From§Each

Page A229From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 5 November 2026

Blakeman calls Stefanik 'do-nothing' weeks after not doing the one thing he owes: refunding $360,000 to donors.

By LouOne More Question

“Ron DeSantis bashes Vivek Ramaswamy as Ohio candidate, calling him out of touch”, 5 November 2026 (Photo via Washington Examiner — the original report)

As it ran on the front

I want to start with something that has nothing to do with any of this, except that it does, so bear with me.

My brother-in-law moved apartments on Saturday, and I went to help, which mostly meant standing in the driveway while two professionals loaded a truck. Halfway through, the dresser they'd set in first started sliding when the mattress went in on top of it at an angle. Nothing fell. But I watched the two of them stand there a good two minutes arguing about whose fault it would have been. The one on the ramp said the other one should have strapped the dresser down before the mattress went in. The other one said the ramp guy set the dresser too close to the wall to strap it. Neither one of them looked at the truck. Neither one of them asked whether six rooms of furniture was ever going to fit on a sixteen-foot truck in the first place. That wasn't the argument they wanted to have.…

…(cont) I bring it up because I spent Wednesday night with a stack of clippings — on the porch, not the kitchen table, my wife wanted the table back — trying to understand how a party that just lost the way this one lost spends its first three days. And I kept thinking about the dresser.

Here's what I had written down. In Ohio, did the Ramaswamy campaign run an ad about his opponent's mother that, with less than two weeks left before the election, had the sitting governor of that state and a sitting U.S. senator of that state — both Republicans — on record denouncing it? I have that written down. And did the candidate lose badly enough that another Republican, the governor of a different state, went on a show this week and asked out loud how bad they beat him — "like a drum" is the phrase I have — and said, no, he was never in tune with voters to begin with?

So is that one strap, left loose?

Here's the other one. Did a Republican candidate for governor of New York lose his race this week to the incumbent, and did he then post that an outgoing member of Congress from his own party is a "selfish, do-nothing politician" who didn't lift a finger for him? And did that same candidate, about a month before any of this, still owe roughly $360,000 to his own donors — money he'd raised above what the law lets him keep? Has it gone back? I don't know. Nothing in what I've got says it has.

So now I have two men, a dresser, and a mattress, and nobody asking about the truck.

And the third one — does he blame anybody in particular? Not in anything I've got. He's the one saying, out loud, that he wants to grow his own influence in the party now, after a blowout that left him outside electoral politics entirely since he lost his Senate race back in 2024.

Three men. Three different corners of the same loss. Not one of them, in anything in front of me, using the word "we."

Excuse me — before I let you go, one more thing, because I almost didn't write it down, and then I did. The man who called an outgoing member of his own party "do-nothing" for not helping him win — has he sent the $360,000 back to his own donors yet? Because nothing in what I've got says he has, and "do-nothing" is a specific thing to call somebody while that's still sitting there.

“Nobody in that party is talking about why they lost, they're all just finding somebody else in a red tie to blame — DeSantis picks Ramaswamy, Blakeman picks Stefanik, and the guy doing the picking still owes his own donors $360,000 he hasn't mailed back. That's not accountability, that's musical chairs with the blame instead of the chair. And while they point fingers at each other, nobody's pointing one at the bill that's still unpaid.”
Sal
“This is exactly what a healthy party does after a tough night — it has honest conversations, people hold each other accountable, that's self-correction, not infighting. Sure, the New York candidate is out here calling a sitting congresswoman a do-nothing while he's sitting on $360,000 that technically belongs to other people, but — did I just defend that? That's not — let me get back to you.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

Larry Hogan wants to grow his influence in the GOP after midterm blowout
Washington Examinerright§

Larry Hogan may not have aspirations for another stint in public office, but that doesn’t mean the former two-term centrist Republican governor of Maryland is done with politics. In fact, Hogan is looking to expand his sway in the party after lying relatively low from the political headlines since losing his 2024 Senate bid. His […]

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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.