The Ben Shapiro Show - November 04, 2026


3 Myths About the Blue Wave Busted

Why You Need to Vote Today

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

186.16

Word count

1,632

Sentence count

133


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Last night was, well, that sucked.
00:00:03.000 That was a total and utter blowout.
00:00:05.000 Yes, a blue tsunami.
00:00:08.000 Basically, all of us, the Republicans who wanted to win, we were like Richard Chamberlain in The Last Wave, waiting on the shore for our doom or for the Gen Xers in the crowd.
00:00:17.000 Tia Leone and Maximilian Schell on the beach in deep impact, just watching that gigantic wave come at us.
00:00:22.000 Yes, brutal and pretty unprecedented.
00:00:25.000 The big question this morning is very simple What the hell happened?
00:00:28.000 Well, I want to start with what didn't happen.
00:00:31.000 What this wasn't about.
00:00:33.000 So, you're going to hear from the legacy media that this was about endorsement of Democrat policy.
00:00:38.000 That's not true.
00:00:40.000 It's not true at all.
00:00:41.000 It is not that Americans suddenly turned in favor of Medicare for all or for transing the children or for the Green New Deal.
00:00:48.000 The CNN exit polls show that 54% of voters had negative views of socialism compared to 33% who are favorable.
00:00:55.000 57% of Americans, by the way, favorable to capitalism in that polling.
00:00:59.000 How about support for trans rights to take sort of the big picture?
00:01:03.000 Title issue for many radical Democrats.
00:01:07.000 52% of people polled said that the support for trans rights had gone too far.
00:01:14.000 52%.
00:01:15.000 Okay, so in California, there was a ballot measure in California in a blue tsunami year to impose a wealth tax on people who are worth over a billion dollars.
00:01:27.000 It didn't pass, it failed.
00:01:29.000 Over in Washington, there was a There is a restriction on boys playing in girls' sports, and that is set to pass.
00:01:37.000 So, in other words, the American people didn't radically turn to the left.
00:01:40.000 That's not the thing.
00:01:41.000 That's not what happened last night.
00:01:43.000 Okay, because, and you can tell that, because again, if you look at the Democrats all over the map, many of them are more moderate, some of them are DSA, and they all won.
00:01:53.000 And the results last night were catastrophically bad.
00:01:56.000 Democrats flipped Senate seats in Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maine.
00:02:04.000 Right now, we are still awaiting results in Mississippi.
00:02:07.000 Mississippi, like MI SSS, IASS, IPPI, like that, like Mississippi.
00:02:15.000 Alaska, we're still waiting on.
00:02:17.000 So Democrats could be up to 56 seats in the Senate.
00:02:21.000 And in the House, they may have picked up as many as 43 seats.
00:02:26.000 Again, we were talking about like the outside terrible election for Republicans would be 25 seats.
00:02:29.000 You're talking 43 seats for Democrats.
00:02:31.000 So just a blowout.
00:02:33.000 And here is a county by county net swing.
00:02:36.000 2024 to 2026.
00:02:38.000 You remember there was something like this in 2024, but it was all red in favor of Republicans.
00:02:42.000 Here, I mean, it looks like a tsunami because that's what it was.
00:02:45.000 You're looking at a huge number of counties that shifted D plus 10.
00:02:51.000 And basically, a couple of places that shifted R, like literally, I think two red arrows on this entire chart.
00:02:59.000 So just a brutal, brutal night for Republicans.
00:03:02.000 It was undoubtedly the biggest swing in the modern era in a midterm election.
00:03:06.000 More Senate seats flipped.
00:03:08.000 This year than back in 1974, at least seven Senate seats, maybe more.
00:03:15.000 So, here, for example, is a chart.
00:03:17.000 It shows what we might have predicted based on sort of past data.
00:03:21.000 We used a regression chart here to show how each race might have ended up based on 2024 presidential vote and Trump's approval rating and incumbency.
00:03:30.000 The hollow circle is where history said each race should have ended up.
00:03:34.000 And as you can see, that is not where each race ended up.
00:03:38.000 So, it was a giant wave.
00:03:40.000 That wave was not predicated on Democrat policy.
00:03:43.000 Okay, so myth number one this is Democrat.
00:03:44.000 No, it was not.
00:03:45.000 This is not a justification for Medicare for all.
00:03:47.000 It is not a justification for a vast spending program.
00:03:50.000 It is not a complete embrace of the craziness of the left.
00:03:55.000 Okay, myth number two this was candid equality.
00:03:57.000 This is the one that was coming out of the White House.
00:03:59.000 So, President Trump came out and suggested that it was not him.
00:04:04.000 Here he was on Fox saying that this was not a hit on him.
00:04:07.000 It was not really about him at all.
00:04:09.000 Here was the president.
00:04:13.000 Congratulations to the Democrats.
00:04:15.000 They did a good job.
00:04:17.000 They've been looking for this one for 11 years, and they finally got it.
00:04:21.000 But I don't view it as a hit on me.
00:04:23.000 I think we've had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency.
00:04:29.000 And Mary Margaret Olihan spoke.
