Tag: 2026 elections

CNN’s Van Jones Explains the Secret Network Democrats Used in the 2026 Midterms

CNN’s Van Jones recently explained to Kaitlan Collins how Democrats swamped the polls in the 2026 midterms, winning key races in red states.

He describes a network called the ‘American Accountability Network’ which pushed the narrative of affordability and kitchen table issues. It does not even matter that Democrats will be unlikely to deliver on those issues, all that matters to them is that it worked.

Republicans are going to face losses until they can figure out how to compete in this arena.

Transcript via Real Clear Politics:

KAITLAN COLLINS: Joining me now is my Democratic source tonight to weigh in on what’s going on with his party. Van Jones is a former Obama administration official. Van, you’ve been smiling a lot since Tuesday night.

VAN JONES: I’m still happy.

COLLINS: But a big question, you know, now that we are getting into it.

JONES: Whoop them. Whoop them.

COLLINS: I mean, the Texas races alone are pretty crazy.

JONES: Look, I mean, look, if we were sitting here talking about California being run by Republicans, that would be shocking. That’s how shocking this is. And listen, you know, Georgia, every statewide office held by an African-American woman. I mean, it’s just we’re in a different planet somehow.

COLLINS: So what do you want Democrats to do with this? Because it is a big question.

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“Missing” Memory Card Flips Georgia House Race — Republican Candidate Surges from 58-Vote Deficit to 262-Vote Lead After Seminole County Discovers Uncounted Ballots

Another stunning election controversy has erupted in Georgia after officials discovered that a missing memory card containing hundreds of unreported Election Day votes had completely reversed the apparent outcome of a critical State House race.

Republican State Rep. Gerald Greene, who appeared headed for defeat against Democrat Harry James in Georgia’s House District 154, is now leading after election officials discovered that results from a memory card in Seminole County had never been uploaded, WCTV reported.

The reversal was extraordinary.

Greene had been trailing James by just 58 votes following Tuesday’s midterm elections.

But after the missing results were added, the Republican incumbent surged into the lead by 262 votes, a stunning 320-vote swing that could determine control of a crucial seat in the Georgia Legislature.

And the discovery was no minor bookkeeping error.

According to an official statement released Friday by RINO Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, election officials identified a discrepancy of approximately 388 voters who had checked in at polling locations but whose ballots were not reflected in the county’s reported vote totals.

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Fraud-Linked Democrat Somali Daycare Owner Flips Seat in Minnesota Legislature

A Democrat candidate in Minnesota who defeated a Republican incumbent in the midterm election Tuesday owns a Somali daycare center that is linked to a huge fraud settlement.

The Democratic Farm Labor Party (DFL) (the official name of the Democrat Party in the state) candidate Abdi Daisane is the CEO of Blooming Kids Child Care Center in St. Cloud, Fox News reported Friday, noting he won Minnesota’s House District 14A seat.

Over several years, the childcare center has received over $7 million from the state’s Child Care Assistance Program, the report continued:

His childcare business also received $598,251.62 from the federally-funded Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) since 2020. A nonprofit called Partners in Nutrition, which recently had to pay an $18.5 million civil settlement for fraud, was the center’s sponsor for CACFP funds.

A press release from the settlement says Partners in Nutrition “knowingly defrauded the State of Minnesota out of millions of dollars in federal child nutrition funds during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, in violation of the Minnesota False Claims Act.”

More than 20 locations in Minneapolis were raided in April as federal officials moved to crack down on the alleged fraud linked to Somali-run businesses after citizen journalist Nick Shirley exposed suspected fraud in the state’s Somali community, according to Breitbart News.

The Fox article said it visited the Blooming Kids Child Care Center on Thursday and found the building and area to be quiet and a nearby parking lot mostly empty.

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Flavio Bolsonaro Reveals Why He Fled To Miami; Then Makes One Big Admission…

Flavio Bolsonaro, the Brazilian senator who fled to Miami two days after losing the presidential runoff to Lula, sat down with Glenn Greenwald on Thursday for his first on-camera interview since leaving the country – and spent much of it arguing the election was taken from him.

“I didn’t lose the election to my opponent,” Bolsonaro told Greenwald, saying the vote had been “taken over” by the system.

But when Greenwald pressed him on evidence, Bolsonaro conceded, “I have no proof of fraud.”

