Good morning and happy post-Halloween, so you know what that means: the Mood is Doom. Welcome to this palindromically futile, inevitably retrospective 113th Carnival of Fools! Closing time draws nigh for the GOP in this November election, particularly in our Senate, and by the time you’re so topped off on whiskey or beer somewhere around where the sun’s up over the yardarm, your illusions will not avail you: It’s time to close the doors and let you out into the world.
In other words: Yes, it’s Election Day. And I don’t blame anyone for getting pasted tonight. I have low hopes and little cheer for you at an unusually pessimistic moment — we find ourselves in an Election Day Carnival of Fools, and every prior installment has naturally led us up to this climax.
The GOP Prepares to Break Its Neck in the Senate
Let us start: The House of Representatives is gone. We’ve known this for a year now. The GOP majority, midterm gerrymandering or not, is already a phantom to be replaced in January, with nobody to blame except a president who has never had need nor respect for a legislature — or a tripartite government, for that matter. (Prepare for miserable surprises!) As for my Senate call, I’ll put the bottom line up front: I expect Republicans to break their necks pointedly, ramming headlong into a brick wall singlehandedly erected by their supposed party benefactor, Donald Trump: to go from a 53–47 majority (once theoretically unbreakable, given the 2026 map) to (if lucky!) a 50–50 tie, with JD Vance as the (impossibly doomed, insofar as 2028 aspirations are concerned) tiebreaking vote.
There! There’s your Senate prediction, one I made long ago, and some might say an impossibly optimistic one. It could get worse. Under no circumstances will it get better. And while the details feel (at this point) pointless for me to re-elaborate upon, my appointed task is to break it down for you, so I will. But you’re not going to like it.
AT 6:00 p.m. ET:
Kentucky and Indiana polls close. These are — for this cycle at least — permissibly irrelevant to tonight’s carnage. (It’s not 2008 in Indiana anymore, and it never was in Kentucky.) At this point, start speed-drinking in preparation for the real havoc. (For Democrats and readers into the Grateful Dead and/or psychedelics: This is when to start timing your dosing.)
AT 7:00 p.m. ET:
Polls along the rest of the East Coast close between here and 7:30. Immediate focus should be placed upon emergency Senate Republican candidate Darline Graham in South Carolina, running to succeed her recently departed brother Lindsey after President Trump (in an ill-considered moment of vanity and pigheaded desperation to replace an ally) designated her Graham’s successor. She knows naught about politics or foreign policy — her older brother’s two specialties — but she sure does know how to bend a knee! I don’t predict her to lose, but she doesn’t deserve to win; as a handpicked candidate, chosen rather explicitly by Trump for her cheerful naïveté (“whatever you say, boss!” only works when the boss isn’t so manifestly deranged), she will edge out a late night and then sit as a placeholder until someone more deserving comes along.
Meanwhile, in North (and less civilized) Carolina, there is no race at all: Polls close statewide at 7:30 p.m., and former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is expected to count coup on hapless Trump stooge Michael Whatley. Trump chased two-term incumbent (and canny survivor) GOP Senator Thom Tillis from this seat for insufficient loyalty to his monomaniacal domestic agenda; his reward will be the easiest Democratic Senate pickup of the night.
AT 8:00 p.m. ET:
In Maine, the indefatigable Susan Collins is held hostage to Trump’s fickle (and implacably Canadian-focused) aggressions. Polls have consistently shown her trailing opponent Troy Jackson. And yet polls have been consistently incorrect about Susan Collins’s resilience. I pick her (improbably, against reason and odds) to hold on in a nightmare wave. If not, the night begins darkly.
Unfortunately, polls also close in Ohio at the same time, and there I predict a blue tsunami. Senator Jon Husted might have a remarkable, athletic set of ass-cheeks (per President Trump), but that won’t help Vance’s semi-anonymous replacement-senator in a race against recently turfed Democrat Sherrod Brown. Whatever issues Husted had to run on in a race where tariffs and the miserable domestic economy currently predominate, they have been stripped away by the atrocious, nuclearly self-destructive “I hate politics, and humanity as well!” ad that ticket mate Vivek Ramaswamy ran in his already-doomed gubernatorial campaign as a late, final “you all die with me, losers!” suicide move. Indecency and flimflammery has its knock-on price. As far as candidates go, Trump sure knows how to pick ’em!
