Democrats swept Tuesday’s midterm elections, taking the House and Senate by significant margins. Seats that went heavily Trump in 2022 went blue; Democrats not only won in most of the closely-watched Senate races (Texas, Michigan, Maine) but in states that seemed likely to stay red and were largely ignored in the press — South Carolina elected Annie Andrews over Lindsay Graham’s sister, and as of 4am Eastern time on Wednesday, deep-red Mississippi remains up for grabs. Mississippi! Cindy Hyde-Smith may well pull ahead, but wow — even if she wins, this sends a pretty strong message that voters, including Republicans, are awfully fed up with Trump, Trumpism, and the Republican Party. And if she loses? All I can say is lololol and congrats to the Democratic senator from Mississippi.

Kansas. Iowa. Ohio. North Carolinas. Both Carolinas! What a night.

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The man to credit with / blame for all of it is Donald Trump. These results are a rebuke of decisions he has made almost unilaterally: The tariffs that raised consumer prices. The utterly pointless Iran war that compromised American security and sent gas prices skyrocketing. The masked ICE agents who abused immigrants and citizens alike and were afforded anonymity and total protection. The corruption that enriched the president and his family to the tune of billions upon billions while Americans were wondering if they could afford the cheapest ground beef on the shelf. A president more concerned about his ballroom, his arch, and the algae in the reflecting pool than how Americans were actually faring.

Americans have given that president a giant middle finger, rejecting even Trump’s attempts to bribe voters into supporting him with $5,000 checks. And any normal president would be chastened, slinking quietly into his lame duck era and allowing his party to distance themselves from him so they might have a shot at regaining some power in two years.

This president, though, has never done anything quietly, and has certainly never done anything for the good of anyone but himself. And I suspect that he will spend the next two years doing everything in his power to exact revenge upon his enemies and push whatever radical agenda is sold to him by a small group of his most loyal and least judicious advisors — the ones who know their careers are tied to Trump, and that their own days in power are waning along with his. This is not going to be Trump’s lame duck era. It’s going to be his revenge era — even as he mentally crumbles before our eyes.

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MSNOW has called the sixth Senate seat flip, giving Democrats control of the Senate and the House. I just heard one of the panelists say that Susan Collins called Troy her opponent, Troy Jackson, in Maine and conceded. Three Republican House seats in Iowa just flipped to the Democrats. Things are moving fast, and they are moving toward even more wins by Democrats in the House.

The opposition party has won back both houses of Congress in a midterm election only three times since World War II. The results for Michigan and Alaska aren’t even in, and it’s already a political earthquake in Washington D.C. The White House will not get a single law passed during the next two years. Not one. They won’t get another person confirmed by the Senate. For anything. No more judges. No more cabinet secretaries. No one. It is likely Democrats won’t even schedule confirmation hearings.

But the big realignment in this election was between money and people. Republicans spent billions to elect their candidates in the midterms. Elon Musk alone spent nearly $500 million to elect Republicans, with $250 million of the total going down the Ken Paxton sewer hole in Texas. Silicon Valley billionaires threw tens of millions at Republicans. AI companies put in their millions. So did crypto companies. All of their millions went to Republicans. Here in Pennsylvania, local television was drenched in ads for Day-trader Bresnahan, who had to have raised tens of millions to waste on them. Did. Not. Matter. Paige Cognetti whipped him by nearly 10 points.

None of the billions spent on Republicans in battleground races worked. People ignored the ads those billions bought and went out and voted the way they were going to vote, and they voted for Democrats. I don’t know what’s going to happen between now and 2028, but money is going to play a different role in that election. The vote today was a people’s vote. It was a vote against billionaires as much as it was a vote against Republicans. And it was a vote against the corruption and excess represented by Donald Trump and everything he and his family stand for.

Today, the people spoke in a mandate to reset the balance of power in Washington D.C. Republicans and their oligarch friends tried to buy this election, but the votes of the people were not for sale.

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We’ve already taken the House, and we’ve won the races we knew we’d win in North Carolina and Georgia, but I’ve got to write this sentence. Georgia will have a governor who is a Black woman, Keisha Lance Bottoms. We’re ahead in Texas. We’re ahead in Kansas. We’re ahead in Michigan. We’re ahead in Ohio. They’re calling House races in North Carolina for Democrats that weren’t on anyone’s radar.

