I think the most fitting response to this week’s election results is found in Jesus’s words in Matthew 28: “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

What’s the connection to the election? First, let’s look at the election numbers.

In the 2018 midterms, white evangelicals made up 26% of the vote. On Tuesday, according to NBC, it was 17%. That’s a decline of nine percentage points.

I’m not a big fan of the elastic term “evangelical,” and tracking only white evangelicals leaves about 40% of my church out of the equation. White evangelicals are one slice of a racially diverse community of people who believe the Bible and allow it to inform their views on moral and spiritual issues that have been deemed political.

However, a decline in the share of voters could reflect lower turnout, a decline in the number of evangelicals relative to the population, or both. As for turnout, we won’t have a reliable number on what percentage of evangelicals actually voted. But some suggest it declined, and that’s a problem. When evangelicals sit out an election, they give up an opportunity to shape its outcome.

So how does all this connect to the words of Jesus?

First, Jesus tells us to make disciples. That should prompt us to ask how faithfully we’ve carried out the Great Commission. We need a renewed emphasis on sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, making disciples, and baptizing them. Start with someone you know. Share what Christ has done in your life and invite that person to read Scripture with you.

I’m sure some critics of the church would say, “Focus on evangelism and stay out of politics.” Well, consider the second part of what Jesus said, the Cultural Commission: “Teach them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” The truth of God and obedience to it is not just a private matter.

Followers of Jesus, equipped and encouraged by pastors, need to share their faith and live it out in a way that impacts the world around them, including government.

My response to the election? Go make disciples for Jesus and teach them to impact the country and the culture with biblical truth.

If you’re looking for a way to put that into practice in your community, visit frc.org/chapters to learn about our Pray Vote Stand chapters.

If you’re discouraged, remember how Jesus began and ended those words. He began by saying that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to Him. And He ended with a promise for us as we go. “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

This article originally appeared here .

If you’re invested in tech stocks, Democrats just took a hammer and sickle to your money. So much for affordability!

The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 1,600 points on Wednesday before yesterday’s 1,833-point crash . Also yesterday, the more tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 1,422 points, and the S&P 500 dropped 334 points. Overall, Thursday’s collapse wiped out about $2.5 trillion in valuation. The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P are all back up slightly this morning, and markets tend to go up in the six months after all midterms. Here’s hoping...

For now, what’s going on, and why do I lay the blame at the Dems’ feet?

For what it’s worth, President Donald Trump agrees, posting on Truth Social , “The Stock Market suffered one of the Worst Days in History based on the results of the Election.... Your 401(k)s have, therefore, dropped. Remember, it wasn’t Republicans, it was Dumocrats.”

In a subsequent post , he added, “So sad to see, you only have yourselves to blame!” Was that aimed at voters?

After Tuesday’s blue tsunami , realization set in on one issue in particular: data centers.

Artificial intelligence — or “ super intelligence ” — is hugely important to the U.S. economy now, and it will only become more vital. To power that economic engine, and to stay ahead of Communist China, America needs data centers . The problem? A sizable majority of Americans don’t want data centers in their proverbial backyard.

“Last year, 180 new data centers were constructed, marking a 170-percent increase from 2021,” writes Evan Gardner at The Free Press. “Today, roughly 38 percent of Americans live within five miles of one, and seven in 10 oppose new ones coming to their communities.”

Opposition has been building amid concerns about water use, electricity bills, noise pollution, and other factors.

Voters on Tuesday not only elected Democrats who oppose data centers but also overwhelmingly approved dozens of measures restricting or banning data centers. Only one jurisdiction — Harwood, North Dakota, population 800 — voted pro-data center. Development of data centers “stops when I’m governor,” promised Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa. Texas Democrat Representative Greg Casar supports a nationwide moratorium on new data centers, and he crowed, “The revolt against data centers was one of the top issues of the 2026 election.”

