500,000+ readers just today.
Vance’s midterm postmortem.
Remember, remember the 5th of November, Tangle readers. This is Editor Audrey Moorehead, and today is Guy Fawkes Day, the British holiday celebrating the failure of a 1605 plot to blow up Parliament in order to assassinate King James I. Fittingly, the city of London will celebrate tonight by blowing up fireworks. I can see how the American spirit descends from the English.
Back stateside, I’m considering what spirit will descend from Trump’s GOP in the wake of its sweeping losses in the midterms. And we at Tangle are particularly interested in JD Vance’s midterm postmortem and what it means for the future of the party. Then, a reader question about Russian bots online, an under-the-radar story about statistical agency staffing changes, and finally a feel-good story on a teen’s medical invention.
It’s a 13-minute read.
Isaac Saul, Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Carina Pacheco, Russell Nystrom, Isaac Wood, and Bailey Saul edited or contributed to today’s newsletter.
Suspension of the Rules.
In a special, in-person, post-election edition of Suspension of the Rules, Isaac, Ari, and Kmele try to get a handle on the magnitude of Tuesday’s Democratic victory and discuss what the most immediate impacts will be on the current government — both in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Speaking of Congress, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) drops in to give his perspective on the blue tsunami. You can check it out here:
The new episode
Quick hits.
- Mississippi’s Senate race is still too close to call, with Scott Colom (D) leading Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) by approximately 1,100 votes. (The latest) Separately, Alaska’s Senate race is also still too close to call, with Mary Peltola (D) leading Sen. Dan S. Sullivan (R) by approximately 600 votes. The state will likely conduct second-round ranked-choice tabulations to determine the winner. (The latest)
- Decision Desk HQ projected that Nithya Raman (D) will defeat Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) in the city’s mayoral election. (The call)
- President Donald Trump has reportedly consulted advisers on firing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. (The report)
- Israeli President Isaac Herzog formally accepted the country’s election results and began talks with party leaders over forming a new government. (The acceptance)
- The European Commission said that Montenegro is on track to join the European Union as early as 2028; Montenegro would be the first country to join the bloc since Croatia in 2013. (The update)
7 reasons why 1,000,000+ people are skipping the dentist and choosing these “Purple Whitening Strips” instead.
If you drink coffee, tea, or red wine, you know how easily stains can dull your smile. And if you’ve given up on whitening because traditional products leave your teeth feeling sensitive, there’s a new approach worth checking out.
PurelyWHITE Purple Whitening Strips combine purple color-correcting technology, which helps neutralize yellow tones, with PAP+ to help lift surface stains. The peroxide-free formula offers an alternative to traditional whitening strips, with sensitivity-conscious whitening in an easy at-home treatment.
What’s behind the purple whitening trend?
Discover all 7 reasons more than 1,000,000 people are making the switch.
Today’s topic.
Vance’s post-midterms analysis. On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance shared his assessment of Republicans’ midterm performance, arguing that the war in Iran was primarily responsible for the party’s significant losses across the United States. Vance’s post headlined broader discussions about the GOP’s electoral performance and raised questions about how the vice president might position himself for a 2028 presidential run.
In the post on X, Vance wrote, “The main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.”
He continued, “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” Vance identified ending the war, a heightened focus on affordability, putting America first, and changing the U.S.–Israel relationship as strategies for Republicans to win back voters.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal, “Iran was a piece of it,” but said he did not regret his decision to go to war. Later in the day, the president suggested Vance’s assessment was “largely true,” as the conflict “drove the gasoline up a little bit short term.” However, he said attacking Iran was the only way to prevent it from building a nuclear weapon.
Vance’s post comes as Republican politicians and conservative media figures offer varying perspectives on the party’s midterm performance and its possible presidential nominees in 2028. Today, we’ll share views from the right and left on Vance’s assessment of Republicans’ defeat. Then, Editor Audrey Moorehead’s take.
|
What the right is saying.
|
In The Free Press, Michael Brendan Dougherty argued “[Trump] betrayed America First.”
