November 5, 2026

Hey, welcome to Don Talk for Thursday, November 5th, 2026.

Hey everybody, welcome to Don Talk. It's Thursday, November 5th. We have, let me get this thing in my ear so I don't feel like I'm half deaf. There we go. I tell you these in-ear monitors

sometimes i just don't know if i'm uh i'm equipped for that anyway i want to i want to thank you for being here um you're probably not here while i'm doing this live but i'm trying out a new format a new show basically it's a rebranding of it's not even a rebranding it's just it's a concept i had several years ago and i'm attempting it yet again yet again which one of these is the volume for

this one it's not that hello hello hello oh there it is it was a little too loud a little too loud so yeah we had an interesting week this week um i don't know if you if you were aware but we had this little thing called the midterm elections that happened tuesday and i am not one to gloat

because in all my years on this spinning green and blue globe that we're on, I have discovered that any time I let myself gloat, karma has a tendency to come and bite me in the ass for some reason.

But I'm going to gloat just a tiny, tiny little bit because there are a lot of there's a lot of firsts that happened after the the midterm elections and you know we still have a we still have a handful of races that need to be called alaska we may not know anything about alaska until honestly around the 18th of november

they've got rank choice voting which i 100 support those who don't support it they don't support it for one of two reasons one they don't understand it two they can't cheat at it so that whole kerfuffle out there with dan sullivan and daniel j sullivan and the you'll have to

you'll have to pardon me but i cannot remember the the democratic uh candidate's name right now There's just a few hundred votes between her and the Republican incumbent, who is Dan Sullivan.

And quite honestly, you know, the Republicans, especially Donald Trump, everybody was going apeshit crazy over the fact that there was another guy on the ballot with the same-ish, very similar name.

And the funny thing is, if you've seen any of the news reports, they actually had people, Alaskans, is that how you say it? Alaskans? They had Alaskans looking at the actual ballot and questioning, could you not understand this?

And they were like, yeah, it's perfectly fine to understand it, which I thought was interesting because it clearly says Dan or Daniel Sullivan, I can't remember which one, and in parentheses, Republican incumbent. So unless you don't know anything about your elected officials in your state, then it would reason that that's clear.

It's rather clear. So anyway, there was concern. You know, those on the left, and I pride myself as being someone that's left of center, they were confident that they'd be able to flip the house.

Less confident about flipping the Senate. And holy bejesus, have they flipped the house? I am looking at a report. It's currently 3.56 p.m., almost 4 p.m. on this Thursday afternoon, November 5th, 2026.

In good old South Central Georgia, 251 seats in the House. They gained, as of right now, gained 39 seats.

39. It's 251 Democrats, 155 Republican. You needed 218 to, quote, win. But they also flipped the frickin' Senate.

They gained seven seats. We were all concerned that even if we got the 51st seat, it might as well have just been 50. And then, of course, J.D. Vance, being the vice president and a Republican, would have broken the tie on anything.

And the reason why is because of the asshole Fetterman. Because with him, you never know which way the wind's going to blow. There's a very good chance that he would vote against any Democratic initiative and vote with the Republican Party.

He might as well switch parties, honestly. But as it stands right now, and there's still the potential to gain another seat or two in the Senate, the Democrats have the majority. 54 to 44.

It would have been fantastic for them to get over 60, but that was just not going to happen. I don't even think there was enough races to run to be able to get that, honestly. I can't say that for sure, so don't quote me on that.

So we have a Senate at 54 Democrats, 44 Republicans. We currently have a House, 251 Democrats, 155 Republicans. And I've heard, I've seen or heard some rumblings that there's the potential that they could get to like 255 or something.

I'm like, okay, that's great. But we are where we are. And right now, I think that's good enough, right? So I'm looking at the Guardian. Democrats flipped four more House seats, taking lead to nearly 100.

The Democrats have flipped another four House seats, extending their lead over the Republicans. In the lower chamber, 251 to 155, with 29 races left to call. Here are the latest results. Arizona's 6th Congressional District U.S. Marine veteran Democrat Joanna Mendoza beat two-term Republican incumbent Juan Kismani.

And if I screw up any of these names, I apologize to all of those folks. Colorado's 5th Congressional District, Democrat Jessica Killian, a former Army captain, beat first-term incumbent Republican Jeff Crank, who was criticized by relatives of Virginia Guilfrey for refusing to meet them.

Is she the one from the Epstein files? I think she may be. North Carolina's ninth congressional district, Democrat Richard Ojeda beat two-term Republican incumbent Richard Hudson in a seat that has been red for the last 14 years.

