Posted on 10/24/2026 5:56:38 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Democrats lost control of Washington in 2024 because they were living in a bubble. The rest of America had ventured into alternative media to hear broader perspectives about topics like immigration and DEI, but Democrats remained stuck in the Obama-era information ecosystem, taking cues from network news, the New York Times, and celebrity speeches at the Oscars.
Social media made the problem worse. Algorithms fed Democrats a steady diet of elite-approved cultural signals while woke progressives punished nonconformists with mobs and cancellations. Liberals cut off friends and family who strayed from the script, retreating into ever-smaller circles of the like-minded.
The woke-era Democratic bubble proved remarkably durable, surviving one reality check after another for over a decade: Brexit, Donald Trump’s 2016 win, the backlash to “defund the police,” COVID restrictions, the parent revolt against indoctrination, to name a few.
2024 punctured it. Trump’s comeback from the depths of Jan. 6 to the heights of a popular vote victory couldn’t be spun or explained away. Democrats had to face it.
As they searched their souls, Trump stormed into Washington and had his way with it. And it didn’t take him long to alienate the voters who had just handed him a mandate to clean up the Democrats’ mess. Chaotic ICE raids, whiplash tariffs, a ballroom funded by companies with business before the government, a military parade on his birthday, a $400 million gift jet from Qatar, pardons for the Jan. 6 rioters: the list of self-inflicted wounds goes on.
The sheer amount of activity in Trump’s second term overwhelmed, stupefied, and ultimately numbed even his own supporters: the perfect condition for a bubble to form. And a thick one did.
Those same anti-woke outlets became echo chambers of their own, rewarding ideological and rhetorical excess. Then MAGA began purging its own dissenters, specifically anyone who dared to draw and enforce boundaries. When Tucker Carlson welcomed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for a lovefest of an interview, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts cut a video accusing Carlson’s critics of belonging to a “venomous coalition.”
The lesson differed slightly from the woke Left’s. It wasn’t about staying on script, because there was no script. It was about staying loyal. And loyalty without limits bred arrogance and corruption.
At the midpoint of Trump’s second term, the MAGA movement has lost all sense of how it is perceived by normal people: those who don’t obsessively follow politics and just want lower prices and a president who doesn’t embarrass them.
Just as Democrats lost sight of how off-putting they became through land acknowledgments, talk of “birthing people,” and the use of “Latinx,” Republicans are now blind to how their own behavior appears outside the bubble. Inside it, their excesses play like strength and clarity of purpose. Outside it, the same behavior looks unhinged.
Among the more recent displays of embubblement: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s short-lived plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Hasan. This attempted resurrection of the grisly ritual — the last public execution in the United States came in 1936 — thrilled the hardcore theocon and NatCon factions of the Right, who, for reasons ranging from biblical notions of retributive justice to the conviction that a strong state must be seen wielding its power, thought a livestreamed killing was just what America needed in this, the year of our Lord 2026. The plan enjoyed spirited defenses in highly visible conservative spaces, from the erudite heights of the First Things podcast (though they eventually agreed Trump was right to cancel it) to the seedy depths of Jack Posobiec’s social media feed.
Trump himself appeared enamored of the idea. Even in calling it off, he insisted a livestream “might have been a strong deterrent,” and dropped it only because “many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch.”
The public, however — the same public about to render its verdict on Republican rule — recoiled in horror. An ABC/Washington Post poll found that 80% disapproved of the deathstream, while only 18% supported it.
As CNN’s resident lib-slayer Scott Jennings would surely attest, being on the wrong side of “80-20 issues,” especially ones that dominate news cycles for their sheer novelty, is a bad idea — and a sure sign of living in a bubble. Responsible party leaders, especially Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), deserve credit for signaling unease with the deathstream. But an idea like that only surfaces in a deeply diseased ecosystem.
The Republican strategy to combat the surprisingly strong campaign of state Rep. James Talarico for Senate in Texas is another symptom. Rather than attack the woke seminarian’s decidedly un-Texan ideas — Talarico voted against funding border security, wants stricter gun laws, and thinks abortion is morally justifiable because of the Virgin Mary — Republicans, taking cues from Stephen Miller’s West Wing, adopted the posture of schoolyard bullies.
Hurling insults like “TalaFREAKo” and “Low-T Talarico,” Ken Paxton built his entire campaign around questioning Talarico’s masculinity, especially his carnivorous bona fides and sexual orientation. Last week at a rally for Paxton, Vice President JD Vance got in on the fun, responding to a man in the audience who shouted “I love you!” by saying, “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”
The joke landed inside the MAGA bubble. Townhall posted the clip with a laughing emoji. Prominent NatCon William Wolfe posted it with the caption, “Vance is just so good at this.”
But outside the bubble, Paxton’s bully strategy has backfired bigly. Talarico has parried every taunt with a sermon on loving thy neighbor. The contrast has been devastating for Paxton: a smiling seminarian quoting the Gospels on one side, and a scandal-plagued attorney general, backed up by his gang of schoolyard sidekicks, hurling adolescent insults on the other.
