WINNING

Why this Democratic wave will build into an unstoppable tsunami come November ...

Let’s start here today, patriots:

• Republicans are in charge of the House.

• Republicans are in charge of the Senate.

• Republicans are in charge of the Executive.

• Republicans are in charge of the Supreme Court.

And here:

• We are at war.

• Gas prices are skyrocketing.

• Consumer prices on things like food, clothes, and healthcare are soaring.

• A crooked president’s goon squad is murdering people in our streets.

• Our airports are being controlled by those goons, and clogged to overflowing.

• Our government has been attacked by billionaires and is unable to meet the needs of a public who pay the bills with their hard-earned taxes.

• Clean air and water are under attack by corporate vultures.

I am trying to think of a period in my long lifetime when so many things in the United States were completely off the rails, and the country itself was being held at gunpoint by a racist, heartless, and gutless political party so intent on inflicting pain and hurt on its citizens rather than helping them.

Make no mistake about it: The Republican majority owns all this pain and hurt.

Well, there are signs the majority of America has finally had enough. The evidence of this is everywhere, but mostly where it counts: at the polls.

Tuesday night, Democrats did more of what they have been doing the past year and flipped two more legislative seats.

These special elections were sweet as chocolate because they went down in Florida, a place that not so long ago was a battleground state. That was before becoming a bastion of deregulation and gerrymandering that is now busy choking the selfish people who supported all that.

First, Democrat Brian Nathan, a Navy vet and union organizer, shocked Republican state Rep. Josie Tomkow in the Sunshine State’s District 14 contest, by 408 votes, taking 50.25% of the vote to Tomkow’s 49.75%.

Two things:

1. This was a razor-thin margin, highlighting again that every vote counts, people.

2. Go Navy.

Things got sweeter yet in the night’s other featured race, when Democrat Emily Gregory flipped the seat in Trump’s home district. Gregory, who works in public health, edged Republican financial adviser Jon Maples, 51%-49%, in a district that Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024.

Trump, a convicted felon, now lives in a Democratic neighborhood, after being run out of another Democratic neighborhood in his hometown of New York City with his tail between his swelling legs.

Let me tell ya, it takes real talent being hated everywhere you live ...

With their victories last night, Democrats have now flipped 30 seats during the past year, while the Republicans have flipped exactly ZERO.

Democrats are over-performing everywhere in America, and to the winning tune of approximately plus-12%.

They are winning hyper-local elections, and high-visibility contests like the governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia, where the two Democratic candidates blew their Republican challengers out of the water by double-digit margins. Both races were expected to be close.

I will keep writing in this corner of the Internet that if Republicans continue to try to drive America off the cliff (they will), when all the votes have been counted Nov. 3, Democrats will have a won a whopping majority in Congress in the vicinity of 60 seats, and will have improbably secured the Senate by a seat or two.

I encourage you to bookmark that. The numbers don’t lie, and the numbers are repeatedly piling up on the Democrats’ side.

This will not be a classic wave election, it will be a tsunami election, and I’ll address what I know you are thinking in a moment, because the news gets worse for Trump’s Republicans:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday night, has Trump’s approval rating on the economy sitting at a measly 29%. This, along with immigration, was his strongest issue heading into 2024. It is the lowest rating for a sitting president, since George W. Bush crashed the economy in 2007. That was a year that also saw us engaged in an idiotic, senseless war in the Middle East, by the way.

Trump’s overall rating has plummeted to a pathetic 36%, and is dropping faster than Stephen Miller ogling a Hitler poster.

I’m always a little puzzled when I post numbers like this and immediately get responses like, “Who are these people???? How can these numbers be so high???”

I wonder if they are living in the same country I am. Why, on my way to North Carolina last week, I passed a truck adorned with a painting of Trump on its cab.

Seriously.

Like it or not, MAGA still proliferates by the tens of millions in America. It is a racist cult, and the people dumbfounded by these numbers have to know this — especially because I guarantee you that they all have current and past friends and family who are still tucked deep inside this cult.

That one in three Americans still support Trump is sad, but hardly surprising.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Well into the 1950s, and after Hitler’s monstrous atrocities had been exposed, more than 40% of Germans still viewed him in a favorable light.

Hell, in our own country, we are still fighting the Civil War. You can’t get rid of a statue of a racist like Robert E. Lee without a significant political skirmish.

Point is, these things take time. It’s also worth accepting that America will never heal properly after this latest Republican beating. We will always walk with a limp, even as we try to go forward.

But we must go forward …

Now addressing your nagging concern …

Will Trump do everything in his power to affect the midterms and our vote?

Of course he will. He’s an anti-American coward, who has always been terrified of a fair fight. He’s also finding his dirt-low level.

People are not taking into account just how unpopular he is, and how much more damage he will do to our country in the next nine months in the run-up to all these elections. There’s no telling how bad things will get, but we all know for certain they will get worse.

Used to be a president would get approval numbers like this, and he and his party would do their damndest to course-correct, and at least acknowledge people’s pain.

Not this one.

No, this one lives deep inside his fat head. He’s a malignant narcissist who sees the world that he hates through his beady black eyes. He gets off on all the pain he causes, and actually feeds off it.

We have to know by now that Trump wants everybody just as miserable as he has always been through a too-long life, in which he threatened love at gunpoint instead of earning it.

He’ll dig in and demand loyalty from his pathetic party, which knows the cliff is now only footsteps away.

Trump will do everything in his power to hurt America and our basic Democratic functions like voting. The only thing we can do about that is exactly what we are doing, and press forward.

I don’t know a single person who is talking about backing up.

There are No Kings marches scheduled Saturday, and if you can, I encourage you to attend one. I predict they will be the largest gatherings in American history.

These things matter, because they represent the best of a Democracy, and are staffed by good people who will recruit you to do even more in defense of your country. If nothing else, just standing side by side with fellow patriots, will do you a ton of good.

We have claimed the high ground in America, I suggest we use it to our advantage to inflict as much good as possible.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)

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-Earl