Cross-Examination

• The stock market was hoping for a red wave: Following the midterm election results, Wall Street saw a deflation in stock values as the anticipated red wave failed to arrive. The Dow Jones dropped 530 points and the NASDAQ fell 229 points. The biggest factor in the market slump was due to uncertainty as to which party ends up controlling the House and Senate. While the House looks likely to come under Republican control, the Senate leaves a lot of questions up in the air for investors. The lack of a clear mandate from the electorate against the Democrat agenda further breeds a sense of unease in the market, as the notion that any big changes will be coming from Washington appears to be limited. Ironically, at the end of the day, Republicans may have won, but it feels like defeat because expectations weren’t met.

• Conservatives won in New York: The Empire State gubernatorial race appeared to be reaching tossup territory in the final week leading up to the election, but Democrat incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul was able to defeat a serious challenge from Republican Representative Lee Zeldin. The thought that Zeldin even had a chance against Hochul in reliably blue New York was remote. However, while Zeldin didn’t win, Republicans did better across the state, effectively eroding Democrat dominance there. What put New York in play for Republicans has much to do with the Democrats’ poor record on crime. As violent crime has been rising, especially in New York City, voters were motivated to look to Republicans for solutions. On the national scene, Republicans netted at least three U.S. House seats from New York, which included the surprising defeat of the Democrats’ House campaign chief, Sean Patrick Maloney. So, while states like Florida got redder, New York’s blue has a decidedly more purple hue.

• Russians are slowly retreating in Ukraine: For the past several months, the tide of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has clearly turned against the Russian strongman. Following the collapse of Russian military forces in northeastern Ukraine near the major city of Kharkiv in late summer, Putin’s forces have been slowly losing the ground they gained early in the war. Now, after months of sustained pressure and heavy loses inflicted by Ukraine’s military in the southeast, Russian military leadership announced a planned withdrawal of forces from the key regional city of Kherson. The loss of Kherson for the Russians would be a major blow for their military strategic capabilities, and it serves to continue to increase pressure on a military that is clearly struggling to adapt to an increasingly superior-armed Ukraine. The exfiltration from the Kherson region of an estimated 40,000 Russian troops will be no easy feat. The few bridge crossings over the large Dnipro River have been severely damaged by Ukraine, forcing the Russians to use barges to move men and equipment across. With winter fast approaching, the prospects of any success for Putin from this war continue to dim.

Headlines

• Georgia Senate race will go to a runoff (PJ Media)

• Biden says midterm vote was a “good day for democracy” and notes the “red wave” didn’t happen (CNN)

• Biden says he plans to do “nothing” differently in second half of presidency (National Review)

• GOP grows support among black, Hispanic, youth voting blocs (Daily Wire)

• Exit poll shows nearly 70% of single women voted Democrat in midterms (Daily Wire)

• Don’t blame Gen Z for voting Democrat; blame the people who told them to (RedState)

• How accurate were the polls in the 2022 elections? (Intelligencer)

• Inflation fell to 7.7% annual increase in October (The Hill)

• Inventories of diesel in the United States are the lowest they have been heading into winter in 70 years (Washington Post)

• Biden courted oil companies before threatening them with windfall tax (Washington Post)

• Biden says Elon Musk’s Twitter deal “worth being looked at” (The Hill)

• Trump attacks DeSantis: I got more votes than him, needs to be “more gracious” to me (Daily Wire)

• Mike Pence suggests a Lincoln Project ad convinced Trump he could overturn the 2020 election on January 6 (Fox News)

• Policy: Heritage Foundation releases top seven priorities to promote conservatism in next Congress (Fox News)

• Humor: Millions of Americans struggle to fill the void in their lives left by absence of political commercials (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.