“I got probably 85 million votes. They say 78 million, 79 million. They cheated in this election too. It was just too big to rig. They cheated like hell … a Democrats will get 3, 4, 5, 6, and even 7 ballots, and then we’re supposed to win. They’re professional cheaters.”

— President Trump, speaking to reporters.

“The Democratic National Committee, which began 2026 in debt and nearly $100 million behind its Republican counterpart, made a $6.5 million bet in the final weeks of 2025 to buy former Vice President Kamala Harris’s old email list of supporters,” the New York Times reports.

“That money almost immediately went to help Ms. Harris pay off expenses left over from her 2024 campaign.”

“Ms. Harris’s new political group, Fight for the People PAC, spent nearly $7 million in the final month of 2025, new federal filings show, overwhelmingly on presidential campaign expenses that had not previously been disclosed as debts.”

“Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to defend the most high-profile defeat of his political career, roughly two years after he withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, having spent more than $160 million to compete in one state and not win a single county,” Florida Politics reports.

Said DeSantis: “You know, you have no regrets in life. You just live, and you go forward.”

He added: “A lot of the people that have criticized me for running privately asked me to run because they didn’t think President Trump could win again. And there were reasons to do that.”

A new Emerson College poll finds 48% of Americans support the Democratic candidate on the generic congressional ballot and 42% plan on voting for the Republican candidate.

“Josh Shapiro wasn’t the only finalist to be Kamala Harris’ running mate who was asked if he had ever been an agent of a foreign government… Tim Walz was, too,” CNN reports.

“The Minnesota governor — whom Harris ultimately picked — was asked by her vetting team if he had ever been an agent of China, prompted by aides’ review of the multiple trips Walz took to China before running for office.”

“The political operation founded by Charles and David Koch raised and spent well over half a billion dollars during the 2024 election cycle, showing that the family unit remains a financial juggernaut despite its opposition to President Trump’s re-election,” the New York Times reports.

New Republic: “Democrats need to move right to win back voters in 2026 and 2028—that’s the conventional wisdom from a slew of Democratic think tanks and Beltway strategists. To make their case, they’ve released reports and polling trying to prove that voters are more moderate on many social and cultural issues—like trans athletes in school sports and immigration—than the party’s far-left activists.”

“But an exhaustive new report makes a convincing counterargument. More importantly, it provides a road map for Democratic candidates that doesn’t require throwing vulnerable members of their coalition under the bus.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), an ardent ally of President Trump, will launch her long-expected bid for governor Friday, Politico reports.

Charlie Cook: “Tuesday’s results back up my oft-stated argument that the November 2024 election was a highly focused repudiation of President Biden, the Biden-Harris Administration, and, by extension, Vice President Kamala Harris, not the top-to-bottom repudiation of the Democratic Party that many have made it out to be.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris said that then-President Joe Biden “didn’t want that debate,” describing a reluctant president whose fateful night on stage accelerated President Trump’s return to the White House, Axios reports.

Said Harris: “If you don’t want to be in the competition, it will absolutely have an impact on your performance. I’m pretty sure that he did not want to debate… I think he got talked into it.”

“In late August, a photographer in Santa Monica, California, stumbled on an odd sight. Parked at the beach was a bus emblazoned with ‘Kennedy 2024’ and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s smiling face,” the Boston Globe reports.

“The ‘spotted’ post on Instagram was just the beginning of what appears to have been a cross-country trip for what was the official bus of Kennedy’s now-defunct presidential campaign. Days later, in early September, it was spotted in Reno, Nevada, with bicycles mounted on the back, and then again in Venice, California. In between, it appears to have been at the desert art and culture festival Burning Man, according to multiple posts on Reddit.”

Vice President JD Vance had some choice words for Kamala Harris saying she had no “substance” and that each time he listened to her he felt “dumber in the process,” The Wrap reports.

Said Vance: “The problem is not that Kamala’s campaign was too short. It was too long. When people actually listened to what she had to say, per polling, it went down and down and down. A 150-day campaign, three additional senators, and Donald Trump would have won by an even bigger landslide.”