James Talarico Won Texas Before Election Day Even Started

Democrat James Talarico didn’t just win big in Texas’s Senate race—he won before Election Day.

According to data from the Texas secretary of state’s office, Talarico got 4,397,474 votes in early voting—more than the 4,249,373 votes that his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General James Paxton, received overall. While the election results have not been certified by the state of Texas yet, all 5,303 polling locations and 254 counties in the state were reporting results, according to the secretary of state’s website.

The total margin of victory stands at 55 percent for Talarico versus 43 percent for Paxton, greater than the 50–43 margin the last poll predicted before the election. Texas has a 12-day early voting period, and it shattered its own turnout records, with 7.4 million Texans voting during that time.

Talarico’s win was already historic, as he is the first Democrat elected to represent Texas in the Senate since 1988, when then-incumbent Lloyd Bentsen won reelection. But a win by 12 percentage points, in a state Trump won by 13.7 percentage points in 2024, shows just how unpopular Republicans were in these midterms.

And Talarico was not the only Democrat to win in Texas: The party swept every statewide race, is on track to take over the state House, and flipped all four of the state Supreme Court seats that were on the ballot. Texans not only followed the rest of the country in punishing Republicans during these midterms, but they came out in large numbers early, and upended decades of GOP dominance.

Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, the oldest person in Congress at 93 years old, will not be retiring early—meaning newly elected Democratic Governor Rob Sand will choose his successor in the event that he passes away.

“Sen. Grassley is not resigning,” a Grassley spokesperson told the Washington Examiner, rejecting the idea that Grassley would step down before the year’s end to allow outgoing Governor Kim Reynolds to appoint a fellow Republican in his place. “He remains committed to delivering for the people of Iowa, who overwhelmingly elected him to a six-year term in 2022.”

Back in September, Grassley expressed concerns about what a Democratic governor in Iowa would mean. “One of the reasons I’m worried about who’s going to be elected governor—I don’t plan on dying in office, but if I did, I don’t want a Democrat governor choosing my successor,” Grassley said.

Now, that’s exactly what will happen if he does pass, an event that is not unlikely given his age. Grassley is up for reelection in 2028, meaning if he dies in the next two years, there’s no way a Republican senator takes his place. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats already have a 10-seat majority in the Senate.

Sand in September said that he’s open to appointing an independent in Grassley’s place if he does die, but we’ll have to wait and see if he stays true to that, given that his comment came well before Democrats took back the Senate so resoundingly. Democrats also won three of Iowa’s four House seats.

Regardless of Grassley’s politics, he is the primary example of the gerontocracy that plagues Congress, particularly in the Senate. A 93-year-old should be spending their time with their family and friends, ruminating on the long life they’ve been blessed to live. Instead, Grassley is letting his own ego and interests fuel him, and it’s placed the Senate in a precarious position for Republicans in the event of his passing—especially given the state’s new Democratic governor.

Donald Trump really didn’t care about the midterms. Then he panicked.

The president’s mood and regard for the consequential elections fluctuated rapidly in the months preceding them, according to a senior administration official that spoke with The Wall Street Journal. All too frequently, Trump placed his ego above the interests of the American public, apparently convinced that his foreign policy and legacy would ultimately matter more than domestic issues.

Trump was obstinate when faced with the facts. When aides shared his negative polling numbers throughout the spring and summer, highlighting the affordability issues sparked by the Iran war, Trump pushed back by claiming the polling was fake, the official told the Journal.

But toward the end of summer, Trump suddenly switched his tune, The New York Times reported. “We’ve gotta win. Anything we gotta do,” he privately told advisers, according to the outlet.

But when he finally decided to invest in the midterm races, Trump favored GOP candidates that he believed would be loyal to him, even if they faced more dire political odds.

Trump-endorsed candidates lost just about everywhere. Senator Susan Collins lost Maine, and Senator Darline Graham lost South Carolina. Former RNCC Chair Michael Whatley couldn’t break through in North Carolina, and Representative Mike Collins fell flat in Georgia. The GOP even lost Texas, which turned away from Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton in favor of Democratic alternatives.

Voters in Ohio were repulsed by an ad produced by biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who tapped his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother to bad-mouth her, even though she abandoned her daughter when Acton was just 12 years old.