“The exit polls have Donald Trump’s approval at 38%, lower than George W. Bush’s in 2006,” Dougherty wrote. “The climbdown started on ‘liberation day’ and coincided with a popular reaction against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. But it began really tanking with the war, dropping to 33% by August of this year. Polls suggest that a healthy majority of voters say he made the wrong decision in starting the war. CBS found that a quarter of Republicans agree.”
“Though election analysis will say that voters ranked the cost of living higher than foreign policy issues — which is certainly true — this year, they are not separate issues… Estimates put the cost of the war at nearly $2,000 per family,” Dougherty said. “Because Trump believed victory would be without costs, there was no need to explain the war’s aims to Americans. Their support wasn’t needed… This was an ‘excursion.’ But the war has not been swift or decisive.”
The Washington Post editorial board called the results “a verdict on two years of protectionism.”
“Vice President JD Vance posted 617 words on X on Wednesday explaining the Republican midterms wipeout,” the board wrote. “One word that did not appear in Vance’s postmortem: tariffs. President Donald Trump won in 2024 partly because voters who were angry about inflation trusted him to make life more affordable. Two years later, the economy was again the dominant issue for voters, but this time, it was an enormous liability for his party.”
“For a generation, Republicans argued that prosperity comes from competition, open markets and letting American consumers decide what to buy and American businesses decide where to source their supplies,” the board said. “The party lost its way, and the past two years tested Trump’s proposition that Washington can make Americans richer by taxing imports, restricting choices and picking winners. Voters have now rendered their judgment on that failed experiment.”
In The Daily Caller, Amber Duke said “Trump brought back America First.”
“President Donald Trump has been the center of Republican politics for more than a decade. He shattered the old GOP consensus on immigration, trade, foreign policy, and the relationship between the party and working-class Americans,” Duke wrote. “But identifying the failures of the party is not the same thing as building a durable political movement to replace it. There’s an important distinction between MAGA and America First.
“MAGA is a movement built around Trump. America First is a governing philosophy that predates him and ought to outlast him,” Duke said. “Trump may have brought those principles back into the political mainstream, but he doesn’t have a monopoly on defining them. The conservative movement now faces an important question: What does America First actually mean beyond Trump? And who gets to set the agenda?”
|
What the left is saying.
|
In his Substack, Derek Thompson suggested “the Trump decade is over.”
“When commentators say ‘I don’t recognize this country’ they typically mean it in a bad way. But, in my frazzled state of disbelief, I’m genuinely finding it hard to wrap my mind around an election result where Kansas voted like New Hampshire and Mississippi voted like Wisconsin,” Thompson wrote. “Donald Trump is hideously unpopular in every context, except… among die-hard Republicans who show up to vote in primaries.”
“This will create a conundrum for conservatives who recognize that they have to move beyond his policies to win any national election without distancing themselves from a man who still possesses a voodoo-like power over the party faithful,” Thompson said. “Today, Vice President JD Vance gave us a glimpse of what that might look like… The message here seems to be: I stand for Trumpism, which means doing the opposite of Donald Trump in every way. Ok, good luck, I guess!”
In Bloomberg, Ronald Brownstein said “Trump’s MAGA coalition just got vaporized.”
“The [midterm] results reduced to rubble Republican hopes that Trump had engineered a political realignment grounded in expanded support from working-class minority voters,” Brownstein wrote. “In the 2024 election, Trump expanded the GOP’s reach among non-White voters without a college education… Republican strategists exuberantly predicted that Trump had built a durable Republican advantage by forging what they called a ‘multiracial working-class coalition.’
“But Tuesday’s results showed that those predictions were wildly premature,” Brownstein wrote. “Democrats on Tuesday carried 64% of Latinos, 71% of Asian Americans, 90% of Black voters (including 86% of Black men) and 73% of adults aged 18–29,” Brownstein wrote. “For dazed Republicans picking through the rubble, that may be the most discouraging part: recognizing that their fate in the next election, too, could hinge on whether Donald Trump responds to this roar of rejection.”
