Republicans are reeling over an apparent erosion of support from Latino voters, a voting bloc that boosted the party in 2024, in Tuesday’s off-year elections.
According to CNN exit polling, New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D) won the support of 68 percent of Latino voters, while Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) received 67 percent support from Latino voters.
The results mark a shift from just one year ago, when the voting bloc helped propel President Trump to victory. Republicans say the time is now to course-correct ahead of next year’s midterms.
“Unfortunately Latinos are leaving the Republican Party after giving us a monumental chance in 2024,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) in an video posted on the social platform X after Tuesday’s results. “In New Jersey and Virginia, Hispanics moved back more than 25 points to the Democratic Party.”
“This is our wake-up call,” she said.
The clearest sign of that wake-up call was in New Jersey, where, according to census data, the Hispanic population makes up 21.6 percent of the state’s population. According to the Pew Research Center, Latino voters make up 16 percent of the state’s electorate.
Trump made significant inroads in enclaves in the state dominated by Latinos in 2024. The president became the first Republican to win New Jersey’s Passaic County in more than 30 years last year. One year later, Sherrill carried the county by nearly 15 points.
Democrats also won back Hispanic voters in Virginia a year after Republicans made inroads in the state. Spanberger won the Northern Virginia city of Manassas Park, which has a large Hispanic population, by 42 points. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, by comparison, won it by just less than 20 points last year...
All of which makes the following all the more hard to swallow.
Senate Democrats are caving on the shutdown.
The broad framework for agreement, which was negotiated in part by Sens. Angus King, Jeanne Shaheen, and Maggie Hassan, as well as GOP senators, has “more than enough” members of the Senate Democratic Caucus to advance, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose the terms,” Politico reported.
In exchange for their votes, these handful of “moderate” Democrats—which notably does not include Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—are getting nothing.
Well, that’s not true.
They’re getting a promise of a vote on ACA subsidies in the Senate, which will easily go down in defeat. Not to mention, Speaker Mike Johnson has said he’ll never even bring the matter up for a vote in the House.
The deal also fully funds the Veterans Administration and Department of Agriculture, and the operations of Congress, of course, because they have to take care of themselves.
Nothing in that is a victory for Democrats.
The surrender is perplexing given how clearly the shutdown was hurting Republicans, so much so that President Donald Trump specifically cited it as one reason for why Republicans got their asses kicked in last Tuesday’s off-year elections.
But instead of letting Trump figure out a way out of his own mess, Democrats inexplicably threw him a life vest on Sunday night.
There is one silver lining—this deal will eventually haunt Republicans. Had Democrats succeeded in saving ACA healthcare subsidies, clueless voters would never have known of the Democrats’ role in safeguarding their insurance.
When Republicans vote down Democratic efforts to save health care for millions of Americans, the blame will be crystal clear.
What an unmitigated disaster. In addition to Sens. King, Hassan, and Shaheen, the Vichy Democrats included Sens. Durbin (IL), Kaine (VA), Rosen (NV), Cortez Masto (NV), and Fetterman (PA). If we had a strong Minority Leader instead of Chuck Schumer, perhaps the jail break could have been headed off. The Malignant Fascist knew he was over a barrel and losing ground. Instead, a week after voters across the country strongly signaled that they supported Democrats' efforts to put a check on the Malignant Fascist's vandalism, these eight Senators decided to "negotiate with themselves" and deliver a victory for the extortionist (who's already saying Dems are "cracking like dogs"). The view he and his rotted out party had going into this shutdown was that Dems were spineless and would eventually cave. These 8 proved them right. This won't be the last time they''ll try extorting Democrats, secure in the knowledge that some will "crack like dogs." Needless to say, no money will be flowing from these pockets for the DSCC; we'll be picking and choosing which Democrats deserve support in the future, and it certainly won't be any of these Vichy Democrats. (Some key Democrats are speaking out against this "betrayal.")
The Trump administration has been giving additional massive tax breaks to uber-wealthy corporations through under-the-radar notices, according to a report.
Through proposed regulations, the Treasury Department has offered tax relief to private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, and other large corporations, the New York Times first reported.
For example, in October, the IRS issued new proposed regulations that would provide breaks to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, the IRS proposed a rollback of rules to prevent multinational corporations from dodging taxes by claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries.
The notices have not made headlines, but have been flagged by accounting and consulting firms.
“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the think-tank American Enterprise Institute, told the Times. “Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”
The recent IRS tax notices tack on to the tax relief laid out in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, which included the extension of the so-called “Trump tax cuts” from 2017 that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would reduce tax revenue by $4 trillion in the next decade. [snip]
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” provides more than $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the top 5 percent of Americans, the Center for American Progress found.
The proposals target former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which ensured profitable corporations paid a minimum tax to combat inflation and reduce the federal deficit. That law generally required corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to pay 15 percent of the adjusted financial statement income.
A 2022 study suggested that only about 80 corporations would be subjected to this requirement. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the act would bring in $200 billion in revenue over the course of a decade.
In September, the IRS released notices regarding the 2002 minimum tax, issuing interim guidance that allows corporations to “disregard gains and losses that are unrealized for regular tax purposes” on its holdings of digital assets when calculating its adjusted financial statement income. [snip]
Proposing regulations through the Treasury rather than passing laws through Congress means “you can just give away the goodies to one group, without having to take back anything from another,” Daniel Hemel, a law professor at New York University, told the paper. It’s a route that “that previous administrations have exploited and which the Trump administration is exploiting more aggressively,” Hemel said.
Trump has recently leaned on his wealthy allies to fund a $300 million ballroom in the White House. Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft are among the corporations and donors chipping in to the project.
The big corporations and the oligarchs are in a pay- to- play grift being run by the convicted felon Malignant Fascist. They get tax breaks on top of tax breaks while average Americans struggle to make ends meet. Time to sharpen those pitchforks!
Well, they just won the midterms, so they provided an off ramp for their brethren across the aisle. After all, can't we just be reasonable?
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