“That’s why I’m not going to challenge this in the Brazilian courts, because I don’t have proof and I never will,” he added, arguing that investigating the matter is forbidden in Brazil.

The nearly hour-long interview, released Friday on Greenwald’s Substack and YouTube channel, covered Bolsonaro’s escape, the probes that led Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to order him to surrender his passports, money from disgraced Banco Master banker Daniel Vorcaro, and whether he still considers himself Brazil’s rightful president. Bolsonaro is under investigation for alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in two cases, including allegations that a sports betting company was used to launder fraudulent deductions from government pensions. He denies wrongdoing.

“Actually, I didn’t leave Brazil, I left for Brazil,” Bolsonaro said of his departure, adding that he sees no conditions for a return while things in Brazil remain as they are.

His case that the vote was rigged rests largely on arithmetic. Lula, who was reelected by roughly 4.4 million votes, added 10.3 million votes between the first round and the Oct. 25 runoff, Bolsonaro said – more than the roughly 9 million votes cast for every other first-round candidate combined. “There’s no mathematical or statistical explanation, nothing, for Lula having gotten all those extra votes,” he said. “It’s impossible, unless the result was manipulated.”

He also pointed to a ruling by Justice Cristiano Zanin – Lula’s former lawyer – extending voting in Bahia by two hours, which he said was issued at 5:01 p.m., after polls had closed. When Greenwald noted that Bolsonaro’s own campaign had asked for extensions too, Bolsonaro said it only did so because the Workers’ Party had, that a little over 34,000 people voted in that window, and that the two-hour delay in releasing results was so “something could happen.”

Greenwald pushed back: if the left had the power to manipulate the result, why didn’t it do so in the first round, when Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party swept? Bolsonaro, who earlier boasted that his allies won 19 of 27 governorships and will hold 286 of the 513 seats in the lower house, didn’t take up the question, asking instead what could explain Lula’s surge in 21 days.

He also floated the idea that criminal factions such as Comando Vermelho and the PCC, which he said dominate areas home to more than 50 million Brazilians, may have forced residents at gunpoint to vote for Lula. Asked whether that actually happened or was just a possibility, he said: “I want an investigation.”

As we reported, a version of his post-election letter declaring him Brazil’s “true president-elect” circulated last week before being pulled. Bolsonaro told Greenwald that wording came from a first draft he had already vetoed, that it “ended up becoming public” without his doing, and that only the final version – calling him Brazil’s “leader” – went out on his account. Asked whether he still considers himself president-elect, he said “neither I nor Lula can say with 100% certainty that anyone was elected president of Brazil.”

Bolsonaro refused to say who planned or paid for the private flight out. “I’m not going to give details about anything,” he said, claiming anyone around him would be persecuted. He said he left Brazil with his driver’s license and entered the US with his passport, legally, and denied speaking with the US, Argentine or Israeli governments before the trip. He also declined to say whether, as has been reported, an Israeli national tied to the Mossad was in the car with him, while insisting it had nothing to do with the Israeli government. Since arriving, he said, he hasn’t spoken with anyone in the US government and now plans to start regularizing his immigration status – consistent with Marco Rubio’s claim last weekend that the US had no direct role in his departure. (translated)

He described the moment Federal Police notified him he could no longer leave the country – at the gate of the house where his father, Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for attempting a coup after his 2022 election loss. His father, eyes welling up, told him he knew where they were going with this, Bolsonaro recalled. “Dad, I know, and don’t worry – I know what I have to do,” he said he replied.

Asked why he didn’t stay and fight the cases, as Lula did before his 2018 imprisonment and as his father did when he returned from Florida in 2023, Bolsonaro called his father’s return a mistake. “I learn from President Bolsonaro’s mistakes and successes, and I’m not going to make the same mistake,” he said. “I’m innocent. It’s the judge who would judge me who isn’t innocent.” (translated)

On Vorcaro, Bolsonaro said the money for “Dark Horse,” the film about his father, went to the production company as a private investment in exchange for a share of the profits, and claimed police had since acknowledged there was no public money in the film and no favor from him as a senator. Greenwald noted that Bolsonaro had initially denied seeking money from Vorcaro; Bolsonaro said the deal was covered by a confidentiality agreement.