In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser wrote “[Republicans] showed up for the Democrats.”
“By Wednesday morning, JD Vance admitted it wasn’t that Republicans failed to show up but that they did,” Glasser said. “This righteous blue wave was made in red America. Whatever he may say later — and I have no doubt he will spend years pretending that what just happened somehow did not just happen — Trump knows it, too… Was it because of the Iran war, as many here in Washington are already starting to argue?”
“Maybe, but I think not only that. Results like this don’t happen just because diesel is pushing seven dollars a gallon at the pump. The scale of this is so large because the scale of Trump’s offenses has been so vast,” Glasser wrote. “They voted because so much of what is happening in Trump’s America seems so very un-American… Whatever happens next, the American people have finally and definitively told Donald Trump that enough is enough.”
|
||||
|
||||
|
Reminder: This is where we share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, leave a comment or reply to this email.
|
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the release of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir that launched Ohio upstart JD Vance onto the political scene. In it, Vance tells the story of his difficult, unstable childhood and how — through Marine enlistment, college at Ohio State University, and eventually admission to Yale Law School — he lifted himself out of poverty and made something of himself.
Much ink has also been spilled deducing all the ways in which Vice President JD Vance now differs from that young upstart. He has, after all, gone from criticizing Trump in the strongest terms to serving as his right-hand man. Advancing the president’s goals has put Vance in conflict with some of his supposedly deeply held values. Trump’s foreign entanglements in Venezuela and Iran directly contradict Vance’s isolationist campaign-trail rhetoric, putting Vance in the awkward position of publicly defending the war while privately opposing it. Trump’s more worldly and crude actions have thrown the vice president into open conflict with the leader of the Catholic Church that Vance calls his spiritual home; but Vance has taken his disagreement with the Pope in stride and waved away concerns over offensive conduct by saying bigger issues are at stake. And finally, the Trump administration’s turn to economic populism contrasts 2016 Vance’s bootstrap mentality. But Vance has embraced that position with the most gusto; indeed, I’d argue that economic populism is now one of Vance’s few sincerely held positions.
For me, Vance’s self-contradiction proves him fundamentally insincere, willing to sacrifice anything just to get closer to power. While insincerity is par for the course in politics, I find Vance’s particular brand of insincerity more intense and repugnant: I have no idea what he really stands for, and I’m not even sure I trust the stories he tells about himself. In the preface to his latest book, the spiritual-conversion memoir Communion, Vance claims that he was drawn back to Christianity by contrasting the spiritual satisfaction of Christians he knew with the hollowness of secular Ivy-League striver culture; and yet, because (like him) I’ve seen both of those cultures up close, I recognize more of the latter in him than the former.
Yet in the aftermath of the midterms rout, the vice president no longer seems so happy to go along with all the president’s plans. Nothing has made that plainer than the X post in which he publicly blamed Trump’s policies, declaring that the American people had sent the administration a clear message and calling for the Republican Party to focus on winning back their 2024 voters by hewing closely to four paths: ending the war, lowering the cost of living, putting “America First,” and changing America’s relationship with Israel.
Though Vance’s condemnation of the Iran war is a divergence from Trump, it’s not exactly inconsistent with the rest of the vice president’s views: He’s one of the stauncher Israel critics within the administration, “Putting America First” is rhetorically vague, and lowering the cost of living is the very promise that buoyed the Trump–Vance ticket to the White House in the first place.
Vance’s tweet is, nakedly, the opening salvo in the war to shape the post-Trump GOP. Trump’s Republican Party was about as sharp a divergence from the GOP of the past as one could find, and as the decade since 2016 has worn on, more and more of the party’s old guard were ousted. Now, the party has been reduced to a collection of disparate factions vying for power: the “tech right,” best represented by Elon Musk and AI companies; the postliberals, a mix of Catholic and secular figures who want the government to play a more active role in moral formation; the neoconservatives, best represented by the party’s Iran war hawks; and classical Reagan-style Republicans, who still hold to free-market values. On the fringes of the party are figures like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, who represent conspiratorial and racially charged splinter MAGA movements that are growing in relevance but don’t yet seem to hold political power.
