Elon Musk—the Tesla CEO most recently in the headlines for spending half a billion dollars to have his ass handed to him in the midterm elections by a blue wave of young progressives and populists whose platforms weirdly did not include any of his pet issues like “starting a race war”—announced that Cybertruck production would be “winding down” on X, a social media platform he bought in 2022 so as to render it absolutely useless for virtually anything except nonconsensual pornography and shitposting.

According to Musk (the world’s most reliable narrator), this change is simply “to make room for increased Cybercab production.” Totally by coincidence, “Cybertruck sales declined 48 percent from 2024 to 2025” and were down 28 percent from January through September 2026, as the Associated Press reports. All Tesla sales nosedived at the start of 2025—“its worst showing since 2022 and ... far lower than analysts’ predictions”—numbers Wedbush Securities described as “a disaster on every metric.”

Visually, the Cybertruck asked and answered pressing questions. Questions like: What if a hammerhead shark were also a microwave? What if the abstract concept of “toxic masculinity” took on a physical form? Can a car be so powerfully off-putting that it makes your wife divorce you? Can a person communicate, solely through their chosen mode of transit, where they were on January 6, 2021?

We do not yet live in a society where we can recall cars for being hideous. But no matter: Within six months of its debut, the Cybertruck was recalled four times for more material concerns, namely that the construction of these trucks was exceptionally shoddy and likely life-threatening. Trim pieces on the truck bed could detach, becoming a road hazard, as they were not properly adhered to the vehicle; a light bar could also detach and be a risk to other motorists and pedestrians. In April 2024, nearly 4,000 Cybertrucks were recalled after it was found that the accelerator pedal could become stuck—I’ll let you put duh and duh together on the likely consequence of that pesky hiccup. Last March, Tesla had to yank nearly every single Cybertruck off the road because of a stainless steel exterior panel that could fly off and, you guessed it, injure and/or kill people.

But even when construction went according to plan, the Cybertruck was destined to be a deathly menace. Safety experts argued that the stainless steel truck was dangerous by design—they didn’t say anything about how it was also really ugly, but I just think that bears repeating: It’s so unbelievably ugly—but Musk, demonstrating his characteristic empathy and concern for his fellow man, assured would-be Cybertruck drivers, “If you have an argument with another car, you will win.” Famously, car crashes have “winners” and “losers” and everyone’s ideal scenario in a car crash is not only to “win” but to also have committed vehicular manslaughter.

Musk evidently did not consider that Cybertrucks would also endanger their own drivers and passengers, but they did: When only 60,000 Cybertrucks had been sold, there had already been five known fires involving four harrowing fatalities. As The Guardian reported, “Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones.”

Trapping passengers inside its fire-prone vehicles and burning them alive is something of a Tesla specialty, but the particulars of the Cybertruck’s design were even worse than Musk’s average offering. The windows—ironically, given that during a launch event, an attempt to demonstrate the windows’ impenetrability resulted in them shattering onstage—are tougher to break than a standard car window, which is all well and good until you are trying to, say, escape from a burning car when the doors won’t unlock, as was the case in a horrible crash in Piedmont which killed three college students who “asphyxiated in a fire that had exploded at the truck’s front hood after the collision.” A witness who tried to help them was unable to open the car doors, whose electronic buttons weren’t functioning. (There are no door handles on the outside of a Cybertruck.)

Tesla Cybertrucks are (or, I should say, were) produced in Texas, a state which Musk tried, and failed, to keep in Republican hands. Instead, Democrats won literally every statewide office. James Talarico became the first Democrat to win statewide office in more than 30 years and Gina Hinojosa defeated Greg Abbott in the governor’s race—and, per the New York Times: “Every county in Texas shifted left.”

The Cybertruck is survived by Musk, whose unconscionable wealth—net worth: $860 billion, give or take—means he has the means to torment us once more with whatever dumb fucking idea he has next, unless someone in our maybe-soon-to-be-functioning government wants to do something about that. Still, it is important to take our wins where we can get them, and watching Musk fail is one such victory. In trying to embody the spirit of Henry Ford, Musk succeeded only philosophically (by being a Nazi) but not practically (by building a functioning automobile).

President Donald Trump announced on Friday that Miller, his deputy chief of staff and domestic-policy advisor, would take the top job in a post-midterms shakeup starting on Monday. “Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation,” Trump said in a post on his personal social-media website. “I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff—She has done a great job!”

Friday’s announcement came after Trump and Miller had effectively handed control of Congress to the Democrats. Two years of disastrous results on corruption, immigration, tariffs, and the Iran War alienated enough of the electorate that Texas went blue after 40 years of GOP control. Now Trump may have just handed Democrats the White House in 2028 as well by promoting his most extreme and destructive advisor to oversee the last two years of his presidency.

The shift was met with applause in the most far-right corners of American conservatism. “Stephen Miller is a wartime chief of staff,” Brent Scher, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, said on Twitter on Friday. “This is going to be awesome.” Benny Johnson, a far-right YouTube personality, wrote on the social-media website that White House aides kept texting him “it’s Miller time” after the news broke. “It’s like the dogs have been let off the chain,” he added.

As Trump’s top domestic-policy advisor, Miller has functioned as a servile but ruthless shadow president for a chief executive who cares more about television footage than policy details. Like all authoritarians, Trump has attracted a mixture of thugs who revel in violence, weaklings who crave service to bullies, and opportunists who hope to advance their own fortunes. Miller has championed the deportation of as many immigrants as possible from the United States, taking an extreme approach even by GOP standards that evokes ethnic-cleansing campaigns and white nationalism.

Miller is also hostile to the American constitutional order and to international law. He argued unsuccessfully for Trump to suspend habeas corpus to round up immigrants last year and told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a January interview that the U.S. should acquire Greenland by force. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said, in remarks that would not sound out of place for a mid-20th-century German speaker.

His own leadership qualities are hardly stellar. Miller has a reputation throughout D.C. for openly berating junior staffers and senior officials alike for not effectively executing his draconian policies. A 2020 New Yorker profile recounted how he ended one such meeting with Department of Homeland Security officials by emotionally letting down his guard. “I didn’t mean to come across as harsh,” Miller reportedly confessed, describing his obsession with deportations. “It’s just that this is all I care about. I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” (He is now married with four children.)

During Trump’s second term, he escalated a series of immigration raids in Los Angeles in 2025 by reportedly telling federal immigration officials to arbitrarily gather people off the streets. “Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” an unnamed DHS official told The Washington Examiner last May, recounting a meeting that he had attended. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’”

The snatch-and-grab tactics that DHS officials pioneered in Los Angeles and other major cities throughout 2025 came to a deadly conclusion this spring. Miller had championed the administration’s siege of Minneapolis, where thousands of federal agents poured into the city and began grabbing suspected immigrants off of the streets at will. Massive protests and community actions disrupted some of the raids as Minnesotans tried to protect their neighbors. One federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, a writer with three kids, as she tried to drive away from one clash in her neighborhood in January. Another agent gunned down Alex Pretti, a local nurse, who tried to render medical assistance to a woman that the agent had knocked to the ground.

Footage of the shootings and protests prompted an intense public backlash to Trump’s immigration policies. Millions of Americans were horrified at the sight of masked federal agents gunning down their fellow citizens in the street with no consequences. Miller was not among them. He described Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists” and forcefully advocated for the administration’s tactics in Minneapolis throughout the campaign. After other Republicans begged him to change course, Trump wound down most of the operation shortly after Pretti’s killing and fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a few months later. Miller stayed put.

Miller has often argued in recent years that Democrats are “not a legitimate political party,” but rather a “domestic extremist organization.” Nonetheless, his elevation is good news for Democrats in the short and long term. Trump had initially struck a rare conciliatory note in the wake of the GOP’s crushing losses this week. He accepted the election results after more than a decade of election denialism when things didn’t go his way. His administration’s half-hearted, half-baked efforts to challenge ballots and candidates in Alaska, California, and elsewhere faded away overnight.

“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” Trump told two New York Times reporters in a phone call on Election Night, referring to Democratic leaders. “We’ll probably work something out.” Similar messaging from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led to growing rumbles in Democratic circles about whether they should be elected House speaker and Senate majority leader, respectively, when the new Congress takes over in January.

A defter and more chastened Trump might have made life difficult for Democrats in Washington by trying to compromise with them, dividing a fractious political party that is normally united in opposition to him. Miller’s promotion has brought that potential honeymoon period to a close. “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands,” Jeffries said in a post on Twitter on Friday. “His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”

Trump’s announcement is also the first major shake-up of his administration’s top ranks since Democrats recaptured Congress by overwhelming margins on Tuesday. The president said he wouldn’t dismiss Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday despite calls by conservatives for him to step down or be fired. Democrats and Republicans alike blame him for the disastrous course of the Iran War. Outgoing Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, a frequent Trump critic, plans to bring an impeachment vote against Hegseth later this month. Congressional Democrats are reportedly eager to target him with oversight hearings next year as well.

Indeed, nearly all of Trump’s second-term departures have been women. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned over reports of the toxic, harassment-fueled workplace that she allegedly cultivated. Trump dismissed Attorney General Pam Bondi for failing to prosecute his enemies and botching the Epstein files scandal. Noem was shuffled out of her role after the failed siege and occupation of Minneapolis, as well as a variety of corruption and personal-misconduct scandals. Kimberley Guilfoyle, the president’s son’s ex-girlfriend, lost her job as ambassador to Greece for soliciting payouts in writing from foreign billionaires in September. Katie Zacharia, a woefully inept hire who falsely described her legal credentials, only lasted four days as White House press secretary last month.

Trump’s chiefs of staff also have a tendency to not stick around for long. Wiles was the fifth person to serve in the position so far. The role is a stressful and grueling one under any president. Only three of the twenty-five people to hold the post since 1981 have served for an entire four-year term, and none have done it in the last twenty years. Most do not even make it to a second year. Wiles’ tenure was the second longest one of Trump’s tenure, and was awarded to her in thanks for masterminding Trump’s re-election campaign in 2024.

A White House chief of staff’s power and responsibilities can vary. Generally speaking, they oversee the political staff at the White House. They coordinate policy decisions by the president and various other portions of the executive branch. They liaise with Congress and foreign officials. They go on cable news shows and talk to reporters behind the scenes. Some chiefs of staff, like Jim Baker under Reagan or Rahm Emanuel under Obama, can become nationally known figures in their own right, wielding more influence than even top Cabinet officials.

Like her fellow Trump-era predecessors, Wiles fell on the weaker end of the spectrum. Trump is notoriously capricious and mercurial. He is prone to trusting long-time sycophants like Miller over newer faces and more experienced voices. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff during his first term, later publicly warned Americans ahead of the 2024 election described the then-ex president for whom he had worked as a fascist and predicted that he would govern like a dictator if re-elected that fall.

Indeed, during the first half of his second term, Trump exulted in his lack of constraints—thanks to a MAGA-stocked executive branch and congressional Republicans’ supine posture—and simply did whatever he wanted. By most accounts, Wiles had comparatively little influence to other prominent Trump allies. She found herself overshadowed by Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who destroyed federal agencies and laid off civil servants in the first few months of 2025, and by Miller himself, who oversaw the Trump administration’s sprawling mass-deportation agenda.

Now, Miller gets to supervise the wreckage of his own mistakes. He enthusiastically championed Trump’s tariff policy, which drove up prices for Americans and wiped out entire markets for U.S. agriculture and manufacturing. After the Supreme Court struck down most of the tariffs in January, he denounced the justices in the majority as “cowardly.” Even many devout MAGA enthusiasts regarded the Iran War as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to avoid wars in the Middle East and prioritize American interests. Miller has vocally defended Trump’s decisions even as the economic and political fallout doomed his fellow Republicans at the polls.

For Democrats, Miller represents all of the Trump administration’s worst decisions—its authoritarianism, its bigotry, its arrogance, and its foolishness—in one person. There is little doubt that Miller will continue to push the second Trump administration down its self-destructive path, and that he will drag the rest of the GOP down with him. Vice President JD Vance, the putative GOP frontrunner for 2028, gets to spend the next two years publicly defending every extreme decision that Miller makes even as the electorate demands a new course. Other Republicans on the campaign trail will have to decide between embracing Miller’s unpopular policies or distancing themselves from an angry, vengeful power center of far-right American conservatism.

Past presidents have spent the last two years of their administration trying to make things a little easier on their party and their successors. George W. Bush faded out of public view in 2007 and 2008 to avoid tarring the rest of the GOP with his deep unpopularity after the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. Bill Clinton, stung by the Lewinsky scandal and his then-historic impeachment, rarely appeared on the campaign trail in 2000 as Vice President Al Gore sought to turn the page. With Miller at the helm, there will be no quiet twilight for the Trump era. The two men will continue to inflict as much harm as they can on the country—and, by extension, on any remaining hope for the GOP to stay in the White House or reclaim power in two years’s time.

Trump had an awkward interaction with reporters outside the White House after they asked him to explain his decision to replace chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller.

“I wanted to make a change,” Trump said. The president had previously dismissed reporting that he was planning to oust his “ice maiden”—but that was before Republicans suffered staggering losses in the midterm elections this week.

“We gotta make moves, sometimes in life you gotta make moves,” Trump said.

“We’ve beaten Iran. We are doing very well with Iran, we are talking to Iran, we have been. We haven’t lost a soldier in seven months, or six months,” Trump said.

In July, just four months ago, Trump attended a funeral for four U.S. service members who were killed in Iranian attacks in the Middle East, amid reports accusing the Trump administration of hiding casualty numbers. As of October, 23 soldiers had died as a result of Trump’s disastrous military campaign.

Trump quickly departed from the press gaggle, as one reporter shouted after him, “How does it feel to lose?” The president continued to flee and did not respond.

Donald Trump is weighing an executive order that would brand some nonprofits as having terrorist ties, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. In doing so, the executive order would nix the organizations’ nonprofit status and fundamentally unravel their operations.

Sources familiar with the matter told the Journal that the executive order has been in the works for months and is not yet finished. It remains to be seen if Trump signs the effort or scraps it altogether.

It was not immediately clear which groups could be targeted, though the dangerous label could offer a much more immediate route for the administration to penalize its perceived political opponents than by pursuing potential legal violations through the IRS.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted that such an effort was underway while speaking before the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism in mid-July.

“We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, which charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign-influence activity, and how those entrusted with stewardship of these organizations have instead enabled violence,” Bessent said at the time. “Where the evidence leads, we will not hesitate to follow.”

