Whole Hog Politics: President Dennis Duffy

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In the long-running TV comedy 30 Rock, the protagonist, Liz Lemon , played by Tina Fey , has an on-again-off-again love interest in Dennis Duffy, played by Dean Winters (aka the mayhem guy from the insurance commercials).

The Duffy character has ended up having a surprising bit of political relevance, most notably for a 2008 episode that prefigured some of the changing nature of the Republican Party. Duffy is hailed as a hero for saving a commuter’s life on the subway, and the show’s preeminent Republican, Alec Baldwin ’s Jack Donaghy , tries to recruit Duffy as a candidate.

Duffy, a grifter and a fool, describes his ideological views as “fiscal liberal, social conservative.” In 2008, that was a laugh line, since in those days, many Republicans tired of the long battles of gay marriage and abortion had adopted the inverse — fiscally conservative, socially liberal — as a way to distance themselves from the long culture war that was alienating the party from many college-educated and upwardly mobile voters.

Indeed, the “new right” movement that would grow out of the defeats of the following eight years would be of a Dennis Duffy kind. President Trump and his MAGA movement weren’t conservative on those old issues, but it definitely embraced a kind of right-wing populism in which big government and big spending were paired with an enthusiastic form of culture war. It was a world in which Republicans shrugged off $2 trillion deficits and a sitting vice president would brag that Americans “do not have to apologize for being white” anymore — a world Duffy might have imagined.

But the Duffy-Lemon dynamic was actually a pretty good template for the tempestuous relationship between Trump and his adopted party. Duffy’s signature line after every breakup or encounter with Lemon was, “You’ll be back, dummy.” She would fume at his gall and her own weakness for falling for his old lines again, but he was right. And so was Trump . Every time it seemed like this time was the moment that the GOP had finally had enough, they came back again and again.

Trump has now led Republicans to what is already a worse midterm defeat than the 1974 Watergate-era catastrophe — and we’re still counting. With the potential loss of as many as 55 House seats, nine Senate seats and six governorships, 2026 may end up ranking with former President Herbert Hoover ’s 1930 rout on the list of worst-ever midterms.

There is a debate among Republicans only just now beginning over which factions of the party — the nationalists led by Vice President Vance or the mostly leaderless conservatives whose laments were expressed this week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — are most to blame.

But it isn’t really that complicated. The midterms were about Trump and Trumpism, and because the GOP had so fully given itself over to him after his 2024 comeback, the damage left no corner of the party untouched.

Trump had in the past benefitted from resistance from factions within his party. But in the final iteration of MAGA, there was no creative tension and none of the “guardrails” we used to hear so much about. In his first term, friction with congressional leaders and governors helped keep some of Trump’s most damaging impulses in check. In the second Trump term, they refused him almost nothing — except for the abolishment of the Senate filibuster, which Republicans are about to rediscover as a principle pillar of the republic.

And it all ended in tears Tuesday, setting up a lame-duck period that promises to be an absolute grind for a party that would very much like to be able to turn the page on what will come to be remembered as a very embarrassing episode in its history.

Breaking up is hard to do, but it would appear that voters have done for Republicans what they couldn’t do for themselves.

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A consortium of news outlets c onducted a new kind of voter analysis around this year’s elections. Some relevant findings below:

White men (35 percent): 45 percent Democratic, 53 percent Republican

White women (38 percent): 52 percent Democratic, 46 percent Republican

Black men (4 percent): 86 percent Democratic, 12 percent Republican

Black women (5 percent): 93 percent Democratic, 6 percent Republican

Latino men (5 percent): 58 percent Democratic, 39 percent Republican

Latino women (5 percent): 68 percent Democratic, 30 percent Republican

18-29 (11 percent): 73 percent Democratic, 25 percent Republican

30-44 (20 percent): 62 percent Democratic, 36 percent Republican

45-64 (34 percent): 52 percent Democratic, 47 percent Republican

65+ (36 percent): 50 percent Democratic, 50 percent Republican

Vote by 2024 presidential election preference:

Kamala Harris (49 percent): 97 percent Democratic, 2 percent Republican

Donald Trump (44 percent): 7 percent Democratic, 91 percent Republican

Did not vote (4 percent): 70 percent Democratic, 25 percent Republican

Crucial (34 percent): 72 percent Democratic, 26 percent Republican

A major factor (40 percent): 58 percent Democratic, 41 percent Republican

A minor factor (19 percent): 31 percent Democratic, 68 percent Republican

Not a factor (6 percent): 23 percent Democratic, 75 percent Republican

ON THE SIDE: ‘WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE’

Mojo : “Early May, 1976. Deep in the Louisiana swamps, the musicians of Bob Dylan ’s Rolling Thunder Revue are spending the afternoon with Bobby Charles , the cult hero who’d made an album with The Band in 1972, and who also, in a previous life, had written See You Later, Alligator. On the road down South for the second Rolling Thunder tour, a show has been cancelled and Charles – whom Dylan later calls ‘one of the most melodious voices ever transmuted into a piece of vinyl’ — has invited everyone to his place in the bayou for a barbecue. But he isn’t cooking hamburgers. According to percussionist Gary Burk e, not long before his passing earlier this year, ‘There were a lot of local characters and this unusual-looking stew. I said, What is this? This guy with a Bowie knife in his belt, somebody you don’t want to mess with in a dark alley, says, ‘It’s alligator. I caught this last night.’’”