The commentator Matt Walsh declared Vance’s tweet “the most thorough and honest” analysis he’d read of a party’s election defeat, while free-market writer Phil W. Magness criticized Vance’s take for failing to account for the president’s disastrous tariffs.
As the commentariat begins to form ranks, GOP politicians are vying for positions as commanders of the new regiments. Simultaneously understanding the utility of Vance’s move and spotting the weak spots in his lines, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz posted an even longer postmortem on X that was much more critical of the Trump administration’s economic policy. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis offered his own frank assessment that the GOP had focused too much on the culture war and not enough on voters’ pocketbooks, a criticism that sets him apart from the rest of the Republican Party’s 2028 hopefuls.
Vance, it seems, is betting that the lion’s share of 2028 Republicans is more like the “New Right” with whom he’s aligned himself: the Peter Thiel techies, postliberals, and disaffected young men are the clear target audience of his prescription to right the ship. Marco Rubio — though he hasn’t joined the post-midterm chorus just yet — has spent the last few months building a decidedly hawkish thesis about the virtue of defending Western civilization. Cruz and DeSantis, meanwhile, seem to be jockeying for the faction that’s more akin to the Republican free-market old guard, though the two diverge on the importance of the culture war for the GOP’s future.
As I’ve come of age, I’ve developed more and more of a sense that neither of this country’s major political parties has room for me. Now that the Trump GOP seems to have been demolished, I’m waiting with bated breath to see what the party’s future might hold for me. But I already know that I’m not interested in the future that JD Vance clearly hopes for: one guided by economic populism and class grievance, one defined by its distrust of the global order and unwillingness to set America as a shining city on a hill, one willing to compromise virtue for ambition and unwilling to consider that his own compromise might have led to his party’s defeat.
And yet, for all my ideological opposition to JD Vance, I know his success comes from his shrewd observations of human character and political intelligence. Vance, like the postliberals he aligns with, has largely correctly identified the major problems facing Americans today. As Ross Douthat wrote in The Free Press, the New Right was only able to rise to prominence because it “had a strong claim to be more in tune with the American moment than many rival factions.” The throughline from Hillbilly Elegy to 2026 Vance is a keen eye for the spiritual malaise engulfing America; the key change is his understanding of the solution. To align himself with Trump, Vance eschewed classical economic conservatism for top-down, government-provided solutions for Americans’ economic woes. And as he’s centered his political identity on Catholicism, he’s begun insinuating that there might be a top-down solution for spiritual wandering, too.
The midterm elections provided proof that Vance’s diagnosis was correct, but the medicine he’d chosen to sell the public was little more than a placebo — and its ineffectiveness has left American voters even angrier than before. I’ll be curious to see, then, what direction his instincts lead him to take next: What sort of leader does Vance think this moment requires? What will he do to mold himself into the shape of that leader?
Take the survey: Who do you think is Republicans’ current frontrunner for president in 2028? Let us know.
Disagree? That’s okay. Our opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we’ll consider publishing your feedback.
Your questions, answered.
I’ve heard that after Ukraine struck some of the data centers in Russia, some of the political bots online — particularly on Reddit’s more conservative boards — went silent. Is there any truth to this? How much is Russia actually influencing politics here in the West using AI sock puppets?
— Brian from Colorado Springs, CO
Managing Editor Ari Weitzman: Since October 8, Ukraine has struck data centers that host services for Russia’s tech giant Yandex, causing a massive 89% drop in both human and bot traffic from Yandex’s servers. After these reports, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said there was “less hate, less division and fewer provocations” on the internet because of “fewer bots.” The claim reverberated online: Tomáš Zdechovský, a Czech member of the European Parliament, posted on X, “If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets.” Chad Scott, a U.S. Army officer and foreign policy commentator, stated that “bots generat[e] roughly 21–29% of U.S. Twitter content” and called the timing of the strikes before the midterms “pretty interesting.”