Nine organizations have already been identified as having terrorist ties, though those designations came from federal agencies such as the Treasury Department, as opposed to from the White House, according to the Journal.

But there have been numerous other occasions in which Trump and his allies have baselessly resorted to the “T-word” to advance their agenda. Earlier this year, officials across the Trump administration branded Minneapolis residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as terrorists in order to brush their deaths at the hands of federal agents under the rug. And even in the most recent election cycle, Republicans resorted to slandering Representative Ilhan Omar and Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed as terrorists in futile attempts to discredit their authority and undermine their influence.

The midterms were not a story of Democratic moderation, political scientists Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach argue. Instead, they say that Democrats won everywhere due to strong turnout among left-leaning voters, weaker turnout among conservatives, and some voters flipping to Democrats because of anger at President Trump. Increased Black turnout in the South and Latino voters in the Southwest swinging back against Republicans were particularly huge factors, according to the two scholars. The two emphasized that Democrats across the country won by employing an anticorruption message. Looking forward, Bonica, who teaches at Stanford University, says Democrats can take actions to address corruption and billionaire power within the House of Representatives and other institutions they will control, without needing Trump’s signature. Grumbach, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, says the results are the latest indication that all kinds of candidates can win elections. Therefore, in upcoming primaries, Democratic voters should focus on policies and candidates they like, rather than polls and perceptions of electability.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon. This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon, joined by two regular guests at this point, two of my favorite political scientists. Adam Bonica is at Stanford, Jake Grumbach is University of California, Berkeley, and this is our second podcast where we’re going to break down the election results and talk through them some. So Adam, Jake, thanks for joining me.

Jake Grumbach: Thanks for having me.

Bacon: So let me start with, when I talked to you all about doing this, I wasn’t thinking about discussing Mississippi. And really didn’t think about South Carolina either, to be candid about it. So I definitely had in my head 52 Senate seats, 230. That was what all the data experts were saying. And I think NBC had over 250 estimated.

So let’s talk about that first in terms of your general impressions. I’ll start with Adam and then go to Jake. Your general impressions of what we saw on Tuesday.

Adam Bonica: I had expected 250 seats. And that was way above. And even that, the size of the wave—no one predicted it would be this large. No one predicted Mississippi would be in play.

And one thing I thought was probably pretty clear is that it was unlikely that we would see a situation where we would just have a few races that were really close. It was probably going to be in the Senate either a big win or a pretty devastating defeat. It was much more bimodal than we’ve seen in the past.

But the other thing is this majority is going to rival the size of the majority Democrats came into office with after 2008. The year in which they were able to get a lot done. And it is surprising. I think we’re all still processing it.

Grumbach: Yeah, I agree with Adam. I’m sorry, I’m a little choppy right now. I’m having some computer difficulty, so I’m a little choppy right now, but I hope you can hear me.

I was surprised at this wave election. The one thing I’ve learned from Adam over the years is that in the modern polarized era, parties rise and fall together in wave elections. And this was a blue wave election, that across the country you saw massive blue shifts, and the wave was big enough that it carried even parts of the Deep South. It looks increasingly like it’s going to include Mississippi. Of course, Texas was a massive sweep by the Democrats.

But for me, I think one of the most underemphasized pieces of this has been Black organizing in the South. I served as an expert witness for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, pre-Callais, in a Voting Rights Act case in Mississippi. And as a Northerner, I’m a Californian through and through, my impression of Mississippi being there was that it was unlikely to shift blue anytime soon, despite the efforts of Black people in Mississippi and the occasional caucusing coalition with white liberals as well.

So I think this was a real national wave election, and that’s the main takeaway, is that the Democratic Party fielded pretty good candidates across the board, across the country, that were compelling in their areas, and that the Republican Party under Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular.

Bacon: So I want to do a little bit about geography now. You talked about the South a little bit, but is that the big geography story? Or is there anything else about geography we should think about?

Bonica: I think the geography story has been one long in the making. So when all is said and done, I think the story of this election, one of the stories in terms of demographic shifts, is going to be, A, a turnout story, where we’re going to see that Democrats finally matched or exceeded Republican turnout rates. And two, that the youth vote was incredibly important.

And this has been a trend, right? When young people turn out and show up for Democrats, they tend to win in wave elections. That’s been the pattern since 2008, really.

And if you looked at Mississippi, if you looked at Texas, you saw these generational curves that were overwhelming. And a lot of the backsliding, I think we saw, the Democratic backsliding that Jake has written about, the gerrymandering, the pushing democratic institutions away from electoral democracy to preserve these majorities, had a lot to do with the fact that there was this generational pressure building in Texas, even in Mississippi. Mississippi has a big curve, too. The younger people in Mississippi were pretty Democratic.

And we saw it happen first in Georgia, but Texas and Mississippi, they’re not as unpredictable as one would think. I think it happened sooner than I would have expected. But the geography story, again, I think is really more a geography story about how young and old people in a lot of these states have very different sort of partisanship and preferences.

Bacon: Jake, I asked while you were away about if there’s a geography story of the election. I think the one story we’re talking about is the South. But is there any other geography story? And also, if you want to talk about the South more. Because I think that’s the takeaway, was Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas. Talk about that story. What do you think is driving that?

Grumbach: First, apologies for my technical difficulties. This seems to happen every other Perry Bacon show session I go on. Won’t happen again, I’m investing in better hardware.

So I do think Adam’s right about a geography story, but overall I’ve really learned from Adam that national waves carry the day, and this was true of much higher turnout among Black voters and young voters than previous midterm elections outside of potentially 2018.

Adam talks a lot about differential turnout. So swing voters do matter here. A number of people did switch from voting Trump 2024 to in 2026 voting the Democratic slate in their areas. But really across the country it’s that Republicans were more likely to stay home, people who lean Trump or wouldn’t ever vote for a Democrat but are now a little bit disappointed or embarrassed by the MAGA sort of performance.

And increased turnout and passion from Black voters as a response to the Voting Rights Act ending, Latino voters as a result of the economy, the cost of living and ICE, and young voters who see a Democratic Party nationally that provides a potential path forward rather than “Just vote for us, we’re not Trump,” type of thing.

So I think it’s really across the board, but regions do matter, and bigger swings in the redder places, that is places that were deeper red or swung farther towards Trump in 2024. Southwest Texas is a classic. Latinos in West Texas split maybe 50 percent Trump 2024 or so. They absolutely repudiated that coalition in this election, which resulted in a massive swing.

But again, I would say the story is national, and in a wave this big, the biggest wave since Watergate in terms of the popular vote for a single party in a midterm election against a president like this, it really carried the entire country.

Bacon: So I’m old enough to remember stories about there being a political realignment in America after 2024, in which voters of color were going to vote Republican in the future. So I think it’s worth doing a little mockery, but let me be serious for a second here to say, I think one account of that, the account I had of that, was anti-inflation, anti-incumbency.

Biden lost a lot of voters, including voters of color and including young voters, and some of those people are going to come back in 2026. That’s obvious and that was going to happen. So I thought the realignment stories were overdone a little bit.

But that said, the numbers looked a little bit deeper than just a real shift backwards toward the Democratic side. So Adam, was there never a realignment? Did Trump realign again by being so crazy? So talk about the minority story of 2024 and 2026.

Bonica: Yes. So Jake and I, I think we talked about this with you probably a year and a half ago, looking at how turnout was the primary dynamic that mattered in the 2024 election. Places where turnout was depressed tended to be in more urban, more multiracial areas.

And places that saw increases in turnout—Trump, one thing to his credit, is he really does have a turnout advantage. These sort of poll misses seem to consistently follow this trend, that he is able to mobilize a certain part of the electorate that may be less inclined to vote.

So if you take, the turnout dynamics are important, but then there’s another type of voter, which is an anti-system, often anti-incumbency voter, who may be activated because they’re upset about something, but also just they don’t like the status quo, and they don’t like the party in power often, and their vote is against the system.

And we see this consistently as well. The types of voters that are swing voters, and they exist, there are plenty of them out there, they’re not the type of voters who are being persuaded by, “Here I have policy X versus policy Y.” They tend to be people who say, I want my life to be better. I think the system is broken. I think the system is corrupt. And they’re more of a disruptive force, not a sort of orderly, you can be won over by being more appealing than the other side. You win them over by right now not being the party in power.

Bacon: When you say turnout, let me probe a little bit. It is obviously the case that more people voted in 2024 than 2026. That’ll be almost the case, I’m sure, in every state. So when you say turnout, drill down. What I think you mean is, in Chicago, more people voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than voted for Kamala in 2024. So therefore, this idea that individual Chicagoans did not become Republicans who are Black.

And so roughly, the Republican Black people in Chicago turned out, some of the Democrats didn’t, and it creates a swing that is really turnout-based. But I think in like South Texas, there was actual swing, right?

Bonica: Yeah. And this is partly why South Texas stands out so much, why it is the outlier region. I think there are a lot more voters of the type I just described, and they probably had that stacked on top of a turnout differential that looked different.

Think you have 100 Democratic and 100 Republican voters in a district. On average, Democrats historically have been turning out like 60 of them in midterms versus 70 for Republicans. That gap between the probability of a registered Democrat turning out versus a Republican was about as large as it has been in a decade in 2024.

And in 2018, the last time we have full data for, it was about equal. Democrats were equally likely to get to the polls as their Republican counterparts. When you close that gap, Democrats win in big wave elections. And when that gap widens, Democrats perform really poorly in Republican wave elections.

Grumbach: All right, yeah, to jump in here. So Perry, you started talking about the supposed realignments of 2024. You said you think they are a bit exaggerated. They were a lot exaggerated.

So the big things were like, Latinos are now a conservative group that will consistently vote Republican, or lean at least purple to Republican. The second was young men, especially the red-pilled young men, Joe Rogan listener type of kid.

Bacon: Joe Rogan listeners just—

Grumbach: Exactly. That’s just now MAGA. Then you see this cultural dominance in punditry and media. You saw New York Magazine has sent the cruel kids table, and it’s like this election that Trump wins by a couple percentage points becomes this mandate that culturally MAGA is dominant, led by Latinos and young men shifting, right? And that really disrupted this idea of the Democratic Party as this more multiracial coalition that we know historically since really the New Deal and the civil rights era.

But what happened very quickly in 2025 is those constituencies swung back dramatically. As Adam mentioned, there’s differential turnout, so the more conservative Latinos and young people.

This was a classic thing, was that Latinos swung to Trump 2024 somewhat, right? They still were majority Kamala Harris, but the biggest Republican presidential victory for Latinos since George W. Bush 2004, who was much more engaged in Latino outreach than Trump was. And this was like, OK, we’re in post-racial politics. Latinos are rejecting racial politics.

But it actually turned out in surveys that it was the more racially conservative Latinos who were shifting most towards Trump 2024, the types of people that answer survey questions that, for example, Black-white inequality is due to a lack of Black effort rather than discrimination. If you agreed with that statement, you were much more likely to swing towards Trump as a Latino in 2024, or a young man.

What happened after that, though, was a rapid shift backwards. So those realignments—Adam and I talk about in some recent work in The New Republic on Democratic Party consultants and fundraising consultants, that there’s this real impulse within the Democratic Party network, due to a lot of consulting money incentives, to in every election be like, “There’s this new crisis that demands top-down strategy for the Democratic Party, and that needs to go through us and pay us a lot of fees and listen to us about the strategy.” And that strategy tends to be what maximizes fundraising, maximizes the fundraising text and pleases large donors.

But regardless, the point here is that actually it turns out politics and party building are long-term efforts of building constituencies, and that things happen, like inflation, like COVID, like nominating more or less popular nominees at different levels, that shift constituencies. And that small Trump victory was not a mandate over these demographic groups or over the country.

We see a swing back, and not only because Trump’s economic performance has been poor. It is true, it has been worse than in the late Biden era, and people are not happy with prices and things, and the war in Iran has generated higher energy costs that has spilled over in tariffs in the economy. That’s a large part of it.

But also, just unlike what the realignment pundit types were saying, the cool kids table type of thing was saying, “No, Latinos, young men, everybody hates immigrants,” right? And are just motivated by these kitchen table issues.

The repudiation of ICE in Minnesota and throughout the Latino electorate in the country is so big, and that’s true among young men as well. Seeing ICE in action. And for Black voters, seeing the Voting Rights Act go down in flames. Those things are beyond the sort of affordability, cost of living type of questions. Voters do care about that as well.

And the Democratic Party, through Chris Van Hollen sort of championing a more humane, less authoritarian immigration policy, and the Kilmar Abrego sort of episode, Minneapolis protesters and things like that, those were real beachheads that shifted public opinion, and Trump never recovered from those dynamics.

So the realignment was not really there. At the same time, this swing is not going to last either. What the Democratic Party needs to do nationally is continue to build organizing, Black voter mobilization in the South, the labor movement, young people. And how young people who don’t have in-person civil society and are stuck in social media, how do you continue to mobilize these constituencies, build organization and an agenda? That’s a long, slow process that’s not this constant realignment, top-down strategery thing that the sort of consultant class pushes after every election.

We’re already seeing that right after this election. We’re already seeing, these are the lessons of how Democrats need to govern, from polling and things like that. Build the party, dedicate your life to that.

Bacon: Let me give a sort of—we talk about insincere moderate arguments. Let me compare El-Sayed to this X person and ignore all the factors that were involved there. But let me give a more sincere presentation of that, which might be, OK, the party brand matters. I think we can say in this era, the party brand matters.

So in 2024, the party brand maybe still has some inklings of Black Lives Matter and protest, and there’s a Black woman who’s on the top of the ticket. 2026, there’s a few Democrats who said some negative things about trans people and said they’re conservative on that. The party has stopped talking about race, and that’s bad, but they’ve dropped racial inequality, period. And so the brand is more, quote unquote, moderate.

And I think the moderate people might say, when the brand is differentiated among 97 candidates, most of whom are white, then that’s a safe brand. So the key thing there in 2028 is, if they were honest, they’d say, not make the brand too diverse by putting AOC or Kamala Harris there. And so the key thing is to make the brand generic, and where is the young Roy Cooper?

That’d be a more polite version of their argument that would actually be more rigorous. Talk about why the lesson here potentially is that the Democrats still should, even if moderation doesn’t produce everything, having the Roy Cooper brand be the national brand might be useful. Adam, start with you.

Bonica: Yeah, we’ve written a lot about this sort of positioning on the left-right spectrum being a pretty big distraction from the types of things the party should be doing to build a movement. Those often come from a type of realignment that we’re dancing around.

