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Injecting a little dose of reality into the Fox News bubble on Wednesday morning, Bret Baier pushed back against his MAGA-boosting colleagues’ narrative that Tuesday night’s Democratic wins were always expected because they happened in “blue states.” Instead, the network’s chief political anchor explained that “it’s a big loss” for Republicans and that the “massive” margins of victory for Democrats spelled “dangerous things” for the GOP going forward. As the results rolled in on Tuesday evening and it was clear that Democrats weren’t only going to prevail in their gubernatorial and mayoral races but win in a decisive fashion, Fox News hosts and pundits quickly began downplaying the overwhelming GOP losses as inevitable. Pro-Trump star Jesse Watters, for instance, began leaning hard into this talking point early on. Despite Fox News spending the past weeks relentlessly hyping how close the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races were, and even giving long-time foe Andrew Cuomo an on-air boost in his New York mayoral contest, Watters made it seem like Republicans never had a chance. “They had to bring Barack [Obama] in from Hawaii, they had to pump millions more dollars into these races than they should have. These are blue states!” Watters exclaimed shortly after Fox called the Virginia gubernatorial race for Abigail Spanberger. “This is Virginia. This is Jersey. They outspent Republicans like almost two-to-one!” The cope continued on throughout the evening. With Mikie Sherill walloping Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli in a race that pollsters had predicted as being a nail-biter, and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani defeating Cuomo easily, the network’s MAGA stars also wanted to make it clear that the fault did not lie with the increasingly unpopular president. “The Democrats are going to spin this: ‘This is a referendum on Trump.’ I mean, these are all blue states,” Watters declared, an argument that Trump confidant Sean Hannity would echo throughout his program the following hour. Hannity also hosted a GOP pollster who claimed that Republicans struggled on election night because of the ongoing government shutdown and the fact that Trump’s name wasn’t on the ballot. The Trump-Fox feedback loop would take full effect minutes later, as Trump would post that very same argument on his Truth Social platform. Whenever the right-wing network’s personalities weren’t making excuses for the GOP and reassuring the president that the losses weren’t on him, they were fearmongering over what a Mamdani victory meant for both New York City and national politics. “The soul of the Democrat Party belongs to the radical left now,” Laura Ingraham groused, invoking Mamdani and the surprising triumph of scandal-plagued Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones. “A communist, a socialist, and a man with a murder fetish — this is who they’ve become.” Hannity, meanwhile, declared on air that his phone was blowing up with texts and calls from friends living in New York who were “officially depressed and scared” about Mamdani running the city. “I honestly feel bad,” Hannity sighed. Still, one of the prevailing narratives that persevered through Wednesday morning was that Republicans were always going to lose because they were running in liberal strongholds. “If you look at New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli did a really good job of focusing on economics. That state is just blue. And everybody who was normal and red, a lot of them left to Florida,” Fox & Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy insisted. Baier, who led the network’s special election coverage on Tuesday night, visited the curvy couch on Wednesday morning and poked a hole in the rhetorical bubble that the conservative cable giant’s stars had formed. After co-host Lawrence Jones asked what lessons could be learned by Republicans even though the races they lost were in “strongly Democrat areas,” Baier pointed out that conservatives believed going into election night that they would put up strong performances. “It’s a big loss,” the anchor explained. “You can say that these states were traditionally blue, but you can also say that heading in, there was some thought that – especially in New Jersey – Ciattarelli would do better.” Adding that the “spreads here are surprising,” Baier said that a look “inside the numbers” revealed “some dangerous things” for the Republican Party. “One, young women overwhelmingly in New Jersey and Virginia supported the Democrat based on economy,” he stated. “On immigration, maybe those ICE images, the affordability push by Mamdani really sticks.” Noting that the results centered on “inflation and how people feel about the economy,” Baier asserted that the “dichotomy between how Wall Street’s doing and how big business is doing and how you feel about it at home is something Republicans really have to look at closely.” Circling back to the margins of victory for the Democratic candidates, Baier told his colleagues to “look at the spread in Virginia – it’s massive.” On top of that, while Baier said that the president was “right to say he was not on the ballot and when he’s not, it doesn’t produce the same emotion” for his base voters, it “does produce emotion on the other side – the anti-Trump voter.” And, as Baier concluded, “they came out in droves.”
