Julie Waters

The postscripts from the blue tsunami continue to reverberate around the country. Here is an article by another Texan, Julie Waters, a wife, mother of 3, and attorney and public education advocate. She takes rural Texas voters to task for voting so consistently for Republicans, no matter what. I'm glad I'm on her side.

Rural Republicans, you and I need to have a come to Jesus talk. I know many of you are angry and scared with Democrats sweeping not only Texas but practically the entire country. You are scared of "gays, trans and Muslims." You are scared of Sharia law, communism and socialism sweeping the country.

I get that. I get your fear. Not because I share those fears but I feared the tyranny of Trump. I literally feared for my life the night before the elections.

And many have feared Trump and what he has unleashed over the last two years, hence the blue sweep across the country. The people have spoken through their vote.

So I am not going to dismiss or belittle your fears.

But I am also not going to let you attack me. I have not changed through this anti-data center journey. I have said from the very beginning that my purpose was to VOTE out every single politician who did not listen to their constituents about data centers.

And guess what???

We accomplished just that. We voted out the people that brought this horrible plague to our land. This is a MAJOR VICTORY for Texans United Against Data Centers!

Most of you thought it was impossible because it seemed impossible. It seemed like Republicans had this stronghold that could never be broken and that is exactly WHY they behaved the way they did.

They thought they could get away with taking millions from Big Tech and ignoring their constituents. They were blinded by their own corruption. (Someone still is.)

They thought Texas would stay red forever and that they could take land for 765KV lines and data centers and rural Republicans would allow it.

Did you? Did you allow it??

When your lakes and wells went dry and your county roads were ruined by hundreds of 18 wheelers a day, did you still vote red? Did you vote against your own interest?

From the beginning, I told you that your vote was the only thing that would stop data centers. I asked you to call Governor Abbott and tell him to call for a special session if he wanted to keep your vote. 

And many of you called.

But did you mean it when you called???

From all the "I'm disappointed in you, Julie" comments to "I thought we were on the same page" I take it you did NOT vote differently.

Clearly you do not hate data centers as much as you hate "Muslims, gays and trans." And that is really sad and downright racist.

Because I guarantee you that in West Texas, there are data centers closer to you than a Muslim or trans person. There are no Muslims in Crowell, TX. But there is a data center every direction 30 miles, east, west, south and north of Crowell.

There are more data centers than there are Muslims in rural Texas.

Some of my closest friends are Muslims and none of them are pushing Sharia law or trying to kill Christians.

Timmy is not going to go school one morning and come back as Tammy. Public schools can barely afford pencils, much less surgeries.

Good Lord, have some common sense.

In fact, I should be disappointed in you. I thought YOU were against data centers and depleting what little water Texas had left. But no some of you are happy to defend Elon Musk and all the jobs that he has brought to Texas...while he is at the very center of the AI universe. Have you lost your mind?? He wants to buy a state park! He tried to buy a US Senate seat!

"I hate single issue voters." I didn't vote on just data centers. I also voted on public education. Abbott has singlehandedly dismantled public education in Texas. My own children's school was closed due to a lack of funding. I vote on the things I have been personally affected by. When has a "gay, trans or Muslim" person ever done anything personally to YOU? I bet you have never met two out of the three people you fear. Yet this is what you vote on, not the data center being built 3 miles from your house on unincorporated land. Not the fact that when you were on water boil notice for weeks or months, your elected officials didn't care one iota.

No, you just elected the same man to continue not caring about you.

“You just voted for higher taxes.” Democrats won’t have to raise taxes if they stopped all the corporate welfare given to Big Tech by Republicans. Make corporations pay their fair share and use that money for public education and healthcare.

"You'd better hold the Democrats to their campaign promises." Well, duh. Why wouldn't I? Why would I fight this hard and just roll over? Of course the fight continues. If fact, it gets easier. We now have allies in the state House and every statewide office. There are people in power that will actually listen.

So the reality is that Nov. 3, 2026 is a HUGE win for data center opponents. Every data center is sweating bullets right now. There's a bunch of you whining that Gina isn't going to do anything but her mere presence is giving data center CEOs a cold sweat. Data centers KNOW they are in big time trouble and that is why their stocks crashed yesterday. Regulations are coming BIG TIME.