He said he would vote to impeach Moraes, citing the R$129 million he said Moraes’ wife received from Banco Master for supposed legal work. “Everyone knows she didn’t practice law,” he said. “The one who practiced law was Alexandre de Moraes himself.” (translated) Asked about Justice Kassio Nunes Marques, a Jair Bolsonaro appointee whose son Greenwald said received millions from Banco Master, he declined to give an opinion, saying only that any justice who broke the law should be impeached.

Bolsonaro said he will keep serving out his Senate term, which ends Jan. 31, 2027, voting remotely as he did this week on Lula’s public-security constitutional amendment, and that he is living on savings for now, with income as a lawyer and from a business that makes graphene helmets. He said he would run for president again in 2030 if his party agrees – and that if his father regains his eligibility, “he’s my candidate.”

Brazil’s judiciary, he said, needs its credibility restored after Moraes threw it “in the trash.” “Today, Brazilian citizens look at the Supreme Federal Court and feel disgust.”

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Flávio Bolsonaro Rejects Election Results, Questions Whether Brazil Will Have Elections Again in Greenwald Interview

Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the frontrunner in this year’s presidential election in Brazil, asserted on Friday that the results showing that incumbent socialist President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva defeated him were “impossible.” Bolsonaro questioned whether Lula would even allow a presidential election in 2030 in his first major interview with Brazilian media since escaping to Florida last week.

Bolsonaro sat down for nearly an hour with American journalist Glenn Greenwald with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo for a conversation published in full on Friday evening but recorded the day before.

Bolsonaro had stated in a social media message this week that he would soon offer public statements and extended interviews to offer his opinion on the election and the subsequent political crisis that it unleashed, which resulted in his departure to America. He also claimed that he had declined interview requests from outlets that did not agree to publish interviews in full, without edits, as Greenwald did on Friday.

Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned conservative former President Jair Bolsonaro, won the first round of voting in the Brazilian presidential election in early October, but lost the second round as a result of a significant boost in the left-wing vote.

While his political party accepted the results of the election, the integrity was compromised by a bizarre and unprecedented legal situation in which a justice on Brazil’s top court, Cristiano Zanin of the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), issued an edict allowing polling stations to be open for an extra two hours, granting a Lula campaign request. The STF does not have the power to issue such an order — much less any individual justice — and Zanin published the decree at 5:01 p.m., as Bolsonaro noted in his interview on Friday, meaning most polling stations were already closed.

On the night of the election, Bolsonaro declared it “impossible” to accept the election results and said he would challenge them. Minutes after the results were certified, another STF justice, Alexandre de Moraes, demanded that Bolsonaro hand over his passports to ban him from leaving the country. By early November, Bolsonaro was in Miami, Florida, where he met Greenwald for his interview.

Bolsonaro told Greenwald that he would not go so far as to declare himself the president-elect of Brazil, but that, given the irregularities, Lula could not do so, either.

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After Republican election debacle, Democrats pledge “bipartisan common ground” with Trump

Following the massive repudiation of US President Donald Trump in the 2026 midterm elections, the Democratic Party has launched a campaign to rescue the Trump administration.

As is universally acknowledged in the media, the 2026 midterm election was the greatest electoral repudiation of a sitting president in over half a century, and one of the largest in American history. The shift against Trump ran through every region of the country and every section of the population, and it was sharpest among rural voters, young men and workers whom Trump had claimed as his base.

The vote was a rejection not only of Trump but of the entire agenda of his administration. It expressed mass opposition to the growth of social inequality, war, the assault on immigrants and attacks on democratic rights.

Yet the Democrats came out immediately offering bipartisanship.

Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become speaker of the House in January, declared that Democrats are “ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground” and that “the American people don’t want us to get even.” He added that not a single member of his caucus had raised impeachment with him.

Barack Obama declared that Americans “want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” The same line was repeated in various forms by newly elected Democrats: a call to “restore a sense of decency and bipartisanship in Washington,” (Kansas Senator-elect Adam Hamilton); the assurance that “come January, we will be forced to work together,” (Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand); a disavowal of any interest “in moving Minnesota to the left or the right,” (Minnesota Governor-elect Amy Klobuchar).

