Midterm Results: Democrats Won Big. Do We Even Have a Country Left? | Jenny Beth Martin

[00:00:01] Last night was a tough, tough night. We took some really hard losses. Now, what are we going to do about it? Do we even have a country left? I'm Jenny Beth Martin and this is The Jenny Beth Show. Welcome to The Jenny Beth Show.

[00:00:31] Last night was a very tough night. The Republicans lost and the Democrats won and the Democrats won big. They won the Senate seat in Texas, which was shocking and extremely difficult. They won the Senate seat in Kansas and in Iowa and in South Carolina. And the list goes on and on. They may have won the Senate seat possibly in Mississippi. They flipped Maine. They flipped North Carolina.

[00:00:58] And they may have won in Alaska as well. It looks like in the Senate, we're going to have at least seven seats that have flipped. The Democrats have picked up and possibly as many as 11. The House, we lost the House. Speaker Johnson has said he is not running for the House Minority Leader. Jim Jordan is putting his name in to run for that. And I think Steve Scalise will be as well.

[00:01:27] So we're going to have that to think about in the coming days. On the gubernatorial races, we lost the Georgia governor's race, the Texas governor's race, Ohio, Iowa, and maybe Kansas. Someone is looking like we've lost that. I don't know if the final counts are in there.

[00:01:48] For the first there, they're probably more. I'm kind of giving just high level information here for the first time since 2010. Democrats will have more governors in America than Republicans do. So when it came to that, it was a really tough night. And then they picked up state legislative chambers, including in Arizona, in Michigan, in Minnesota, Texas, Georgia.

[00:02:14] That list is pretty substantial as well. So it was a very tough night overall. There's no other way to describe it except that Republicans and conservatives had a very bad night and Democrats had a very good night and they are probably very happy this morning. So we go to bed, we get up and we're thinking about last night.

[00:02:40] And many people I've gotten messages from people saying they don't know what are we going to do next? How are we going to survive? And they're worried about the country. Some people are joking about moving to other states or other places. And here's my recommendation for all of you. It was a midterm election and midterm elections are always difficult for the president or almost always difficult for the president, for the president's party.

[00:03:08] So last night held true for that. And we need to take a step back and think about what went wrong and what we can do better and look for the lessons that we can learn from this election cycle so that we can improve and be better in the future. Right now, my first thing that I recommend to people for you to consider doing when you finish the show, maybe not before, but even if you do it after I say this, I completely understand.

[00:03:37] Take a deep breath and just turn off social media and the news for a day or two. Just step away from it all. Go spend time with your family and your friends. And remember why the motivating people that get you going, that make you want to work so hard to save the country.

[00:03:56] It's oftentimes after we've had a tough loss, it's important to just take a breath and regroup so that we can come back and fight figuratively another day. Once we do that, what we need to be doing is looking for the places where we can make a difference in the coming weeks and in the coming months.

[00:04:17] When it comes to what's happening in Washington, D.C., there will be a fight for who is going to control the Republicans in the House or be the leader of the Republicans in the House and the leader of the Republicans in the Senate. We may or may not engage in that, but that is something coming up. Government funding will be ending in a few weeks and they are going to have to step up and continue to fund the government.

[00:04:42] So there will be some sort of legislation passing related to government funding. And then we have we also know that as we're looking at the next few weeks in Washington, D.C., the new Congress will begin in January.

[00:04:59] And I think we are going to see a ton of investigations and possibly impeachment hearings and other kind of hearings from from the Democrat, the new Democrat majority in both the House and in the Senate. We need to be prepared for that and brace ourselves for it. And then in two years from now, we're going to in this will get started very, very soon.

[00:05:24] We're going to have the election for the next president and we'll be trying to figure out who is going to be the nominee for Republicans when it comes to the next president. So there are a lot of things that will be on the horizon that are related to politics. There are nearly a half million, five hundred thousand local elected seats in this country there.

[00:05:50] So we had a tough night, but I'm pointing that number out because there may be people who are listening and watching right now and thinking I could do better and I can make a difference in this country. And if you're someone who is wondering and thinking about that, I urge you to consider the fact that there are school board seats. There are city council seats. There are state legislative seats, county commission seats.

[00:06:17] Of course, you've got the House and the Senate and the big ones that that we often focus on. But there are seats that go all the way down to the most local level. And if you are interested in doing something like that and maybe you want to think about running for office, I would encourage you to check out what the Leadership Institute has. They have a lot of online training for candidates.

[00:06:40] And over the next couple of months would be a good time to engage in that training, study it, learn how to be a candidate, learn how to be a campaign manager so that we can be more effective at running campaigns and at winning in a couple of years from now.

[00:06:56] We also want to think about our organization, at Tea Party Patriots Action and at Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, what were the tools and the resources that we provided to you that were helpful during this election season and how were they helpful? And what else might we have been able to do that would have made things better for you? So if you have thoughts on that, let us know because we want to learn and make sure that we are improving.

