We've Seen This Begging for Defeat Before, Peggy. No Sale.

Greetings, and welcome to Saturday, Oct. 31, 2026. Happy Halloween! Remember to set your clocks back an hour before bed tonight, since daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. Sunday. Just don’t fall back on Tuesday. Election Day is three days away.

My calendar says it’s Halloween, Reformation Day, Magic Day, Caramel Apple Day, and Knock-Knock Jokes Day. Hand out the good candy, not the stuff the dentist gives away. Raise a toast to Harry Houdini, who died 100 years ago today. Bite into a caramel apple, if your dental work can take it. Tell the grandkids a knock-knock joke or two. And if anyone in Washington claims they can make your tax dollars disappear and reappear as savings, remember that only one of those tricks is real.

Today in History:

1517: Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg, Germany, launching the Protestant Reformation.
1864: Nevada becomes the 36th state, admitted in time to help reelect Abraham Lincoln.
1926: Escape artist Harry Houdini dies in Detroit of peritonitis, at age 52.
1941: A German U-boat torpedoes the destroyer USS Reuben James off Iceland, the first U.S. Navy warship sunk in World War II, killing about 100 sailors.
1941: Workers finish carving Mount Rushmore after 14 years.
1956: British and French aircraft bomb Egypt during the Suez Crisis.
1959: Former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald walks into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and tries to renounce his citizenship.
1961: Soviet authorities remove Joseph Stalin’s body from Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square.
1968: President Lyndon Johnson announces a halt to bombing North Vietnam, five days before the presidential election.
1984: Two of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's own bodyguards assassinate her in New Delhi.
1992: The Vatican formally acknowledges that Galileo Galilei was right about Earth orbiting the sun, 359 years after condemning him.
1999: EgyptAir Flight 990 crashes into the Atlantic off Nantucket, Mass., killing all 217 people aboard.
2011: The United Nations marks the symbolic date of the world’s population reaching 7 billion.

Birthdays Today include: John Keats, poet; Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts; Dale Evans, singing cowgirl and Roy Rogers’ partner; Michael Landon, actor from Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie; Dan Rather, newsman(?); John Candy, actor and comedian, Uncle Buck and Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings; Larry Mullen Jr., drummer for U2; and Vanilla Ice, rapper, “Ice Ice Baby.” If you’re sharing a Halloween birthday, happy birthday from all of us here, and enjoy the free candy.

* * *

I made the remark in one of the internal discussion pipes here at PJ Media the other day, that we’re starting to see the GOP establishment… the John McCain / Mitt Romney / George W. Bush wing of the party, trying to claw its way back to relevance by calling more or less openly now for the defeat of MAGA candidates in these midterm elections. I suggested this has happened before, during the last two years of the Reagan presidency.

As if on cue, a column drops in my lap to make that point for me. In that discovery, I find myself amazed that I ever held any respect at all for Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. Her latest is why I marvel at my overly generous nature:

I believe a big, big wave is coming, and I see it as composed of many colors—blue voters predominantly, but indignant red voters too, and disappointed Trump-base voters, many staying home.

This is what I hope for: that it won't be a close election, that the outcome is unmistakable. Let it be a clear and obvious rebuke—a rejection, a rebellion, a rout.

…

The Republican Party has to get healthy again. Healthy doesn't mean "the establishment returns." It will never return. The GOP establishment of 1990-2016 ran things into the ground, is discredited and over. Also they're 80. They destroyed the party by detaching from the legitimate needs and pleas of its base and by secretly regarding that base as stupid nobodies.

Here we have a woman, an obviously talented writer, who calls herself a conservative Republican while openly cheering for her own party to get crushed on Tuesday. She does it while lecturing the rest of us about an establishment that "secretly" regarded the base as stupid nobodies. Secretly? Peggy, Honey, you're doing it in the Wall Street Journal. I mean, people actually see what you’re doing.

Noonan has shown this attitude for more than a decade. Whatever her complaints about the failures of the GOP establishment (and let's be fair, she has occasionally made brief mention of them), she's an establishment creature to the bone. And her insipid whining sounds a lot like the noises George Will made in 1976. I lost all respect for the bowtie genius years ago, and this quote I ran about a year ago, from Will's Washington Post column that November, is why.

But Reagan is 63, and looks it. His hair is still remarkably free of gray, but around the mouth and neck he looks like an old man. He's never demonstrated substantial national appeal. His hardcore support today consists primarily of the kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun. And there's a reason to doubt that Reagan is well suited to appeal to the electorate that just produced a democratic landslide. If a Reagan third party would just lead the "Nixon was lynched" crowd away from the Republican party, and into outer darkness where there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be at worst a mixed course for the Republican party. It would cost the party some support, but it would make the party seem cleansed.

Go ahead. Tell me these two commentaries aren't cut from the same fetid cloth.

Will mocked Reagan for being 63. Will at that point, was 35. Noonan sneers that the old guard is 80. She’s 76 today, just having had a birthday a bit over a month ago.

In both cases, the complaint about age is a stand-in for the real one: these voters, and the man they chose, embarrass the right sort of people at the right sort of Washington dinner parties and K Street coffee shops. The word that gives the game away is "cleansed." Will wanted the party cleansed of its actual conservatives back in the day. Noonan wants it "healthy" in 2026. Same prescription, new and equally contemptuous label.

And watch how fast that contempt evaporates once the voters prove it wrong. Will used his column to carry water for Gerald Ford in those days. The voters sat on their hands. Six years later, the man Will claimed "never demonstrated substantial national appeal" carried 44 states. Will had already gone over by then: he helped prep Reagan for his debate with Jimmy Carter, then went on ABC to praise Reagan's performance, without bothering to mention his part in it. Four years after that, Reagan carried 49 states. Nothing converts an establishment pundit faster than a landslide victory he didn't see coming, I guess.

Then there's the irony that ought to sting Noonan the most. She made her name writing Reagan's speeches. She wrote "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc." She wrote the Challenger address. She built a career on the man George Will wanted to march out of the party into outer darkness, and now she's writing George Will's column for him, half a century late.

Both of them have spent the Trump years exactly where you'd expect. Will quit the party in 2016, and thankfully, he hasn’t really been taken seriously since then, except by Democrats. Noonan has spent a decade wringing her hands in print. What's changed is that neither one of them even bother to pretend anymore. Noonan isn't predicting a wave. She's praying for one, and contritely begging the base to sit on its hands and help bring about the defeat she dreams of.

That's the tell. The establishment Noonan claims is dead and buried never needed to win. It only ever needed the base, the actual GOP voters, to lose, so the “grown-ups” could take the party back and steer it toward a political center that exists only on the opinion pages. In 1974, the base declined the invitation, and what followed, several years later, was Reagan. 

I pointed out the pattern that Noonan so desperately wants us to ignore a couple days back, and it bears repeating in this context:

 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.

Republicans who want something like those victories again would do well to ignore Peggy Noonan on Tuesday, and to remember after Tuesday who was rooting for them to lose.

Thought for the Day: On Halloween, people wear masks for one night. In an election year, some candidates, and a fair number of pundits with them, have worn theirs since spring. Mark me on this; Tuesday is when they come off.

VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts on this. Your voice matters. 

Take care of yourselves, gang. I'd like to see you here again tomorrow.

Editor's Note: Thanks to President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth's leadership, the warrior ethos is coming back to America's military.

Help us continue to report on Trump and Hegseth's successes as they make our military great again. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.