But a realignment doesn’t come from the parties just playing on the same turf. It comes from a party upending that sort of what’s liberal, conservative. It’s about, we’re for better government, we’re for anti-corruption, we’re truly not like the other guys. We’re truly ruling for the public. Those are the types of movements real progressive realignments emerge.

A second part of it is, empirically, it just does not bear out in the data. For all the concern about Justice Democrats, their shift in this election, their improvement over Harris’ vote shares in their already really Democratic districts, so they don’t have a lot of leeway, is just as big as the Blue Dogs, right? There’s no difference. The wave affects everyone. The idea that it was because the party became more moderate—

Bacon: Just to clarify what Adam was saying, just to break down. So Justice Democrats did about eight points better than Harris, as did Blue Dogs in their districts, about eight points. So the moderate bonus didn’t exist functionally. That’s what you’re saying, right?

Bonica: It’s so small that it does not swing any races. Nationally, the political center is a no man’s land at this point. Everyone who goes to inhabit it becomes some sort of political pariah, from Sinema to Fetterman to Jared Golden. It’s not a welcoming place because it’s not where the future of politics is. People don’t want a status quo that they protected.

And I think the other thing that Jake was saying that’s really important here is, there’s this emphasis in our political culture right now of this very short-termism, of maximizing vote shares or profits in the very next election is all we care about.

But that’s not how you get out of moments like this. You do it through what Jake said. You mobilize. The idea that you need an all-white party—what you need to be doing is building an inclusive party that actually has those roots to all different communities and all different types of people, that then can be built up.

You don’t play defense in a moment like this and expect to come out on top. You need to actually, as Jake said, it’s about building the party. That’s a slower process. But if you were a business and you only cared about the next term’s short-term profits, you’re just liquidating whatever value the company has.

What you want to do is build out the company. You have to build out the project over a long period of time, and that just seems to be missing from a lot of our elite level top-down politics.

Bacon: Jake, you have anything there?

Grumbach: Yeah. So I totally agree with Adam here.

Two things that make this sort of moderate progressive comparison challenging now and total BS across the board. You don’t want to listen to anybody who’s like, “This type of candidate performed like this, and this shows how the party must perform.”

And one reason for that is because we’re in national partisan warfare. So what El-Sayed does, it doesn’t just stay in Michigan, right? It’s the entire Republican Party, nationally on conservative media, targeted this one race. That makes him potentially serve as a lead blocker for a broader, and takes away resources from elsewhere. There are so many spillovers.

Bonica and I are stats nerds. That’s our actual day job. We come on the Perry Bacon Show as an extra treat in our job. But what we do is we’re quants, and we separate correlation from causation. And what we see now is we can’t do that anymore. Parties rise and fall together.

So while it’s clear that, for example, El-Sayed suffered an Islamophobia penalty, that’s actually pretty clear. It was relentless Islamophobia. I was young in the post-9/11 era. It seems more explicit even.

Bacon: George Bush was not going around calling average American Muslims terrorists. He actually went out of his way to say the opposite, in fact.

Grumbach: It was jaw-dropping.

And one interesting thing about this is, this already harms this moderate progressive comparison when people are saying El-Sayed ran a couple points behind other candidates, let’s say. It depends how you slice this. That’s not even potentially true under all metrics, right? But let’s imagine that’s true for a second.

People are saying, “Oh, that’s because he’s too far left.” But the Republican attacks on him were entirely about identity. Zero policy. They didn’t attack him for Medicare for All.

Bacon: They were not talking about Medicare, bro. They were talking about Muslims.

Grumbach: They’re talking about, this guy’s a scary Muslim. And because of that, we can’t draw broader conclusions. We don’t know what it would look like if he was a white Christian dude. We just don’t know. We don’t know if he switched his policy positions, what would happen on Israel-Gaza, Medicare for All, or anything else.

The point is, this is a national party that succeeded incredibly well with El-Sayed as a kind of lead blocker in this way. And just resist any of this sort of strategery stuff.

What I saw was actually that, like Bonica said, candidates were well-calibrated to their areas. And then Perry, you mentioned some candidates tacking more centrist on transgender issues recently. That was a key debate in the Democratic Party strategy messaging debates, is that it is true that trans participation in NCAA sports polls pretty poorly. It’s also low salience.

Andy Beshear in Kentucky and others have threaded this needle as kind of conservative Democrats who don’t compromise on trans rights. Others, like Talarico, famously did hedge on trans rights. That is an incredibly uncertain question, right?

But I think it’s issue by issue, these are the debates parties have. But I would just say there’s no clear answer to that either. And it’s also tough to say to trans rights activists, too, it’s not a clear answer that attacking right on trans issues didn’t help either. It’s totally uncertain, and you should not believe any incredibly robust hot takes.

And again, this is why voters, activists, small donors, people who are watching this show right now, don’t get too into being pundit brain strategists yourself. Say what you believe in as a voter, as an American, what type of world you want to build and what types of policies you want and what kind of candidates you like.

That is the most healthy way to manage a party base. And unfortunately punditry and consultants really want you to be a strategist saying, “I don’t dislike this person, but the median voter probably does,” and that’s just a poor way to run a party.

Bacon: Adam wrote a lot last year particularly about the virtues of talking about corruption as a sort of unifying issue. And if I was going to say something, I think this is not in the punditry as much, but I think Talarico talked about that, Ossoff talked about that.

A lot of Democrats talked about money in politics, the scourge of billionaires, but not necessarily in a sort of a Bernie Sanders Medicare for All way. In a way that is more about, our political system is broken. And I think that was a widespread trend. So talk about, were you surprised by how many candidates ended up doing something you were talking about, Adam?

Bonica: No, I wasn’t surprised. Moving beyond the consultant pressures, the situation the United States finds itself in feels unusual or extreme, but it’s very common for democracies around the world to have dealt with very similar scenarios and situations.

And a consistent theme that you see over and over again, most recently in Serbia, but before that in Hungary, we saw it in Bulgaria, we saw it in Bangladesh. It’s just a consistent—

Grumbach: Brazil.

Bonica: Brazil also had an element of that as well. Is that anti-corruption politics becomes a type of unifying movement against authoritarians.

Trump is, by basically any expert on this area’s assessment, the most openly corrupt, extremely corrupt leader that I think we’ve seen in contemporary politics. Putin even at least tries to hide what he steals. Trump just does it out in the open. It’s profound to watch this.

I’m a bit surprised we didn’t see more of it from politicians, because it’s just such an easy opening. And then going back to this question, we spent so much time talking about trans rights. Look at the exit polls. How many people said that was crucial to their vote? It was not a large percentage.

Go look at what people said was crucial or extremely important to their vote. It was corruption. That was the number one determinant people told the people in the exit polls, that determined their vote. It was more important than affordability. And when you actually ask voters about corruption and affordability, they see them as the same issue in most cases.

So it is the defining issue of this election. Voters have been screaming this at the top of their lungs. In every survey where corruption is a question, voters are very clear that this is their biggest concern, government corruption. It’s amazing how little play it gets.

And part of it is, if you look at voters’ views on both of the parties in terms of who’s corrupt, they see both parties as corrupt. The Democrats are not anywhere close to as corrupt as Republicans. We don’t need to play that game. But voters don’t go and look at someone and go like, “He’s less corrupt than the other guy, so he’s my guy,” right?

They want someone who’s clean. They want someone who’s authentic and someone who’s going to clean up the system and change from the status quo that they see as broken to one that actually starts serving the public. And that’s fundamental to anti-corruption politics.

Another word for it is a reform party. We have a long history of this in the United States as well. The Watergate babies came in and changed a lot in terms of how corrupt the Democratic Party was in certain ways at that time. They reformed their own party, their party rules, in an effort to clean up what was going on after Watergate.

But going back to Teddy Roosevelt, this was his secret sauce in politics, was he was an anti-corruption candidate. And he’s a long lineage of very successful politicians, and it’s the type of thing that creates these political realignments that we are very overdue for, but also are in desperate need of to dig ourselves out of this hole.

Bacon: And Jake, corruption I think is one that obviously was relevant. I think gas prices were obviously relevant. ICE I think was relevant. Any other issues that you think drove, or any messages or issues that are worth saying this worked, or this didn’t matter at all, or what have you?

Grumbach: Yeah, I mentioned the Voting Rights Act, especially for Black voters, and especially in the South where Black Voting Rights Act districts were wiped away. The real casualty of the end of the Voting Rights Act—and I remember discussing with Hakeem Jefferson from Stanford and you, Perry, on the show. There’s some issues with Latino opportunity districts and things, but the real hit is southern Black districts.

We saw Justin Pearson’s district in Tennessee, the Memphis district long held by Democrats, was cracked and he loses by one point. Some figures in Alabama eke out a victory in a redistricted district. But Pearson’s is a classic case of the casualties of the new era of gerrymandering, where racial gerrymandering is essentially allowed in addition to this partisan gerrymandering we know very well from the 2010s.

But on corruption, Adam was like Babe Ruth calling his shot. He has these pieces from a couple years ago. Democrats need to be the anti-corruption party. Tie it to the cost of living. It’s big money in politics. Corruption is why policy doesn’t help you economically, right?

And that’s a clear thing voters cared about. He called his shot like Babe Ruth and then hit that homer, because in exit polls it was 90 percent said corruption was a top issue of why they voted. This went beyond the economy stuff.

Bacon: Economy stuff.

Grumbach: Exactly, economy type of stuff. Hugely important in defeating authoritarians around the world, as Adam said, as well as student protest movements, also very important for that, and the Democratic Party should really think about this.

But in thinking about what the Democratic Party can do now with control of Congress and not the White House, this is actually a really important thing. I’ve heard some people already say, “Now it’s time for the Democrats to deliver economically and the cost of living and deliver material goods to people that make people like Democrats.”

I wish that were possible, but when you don’t have the White House, you can’t pass statutes. This isn’t like Mamdani’s ability with a somewhat favorable city council that’s aligned under a leader who can then deliver better transportation and make your life, fix potholes.

What the Democrats can do in Congress is investigate and hold the Republican Party in the White House accountable. They can block nominations, especially for the judiciary, that’s very important, all the way up to the Supreme Court with Senate control. And they can investigate and try to start the process of accountability through Congress that we’ve seen going back to, for example, Watergate.

This is crucial, and you hear from the Democratic leadership some back and forth here. Both Hakeem Jeffries in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate have signaled already in little ways that we’re looking forward, not backwards. This is about moving forward with consensus kitchen table issues. Hakeem Jeffries even said, “Americans want to get ahead, not get even.”

And I think people speak in these platitudes on TV, so you shouldn’t draw too much from this. But to frame accountability for high crimes and misdemeanors, rampant corruption—DOGE broke Article 1 of the Constitution, right? Ignoring judicial orders on immigration orders, that’s Article 3 of the Constitution. They have broken the rule of law.

Not just political inequality and the fight for voting rights and the first sort of dimension of democracy that’s been a struggle throughout American history, for political equality and one person, one vote for everyone. But the rule of law, right?

That is so broken that there will need to be deterrents so that future political leaders do not break the Constitution in the same way. That’s going to require accountability. And it’s going to be tough, because American political institutions are so decentralized in checks and balances and state and local government that it’s hard to centralize accountability, right?

One lucky thing for the Democratic Party this cycle is that the Republicans held every part of the federal government, so there’s nobody they tried to blame. JD Vance was trying to blame Democrats for prices and stuff. It doesn’t compute even to people not paying attention. That does not work.

Now, with the Democrats holding both chambers of Congress, there’s going to be this attempt of the Trump administration to say, We didn’t mess up. The Democratic Party’s blocking us for this. It does get then distorted.

The media typically brings up, “Oh, they’re disagreeing,” blah, blah, blah. It’s a tougher sell, so people have got to keep their eyes on the prize, think about accountability, and with a trifecta potentially, knock on wood, in 2029, that’s when you can pass a real agenda to improve people’s lives materially through congressional statutes that are signed by the president.

Bacon: Two final questions. There’s a discourse about the leadership and about Jeffries and Schumer. I guess the conventional wisdom I’ve read among progressives is basically, Hakeem Jeffries is not up to this and not strong enough, but he would be the first Black speaker, so they’re going to vote for him, let it go. And versus Indivisible is already demanding that Schumer not become the Senate Majority Leader.

So Adam, I’m just curious what your thoughts are. Do you think these two are up to the job, and if not, should they be replaced?

Bonica: Corruption is the movement that I think the Democratic Party needs to grasp. I see none of that coming from Jeffries. In fact, I see outright hostility towards it. I’ve seen this in a lot of channels. And Schumer is in a similar situation.

So I watched the DCCC leadership press conference with Jeffries and other soon to be House leaders, most likely. And they were talking about affordability, linking everything affordability. Which is an important problem. But then you look at it, just setting themselves up to fail in a way on this issue, where—

Bacon: They can’t make anything affordable in the next two years because they don’t have the power.

Bonica: It’s also just a global problem. Governments have some levers, but they don’t have the main lever, which is the Fed, which has now aligned with the White House. But globally, we saw post-COVID inflation and rising prices. Governments around the world with all types of policy levers were unable to control it. In fact, Biden did better than basically anywhere else. And he’s still punished for it. This is a really hard thing to deal with.

But getting back to leadership, there are a whole bunch of collective action problems within the party. The party’s coming in with an approval rating that is 10 to 20 points lower than their approval rating was in 2010 when they lost in a landslide. People do not see the Democratic Party as a popular party. They are the alternative, and that is what this election was about, but they need to be more than that.

Now, dealing with affordability is going to be very difficult through policy, as we described. But the thing they do have complete control over is adopting anti-corruption policies. They don’t need to pass legislation to do it. They just need to say, “As rules for our Democratic Party.”

If you recall, after 2006, when they ran on that culture of corruption platform, they came in and did a bunch of rules that changed how lobbyists could engage with politicians. All these things they talk about wanting to do, banning congressional stocks, getting money out of politics, removing mega donors, or even, stop exploiting seniors to fundraise and draining their retirement accounts through exploitative fundraising, the revolving door.

All of that can be resolved within the Democratic Party with a leader that says, “These are the new rules. If you do not follow the rules, I will use the powers as speaker to say that you no longer get the committee you want. You no longer have free privilege to bring bills to the floor. You lose a whole bunch, you get the worst office.”

All of these tools that majority leaders have been able to use and speakers have famously used to reform Congress, that’s what a leader needs to be doing right now. And you know what? You don’t need to worry about the Supreme Court. You don’t need to worry about Republicans.