00:04:31.000 Two officials at the White House yesterday.
00:04:34.000 One of them said, quote, President Trump was not on the ballot, and it's proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot.
00:04:38.000 Also, candidate quality matters, and President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.
00:04:45.000 Also, anyone who voted Democrat today is going to have a serious case of buyer's remorse when gas prices come down quickly, when the Iran conflict is solved, but they're still stuck with a list of liberal extremist Democrats.
00:04:55.000 And the White House then blamed candidate quality.
00:04:57.000 Okay, this was not a candidate quality issue.
00:05:00.000 It was not.
00:05:01.000 In some races, candidate equality might help at the margins.
00:05:04.000 But Susan Collins, who's a really good candidate in Maine, right?
00:05:07.000 She is the ultimate political survivor, cat with nine lives.
00:05:10.000 She lost.
00:05:11.000 Ken Paxton lost in Texas, but he lost by like 12 points, 12 points in Texas.
00:05:18.000 Okay, even if John Cornyn had been the nominee in this wave election, he probably would have lost.
00:05:23.000 Ashley Hinson in Iowa lost, very good candidate.
00:05:26.000 Mike Collins in Georgia got blown out.
00:05:28.000 So, did candidate equality make a difference?
00:05:30.000 Maybe in the margin of victory for Democrats, but it was just a wave, like a tsunami.
00:05:34.000 And again, I have proof positive here.
00:05:37.000 Angie Nixon in Florida, my home state of Florida.
00:05:39.000 Angie Nixon is an ambulatory psychotic DSA member, a person who probably should be in a straight jacket.
00:05:44.000 Angie Nixon came within two points of winning a Senate seat in Florida.
00:05:49.000 In Florida.
00:05:52.000 Again, so this was not about candidate quality.
00:05:54.000 Annie Andrews won going away by like six points in South Carolina.
00:05:58.000 Maybe Ralph Norman would have won the seat, but I kind of doubt it.
00:06:02.000 According to our friends and sponsors over at CalShee, again, the forecast is that Democrats will win at least 53 seats.
00:06:08.000 I mean, they already have, they've already won.
00:06:11.000 And we should mention here about the prediction markets.
00:06:13.000 The prediction markets did a really good job of predicting last night.
00:06:16.000 It turns out that when people put their money where their mouth was, virtually all the races were favoring Democrats going in.
00:06:23.000 Many of us were doubtful.
00:06:24.000 We didn't know what the vibes were.
00:06:25.000 We didn't know how reflective the polling would be.
00:06:27.000 The polls, it turns out, did a good job.
00:06:28.000 And so, by the way, did the prediction markets.
00:06:31.000 Okay, so the final myth here, and again, this is the biggest myth of all, is that it wasn't Trump.
00:06:39.000 You heard that where Trump says it's not me, it's candidate quality.
00:06:43.000 That's not true.
00:06:44.000 It's not true.
00:06:46.000 Simply put, very simply put, like in one sentence, this midterm election was a repudiation of President Trump.
00:06:54.000 Period.
00:06:55.000 End of story.
00:06:56.000 That's the whole thing.
00:06:59.000 Look at President Trump's approval ratings, and what you see is a presidency that basically, since the outset, has been the story of a steady and devastating decline in approval rating.
00:07:07.000 There are people who are looking for sort of step functions here.
00:07:10.000 What I mean by that is clearly iterated points of inflection, like Things were going fine and then they were going really poorly.
00:07:15.000 And then he recovered and then they went really poorly.
00:07:17.000 But that's not actually what his approval rating looks like.
00:07:20.000 What President Trump's approval rating looks like is pretty much from the time he became president, a slow and steady decline.
00:07:29.000 Liberation Day really hurt him, a mild recovery, and then a slow and steady decline from a high of 52% all the way down to 38.3% in the Nate Silver average of approval ratings.
00:07:44.000 If you take this chart all the way back to the beginning of 2025, again, what you see here is not some sort of like gigantic jump at any one point.
00:07:51.000 When you look at Joe Biden's approval chart, what you see is that he was in the high 40s and then Afghanistan happened and he dropped into the low 40s, high 30s.
00:07:58.000 And then he just stayed there.
00:07:59.000 What you see with President Trump is just a slow and steady and unremitting decline.
00:08:04.000 So, this right here is a chart of the generic congressional vote dating back to election day 2024 to yesterday.
00:08:10.000 And what you see is, again, a slow and steady increase in the margin for Democrats.
00:08:16.000 It's not like a gigantic jump here or a gigantic jump there.
00:08:18.000 It's just a slow, steady bleed out for Republicans, which, again, the gap begins pretty soon upon.
00:08:24.000 His presidency, and then it just kind of grows and grows and grows and grows.
00:08:28.000 It was already north of five points in April of 2026, but it was north of five points in late 2025, and then sort of continued to grow.
00:08:37.000 What an amazing video you just watched!
00:08:39.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:08:40.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.