This is the Nov. 2, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“Mike Rogers will be another rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda. We can’t afford to give MAGA another Senate seat in November.”
— Rep. Haley Stevens, who endorsed the Republican Senate candidate yesterday, in an Aug. 1 post on X
Seventy-eight years ago today, Harry Truman was supposed to lose the presidency.
The polls said so. The pundits agreed. The Chicago Daily Tribune was so certain that it printed the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” the next morning.
But Truman won re-election.
I’ve said it time and again: I don’t believe polls.
Even when I ran for Congress, I never looked at poll numbers.
But the final New York Times/Siena polls, released last night, are hard to ignore.
Democrats are leading in 6 of 7 battleground Senate races, including Texas and Kansas, and have gained ground in six states since September.
Siena got it dead right in 2024, even when I had trouble trusting its numbers. They were right throughout the campaign, especially at the end.
That leaves two possibilities: Either Siena has gotten something terribly wrong — which I think is unlikely, given its track record — or we’re in the middle of a break in the electorate.
We’ve seen it before. In 1980, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were tied on Friday. On Tuesday, Reagan won in a massive Republican landslide.
In 1994, I was down 2 points on Friday. On Tuesday, I won, 62% to 38%. And that happened to Republicans all across America.
A similar break may be underway right now, with undecided voters moving toward the party out of power, as they so often do in off-year elections.
We’ll find out tomorrow.
ON THIS DATE
On Nov. 2, 1983, with Coretta Scott King looking on, President Ronald Reagan established a federal holiday honoring her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The signing capped a 15-year campaign that included a petition to Congress bearing 6 million names and Stevie Wonder’s 1980 song “Happy Birthday,” with its tribute to King: “We know the key to unity of all people is in the dream that you had so long ago.”
WHAT THEY SAID
Jim VandeHei on Michigan’s Senate race
“Obviously, Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed hate each other. They’ve hated each other for a long time. But I just don’t think people vote that way. Most people care about the fact that things cost more than they used to, health premiums continuing to go up, and whether their kids’ lives will be worse than theirs. For independents, it’s the lesser of two evils. They don’t like anybody — they just happen to hate Republicans more than Democrats right now.”
David Drucker on Roger Marshall’s rogue video
“This is what happens when you have single-party control of a state, and any politician of any skill set has been able to skate by because of partisanship. The moment you’re tested in an election like this, you get tripped up. And I think it’s just as simple as that.”
John Heilemann on GOP spending in unexpected places
“If you don’t want to believe the polls, follow the money. Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars in South Carolina in just the last few weeks, are investing millions in Mississippi, and now the president is going to Louisiana. Everything’s in play, and there are going to be, I think, some huge surprises on election night.”
The post ONE DAY MORE appeared first on MS NOW.
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From MS Now.
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