In fact, you want to create that contrast. Let the Republicans be corrupt for two years so you can show that, Look, we cleaned up. We took it into our own hands and said, All these things we don’t like about politics, we actually rooted out in our own party, and we held our own accountable.

And then as part of that, you pass legislation that’s anti-corruption legislation. And think of the political communication dynamics. Democrats show up, they have now adopted voluntarily these reforms that voters have been clamoring for, and then they show up and say, Here’s a bill to make Republicans do it too.

And they pass it through the House, and they pass it through the Senate, and it shows up at the White House, and Trump vetoes it. And then you do it again, and you do it again.

It would be catastrophic for Republicans to watch that happen. This is the one bipartisan issue that Trump has. The only thing that he has reached across the aisle to do is to pardon and excuse political corruption within the Democratic Party. This is his biggest weakness.

Their focus on affordability, which I don’t think that they have the levers to do. A leader in this moment, whether that’s Jeffries, and I’m skeptical that it is, but I hope it could be, understands that this is a golden opportunity.

You could be basically the best speaker in the history of the country and reform how we think about politics, without worrying about any of those institutional barriers that we’ve faced on so many other issues.

Bacon: Jake, I’m so certain that agenda he said will not happen. So I wanted to probe about why. I would not say Chuck Schumer likes corruption. I would not use that sentence directly.

So why are Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, in my view, opposed to doing anything about political corruption? Maybe they’re for it secretly, but discuss the barriers, why that’s unlikely to happen. I don’t want to say not going to happen, unlikely to happen.

Grumbach: Excellent question. So the answer is incentives, and thinking like a game theorist here.

Schumer especially has served the longest of these two congressional leaders, and when you rise the ranks in an institution, you get used to the norms that rose you to the top of that institution. And especially in the Senate, the norms are like this debate comedy, even the filibuster is a legitimate tool to use. My friends on the other side. That’s throughout the party.

And the same goes for, as Adam’s saying, fundraising. The types of fundraising models that get you to rise within the party mean you don’t want to get rid of this fundraising sort of machine, which is why you ended up at this particular place in the party, and how people rise and fall within the party.

But now we’re in a new era where, as a party, we have to prioritize the party winning over authoritarianism as a collective whole rather than individual status within the party. And that is a very challenging thing for American political parties, given the institutions of district-based elections and long-term incumbency, where you rise in committees and things throughout that chamber. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about politics. Sadly, we’re in an authoritarian moment that calls for breaking that glass and thinking differently.

So the three challenges of American authoritarianism right now, the Democratic Congress and its leadership have been behind on, and the Democratic base have been ahead on. Remarkably, this is from Minnesota ICE resisters to people at No Kings protests to Black voters in the South. The base of the Democratic Party is much more open and focused on this, and has been changing and thinking collectively as a party in a different way.

And I’ll say the challenges are threefold. First is Trumpism, and that’s the one we most hear, the end of the rule of law. But also the longer term McConnellism challenge, which has been to use US institutions to empower numeric minorities against majorities.

So that’s the revolutions of gerrymandering, using eroding norms to not seat Supreme Court nominees of the other party, using everything up through the letter of the law that’s possible but eroding every norm to have your side gain structural advantage in political institutions.

And the third is Muskism, the idea of incredibly wealthy mega billionaires. This guy’s richer than any human in human history, whose power rivals the power of all of us in the entire country and is essentially above the law, came in with DOGE, destroyed the Constitution, didn’t go through the normal nominations process, and is now out spending half a billion dollars on this election cycle, right?

Those three challenges are new, McConnellism a little bit more long term. Those require breaking the glass in the fire extinguisher, trying new things as a party, and you cannot go along with the usual, You’ll rise in this party if you fundraise well and leadership in this way.

So the Democratic Party base, when you poll registered Democrats, they are not supportive of these leaders. And it’s because they see these leaders not breaking the glass to make sacrifices to their potential individual positions in these institutions, to take risks on behalf of the broader party and the country as a whole.

And that’s things that in every fundraising text, ordinary voters are being asked to sacrifice money, time, all in, vote blue no matter who, don’t worry if it’s not your nominee you particularly like. Trump is in office, and you better step up. And the base is asking all parts of the party, including the leadership, to do the same. So I think that remains an open question.

Bacon: That was a good framing, in part because Trumpism, McConnellism, and Muskism—I wrote a profile of Chuck Schumer when he joined the leadership in the Senate Democrats. That was in 2005.

So many of those three things, actually, he’s been in office in leadership way before McConnell was in office, and McConnellism is different in certain senses. I think that gets the sense of why his thinking is so outdated. He was in Congress much longer than 2005. He was in leadership in 2005, which tells you how maybe outdated his vision of the world is.

So the last question will be a little bit more personality driven, about the future. We’re going to have this Democratic primary soon. So I look at the election results and think, if I’m Andy Beshear, who’s my governor, who has done a good job, I think.

If I’m Josh Shapiro, I was going to go out and say, Look, I can win in a purple state, in a red state, and look at me, and look how great I am, and we have to nominate someone who can win those hard places. A Black man is going to be elected senator in Mississippi. I think it’s fairly obvious that a white governor can win.

So I guess there’s two questions. One is, is the electability campaign going to be more challenging? And then second, as a progressive myself, yeah, AOC is not Abdul El-Sayed, but is it easier to see her running today than it was two weeks ago?

So start with Adam, in terms of 2028. Does Jon Ossoff have to run, or should everybody else read his corruption talking points, and should Raphael Warnock just steal those and stop talking about being a nice pastor and talk about that? Or just any kind of lessons about 2028 that you want to talk about here, as my last question.

Bonica: Yeah, if there was one sort of message I could communicate to people who are going to be voting in and engaging in the Democratic primary, which as always will be chaotic and there will be a lot of unknown variables about it. But it goes back to a piece that you wrote recently about electability. That it just dominates so much of what happens in how we talk about politicians.

But it’s not real. This election is the latest in many that has shown that you win because your party and your movement is popular. AOC is no less likely to win than Beshear, I would say, if she was in the general election. The reason is who she’ll be running against.

But there’s also a much bigger issue, the prize here, which is if we’re trying to build a broader party, we’re trying to build a younger party, think about the long term here. The type of candidate that can really mobilize younger voters, who can really mobilize and say, “This is a party for a lot of people.”

And a great thing about the Democratic Party is, it can have a voice like Beshear and AOC, both who I’d say are anti-corruption candidates. And they’re the good guys. And being a good guy is not a progressive or centrist thing. That’s separate. And I think people should look at candidates and vote for the candidates that they think will be the best and strongest president and candidate. That’s what’s in the party’s best interest.

Bacon: Jake?

Grumbach: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And one thing I’m very supportive of is thinking about primary election institutions and how those rules distort and create these pathologies in the nomination process for president.

So what we need to move towards is one national primary day, right? Potentially with ranked choice voting. This is the most obvious use case of ranked choice voting, where you can rank AOC one, Beshear, whatever, right? People know these candidates in that way at the presidential level.

This isn’t ranked choice voting for dog catcher in an exurb that you don’t know who’s running. This is ranked choice voting at the presidential level. And it’s really pathological that you get this Iowa, South Carolina jockeying, New Hampshire caucus, and then momentum hits, donations hit, and as Adam said, the debate becomes entirely not who do you like and whose policies do you like, but rather what do you think will win the general election.

That fails to capture the energy of the movement and the base and build a movement. A primary election is to actually learn something about what people want, right? It’s not to be strategic about some later date. It’s about saying, “Where is the energy?”

I think Mamdani in New York is the best example of this, where it’s unexpected. Wow, he’s generating a ton of volunteers and energy. We’ll learn from that, and the Democratic Party did. Now everybody’s talking like Mamdani. That’s how it works.

You should use the presidential primary season to learn. Oh, maybe AOC doesn’t generate the youth energy we expected on college campuses. Maybe she does. Maybe somebody else comes out as a dark horse candidate. That’s what you want to see. Our institutions are set up to totally distort that.

And what people should think about, no matter when you’re voting in the 2028 primary season, no matter what state you are, resist the urge to be a strategist pundit. Support who you support. Be proud of that.

And hopefully this sort of pundit economy second order strategery of soccer moms will decline, and people can talk about what world they want to build and how they want to govern. And that would create a much healthier politics and a much clearer path to defeating authoritarianism.

Bacon: That’s a great place to end on. Jake, Adam, thanks for joining me. Love all your work. I’ll encourage people to check it out. You guys are on Bluesky. I think Jake is on Twitter. And they’ve co-written some excellent pieces. There’s one in Boston Review laying out how to fight authoritarianism that I thought would give a really good look at why what Schumer and Jeffries are doing is not effective, if you’re trying to win this broader fight. And they have a more recent piece about the consulting class that was published here at TNR. So I encourage you to check out both of them, and great to see you guys. Bye-bye.

Grumbach: Thanks so much, Perry.

A Federal Election Commission filing shows that the first Muslim to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate made the PAC official on Thursday. The leadership PAC is not connected to his campaign and will allow him to raise money for other candidates, perhaps a sign of greater political ambitions.

Habibi, meaning “my beloved” in Arabic, is a term of endearment that El-Sayed has used often during his campaign, even using it to refer to Vice President JD Vance in his victory speech early Wednesday morning.

“JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January,” El-Sayed said.

Abdul El-Sayed to JD Vance:

JD, habibi, there is this delicious irony in the fact that you're constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January. pic.twitter.com/4XwZejXsm8

— Clash Report (@clashreport) November 4, 2026

The San Francisco Chronicle obtained internal reports on the deaths of 29 immigrant detainees who died between January 2025 and January 2026. In the 29 cases the Chronicle reviewed, 23 immigrants died after receiving medical care the agency itself found was deficient.

ICE investigators determined that detention staff “deviated from safe limits of practice,” or “did not provide medical care within safe limits of practice” for the 23 detainees.

In at least eight of the cases, medical staff failed to perform CPR correctly, or at all. In only three of the cases, investigators determined that the deficient medical care did not directly contribute to the person’s death.

The agency continues to insist that there has been no spike in detainee deaths, though 2025 saw the most immigrant detainee deaths since 2003. So far in 2026, 31 immigrants have died in ICE detention.

During President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE has subjected tens of thousands of people—including U.S. citizens, lawful immigrants, and immigrants with no criminal convictions—to overcrowded rooms, unsanitary conditions, and insufficient food and water.

In many cases, immigrants report having been denied adequate medical care. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff released a report in October 2025 documenting at least “85 credible reports of medical neglect” at U.S. detention centers. In January, ICE announced that it had stopped paying for immigrant detainees to receive health care—and wasn’t planning on paying again for months.

For the Trump administration, the cruelty is part of the point. The Department of Homeland Security even rejected plans to construct immigration detention facilities that were more humane.

Trump made the announcement on Truth Social Friday afternoon, saying that “Susie Wiles, who has done an outstanding job, will be moving over to the Trump Political Operation. I want to thank her for her service as Chief of Staff — She has done a great job! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Miller, previously the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is receiving the promotion after serving in both Trump administrations. He is well-known for his hardline, xenophobic, and racist views on immigration, which led to violent and deadly mass deportation policies in Trump’s second term.

Trump’s decision to elevate Miller suggests that he is unrepentant about much of the negative attention brought by ICE’s violence even after Republicans were dealt historic losses in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, Miller was the target of leaks from Republicans and Trump administration officials over how his deportation plans were going too far, with even one anecdote about First Lady Melania Trump complaining to the president about people she knew being deported. Wiles reportedly tried for months to steer Trump away from Miller’s approach, according to The New York Times.

Ultimately, though, Wiles is the one on her way out. She tendered her resignation Thursday night, as Trump has partly blamed her for the GOP’s devastating election losses, Wired journalist Hugo Lowell reported. Rumors that she would be made into a scapegoat for the elections had been floating around for weeks.

In a statement posted on X, Wiles said, “Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime. I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First. More than anything, I’m grateful for the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. While my role may be changing, my commitment to the President and the mission never will.”

Promoting Miller now is a clear message to Democrats after their massive election victory.

The death of nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents in January caused a sea change in Americans’ thoughts on immigration, and gave Democrats the edge this November. ICE heavy-handed tactics continued, though. ICE agents have shot at least 25 people in Trump’s second term, according to the Times. On top of that, dozens of immigration detainees have died in ICE custody due to inhumane conditions encouraged by Miller.

But Trump clearly doesn’t care about any of that, and wants to double down on the most brutal part of his second term by elevating his most vile staffer, giving Miller the run of the White House. Any thoughts of Trump moderating or working with Democrats in the final two years of his presidency have been dashed by this move, and Democrats should receive the message loud and clear.

In response to Miller’s appointment, Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, who will be taking over the House Oversight Committee next year, said “Stephen Miller should lawyer up.”

This story has been updated.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 5,182 measles infections nationwide Friday, the highest case load of the disease that the country has experienced since 1991. Forty-five states have been affected.

But public-facing federal datasets have not kept up with state reporting. The agency has acknowledged just four measles deaths so far this year, while Pennsylvania on its own has reported six. Health agencies in New York and Wisconsin each reported at least one additional death.

Measles hasn’t been a national concern since 2000, when the long-term use of a vaccine proved so effective at minimizing risk and exposure to the disease that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated from the United States. That status is up for reassessment this month. If it’s determined that a singular viral strain has circulated the country for 12 months, the U.S. will no longer qualify for the label.

The virus’s dormancy has been challenged by anti-vaxers, who have opted against medicating their children in fear that vaccinations could cause autism (a thoroughly debunked conspiracy). One such conspiracist, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has refused to combat the ensuing measles outbreak with vetted science—instead, he has issued guidance that the illness can be treated by simple vitamins.

In April, Kennedy fell short of offering a full-throated endorsement of the MMR vaccine that has historically been used to treat measles, telling CBS News that his agency was focused on finding treatments for unvaccinated individuals while falsely claiming that the jab had not been “safety tested” and was not effective for long-term prevention. As of 2025, there are no known effective treatments or cures for measles other than vaccine prevention.

The return of historically eradicated diseases is thanks to a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of giving their children autism. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

But America’s is not the first measles response that Kennedy has bungled. Under Kennedy’s stewardship, the anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense had its own questionable history with the disease. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on Samoa in 2019, the organization spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout the nation, sending the island’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

The Washington Post reports that now that Democrats won back control of Congress, they are planning to probe powerful entities in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the first targets could be Apple, Meta, and Elon Musk and all of his companies. 

