Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate with victories in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia on Wednesday, ensuring Donald Trump’s party will control at least one chamber of Congress next year.

The results also ensured Republicans in the Senate would be able to help Trump, who secured a comeback presidential election victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, appoint conservative judges and other government personnel.

Republican Tim Sheehy unseated Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester in Montana and Republican West Virginia Governor Jim Justice won an open Senate seat in the state shortly after polls closed, taking over the seat previously held by Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned-independent.

In Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno was projected to defeat third-term incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown.

“This is not a cultural war that you can win just by doing fucking podcasts” + Meat Loaf’s wikipedia drama, eating disorder Twitter turns on Trump, DDG on Kai Cenat

The acknowledgement crystallized an alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers. Joe Rogan*, Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys, and the myriad content creators who Trump collaborated with during his campaign played a key role in amplifying conservative messaging and helping him reach audiences that traditional right-wing outlets simply never could. You can read more about Trump’s influencer strategy in an article I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter today.

While the right has spent years fostering a symbiotic relationship with alternative media, the left has failed replicate anything like it. There are simply no progressive content creators with Rogan’s cultural impact and online following, and a quick look at the podcast charts or trending channels on YouTube shows the disparity between conservative vs progressive creators’ reach online.

Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate with victories in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia on Wednesday, ensuring Donald Trump’s party will control at least one chamber of Congress next year.

The results also ensured Republicans in the Senate would be able to help Trump, who secured a comeback presidential election victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, appoint conservative judges and other government personnel.

Republican Tim Sheehy unseated Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester in Montana and Republican West Virginia Governor Jim Justice won an open Senate seat in the state shortly after polls closed, taking over the seat previously held by Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned-independent.

In Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno was projected to defeat third-term incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown.

Republicans won control of the U.S. Senate with victories in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia on Wednesday, ensuring Donald Trump’s party will control at least one chamber of Congress next year.

The results also ensured Republicans in the Senate would be able to help Trump, who secured a comeback presidential election victory over Democrat Kamala Harris, appoint conservative judges and other government personnel.

Republican Tim Sheehy unseated Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester in Montana and Republican West Virginia Governor Jim Justice won an open Senate seat in the state shortly after polls closed, taking over the seat previously held by Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned-independent.

In Ohio, Republican Bernie Moreno was projected to defeat third-term incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown.

“This is not a cultural war that you can win just by doing fucking podcasts” + Meat Loaf’s wikipedia drama, eating disorder Twitter turns on Trump, DDG on Kai Cenat

The acknowledgement crystallized an alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers. Joe Rogan*, Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys, and the myriad content creators who Trump collaborated with during his campaign played a key role in amplifying conservative messaging and helping him reach audiences that traditional right-wing outlets simply never could. You can read more about Trump’s influencer strategy in an article I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter today.

While the right has spent years fostering a symbiotic relationship with alternative media, the left has failed replicate anything like it. There are simply no progressive content creators with Rogan’s cultural impact and online following, and a quick look at the podcast charts or trending channels on YouTube shows the disparity between conservative vs progressive creators’ reach online.

The past four years were a very bad time to be in power. The pandemic did real damage to the global economy, which governments papered over through deficit spending in 2020. But the bill for Covid-19 was always going to come due in 2021 and 2022. And virtually every party that happened to be in power at that time has suffered at the ballot box.

The first is the rightward drift of working-class voters. Americans without college degrees have been shifting rightward for decades, but Trump’s conquest of the GOP in 2016 greatly accelerated that trend. Biden fended off further erosion in his party’s working-class support four years later. But according to AP VoteCast, Trump – who won non-college-educated voters by 4 points in 2020 — won them by 12 points four years later.

Democrats do not control their fate. A second Trump presidency threatens to pervert the democratic process in ways that entrench Republican power. But the party can try to make itself appealing to a broader share of Americans. And it must.

A night to remember, a campaign to memory-hole, and a rightward shuffle that would make the Electric Slide blush.

→ Trump won: Yep. Trumpo won the election thanks to White Supremacy (Latinos) and Disinformation (men). The whole country simply jolted to the right

t gave me goosebumps and also made me furious, because she’s a good and fine person who ran a truly terrible campaign. It was a campaign that exemplified all of the delusions of the modern Democrats: that you never need to say what you stand for (because people should just assume you know what’s best for them), that you should never answer hard questions or appear with questionable figures, and that the only issue any American woman should care about is abortion. She refused to go to Austin, Texas, to sit with Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the country, where Trump gave three hours (Kamala agreed to speak with him only if he left his studio and came to her, and she’d give an hour, but Rogan is like a bridge troll where everyone has to come to the bridge and live forever). Rogan is to undecided voters what the Pope is to Catholics. But progressives hate Joe Rogan, so Kamala snubbed him.

But it’s a good reminder: The real villain of this story is Zombie Biden and his family, I hate to say it.

Erie County in the northwest corner of the state has been the quintessential bellwether in Pennsylvania since the 1980s. In recent elections, it went for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. It held onto its title in 2024 by going for Trump.

I believe Pennsylvania will remain a swing state in 2028. But Democrats will need a more compelling message, not just for the white working class, but also for working-class Latinos and African Americans in these key counties.

Amid the endless, inevitable recriminations following the Democrats’ decisive loss Tuesday, one cut through the din: The Harris campaign failed miserably in engaging with the “new media,” the archipelago of podcasts, social media influencers and streamers that for many voters simply are the media.

Trump and his surrogates blitzed digital media, including long sit-downs with Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Tim Dillon, and a host of other not-explicitly-political venues that reach younger Amercians who might not see TV ads or read mainstream news sites.

“It’s a young world,” president-elect Donald Trump observed on Barstool Sports’ “Bussin’ With the Boys” podcast in October — a video podcast where he spent nearly an hour sitting in a room full of pumpkins and spiderwebs talking loosely about football, combat sports, social media and his approach to the campaign.

Biden called for unity in the wake of Tuesday’s stinging defeat.

“We accept the choice the country made,” the president said. “I’ve said many times, you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”

“I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system—it is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent,” Biden added. “And it can be trusted, win or lose.”

For the field of AI, his choices could prove profound. When a technology is just budding, the chances of future “butterfly effects” from poor policy choices are particularly strong. The reverberations from Trump’s election will be felt for decades, not just for the next four years. We must get this right. In my view, trade and geopolitical competition are by far the policy domains most critical to long-term American AI success and should be kept in sharp focus by the new administration.

The best path forward to both geopolitical and economic success is competition, not control. Tariffs and export controls are truly awesome executive powers and therefore demand careful consideration and assessment. Trump is taking office at a critical technological moment. If his administration chooses a steady trade and geopolitical competition policy, the U.S. could seize the moment and secure economic, security and technological returns that will pay dividends for decades to come.

Let’s not squander this opportunity.