A claim has been going around this week, a few days before the midterm elections: Fox News’ ratings have “plummeted” — down to lows not seen in 25 years — and maybe that tells us something about how Tuesday is going to go.
I checked. And because this is the kind of story that usually turns out to be spin, let me say the surprising part first: the numbers underneath it are real.
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You have probably heard of Göbekli Tepe, the hill in southeastern Turkey with the great stone circles — T-shaped pillars carved with animals, raised around 9600 BCE. Its excavator, Klaus Schmidt, gave the world a headline: this was the world’s first temple, built by hunter-gatherers who gathered for ritual and feasting, with no houses, no hearths, no town. First came the temple, then the city. Religion, the story said, invented civilization.
The archaeologists who dig there now — Schmidt’s successors, led by Lee Clare — have spent the last several seasons respectfully taking that story apart.
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Eight days from now, Americans vote, and there is a real possibility — not a certainty, a possibility — that when the counting is done, the Democrats will hold both the House and the Senate. I want to walk through what that would actually mean, because I don’t think most of the shouting on television has thought past election night. What happens in January if the Republicans lose big? Short version: an impeachment, a frozen government, and a president who is done — not wounded, done. But walk it in order.
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I spent part of this afternoon cancelling streaming subscriptions, and when the dust settled I was saving myself over fifty dollars a month. Hulu is paid through November 20 and then it’s dead. HBO Max turned out to still be billing me through Amazon even though I believed I had already cancelled it directly — I may have been paying for that one twice. Amazon Music Unlimited has apparently been dead since June; nobody bothered to tell me, including Amazon.
Clearing all that out got me looking at what I had actually been paying for. And that’s when the principle of the thing stood up and waved at me.
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Texas is about to elect a United States senator. By the time the counting is done, the race between state Representative James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton will have cost well over half a billion dollars. Not the whole Texas ballot. Not the state’s twenty-some congressional races. One seat, two candidates, one election.
As of the last full accounting on October 23, spending in the race had reached about $560 million — roughly $129 million spent by the two campaigns themselves, and about $431 million spent by outside groups for or against them. The final two weeks, historically the most expensive of any campaign, weren’t in those numbers yet. By the method OpenSecrets uses for its historical rankings, no Senate race has ever cost more. The old record — Georgia’s 2020 race between David Perdue and Jon Ossoff, which ran through a January runoff — was $516 million. Texas passed it with weeks to spare.
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