Ohio's 10th congressional district, Democrat Christina Knickerbocker beat veteran Republican congressman Mike Turner. So we're still waiting for a number of closely watched contests to be called. These, of course, include the final two U.S. Senate races, Mississippi and Alaska.

Those are tight. Mississippi, I did not know this, but Mississippi is kind of interesting. They don't allow automatic recounts. You know, here in Georgia, I think if it's within one and a half percent, you get an automatic recount.

Now, that does not mean that one or the other party can't petition to have a recount done. But I think they're going to have to pay some money. Because quite honestly, I've been getting, this gentleman in Mississippi, I've actually been getting texts about asking for money.

So I'm thinking, okay, number one, I don't live in Mississippi, but I get it. You know, sometimes we want to, we look at the whole and we want to make sure that we can get as many Democrats in there as possible so we support other Democratic candidates in other states.

There's no law against it. Last time I looked, I think, God, there must be like a 50 to 75 vote difference, maybe 100. It's tight, tight, tight, tight. But in both of these scenarios, Democratic candidates are hoping to oust Republican incumbents to bolster their new majority in Congress.

As I've said, Democrats have a 54-seat majority. We're still waiting on those results. For Alaska, it literally could be November 18th. Democrats have flipped another eight House seats, strengthened their majority in the lower chamber.

We've already talked about that. Democrats are leading Republicans 251 to 155. Twenty-nine races left to call, as a number of GOP representatives felt the weight of the blue wave that has swept their party out of power. We're still waiting on some key House results in toss-up districts where Republican incumbents are hoping to hang on.

And, of course, these include Lauren Boebert in Colorado's fourth congressional district. I'd already seen some reporting that she had lost, but maybe it's just really, really, really close. Virginia Fox in North Carolina's 5th, Jeff Van Drew in New Jersey's 2nd.

Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt's hoping to keep South Carolina's 1st Congressional District red. This is the seat the GOP firebrand Nancy Mace currently holds. Nithya Rahman, I guess I said that name right, was elected to serve as the mayor of Los Angeles, barely getting a narrow win over incumbent Karen Bass.

It was in a major shakeup in local politics. It's going to reflect the growing dissatisfaction with the direction of the city. She was a progressive urban planner that had served on L.A.'s city council since 2020. She caused a stir when she entered the race earlier this year, hours before the filing deadline and shortly after endorsing Bass for re-election.

And her campaign was once viewed as a long shot. armie dylan a key ally of donald trump has resigned from her position leading the justice department civil rights division in a statement blanche said today he accepted her notice dylan is the first high-ranking justice department official to leave after the midterm elections in which democrats took control of congress democrats are expected to use that power to aggressively

investigate executive agencies including the justice department this is this goes back to something that a video I put out on my Instagram account. I believe it was yesterday. I caution the Democratic Party to not squander the opportunity that they have been given,

not squander the opportunity that the American people have given them for the next two years. I realize that there are people out there that they want to go balls to the wall and as soon as the Democratic majorities take hold in January, they want to impeach Trump, they want to impeach Hegseth, they want to impeach that person, investigate that, etc., etc., etc.

Okay, that's one way. But here's the thing. The American people did not make the decision to put the Democratic Party in control of the House and the Senate so they could spend their time going after Trump, going after his cronies.

Does he need a check on his power? Hell yeah, he does. And I'm not against that. They need to just do it the right way. And there's going to be some instances where I know they're going to have their oversight committee and they're going to subpoena people.

They do need to do some investigations. But first and foremost, they don't need to let that blind them to the fact that the reason why they are there is probably one simple word, a word that Donald Trump was trying

to convince everybody was a Democratic hoax all the way back to 2025, affordability. And there's probably a handful of ways that they need to tackle the affordability issue.

Number one is put the kibosh on Trump's, some would call it illegal war, but it's definitely unethical, war against Iran. Iran was not in the middle of making a nuclear weapon.

We already had a great deal with them that the Obama administration had negotiated, of which Trump tore up in his first term because, of course, nobody makes a deal better than me.

It wasn't his deal. So, of course, he couldn't. He couldn't have it. Plus, he hates Obama. But that right there, that entire scenario needs to be curtailed or kiboshed. We need to get out.

Even if we have to leave with our tails between our legs like we did in Vietnam. This is Trump. Trump never went to Vietnam. Mr. Bonespurs himself never went to Vietnam. Never was in the military. Well, now he's got his own personal Vietnam.

And if we need to leave, we need to get out and we need to suffer the consequences of what he's done to our country, the Strait of Hormuz, because it was it was completely open and free before he started this mess.