“Texas, Georgia and Ohio account for more than 40% of all planned data-center capacity in the U.S.,” reports The Wall Street Journal, and all three just flipped from Republican to anti-data-center Democrat governors. Moreover, the Journal says, “About 56% of voters nationally said data centers were a crucial or major factor in their picks for Congress.”

“There were few concrete details from Democrats elected on promises of everything from outright bans to more scrutiny,” the Journal notes. “But slowing the rapid growth of properties that house the hardware for AI systems could upend one of the main drivers of U.S. economic growth.”

The stock market responded accordingly.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not pushing for data centers in every town, near every school, or on every scrap of undeveloped green grass. Communities ought to have a say in zoning guardrails, and tech companies need to address public concerns about water, electricity, and noise pollution. But when Democrats are out there demanding the nationalization of Elon Musk’s companies , I don’t trust them for one second to have our national interests at heart on data centers.

Speaking of Musk, he posted on X early Wednesday morning, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.”

He’s not kidding, and his companies could do it.

Tech companies are innovating in other ways, too. One company, Gardner says, “has built a network of mini data centers that are small, quiet, and slide neatly into a customer’s kitchen.” Many larger new centers have addressed all the concerns about water, electricity, and noise mentioned above — if those concerns weren’t overblown or outright Chinese propaganda in the first place.

The bad news is that tech companies lost the early PR battles . The good news is that Americans are generally a reasonable lot, and as long as the terms are fair, people can be persuaded. If tech companies want to build, they need to win over communities.

But if Bernie Sanders and the socialist leftists headed to Congress get their way, tech companies won’t even get that chance. “Democrats must enact a national moratorium on AI data centers,” Sanders insisted after the election.

Well, that is exactly the sort of policy that just cost millions of invested Americans trillions of dollars.

For the last two years, the Trump administration has been governed by a simple mantra: “We can just do things.” On Tuesday, voters replied, “So can we,” and wiped out the GOP. This was not a blue wave. This was not a blue tsunami. This was the breakup of a winning coalition.

Those voters, in breaking up the coalition, treated down-ballot races as proxies for their contempt of Washington, D.C. The race for dog catcher became nationalized because of Republican political malpractice.

In 2024, Donald Trump assembled a multiracial and multiethnic coalition of voters who bristled at the progressivism of the Democrats and the wreckage of the economy. By 2026, Trump and his White House acolytes set that coalition on fire to cater to a group of hyper-online grievance mongers who have confused Twitter with real life.

It was gas prices. And it was the war.

But it was also calling affordability a “hoax.”

And it was also the corruption.

The playing nice with Russia while treating our allies worse than our enemies.

The impression of cruelty.

The overly aggressive deportations.

The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic.

The aggressive redistricting push.

The threats against enemies.

Gas prices and the war cannot explain a wipeout from top to bottom in Texas or Georgia or losing South Carolina or Ohio or a total coast-to-coast wipeout. Only the simpletons can believe that.

Adam Hamilton won Finney County in Kansas, a Trump +35 county in 2024, and he did it with Hispanic voters. He did not do that just because of war and gas prices.

On Tuesday, voters did not say they wanted open borders. They did signal they didn’t want their neighbors rounded up and deported before the actual criminals — and by criminals, they meant the actual bad guys, not people who just crossed the border illegally and have lived quiet lives. But MAGA knows no distinction.

On Tuesday, voters did not say they want globalism. They did signal that tariffs and economic protectionism have hurt them more than helped them. They signaled that a president randomly starting trade wars is bad. They signaled that a president far more concerned with tearing down parts of the White House than dealing with rising prices is a president they cannot trust. They are also furious with a botched war that raised gas prices, diesel prices, and fertilizer prices while straight-faced Republicans tried to tell them that, actually, the economy is doing great.

Voters are tired of the weirdos in Trump Land who trade on social media memes, latent racist memes, a fixation on winning Twitter, and nonsense over seriousness. Most of all, voters are tired of a GOP that fixates on an unbuilt high-speed rail line in California while ignoring the incompetence in its own midst. That incompetence imposed a random regime of tariffs and started a war without first securing enough missiles to finish the job.