The House is already preparing to investigate how President Trump used Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Post. House Democrats are also looking at Apple’s hosting of tracking apps used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and at Meta for demanding that local governments sign nondisclosure agreements regarding data centers. 

Corporate lawyers in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to meet with corporate executives to offer advice on the impending high-profile public investigations. Many firms are preparing pitches to attract Musk as a client, as he is not only the world’s richest man, but also holds billions in government contracts, has a close relationship with Trump, and led the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency initiative.  

One lawyer at a major D.C. firm told executives in a private online meeting Thursday that “this is a new era.”

“If your company is caught up in this oversight, it’s likely to be much more highly publicized,” the lawyer said, according to the Post. 

Dozens of corporations and CEOs donated to Trump’s transition fund, his inauguration fund, and his White House ballroom project. Where that once may have protected them from regulations and investigations from the Trump administration, with this new Congress, the opposite is true. Trump also made millions investing in many companies and publicly praised companies that did him favors. 

“Lawyer up,” wrote Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, the next chair of the House Oversight Committee, in a brief statement on election night. 

A map produced by Ground News using data from civicAPI showed just how far each U.S. county’s margin moved from the 2024 presidential election to the 2026 House vote. A whopping 94 percent of U.S. counties shifted left in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Jurisdictions in all 50 states reported an average 13-point shift toward Democratic House candidates. No state showed an overall shift toward the Republicans in the House, although there were a handful of districts that moved right.

The states that showed the largest shifts toward Democratic House candidates were New Jersey, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The states that saw the smallest leftward shifts were South Dakota, Vermont, and Oregon.

The map indicated that even in states where Democratic candidates did not win, such as West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky, there were still heavy leftward shifts among voters.

Voters under 30 swung sharply toward the Democratic Party, according to the AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters across all 50 states. Republicans appeared to lose most—if not all—of President Donald Trump’s gains with Hispanic and Black voters in 2024. Moderate and lower income voters also turned up to support Democratic candidates.

Burgum’s 2026 financial disclosure document shows that the vast majority of his wealth is held with Arthur Ventures, the investment firm he co-founded. While Burgum’s Senate confirmation ethics agreement forced him to resign from Arthur Ventures, he still maintained his financial interests at the firm. According to an analysis by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks that was shared with ProPublica, Arthur Ventures invests between $18.1 million and $64.4 million in AI companies—meaning that Burgum is pushing an unpopular policy that will personally enrich him. Burgum has blamed the mass rejection of data centers on a “foreign psyop.”

The Trump administration, of course, denies ProPublica’s reporting.

“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson said. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”

Yet Burgum isn’t the only Trump administration member who stands to personally profit from his investments in AI and data centers. According to a ProPublica review, over 380 administration members or their spouses have investments in or other financial ties to Nvidia, 320 have ties to Alphabet, and over 240 are invested in Meta Platforms—all while the administration allows states to construct data centers and inject their technology into every level of everyday life unfettered.

“Like every other goon in this administration, Data Center Doug is in it for himself,” California Representative Jared Huffman wrote online. “He wants to cover our public lands with AI data centers that will make him and Trump’s tech buddies richer.”

Ohio’s first female governor-elect told CBS Mornings Friday that she has “no intention” of speaking to the losing Republican after he produced a disturbing political advert featuring her estranged mother.

“It was sad, I would like to say I didn’t expect this but there was no low my opponent wouldn’t sink to,” Acton said, noting that Ramaswamy’s other attack ads were filled with “lies” and “vitriol.”

“I heard that he did leave you a congratulatory phone call,” said host Gayle King. “Have the two of you spoken since election night or at all?”

“Gayle, I think we can’t normalize behavior like this. It was so beyond the pale. So I have no intention of speaking to him. I do believe that leaders’ words matter, and we need to hold folks accountable,” Acton said.

As the days ticked down to the midterm election, Ramaswamy hatched a crackpot plan to damage Acton’s credibility by weaponizing the sexual assault she suffered during her childhood against her. Ramaswamy used Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, as part of a smear campaign to paint the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee as a liar.

He moved forward with the ad spot against the advice of his team, and while ignoring publicly available information demonstrating that Arthur abandoned her children to skip town with her husband—Cledith “Bud” Arthur—who was indicted for allegedly raping Acton when she was a young girl.

The biological daughter of that man lent credibility to Acton’s account of the abuse days after the smear campaign was leaked. Speaking through tears during an interview with the Daily Mail, the Youngstown, Ohio–based woman said that Arthur had also raped her late sister, Christine, years before he married Acton’s mother.

Acton has been very public about her broken family and childhood struggles. Over the years, she has discussed the horrific sexual abuse she endured from her stepfather (which she told The Youngstown Vindicator occurred between the ages of nine and 12), and also shared her experiences with homelessness in her youth. In a March 2020 profile by The Toledo Blade, Acton said that she spent one of her childhood winters living in a tent outside Youngstown.

Ramaswamy—a biotech billionaire that attended one of Ohio’s largest private high schools—saw those stories as potential political fodder, and attempted to utilize them for his own personal gain. But in doing so, he ultimately hurt himself.

The 41-year-old MAGA acolyte has since become a bit of a political pariah that is unwelcome on either the left or the right, as Democrats and Republicans alike condemned the low blow.

“There is no holding back on the desire to leave now,” one former White House official told MS NOW Friday. “Some are making calls to try and jump ship.”

What happened on Tuesday has been described by some Republicans as an “extinction-level” event, as Democrats scooped up areas of the country that have been historically seen as deep-red, according to the news outlet. A White House official told MS NOW that the election results had amounted to “the worst-case scenario.”

But as Trump approaches the lame duck portion of his second term, some members of his staff are looking for an off-ramp out of MAGA world.

“In this current trajectory, there’s no shot this is salvageable,” a former White House official in touch with current staffers told MS NOW, speaking on the matter of the MAGA agenda. “What is the president’s focus these last two years? It’s probably renovations.”

Trump has obsessed over his legacy throughout his second term, a fixation easily illustrated by the long list of vanity projects he’s cooked up instead of fulfilling the difficult job of steering the nation. So far, Trump has razed the White House East Wing, started construction on a $600 million ballroom (the price of which keeps growing), proposed a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transformed the Palm Room from a lush green foyer into a sterile lobby, and mowed down Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s famous Rose Garden.

The administration also spent more than $16 million on an unsuccessful and rushed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, took a sledgehammer to the Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley, indiscriminately axed trees in the Washington area, and destroyed the Kennedy Center in a futile attempt to attach Trump’s name to the living memorial.

“There is no holding back on the desire to leave now,” the former official continued. “Some are making calls to try and jump ship.” Others are reportedly seeking out legal counsel as a “precaution,” the official told MS NOW.

Another former official summed up the current atmosphere succinctly: “pain.”

“Everybody’s going to start infighting,” they told MS NOW.

Politico reports that John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general in charge of national security, and Jason Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, are both leaving the DOJ. Eisenberg oversaw cases relating to espionage, leak investigations, and terrorism, and was also involved in the prosecution of former Trump national security adviser (turned Trump critic) John Bolton earlier this year for illegally retaining classified materials.

Quiñones oversaw an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan over his statements to Congress about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Quiñones was also overseeing the prosecution of former Cuban President Raúl Castro. In a statement, Attorney General Todd Blanche said that “We are grateful for Jason’s leadership in combating violent crime, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and transnational crime. Jason has served the Department multiple times over his distinguished career, and we thank him for his service to this country,” Blanche said.

Blanche also announced Eisenberg’s resignation, noting that this was his “second tour of duty serving President Trump as a national security official and advisor.”

Democrats’ resounding victory in Tuesday’s midterm elections seems to have scared officials in the DOJ, who may now be targets of investigations in a Democratic-controlled Congress next year. Subpoenas and other oversight tools are already being prepared against the DOJ.

Democrats will also be able to look into the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump’s business dealings, corruption surrounding presidential pardons, and deals with foreign governments—and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Dhillon, Eisenberg, and Quiñones are likely the first of many to jump ship, and they should probably consider lawyering up.

This story has been updated.

Musk announced Friday that Tesla’s Texas plant would cease production in the middle of next year in order to build CyberCab, the company’s self-driving taxi.

Since launching Cybertruck in 2023, Tesla has consistently struggled to meet the vehicle’s sales target of 200,000 per year. In the third quarter of 2026, the company only sold 8,300 “other models,” which includes the Cybertruck. Ahead of the vehicle’s initial release, Musk fretted on an earnings call: “We dug our own grave with Cybertruck.”

Musk’s metal monstrosities became the unfortunate symbol of Donald Trump’s second term, after Musk bought the president’s way back into the White House in 2024. Musk spent twice as much to buy this week’s midterm elections for Republicans, but he’d have been just as well off if he’d lit the cash on fire.

The announcement comes as Tesla’s shares declined 11 percent Thursday, following a Democratic sweep in the midterm elections that flipped both chambers of Congress blue. Evidently, investors are concerned that Musk could face new congressional probes and harsher regulations. The aggregate market cap losses for Tesla and SpaceX came to more than $420 billion since Tuesday’s close, CNBC reported.

Musk has used his proximity to Trump to boost his many businesses, including Tesla cars, which Trump showed off at the White House like a hacky used car salesman. In some cases, the administration even pressured foreign governments into approving Musk’s products.

Democrats have signaled they plan to investigate Musk’s shady leadership of the defunct Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ lucrative contracts with the federal government, and his alleged role in cutting Ukraine’s Starlink access, perhaps on behalf of his close friend Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In a 33-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that no construction can take place on the arch for 14 days while other legal proceedings play out, which she said were likely to succeed because, unsurprisingly, the Trump administration didn’t follow the legal processes before beginning the project.

The ruling came hours after the National Capital Planning Commission, packed with Trump allies, voted to approve the project in an 8-4 vote, ignoring eight hours of comments opposing the measure from concerned residents, veterans, and lawmakers. But there are multiple lawsuits hoping to stop the project for good: one from a group of Vietnam War veterans and an architectural historian, as well as a joint lawsuit from the District of Columbia and Virginia governments.

Meanwhile, Trump seems unphased. The official White House X account posted an AI rendering of the arch on Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., Friday morning along with a link to triumphalarch.com, a website full of Trump’s praises and reasons for the project.

The project’s opponents have complained about how the massive building will overshadow Arlington National Cemetery and obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial. But Trump doesn’t care about that, or what the courts say about his project. He also seems to be disregarding the message Americans sent in Tuesday’s elections, as he pushes ahead with an unnecessary vanity project and his party is left in shambles. Meanwhile, Democrats are gearing up on how to stop him.

“I urge all officials and firms involved with this illegal project to consider the legal hazards they may be facing by advancing it, because, in case you hadn’t heard, we’ll soon have a new Congress that takes the rule of law very seriously,” Democratic Representative Jared Huffman warned at the planning commission meeting Thursday.

It all started on Thursday, when Alex Bruesewitz, who is behind much of Trump’s digital media strategy, took aim at conservative social media influencers following the GOP’s massive midterm election loss.

“Believe it or not attacking Democrats over their relationships with a streamer (Hasan Piker) wasn’t an effective hit,” Bruesewitz posted, not mentioning Loomer by name. “GOP candidates probably shouldn’t take messaging advice from fringe right-wing ‘influencers’ moving forward.”

Loomer took the bait.

“But they should take their advice and meetings with @TuckerCarlson instead?… It’s completely reasonable for people to be appalled with Democrat candidates campaigning with a guy who said America deserved 9/11. Hasan Piker regularly makes comments in support of jihadi groups,” she wrote. “What wasn’t helpful was your friend Tucker Carlson essentially endorsing Abdul El-Sayed over Mike Rogers and using his show to tell people to not support Rogers just a few weeks out from an election. But we all know you will never condemn your buddy Tucker.”

“Laura, you are basically the Republican version of Hasan Piker. Democrats over the years have attacked Republicans for affiliating with you. Those weren’t effective hits either,” Bruesewitz replied. “Voters simply don’t care enough about ‘influencers’ or streamers. lol”

Loomer took offense to that, claiming that she was not an influencer and criticizing Bruesewitz for his association with Omeed Malik, a conservative venture capitalist and major Republican donor.

“I’m a journalist and an opposition researcher Alex. What are you? What is it that you do for Omeed Malik exactly? He’s a Muslim right? Half Iranian and half Pakistani if I’m not mistaken,” Loomer fired back. “Is that why you have such an issue with the things I say about Islam?”

“Okay lol. But is it common for journalists to get paid for their opinions and tweets?”

“You say ‘Okay lol.’ Not sure why you are laughing. I recall last year your company X strategies reached out to me asking me for help. Do you deny that? What is so funny? I guess I don’t get the joke,” Loomer said, admitting that she was indeed paid to tweet. “You loved sharing my journalistic reports during the 2023/2024 DeSantis-Trump primary too. What changed?”

“No I don’t deny that. I’ve paid you for tweets before. I haven’t for at least a year though,” Bruesewitz wrote back. “I also know you still get paid by others for tweets so I do think it’s fair to refer to you as an ‘influencer.’ What percentage of your tweets are paid for?”

Loomer had no direct response to Bruesweitz’s question, instead accusing him of having ties to the Qatari government.

This a massive allegation, further confirming that much of what we see on social media is privately paid for and manufactured by people with a particular political bias.

Hours later, Loomer announced a “one to two month show hiatus.”

“I’m getting married, and I want to give this exciting part of my life the time that it deserves, as I’ve spent a lot of time fighting for our country, and for President Trump—sometimes at the expense of my own personal life,” she said.

The hiatus, of course, also comes after Loomer posted 119 times on X in less than 28 hours following the election results, according to an analysis by Newsweek.

While some online chalked up Loomer’s break to the Republican midterm upset, others noted that it also occurred right after the revelation about her undisclosed paid content. We still don’t know how much she might’ve been paid, or who else is paying her.

Before we start to answer that question, let’s check its premises, because history overflows with people asking the wrong questions. Its premises are two. First, that we have entered a new reality. Have we? And second, is it in fact Trump who is responsible for the Republicans’ cataclysm?

On the first premise, the answer is an emphatic yes. The election results are so overpowering that they transcend mere politics. This is a cultural change. There are moments in politics when you can just feel a dam bursting, when you can just hear a democratic people collectively screaming, We’ve had enough!

I’m old enough to remember, and honest enough to confess, that 1980 was definitely such a moment. It wasn’t even Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory, though that was evidence enough. It was the flipping in the Senate of 12—yes, 12—seats, with numerous old liberal lions like Birch Bayh and Frank Church losing to no-name Republican contenders who were of a new and decidedly more right-wing breed than Washington was accustomed to at the time. I still remember watching the returns that night and thinking, Hmmm. Something is happening out there that I didn’t understand at all.