Data centers are actually fleeing the country. Google and others just announced they are building in Malaysia. They knew they were done for once the Democrats won so many seats across the country.

So overall, this is a WIN!!!

And I am not going to let you steal that joy from me. If you don't like what I post, don't stop at unfriending me. Block me.

I will engage in civil dialogue, even if you disagree with me. But the minute you attack me personally, use foul language or name calling, I will block you.

Some of you think I write because I am planning to run for office. If this were true, I would try to be more diplomatic in my posts, not encourage people to block me. If I were running for office, I would actually care what people thought about me - because that is how you earn votes. By making friends, not enemies.

I write because most people are too afraid to. I write about things that matter like our land, water, democracy and not being racist. I'm not writing for likes or monetary gain or to run for office.

Someone has to say the hard things.

Someone has to fight for others.

And today, that someone is me.

So block away.

Julie Waters

WIRED

It's great to see so many medical and science professionals winning seats in the 120th Congress. Hopefully it will be a good counter to that roadkill-eating looney tune - RFK, Jr - secretary of HHS. His "Make America Healthy Again" campaign is just as deceitful and ludicrous as Trump's "Make America Great Again" bullshit slogan, if not even more dangerous, as it deals so much with public health. Story in Wired below on the new crop.

The Blue Tsunami Swept Doctors and Scientists Into Office

More than 80 percent of congressional candidates backed by the pro-science PAC 314 Action won, including Michigan senator-elect and epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed

Kate Knibbs - Science - November 5, 2026

WHAT DO MICHIGAN senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, South Carolina senator-elect Annie Andrews, Ohio governor-elect Amy Acton, and North Carolina representative-elect Jamie Ager have in common, beyond their victories in this week’s midterm elections?

Each is either a doctor or a scientist. And each had the backing of the political action committee 314 Action Fund, which focuses on electing pro-science voices to public office.

“We really benefit by having those data-driven, fact-based decisionmakers actually in a position at the governing table,” says Shaughnessy Naughton, a chemist and former congressional candidate who founded 314 Action after losing her race in 2016. This cycle, the PAC spent above $30 million donating to and supporting various campaigns, including fundraising for specific races. It raised $3.6 million for pediatrician Andrews in the fight over what had been Lindsay Graham’s Senate seat in South Carolina, for example, and another $3 million for physician Acton’s campaign in the hotly contested Ohio governor race, according to Naughton.

The organization’s success rate topped 80 percent this cycle for congressional candidates, with 14 of 17 of its candidates in the US House of Representatives winning their races and hundreds of successful down-ballot candidates. Nine of these races flipped seats from Republican to Democrat. Victorious congressional candidates who flipped their districts this year include an oncology nurse-practitioner, a mathematician, a microbiologist, a nuclear engineer, and an agricultural scientist. “It did turn out to be a health care election,” Naughton says.

Richard Frank, the director of the Brookings Institute’s Center on Health Policy, notes that health care workers and scientists have always been part of the makeup of Congress, but not to this degree. “What is unusual,” he says, “is just how many came in one wave.” He sees the spike in this type of candidate as a direct result of the hostility toward medical and technical expertise from the Trump administration. “Science has been under attack,” Frank says. “It’s not surprising that scientists have recognized that, and some of them went out and ran for Congress.”

The rise of the science candidate has several causes, according to historian Kristoffer Shields, who runs Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. “Some of it certainly is a reaction to what's been happening at the federal level, the defunding of a lot of laboratories and scientific exploration,” he says. But he also sees this as a legacy of the pandemic, when many health care workers started thinking about how politics impacts public health.

Earlier this year, El-Sayed emphasized to WIRED that his candidacy was focused on public health, noting that the cyclospora outbreak that sickened Americans over the summer likely stemmed from the Trump administration’s choices. “We DOGE’d our whole service that keeps the lettuce safe,” he said at the time, referencing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency directing mass layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration.

