Two days after losing both chambers of Congress, the Republican Party began in public the argument over why. Vice-President JD Vance posted a 600-word statement on Wednesday that put the defeat on the war with Iran. “The reason we lost is the war,” he wrote. “The president himself said so last night.” President Trump, who had defended the war through the campaign, agreed that the midterms were “largely” decided by the war and said he would “do it again” if given the same choice. The BBC, which reported the exchange, found little recent precedent for a sitting vice-president breaking so sharply with a president on a signature foreign policy. Vance did not name Trump in the post, and, according to The New York Times, showed it to him before publishing. The deference is what made the statement legible as something other than a resignation: it read as the opening of a campaign, two years before the next election.

The administration and the rule of law

The Federal Register’s two-day window carried 203 documents: four presidential documents, twenty rules, sixteen proposed rules and 163 notices. All four presidential documents are continuations of national emergencies, and all four were signed on November 3, the day of the election, then printed this morning. The one on Iran continues for a year the emergency declared by Executive Order 12170 on November 14, 1979, finding that relations with Iran “have not yet normalized” and that the process of implementing the agreements dated January 19, 1981, is ongoing. The notice takes care to distinguish that emergency from the one declared by Executive Order 12957 in 1995 and renewed in March. The other three continue the emergencies on Nicaragua, on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and on securities investment in certain Chinese companies. A continuation is the least dramatic document the register prints and the most durable: it keeps in place, for another year, authorities that would otherwise lapse.

The rules were routine. The FCC’s provisions implementing the Martha Wright-Reed Act on interstate inmate calling took effect November 5, after the Office of Management and Budget approved the information collections on which the commission’s orders depend; the notice announces a date rather than a new policy. The Legal Services Corporation set cost standards for its grantees’ purchasing and property management. The notices were dominated by trade administration: preliminary and final determinations in antidumping and countervailing duty cases on steel, aluminum, pipe, lockers and wind towers from China, Korea, Mexico, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Austria, Spain, India and Vietnam.

The courts

The Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit opinion feeds recorded nothing in the window, as they had the day before. The visible work was again in the district court, where CourtListener recorded nineteen new entries in the District of Columbia on November 4 and 5, four more than the fifteen of the previous day. Among them were Health Partners Plans, Inc. v. Department of Health and Human Services, AT&T Services, Inc. v. T-Mobile US, Inc., E.ON SE v. Kingdom of Spain, Feinberg v. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wilkinson v. Washington Reporter, LLC. Five of the nineteen name either Rubio or Mullin as the defendant. The pack carries captions and docket numbers, not complaints, so this report can say who sued and not what the suits allege.

Of the five watched dockets, two moved and three were silent. Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center matter, recorded four minute entries on November 4. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, the East Potomac golf case, recorded nine entries that day, among them docket entries 132 through 134. Phang v. Blanche recorded nothing in the district court, MSW Media, Inc. v. Department of Justice recorded nothing, and the consolidated appeal in the D.C. Circuit recorded nothing.

Markets

Equities rose sharply on November 4, the first session after the result. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 1,569.40 points, or 3.03 percent, to 53,356.12. The S&P 500 rose 119.70 points, or 1.58 percent, to 7,688.62, and the Nasdaq Composite gained 364.504 points, or 1.44 percent, to 25,736.513. The Dow’s move was nearly twice the S&P’s in percentage terms. Prices alone do not explain the gap, and this report will not invent a reason for it.

This morning the VIX was 16.80 at 07:00 CT, up 0.19. The ten-year Treasury yielded 4.888 percent at 07:00, down less than a basis point on the day. Front-month WTI crude was $89.19 at 06:50, up $1.07. Gold was $4,141.10, up $68.10, and the dollar index was 101.572. All of those are morning prints, not closes.

Treasury’s curve for November 4 ran 4.58 percent at two years, 4.90 at ten and 5.28 at thirty, a 2s10s spread of +0.32, two basis points flatter than November 3’s +0.34. Total public debt outstanding was $40,547,403,570,985 on November 3, up $45,322,604,888 from November 2. Of that, $32,765,330,118,711 was held by the public and $7,782,073,452,274 was intragovernmental.

The economy

No new month entered the BLS series; September remains the newest reading in all three. The all-items consumer price index was 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, 1.96 points above August’s 334.980, a monthly rise of 0.59 percent. Unemployment was 4.2 percent, a tenth above August and July. Total nonfarm payrolls were 159,044 thousand in September, a gain of 29 thousand after August’s 133 thousand. Taken together the readings describe prices firming while hiring slows, the same reading the numbers gave a month ago, and nothing published since has changed it.

Elections and the midterms

Both chambers are decided; the size of the majorities is still moving. The BBC’s results tracker this morning had the Senate at 54 Democrats to 44 Republicans, with two of the thirty-five contests still counting, and the House at 240 to 147, with 48 of the 435 races uncalled. That is twenty more House races called than the tally this report carried yesterday, and a wider Democratic margin.

Vance’s statement ended with the party’s emerging program in four lines, which the BBC printed in full: “1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel.” Whether or not he runs, that list is now the clearest public account of the argument the party will have after its defeat.

Polymarket’s two remaining Senate contracts moved sharply toward the Democrats overnight. Mississippi has Scott Colom at 97.3 percent on $664,606 of twenty-four-hour volume, against Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith at 2.9 percent on $487,526. Alaska has Mary Peltola at 95.3 percent on $819,730, against Senator Dan Sullivan at 4.9 percent on $484,576. Yesterday those contracts read 79.0 and 84.4 percent. The contract asking which of seven swing states Republicans will win put “None” at 95.0 percent on $746,961, up from 82.5. A separate board on Republican Senate seats after the midterms puts 44 seats at 94.4 percent on $163,311 and 45 at 5.6 percent, which agrees with the 54 to 44 count. House races are still trading: NC-03 has Raymond Smith Jr. at 75.5 percent on $138,914 against Greg Murphy at 23.8 percent, and AZ-02 has Eli Crane at 67.5 percent against Jonathan Nez at 32.5. These are the venue’s prices, not this publication’s view.

The world

The day’s sharpest development outside the United States was a sentence in Hong Kong. Joshua Wong, one of the most prominent figures of the city’s 2019 pro-democracy movement, was sentenced Thursday to ten years in prison for his second conviction under a Beijing-imposed national security law, the Associated Press reported. Wong, 30, pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to collude with foreign forces. Judge William Tam called the offense grave, took thirteen years as a starting point and reduced the term for the plea; he allowed it to run concurrently with the four years and eight months Wong is already serving, of which about two months remain. Before this charge, Wong had been expected to be released in January 2027.

“NSL charges can be repeatedly weaponized to keep a specific political prisoner in jail, if the government deems necessary,” said Eric Lai, a research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Asian Law. Hong Kong authorities say the security law is essential to the city’s stability after 2019 and that enforcement is evidence-based; Beijing regards Wong as an anti-China figure who supports independence. Observers quoted by the AP read the sentence as a sign that the authorities intend to keep prominent activists imprisoned as long as possible. It lands on a civil society already thinned: news outlets known for critical reporting have closed, and dozens of civic groups have dissolved.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on November 5, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (the November 4 close for the equities, and morning prints for the VIX, the ten-year, gold, crude and the dollar), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (November 4), FiscalData (November 3) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. Federal Register counts and document descriptions were read from the register’s own API, and the courts section draws on CourtListener’s RECAP search and its watched-docket feeds. The account of the vote counts and of Vance’s statement draws on the BBC’s results tracker and report; the account of the Hong Kong sentencing on the Associated Press.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman