The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
In a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump, Democrats have won control of the House by a large margin, and they’re on track to win a majority in the Senate. It’s an absolute wipeout. And critically, Democrats have regained enormous ground in areas of the country that they’ve long struggled with: the South, the parts of the Midwest that Trump conquered, the Great Plains, Texas. This will change our political geography and deal a truly crippling blow to the MAGA movement, and render Trump a significantly diminished figure.
We’re talking to New Republic editor Michael Tomasky about all of it. Mike, what a night.
Michael Tomasky: Incredible. I had never seen a night like it. And you know, at my age, probably will never see another night like it. Amazing.
Sargent: It really is. Let’s start with the Senate. As of this recording, Democrats easily won North Carolina and Georgia. Michigan appears to be holding. They’ve now flipped South Carolina. They’re on track to flip Maine, Ohio, and Texas, and probably Kansas as well. That would seem to put Democrats at a minimum of 53 seats, assuming it all holds, probably 54. What do you make of that, Michael?
Tomasky: I thought it would be around 53 or 54. So it’s just what I expected, I guess. But it’s even more, because there’s still Alaska. And if all of these dominoes have tumbled in one direction, the remaining dominoes are likely to tumble in the same direction. So it could be 55 or something like that.
And it’s not only that, Greg, it’s the margins. These aren’t close. Ohio was kind of close. It looks like Maine is sort of close. But Talarico’s winning by a lot, and a lot of these other races, they’re just not close. And it’s just as you said, it’s just a stunning, stunning rebuke of Trump and MAGA, just all across the board.
Sargent: A big story here seems to be the Democratic inroads in the South, right? Democrats held Georgia. They just elected the first female Black governor there. They’re on track to taking Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas. They just flipped the House seats in Kentucky’s sixth district and in North Carolina’s 11th district, which is in Appalachia.
Those are both House districts that Trump won by double digits. They held a bunch of House seats in Florida that have been gerrymandered. Michael, this was unthinkable a decade ago. I think Trump did this, right?
Tomasky: Yeah, absolutely. And we have him to thank. So we finally have something to thank him for.
Yeah, the margin again—the margin in Kentucky six, the Democrat won by nearly 10 points. And Kathy Castor in Florida, they redrew her district. She’s a Democrat from the Tampa area. They redrew her district to finish her off. She won very comfortably.
The Democrat in the new 22nd district won pretty comfortably. But it’s all Trump. And, you know, he has brought the MAGA movement and the Republican Party crashing onto the rocks. Absolutely crashing onto the rocks.
Sargent: I think North Carolina’s 11th actually tells that story pretty well, so it’s maybe worth dwelling on. North Carolina’s 11th district is in the western part of the state. It’s in Appalachia. It’s got Asheville, but there’s a lot of rural territory there. It’s basically Trump country. It really is Trump country.
And that’s the place where Donald Trump lied about the disaster response. And I think that really pissed off a lot of people out there. And Democrats were telling me for a long time to keep an eye on that district for this reason.
And Jamie Ager, who’s a farmer—his family has been farming in the region for generations. He’s absolutely North Carolina 11 through and through. He won this by double digits. I mean, that is an enormous flip. It’s just unthinkable. This is Appalachia, Michael.
Tomasky: I know. I know. It’s just incredible. And again, the margin, double digits.
And speaking of Appalachia, Pennsylvania—Scott Perry, one of the MAGA-est of the MAGAs, up to his eyeballs in January 6, he was from that part of Pennsylvania that’s known as Alabama, in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. He lost by double digits, if I’m not mistaken. Got swamped.
So it just—everywhere you look, I mean, I’ve been, as I’m sure you have, I’ve been following this through different means. I’ve been watching TV, I’ve been looking at my computer, I’ve been looking at my social media feed, I’ve been on email chains with friends. And results are coming in from all those things, just hitting me as we speak.
