Meredith Lee Hill✓

Hakeem Jeffries @RepJeffries

Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

Breaking and very sad news -- Sen. Chris Murphy is hospitalized following a stroke, an aide to the Connecticut Democrat confirmed Sunday. His staff began notifying people Saturday afternoon of the hospitalization and stroke, a person told POLITICO at the time. “Yesterday afternoon, Senator Murphy started experiencing numbness in his arm while at his son’s hockey game. He was taken to a local hospital, where it was discovered he had experienced a stroke,” Allison Herwitt, Murphy’s chief of staff, said in a statement. “He was transferred to Johns Hopkins for further monitoring and is responding well to treatment. The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery,” she added. Murphy, who is viewed as a potential 2028 White House candidate, has been traveling the country to campaign for candidates, including recent stops in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida. He had been previously scheduled to attend campaign events in New Hampshire on Sunday. more w/ @jordainc

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

NEW — It’s do or die time for Dems to win back key Trump districts in the Midwest Dems are running neck and neck with Rs. At least one GOP incumbent has raised concerns for weeks about $. It’s still an uphill climb. From #WI03, #MN01 + IOWA >> @politico

Nico Portuondo @NicoPortuondo

SCOOP: Jeffries spokesperson says Senate permitting bill “falls short,” calls for more House input before they can support it: "[It] falls short in several areas, including the manner in which NEPA reform is undertaken and the failure to adequately protect tribal sovereignty.

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

🚨🚨 scoop - NRCC Chair Rep. Richard Hudson conceded his race for reelection He called Dem Richard Ojeda The AP has not yet called the race. But the decision is a stark sign of just how far the country shifted left: The person responsible for getting House Republicans elected this cycle is accepting defeat in a district President Donald Trump carried by almost 16 points just two years ago.  W/ @andrewjfhoward

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

it was a trove of internal GOP polling from Sept that sparked a new level of deep Republican panic >> it showed a wipeout of their Iowa House seats, incumbents across the map at risk and catastrophic scenarios in deep-red Trump districts, @politico reported. @andrewjfhoward @Reporter_Mia more here >

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

NEW — In late September, top Republicans across House GOP leadership, leading political operations and individual campaigns received a trove of internal polling. It sparked a new level of panic. The polling didn’t just reveal a harsh environment for the party in power on par with typical midterms, but rather some close-to-catastrophic scenarios in a slew of formerly safe red seats across the country. Key seats in Kentucky, North Carolina, Nevada and other areas that President Donald Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024 were competitive. All three vulnerable GOP-held seats in Iowa looked doomed. And most ominously, a crop of Republican incumbents who haven’t had to run serious races in years were vulnerable, from Oklahoma to Wisconsin and beyond. More on the race to shore up those red seats in the final stretch w/ @andrewjfhoward @Reporter_Mia > via @politico

Connor O'Brien @connorobrienNH

Another big flip: Rep. Mike Turner — third most senior House Armed Services Republican and former House Intel chair — is defeated by Dem Kristina Knickerbocker, per AP. The rout of House Republican defense hawks continues.

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

Scoop: Star GOP recruit Jay Feely attended a late-August meeting with Speaker Mike Johnson and GOP megadonor Elon Musk in Texas — as top Rs worked to secure Musk’s help in defending the House GOP majority. Two months later, the former NFL kicker and longtime friend of President Donald Trump is now navigating the headwinds facing Rs in his own premier GOP battleground race. Trump’s political operation and aligned groups just injected another $2.2 million into AZ-01 to boost Feely, hitting $22 million and counting in a seat Rs are determined to hold. Feely told @politico this fall it would “probably be the most expensive race in the country.” more w/ @andrewjfhoward via @politico

Adam Wren @adamwren

Former Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray was right.

