Politics
McConnell announces retirement from the Senate
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader and the most consequential Republican senator of his generation, said Thursday he will not seek reelection next year. “Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said in a midday floor speech. “Every day in between…
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Kevin Stitt, the outgoing Republican governor of Oklahoma, has a message for President Donald Trump: Try being nice.
“People are just kind of tired,” Stitt told Blue Light News in an interview Friday morning, three days after the Republican Party suffered devastating election losses across the country and a few hours before Trump elevated Stephen Miller to be his chief of staff.
“They are just ready for something new and a change … President Trump’s policies are amazing, and he does a really good job on a lot of fronts, but the civility and then just trying to be nice to people, I think would go a long way.”
Stitt, who was until this summer chair of the National Governors Association, has been in Trump’s crosshairs before. In February, Trump lashed out at Stitt in a dispute over the annual NGA gathering at the White House, calling the Oklahoma governor a “RINO” and a “wiseguy.” The two later appeared to patch things up, after a White House sit-down in March.
Stitt is now one of several prominent Republicans calling on the president and congressional leaders to take stock of the party’s midterm losses and change course heading into 2028.
Asked on Friday if Trump had been nice to him, Stitt laughed, before replying: “I’ve always gotten along with President Trump. He’s always been good to me.”
But the term-limited governor, who has said he intends to return to the private sector next year, did not shy away from calling out the president. Stitt urged Trump to stop directing the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents — tactics the governor described as “Third World country stuff” — and use his final two years in the White House to seriously pursue bipartisan immigration reform.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
You called last year’s election results a “butt whipping” for the party. If 2025 was a butt whipping, what was 2026?
Oh man! I don’t swear, but it’s probably worse than a butt whipping. It was pretty bad. But here’s the deal: I think it didn’t go the way that we had hoped, but I just want everybody to know, it’s not the end of the world. We’re all Americans, and it really shows you that we’re not as partisan as we think. In other words, the American people can swing both directions, right? That’s a positive.
Our leadership matters, the way we conduct ourselves matters. The American people wanted something different, and I think in two years we’ll see what happens.
I think [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott’s loss was really the most shocking to me because he’s such a good guy and has been a great governor for Texas, and I don’t think anybody saw that coming.
What happened? Why do you think the results went the way they did?
People are tired of the self-dealing that they see in politicians. They see people going to Congress and getting rich, and government contracts to big business. I think people are just really, really cranky right now. Obviously, the kitchen table issues like diesel prices are super hard on the average American, and things are costing more, and I think people are frustrated.
We’ve got to get back to talking about spending. The national debt [is] out of control. We’re spending $2 trillion. It doesn’t matter if Republicans or Democrats are in office. People don’t even talk about tax policy anymore because they think they can spend whatever they want, regardless of income, and that is driving things up.
We have got to have permitting reform done. If you think about why are gas prices so expensive, part of that you could blame on the war in Iran, but a lot of it is the lack of development of new gas processing pipelines. It takes us eight years to build things anymore, and we have so squashed the private sector from meeting the needs of Americans through over-regulation.
Do Republicans need to do a better job of messaging?
They need to do a better job of messaging. But they also need to do a better job of leading when we get there.
I think the American people are so tired of weaponizing the Department of Justice. When President [Joe] Biden, his party was raiding Mar-a-Lago, they were suing President Trump, and then Trump wins big. I wish that we wouldn’t have flipped the script and started weaponizing and going after political opponents. This is Third World country stuff. We have got to stop that.
Now, when the Democrats are in power, if they try to start impeaching Trump again and try weaponizing and investigating instead of leading, I think the American people are going to be frustrated in two years again.
How much blame do you place on President Trump for the midterm results?
President Trump is what he is… I think just over 10 years, people are just kind of tired. They’re just ready for something new and a change. President Trump’s policies are amazing, and he does a really good job on a lot of fronts. But the civility and just kind of being nice to people, I think would go a long way.
Has Trump been nice to you?
I have always gotten along with President Trump. He has always been good to me. But you know … we all know that the president, he’s a fighter, and it’s so tough to be the president because everybody’s always attacking him. But I think that just a little more decorum, and people would give him more of the benefit of the doubt.
He is talking now about potentially working across the aisle. I know you brought up permitting reform. Are there other areas where you would like to see him and the administration working with Democrats on Capitol Hill?
Immigration reform is something where I think there’s a really good opportunity. President Trump is the president that has the credibility because he secured the borders after Biden’s disaster, and literally he could be the one that could really give us some immigration policy that allows the workforce that we need.