Yet darker moments await in Michigan — and here, despite poll closing times, I expect not to know for sure until later hours — when I expect that, despite all the last-second tsuris, Abdul El-Sayed will win the Senate race as Gary Peters’s Democratic replacement in the Wolverine State, and reasonably handily at that. In any other year, given the matchup between an eminently worthy candidate like Mike Rogers versus a forcefully unapologetic terrorist sympathizer like El-Sayed, this would be the one “upside surprise” I might ask readers to focus on. But Michigan is coded Democratic. (Trump’s two narrow victories there were precisely the sort of fool’s gold only a fool like Trump would willingly abuse as his “natural birthright,” rather than attempting to foster.) And in this year of tariffs and student-focused outrage, there is little hope for sanity to prevail. Michigan is a lovely state. Tonight they will choose a demonic figure as their senator.
Worry not, though, because it gets worse!
AT 9:00 p.m. ET:
The bloodbath truly begins, as the Midwestern states begin to close down polls and start counting. By this time polls close in El Paso, and we finally begin to survey the damage in Texas. I’ve written approximately 7,000 words about this race, dating back to a year ago, so let me be blunt in telling you that Republican Ken Paxton is doomed and will prove to be the suppuratingly corrupt scum-heel who — with Donald Trump’s ignoramus insistence and encouragement — helped turn Texas blue. You’ve had enough time to adjust to this potentiality, and now it’s no longer potential. (And if he wins — well, *phew*, but now we have to drag this vaguely amphibious blob around for the next six years.)
In other Midwestern and Plains states I still hold out hope: Adam Hamilton is a uniquely qualified Democratic challenger to Kansas’s (altogether too willing) Trump functionary Roger Marshall, but even I, as pessimistic as I am, think that Marshall’s self-defeating moves near the end of the race won’t be enough to topple him. (If I am proven wrong and Kansas history shifts left, you can blame tariffs.) By the same token, I expect Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts to pull out a closer-than-it-should-be race against “independent” Dan Osborn, for the same reason that Republicans have run ahead of so-called independents (read: Democrats) for decades now.
In Iowa things could be different, however. Once a swing state, lately a “red” state, Iowa is firmly now back up for grabs again. Sixteen years of Republican control of the governor’s mansion looks to be gone now, as outsider Zach Lahn won and then frittered away the gubernatorial nomination on a campaign based largely on attacking the state’s own agribusiness industry. Lahn’s pathetically amateurish flailing — structured around trying to frame himself as a MAGA “outsider” in a world where Trump’s tariff regime is targeted explicitly at the heart of Iowa, a state whose rural voters Trump considers easily swindled — has only dragged down the chances of Ashley Hinson, an eminently qualified candidate, to replace the retiring Senator Joni Ernst. I still narrowly favor her to win, but if you wake up to Josh Turek, remember who got you here.
AT 10:00 p.m. ET:
Nevada polls close, among others. This is worth noting because Nevada is a state that notoriously does not matter (and never has) to the national electoral calculus; therefore its voting trends often go unnoticed outside of people named Jon Ralston. But it seems perilously likely that, given the national unpopularity of Trump and the Republican Party, reasonably well-liked Governor Joe Lombardo is on track to be turned out of office — or run things appallingly close. If close, we won’t know the results for days.
AT 11:00 p.m. ET:
California polls close. Nobody of any importance on the Republican side will ever win statewide in California again, so smart people understand that I’m here solely to watch L.A. Mayor Karen Bass get punted out of office by the even more worthless DSA ultraprogressive Nithya Raman. You thought being a true-blue Castro functionary was too far left for the City of Angels? Get ready for full-scale luxury automated homelessness, people.
AT 12:00 a.m. ET:
Nothing of importance whatsoever will happen. But I’ll still be awake because . . .
AT 1:00 a.m. ET:
Polls close in Alaska. Ha ha, this is a bit of a joke. We won’t know the result in Alaska for weeks, most likely. You can thank the unforgiving realities of geography (those huskies can sled only so many ballots down to Anchorage at one time), or you can thank the absurdities of the Lisa Murkowski-approved “ranked choice voting” ballot, but we’ll find out whether brass-knuckled Inuit brawler Mary Peltola will defeat one of the two Dan Sullivans on the ballot somewhere around Thanksgiving.
Whatever You Do, Do Not Miss Our Election Live Blog
It has now become a National Review tradition! We will be hosting our spectacularly unfiltered (and therefore bluntly hilarious) reaction to the incoming election results tonight. You can clock in here around 6 p.m. EST.
Until next week — assuming I don’t have a stroke after all of this.