The president’s understanding of American priorities at times seemed so far removed from reality that it bordered on the absurd. At one point, Trump reportedly told his advisers that he believed his ceaseless commentary about Ohio Senator Jon Husted’s ass was making Husted more “interesting” to Ohio voters. But it did not. Instead, Husted lost by a margin of nearly five percentage points on Tuesday.

“It really didn’t have to be this way,” Representative Ralph Norman, who lost the South Carolinian GOP nomination to Graham, told the Journal. “Pride goeth before the fall. It’s going to be a wake-up call for the Republican Party.”

By the end of September, diesel prices had hit a record high, and Democrats seized on the opportunity to target historically deep-red districts. A pollster remarked on a Republican call that “people will mark the last week of September as the week the bottom fell out,” according to the Journal.

But Trump’s mind was elsewhere, unable to comprehend the national blowback to the rising cost of living. He’d call Senate Majority Leader John Thune to talk about killing the filibuster or attempting to choke voting efforts via the Save America Act. Thune would try to bring up affordability, but he couldn’t get through, the Journal reported.

Donald Trump’s favorite aide, Natalie Harp, appears to have taken control of his cell phone as everything crumbles around him.

The Independent reported on Wednesday that its attempt to contact the president via his personal phone number as midterm results were rolling in was intercepted by a young woman. Multiple journalists confirmed to the outlet that they’d experienced the same thing.

Politico’s Dasha Burns called the president during an election-night livestream on Tuesday and was greeted by a surprising voice on the other side. “Hi, may I ask who’s calling?” a woman’s voice said. The voice appeared identical to Harp’s based on a recording of her speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, according to The Independent.

Over the past two years, Harp has become the de facto gatekeeper to Trump. As his “human printer,” she has taken up the task of printing out flattering news coverage and positive social media posts to show the president for his approval to share on his social media accounts. With Harp at the helm, the president’s social media posts have only gotten more outrageous and divisive, and she wields the power to elevate any right-wing poster to a policymaker.

In turn, Harp seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with the president’s approval. Her own past writing reveals that she views Trump as a kind of spiritual adviser, a father figure, and a Mr. Darcy-type romantic lead.

As Democrats have retaken Congress and the Trump administration has suffered a stunning rebuke from Americans, Harp has taken to acting as an intermediary for the president and the press.

After Republicans were soundly defeated in Tuesday’s midterm elections, the GOP’s knives are coming out for Stephen Miller.

Leaks from within the Trump administration are targeting the White House adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy, with unnamed sources attacking him.

According to The Wall Street Journal, first lady Melania Trump at one point complained to President Trump that people she knew were getting deported, leading the president to tell his aides that Miller’s aggressive deportation plans were going too far.

Another report in The New York Times noted that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, herself potentially on the chopping block after Republicans’ election fiasco, was not a fan of Miller’s heavy-handed immigration approach, and had tried for months to get Trump to take a different route.

After federal immigration agents killed nurse Alex Pretti in January, Miller joined then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in calling the Minneapolis nurse a “domestic terrorist,” which didn’t go over well with the rest of the White House. Trump, worried about the video of Pretti’s death, told his press secretary Karoline Leavitt to distance him from Miller’s and Noem’s comments, and told immigration czar Tom Homan to go to Minnesota to fix the situation. After that, Democrats took the edge in polls about immigration policy.

The fact that Republicans are bringing this up now, following devastating losses in previously safe, deep-red areas, suggests that they want Miller out. They have good reasons, but they should have done this a long time ago.

Miller’s racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia were well known, even going back to Trump’s first term. He has long sought to unleash the full power of government might against immigrants that he deems less than human, despite his own Russian Jewish ancestors arriving as refugees. He probably had a hand in Trump’s decision to restrict refugee admission to white South Africans only, even though their refugee status is dubious at best.

Miller’s push for high deportation quotas has given heavy rein to a bloated, overfunded Immigration and Customs Enforcement that engages in violence and oversteps its bounds, even targeting U.S. citizens. It was too much for one acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, who quit in April due to health issues. The backlash was a major reason why Republicans were pummeled on Tuesday, and if Republicans are now blaming Miller, let’s hope that he is soon shown the door.