And everything that comes in is like, oh my God, he won. Oh my God, she won. Oh my God, he won by nine. Oh my God, you telling me she won by 11 points? Are you kidding? And it’s just been like that nonstop.
And I can’t think of one piece of negative news. I mean, the Florida results—but people didn’t really expect the Democrats to win Florida, Jolly or Nixon, and they came awfully close.
Sargent: They did come awfully close. And as we said earlier, there were some positive stories out of Florida, which is that the Republicans were unable to gerrymander out these Democrats.
I want to dwell a little on Kentucky six for another reason. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, this is a big deal for him. And it’s got major 2028 implications as well. Andy Beshear told us all that Kentucky six could be flipped.
I think there was a lot of skepticism, for good reason. Again, this is a place Trump won by double digits, but he kept insisting it would happen. And now it’s happened.
I’ve got to think that gives him a bit of a leg up. And these big inroads in the South, they’ve got me thinking about Southern governors running for president. That vibe is coming to mind kind of heavily now, right?
Tomasky: Yeah, yeah, it is. And you know, it’s going to change the character of the House Democratic caucus. If there are going to be 245 or maybe even 250 House Democrats from these places where there haven’t been Democrats, Greg, since—well, since 2010, 2008, or 2006, I guess, was the big election that swung so heavily in the Democrats’ direction.
And the Democrats really expanded their map in that year. And that was in the wake of, you know, the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina, and President Bush, the second Bush, took a real pummeling.
And then after 2010, when Obama was president for two years and the economy hadn’t recovered and the Republicans regained all those seats, the Democratic map contracted.
And for a long time, it looked to me and to you and to, I’m sure, a lot of people listening to us, like it was never going to expand back into places like western North Carolina. But now it has. And it’s a great opportunity for the Democrats to try and make that permanent.
Sargent: Yes, there’s going to be a major opening for Democrats to reconnect with some of these rural voters, some of these small-town voters, churchgoing voters, in these places.
I want to pick up on your point about Obama and the Blue Dogs, because it did seem like the Blue Dog Democrat was extinct. But now NBC is projecting, at least at my last hearing, NBC’s projecting 244 House seats for Democrats, as you say, could go higher. But that means we’re going to see some Democrats in some really, really unusual places.
I don’t have a clear picture where that’s going to be right now, but I think maybe they’re going to win some districts in South Texas, which are historically a little tough for them. They’re going to be in Appalachia.
They’re going to probably win, I think, that one in Virginia, which is a pretty rural district as well. It’s not Appalachia, it’s eastern Virginia. You know the one I mean, I think, right?
Tomasky: Yeah, the first. Yeah.
Sargent: Yeah, right. They’re going to flip that, aren’t they?
Tomasky: It’s a close race right now, but they have a good chance of doing it, yeah.
Sargent: Yeah, and then they’ll get the Virginia Beach seat, which is more of a swingy area. But you’re going to see—I think you’re going to see them flip some seats in Iowa, right? They’re going to have a lot more Democrats in rural areas, right?
I don’t know if they’re going to flip Wisconsin’s third, which is Derrick Van Orden, major MAGA guy, but I’m sure it’s very competitive as of this moment. But point is, they’re going to get into places like Iowa, rural Iowa, they’re going to get into South Texas, they’re going to get into western North Carolina.
And there’s going to be like a new rural caucus of Democrats, although I think they’ll be a little different. It’s a different time now than it was even as recently as 2008.
Tomasky: Yeah. Yeah. And I hope that means there are going to be a lot more Democrats in the caucus that you might call moderate. But I don’t know that they’re so moderate on economic issues.
I think a lot of these people are pretty populist on economic issues, and are ready to take on Trump and his friends, and the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels and people like that, and transfer wealth back to working- and middle-class people in a pretty serious way. I hope the caucus is ready to do that en masse.