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Outcome Of Alaska Senate Race May Not Be Known For Weeks

The outcome of a tightly contested and controversial U.S. Senate race in Alaska may not be known until the end of the month or later.

U.S. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, a Republican, is making a bid for a third six-year term. As of 1400ET today, he trails former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, by 637 votes with 74% of ballots counted. He has 102,325 votes to her 102,962.

The race has been the focus of controversy after The New York Times reported that Peltola’s campaign helped recruit a candidate with the same name as Sullivan in an apparent attempt to confuse voters. She has denied doing that.

Twenty-three percent of votes have yet to be tallied. Even when they are, the narrow margin separating the candidates means that the outcome may be decided not at the state’s polling sites but through the mail via absentee and questioned ballots.

In the previous midterm congressional election four years ago, Alaska officials said they received 9,143 in-person absentee ballots and 8,009 questioned ballots. Two years ago, in the presidential election, state officials reported receiving 18,158 in-person absentee ballots and 15,138 questioned ballots. Voters can ask for a mail-in ballot and still vote in person, so the number of outstanding votes in the state’s general elections in 2022 and 2024 is unclear.

Steve Kirch, public relations manager for the state’s division of elections, did not immediately return an interview request.

What is clear is the 49th state’s deadline for counting all votes.

By Nov. 13, absentee ballots from the 50 states plus its territories as well as Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa should have arrived and must be postmarked by Nov. 3. By Nov. 18, all ballots from overseas addresses must be received and postmarked by Election Day. By Nov. 19, the State Review Board begins its review of election materials, and by Nov. 25, state officials expect to certify the election results.

In addition, Alaska has ranked choice voting. Peltola or Sullivan will need to receive more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes after officials have counted them all. If neither does, the last-place candidate is eliminated. Then, state officials redistribute that candidate’s ballots according to voters’ second and subsequent choices. The process continues until a candidate receives a majority, or 50% plus one vote.

Despite the state’s deadlines, federal officials may complicate them.

The Justice Department has sent a target letter to prominent Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias asking about his possible involvement in petitioning a retired teacher by the name of Dan J. Sullivan to run for Alaska’s Senate seat, according to the Associated Press.

Audrey Cook, a spokesman for the Justice Department, told The Center Square that the agency “cannot discuss ongoing investigations.”

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The Midterms and AI’s Credibility Problem

To the extent that the midterms were a referendum on artificial intelligence (AI), Dario Amodei should take the results personally. The Anthropic CEO has become the face of an industry with extraordinary potential—and of the creepy, apocalyptic messaging that makes Americans distrust it.

AI was not the focal point of the election. But the industry risks drawing exactly the wrong lesson from public skepticism: that Americans are rejecting the technology itself.

There is a difference between opposing AI and distrusting the people who insist it could destroy humanity while racing to sell it to you. Some of the industry’s most prominent executives seem determined to erase that distinction, serving up own-goals against their own interests.

Chief among them is Amodei, the founder and CEO of Anthropic, which is set to go public in the coming weeks.

Amodei has become the face of AI doomerism while simultaneously leading the company through a potential multi-trillion-dollar IPO. Make that make sense. He is on the frontier of building critical software, while simultaneously panicking the masses with frightening sentiments about the very product he is advancing. The electorate has interpreted this very bluntly and rationally. An honest observer may be led to ask, “Perhaps we should be afraid of this stuff and turn it off?”

I am unapologetically pro-AI, but that has come from dedicating lots of time and energy to understanding the positive implications of innovation. When these companies build products and services that help to amplify human productivity and prosperity, they should be applauded. But they’ve become a hard team to root for.

The constant doomer signaling is becoming insufferable. Virtually every week, you’ll see major AI executives going on prime-time television and whining about their own technology. Yet the second the TV hit ends, they go back to racing to develop and commercialize the technology. The schizophrenic nature of AI messaging and actions from these Bay Area tech bros like Amodei has led to a deep level of distrust across the ideological spectrum.

Instead of deploying effective and truthful rhetoric to build public confidence, they are fomenting an obvious credibility problem with the American people. If AI dangers are truly grave, why do they keep building? If the truth is that you believe only you can be trusted to build these systems, then tell that to the American people and be straightforward with them.

