Jim Geraghty

Appointing Pete Hegseth to the Senate seat strikes me as an unwise move, unless Blackburn wants someone who will not run in the special election for the seat in 2028. Whether or not you think Hegseth is doing, as Trump put it, “a very good job,” nationally just 32 percent of voters approve of the way Pete Hegseth is handling his job as Secretary of Defense. Maybe that number is a little higher in Tennessee, but I wouldn’t count on it being dramatically higher. An appointed Hegseth could well be a deeply flawed incumbent senator come 2028. And if you say, “hey, it’s Tennessee, the Republicans always win…” well, a lot of people were saying things like that about Texas and South Carolina and Kansas up until this week.

By the way, another indicator of the scale of the blue wave: Marsha Blackburn won the Tennessee governor's race by about 2.5 percentage points. Four years ago, Bill Lee won reelection by 32 percentage points.

In October the U.S. Energy Information Association said it projects retail diesel prices to average about $4.50 per gallon next year and for gasoline prices to average just under $3.60 per gallon.

As you can imagine, GOP Mississippi senator Cindy Hyde-Smith's “you have so many proteins to choose from” sounds uncomfortably close to “let them eat cake.” Or perhaps President Trump’s remarks when asked about his tariffs raising prices for consumers: "They made a trillion dollars when, with Biden, a trillion dollars even a trillion one with Biden, selling us stuff — much of it we don’t need. You know, somebody said, 'oh the shelves are going to be open.' Well maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally." Any elected official who tells the public they’ll just have to make do with less should expect to get tossed out on his or her keister in the next election.

“You have so many proteins to choose from.” Ready for an irony? Hyde-Smith is a cattle rancher. You might think she _wouldn’t_ want Mississippians or Americans to choose other proteins besides beef when grocery shopping. The DSCC distributed a clip making it appear that Hyde-Smith immediately answered Keeton’s question with just those eight words. (It’s not fair or accurate, but in a cycle that produced the Ramaswamy ad featuring Amy Acton’s mother, an attack ad that truncates an opponent’s on-camera comments feels like small potatoes.)

Do you think the GOP wipeout at the state legislative level was driven by a desire for a more isolationist foreign policy? Do you think Keisha Lance Bottoms beat Rick Jackson in the Georgia governor’s race because the people of Georgia thought our foreign policy was too interventionist?