In 2024, 314 Action’s past acceptance of funding from groups with ties to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC came under scrutiny. The organization no longer accepts AIPAC funding and supported candidates like El-Sayed who were vocally critical of the Israeli government. Unlike some other political committees that aim to put doctors in office, like the American Medical Association’s PAC, 314 Action specifically focuses on electing Democratic health and science experts; it is forthright about its opposition to the Trump administration’s approach to public health.

That so many of these politicians are advocates for the importance of public health and scientific expertise suggests that the election was, in part, a rejection of current health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA movement, which promotes medical misinformation, including anti-vaccine sentiment. Many of the winning candidates with scientific and technical backgrounds have explicitly discussed how their concerns about the state of health care policy drove them to enter the race. “I am appalled seeing infectious diseases spreading through our communities that we had once declared eradicated,” microbiologist Jasmine Clark, the incoming representative from Georgia, told The Guardian earlier this year.

Clark was first supported by 314 Action when she ran for Georgia’s House of Representatives eight years ago. “She was in the first class of scientists that we helped elect in that 2018 cycle and now has made that move up to the federal level,” says Naughton.

Shields sees the straightforward communication style favored by doctors and scientists as another asset that has made them strong candidates. Some of this year’s winners are especially direct. In recent interviews, South Carolina’s Annie Andrews has referred to RFK Jr. as her “archnemesis” and promised to hold him accountable.

314 Action has also been clear that rebuking RFK Jr.’s agenda is a core part of its goals. In 2025, it launched its Guardians of Public Health initiative to recruit health care experts to run for public office. “We thought it was important to speak directly to doctors and people in public health, like nurses, to say that we have this program and we need you to step up to run, because we have a madman running the Health and Human Services cabinet,” Naughton says.

The push for pro-science public servants isn’t over; 314 Action is starting its next recruitment round later this month.

WIRED

Dean Blundell

Dean Blundell makes a pretty good recap of the awesome election. I am still in partial disbelief that the Dems routed the Guardians of Pedophiles so much. Now, Ted Cruz is the ONLY Republican in Texas to hold a statewide office! Ha! I don't know if Texas has ever swung so much in any election. A lot of this was due to Hispanics realizing that Trump lied to and duped them, and they decided to punish him by going back to Democrats. Now, if only the cultish white folks who still swear by Trump could finally see the light, but the problem with that is that quite a few of these cultish white folks are quite happy with everything that Trump has done, because most of them are still racist as hell. They will have to learn the hard way, or take their hate to their graves.

Inside the White House on the Worst Night of Trump’s Life: Silence, Whiskey and a Scapegoat Hunt

Leaked accounts from inside the residence show a president who went catatonic before taking Natalie Harp upstairs leaving guests to flee for local bars and no one touched the cheesecake. 

DEAN BLUNDELL NOV 5

Donald Trump ordered appetizers from the Cheesecake Factory for his victory party and then lost the House, the Senate, seven Republican Senate seats, five governorships, the entire state of Texas and the ability to form words, in that order. The sliders went stale in the East Room around 10 p.m. The president was upstairs in the dark. His staff were in a bar. This is the most satisfying thing I have written in two years, and I want you to enjoy every bite of it the way nobody enjoyed those Cheesecake Cafe eggrolls (Yes, they had it catered by the Cheesecake Cafe).

America just voted for its soul, and Trumpism lost. Both chambers. Texas. South Carolina. The accountability phase for the Trump Regime starts now, and we’re going to cover every subpoena, every hearing and every whiny Truth Social post together. You did this. We’ve waited three years for this night, and thousands of you joined this past week to be here for it. The price freeze was supposed to end last weekend, but the response has been overwhelming, so I’m extending it to FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6. I’d rather you be in the room when the reckoning starts than outside reading about it later. No ads. No owners. Just readers who decided fact-based reporting was worth protecting. Paid gets you unlimited access to every post, every chat and the smartest, kindest community I’ve ever been part of. Join before Friday and lock in your rate for life. Come with us for the reckoning. Thank you for being here.

The scene upstairs

Here is what White House insiders are now leaking to the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast and anyone else who will listen, because the first rule of a Trump disaster is that everyone inside it immediately starts talking.

