Louisiana Senator John Kennedy didn’t mince words on Wednesday as he assessed the 2026 midterm results that handed Democrats control of both the House and Senate.
In classic Kennedy fashion, the plain-spoken Republican told anyone still insisting the outcome was routine that they were simply not paying attention.
“This was not a normal midterm election,” Kennedy said. “If you have concluded otherwise, congratulations, you’re stupid.”
Kennedy acknowledged that the president’s party historically tends to lose congressional seats during midterm elections. But he argued that the magnitude of the Democrats’ gains this year should serve as a serious warning to Republican leadership.
“If you go back 50 years or so, it’s fairly normal for the party opposing the party of the president in power to lose votes in Congress, even to lose the Congress, or lose one or both houses of Congress,” Kennedy said, apparently referring to the party holding the presidency.
He cited 1998 and 2002 as notable exceptions to the historical pattern.
But Kennedy insisted that Republicans cannot simply hide behind historical precedent to explain away what happened.
“So, to the extent that the Republicans have lost control of Congress, historically, that’s not abnormal. It was the size of the loss,” he explained. “Normally, there’s about a 7-vote swing. In this case, under normal circumstances, it would be a 7-vote swing in favor of the Democrats. In this election, there was a 13-vote—13% swing. This was not a normal midterm election.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) delivered a brutal reality check to Republicans following the 2026 midterm elections.
“This was not a normal midterm election. If you have concluded otherwise, congratulations, you’re stupid.” https://t.co/V5C6I4GuNs
— The Gateway Pundit (@gatewaypundit) November 11, 2026
Kennedy’s blunt assessment lands amid a wave of independent analyses that have highlighted just how far outside historical norms the 2026 results sit.
The Gateway Pundit has reported extensively on those patterns. One analysis found that Republicans retained roughly 85% of President Trump’s 2024 share across Senate and gubernatorial races in a remarkably consistent formula that held across widely different states, an outcome with extremely low historical probability.
Related reporting documented multiple historical firsts, including Democrat Senate candidates in traditionally Republican states receiving more raw votes than Kamala Harris received in those same states in 2024, a scenario described as approaching zero probability in the modern record.
Additional work placed the odds of Democrats prevailing in 29 of 30 contested Senate races at roughly 1 in 5,510. Separate examinations have flagged voting-equipment issues, adjudication anomalies, and other irregularities reported on Election Day and in the days that followed.
Jim Hᴏft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
You can email Jim Hᴏft here, and read more of Jim Hᴏft’s articles here.
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