On the second question, the answer is—well, it’s an even more emphatic yes. Vice President JD Vance can blame the midterm rout on the Iran war. Please, God, let that settle in as the conventional wisdom on the right, because it will doom them to further failure. This bloodletting happened because of Trump: the war, sure, but also the tariffs, the economy, the corruption, ICE detentions and killings, the hiring of his harlequinade of incompetents, the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool—all of it.

Pollsters are paid to settle on one explanation, so they do what confused pols seeking clarity pay them to do. But the world and people’s brains don’t work that way, especially when a leader insists on making us think about him as incessantly as Trump does. Trump, in his unquenchable sleaze, malfeasance, corruption, and economic incompetence, just became too overwhelming for the average voter. Anyone who thinks this sea change was about anything else is lying or stupid.

Very well. We’ve addressed the premises. Now let us return to the question itself. Now that Trump is about as lame as a lame duck can get, will congressional Republicans finally rise up against him in defense of reality?

It’s the most important question of the moment because, tragically, under the rules of the modern media, Republicans will still have more power to stop him than Democrats will. Yes, Democrats will hold the committee gavels, and Democrats will have more power over subpoenas and witness lists and all the rest when it comes to congressional oversight hearings. That’s real power, and they should—and by most accounts will—use it.

But we must presume that Trump will ignore, and will order all his people to ignore, the Democrats’ subpoenas. Think on it: Can you actually picture Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem answering a subpoena to traipse up to Capitol Hill to be grilled about, oh, how they got the addresses of the people they rounded up?

I didn’t think so. The same thing goes for Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump sons, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, dear old Big Balls, and the rest of the mephitic menagerie.

So they’ll ignore the Democrats. Then the Supreme Court will, I think, say no, you can’t do that. Then they’ll say to the Supreme Court, fine, make us. At that point, congressional Democrats will have to decide whether to have them arrested. If Aaron Sorkin were writing this, they’d do it in a heartbeat. But this is the real world, with the real Democrats we’ve come to know.

And so, we will be looking to Republican senators and House members to pitch in and say something. Twenty Democrats inveighing against Trump’s crimes won’t have the moral force with the mainstream media and with the nonpartisan public that one prominent Republican will carry.

Who might those Republicans be? Overall, my hopes are not high. Here, for example, are the current Republican members of the House Oversight Committee, which will be chaired by California’s Robert Garcia, who has promised an energetic investigative agenda. It’s a pretty grim bestiary. Even so, a few of them (and there will be several new members) will come from districts where they’ll fear losing in 2028, and they may be willing to speak up.

Likewise, a few senators who are up in 2028 from suddenly competitive states might play ball: Ted Budd of North Carolina, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Ashley Moody of Florida, who will be defending her seat again (her narrow victory over Angie Nixon was a special election for Marco Rubio’s old seat). And, finally, some of those who want to run for president in 2028 might seek to distance themselves from Trump.

Those are political calculations. Let’s conclude by talking about plain old right and wrong—a pointless pursuit, I know, when it comes to discussing Republicans, but we should still demand it as a standard.

So we look to the Republican members of the House and Senate, and we ask: Are they chastened? Are they humbled? Have they learned anything? Has this historical humiliation finally taught them that lashing themselves to Trump’s flaccid mast is not only foolish and suicidal, but the wrong thing for America? We’ve been told over and over and over for a decade that in private conversations, they know Trump is a fool and a charlatan and a crook. They’re just afraid of him and his power over the base, and they don’t want a primary.

So we end where we began, with the core question that emerges from this Republican Armageddon. Will congressional Republicans find their spines? Will some of them finally do and say what they know to be right? Will they stop sputtering “I’m not familiar with those remarks” as they duck quickly into the Dirksen Building elevator? If they can’t do that now with their dear leader, the lamest lame duck in American politics since at least Lyndon Johnson in 1968, well, then history will be their judge. And so will the voters come 2028.      

The president logged onto Truth Social around 6:18 p.m. to lament about falling stock prices.

“The Stock Market suffered one of the Worst Days in History based on the results of the Election. Such a sad thing to watch!” Trump penned. “It took so much work to get us to a level that no one has ever seen before, and then this.”

“Your 401(k)s have, therefore, dropped,” he continued. “Remember, it wasn’t Republicans, it was Dumocrats. Do not fear, however, we will soon, one way or the other, be BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE.”

The Nasdaq stock market took a dive this week, with tech-related companies tanking the hardest as shareholders grappled with the fallout of dozens of local data center–related ballot initiatives that largely banned or halted the development of the resource-zapping facilities across the country. But, simply put, that’s what Americans voted for.

Worries over Silicon Valley’s immediate future were also triggered by numerous winning Democratic platforms, which promised to hammer down on regulations for and vote against data center construction.

Trump likely felt the hurt in his wallet, as well. The president’s 2026 financial disclosures revealed sizable investments in a number of tech companies pursuing artificial intelligence projects, spending millions of dollars on stock purchases for Oracle, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet.

He’s also bet taxpayer money on the tech venture. Days into his second term, the president unveiled a $500 billion public-private venture to support AI development. The project was dubbed Stargate and backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX.

It’s possible that the silver spoon billionaire’s lifestyle is so far removed from the rest of American society that he simply can’t comprehend the public opposition to data centers. Trump will never be hard-pressed to find drinking water like the residents of Flint, Michigan; he apparently doesn’t have to buy (or even pronounce) America’s increasingly expensive groceries; he won’t need to split the cost of record-high gas prices at the pump between credit cards; and he will never experience the crushing toll of the housing crisis (a “big yawn,” he said in June, while profiting off it.) In August, Trump even went so far as to claim that anyone who opposes data center development is “backwards and poor.”

Later Thursday evening, Trump again blamed the stock market “crash” on the election results. “So sad to see, you only have yourselves to blame!” Trump wrote.

But the true source of his spiral was revealed in a third post. “I JUST WASN’T ON THE BALLOT. IF I WERE, WE WOULD HAVE WON IN A LANDSLIDE! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Trump has no public events scheduled for Friday. In fact, the White House didn’t even post his schedule for the day.

As Democrat Eileen Laubacher’s lead over Boebert grew slightly Thursday in the race to represent Colorado’s 4th District, Boebert’s campaign released a statement suggesting foul play. Scott Gessler, the attorney for the campaign, claimed that the votes had been “trending” in Boebert’s favor since election night, “consistently lowering the margin under one percentage point.”

“We are investigating some very unusual voting patterns and expect this election to head to a recount, one way or another,” Gessler continued.

As of Friday morning, Laubacher was still leading Boebert 48.75 percent to 47.94 percent, with 97 percent reporting. The two candidates had a margin of 3,069 votes, more than three times the automatic recount threshold of 921 votes. Boebert’s campaign could still choose to pay for a recount.

Colorado GOP chair Craig Steiner urged Republican voters Friday to cure any affidavit ballots. “Every cured ballot matters in a race this close,” he said in a statement.

Inside Washington

“We campaigned as affordability Democrats. That was the message of every single candidate across this country,” Representative Katherine Clark, who is poised to be the House majority leader come January, told CNN on Thursday. “And that is exactly how we’re going to govern.” Delivering on this message, however, is easier said than done.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is almost certain to be the next House speaker, likewise said that the party will be united “right out of the gate” to address the cost of living crisis—a topic that Democrats credit for their massive Election Day wins. In a “Dear Colleague” letter on Thursday, he proposed reversing cuts to the Affordable Care Act subsidies that have forced millions of Americans to pay more for health care, undoing cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, reversing tariffs, and stopping the war in Iran—all in the first 100 days of the next Congress.

Some advocates are pushing Democrats to start even sooner. “Government funding runs out on December 11, and I think they should use that must-pass vehicle to demand an end to the war in Iran, bringing down gas prices. And they should ensure that the Medicaid cuts don’t go into effect in January, which would raise health care costs for families,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.

Republicans, of course, might not go along with that while they still hold power in the lame-duck session. There’s also the issue of President Donald Trump’s veto power, which could thwart Democrats’ affordability legislation during the next Congress. Trump has given conflicting messages, telling some journalists that he plans to work with Congress and others that he will become “Mr. Veto.”

Some Democrats want to tailor their agenda to that reality. “How about we spend the majority of our time on stuff that we all agree on,” Representative Adam Gray of California told Semafor. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii is similarly cautious: “I do not think it is time to propose things that the president of the United States is guaranteed to veto,” said Schatz, who is in line for a Senate leadership role. “I think that’s a bit of wasted energy.” Progressives like Representatives Greg Casar of Texas and Ro Khanna of California, on the other hand, adamantly disagreed with that sentiment. “Make him veto Medicare for All. Make him veto a $25 living wage. Make him veto free childcare. Make him veto Block the Bombs to Israel,” Khanna wrote on X.

Economists like Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, also want to see Democrats go beyond just addressing the high cost of groceries and gas, which was a major part of the campaign. “In terms of the policy levers that will actually work to make affordability better,” he said, “we have at least as many, probably more, that work on the income and wage side than the price side.”

Raising the minimum wage and passing labor legislation that empowers workers would increase incomes. It would be a way to give Americans more purchasing power without trying to lower the cost of goods directly, which can be more difficult. Jared Bernstein, chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden, makes a similar argument, and is concerned that Democrats could overpromise and underdeliver on lowering prices. “Nobody should be saying that they can lower the price of everything within the walls of Target and Walmart,” he said. “Trump, of course, made precisely such claims, and to say they redounded against him is a massive understatement.”

One thing that most Democrats and experts can agree on: ending the Iran war as quickly as possible. Even if ending the war doesn’t immediately bring down the price of gas, it would begin the process. The war is deeply unpopular; in a remarkable social media post on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance admitted that it’s part of why Republicans lost Congress.

Even if Trump’s vetoes make affordability legislation tricky, Democrats “have another tool, and that’s oversight,” Owens said. “Americans are aware that one of the reasons that prices are so high is corporations are charging them more than they need to, taking advantage of the war in Iran, taking advantage of the tariffs to raise prices,”she said. Addressing and exposing corporate corruption, she argued, is also good affordability politics. Ultimately, Democrats will need to think about the full array of tools at their disposal—lowering prices, raising incomes, pressuring Trump to sign their bills, and holding hearings. Perhaps the most important thing they can do is show voters that they are doing whatever they can to make life more affordable.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Could Dems’ state-level victories turn out to have a greater long-term impact than retaking Congress? While the tally is not yet final, Dems so far appear to have ended Republican “trifectas” in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas; built Democratic trifectas in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and possibly Arizona; flipped the North Carolina House, quite possibly the Texas House, and both chambers in New Hampshire; and won the governor’s races in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas. “Democrats will have the power to rewrite policies on redistricting, abortion, climate, health care, education and taxes,” The Washington Post summarizes in its rundown of state results. That includes taking “meaningful steps on lowering utility costs, expanding access to child care and health care, reproductive rights, safeguarding elections and other issues.” And then there’s the big question that Axios raised this week: Could Dems’ state victories pave the way for getting rid of the Electoral College?

Let’s zoom in on one item in the Post’s list: What do these sweeping Democratic victories mean for climate policy? The party conspicuously sidelined the issue on the campaign trail. But as Steven Rodas and Liza Gross at Inside Climate News pointed out this week, voters consistently backed environmental protection on state and local ballot measures on Tuesday. Perhaps the most striking example: More than 80 percent of Michigan voters chose to ban campaign contributions from utility companies. (The first lawsuit challenging this ballot initiative has already been filed.)

The new Democratic trifecta states in particular now have a lot of options on the climate front. And there are signs of movement at the national level, as well: Chellie Pingree, fresh off a commanding victory delivering her a 10th term in Maine’s 1st congressional district, is ready to rumble, telling Grist’s Jake Bittle this week that she has, in Bittle’s words, “prepared a long list of investigations and subpoenas for Trump administration officials, including EPA chief Lee Zeldin.” Pingree, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department, also wants to insert stipulations in funding bills “that would deny agencies core operational funds or restrict travel money for leading officials unless they doled out solar and energy funding as Congress previously instructed them to.” For an administration famously attached to its travel money, that probably counts as shots fired.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Monday at 2 p.m., the Brookings Institution will host an online event about “the consequences of the 2026 midterm elections,” featuring David C. Barker, Karen Tumulty, Jonathan Rauch, and Sarah A. Binder.

Also on Monday, at 1 p.m., New America will host a virtual discussion with Better Life Lab’s Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson about their new research on men and caregiving, as well as insights regarding the barriers that keep some men from being more involved in caregiving, even when they want to be. Mohan Sivalogonath of Dads for All, stay-at-home dad Shannon Carpenter, and elder caregiver Carlos Olivas will join for a panel discussion.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: 

I mean, there’s an obvious answer here: Literally almost every Democrat. But if we think outside the box, then we might have to hand this award to Mike Johnson, who announced after the midterms that he would not be running for minority leader, one of the worst jobs in Washington, perhaps second only to being the majority leader in a GOP-led House. Johnson led a caucus of MAGA-werewolves who routinely brined themselves in right-wing meme slop about as well as anyone could. He will now get to spend more time with his son and their favorite hobby: monitoring each other’s pornography intake.

Bad Week: 

Again, obvious answer: nearly every Republican in Christendom! But some Democrats fared poorly, as well. Haley Stevens’s decision to go against the party and endorse Mike Rogers was a shot so poorly taken that even Lin-Manuel Miranda would have been like, “Hales, I’d have holstered that one.” And we must spare a thought for John Fetterman, a senator who exists only to thwart his own caucus, which will now swell to numbers so large as to make him entirely irrelevant. Go ahead and switch parties, pal! (Caveat: A new annoying Democratic senator with swing vote power could emerge at any time.)

—Jason Linkins

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

The first Latino governor in the United States was Romualdo Pacheco of California. In what decade did he ascend to that office? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

The Daily Mail reports that Trump was spotted walking through the streets of the city on October 29, one day before her forty-fifth birthday. The newspaper obtained federal records showing two Secret Service contracts adding up to $93,000 for agents to secure and stay in two five-star hotels ahead of Trump’s arrival.

These included a $59,543 contract for rooms at the five-star Sofitel Marrakech, and a $33,457 contract for a Secret Service team at La Mamounia, where the Kardashian family and Winston Churchill have stayed. Those bills don’t include agents’ transportation, meals, flights, or salaries.