And I'm not sure there's a way for us to get out of this conflict and have that open back up the way it was before. I would like to think we can figure a way out, but I'm not sure. But that's the reason why gasoline and diesel fuel are so damn high.

Has nothing to do with the Democrats. Those on the right love, love, love, love to claim that the average price of a gallon of gasoline was way higher under Biden than it is now.

And that is a lie. That is a lie. There are a lot of things during the Biden administration that if you dig into it, you'll see that he did the very best that he could. He brought the inflation down. I think we peaked at like 9% or 10%, and it was all due to COVID and all the extra money that was flooded into our economic system to help keep everybody afloat, right?

That's just the way inflation works. And with the CHIPS Act and all these other things, the Inflation Reduction Act that the Biden administration passed and signed in the law, when Trump took over, as he did the first term, he took over a pretty good economy.

And then he trashed the shit out of it, just like he did during the first term. Now, I'll give him some credit on this. I believe there's a possibility that if COVID had not happened, Trump probably would have gotten his second term in 2020.

I firmly believe that. But just like the scenario we have now with affordability, where diesel is six and seven dollars a gallon, depending on I think there may even be some places as high as 10.

I can't vouch for that, so don't quote me on that. Gasoline being over $4, the only reason why we've got it pretty good here in South Georgia is because our Republican governor, and I will give kudos to Brian Kemp, even though he is a Republican governor, he has done some pretty good things for the state of Georgia.

He's also stood up to some of the bullshit and shenanigans of Trump and the Trump administration. I'm not saying I would have ever voted for him because I just can't bring myself to vote for a Republican anymore. I haven't voted Republican since George W. Bush.

I was always a Republican voter up until George W. Bush. I did not vote for his second term. I completely flipped parties from his first term to his second term, and I've been voting Democratic ever since.

But Kemp actually has been a pretty good governor for the state of Georgia. And the fact that he has suspended the $0.33, $0.33, $0.33, $0.34 gasoline tax here in the state of Georgia has helped tremendously.

He's done this before. That's the only reason why our gasoline is not $4 and $5 a gallon around here. But that means that the state coffers are taking a beating on some of that. But these are the things that the Democrats need to, in my opinion, they need to focus on affordability.

They need to focus on getting a handle on our health care system here in the United States and health insurance. And they need to do something about ICE.

And even connected to that, we need a comprehensive plan of figuring out our immigration policies and getting this crap straightened out.

Because the United States is as powerful and full of wealth, not just in money, but in diversity and intelligence and all of these things that make this nation what it is.

It's all due to immigration. None of us are originally from here. None of our descendants are originally from here. And what I mean by that is, well, the only ones that can truly, truly, truly say that their descendants are originally from here are the Native Americans.

We can claim that we've got descendants that go back to the original 13 colonies. Okay, that's fine. But I'm making a different distinction here. We came over here and we took this land, all right? It's what people do.

It's what we as humans apparently do. But it's because of all the diversity and all of the people who immigrate to this great country of ours and bring their experiences and a little bit of their culture. It's what makes the United States great.

And so we don't need to kill immigration. We just need the path to it to be easier to understand. The process needs to be a lot less involved so that you don't have people trying to come into the country illegally.

Now, I'm not going to say that a brand new comprehensive plan that gets 90% of it right is going to stop people coming over the border illegally. That's just not possible. unless you want to put up a frickin' wall all the way around the country and, well, talk about being isolated.

But it's just like, I look at it like this. It's what happens with piracy when it comes to movies and television shows and music and stuff like that. You can probably go and find a graph somewhere, a line graph, That shows how when content started becoming more readily available on streaming services,

especially with Netflix, you'd pay your subscription or $7, $8, $10. Of course, now it's like $200. I'm being facetious, but they keep going up. That's the reason why I don't have Netflix. I think the package I was on whenever I finally got off of it had gone up to $25, like $24.99 or something like that.

If you make it easy for people, easy and affordable, you make it easy and affordable for people to find the content that they want to consume, movies, television shows, comedy specials, music, piracy goes down.

But as soon as you start making it more difficult, and that difficulty can be something as simple as, I don't know which damn streaming service this thing happens to be on. Because I come from the cable broadband world.

I worked in that for 13 years. And we used to joke about the fact that the cable prices just kept going up and up and up. And I can tell you, I can tell you for a fact that it was not the cable company raising your rates.

No, no, no, no, no. It was the content providers. Every three years, you negotiate new contracts with your ESPNs and your ABCs and NBCs and all of these other things. And every three years, they wanted more money.

And so those increases got passed on to the consumer. And we were like, when Netflix started offering streaming, many of us were looking at that going, okay, this is the way.