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

NEW — Retiring GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada on the current landscape: “There's absolutely no, ‘Yeah, I'd rather be us than them.' It's like everybody better button up their chin strap and be ready to play through the fourth quarter.” Amodei tells @politico he will “absolutely not” vote for Trump-endorsed David Flippo in his once-safely red #NV02 - amid stolen valor and other allegations. Trump won the district by 14 points. Amodei is "strongly considering" voting for the Independent more than ever. GOP officials have been weighing whether Trump should campaign in the area to boost Flippo. w/ @sambbenson via @politico

Ted Cruz @tedcruz

History was made last night. For months, we were saying that 2026 was the most consequential midterm election of our lifetimes. Unfortunately, we were right. Sometimes history is to be celebrated; other times, it is to be mourned. Always, it must be reckoned with. 2026 was not simply a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami. It was an ass kicking. It was not simply a bad 2006 midterm election. It was a Watergate-level repudiation. What happened, and why? What are the consequences, and where on earth do we go from here? When all the votes were counted, the problem wasn’t turnout. Instead, our voters, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, showed up and voted, and rejected our candidates, voting Democrat instead. We’ve lost the House. We’ve lost the Senate. When all is said and done, we will have lost eight to 10 Senate seats. We lost in historically red states, like South Carolina and North Carolina, Kansas and Iowa. We lost in purple states, like Michigan, and New Hampshire, and Georgia. And we just barely won by just a single point in bright red states like Florida and Louisiana, and then there’s Texas. Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas. In the Lone Star State, we lost every single statewide election. For weeks, I had been publicly warning on this podcast that we were in very real danger of losing everything in Texas. Far too few believed that was possible. I am very, very sorry that it came to pass. Texas has not had a Democrat governor since 1994. We haven’t had a Democrat senator since 1993. Now we’ll have both. Why were the results so overwhelming? Pundits and analysts will break down the results for weeks or months or even years to come, but several things are already evident today. Years ago, the very best political advice I ever got was from Heidi. She said, “It’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about their kids, their families, their hopes, their dreams, their futures.” Too many politicians forget that. Take the state of Kansas, for example, a state that has not elected a Democrat senator since 1932. It just did. Here’s what exit polling showed were the top issues in Kansas. Number one, cost of living, energy, and groceries. That was listed as number one by 30.6 percent of voters. Corruption. Number two, 18.5%. The cost of the Iran war, 10.1%. The candidates are terrible, 7.9%. The Canada trade war, 7.6%. The GOP didn’t do enough to support Trump, 6.6%. Republicans didn’t pass the Save America Act, 5.6%. Trump’s focus on monuments, 5.5%, and data centers and AI, 3.8%. The top issue, cost of living, is very real. Too many in politics dismissed it. They didn’t understand. They pointed to the macro numbers showing the stock markets soaring, median income at record highs, and poverty at record lows. Those data are true, but they don’t tell all of the story. Here are some stats that are a lot more real and personal. Spam, Hormel’s processed meat substitute, broke record sales, selling 113 million cans last year. That is nearly as much spam as was sold during the entirety of World War II. 29 percent of Americans have used buy now, pay later for groceries this year. That’s double the share just two years ago. In August, banks repossessed 42% more homes than they did last year. In 2024, car repossessions topped 2.3 million, above the 2009 peak in the middle of the Great Financial Crisis. In 2025, 6% of 401k holders took hardship withdrawals, paying penalties. That is a record, and triple the norm. And here’s one that’s really stunning. Americans made more than 75 million paid plasma donations in 2026. That’s another record. That means 200,000 Americans every single day, with a needle in their arm, just to pay for groceries. That is very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care. Food is too high, gas is too high, diesel is too high, insurance is too high, life is too high. Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars. There’s a very real economic disconnect. Our K-shaped economy is a yawning divide. Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire, a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families. Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years. Understandably, people were pissed off, and elected Republicans didn’t do enough to address their very real pain. So, what do we do now? We need to listen and respond. We need to champion economic policies that make a real difference in working people’s lives, and we need to deal with the consequences. Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say. We can be certain that the Democrats in Austin and in Washington will overshoot. In Texas, they will try to raise taxes dramatically. They may even try to adopt a state income tax, or even a California wealth tax. They will try to shut down the energy industry, destroying jobs across our state. They will embrace the radical transgender agenda. They will persecute those they perceive to be enemies, especially Elon Musk. And in Washington, they will attack Trump every single day, constantly. Impeachment hearings, subpoenas, his family, cabinet members, business leaders, open persecution, and nonstop retaliation. Make no mistake. Nationally, the radicals are in charge. The communists and the Islamists who have taken over the Democrat Party have now taken over the United States Congress. They will be unleashed. Sadly, that means many Americans will be hurt. Texans will be hurt. Their assault on business will make Texas a much less attractive place to start or grow a small business. Texas will become more like California if they succeed in halting all new investment into AI. The economic results will be dramatic. Over $700 billion in new projects are scheduled to start in the next year. If the Democrats shut them all down, our country will very likely go into a recession. That will suit the Democrats just fine. They’ll just blame it all on Donald Trump. In the next two years, we need to do two things. One, fight the madness. I will work with Democrats when they’re willing to be reasonable. Last night, I called James Talarico. I congratulated him on his very impressive victory. It was a pleasant conversation, and I told him that I looked forward to working with him to try to benefit Texas. So, if there are things like flood relief for the Hill Country, or trying to get the space academy to Texas, he and I will work together. But if the newly elected radicals push policies that hurt Texas, raising taxes, destroying jobs, opening the border, releasing violent criminals, threatening our children, undermining our constitutional rights, I will fight with all of my strength to defend Texas and to defend the Constitution. And number two, we need to rebuild, getting behind policies that directly benefit the constituents we lost. There’s a complicated story, no doubt, of what happened on Election Day, but as I see it, the key constituencies we lost were blue-collar voters, what had rightly become the core base of our party, Evangelical Christians, who didn’t show up with the same numbers and fervor as prior elections, farmers and ranchers. Tragically, we alienated rural America. Young people, who excitedly had voted Republican in 2024, and who shifted hard blue this cycle. And of course, Hispanics. For Hispanics, there’s a strong overlap with young people and blue-collar workers. In 2024, just two years ago, I was proud to carry Hispanics statewide in Texas by six points, and we swung the Rio Grande Valley red for the first time in a century. It can be done, but in this election, those Hispanic voters overwhelmingly went back Democrat. We have got to turn that around. And for young people, we need to be the party of the future. We need to champion policies that expand their future. Our two single biggest legislative accomplishments of the past two years, Trump Accounts and the school choice tax credit, which will unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships for kids, are generationally powerful. I was proud to author both of those transformational policies, and yet too few candidates all across the country ran on that record. Too few voters were even aware of what we’d accomplished for their kids and their future. But we need to build. We need to expand to continue creating a new investor class for hundreds of millions of Americans, help everyone, every American, become an owner, to have real skin in the game, to create new generations of capitalists ready to reject socialism. People voted as they did because they were angry. Ironically, the Democrats that they elected are going to advance policies that will make affordability worse. The Democrats want gas prices higher. They want to ban gasoline engines altogether. Their extreme environmental mandates will drive up food prices and the prices of everything else. But hear me now: we will bring Texas back. I am filled with hope and optimism. Texas will be red again. We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas. We will rebuild as a true blue-collar party, not by embracing socialism, but by being real free-market conservatives. The way we built the Texas economic miracle in the first place, and we will build and rebuild America as well. When the zealots overreach, and they will, we will stand ready to lead in the direction of freedom, of prosperity, of safety, and security, and common sense. We will return to a new dawn of freedom in America. It is dark right now, but it is always darkest before the dawn, and morning is coming. That is my fervent prayer, and that is my commitment to you.

Meredith Lee Hill @meredithllee

👀NRCC Chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) will give his first interview after conceding his reelection race to Dem Richard Ojeda — on local Fox 8 WGHP tonight. It’s also his birthday.