Arrr… Welcome aboard, Matey. It’s Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026. The weekend's here, which means half the country is about to spend it talking like a pirate for no defensible reason.
My calendar says it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, (Huh.. that must be the reason), PawPaw Fruit Day, Butterscotch Pudding Day, and Red Panda Day. Grab a pawpaw, eat butterscotch pudding while admiring a red panda video, and say "arrr" at least once before noon — nobody's checking your work today, anyway.
Today in History:
1356: English forces defeat the French at the Battle of Poitiers, and capture King John II.
1676: Forces loyal to Nathaniel Bacon burn Jamestown, Va.
to the ground.
1692: Authorities execute Giles Corey by pressing after he refuses to enter a plea at the Salem witch trials.
1777: British troops win a costly tactical victory over the Continental Army at the First Battle of Saratoga.
1778: The Continental Congress passes the first United States budget.
1796: Newspapers across the country print George Washington's farewell address.
1862: Union troops under William Rosecrans defeat a Confederate force at the Battle of Iuka during the Civil War.
1863: Confederate and Union forces clash at the Battle of Chickamauga.
1864: Union troops under Philip Sheridan defeat Jubal Early's Confederate force at the Third Battle of Winchester.
1870: Prussian forces begin the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.
1881: President James Garfield dies eleven weeks after being shot by Charles Guiteau; Chester Arthur succeeds him as the 21st president.
1893: New Zealand grants women the right to vote, becoming the first self-governing country to do so.
2005: Al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri claims responsibility for the July 7 London transit bombings.
Birthdays Today include: Jimmy Fallon, comedian and host of The Tonight Show; Trisha Yearwood, country singer known for "She's in Love with the Boy"; Jeremy Irons, actor from Reversal of Fortune and The Lion King; Sanaa Lathan, actress from Love & Basketball; Cheri Oteri, comedian and former Saturday Night Live cast member; and the late Adam West, actor best remembered for playing Batman — if today's your birthday, too, happy birthday.
* * *
Let's take note of some trends, and see if we can spot a pattern, and if so, let's see what the tea leaves say about the mid-terms.
Hillary Clinton lost, and the Clinton Foundation spent the next several years in freefall. Its reported revenue cratered from about $224.8 million in 2016 to $56.8 million in 2017, and the latest filings show it limping along at $48.6 million in 2024. Voters didn't need a subpoena to draw their own conclusions. Uranium One remains the loudest example: people tied to a company chasing Russian control of American uranium interests wrote checks to the Clinton Foundation at the same time Bill Clinton pocketed a $500,000 speaking fee from a Russian investment bank promoting that very deal. The foundation didn't stumble into that intersection by accident — it built its entire business model around it: political power, wealthy donors, foreign governments and business interests, international philanthropy, and access to senior government officials, all stacked on top of each other like a Jenga tower nobody wanted to admit was wobbling.
Biden lost, and the money for his library simply refuses to show up. The AP reports that his team keeps hitting fundraising walls, with corporate and institutional donors suddenly discovering they have other priorities. Funny how the Biden family operated in that exact same intersection the Clintons carved out — political power, wealthy donors, foreign governments and business interests, international philanthropy, access to senior officials. Different family, same real estate.
USAID shut down, and the DNC had to mortgage its own building. As of July 31, 2026, the FEC reports about $16.1 million cash on hand against $17.9 million in debt — contemporary reporting pegs the debt closer to $18.5 million. The DNC took out a $15 million loan in 2025, barely a year after losing the White House, and D.C. deed records confirm it put up its own Southeast Washington headquarters as collateral to get it. The party has pledged that building before, so nobody can call this unprecedented. What they can call it is the size and the timing — a record loan, taken out at the exact moment donors decided to stop returning calls. The trend has run against Democrats for a while now; they've just started running out of collateral to prove it.