Donald Trump and his political team have done what the pre-Trump GOP never did. They’ve shrunk the map. Pre-Trump, the GOP turned Georgia and Texas red. Post-Trump, they’re now blue. George W. Bush got legislative victories, many of which are still on the books. Trump’s victories are ephemeral and can almost all be wiped out by the next president.

This makes the second term of Donald Trump the most impermanent presidency in American history.

Every big win, except tax cuts, can be undone by a single future president. All we got was Ozymandias, and in the ruin, a lot of other good Republicans got wiped out because they refused to rein in the president’s excesses, turned a blind eye to the corruption, and excused the crude, the rude, the racist, and the antisemite on their own side.

On Tuesday night, God smashed a lot of idols. We are left with the pastors and pundits who insisted Christians needed to vote for evil because it was lesser, and the Christians and mainstream America resoundingly responded with, “No. We don’t.”

More than a “thumping.” That’s what George W. Bush called it when Democrats won majorities in both houses by gaining six Senate and 30 House seats in 2006. In Tuesday’s midterm elections, Democrats won majorities in both houses, gaining seven Senate seats, with chances at two more, and have gained or are ahead in 40 Republican House seats.

Quite a reversal from 2024. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, President Donald Trump’s party may end up holding no House seat that voted for Trump by less than 9 points two years ago.

Trump likes to boast that he carried all seven target states in his 50% to 48% popular-vote reelection. This year, all seven — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — went Democratic.

Much — maybe nearly all — of this is Trump’s doing. His “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the frivolous way he kept adjusting tariffs up and down, clearly kept inflation up and produced no visible positive effect. Like Joe Biden’s belief in Democrats’ historic remedy of pump-priming spending, Trump’s idiosyncratic belief in the power of tariffs proved destructive for his standing and his party’s.

Trump’s insistence on slavish loyalty in selecting candidates has also cost Republicans dearly. His choices in Georgia (2021 and 2022) and Arizona (2020 and 2024), his failure to get candidates who lost by less than 1 percentage point across the finish line in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2024, and his picks this year in North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas have arguably cost the party nine Senate seats heading into 2027.

That’s the difference between a Democratic Senate with 54 or 55 seats and a Republican Senate with the same majority. Between a Senate that confirms Republican Supreme Court nominees and one that invokes the Mitch McConnell precedent to refuse even to consider them. Between a Senate that might seriously consider convicting and removing an impeached president and one that would reject the effort outright.

As always, small numbers can make big differences in a 100-member Senate. Odds tend to prevail in elections for all 435 House members. And overall, the numbers in the public polls have held up pretty well this year, as pollsters have been making reasonable adjustments to lower response rates from Republicans — a subject on which I may comment later, and many others will soon.

And the messages from comparisons between the 2026 exit poll and 2024 exit poll stack up pretty well with the county election reports pouring in over the last 24 hours.

Republican percentages this year seem to be about 6 percentage points lower than Trump’s 2024 percentages among the most watched demographic groups — whites, men and women, white college graduates and non-graduates, and various income groups.

In the county returns, we see central-city counties post overwhelming Democratic percentages, suggesting a sweep of almost every precinct. We see Republican majorities in suburban and exurban counties atrophying in the Southeast and disappearing in Texas. We see Republican percentages holding up only in the most un-metropolitan rural counties.

We see some interesting regional patterns. In far northern states, Republican candidates for senator and governor did not lag as far behind Trump’s 2024 levels, perhaps for local reasons: Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-Maine) personal popularity, Democratic scandals in Minnesota, and Abdul El-Sayed’s divisiveness in Michigan kept Democrats from running more than 1, 3 and 4 points ahead of Kamala Harris.