Yes, Ukraine did strike Yandex’s data centers. Yes, their bot traffic plummeted. Yes, Russia has operated sock puppet bot accounts on X. But no, the Ukrainian strikes didn’t noticeably cause a decrease in Russian propaganda bots.
Yandex is like Russia’s Google; the bots that were taken offline were automated net crawlers and scripts that search engines everywhere use, not disinformation-posting bots. In other words, the bots Yandex operates are completely different from the automated sock-puppet accounts fueling Russian propaganda. If anything, Russian propaganda posts increased over the period following the Yandex strikes. An analysis by Graphika found that conservative sites on Reddit had normal traffic, and the only subreddits that were impacted were Russian ones — sites where real users who rely on Yandex services would congregate — regardless of ideology. Graphika also found that “mentions of MAGA on X rose 25% in the first eight hours after the Vladimir strike, compared with the same hours on the four previous Sundays.”
Cloudflare attempted to clarify that in their initial posts, but it didn’t matter; the claims had already taken off. And the backtracking that followed was half-hearted and late. Zelensky clarified that he was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” — the general vibe, not anything measurable. Zdechovský said he wasn’t necessarily presenting his claim as fact (though he continued to leave his rather popular post pinned on his profile). Scott said he never technically claimed the strikes incapacitated bots on X, so he never technically said anything false.
It all added up to a story that spiraled out of control based on a misinterpretation of the word “bot” and an obvious knee-jerk reaction to a word cloud that included “Russia” and “data centers.” As Renée DiResta wrote, “Ironically, a story about the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots became a viral misleading story on its own.”
Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.
Under the radar.
In October, Not-Ship’s Amanda Shendruk reported on decreasing staffing at U.S. statistical agencies over the past two years, and the decline’s effect on publicly available federal datasets — government-provided statistics that economists, journalists and business professionals rely on to inform them about workforce demographics, weather, food insecurity, air quality, and more. Shendruk created some Tangle-exclusive visualizations to show the scale of the changes. Here’s a look at staffing:
Separately, health data has been among the categories of agency data most affected by staffing reductions. The Data Policy Institute’s Denice Ross says that this “zombie data” — data sets that are still accessible but haven’t been updated for years — results from cuts to initiatives like the sickle cell data program, infant and mother health trackers, and reproductive science. You can read Shendruk’s full report on the staffing cuts and zombie data on Not-Ship.
Coffee, tea, or red wine leaving their mark? PurelyWHITE Purple Whitening Strips combine purple color-correcting technology with PAP+ to help neutralize yellow tones and lift surface stains. The peroxide-free formula offers an easy, at-home whitening alternative.
What’s behind the purple whitening trend? Discover all 7 reasons more than 1,000,000 people are making the switch.
The extras.
- One year ago today we covered the results of the 2025 elections.
- The most clicked link in our last regular newsletter was JD Vance’s post on X about the midterms.
- Nothing to do with politics: This black bear just won the 2026 Introvert Award.
- Our last survey: 4,348 readers responded to our survey on the 2026 midterm results, with respondents ranking inflation as the most salient issue for voters. “Inflation, cost of living, and tariffs are just different sides of the same economic dice,” one respondent said. “The in-your-face corruption of this administration, as well as the inability of the GOP to take a stand against it, was the basis for all the ills and issues since Trump became president,” said another.
Have a nice day.
When the close friend of rising tenth grader Aanya Mansani fainted in school, the Texas teen and other bystanders rushed to her aid. But no one knew her allergies, medications, or whom to contact — in other words, the biggest barrier to help was a lack of knowledge. That experience prompted Mansani to invent a QR code-based emergency medical platform that provides instant access to essential information such as allergies, medications, and emergency contacts. The 14-year-old recently won a Gold Medal at the 2026 GENIUS Olympiad for her invention. “This process taught me how to balance usability, privacy, and technology while building a solution designed for real emergencies when every second matters,” she said. Good Good Good has the story.