The result has been a small but persistent polling lead for Talarico, who would become the first Texas Democrat elected statewide since 1994. Even if Paxton ekes out a win in deep-red Texas, this pathetic campaign strategy has cost Republicans boatloads of cash and attention they could have spent elsewhere. A super PAC tied to Senate Republican leadership alone is pouring more than $100 million into ads.
More examples of bubble-behavior pile up by the day. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy just ran an ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother, who lost custody after her husband was indicted for raping her daughter. Then Ramaswamy pledged $4 million to promote it, and Vance told Republicans who objected to “stop whining.”
Not to be outdone, the president dangled $5,000 checks in front of every adult American if Republicans keep Congress — an open-air bribe. He also appointed a comically unqualified press secretary, Katie Zacharia, presumably because she looked good on camera, only to see her flame out in five days. And that same week he shared footage of a tiger killing a man, then followed it with an AI fantasy of himself grappling with the beast and hugging it like a pet.
I hate to say this, because I can’t stand it when liberals do, but none of this is normal. Not even for Trump and the GOP he’s spent a decade remaking in his image.
Inside the bubble, though, it all feels normal. That’s how bubbles work. A movement cut off from the mainstream stops listening to its grown-ups and begins following its edge-lords. Extremism masquerades as courage, cruelty as strength, obscenity as moral clarity.
Until it pops. And the people stuck inside finally see reality, and themselves, in clear light.
If November delivers a crushing verdict, Republicans will face a choice. They can either blame the media and crawl back inside the bubble — or they can look at themselves honestly and get their house in order for 2028.
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There is also a lot right. Talarico should be DOA, and while not mentioned Collins should have Maine locked up. Instead, both are dead heats.
Regardless if we lose the House and/or keep the Senate, we should focus on how Rubio is going to defeat an opposition in which its milquetoast preacher in Texas, a radical in Michigan, and guy who procreated with his second cousin (twice) in Maine won - or came frighteningly close to winning Senate seats.
I keep reminding myself of the huge Red Wave that was supposed to happen in ‘22. It fizzled.
This could fizzle just as easily.
I keep reminding myself of the huge Red Wave that was supposed to happen in ‘22. It fizzled.
This could fizzle just as easily.
There’s alot wrong with this article, alright. Starting with the author sounding like a leftist retard
Democrats are Godless Reprobates who will
ALWAYS vote to Murder the Unborn and
ALWAYS vote for Sodom and Gomorrah LGBTQ+ Agendas
Those ARE their basic platforms
I agree. The article has some Fair criticisms but also some very unfair ones.
Voter turnout in Virginia is already higher than 2022. That might be a good thing.
This reveals the author's Leftist tendencies. The pardons were a campaign promise that President Trump quickly kept.
Most of the rest of the whining is the result of a split country. We already knew that with Obama. The problem was not so much Obama , who thankfully was too lazy to get all he wanted. The problem was that half the county could be lured into voting for a poisonous cancer to freedom like Obama still is.
Oh peter, this sound more like your wet dream. Take you opinions and sit on them. We don’t do long winded uppity opinions from someone who isn’t important in the big scheme of our lives.
They got nuthin’. Maybe less than that. The reports of fraud are pretty amazing.
Democrats Finally Released Their 2024 Autopsy — And It’s a Mess
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/democrats-finally-released-2024-autopsy-210601854.html
MAGA may eventually be co-opted, the way the Tea Party was.
But the spirit that motivates it, that yearning for individual liberty and freedom will remain.
He is a leftist retard.
Historically, the Party of the sitting President loses House seats in the midterm. We have to go back to 2002 to find a midterm where there are gains. The Senate is a mixed bag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_midterm_election#Historical_record_of_midterm
If we hadn’t bombed Iran, and then been told repeatedly it’ll only take 2 weeks to finish the deal, it could be way different.
That ship sailed. We are here now.
I am truly scratching my head at Michigan, Maine, and Texas. We should be throttling those Dem candidates. And yet those are tossups.
We need to figure out WHY they’re tossups and fast. Rubio (or Vance, but I think he needs more time to mature and season) won’t have a ton of time to build a team and initiate a winning strategy.
RATS have always lived in a bubble. They lost in 2024, because they couldn't cheat like they did in 2020.
We had 47 years of other Presidents kicking that can down the road. I certainly don't hold that against President Trump. With its own citizens burning down mosques it seemed like a revolution could overthrow the Islamic regime. That would be a wonderful thing for the rest of the world because revolutions like that have a tendency to spread. It could still happen but sometimes a gamble simply does not work out as planned.
We shall see I guess. Ipray the Republicans will retain both houses of Congress.
The Biden Junta did not turn America into a parasite magnet for nothing. The party of evil now has imported enough scum of the Earth to make elections closer than they would have been otherwise. It is literally how a Communist Mozlem became the mayor of NYC.
This article doesn’t mention the primary cause of Trump’s declined in popularity, the Iran war. He blew up his top three campaigns promises. Lowering inflation with lower energy costs, no more endless wars and America first.
At paragraph 5 I smelled that recognizable stench of RINO.
I remember how they spent 1989 to 1993 purging all the Reagan appointees. Kinder and gentler of course.
The red wave of 22 fizzled because of a lot of cheating. 15-20 House seats for openers. That would never go the other way. When it comes to the House, for the rats a 1 seat majority is as good as a 100 seat majority.
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