Recent reports show that Anthropic has built a scientific laboratory for advanced biological experiments in the San Francisco Bay Area. This should come as a shock to those who read and watch the statements of Anthropic executives, who are repeatedly emphasizing potential biological catastrophe via AI, and here they are, opening a wet lab in a major urban area.

The broader polling of AI sentiment shows an industry in the throes of a credibility crisis. A Gallup survey in July found that only 27 percent of Americans trusted businesses to use AI technology responsibly. And a whopping 79 percent expected AI to reduce American jobs over the next decade. Those numbers should be a warning to executives who keep giving the public reasons to fear their products.

After the midterms, I hope that the AI industry wakes up and stops deploying more rounds of apocalyptic talking points in the name of safetyism. It’s not good for public confidence, and it’s not good for America.

It’s important to take AI unknowns seriously, especially when you are releasing powerful and consequential products to the public that may be granted access to sensitive data. In the right settings, it’s important to address those specific problems and find ways to innovate through engineering solutions. But it’s so fundamentally antagonistic to the American spirit when Amodei and his colleagues frame innovation as a terrifying process akin to the sentiments coming out of some regulatory bureaucracy in Europe.

Dario Amodei is not an elected official, and he’s never asked to be one. He runs an incredibly influential AI company. And whether he likes it or not, he has become the face of an entire industry. He needs to stop making the case against it. AI has the potential to contribute immensely to American prosperity and humanity more broadly. Its most prominent spokesmen should speak to the upside of this technology, not behave as though building it is a privilege reserved for a handful of people who know better than the rest of us.

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BIZARRO WORLD: Turns Out Luigi Mangione’s Cousin is a MAGA Republican – And He Just Won an Election in Maryland

As if the 2026 midterms couldn’t get any weirder, it turns out that Luigi Mangione has a cousin who is a MAGA Republican who just won a local election in Maryland.

It’s as if everything that has transpired over the last few days is part of a strange work of fiction.

Nino Mangione just defeated a Democrat in a race for Baltimore City Council.

Breitbart News reports:

CEO Killer Luigi Mangione’s Cousin Nino Wins Baltimore Council Seat on Law and Order Platform

The name Mangione is in the news again, but this time it is not that of accused United Health Care CEO killer Luigi Mangione. It is his Republican cousin, Nino, who defied a nationwide Democratic election sweep and won re-election to the Baltimore County Council on Tuesday.

The win came despite the 39-year-old Mangione being a “staunch MAGA Republican whose grandfather was a multimillionaire real estate magnate,” Newsweek reported in a profile of the two cousins Thursday.

The councilman narrowly won his seat with 48.7 percent of the vote over his Democrat opponent Shawn McIntosh who had 45.2 percent in a race covering what is considered the “purplest” of the county’s districts, the magazine reported.

Nino and Luigi Mangione are both among the 37 grandchildren of the late Nick Mangione Sr., a “self-made multimillionaire who owned country clubs, nursing homes, and radio stations and was an established business patriarch in Baltimore by the time of his death in 2008,” Newsweek reported.

The two Mangione grandchildren could not have charted more starkly different life paths. Luigi pled guilty to stalking charges in federal court earlier this year after admitting he traveled to New York to shoot and kill CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel in December of 2024.

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Missouri Democrat State Rep Arrested For Threatening to Kill Couple Hours After Being Reelected

Missouri Democrat State Rep. Anthony Ealy was arrested on Wednesday morning for trespassing at an apartment and threatening to kill a couple shortly after being reelected.

Anthony Ealy reportedly trespassed at an apartment in Jefferson City two nights in a row and threatened a woman and her husband.

Ealy allegedly said something about a gun and told the husband, “I’m going to kill you.”

Anthony Ealy is a Democrat who represents Jackson County’s District 36. He is also an attorney.

Fox 4 reported:

Missouri State Representative Anthony Ealy, Jr., was arrested on Wednesday after being reelected.

According to the incident report, just before 11:30 a.m., police were called to an apartment in Jefferson City, Missouri, after a woman reported that Ealy had trespassed and threatened her and her husband.

The report says Ealy threatened the woman’s husband – saying something about a gun then telling him “I’m going to kill you.”

Ealy appeared to be having a panic attack or mental health crisis, according to the incident report.

The report also notes that Ealy had allegedly done the same thing the night before.

The woman’s husband plans to press charges for the threats that were made, the incident report says.

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