Greets! It’s Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026 — five days until Election Day, which means five more days of political ads interrupting your oatmeal. It's the election and what comes after that's on my mind today. Long-time readers will understand that I don't shrink away from a fight with the squishy GOP establishment. Today will be no different. But first, time for the usual opening segments. I run this every day because to understand who we are, we need to fully understand who we've been.
My calendar says it’s Cat Day, Oatmeal Day, Internet Day, Hermit Day, and International Day of Care and Support. So grab a bowl of oats, lock the door, and spend the day online with the cat like the hermit you’ve secretly always wanted to be.
Today in History:
1618: England executes explorer Sir Walter Raleigh for treason.
1787: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premieres his opera Don Giovanni in Prague.
1863: Delegates from 16 nations meet in Geneva and agree to form the International Red Cross.
1901: New York executes Leon Czolgosz for the assassination of President William McKinley.
1923: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk proclaims the Republic of Turkey.
1929: Wall Street collapses on Black Tuesday, kicking off the Great Depression.
1940: Secretary of War Henry Stimson draws the first number in the nation’s first peacetime military draft.
1945: Gimbels department store in New York City sells the first commercial ballpoint pens at $12.50 apiece. That's ~$235 in today's money.
1956: NBC debuts The Huntley-Brinkley Report; the same day, Israel invades the Sinai Peninsula, sparking the Suez Crisis.
1969: Researchers at UCLA send the first message over ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet — and crash the system two letters in. It didn't even have the Blue Screen of Death.
1998: Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) returns to space at age 77 aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
2004: Al Jazeera airs a videotape of Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
2012: Hurricane Sandy makes landfall near Atlantic City, N.J., flooding lower Manhattan and much of the Jersey Shore.
Birthdays Today include: Richard Dreyfuss, actor (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mr. Holland’s Opus); Melba Moore, singer and actress (Purlie, Hair); Kate Jackson, actress (Charlie’s Angels, Scarecrow and Mrs. King); Dan Castellaneta, voice actor (The Simpsons); Rufus Sewell, actor (Dark City, A Knight’s Tale, The Man in the High Castle); Joely Fisher, actress (Ellen, ‘Til Death); Winona Ryder, actress (Beetlejuice, Heathers, Stranger Things); Gabrielle Union, actress (Bring It On, Being Mary Jane); Tracee Ellis Ross, actress (Girlfriends, black-ish); Ben Foster, actor (3:10 to Yuma, Hell or High Water). If today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday — go celebrate with the cat.
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Kurt Schlichter in a Townhall VIP makes an important observation:
I don’t know how the midterm elections will turn out; I think Republicans will do better than expected, but who knows? – yet there’s one thing I’m entirely sure of. This election cycle has, at least, allowed us Republicans to rid ourselves of some of the biggest hacks any political party has ever had the misfortune to be saddled with. Whether we beat them in primaries or scared them out of primaries entirely, they’re gone, and they aren’t coming back.
When this is over, we will be rid of that fraud Thomas Massie, the insipid Thom Tillis, the tiresome Bill Cassidy, and the Kinzingeresque Ukrainian fetishizer Don Bacon. Also past his sell-by date is that Bushesque phony John Cornyn, whose absolutely disgraceful post-primary defeat conduct has utterly vindicated the Texas Republicans who rejected him, whether Ken Paxton beats the blasphemous homunculus or not.
Of course, this is spot on and well done, Kurt, as always. But here’s the part nobody wants to hear the morning after the victory lap: Clearing out the moronic deadwood doesn’t end the fight. It just changes the shape of it. Even with these people gone, and the establishment GOP — see also, RINOs — thus depleted, we still have more work ahead of us than behind us.
I reminded you that just recently, the establishment GOP never made peace with President Ronald Reagan or the people who elected him, and that it spent the next 40 years trying to scrub his fingerprints off the party. The establishment utterly refuses to learn the lessons that Reagan and now Trump have taught us. It pains me to say this, but the next forty years will look much the same. Different names, same playbook.
Consider the track record. I know a lot of folks reading this were not even alive yet when this stuff went down, which is exactly why I keep bringing it up. There are lessons to be learned here.
The establishment backed Gerald Ford over Reagan in 1976 and told everyone the Gipper couldn’t win. In 1980, George H.W. Bush dismissed Reagan’s economic plan as “voodoo economics” — and then spent eight years riding shotgun on its success. The moment Bush took the top job, he promised a “kinder, gentler” nation, which prompted Nancy Reagan to reportedly ask, “Kinder and gentler than whom?” Good question. Two years later, Bush torched “read my lips” on the altar of bipartisan respectability, and voters handed him his walking papers in 1992.
What followed? Bob Dole. “Compassionate conservatism,” which mostly meant big-government Republicanism with a nicer haircut. The GOP rank and file, always more conservative than the establishment, sat on their hands for his presidential run. John McCain, who never met a reporter he wouldn’t serenade at the expense of his own voters, got the same response from those voters. Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama with exquisite manners and then discovered his spine only when a Republican president needed opposing.
Every one of these men carried the same message from the same donor class: Reagan was a nice old man, but the grownups are back in charge now. The voters sat on their hands instead of voting for any of them. Clearly, they've never learned the lesson as to why that happened.
The thing is, that crowd doesn’t die. It doesn’t even retire. It regroups.
Recommended: Before You Vote, Remember That They Tried to Kill Trump for a Reason
Fast forward to tomorrow and beyond. The people who dragged their feet on the SAVE Act are still there. Think about where Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn go next. Nobody sends them to a monastery. They land on corporate boards, at K Street shops, and in the green rooms of cable networks that will happily book any “Republican” willing to trash Republicans. Their staffers scatter into consulting firms that advise the next crop of candidates. Their donors keep their checkbooks — and their grudges. The Chamber of Commerce wing of the party has outlasted every populist wave since Barry Goldwater, and it intends to outlast this one, too.