Within an hour of the first results on Tuesday night, Trump retreated to the second-floor private residence with Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old aide who follows him around with a printer, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. He put Fox News on. And then, according to one source, he stopped speaking. Not quiet. Not sulking. Paralyzed. One insider described him as barely getting a word out. Another said the residence was “very, very dark” and called it a dark scene, which is the kind of thing you say when you want the reporter to understand you mean the lighting and the man.

Downstairs, Cabinet officials, advisers and MAGA hangers-on had gathered in the East Room expecting a party. Somebody had ordered platters of Cheesecake Factory appetizers. The word used by the Mail’s source for this plan was “delusional,” and I don’t think I can improve on it. By 10 o’clock, the trays were uneaten, and the senior people were gone, out the door and into the bars of Washington to drink and figure out who was going to get fired.

Nobody in that bar, I promise you, said the name Donald Trump. 

They told him he’d win

This is the part that should make you laugh out loud. Trump walked into Election Day with a 32% approval rating and Democrats holding a 9-point lead on the generic ballot. Those are not ambiguous numbers. Those are numbers you can see from space.

And his people kept telling him he was going to win anyway.

Susie Wiles was reassuring staff that Republicans would come out on top as late as September. Chris LaCivita, his former campaign manager, was feeding him the same line at weekly Thursday meetings. By Tuesday morning, West Wing staffers were apparently chatting about Republicans expanding their majorities in both chambers. Expanding. On the morning of the day they lost seven Senate seats.

One source summed up the whole building in four words: delusional right until the end.

Jason Miller, the longtime comms guy who has more illegitimate kids than Elon Musk, was reportedly sweating through his shirt as the networks called one Republican loss after another. I would pay real money for that footage.

How bad was it, actually

Let me lay it out, because the scale matters.

Democrats flipped Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. Seven. They sit at 54 seats, with Alaska and Mississippi still too close to call, which means it could end at 56. Susan Collins is gone after nearly 30 years. Sherrod Brown is back. Roy Cooper flipped North Carolina.

In the House, Democrats are projected to land somewhere north of 250 seats. Republicans had gerrymandered Florida and Texas at Trump’s request to protect themselves. Three of the redrawn Florida seats went Democratic anyway.

And then there’s Texas. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton, Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate, to become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas in 32 years. Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott, a three-term governor, which nobody serious thought was possible a year ago. Democrats took the Texas attorney general’s office, the lieutenant governor’s office and the Texas House for the first time in more than two decades.

Five governorships flipped. Up to a dozen state legislative chambers. Pennsylvania’s Senate went blue for the first time since before 1994. Arizona’s legislature looks like it flipped for the first time in roughly 60 years.

This was not a correction. This was the country walking into the voting booth and telling the man upstairs in the dark exactly what it thinks of him.

The excuses, ranked by stupidity

Trump may have lost the ability to speak, but he never lost the ability to type. Here’s what came out of Truth Social while the residence lights were off.

Fox News bears responsibility for the losses. That one is my favourite because the man was literally watching Fox News as he posted it.

Greg Abbott became a RINO in the last six months of his political life, and that’s why he lost. Abbott, a man who spent a decade turning Texas into Trump’s personal test lab, is now a Republican In Name Only because he lost a race Trump’s candidate dragged him down in.

And then the big one. He wasn’t on the ballot, and if he had been, they’d have won in a landslide.

On September 28, this same man posted, in all caps, telling MAGA to pretend he was on the ballot. He spent weeks on stages across the country begging voters to treat the midterms as a referendum on him personally. They did. He got his referendum. He lost it by seven Senate seats.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported Wednesday that he’s saying the same thing behind closed doors: that this wasn’t a rebuke of him; it was a rebuke of his absence. He keeps pointing to rally sizes, telling allies he saw all those people and they just didn’t show up for the candidates. Holmes actually went to those rallies and interviewed the people at them. They were already Republican voters. There was no love to transfer. The crowds were the same crowds, and the crowds were never the country.

The scapegoat auction

So who pays? Because somebody has to, and it won’t be the guy whose name is on the building.