[00:07:25] Right now in our organization over the next few weeks, we're going to be improving some of our systems and our website so that we have refined what we offer as far as training goes and ways to engage and make that even better than what we've got right now going into 2027 and 2028. And the other thing that I want to say is something I think is really important.

[00:07:56] It's this. I said a minute ago, take the time and think about what and spend time with the people who are the motivation for you to do what you do to save our country.

[00:08:08] The other thing that I think is important is taking a step back and remembering the principles that guide us, our founding principles, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, those rights that we care so much about and that we understand distinguish America from other countries in the world

[00:08:29] and are what make our country what it is and how those principles protect the freedom and the liberty and the rights that we have that come from our creator. And I think that it's important for us to remember that is what we're trying to preserve in America. That is what we're trying to conserve in America. We're trying to conserve and protect our liberty.

[00:08:55] We're trying to make sure that each individual is able to protect their own liberty and that the government doesn't get so big and so expansive that it is infringing on our liberty and rights. And so if you haven't done our Constitution training, that might be something that you want to go back and or the Constitution and the Founding Principles podcast series that I did over the summer with Bill Norton.

[00:09:21] It might be something that you want to go back and watch over the coming weeks and just think about that and remember those founding principles. We have to make sure that when we are making plans for the future, that everything that we're doing with those plans helps us ensure that we are protecting liberty, that we are standing for personal freedom, economic freedom, and that we are looking for ways to have a debt-free future with America. Our job got much more difficult last night.

[00:09:50] But let me tell you something. When this Tea Party movement began back in 2009, in the day after and the couple of weeks after the election in 2008, everything seemed really difficult then. President Obama had won. He won the House and the Senate, and he just swept through the entire country. And it was a tough day and a tough few weeks for Republicans.

[00:10:19] And during that time, there were several groups that said, OK, instead of being upset and frustrated, we're going to figure out what can we learn? How can we improve? How can we set the groundwork to be better? And those include two gentlemen who started Top Conservatives on Twitter. It wound up just being a hashtag, poundTCOT, T-C-O-T.

[00:10:43] And there was a website that people could go and register and say, I'm a conservative on Twitter, so we can communicate. You can do all that with AI now. There's so many things that have advanced with social media. But they set the stage and created that ability for us to communicate better with other conservatives. And there was another group called Smart Girl Politics.

[00:11:06] And they found a way to get conservative women to interact and communicate online and start looking for ways to make a difference. And then in February of 2009, Rick Santelli had a rant as the stimulus bill was moving through Congress. And it was the first big piece of legislation that Obama signed. And it was pretty much inevitable that it was going to pass. But we were very frustrated by that.

[00:11:35] And we stood up against it. And Rick Santelli was ranting about it and said, we should have a tea party like our founding fathers did. And those people who started Smart Girl Politics and top conservatives on Twitter and one other gentleman named Eric Odom, who had done something called the Don't Go Movement back in the summer in 2008, organized, communicated together. We got on a conference call together and we started planning tea party rallies.

[00:12:03] And we had tea party rallies the following week. We had 48 tea parties with 35,000 people in attendance. And six weeks later, we had over 850 tea parties around the country. My point is this.

[00:12:15] Back in 2008, because of Terry Kristoff and Stacey Mott and Eric Odom from Don't Go and Michael Patrick Leahy and Rob Nappel with Top Conservatives on Twitter, and I was involved in all three of those different groups, but those were the leaders of those three different groups. We didn't stop. We took a breather and then we figured out how can we improve? What are the lessons that we could learn?

[00:12:44] How can we improve individually? And how can we improve as organizing with other people? And then we were ready when the time came for us to take action. And that's what we're going to be doing at Tea Party Patriots Action over the next couple of months. We're going to be going back through and saying, what do we do? What can we improve? What do we need to drop? What lessons do we learn? And then we will be ready when the time comes for the next thing.

[00:13:14] And I urge you to do the exact same thing. Don't give up. Don't lose hope. America is so much bigger than any single election. And we will have elections that we will win in the future. And we will have elections where we feel like we do this morning and like we did last night again. That is the nature of our representative republic or our representative democracy, our constitutional republic. You're going to win some and you're going to lose some.

[00:13:43] And boy, when you lose, it is no fun at all. And when you win, it really feels quite good. So I'm sure the other side is feeling good right now this morning. But I know that our country is bigger than any one politician. It is bigger than any one elected official. The strength in our country comes from our founding principals and our fellow Americans.

[00:14:06] And we have to find a way to lean into both of those, both our founding principles and maintain relationships with our fellow Americans and do all that we can to save our country and to preserve liberty in America. And that's what we're going to be doing at Tea Party Patriots Action. I encourage you to join us. You can do that by going to teapartypatriots.org. And we'll see you on the next show, the next episode of The Jenny Beth Show.

[00:14:35] If you enjoyed today's conversation, go ahead and hit like and subscribe. It really helps us reach more people who care about liberty and the Constitution. You can find this and other episodes at JennyBethShow.com, as well as Facebook, YouTube, Rumble, Instagram, X, and your favorite podcast platform. The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots Action.

[00:15:01] For more information, visit teapartypatriots.org.