Officially, Ivanka Trump is not a White House employee, but she is entitled to Secret Service protection as a child of the president. The trip was reportedly not long, as the Daily Mail’s source said that she returned to the U.S. in time for Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Moroccan news outlet Le360 said that Trump was seen walking through Marrakech’s old neighborhoods and souks, and ate traditional Moroccan food. It’s her third visit to the country, according to the news outlet, as she visited on a diplomatic trip in November 2019 when she was an employee of the first Trump administration, and later in summer 2022 on a private trip with her husband, Jared Kushner.

Ivanka Trump’s net worth is estimated at $100 million. Even though she is entitled to Secret Service protection, at a time when many Americans are struggling (thanks to her father’s policies), she should be willing to reimburse the government for all of the high-end expenses she racked up in Morocco, as five-star hotels don’t come cheap. But perhaps we should be grateful that she didn’t stay at a Trump-owned property and force the Secret Service to fork over money to the family business, like her father often does.

A Thursday memo from the White House Office of Public Liaison sent to about 3,000 conservative organizations listed a series of Trump accomplishments, vowing that a Democratic Congress wouldn’t reverse them, according to The Wall Street Journal. But the memo ended with one sentence highlighted in yellow: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”

“‘We’re watching you’ is not the message the White House should be sending,” Caroline Sunshine, a White House aide during Trump’s first term, wrote online. “We’re LISTENING to you is what anyone in the WH who has the President’s best interest should be saying.”

Earlier emails from the White House office didn’t include language about “monitoring” groups, according to a review by the Journal. The shift comes as a flurry of conservative voices, from commentator Matt Walsh, to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to Vice President JD Vance himself, have lambasted President Trump’s policies and decision-making—placing sole blame on him for Republicans’ midterm election loss. And while the office told The Wall Street Journal that it wasn’t a threat, this is an ominous message to send to a coalition that is actively fracturing.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s war on Iran played a major role in the GOP’s massive electoral drubbing this week, and as a result, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in serious trouble. Donald Trump just defended him, but then in a strange aside seemed to suggest he’s vulnerable. Meanwhile, Republicans and Trump allies really have their knives out for Hegseth, and the campaign to remove him appears serious. He even faces an impeachment vote next week.

But we want to get into what the Democratic Congress can really do about Hegseth’s disastrous reign. So we’re talking to Congressman Adam Smith of Washington State, the incoming chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Congressman, thanks so much for coming on.

Adam Smith: Well, thanks for having me, Greg. It’s always a pleasure.

Sargent: So, on Hegseth’s tenuous position, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl spoke to the president and reported Thursday that Trump said, “I have every intention to keep him.”

But Trump said people unhappy with Hegseth aren’t contacting him, saying, “I get these calls about him. I don’t understand why.”

And Trump even admitted it would be easier to confirm a new defense secretary before Dems control the Senate next year.

Congressman, this is how Trump turns on people, with talk like this. You’ve been around the Pentagon a long time. How do you read it?

Smith: I think it’s 50-50 that Trump does get rid of Hegseth for the reasons you stated. And also because the Iran war has been a complete disaster. Trump needs a fall guy. And we all know Trump’s not going to take personal responsibility for it.

So Hegseth would be convenient, and deservedly so. Hegseth was a cheerleader for this and a lot of the disastrous decisions that have been made going into it, Hegseth has been right in the middle of. So I think that’s a distinct possibility.

The other thing to weigh here is that on Wednesday the motion by Congressman Massie is ripe for a vote. And by every estimation, it will pass and he will be impeached. And off that goes to the Senate. Then the Senate is legally required to spend all of their time dealing with that until it’s done with.

Sargent: That’s going to be quite a scene. And MS NOW reports that Trump has been asking allies what they think about Hegseth, and some of them are pushing for a replacement. One official says, “There’s a lot of people who want his scalp, and they smell blood in the water.”

This looks real to me, Congressman. What are you hearing from inside the Pentagon? Is there consternation?

Smith: Yeah, well, we don’t hear a lot from inside the Pentagon. I can tell you, from inside the military more broadly, yes. There are people who have been concerned with the way Pete Hegseth has been running the department. And it comes down to politicization of it, first of all.

And second of all, it’s become so much about personality. Look, there is a professionalism within the military. And that’s not that there aren’t people who serve in the military who don’t have strong political views one way or the other. There certainly are. But they’ve always put those aside in favor of the job, the mission, and working together.

Pete Hegseth has not done that. I mean, he’s had those two, you know, ridiculous forums where he brought every flag officer together to give a pep rally of sorts, in which he seems to be obsessed with physical appearance more than with actual results.

We’ve had the firings that, from what we’ve heard, in many instances people have no idea why they happened. Hegseth is the first secretary of defense ever to directly involve himself in mid-level promotion decisions, you know, to go in and cross off names.

So all of that, I think, has had a very negative effect on morale within the Pentagon. And look, none of this is to say that there aren’t some people, I’m sure, in the military who love Hegseth and love what he does. But dissatisfaction within the Pentagon about his leadership is high, from what we have heard, or what we’ve been told.

Sargent: I’m sure it is. I’m sure there would be a lot of people who’d like to see him go.

The Iran war has cost $47 billion so far. Trump is still talking about a major attack. Have you been briefed on what the attack is? Senator Murphy says it’s “insane.” Is he right?

Smith: Yeah, I mean, look, they haven’t briefed us consistently on this from the very start. They have been doing attacks in the last few days, last few weeks.

What isn’t widely understood is, for months now, we have been engaged in a major military operation to secure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, yeah, we’re up close to, like, 80 percent of traffic of what was there before the war. But it’s costing us an enormous amount of money to protect those ships coming through, and to bomb potential missile launchers and missiles that Iran’s trying to build. So it’s become very, very expensive.

Sargent: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because it seems like there’s a vulnerable pressure point here for Democrats going forward. How much are we talking about? How much is being spent just to escort these ships out of the strait?

Smith: I don’t know exactly, because they won’t report it. And that’s the lack of transparency we’re talking about, and the lack of information that Hegseth just isn’t providing to us. But you see the dollars and the figures adding up, and it is definitely having a huge impact on how the Pentagon pays for everything else.

And also, where does it end? Iran does not appear to be interested in giving up anytime soon. So how long can we keep this up? And this isn’t even talking about all the bases that we’ve had damaged and destroyed in the Middle East, which are not calculated in that $47 billion, by the way.

Sargent: Do you think that there’s a massive cost here that’s being buried?

Smith: Yeah, no question. I mean, the equipment that has been destroyed and the bases that have been destroyed have not been calculated into that cost. That’s just what we’ve spent.

Sargent: Democrats are going to have to get that information, right?

Smith: Yeah, that’s going to be one of our big pushes, is to get some transparency and get some information provided.

Sargent: So how are Democrats going to stop this war? Is there a coming point at which they’ll need money and can be defunded there?

Smith: There’s no easy way to do it, because Trump keeps robbing every account he can rob to keep funding it and keep moving it forward. What we will do is we will vote resoundingly to end the war. We will vote to cut off all funds that go to the war. But remember, he will still be president. He will still have veto power.

I think the war can be stopped if we can persuade a number of Republicans. We could conceivably get a two-thirds majority to do this. And maybe Trump finally wakes up and starts caring about what people think instead of just doing things on a whim. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

But the other part of this is, we have to end the war, but to end the war, we have to admit something that we’re not going to want to admit. We lost. Iran will be in a stronger position when this war is over than they were when it started. And we will be in a weaker position. And that’s just baked into the cake at this point.

There’s no fixing that. And historically, we stayed in Vietnam too long, we stayed in Afghanistan too long. And part of the reason was, well, we don’t want to admit that we lost.

Sargent: Trump certainly doesn’t. So just for clarification, you think that Democrats in both houses next year will pass a measure which cuts off funding, in the sense that it forbids funding for the Iran war?

Smith: Absolutely. I think it’ll be one of the first things we do, and strongest things that we should do.

Sargent: And then I think there is a case to be made for then trying to get some Republican support to override the inevitable veto. But this will be a bill, if I understand you correctly, which forbids the use of any funding for this war.

Smith: Yeah. That would be the plan. And obviously, look, the legal language and the loopholes and the ways that Trump can sort of jump out of it, those will all continue to be challenges. But yeah, the war has been a disaster. It needs to end.

But a lot of the damage has been done. It’s not like we end the war and everything goes back to normal. Another thing that we need to really push is diplomacy. I mean, right now, Turkey, Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran are talking. Because this, it’s horrible for us. It’s horrible for much of the country. But it’s really horrible for the people in the Middle East who are having to endure this constant and spreading war.

Sargent: I think there’s a scenario you can envision that looks a little something like this. Maybe you pass this thing out of both houses. You even get a couple of Republicans, I don’t know, in the House, maybe, although all that’s left is the really hardcore people at this point on the Republican side.

But you pass it and it cuts off funding, Trump vetoes. Maybe you go to Republicans and say, why don’t you guys go to the president and tell him that you’re going to vote for this thing unless he exits it quietly, or give him a way out, give him an off-ramp, right? Is there a scenario like that? I mean, you’re a veteran of this stuff.

Smith: That should be happening right now. There should be some kind of a negotiation happening. This is not going to be easy for us to get out of.

Sargent: So I want to ask you about a few things that need to be investigated. The Pentagon hasn’t released the investigation into the U.S. bombing of the girls’ school in Iran, which killed dozens and dozens of kids. What’s the Armed Services Committee going to do next year to get that?

Smith: Yeah, we will continue to put pressure on them to release it. We’ve been doing that in a bipartisan way, and thus far they have rejected doing that, which is a huge challenge.

Sargent: Subpoenas?

Smith: Yeah, potentially. But yeah, we can subpoena them, we can hold them in contempt. The report should be released. I mean, it’s been nine months now.

Sargent: There’s a strong case to be made to Republicans in Congress who have called for it: Well, OK, you want the report, you say you want the report. Well, join us in supporting a subpoena of it, right?

Smith: Yeah, we will try that, to be sure. Look, one of the things that’s going to be really hard for all of us to deal with is, we’ve taken back Congress, certainly, but Trump is still president.

The executive still has a lot of power. Trump ignores Congress. Trump ignores the courts. This is going to be a very, very difficult fight, and we’re going to have to consistently push to try to get some of the changes that we want.

Sargent: Well, that’s where defunding comes in, I think. My sense is that Democrats are going to have to get a little more comfortable than they are usually with using the defunding lever. Because this is a lawless president. If there’s ever a case for using that defunding pressure to force lawful behavior, this is it.

Smith: Sure, but we do have to be careful. You’re talking about defunding the Pentagon?

Sargent: No, more targeted. More targeted things. Like, I think the start would be for both houses to cut off all funding for the war, and then maybe start to slightly escalate.

Smith: Yeah, no, I think that’s probably a good place to start.

Sargent: Well, the U.S. continues to kill people in boat strikes in the Caribbean. The last one was on October 4. Well over 200 people have been killed at this point. Little to no evidence is being released that these are even drug smugglers.

You’ve criticized this, other Dems have criticized this. Now you’re going to have power. Is there going to be a deep and serious investigation here that gets to the bottom of how this bombing campaign came into existence? Who pushed it, who authorized it, who resisted, what’s the evidence, so forth?

Smith: Yes, we are going to attempt to do that. Absolutely.

Sargent: Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? What do you try to establish in this?

Smith: Well, I mean, I think we want to establish the justification for it. And we’re going to want to bring in people who have made decisions around it, just like you described, and get some explanation. But crucially, Where is it going? What’s it trying to accomplish? What’s going to happen here going forward into the future?

Sargent: Right. And is defunding these strikes an option? I mean, let’s say they come back with—

Smith: Yes.

Sargent: OK, what would have to happen for that step to be taken?

Smith: The same thing, I think, as on the war in Iran. We have to pass, no fund is authorized for boat strikes in Latin America. And then we’d have to face the president’s veto.

And I mean, look, before we get into all of that, I think there is going to be a legitimate effort on our part to say, hey, can we do this the easy way? Can you change these policies that are manifestly unpopular? Can you stop the war, stop the boat strikes, and move in a different direction? While at the same time being prepared to use those stronger levers that you described.

Sargent: I do want to ask you a little bit more about these stronger levers. The administration’s going to defy your subpoenas. So you’re going to subpoena people to appear and discuss the boat strikes. You’re going to subpoena people to release or discuss the report on the bombing of the girls’ school.

Trump’s going to tell people not to testify. This is my speculation, but it seems reasonable to expect that there’s going to be intense obstruction. They’re going to throw subpoenas in the garbage.

There will have to be, in a general sense, a little more of a comfort level, I think, about using the defunding lever. I’m wondering if you could just kind of talk about whether you think Democrats have to get to that point a little bit.

Smith: Well, we do. I mean, as I said, we need defense money, and pass legislation that says, no funding shall go to these particular purposes. And we’ll have to have that fight. Look, it’s going to be an ugly fight between Congress and the executive branch for the next two years. There’s no question about that.

Sargent: How far do you think you’re going to get? Do you think you can get that report on the girls’ school released? Do you think you’re going to be able to stop the boat strikes? Will you stop the war?

Smith: Look, I really don’t know. I mean, and if I said I knew—anyone who says they know, it’s just—we are headed into uncharted territory here. The Trump presidency is absolutely unprecedented. He is completely unresponsive in a way that no other president has been, even after the shellacking that they took in the election.

I mean, you saw Clinton when he lost in the midterms in ‘94, he pivoted. You saw Bush even pivot after losing in 2006, certainly saw Obama pivot after we lost in 2010. What’s Trump going to do? It’s unprecedented. So we’ve got to try to figure out what he’s going to do. And, you know, so it’s going to be a major challenge.

Sargent: I do wonder whether the war can actually be defunded successfully here, or whether it’s going to actually have to come to that.

Smith: Yeah. No, look, the one thing I hope people understand is, the damage that Trump has done is not easy to unravel. Because even if you sort of dig down a little bit on what ending the war means, you know, we pull out, we pull back, what happens then? That’s why I think the diplomatic element, the peace negotiations, are such a crucial part of this. But it’s going to be a challenge.

Sargent: Do you think that if it actually comes to a defunding fight, like if everything you’ve tried has failed and you vote to cut off funding for the war, do you think the leadership will be supportive of that, the Democratic leadership in Congress?

Smith: Yes.

Sargent: Do you have, like, special assurance of that, or is it just speculation?

Smith: I think ending the war is one of our central pledges in this election.

Sargent: Yeah, it has to be done. It would be a catastrophe if Democrats punted on that, don’t you think?