In the bar three streets from the White House, a consensus formed fast. Susie Wiles has to go. One senior official told the Mail that she took over the entire Trump apparatus and is the conductor of the orchestra, which is a polite way of saying the orchestra just played the Titanic’s final number. Trump was reportedly calling allies last month, asking who should replace her. He denied it. Nobody believed him then, and nobody believes him now. 

Then there’s Pete Hegseth. The Iran war was the single biggest anchor on this election. Voters ranked the war and the cost of living it detonated as their top concerns for months, while Trump called unaffordability a Democratic hoax and, according to reports, privately sketched out options for fresh strikes on Iran once the votes were counted. One insider told the Mail the night would have looked very different without the war and predicted Trump would ultimately hold Hegseth accountable. Republicans on the Hill are now saying out loud what they wouldn’t say in the spring: that Hegseth was the loudest cheerleader for going into Iran with no exit plan, and that he misled both the president and lawmakers on how long it would take.

Dean Blundell

on the ballot

Trump barnstormed the country over the last month before the election, mostly talking about himself and not the candidates that he was visiting. In fact, in more than one instance, Trump asked the local candidate to come up and say a few words, and that's about all they did. A very, very few words. Then, Trump goes back to talking about himself and going thru his usual schtick, such as the so popular "dumocrats" - remove the "e" and replace it with a "u" and his favorite, where son Timmy goes to school and comes home "Tammy." And he repeatedly said, "pretend I am on the ballot." And boy, did we ever! LOL.

I feel lucky to be around to witness this political earthquake. We have been long-suffering Texans, watching corruption after corruption and abuse after abuse, unable to do much about it except protest and bitch. It is a glorious thing, and I am ecstatic. Now, Dems, get to work and show Americans what you can do to help the people of the US.

Yes, Trump. You were on the ballot.

After months of insisting that you were on the Ballot, and that you were the ONLY one that mattered, early WEDNESDAY MORNING, as you hid under your covers, you wrote on Truth Social:

"I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!"

Oh, YOU were on the Ballot, all right.

Your corruption, and your greed, and your lies, and your inhumanity, and your racism, and your stupidity were all on the Ballot.

Your war and your war crimes and your atrocities were on the Ballot. Your embarrassing, reckless, and dangerous assaults on our alliances were on the Ballot.

Your tariffs and your stock manipulations and your quid pro quo deals were on the Ballot. Your broken promises were on the Ballot.

Your friends, Putin and Xi and Kim and Netanyahu were on the Ballot. Your friend Jeffrey Epstein was on the Ballot.

Your petty vanity, and your childishness and your tantrums were on the Ballot. Your vandalism of Our House, and our monuments, and our beloved institutions, and our forests and our National Parks and our very environment - our water - our air - were on the Ballot.

Your MAGA cult of ignorance, vulgarity, and hatred was on the Ballot.

Your thinly veiled White Supremacism was on the Ballot. Your hypocritical Christian Nationalism was on the Ballot.

Your Mob of incompetent crooks was on the Ballot. Pete Hegseth. JD Vance. Todd Blanche. Howard Lutnick. Russell Vought. Scott Bessent. Marco Rubio. Stephen Miller. RFK Jr. Linda McMahon. Markwayne Mullen. Kash Patel. They were ALL on the Ballot.

Your hatchet man, Elon Musk, was on the Ballot.

Your Bag Men, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, were on the Ballot.

Your ICE was on the Ballot. Your prisons and your kidnapping and deportations and your violence and YOUR murders of OUR people on OUR streets, were on the Ballot.

Your contempt for the Rule of Law, and your contempt for the Constitution itself, was on the Ballot.

Your slashing of our hard won RIGHTS, our DEI rights, Women's rights, Voting rights, and basic HUMAN rights, was on the Ballot.

Your plundering of our taxes, our healthcare, our finances, our housing, our education and our FUTURE was on the Ballot.

Your assault on everything America stands for was on the Ballot.

YOU, Donald J Trump, were on the Ballot.

AND. YOU. LOST.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Commentary © Glee Violette

Photo credit: Anadolu/Getty