And that’s a place where I think there’s potential for common ground between some of the progressives and some of the new folks, who might not call themselves progressive on some social issues or cultural issues, but I think probably are fairly progressive on economics.
And I think if the Democrats, if Hakeem Jeffries, can just keep them focused on that stuff, I think they can speak with one voice on a lot of these economic concerns, and flip some opinions about them in rural and exurban parts of the country.
Sargent: And I think another thing that makes that essential is that, if you think back to the Blue Dogs, those were some of the people who kind of forced a more moderate Obamacare to emerge.
Tomasky: Yeah.
Sargent: Right? In those days, the Blue Dogs were a little bit more in the Joe Manchin mold, who kind of acts like a populist but isn’t really an economic populist. He’s really kind of, you know, center-right on economics, interestingly.
And I agree that now all of a sudden you’re going to have a lot more unity on this one thing. Maybe not on other things, right? But you will have unity on economic issues.
And that will be, I think, potentially—there’s a long way to go, right? But if they can win the presidency in 2028, then you can really start to see some really big economic proposals emerging, I think.
Tomasky: I think that’s right. And yes, the context is really different. You know, in 2010, 2012, those kind of Blue Dogs were very cautious economically, and they took corporate money, and they didn’t want to be aligned with the progressives at all. I hope and sense that that has changed some now.
The anger over the data centers, the anger over crypto and AI, and the fear of what AI might do to this country and to working people, and just the power that people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the others have over our political system and our society at large—I hope and believe that that’s got most Democrats united in opposition to and anger about all of that stuff. And I think they’ll act on it. I hope.
You know, it’s going to take the leadership of Jeffries and Schumer to make sure that they do. But there’s a great opportunity for them, if they do that, heading into 2028, to show the country what their priorities are and what they want to do.
Sargent: Absolutely. So let’s talk about the Midwest. Just two years ago, Trump won all of it, winning the three blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And of course, he had already turned Ohio and Iowa into red states. But now Democrats are on track to take the Ohio Senate seat. They’ve won the Ohio governorship as well. Amy Acton won it. The Senate seat in Iowa, as of this recording, looks very plausible as well.
I think a big question now is whether states like Ohio and possibly Iowa kind of revert a bit back to swing states after Trump, right? I think people forget that Barack Obama won Ohio and Iowa twice. He won them both twice. It seems plausible that Trump’s conversion of them into red states was a bit of a unique and fleeting event, possibly. What do you think of that?
Tomasky: I agree. Hopefully they’re, like, snapping out of some trance and waking up from some fever dream that they had. Trump, I suppose, to a certain kind of person, mostly white person, said things that seduced them, about the economy and about American society. And, you know, it just takes people a long time to snap out of that.
And it always just amazed me, to watch these interviews with people after the 2024 election, and they say they voted for him because, you know, he said he was going to lower prices, and they believed him.
I mean, I always just thought, how can you believe, first of all, this charlatan? But second of all, a president doesn’t have the—a president can’t say, hey, you can only charge $3.89 for a gallon of milk. A president just can’t do that. Yet these people bought this.
And it was all part of some big—like, I can’t say it any better than the word trance, that people got lulled into. But tonight they snapped out of it. And they emphatically snapped out of it, as you say, in Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, where Adam Hamilton was declared the winner, and other places.
By the way, Kansas has been in the Union since about 1860, and has had senators since 1861. In all that time, he’s only the fourth Democratic senator they’ve ever elected in the history of the state. So I think that that section of the country is just—whatever Trump did to them, whatever drug he put them on, it’s leaving their system now.
Sargent: I hope you’re right. It’s the “cultural heroin” that JD Vance referenced. And I think that that’s interesting, because JD Vance understood at one time, right? He really understood this trance that you’re talking about.
Tomasky: Yeah.
Sargent: He called it cultural heroin. He saw the people around him in his home state of Ohio, site of Hillbilly Elegy and all that. He saw those people slip into that trance and understood that it was a toxic force back then. And then of course he recognized that it was a route to fulfill some sort of ambition of his.