Do you see the midterm results as a response to the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics? Was this a rejection of the way that immigration has been handled?
That may be just one part of it, but it is certainly more nuanced than that. I think it is just an overall frustration with the party that’s in charge right now, and the people are wanting something different.
If there’s violent criminals, we need them out. But there was a case in Oklahoma where the guy had been here since he was eight years old from Vietnam, and he worked for a company, the company was vouching for him … but he had a marijuana charge from 20 years ago that was expunged by the state when he was in college. But yet he’s been deported, has a wife and two kids.
That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t make sense to the average person. And that’s where people are like, “Hey, we’re all for getting violent criminals out, but this guy is chasing the American dream, contributing. He is one that we should give a workforce permit to.
Where do you think the Republican Party needs to go from here?
The American people are looking for civility. They are looking for a statesman. They are looking for someone that is not as partisan that is saying, “Hey, we’re all Americans. Well, we can disagree better. We can disagree with one another on policy, but let’s start debating the policy, like our founders talked about.”
President Donald Trump’s decision to name hard-line loyalist Stephen Miller as his top aide cemented what many Republicans were already privately fearing: There will be no party-wide GOP reckoning with this week’s midterm bloodbath.
Instead, with Trump still in office for another two years, most have grown resigned to the reality that the president is going to lean in on a confrontational approach with Congress — and is not willing to change course.
Republicans on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration are questioning how and whether they can break with the president now after having green-lit much of his agenda, according to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, senior aides and Trump officials interviewed for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s future.
Trump’s decision Friday to elevate Miller, the architect of his unpopular mass deportation policy and an advocate of fierce partisan confrontation, crystallized the frustration.
“There needs to be some self-reflection for Republicans,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said in an interview about the midterm losses Friday morning. “There should be some heads rolling at the White House because we lost badly.”
Hours later, heads did roll. Trump announced Miller would replace Susie Wiles as his new chief of staff.
“Horrible decision,” Stutzman said in response.
One House Republican, when informed that Trump had named Miller his chief of staff, replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”
The immediate aftermath of the election has sharpened the GOP’s core issue for the past decade: They are struggling to navigate the man who they reshaped their entire identity around, and whose record low approval with voters helped to fuel generational losses within the party.
The Iran war is another area where some Republicans are having regrets. Vice President JD Vance identified it as the main reason for the party’s defeat in his election post-mortem.
The problem with Vance’s assessment, one senior Hill Republican said, is, “we’ve been fucking voting for the war since March — because they told us to.”
Republicans and Trump advisers expect the president to wield massive influence in the 2028 GOP primaries, another reason many are staying quiet.
“Everyone is staring at each other and wondering who will speak up and blame Trump first,” said one GOP operative who worked on a battleground race Democrats won. They, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But we’ve been here before. I’m not holding my breath. He still controls the party and its primaries, at least for now.”
The White House responded to Blue Light News’s request for comment by referring to Trump’s praise for Miller on Friday. The RNC declined to comment.
Miller wrote on social media that he is “honored beyond words to serve as [Trump’s] White House Chief of Staff” and “the mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President.”
How much lawmakers will distance themselves will be put to the test quickly: House Republicans will have an immediate opportunity to break with Trump and the war next week, when Rep. Thomas Massie said in an interview with Blue Light News he will trigger his articles of impeachment against Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are a lot of questions about Hegseth,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Friday.
Some senior Republicans are privately nudging Trump officials to ditch Hegseth before the vote, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. The White House is sticking by Hegseth so far, however.
House Republicans will also have a chance to elect new leadership next week, including a new chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But in a sign of what’s to come, none of the candidates — including Reps. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) and Rudy Yakym (R-Ind.) — nor any other GOP leadership candidates have publicly suggested doing more to break with Trump.
A small group of Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately declared, as of Tuesday night, that “MAGA is over,” and it’s time for a “reset,” as one House GOP aide put it — and yet it’s a sentiment no prominent Republican is willing to say publicly.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), one of the longest-serving members of the House, said he wasn’t going to “blame” others for Tuesday’s losses, which left him as the sole GOP incumbent survivor in his home state. Asked if Republicans were dragged down by the president, Smith replied: “I don’t want to answer that.”
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) went a step further. He declined to name Trump, but he said in an interview that he was tired of GOP leaders “ignoring” voters — a remarkable position for a party that Trump transformed into a working-class coalition.
“We had a lot of Republican leaders out there saying ‘everything’s fine.’ And you kind of had the boomer generation saying, ‘Well, yeah, back in my day, interest rates were 15%, so everything’s good,’” said Davidson, a 56-year-old former Army Ranger. “Well, you had a lot of hardworking young people who felt really ignored, and they they went to the polls and said, ‘Stop ignoring us.'”
Davidson said Republicans need to start discussing their problems quickly, or suffer the electoral consequences again.
“Bad news doesn’t get better with time. So avoiding talking about something doesn’t solve the problem,” he said. He said Vance “walked a pretty good line” by being “candid” in his election post-mortem Wednesday.
Vance and other potential 2028 presidential contenders like Sen. Ted Cruz don’t have much time to waste if they want to chart a new path away from Trump. Cruz issued his own post-mortem that included a call to focus more on voters’ economic concerns. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “this midterm was a rebuke of the president and Congress.”
French Hill, the powerful Financial Services Committee Chair who narrowly survived a strong Democratic challenge in his own deep-red Arkansas seat Tuesday night, pointed to “President Trump’s unfavorability” which hit “races across the country.” Hill added: “He will be considered a lame duck, and that often has members of both political parties looking out at who will be the standard-bearers in the 2028 presidential election.”
Most others have remained silent in public.
One thing is certain: The utter devastation in deep-red seats is stirring deep anger among many Hill Republicans, who believe something needs to change.
It’s fueling private recriminations at Trump’s political operation that his advisers didn’t take early warnings seriously about the extent of the damage in states like North Carolina. Trump’s now-former chief of staff Susie Wiles will join his political operation, the president announced Friday.
Trump’s team has blamed “candidate quality” for the losses, instead of the president himself.
“Candidate quality matters. Unless you’re running for the U.S. Senate. They apparently don’t care if you would lose to a pinecone,” said a House Republican, referring to Trump’s hand-picked North Carolina Senate nominee Michael Whatley.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee declined to comment.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who leads the Senate campaign arm and saw Democrats flip a Senate seat in his own state, did not answer reporters’ questions on Thursday. The South Carolina Republican has a policy of not talking to reporters in the halls — and he didn’t start when Blue Light News and others asked why Republicans lost so badly.
Back in August, some Republicans in seats Trump won by double digits were already telling the White House to keep the president away from their districts. Others publicly broke from the White House on mass deportations and the Iran war.
NRCC Chair Richard Hudson had largely dismissed those concerns when Blue Light News asked him in a hallway interview on Sept. 1.
“Based on our polling, the president’s a net positive in every district. And I’ve been encouraging him to get out and do events and do rallies. I’m going to continue to do that,” Hudson said. “I think the more he talks about his record and incredible achievements he’s made over the last Congress, I think the better.”
Then, Hudson lost his own reelection bid. He is the first ever NRCC chair in history to be defeated in a general election.
Mia McCarthy, Andrew Howard and Samuel Benson contributed reporting.
Even the head of House Democrats’ top super PAC didn’t fully anticipate the size of their massive midterm wave.
Heading into Election Day, House Majority PAC president Mike Smith told Blue Light News Tuesday’s results, which have netted them a whopping 252 House seats with more yet to be called, was “on the very high end” of the group’s expectations.
The group spent at least $283 million on ads this cycle, per ad-tracking firm AdImpact, making them the largest Democratic spender in House races this cycle and a significant force behind the party’s big night.
As Democrats turn their attention to 2028, Smith remains optimistic the party can hold on to its majority.
His confidence stems in part from a projection that Democrats will respond to the affordability concerns that were the core of the party’s promise to voters.
If Democrats don’t make efforts to address the rising cost of living, “then it’s a totally different story,” Smith said.
Q: How were you feeling in the final days before Tuesday?
Obviously this would have been on the very high end of what we expected. Over the last three months, overall our polling has been pretty consistent. Our whole thought was, with the right environment, if we have the right message and the right types of candidates in, not just the 50-50 districts, but like deeper in the map, that we could put those seats in play and we could potentially win.
Going into Election Day, our whole feeling was there’s a clear path to like 235-plus [seats]. We were playing in districts that, if you were to rank them from like one to 435, some of those districts were like 250, 255, right? And I would throw IN-05, CO-03, KY-06, SC-01, some of the Florida races. SC-01 wasn’t ever going to be seat 225. That was always in the 240s and maybe even 250s. But we took a chance because we saw what the national environment looked like. We saw what the data was coming back in within these individual races. So I think we were optimistic. But to be totally honest, in our heads, you have to play in seat 255 to get to seat 240. You have to spread out the map. You have to force Republicans on their heels, and then you start piecing together how you get to the 240-245 range. Once the numbers started coming back, that was the best case scenario for us. Everything came together.