In contrast, Democratic Senate candidates ran 11 points ahead of Harris in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and 7 points ahead in Florida. We see here that the slow and steady movement of Northeasterners down I-95 and I-85 over the years has made the South Atlantic states, at least this year, the scene of close partisan battles, just as the once-Republican states in the Northeast became in the wake of the New Deal three generations ago. The biggest surprise was the Democratic victories in South Carolina, which had the nation’s fastest percentage population growth in 2025 to 2026.

On October 17, 2026, roughly 550,000 people marched across France to protest the high cost of living. By nightfall, cars were burning in Paris, the town hall in Limoges had been set on fire, and hundreds of people had been arrested. It was the country’s worst unrest in years, and it followed weeks of high school blockades that had already turned violent . The education minister reported that 24 schools had been burned or ransacked and more than 100 severely damaged .

Let’s face it, the French are no strangers to rioting in the streets. From the bloody revolution in the late 18th century to the Paris Commune of 1871 to the student uprising of May 1968, and more recently the suburban riots of 2005 and the Yellow Vest protests of 2018–19, one could almost call rioting one of the French national pastimes.

But all facetiousness aside, the recent riots in France may not be simply run-of-the-mill. They may portend darker things to come. That French students and young people are burning down buildings and looting stores because they are unhappy or opportunistic is true but doesn’t explain much. The proximate cause appears to be proposed austerity.

The government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu proposed a 2027 budget with a €54 billion fiscal adjustment, giving credible notice that it intends to cut, not expand, government spending. The plan freezes most ministries’ budgets, public-sector pay scales, family allowances and housing aid, and it would freeze pensions above €1,260 a month. And many people are incensed (and incendiary) as a result.

Why would the French government propose such anathema as cutting national spending? It’s because they have a debt problem; or to be more precise, a borrowing problem. Long-term interest rates on sovereign debt have been rising across the world over the past few years from near 0 percent to 3, 4, or even 5 percent. While that may not strike you as a big increase, in relative terms that constitutes an increase of 1000 percent or even more. No country has escaped unscathed.

But in the past few months, France’s borrowing situation has become acute and threatens to grow altogether untenable. In October, the yield on France’s 10-year bonds topped 5 percent for the first time since 2002. What’s also interesting is the spread change in national sovereign debt rates. In February 2026, the French government only paid about 0.6 percent (60 basis points) more to borrow than Germany did. As of the end of October 2026, it was paying close to 160 basis points more.

Such an increase in rates means heavily indebted governments must pay rapidly increasing debt service costs. The basic logic is simple. The French government sells bonds to investors willing to purchase them. Investors demand compensation (interest) for a combination of the opportunity cost of capital (what they could receive by lending their money somewhere else) and a risk premium (compensation for the risk that the French government won’t pay them back). Rising interest rates across the world show that the opportunity cost of capital has risen. But the widening spread between France and Germany stems from investors’ perception of its stability and risk of default.

The more euros that France wants to borrow, the more difficult it will be to pay them back with interest in the future. And, as perception of France’s inability to pay future debt obligations increases, the more expensive it will be for them to borrow. Instead of paying about 3.3 percent in February 2026, they now need to pay nearly 5 percent as of October 26th, 2026. As their financial position worsens, investors perceive a greater risk of default and demand higher rates, making it even more expensive to borrow. You can see why France (and other countries) may have a problem.

When Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire (albeit briefly ), many people objected . They argued that no one should have that much money when others have so much less. As Musk leveraged that fortune in an attempt to shape electoral outcomes, some despaired . Tuesday’s results indicate that was a poor investment, but it’s his half a billion to waste.

Why not? After all, inequality isn’t the same thing as poverty. Consider that there’s a huge salary gap between NFL quarterbacks and NFL punters: quarterbacks earn tens of millions of dollars a year, whereas punters usually earn a few million. But I haven’t seen protests outside of NFL stadiums demanding less money for the “quarterback class” and more for the “punter class.” Punters aren’t poor. That quarterbacks live in even larger mansions isn’t a moral problem.