I think it’s more complicated than that, but basically JD Vance started to buy a certain vision of, I don’t know, the liberal cathedral or whatever they call it, whatever the new right calls it. You know, he started to think that the left is really some sort of major threat that required a tribune-like figure like Trump to break. And he hitched himself to that.
And I think after tonight, that’s going to have looked like a colossal mistake, a colossal miscalculation. I don’t see how Vance manages to kind of escape this wreckage now. What do you think of that?
Tomasky: Yeah, this wipeout really weakens him, because he has tied himself, he’s lashed himself, so aggressively to the MAGA mast. And how does he wriggle out of that? I don’t know that he can.
So it opens up the Republican field, I think, in 2028. I think you’re absolutely right about that. I would still, for now, call him the front-runner, but we’ll see how this shakes out over the next few weeks and into next year.
And one of the things that I’m really interested in watching, Greg, particularly when the new Congress convenes, is, I bet we’re going to see Republicans a lot more willing to criticize Trump.
Sargent: Yeah.
Tomasky: I mean, he’s down and it’s easy to kick a man when he’s down.
Sargent: Yes. And I think they really don’t have any reason to let themselves get pushed around by him anymore, do they?
Tomasky: Right. No, no, they don’t. So it’s going to be really interesting to see.
I think it now possibly portends a much more wide-open 2028 Republican field, right? Don’t you think?
Sargent: I do.
Tomasky: I mean, it was Vance versus Rubio, we thought, or so the conventional wisdom thought. But I think now you get governors, you get Sarah Huckabee Sanders in there, you get a couple senators, and I don’t know, there could be a dozen people.
Sargent: Right. And JD Vance has been prancing around as if MAGA is still culturally ascendant, as if it’s still a real dominant force in American life, I think. And they didn’t really realize what was happening right under their noses, the degree to which MAGA and Trump were deeply alienating the country, both with policy but also with affect, right? Also with the constant stream of hate, the constant rage, the constant derangement.
Everyone’s just had it, and all these Democratic candidates stepped into that breach and sort of created a new politics, I think, almost a decent values-based politics. Which, I mean, look at Talarico. He talks about religion all the time.
Amy Acton talks about her difficult childhood. Every one of them is talking to voters and saying, you don’t need to live this way anymore, you know? This is not what we should be. And it seems to have worked. I think that is a big part of what happened.
Tomasky: I agree. And I think the authenticity of so many of the Democratic candidates in this cycle is something that shouldn’t go unremarked, and is something that, you know, I may do a little reporting on, and may encourage you to do a little reporting on too.
I mean, you know, in so many places you looked, they had a candidate who was from the area, went to college in the area, joined the Navy, or owned a farm, or was a fifth-generation farmer, or, you know, a third-generation small business, you know. It was just a series of people like that, who weren’t your typical Democratic cookie-cutter maybe grew up there but went away to some fancy law school and became a lawyer and moved back to the district in a quasi-opportunistic fashion to run for Congress.
That’s an all too common Democratic story. But these were, like, homegrown people in many, many districts. And they were right for the moment. And I think that probably ties into what makes them a little bit more economically populist too, because, you know, the struggles and the pain of the people in the district are more real to them.
Sargent: I think we might be seeing the birth of a new Democratic Party, Mike.
Tomasky: Wow. That would be good. That’d be a good thing. We need it.
Sargent: We do indeed. Mike Tomasky, let’s all try to get some sleep, man.
Tomasky: Yeah, I’m pretty jazzed. I’m going to be up for a little while. No—Josh Turek, projected winner. Just now.
Sargent: There you go. Iowa two. The whole Midwest.
Tomasky: Yeah. Amazing.
Sargent: It is. Mike Tomasky, awesome to talk to you.
Tomasky: Likewise, my friend. Thanks.