But we should have known that entropy is going to kick you in the teeth and that everybody was like, me too. Netflix was a juggernaut. They probably still considered one. Then everybody had to have their own damn streaming service.

Hulu. Then we had Disney+. Disney+, and Hulu are now kind of together. They're one thing. Paramount+, Peacock. And let's see, what else do we have?

Well, I mean, you can pay for like HBO and Starz and all of that for streaming too. It got to the point a couple of years ago where the curve for what it costs to get all streaming services per month finally exceeded the cost of a full-blown cable package.

And now, as I was saying earlier, the reason why it's difficult is where can I find this movie? Where can I find this television show and that kind of thing? And so if you were to look at the graph today, you would probably see piracy on the rise.

So my point going back to immigration, the more difficult you make it for someone who wants to come to this country, try to chase that American dream, make a living, make a family, contribute to the totality of what makes this country great.

The harder you make that process, the more people are going to sneak across the border. They're going to work. They're going to be contributing members of society until they get caught. And that's the reason why I think we need immigration reform.

We need a comprehensive plan for immigration reform. And it doesn't need to be something that's going to take two years to figure out. But these are the things that the Democratic Party, in my opinion, need to concentrate on.

I do not believe that they need to waste any time trying to impeach Trump. Could the House do it? Probably. But the Senate won't convict him. It's not going to happen.

The Senate will not convict him. So don't waste your time. Don't waste your resources. Don't waste your political capital on trying to do that nonsense. Now, I do believe that Pete Hegseth needs to be investigated.

It would be nice if he were removed, but then again, I don't know who the hell Trump would try to put forth in his position. Because Trump does not make good decisions when it comes to people, to members of his cabinet. They're all morons. Then again, look at who the leader is, right?

So I realize, and Epstein, we need to get to the bottom of Epstein, the whole Epstein debacle. So I realize that some of that's going to go on. There's no way that they're not going to do it.

But it does not need to be their singular focus. Their singular focus, to me, is affordability. Do what the American people voted you into those seats to do. Because another opinion that I have, and I think I said this in my video on Instagram, this was not a vote for democratic policies or a platform or anything like that.

This was a vote against Trump. Trump went out there, even though now he's he's he's trying to say, well, the reason why the GOP got beaten so badly was because he was not on the ballot. Yet he kept going to every one of those rallies and telling everybody, you need to vote like I am on the ballot.

Well, they did. They voted like you were on the ballot, Trump. That should tell you something. So this midterm election cycle was less about, oh, I love what the Democrats stand for.

I love their policies. I love the platform. It wasn't about that. The Democratic Party is only slightly more favored than the Republican Party, and that's not saying much. But this was a rebuke of Trump and his current policies and where we are in this country today.

$4 plus gasoline per gallon, $6 plus on diesel fuel per gallon. Groceries, two years ago, I had a target of $150 per week for my groceries for a family

of three and occasionally a family of four whenever my youngest son would come to visit. And I usually could stay under it. A lot of times it was $120, $130. I gave up. This year, I had to give up. I still try to target the $150, but it's very, very, very rare that I'll ever

be under the 150 we're picking up our groceries tomorrow i'm already over 200 and it's nothing it's not like we don't buy bags and bags and bags of junk food we buy hamburger meat and we go cheap we buy the pre-formed frozen third box of 32 patties that when i first started buying it was

under $20. Now it's $34 or $35. It still works out better that way by the pound than the $7 or $8 per pound of the grass-fed beef that I actually do buy. And yes, I know GFB grass-fed beef is

going to be a little bit on the higher side, but even your 93% lean beef, your 80-whatever, all of that is still running you $4 and $5 a pound. It's affordability.

It's what the Democrats need to focus on. Something that's happened here, of course, in Georgia, and I was actually shocked. I felt like John Ossoff was going to win, and he did.

I just didn't realize how much of a spanking he was going to give Collins. What I did not expect was Keisha winning.

We have not had a Democratic governor for the state of Georgia since the early 2000s, when basically, I think it was a, I want to say it was a 2002 election, and, oh God, I'm having a brain fart, I can't remember who it was, it wasn't Nathan Deal, it was, you'll just have to forgive me,

But anyway, he was the first Republican governor in a long time whenever he won in, I think it was 2002. We've had a Republican governor since the early 2000s for the state of Georgia. We now have a Democrat. We have a Democratic governor.

We have a Democratic lieutenant governor. We have a Democratic attorney general. And I think I heard that the House, the state House, flipped with a Democratic majority, not our Senate.