Levin: Voters are done with Trumpism : National Review: “ President Trump wanted voters to behave like he was on the ballot in the 2026 midterms, and he sure got his wish. Voters delivered a massive repudiation of Trump and Trumpism as they understand them, and the resulting wave washed away essentially every congressional Republican thought to occupy a competitive seat and many more besides. That’s not to say this presidency has entirely lacked for achievements. The Trump administration really seems to have gained control of the southern border, for instance, and has effectively pushed back on some of the excesses of Covid-era wokeism, both of which were (rightly) high priorities for many 2024 Trump voters. Some lower-profile but still important measures have advanced in some agencies, too. But these have been overwhelmed by the broader tenor of this administration, which has utterly lacked any public-spirited vision or direction and has allowed itself to be defined by Trump’s own vapid impulsivity and thuggish narcissism, and to descend into shameless personal corruption.

Trende: Biggest GOP flop since 1974: Poll Vault: “This was an absolute disaster for Republicans. There’s no mincing words, rationalizing, second-guessing, or beating around the bush: However bad you thought that last night could be for Republicans, it was worse. … Everything the Trump Administration did gave a sense of a governing class that was out of control. The UFC ring on the South Lawn. The White House ballroom. Changing the name of Lake Ontario. The ad hoc tariffs. From the point of view of a family struggling to make ends meet, Trump was offering them next to nothing, while giving off a sense that he was doing things simply to do them. … Good news for Republicans: Elections happen again. That’s the most important thing. I’ll probably write more on this later, but our constitutional structure wisely provides for another election in two years.”

Silver: GOP on a tightrope: Silver Bulletin : “[H]ow in the hell are Republicans going to go about picking an appealing candidate for 2028? [Vice President] JD Vance is the leader in prediction markets, but he’s Trump’s vice president. Marco Rubio , the other frontrunner, is the Secretary of State. I’m not sure there’s any John McCain looming on the horizon because it’s hard to be a McCain in Trump’s version of the Republican Party, which constantly excommunicates dissenters. So really my argument is this. It seems unlikely to me that Trump’s approval rating, currently 38 percent, is liable to get all that much better. The decline in his numbers over the past two years has been remarkably persistent, instead. Plus, he’s 80 years old, and doesn’t seem to care about the implications of his unpopularity for anyone else in the Republican Party. I don’t think anyone is expecting him to attempt a Clintonian pivot, much less to pull it off. And the Republican nominee in 2028 will have to navigate an incredibly treacherous tightrope: distancing themselves just enough from Trump without triggering his ire. This produced a massive fail for [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis last time around.”

Bob Crawford: Lessons from 1946: The Dispatch : “In the 1946 midterms, Republicans captured the national mood in two words: ‘Had Enough?’ Voters answered yes. Republicans secured 55 House seats and 12 Senate seats, winning both chambers for the first time since 1928—before the Great Depression and World War II. Eighty years later, ‘Had Enough?’ is being asked again, this time of a Republican president. … Today we remember midterm elections for their margins, but the deeper lesson is that these contests are harbingers of what may unfold in the next chapter in the American political story. Nobody in November 1946 thought they were electing two future presidents and the man who would give his name to an era of fear. They thought they were voting to lower the price of meat. That Republican majority lasted only two years. The people it brought to Washington shaped American politics for decades.”

Mod squad swamps the old squad : The New York Times : “For much of the midterm campaign, progressive Democratic insurgents commanded the spotlight in the fight to wrest control of Congress, defeating establishment incumbents in primaries, drawing enthusiastic crowds and promising to reorder their party’s priorities and remake American politics once they got to Washington. But the path to Democrats’ sweeping victory this week, when they seized control of both chambers of Congress, was paved overwhelmingly by moderates who had spent months persuading voters in Republican-leaning states and competitive congressional districts that they could be trusted to govern and would deliver dissatisfied voters a practical alternative to President Trump.”

Polls understate Democrats for a change: The Atlantic : “Heading into the midterms, everyone who follows American politics had the same question: Were the polls correct, or would they underestimate Republicans once again? The answer turned out to be neither. This time around, the polls undercounted a different kind of voter: Democrats. According to the Silver Bulletin polling averages, Democrats were on track to win the U.S. House popular vote by nine points and narrowly flip a few Senate seats in states that Donald Trump had won by double digits. … In fact, even this year’s seemingly incredible poll numbers turned out to significantly understate Democrats’ strength. Democrats are now expected to win the House popular vote by 13 points, the largest such victory in 50 years. And that four-point national polling error was small compared with the miss in certain states. In South Carolina, polls underestimated the Democratic candidate by five points on average; in Mississippi, by seven; in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, by nine.”

Vice President Vance blames the election failure on the Iran war and tees himself up for 2028 — The Atlantic

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) gives the GOP a locker room pep talk — Politico

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is making her bones with moderates ahead of 2028 — The New York Times

Another progressive, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) wants the Dems to “Run Ro” — NBC News

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) says he won’t run, but his vibes say otherwise — The Atlantic

With a 75-page congressional plan in hand, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) eyes the Oval Office — NBC News

“Do you want the white pill first, or the black pill first?” — Tony Fabrizio, chief pollster for President Trump , making a cyanide joke in a dire pre-election briefing for the Trump team, according to The New York Times .

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FOR DESSERT: HERB TARLEK, CALL YOUR OFFICE

Cincinnati Enquirer : “One of the greatest moments in television history, according to many Cincinnatians, will soon be real. And you can be part of it. WKRP-FM, a very real radio station that serves the Cincinnati area, will drop rubber turkeys from the sky this Thanksgiving season. Sound familiar? The stunt plays homage to the ’80s CBS sitcom ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ and its hallmark Thanksgiving episode during which the station drops live turkeys over a shopping mall in a publicity stunt. The turkeys smashed into car windshields and hit the ground like cement. And the show gave us the ultimate one-liner: ‘As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.’ … The turkey drop will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 25 at 7:30 p.m. … [At] the City of Hamilton Fire Department will drop the turkeys between Municipal Brew Works and The Casual Pint in Hamilton, Ohio.”