This is an election that’s being won on organization, enthusiasm, and turn out. New voters went to the polls in every state in the country. MAGA stayed home, or coughed hard and looked sideways as they filled out a ballot voting Democrat. This may not be a realignment, but the message tonight, the message tomorrow, the message for the next two years is this: Nobody is afraid of Trump anymore, not even Republicans who will have to defend House and Senate seats they managed to hang onto this year.

There will be hearings, dozens and dozens of hearings. There will be subpoenas, hundreds of subpoenas sent by messenger all over Washington D.C. If you’re a lawyer, and you want to make a quick million dollars, put out a shingle that says “I represent Republicans in trouble on the Hill.” You’ll be lounging on your own yacht in the Chesapeake by next August.

Trump will sputter and whine and lie, but you know what? Donald Trump doesn’t matter tonight, and he won’t matter tomorrow. He’s not just a lame duck. He’s over.

Wow. They just called South Carolina for Democrat Annie Andrews. That was the Lindsey Graham seat. Hell, it was the Strom Thurmond seat! For the next six years, it will belong to a Democratic woman.

We’re going to have some fun writing our Substack columns here at the Truscott-Harris household, and it starts right now.

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“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

And, you know, creating a version of Google for students that doesn't incorporate AI is just incompatible with their plans to recruit young customers too hard to do.

This from the same company that cannot produce a genAI product that doesn't easily facilitate cheating. Guided Learning is supposed to get students to Learn Stuff rather than just using a cheatbot (spoiler alert: it's still just a cheatbot).

But Google, the folks who previously declared internally that its school products were intended to create a pipeline of future users, really really really really REALLY want to put AI in front of the 70 million future users sitting in schools. They have just had a "negative cash flow quarter" thanks to massive AI spending. That is further exacerbated by the discovery that this AI-incorporated search that they want to force on students actually makes less money than the old approach.

Look, if you are of a Certain Age, you might still harbor the quaint notion that Google's main business is running a search engine. It is not; the New Google's (the post "Don't Be Evil" Google) main business is advertising. But we tend to be sensitive about the idea of turning over young minds and eyeballs to advertisers, so it has been useful for Google to wear its Ed Tech mask when approaching schools.

Only the Ed Tech mask won't cover up AI, and educators and parents and even students have been pretty clear that they'd rather not give children unfettered access to AI products. 

This is a hell of a bold move for Google, considering that there are plenty of other search engines in the world.

I expect that many other tech companies will be whipping up a counter-Google education campaigns by end of business today.  I can only hope that this piece of evil thuggery will blow up in Google's piggy corporate faces, and I certainly intend to share with my own local school district how I think they should respond. 

I will vote today. I always vote; I am what political operatives call a super-voter, a person who has voted in every election he was ever eligible to vote in, and therefore can be counted on to vote next time, so aiming a megaphone of electioneering at him might not be a waste of time. Today, I only vote in three races, and none of them have any great significance because it would be a huge shock and surprise if they didn't go the way they are expected to go. Josh Shapiro seems hard to beat, and my state and US House members-- well, in my area, if Jesus registered as a Democrat and ran against a drowned rat registered as a Republican, I would not bet against the rat.

Anyway, I will still vote, because that's what good citizens do-- they vote. No matter what. No matter the outcome.

But I won't vote until after I pick up the Board of Directors from school, because they always vote with me. Not in the actual election. But in my county, someone decided years ago to start offering ballots to children.

The children vote on issues like favorite type of cookie or best pet or best way to spend vacation. They vote on a special ballot, hand it in, and in a week or so, the local newspaper/website will publish the results. 

One actual result of this is that the Board knows what an election is, how it the voting place is laid out, how one approaches it, waits one's turn, signs your name, marks a ballot-- the whole business. When the day comes that they can vote in the real election, it will be exciting, but it will also be familiar and unintimidating.

Yes, their teachers sometimes run election simulations. But this gives kids exposure to the real thing, the whole business of voting. No mystery. No fear.

And as a bonus, thanks to some of my former colleagues, some high school students are spending the day as volunteers at polling places.

The cost of this Young Voter Education Program is minimal. There's some non-zero number of man-hours used to tabulate. There's the copier paper used to make the ballots. That's about it. 

So my hat's off today to county officials who hit on a simple but effective method of educating the next generation of voters about how the process works and helping them prepare for the day when they can try to execute their obligations as US citizens.