Maybe you’re thinking the moral problem isn’t simply that someone is richer than others; the problem is that someone is richer because others are poorer. But this thought assumes wealth is a fixed pie. In a market economy, though, it usually isn’t. If an entrepreneur figures out how to manufacture dishwashers for $100 less, millions of people might buy one and make the entrepreneur extraordinarily wealthy. But she only became so by making others better off. Before, customers would only receive a dishwasher in the transaction. Now they have a dishwasher and an extra hundred dollars to buy something else. The entrepreneur got rich by baking more pie, not taking a larger slice for herself.

An increasingly popular argument made by critics of economic inequality focuses on political power rather than consumption . The problem isn’t that the rich can buy a mansion but that they can buy elections. And this does seem worrisome.

One issue with this objection is that it underestimates the importance of organizational advantages in politics relative to economic advantages. Mancur Olson famously argued that small groups enjoy a leg up in political competitions because of incentives, regardless of wealth. Political inequalities will arise even in conditions of perfect economic equality. Even if everyone had exactly the same income and exactly the same wealth, political influence wouldn’t be equally distributed.

Take the case of free trade. Suppose that some domestic producers are unhappy because they dislike the competition from overseas. But consumers stand to benefit from cheaper goods. Notice, though, that the producers have a much stronger incentive to organize than the consumers. They’ll donate to campaigns, hire lobbyists, and call legislators because each of them could lose their livelihoods. But each consumer stands to lose only a few dollars a month if trade is restricted. Even learning about the legislation probably isn’t worth their time, let alone organizing to fight it. The cost of becoming informed and politically active is greater than the benefit, so they don’t do it. Because the producers organize and consumers don’t, we should expect the restrictions to pass.

In this example, nobody was richer than anybody else, yet political power still ended up concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group. And this isn’t some far-out thought experiment. Small groups with concentrated interests routinely outcompete large groups with dispersed interests. This is one of the central lessons of public choice economics . Equalizing wealth doesn’t eliminate the problem because organization is a major source of political power.

Now you might reply that wealth still matters for political influence even if it’s not the only thing that matters. Running a competitive campaign takes money. But this is a different claim than saying that “money buys elections.” Campaign Finance Institute researchers Michael Malbin and Brendan Glavin write, “Money is never a sufficient condition for winning. If the voters do not like what they are hearing, telling them more of the same will not change their opinion.” Indeed, economist Steven Levitt studied repeat candidates for the US House and found that “campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending.” Two recent Senate primaries reinforce the point. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in Michigan despite a nearly 10-to-1 advertising disadvantage . A couple of weeks later in Florida, Angie Nixon won the Democratic primary even though her opponent, Alex Vindman, outraised her 16-to-1 .

A Daily Economy essay by Joakim Book walks back the author's earlier progress-optimism. After years writing for HumanProgress.org and citing Matt Ridley and Hans Rosling, he now argues those sunny charts rested on decades-old information and missed a stall in real living standards for much of the rich world.

He was nudged by Chelsea Follett's The Grim Old Days and by Adam Omary's Progress Conference write-up asking why people "fear progress." Book's blunt answer: most people have not felt much progress lately. University of Michigan consumer sentiment has been near record lows even amid headline growth and huge AI investment. When the map and the territory disagree, he says, take the territory seriously instead of calling consumers irrational.

Interest costs are a big part of that lived experience. New 30-year mortgage rates sit near a generation high, so existing owners will not sell and trade a cheap mortgage for a dear one; household formation and mobility freeze. Karl-Friedrich Israel's Daily Economy work on CPI adjustments and Alchian-Klein asset-price insights point to flat or shrinking real wages for many Americans once you stop treating official indexes as gospel.

Classic progress metrics have plateaued. Child mortality's heroic century-long fall leaves little room left in rich countries; Nordic rates have barely moved in twenty years. Declines in working hours in places like South Korea and Germany often reflect stagnation, green-energy cost shocks, and exit into disability benefits rather than Keynesian leisure chosen from abundance. Follett's own charts show most working-hours gains came from the 1960s–80s, not the last two decades. Even Superabundance co-author Gale Pooley's oil time-price story looks less impressive once you notice oil was cheaper in time terms in the 1980s–90s than recently.

