, right? He noted that Trump's acknowledged, acknowledged Iran's impact on the election during a phone interview, which he did. Vance outlined four strategic shifts for the Republicans moving forward, including ending the Iran war, prioritizing the cost of living, refocusing on an American first agenda and adjusting the U.S.-Israel relationship.

26:51So J.D. Vance also setting the table for his campaign around his messaging. Oh, this is good. This is rich, you guys. I'm so happy that you guys mentioned J.D. Vance. He challenged party members to drop alternative excuses regarding the Senate losses, arguing for transparency. Sit on that one for a moment. J.D. Vance, arguing for transparency. He also validated voters who shifted their support to Democrats, encouraging them to channel that frustration into electing like minded Republicans. That's not that's actually not a bad message because that's that's what he needs to do now. So we might see Vance shift a little more moderate.

27:35So we're going to start seeing some messaging come out now. All right, everyone, what's our big takeaway? What is our big takeaway? We we saw the was some would call it a blue tsunami. Some would call it a red undertow or a riptide, whatever it is. The Democrats won big. And that gave us a slew of messages that we could go through to see the take that we have here. Other people in the administration leaning on the Iran war, gas prices, the economy. All right, you guys, I love spending November 4th, the day after the election, with all of you, my people. I love that we follow all this together.

28:18So I will see you all next week. Same place, same time. See you later. Bye for now.