The SPLC got indicted, and — wonder of wonders — the riots stopped. A federal grand jury charged the organization in April 2026 with eleven counts of wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, and prosecutors piled on a superseding indictment in August. The SPLC pleads not guilty and disputes every word of it, and to be fair, the indictment accuses the group of secretly paying informants inside the KKK and Aryan Nations, not of bankrolling left-wing street protests — connect those two dots at your own risk, but you'll face no counterargument from me. The coincidence still lands: an outfit that spent decades telling America who counts as an extremist suddenly finds itself explaining its own books to a grand jury, and the protest machine it spent years cheering on goes quiet at exactly the same moment. Voters don't need a legal theory to notice a pattern; they just need eyes.
ActBlue landed under investigation, and suddenly the left goes hunting for new friends. Congressional committees are actively probing its fraud-prevention practices, and a September 16 committee report accuses the platform of failing to screen out illegal foreign contributions. ActBlue disputes every allegation and calls the whole investigation politically motivated — because naturally, the fundraising machine that bankrolls half the Democrat Party would never itself be political.
Meanwhile, the DSA and a slate of Muslim Democrat candidates — Zohran Mamdani in New York, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan — have built a genuine, documented working coalition, one outlets across the spectrum are now calling a "red-green alliance." Call it what you want; the left is visibly shopping for a new base while its old fundraising infrastructure gets deposed under oath.
Sorry, but it's impossible not to see these events as linked. Not as some grand conspiracy against Democrats — nobody needs to coordinate a foundation's donor collapse, a library's empty coffers, a mortgaged headquarters, an indictment, and a subpoena. Individual voters did that themselves, one wallet and one ballot at a time.
What we're watching isn't a conspiracy. It's a receipt.
And yes, I’m quite sure that folks grasping at straws will point me to the polling data. As of mid-September, polling averages have Democrats up somewhere between D+7 and D+8 nationally, with Trump's approval sitting in the high 30s — numbers that, if they hold through November, point historians toward a wave on the scale of 2018.
But, before our “No Kings” protesters get too comfortable with that D+7 number, it's worth remembering that generic ballot polling has a well-documented history of face-planting, and not by a rounding error. Research on generic ballot accuracy found that in most election cycles since 2006, the final polling average has landed four or more points off the actual result — not the tidy, reassuring miss the pollsters like to advertise, but a coin flip on whether the number means anything at all.
That pattern always seems to err in one direction. Analysis after the 2024 election found that polls underestimated Trump's support by an average of 2.3 points across three consecutive cycles — 2016, 2020, and 2024. Once is noise. Twice is error. Three times, all in one direction, is a systematic lean, not a shrug-worthy sampling fluke. So that, too, is part of the patterns I’m seeing here.
Our Matt Margolis gets into this in some depth in his recent VIP-only piece, ‘What If We’re Looking At Generic Congressional Ballot Polling All Wrong?’ And by the way, if you’re not a VIP member yet, why not?
Sure, pollsters will tell you the generic ballot is the strongest indicator they've got. But "best available signal" and "reliable prediction" aren't the same sentence, and pollsters know it — they just don't lead with it. Calling this the industry's best effort isn't a compliment. It's an indictment of the whole enterprise.
And here's the tell nobody in the polling business wants to sit with: if that Dem +7 number actually meant what they want you to think it means, the institutional collapse I've documented at the top of this piece wouldn't be happening. Something in that number isn't measuring what they claim it's measuring — and the people writing the checks figured that out without the pollsters.
Thought for the Day: Donors don't flee a winning team. Committees don't mortgage their own headquarters if they're really eight points ahead. You don't indict the fundraising arm of a party that's cruising to a majority.
VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts. I do read the comment section and sometimes I even respond. The idea is, you and I together, we’re building a community, here. Help me build it by dropping a comment. Besides, it's half the fun.
Enjoy your Saturday, and fair seas to ya, dear readers, but take care of yourselves. As Shakespeare wrote, “Self love is not so vile a sin as self-neglect.” Hope to see you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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