You guys cut reservations in some reach districts, only to go back up in the final few days. On the outside, it appeared like cutting spending in those reach districts was a bad sign. What went into those last-minute spending decisions?
A lot of the places we made reservations back in April, and then continued to add on to that over the course of the summer. Partners and allies in a bunch of different places took over our reservations. We tried to be smart by locking in the lowest possible rates in very expensive markets, [so that] even if HMP wasn’t the entity spending, we still had partners and allies that were taking over their reservations. In doing all that we saved about $130 million that we could reinvest.
The challenge with some of the races was by a week out, our money was spent. And in some of those districts, there weren’t any partners willing to step up and do it. Florida is a good example of that.
That’s where we just had to make a decision that there weren’t the resources there, and we had to leave the reservations on the table. Around that time, Mayor Bloomberg was like, “We can’t let these races get away from us. We need to do everything we can,” and that’s where we went back into some of those places.
Did you feel the need to adjust your messaging at all once MAGA Inc. and Elon Musk’s PAC joined CLF on the airwaves?
The short answer is no. The messaging was fairly consistent. Early on, our whole feeling was we need to reframe how voters perceive Democrats. When voters think about what Democrats are fighting for, the first thing we want them to think about is cost of living, the economy. At the same time, bringing to light Republican policies that are increasing the cost of living, or focus on things that are anything but that.
Over several months, we did a bunch of battleground research looking at ‘how does corruption tie into that,’ which culminated in what we would describe as the cost of Republican corruption, and how that is impacting your day to day and your cost of living. That’s what we went into Election Day with.
Overall, we ran, I don’t know, 1300 different types of ads, whether TV, digital, direct mail, or whatnot. 76% of those ads talked about the economy. 60% of those ads focused on corruption, because in so many of them, those two things were interlinked in voters’ minds.
Republicans continued to focus on the same thing. It was trying to paint Democrats as out of touch or extremists. And again, the theory of the case from the beginning was us focusing on economic concerns, especially when we figured out we could tie that corruption lens into it. That’s going to be more important to voters than folks talking about socialism or anything else.
Democrats were able to prevent Republicans from capitalizing on their redistricting gains. Are you worried about those gains bearing fruit in a less favorable environment, maybe as soon as 2028?
In a different environment, these races are going to come together in a much different way. So I do think it’s something that we need to be hyper-focused on. That said, I don’t think redistricting is going to go away.
I’m actually pretty hopeful that these huge shifts across every demographic group that we just saw, as long as Democrats continue to focus on the issue that matters most to voters.
If we don’t, then it’s a totally different story.
Are you saying the fate of Democrats’ House chances in 2028 to keep these seats is predicated on Congress passing something, even with the current president still in the White House, that addresses affordability issues?
I wouldn’t say passing. Soon-to-be Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, since we won, his message is that Democrats are focused on three things: costs, care and corruption.
When we come into power, we are going to be hyper-focused on fighting to bring down the cost of living for voters. I think Donald Trump is still this outsized X-factor in everything. He’s still the sitting president in the White House. So I wouldn’t say it’s like, “Oh we have to pass 300 bills. That’s the only way we’re going to be successful.” I think we just need to show voters that we are willing to get stuff done, and in instances where we need to, work across the aisle to pass stuff that’s going to be helpful to voters. I think if we do that, then I think we’re setting ourselves up for success going into ‘28, both with the White House and the House and the Senate. Donald Trump is still going to be this huge factor in all of this, and I don’t think voters are going to be like, “Democrats weren’t able to accomplish this,” and think that that was us. They’re going to continue blaming Donald Trump going into Election Day 2028.
To go back to redistricting, do you want Democrats in these states where they have newly-won trifectas to take up redistricting even if Republicans don’t push for it again?
I think Democrats need to do everything that it will take to win, and if that means that in states where we control the state house, the state senate, a governor’s race, we have an opportunity to redraw the map, I think we need to do it.
What were the seats Democrats flipped that surprised you the most?
I would say NJ-02 [Rep. Jeff Van Drew’s seat], It was a district where we had looked at it — we did not think that it was credibly possible, to be totally honest.
I’d say North Carolina as a whole, probably. We felt good about NC-01, NC-11 for a while…. [NRCC Chair and North Carolina Rep.] Richard Hudson, we looked at that district. There was a clear path to winning it. There just wasn’t money, at the end of the day. NC-13, NC-14, same thing. The makeup of the districts, they’re not bad targets for Democrats. It was just, how much can we spread resources out? But the total implosion in North Carolina by Republicans at the federal level, at the state level — that was probably one of the biggest surprises.
A version of this article first appeared in Blue Light News Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to Blue Light News Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.
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