Principals

☞ White House: Aides say Biden is walking into COP27 with “wind at his back” following the midterm elections. Biden will give a speech at the climate change conference in Egypt that makes the case the U.S. is meeting its commitments and “demonstrating that good climate policy is good economic policy,” according to a White House official. Senate Energy Chair Joe Manchin will be listening closely to see if Biden maligns the coal industry again.

☞ Chuck Schumer: Schumer has to decide his lame duck priorities even as it’s unclear whether Democrats will hold a majority in January. One top priority, Bloomberg Law reports, is confirming as many judges as possible while they still can.

☞ Mitch McConnell: Reinforcements are coming. McConnell is tapping Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to get Senate candidate Herschel Walker over the finish line, Politico reports. Meanwhile, a potential leadership challenge from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. appears dead.

☞ Nancy Pelosi: The House Speaker will soon head back from the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, and all eyes will be on what she does with her leadership role.

☞ Kevin McCarthy: He’s pushing ahead with plans for a House Republican majority even as the election results remain unclear. McCarthy has also set up a transition team to steer the GOP agenda (more on that later).

Arizona: Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly is leading Republican challenger Blake Masters by almost 5 percentage points with 82% of the votes counted, which was enough for Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman to call the race in Kelly’s favor. Other outlets and networks haven’t yet made a call. Democrat Katie Hobbs still has an edge over Republican Kari Lake in the gubernatorial contest but it is also yet to be decided.

Nevada: The Senate race between Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt is still extremely tight, with Laxalt leading by less than a single percentage point. According to CNN, about 95,000 votes still need to be counted as of Thursday night.

Colorado: GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert is now leading Democratic challenger Adam Frisch, who Steve recently interviewed, by about 1,000 votes in the race for the 3rd congressional district with over 95% of the votes counted. It could be weeks until there’s a final result if officials conduct a recount.

Oregon: The Associated Press officially called the governor’s race for Democrat Tina Kotek, who defeated Republican Christine Drazan despite trailing in polls for months.

Georgia: Everyone is gearing up for a runoff in Georgia next month between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker — that includes campaigns, outside groups, and political leaders. Gov. Brian Kemp is helping Walker; Biden said he plans on “doing whatever” Warnock asks. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, told Semafor that the state AFL-CIO already has a plan for reaching out to working people “cooked” and ready to deploy for the runoff immediately on behalf of Warnock. “We might give people a weekend off,” she said.

House Republicans are inching toward the majority and Democratic hopes of keeping the Senate are rising, but three days after Election Day the control of chambers remains undecided. Republicans currently hold 211 House seats while Democrats have won 194, according to the New York Times. There’s still a slim, but plausible, path to Democrats holding the House if everything breaks their way.

The White House slammed a new ruling from a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas declaring Biden’s student loan debt relief program unlawful. “We strongly disagree with the District Court’s ruling on our student debt relief program and the Department of Justice has filed an appeal,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement late Thursday. The development represents a big victory for GOP-led efforts to block a measure meant to provide up to $20,000 in student debt relief. The latest salvo leaves millions approved for loan relief in limbo, and advocates are pledging to challenge the ruling. Jean-Pierre said the Education Department would “hold onto their information so it can quickly process their relief once we prevail in court.”

China reacted negatively after White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that the U.S. planned to brief Taiwan on the results of the in-person meeting between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali on Monday, calling it “egregious.”

Biden might be projecting confidence about his ability to continue support for Ukraine with a GOP-controlled Congress, but there’s still some doubt in Washington about providing future funding. During an event hosted by the Richard Nixon Foundation Thursday evening, Robert O’Brien, who served as Trump’s fourth national security adviser, offered some free advice for would-be Republican leaders trying to convince “isolationist” members to get on board for supporting assistance for Ukraine.

O’Brien stressed the need for oversight to “make sure that as we extend this aid we do it in a way that’s responsible, that helps Ukraine but also protects our national security.” And he said emphasizing burden sharing with allies would be important to convincing reluctant members to back aid packages. “I think our isolationist wing will look and see if our European allies care about Europe as much as we do, if they care as much about Ukraine in their backyard as we care about Ukraine,” O’Brien told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. The White House is expected to ask Congress to approve an additional batch of assistance during the lame-duck period.

— Morgan Chalfant and Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Punchbowl News: Some Democrats are urging Pelosi to stay on another term as leader even in a minority.