If you want to see where that road leads, look no further than The Bulwark.
The Bulwark launched in 2018 as the last stand of Never Trump conservatism, a lifeboat for the Weekly Standard crowd after that magazine sank, a happening which they clearly don't understand. The pitch went something like this: The real Republican Party would return once the fever broke, and these brave dissidents would be waiting to lead it home. Eight years later, the fever hasn’t broken, the voters haven’t come home, and The Bulwark has quietly stopped pretending it wants them to.
Look at the company it keeps. (Just keep the barf bag handy).
This month, its traveling road show — yes, a Never Trump conservative outlet now sells concert tickets — booked Pete Buttigieg as a special guest. Bill Kristol hosts James Carville to cheer on a Democratic wave. George Conway got his own podcast. The publication’s whole midterm business model consists of selling subscriptions to people who want Republicans to lose, and it doesn’t bother hiding that anymore.
Indeed, The Bulwark's Sam Stein’s October subscription pitch promised readers that the outlet’s work won’t end when the votes are counted, which reads a lot like an admission that the Never Trump project has become a permanent opposition business rather than a homecoming. (A business I might add that the Weekly Standard was dedicated to, which is exactly why it failed.)
OK, fine. Everyone has the right to be stupid. But let’s stop calling it "conservatism," shall we? A movement that spent eight years losing every argument inside the party didn’t take the hint and go build something. It took a check from the other side and kept the “former Republican” label as a marketing gimmick. The hard truth is, The Bulwark isn’t a conservative outlet in exile. It’s a Democratic outlet with a Rolodex full of ex-GOP staffers.
And here’s the part that should worry you: The Bulwark, like so many establishment critters, still hasn’t gotten the message because the message threatens the business. The voters rejected Cassidy. They rejected Massie. They rejected Cornyn. Every one of those primaries amounts to Republican voters telling the Never Trumpers and the Kristol crowd, in plain English, that they don’t want what it’s selling. The Bulwark’s answer? Another podcast explaining in high tones why the voters got it wrong.
That’s the establishment’s retirement plan in miniature. Lose the argument, lose the voters, then rebrand as the conscience of a party you’re actively rooting against. Tillis, Cassidy, and company may not join The Bulwark’s masthead, but they’ll show up on its shows, and the cable bookers will introduce them as “Republican Senator” for years. Every one of them becomes a permanent exhibit in the case against us — and a ready-made talking head the next time the Establishment wants to sell us a squish in 2028.
And make no mistake, the establishment GOP has already circled a date on the calendar. Donald Trump won’t be on a ballot forever. OK, leave aside for the moment that he's already not on the ballot; the establishment’s entire strategy for the past decade has amounted to waiting him out, exactly as they did with Reagan. When 2028 arrives, expect a parade of polished, focus-grouped candidates who praise the “energy” of the Trump years while quietly promising donors a return to “normal.” Normal means open borders for cheap labor, endless foreign entanglements, and a party that apologizes for its own voters. We’ve seen that movie. We know how that one ends.
So the real question, and the real battle, is: What do we do with the empty seats?
First, we actually vet the replacements like our country depends on it, because it does. A primary win means nothing if the guy who beat the RINO turns into a RINO the minute he discovers the Capitol Grille. Washington has a remarkable talent for converting firebrands into furniture. Ask who funds the new members, who staffs their offices, and who they call when the leadership comes knocking. Personnel is policy, and the establishment knows it better than we do.
Second, we treat primaries as a permanent job, not a one-time spring cleaning. The phrase "eternal vigilance" leaps to mind.
The people who ran the GOP from 1988 to 2016 never stopped working. They showed up to every county committee meeting, every state convention, every rules fight. Actual conservatives tend to win the big emotional battles and then go home, leaving the boring machinery to the professionals. Spoiler: That’s how we lost the party once. For the love of all that's holy, please: Let’s not do it again.
Third, we build the bench from the bottom. The next Massie-style headache and the next genuine Reagan both start out on a school board, a county legislature, or a state assembly. If we want better senators in 2034, we need to recruit better town supervisors this year. The establishment grows its own. So should we, and in larger numbers.
Finally, we learn to recognize the magic word when we hear it: “electability.” Every time the consultant class wanted to sell us a squish, it called him or her "electable." The last 50 years should give us an indication of how accurate the establishment is when they label someone as "electable". Ford was "electable". Dole was "electable". McCain and Romney were "electable" — right up until the voters had something to say about it. Jeb Bush was a unique situation, where the GOP rank and file actually dared to say "no" to the choice of the GOP establishment before we even got halfway through the primary season. And he got rejected for exactly the same reason the rest of them did.
Reagan, meanwhile, the “unelectable” cowboy actor, won 49 states and damn near won all 50. Trump, the “unelectable” reality TV host, won the White House twice (and probably three times if the evidence we're seeing these days is anything like accurate, and I think it is, for the record). Maybe the people who keep getting this wrong shouldn’t keep getting a vote on who we nominate.
Don't mistake me here. Schlichter is right to celebrate. Massie, Tillis, Cassidy, Bacon, and Cornyn won’t be around to undercut the party anymore, and good riddance. But the establishment didn’t lose a war this year. It lost a few soldiers. It has a 40-year head start on patience, and it will use every bit of it.
We just have to be more patient — and more stubborn, more unmovable — than the GOP establishment is.
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Thought of the day: Throwing out the bums is easy; making sure the next ones don’t become bums is the real job.
VIP members: Let's hear from you because your voice matters. Hit that comments section.
Take care, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow. Bring a friend, too.