Compared with subsistence ancestors, modernity is a miracle; compared with parents' generation, peers often have the same appliances but can afford less housing and face worse fiscal governance. Eric Weinstein's jab — strip fashion and screens and ask whether you are in 1973 — lands hard. Adoption curves for refrigerators, washers, and running water already saturated. Meanwhile fiscal deficits, wartime-level tax takes in Britain, and America's roughly $40 trillion debt path look like regression. Almost all recent "progress" is digital gadgets and social media, with mental-health and polarization bills still coming due.

Book is not rejecting the past gains Follett documents. He is rejecting the habit of treating postwar compounding as a permanent default while Silicon Valley chants AI salvation. Progress is contingent on institutions, energy abundance, and median living standards — not stock indexes or lab demos. Re-run the Gapminder homework with today's data; do not gaslight voters who notice the stall.

The tone is a confession, not a manifesto for degrowth. Book still praises the fall in child mortality and the leap from Nordic subsistence farming to modern comfort. What he rejects is the Progress Conference habit of treating dissent as fear or cult resistance while France burns, fertility collapses, and wartime deficits accompany soft living standards. If AI delivers a new wave of broad prosperity, update the charts then — do not lecture people living the stall that their eyes deceive them.

In January 2018, Patrick Deneen published Why Liberalism Failed . That summer, Barack Obama put it on his reading list, writing that while he disagreed with most of its conclusions, it offered “cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel.” Deneen, in that book, argued that liberal democracy was at fault for the loss of meaning and community because it had to “re-train” people “to think of themselves as individuals separate from nature and one another.” But while Deneen is a man of the right, similar arguments appear on the left. In a 2023 essay for the Socialist Project, Michael Lebowitz, a Marxist economist, wrote that “capital, in short, constantly drives to crowd out all traces of the system of community.”

In principle, this argument also seems to follow. As Murray Rothbard explained in his 1962 treatise Man, Economy, and State , there is little need to conjure a mystic force to explain the origins of society, which very much appear to stem from the relationships that develop through voluntary exchange.

In a nationwide field experiment, sociologist Delia Baldassarri scattered nearly 6,000 “lost letters” across 188 Italian communities and found that strangers returned them more frequently at places where market exchange was most developed. A 2023 study, drawing on survey data from more than 30 countries, determined that people in regions with more market activity were less willing to excuse cheating on taxes or claiming benefits they weren’t owed. To that end, the authors concluded there is no empirical evidence that markets undermine civic morality.

It’s unclear, however, how accurate this story of the relationship between declining community and capitalism is. In fact, research tends to indicate that increased market exposure predicts greater prosociality and trust.

Despite some surface-level differences, their diagnoses (and these sorts of arguments generally) remain similar — capitalism leads to a diminished civil society and less social interaction. But discussions of the decrease of community are not limited to ideological extremes. Indeed, concerns about the decline of community in America, for example, have been commonplace for decades now. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone , which explored the growing isolation of individuals in America amid the collapse of civic organizations.

Markets have taught people to trust and cooperate with strangers to an extent our tribal instincts never could have managed alone. The societies that suppressed markets did not preserve community; they hollowed it out. The forces actually emptying America’s public squares are less likely to be commerce than the ever-expanding state.

Figures like Deneen or Lebowitz have blamed markets for weakening social bonds, concluding that we should further empower the state with more control over social life. But the evidence suggests that restricting markets may do little to restore those relationships — and could undermine some of the institutions that sustain them.

There are real problems with the decline of community, both in America and broadly across liberal democracies. But the claim that capitalism is a major, let alone the primary, cause of the decline of community is unsupported both by logic and the relevant empirical evidence.

Accordingly, restoring community requires more freedom, from building a corner café in a residential area to forming a mutual aid society in place of the welfare state. Far from being the enemy of community, the market may be one of its most underrated allies.