Playbook: House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik endorsed Trump’s presumptive 2024 reelection bid, a move that “caught some Republicans off guard.”

The Early 202: NRCC chairman Tom Emmer — who plans to run for House whip — told the Washington Post that Republicans should be “extremely happy” with the results of the midterms.

Donald Trump rages against Ron DeSantis and Rupert Murdoch as 2024 starts early

THE NEWS

The 2024 cycle starts now, and Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire has picked a candidate early: newly re-elected Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Former President Donald Trump denounced DeSantis as an ungrateful hanger-on in a rambling series of posts on Truth Social Thursday night, and lashed out at Murdoch:

Truth’ed Trump:

“NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious, an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his State, but did, unlike other Republican Governors, whose overall numbers for a Republican, were just average — middle of the pack — including COVID, and who has the advantage of SUNSHINE, where people from badly run States up North would go no matter who the Governor was, just like I did!”

DeSantis did not respond — he’s dealing with a real-life hurricane, not a metaphorical one.

What was Trump so mad about? Well, the New York Post declared that DeSantis’s win showed “he’s the future of the GOP” on Wednesday, then published a scathing Thursday front page depicting Trump as Humpty Dumpty with an op-ed by John Podhoretz blaming the poor midterm showing on his handpicked candidates.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, in a piece titled “Trump Is The Republican Party’s Biggest Loser,” wrote that “Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat” and that “maybe the defeats are what the party needs to hear before 2024.”

Even Fox News participated in the pile-on, rotating through a number of political pundits who praised DeSantis’s successful campaign. Some of them openly criticized Trump, and the digital side of the media company published an op-ed by Liz Peek calling DeSantis “the new Republican Party leader” and Trump “the biggest loser” of the midterms.

“Trump is in the past,” Fox Business’ Stuart Varney declared Wednesday.

SHELBY’S VIEW

While much of the media is, rightfully, focused on the elite conservative shift against Trump in the days following the midterm election, the former president’s source of power has always been his ardent rank-and-file supporters.

As Trump himself noted on Thursday, many of his most prominent allies as president — including top media figures, donors, and politicians — were vocal critics in 2016 and almost none of them endorsed his candidacy early on. Some even cast protest votes for third party candidates in the general election against Hillary Clinton. Only after he proved his hold on the Republican base at the ballot box and delivered conservative wins did they fall in line.

“This is just like 2015 and 2016, a Media Assault (Collusion!), when Fox News fought me to the end until I won, and then they couldn’t have been nicer or more supportive,” Trump said in a statement.

Many of the same Murdoch-owned news outlets wrote similar op-eds after the 2020 election and January 6th, only to find Trump back in control of the party and playing kingmaker in midterm primaries. If Trump makes it through the latest storm with his base, it wouldn’t be surprising to see right-wing media scale back the criticism.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Some conservatives believe average Republicans are, in fact, tiring of Trump. “I think the voters are ready to move on from Trump,” conservative radio host Erick Erickson tweeted. He pointed to a significant shift in how his listeners have responded to the midterm news. “On January 7, 2021, I did not get any calls from people who blamed Trump on my radio show,” Erickson wrote. “On November 9, 2022, all I’m getting on my radio show are former Trump voters who want DeSantis.”

House conservatives aren’t handing the gavel to Kevin McCarthy just yet

Members of the House Freedom Caucus aren’t happy with Tuesday’s election results and want a plan, any plan, from Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy before giving him the gavel. It’s part of a continuous push from the far-right caucus to leverage their power in what will potentially be a slim majority if Republicans regain the House.

McCarthy released the “Commitment to America” in September, a broad overview of goals Republicans want to achieve in the majority. But HFC members want details on how the presumptive leader plans to address the debt ceiling, inflation, the U.S.-Mexico border, and investigating the COVID-19 response.

“I haven’t seen a plan on what to do to demand that we secure our borders where Texans are getting assaulted,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy told reporters. “So, until I see a plan with any kind of leadership, which again is not something you run for, it’s something you demonstrate, then again, nobody’s earned 218 votes.”

Underwhelming election results are the latest point of contention.

“Let’s just review last Tuesday night. I think it was pretty, pretty interesting,” Rep. Andy Biggs, a member of HFC, told reporters Thursday when asked why he hasn’t thrown his support behind McCarthy.