But don't quote me on that, because there's a lot of information that's just been popping up over the last couple of days. Let's see, the 53 minutes ago, I think you pronounce his name Cologne.

leads Republican incumbent by 1,700 votes in nail-biting U.S. Senate race in Mississippi. This is the one I was talking about. Democrat Scott Cologne is now leading Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by a little more than 1,700 votes in the extremely tight competition for U.S. Senate in Mississippi.

So far, 96% of the vote has been counted. We're currently waiting for the Associated Press to call the race. If Cologne wins, it would be an astonishing upset in the state that Donald Trump carried by 22 points in 2024.

The Democrats have not won a U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi since 1982. Wow. It's been much longer, not since 1875, that the state elected a black person to serve in Washington.

And yes, Scott Colombe is a black guy. This is one for the history books, folks. It really is. Trying to see what else we've got going on as far as politics.

Let's look at the U.S. Newsom has commuted the sentences of California's 548 death row inmates. Okay. Yeah, Florida, Florida wound up keeping a Republican governor. His post-mortem of this was this was an extinction level event, if not for Florida.

Yeah, I saw a map, I forget. We've got more Democratic governors now, after the midterms, than we've had in a while. I don't know what the exact number is.

I can't lay my hands on that map right now. But, and yeah, the Nithya Raman, the one that won the mayoral race in Los Angeles, is considered a Democratic Socialist.

Two hours ago, NBC News, Scott Cologne criticizes Democrats for writing off Mississippi amid close Senate vote count.

Cologne criticized his party in an interview with NBC News where he remained confident he would prevail in the close race against GOP Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Why would the Democrats... Come on, Dems.

You know, sometimes it's sad to say. I mean, the Republican Party slash MAGA, you might as well just say it's MAGA. They've got their own issues, but sometimes the Democrats just can't get out of their own damn way. You know? There's also the thing about the Supreme Court.

See, Samuel Alito makes a surprising Supreme Court decision after Democrats win Senate. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is not rushing to retire despite an election result that could make replacing him much harder for Donald Trump. the 76-year-old justice plans to remain on the court through its current term, continuing a position he publicly took before Election Day.

This is according to Bloomberg Law. That decision carries new importance after Democrats won control of the Senate. USA Today reported that the Republican loss immediately fueled calls from some conservatives for Alito to retire while the GOP still controls the Senate, giving Trump a possible chance to nominate a replacement before the Democrats take over.

But Alito had already made his intentions clear. Quote, I intend to stick around through this term, he told Bloomberg in an interview published in October. CNBC reported that the justice said he made that decision months earlier and planned to serve at least through next summer.

Yep. Kind of glad that he's doing that. I don't like him, but I'm glad he's got enough foresight to do his damn job and not kowtow to Trump so that Trump can continue to stack the Supreme Court.

But then again, I'm not so sure that Trump would do that.

He's too busy with his golden ballroom and reflecting pool and his triumphant arch and all this other nonsense golf course because nothing says that I'm going to solve the affordability crisis for the American people quite like cutting down several hundred trees and spending a shit ton of money for a golf course.

And yeah, make it make sense. Make it make sense. All right, well, I think that's where I'm going to wrap it up. Just wanted to jump on here and do a quick little deal with Don Talk.

We have a text number. It's also, you can leave voicemail, 229-520-5957. It's the main number for the radio station, which is wrto.fm, where we play 24-7, a little bit of royalty-free music, along with some of the podcasts that I really like.

If you listen to any of the podcasts on there, go and support those podcast creators, because we make no money off of that, nor would I ever want to monetize their content. That's not what it's about. It's about providing a venue for my peeps down here in South Georgia to get a different point of view, because most of the podcasts that are on there are going to be center-to-left-of-center type of things.

So, anyway, hope you guys had a great Halloween. Now we're heading into Thanksgiving. We had our time change this past weekend, which I don't know if we'll ever get that solved but we're heading heading toward thanksgiving headed toward christmas i usually look forward to this time of year but it's just been kind of blah this time around if you want to shoot

me an email the email is don talk show at gmail.com again that is don talk show at gmail.com and again text or leave a voicemail 24 7 2 2 9 5 2 0 5 9 5 7 most of the time during the live broadcast of the show, I'll have the phone lines open, but I didn't announce that I was even doing it, so it really didn't make any sense to even worry about it. But you can shoot me a text or call it and

leave a voicemail 24-7. Tell me you like the show. Tell me you hate the show. Tell me I need to go die on a fire. Whatever floats your boat. You tell me to go die on a fire, I may need that water that your boat is floating on though. Anyway, that's it for Don Talk. Take care of yourselves. I've been Donovan. Have a great evening.

We'll see you next time.