Posts on Friday, May 8, 2026
LONDON - British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered heavy early losses in elections on Friday, showing the depth of voter anger with his government and raising fresh doubts about his future just two years after a landslide general election victory.
Starmer's Labour Party haemorrhaged support in areas reporting results overnight, including traditional strongholds in former industrial regions of central and northern England, along with some parts of London. The main beneficiary was the anti-immigration populist Reform UK of Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, which gained more than 200 council seats in England, and could form the main opposition in Scotland and Wales to the pro-independence Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.
As I wrote, I watched Wednesday night’s LA mayoral debate between Republican Spencer Pratt, incumbent Democrat Karen Bass, and democrat socialist Nithya Raman, and I didn’t think Pratt just won the evening — I thought he creamed his two leftist opponents. Wiped the floor with them, actually.
While they both whined for more state and federal dollars so they can keep spending our money for ever more failure, he kept relentlessly pounding home the theme that simply doubling down on the old ways of doing things is just a recipe for more disaster — and the tired voters of the Golden State have seen enough of that.
Turns out, viewers agree
The 2026 midterms are just a few months away, and the Democrat Party still has no coherent answer to why it lost working-class voters in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, across the Rust Belt, to Donald Trump twice. Rather than reckon with that, the activist base has doubled down: more ideological purity tests, more litmus questions, more performative opposition to anything bearing the Trump name. Its loudest voices are busy policing their own members.
Into that mess steps Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) — not leaving the Democrat Party, but making clear in a Thursday op-ed that he understands exactly what's wrong with it. In doing so, he may have delivered
Thursday on CNN’s “News Central,” senior data reporter Harry Enten said it was a myth that President Donald Trump is losing support among Republican voters.
Enten said, “As Indiana goes, so goes the nation when it comes to Republican voters and Donald John Trump. He absolutely still has the juice. And when you’re a Republican and you go against Trump, you get voted off the island. I always love Survivor. And in this particular case, what we saw in Indiana was you go adios amigos, goodbye, see you later. And to me, that is emblematic of what we see nationwide with Republicans.”
As RedState previously reported, red states have not wasted any time since the Supreme Court decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case, which ruled that congressional redistricting based solely on race is unconstitutional. States like Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are putting the wheels in motion to put new or previously drawn congressional maps in place ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The Tennessee General Assembly has also been quick to act, debuting a new map on Wednesday that could effectively make the state 9-0 GOP in terms of congressional representation instead of 8-1 R/D.
On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House passed the map, with the Republican-controlled Senate quickly