HFC members released a rules package this summer demanding procedural reforms including ending proxy voting, flexibility to propose amendments, and restoring the motion to vacate–a procedure that would enable any member to bring a vote to remove a speaker at any time, though members seem split on insisting on the last point.

Leadership votes are supposed to take place next week, but Republicans, as it stands, don’t have the seats that would put them in the majority, as races are still being called. HFC members had pushed to vote on the rules package before the speaker’s vote but the idea has since been rejected by leadership, according to Roy.

“We don’t know how many people will be in this Republican majority but I can assure you, that as of this broadcast, Kevin McCarthy does not have the 218 votes to become speaker of the House, and we should not give them to him,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on his podcast “Firebrand.”

Meanwhile McCarthy has already empaneled a transition team including two of his top deputies, Reps. Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise. Both of their names have been floated as alternatives to McCarthy for the speaker’s role and both have publicly stated they’re not interested in the position.

— Kadia Goba

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Ben Wikler had mentally prepared to lose on Tuesday. He’d been “throwing up with anxiety,” he said in an interview, as the party’s own polling showed their candidates persistently tied with Republicans.

Voters delivered a split decision, re-electing Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, while narrowly re-electing Sen. Ron Johnson over Democrat Mandela Barnes. On Thursday, Wikler told Semafor how it happened.

Abortion mattered, thanks to GOP gaffes. As early voting began, Republican gubernatorial Tim Michels told an audience that he’d “never arrest a doctor” for providing an abortion; his campaign walked that back, saying he would want abortion laws to be enforced. Eric Toney, the nominee for attorney general, distracted from his anti-crime messaging by saying he’d let district attorneys prosecute abortion cases across county lines. “Josh’s argument was: I’m never going to divert money from public safety to put doctors in jail,” Wikler said.

Johnson’s allies buried Barnes with crime ads. Republicans expected to beat Evers and Kaul by linking them to fears of crime and the 2020 riots in Kenosha. But the attacks stuck the most to Barnes, a progressive star and the only Black lieutenant governor in the state’s history, and hurt him in rural districts. Wikler saw an impact from nearly $30 million of attack ads from a PAC network supported by conservative donors Richard Uihlein and Diane Hendricks. “You can point very specifically to that period in September when people would watch TV and see seven attack ads and one defense ad,” said Wikler.

Trump hurt the GOP ticket. The same polls that showed close statewide races also found he was “profoundly unpopular” with independents in the state, Wikler said, but the former president kept intervening on behalf of Michels. Republicans shared his obsession with the 2020 election and changing election rules, which turned off voters outside Trump’s base. On Halloween, Michels told a friendly audience that the GOP would “never lose another election” if he won. Democrats blew up that remark, repeating it on the stump and cutting a quick ad. “It underscored the urgency for people to do everything they could,” said Wikler. “People were knocking on doors in the middle of severe thunderstorms on Saturdays.”

— David Weigel

One Good Text With ... Congressman-Elect Maxwell Frost

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Herschel Walker raised $3.3 million on the first day of the Georgia runoff campaign, Fox News reported.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: Former President George Bush will hold a virtual conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

— with our partners at Ground News

• A smaller share of Americans appear to have voted in Tuesday’s midterm elections than in the last one, but a Washington Post analysis identifies a handful of states where turnout topped the high mark set in 2018. Among them: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, Oregon, Utah, Arkansas, and Maine.
• The meltdown of Twitter continued in real time Thursday, with Elon Musk telling the shell-shocked staff that the company doesn’t have the cash to survive and warning of possible bankruptcy. The New York Times rounds up the latest details, including this choice line: “Twitter, whose communication department has been laid off, did not respond to a request for comment.”
• A number of high-profile Republicans who lost races on Tuesday are winning praise for a simple act once considered routine: conceding defeat. From Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s Senate race to Tudor Dixon in Michigan’s gubernatorial contest, GOP candidates have thus far rejected the Trump election denialism playbook, Alex Seitz-Wald writes for NBC News.

If you’re liking Semafor Principals, consider sharing with your family, friends and colleagues. It will make their day.

To make sure this newsletter reaches your inbox, add steve.clemons@semafor.com to your contacts. If you use Gmail, drag this newsletter over to your ‘Primary’ tab. And please send any feedback our way, we want to hear from you.

Thanks for getting up early with us. For more Semafor, explore all of our newsletters.

— Steve Clemons