Smith: Absolutely. Yeah. But again, the problems are complicated. You know, Trump has dragged us into a conflict that’s going to be problematic.

Sargent: Yes, it looks that way. You came out for impeachment of Donald Trump the other day. You want to just make your case?

Smith: Yeah, look, I mean, he’s out of control. He’s not a normal president. What he’s doing is not normal. He’s incredibly dangerous. He has defied over 250 different court rulings. He ignores Congress. He is corrupt beyond imagination, enriching himself, raffling off pardons, the whole Bitcoin stuff, his family.

So all of that is terrible. But the bottom line is, as long as he’s president, we can’t really trust that he’s not going to do even more incredibly damaging things. So that’s the big concern.

Now look, I’m mindful of the fact that a lot of our new members in the House are going to come from districts that don’t want impeachment. So we’re going to have to have this conversation about what’s best for our caucus. And I will follow our leadership. I’m not going to try to undermine them.

I think we need to try to have a cohesive—unity is an overstated way of putting it—but we’re going to have right around 260 members in the House. Getting some sort of cohesive agreement on where to go is a key part of this.

Sargent: I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, Congressman. Let me just ask you, speaking about all these outer-tier members, these members from districts that Trump carried by eight, nine, 10 points, do you think at the end of the day they will be willing to support whatever it takes to end the war?

Smith: I don’t know. I don’t think they know. I mean, look, how to put this exactly? This election was primarily about, well, a couple different things. One, how terrible Trump is. His policies, certainly, but also just his general demeanor and attitude.

We had candidates all across the country who were just decent people, who said, enough of this nastiness. You know, let’s get back to working with our neighbors, trying to figure out how to make things work better.

And then there were Trump’s policies, the tariffs, the immigration crackdown, the war in Iran and huge feeling amongst the American people that life in America fundamentally isn’t fair. And so you could go out there on the stump and you could say, I’m a farmer, I’m a veteran, I’m a teacher, I understand our community, I’m with you, I’m going to help you, I’m going to help protect you. But what does that mean in terms of policy?

We’re $39 trillion in debt. Yeah, we need to get rid of the Medicaid cuts. We need to get rid of the Affordable Care Act cuts, a lot of other cuts. How’s it going to be paid for? Are people in favor of the tax increases that are going to be necessary to get us there? How are we going to accomplish those things, given the hole that has been dug? Certainly by Trump, but even before Trump, we just put ourselves in a weaker position that made the whole thing more difficult.

Sargent: Are there clawback options that you think should be exercised to try to fund the restoration of Medicaid and stuff?

Smith: Yeah. I think we should repeal the entire One Big Beautiful Bill, which means we should put taxes out there. But we have to, I believe, as Democrats, make the case that tax increases are not always bad. All right? If we can’t make that case, then we’re going to have a difficult time delivering on our promises in terms of how to help people.

Now, and part of that is all the billionaires and multimillionaires, all the money that has gone there instead of being available for the programs we need. But those things are going to be difficult. And like I said, I think the people who run for office, they’re great people and everything, but the actual legislative solutions are going to be a lot harder.

Sargent: It certainly is going to be extremely challenging and extremely tense stuff. Congressman Adam Smith, thank you so much for coming on with us. Great stuff. We really appreciate it.

Smith: Thanks, Greg. Thanks for the chance.

Wild Horse Nine, McDonagh’s fifth and most recent feature film, is structured a lot like In Bruges. Both center on two men wandering through an exotic locale, largely unimpressed, frustrated by one another and consumed by regret. The order to kill or be killed forces one of them to choose between personal loyalty and professional duty. For the men of In Bruges, this duty is to the ethical code of the hit man. In Wild Horse Nine, contract killers have been replaced by CIA agents, glorified mercenaries who are bound to protect not democracy so much as American interests.

Wild Horse Nine isn’t just built like a McDonagh movie: It sounds and thinks like one too. Having started his career as a playwright with The Beauty Queen of Lehane and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, McDonagh still writes the kind of dialogue—witty, too witty at times—meant to be played to the back row. The billboards in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri constitute a near-haiku of minimalist free verse: Raped while dying / And still no arrests? / How come, Chief Willoughby? In response to his wife’s postcoital dirty talk in that movie, Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) jokes that he thinks he’s heard that line in a Shakespeare play. “You dummy. It’s Oscar Wilde,” his wife (Abbie Cornish) flirts back.

It is that tension between sweeping cinematic vistas and peculiar, theatrical language that produces McDonagh’s signature effect: pleasing, jarring, a bit off kilter. To watch these actors proclaim their odd thoughts, impeccably expressed while roaming the dusty Midwest or the streets of a medieval city or the vividly saturated Irish coast is to recall how all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players (hint: not Oscar Wilde this time).

In Wild Horse Nine, set in the early 1970s in the wake of a string of dubious ops, CIA agents Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell) are invaders, colonizers, sowers of chaos and violence across the globe and even, we discover, at home. Are these men deserving of their outsize influence, deputized, as they are, by the U.S. government? Not at all. They only approach something like worthiness once they realize they should never have had such power in the first place.

The result is a film more nuanced in its understanding of American exceptionalism than Three Billboards, more political than In Bruges, and just as beautifully lonely as The Banshees of Inisherin. Then again, as Lee half-heartedly tells his friend, “It’s lonely everywhere if you’re gonna die, right?” And if there’s one way we know for sure we are in a McDonagh story, be it a play or a film, it is that death is waiting in the wings.

The main action of Wild Horse Nine takes place on Easter Island. The Moai statues feel tailor-made for an auteur obsessed with dismemberment as a metaphor, providing an immediate dose of violence while promising more bloodshed to come. Anywhere from 500 to 800 years old, the Moai direct stony glares at tourists, but Lee and Chris are not cowed; they irreverently refer to them as the “big heads.”

This odd couple has landed here because Chris said he wanted to see the Moai before he died. He doesn’t remember this wish, though Chris, suffering from cancer-induced dementia, is liable to forget he is dying at all. What Chris knows, and what he has been letting slip in these final days, might get him killed before his illness finishes him. At the very least, his insensitivity will tank his chances at an Easter Island hookup.

Though Chris is the one on a journey, stricken with guilt at the end of his life—for all the deaths he has caused or for which he has been in the “general area”—Lee is the one with a choice to make. Will he murder his friend because he has asked him to do so before his illness becomes untenable, or will he murder his friend because his boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi), has asked him to? “I wish I could die knowing I could trust you,” Chris remarks. It is an impossible dilemma, patently absurd, which is to say, textbook McDonagh: Silly moments are tainted with dread, and doom and death are shot through with silliness.

Chris poses a special threat to the agency because he has chosen to write a memoir, which would, presumably, cover his involvement with the agency-directed hit of America’s thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. “How’re you gonna write that memoir if you can’t remember anything?” Lee inquires. Chris, unbothered, decides to begin his book with a discussion of a dinosaur afterlife, asking Chris, “Didn’t they have, like, vegetarian dinosaurs?” (Wild Horse Nine, keeping company with the 2011 The Tree of Life and this summer’s The End of Oak Street, proves that, when one’s own past proves too burdensome, dinosaurs have the power to bridge the gap between right now and back then, our personal traumas and our shared cultural memories.)

The first third of the film feels light, almost surface-level, as characters banter about beautiful women, unfaithful wives, and which countries have the best cheese (the gayest countries, Chris insists). It makes sense that, in a film about state secrets, talking in code, and cognitive decline, we might feel, as viewers, that something is being redacted. But, as MJ turns the screws on Lee and Chris decides he actually wants to die in, in his words, “Venice, Italy,” the film becomes darker and more claustrophobic. At a bar, Chris tells the two Chilean students they have befriended (Mariana di Girolamo, Ailín Salas) not to go back to their country ahead of what will be the 1973 Chilean coup. He details the horrors to be inflicted on scores of young leftists, their friends and family, and warns them, “Never let them get you in the car,” advising her, instead, to “die in the street.” The allusion to this unspeakable violation earns him a slap across the face, though this warning later proves prescient and invaluable.

While McDonagh’s previous film, The Banshees of Inisherin, is as sweeping as a fairytale, Wild Horse Nine feels more like a play, with its limited settings: a nondescript hotel room, a CIA office, the tacky ordinariness of a 1970s home. It is the disembodied Moai, looking on in judgment, that provide the film’s most compelling visual hook, together with a Kodak Ektachrome–inspired aesthetic. Lee and Chris, dressed in muddy oranges, yellows, and browns, clash with the panoramic swaths of clear blues and greens of Easter Island. The film’s evocatively dated look can be attributed, first, to cinematographer (and regular McDonagh collaborator) Ben Davis, who filmed in a combination of digital and 16mm/super-8 film, and to the makeup team, who curated the delightfully clownish makeup looks for Lee’s wife, Marge (Parker Posey).

And, like a play, Wild Horse Nine relies on its performers above all, with long takes and even longer monologues, pronounced against relatively blank staging. Rockwell, a McDonagh regular, turns in a heartfelt performance, cranky but sincere, and plays well with Parker Posey (another White Lotus alum), who executes her small, messy performance with precision. Buscemi is appropriately menacing, though he is even better playing his character’s weaselly vices for comic purposes. But the film belongs to John Malkovich, with his odd speech cadences, his unnerving glare, and his ability to shift, seamlessly, from levity to murderous violence.

One of the most memorable moments in the soundtrack, played as the two men drive across Easter Island, is Judy Collins’s sweet, melancholy 1967 rendition of “Both Sides Now.” “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” she sings, but it is “life’s illusions” she recalls. For most of Chris’s career, he has forced himself to believe, as Lee puts it, that “sometimes [you] gotta do a terrible thing for the greater good.” But, as the end of his life draws near, he sees from the other side. He advises his young, naïve friend: “Any time you see a man in uniform … kill him.”

So much for bothsidesism. Spoken by a man seeking to undo all that he has set in motion, Chris’s words are not enough to change the course of history, and he knows it. But as a piece of art, Wild Horse Nine is a powerful work of cinematic intelligence, McDonagh having given us a period piece that feels all too much of the present.

Kansas must be exhausted. It swung left 21.06 points Tuesday. As everyone now knows, the state elected Adam Hamilton, a recent Democratic convert and founding pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country, as its first Democratic U.S. senator since 1932. But it also appears to have chosen Cindy Holscher, an economic populist, as governor. Democrats picked up 20 seats in the statehouse, breaking the 16-year-old veto-proof Republican supermajority.

Giving birth to something new is always a bloodbath. So right now, the state is postpartum.

At the same time, Kansas likes a change. The state was forged in rebellion, and Kansans regularly break hard against anyone who’s exploiting them. Thomas Frank’s bellwether 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? is misremembered as a cautionary tale of a moderate state that got waylaid by conservative Christianity. It’s really about a state that sacrificed its native radicalism to culture wars and trickle-down economics.

But repressed radicalism returns, evidently. As the home of Appeal to Reason (1895–1922), the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in American history, Kansas is also the birthplace of campaigns against oligarchs. In the 1890s, popular fury at railroads, banks, and grain-elevator operators drove the founding of the state’s Farmers’ Alliance and People’s Party. A version of this platform is what Holscher, the granddaughter of tenant farmers, campaigned on. She called for a complete moratorium on data centers, and an end to tariffs and the war in Iran, which have walloped the state’s farmers who risk bankruptcy as prices for fuel, fertilizer, and machine parts surge.

The same don’t-tread-on-me-ism extends to reproductive health in Kansas. In 2022, just after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansans soundly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to ban abortion. Hamilton, who once described himself as “pro-life with a heavy heart,” is now explicitly pro-choice. “I acknowledge there is a moral tension surrounding the topic of abortion,” he has said, “but I do not believe that politicians should be making these decisions for women.” Last week, Rob Schenk, a former Operation Rescue leader and onetime anti-abortion militant in Kansas, endorsed Hamilton and praised his pro-choice views in the pages of Mother Jones. (Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a frequent contributor to Appeal to Reason.)

Kansas Republicans were historically progressive or moderate, and they regularly supported the state’s many Democratic governors. But in the 1970s, the rich Koch network, which is headquartered in Wichita, began amassing right-wing influence. In 2012, the network helped oust moderate legislators in the state, and far-right Senator Sam Brownback, the Kochs’ made man, then pushed for deep tax cuts, notably to education. These cuts were so deep that the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state had failed in its legal duty to educate children.

In 2017, over Brownback’s veto, Republicans finally voted with Democrats to roll back the cuts. In 2018, four GOP legislators even defected to the Democrats, saying their party had become too complicit with Donald Trump. “Brownback” became shorthand for the MAGA catastrophe. During this election season, incumbent Democratic Governor Laura Kelly campaigned for Holscher, warning that her Republican opponent in the race, Ty Masterson, would take Kansas “back to Brownback.”

And then there’s Kansas’s origin story, perhaps the most vivid in the nation. Bleeding Kansas earned its moniker in 1854 when 5,000 pro-slavery terrorists from Missouri invaded the territory, brandishing Bowie fighting blades expressly designed for concussive chops and deep thrusts. They menaced voters at the polls, hijacked elections, and installed themselves in an illegitimate, pro-slavery legislature.

But after the Border Ruffians sacked Lawrence, which had been founded by abolitionists, Free-State Kansans rallied, notably John Brown and his sons, who slashed up five pro-slavery settlers with broadswords in May 1856. Kansas entered the union as a free state in 1861, pledged to the party of Lincoln. To go full wonk on you, Kansas voters have never, in the entire history of the state, elected a Democrat to a full Senate term by popular vote who didn’t already hold the seat by appointment of the governor. Senator-elect Adam Hamilton is the first Kansas Democrat to win a full term from scratch, via the popular ballot, without the benefit of incumbency by prior appointment.

For most of Tuesday night, Hamilton led in unofficial counts against the Republican incumbent Roger Marshall (an anti-abortion obstetrician who once sued 700 of his female patients for unpaid debts at 18 percent interest and had 81 of them arrested), but his lead shrank as the night wore on. When the AP called the race, Hamilton had 51 percent to Marshall’s 45 percent. “This election is a rebuke of unkindness and cruelty in Washington,” Hamilton said in his acceptance speech in Overland Park.

The election was also a rebuke of the party that has made unkindness and cruelty its stock-in-trade. Old habits die hard, party affiliations too. Just after his victory was announced, Hamilton claimed that “hundreds of thousands of Republicans” had voted for him. The numbers aren’t in yet, but this is not out of the question.

Thomas Frank is circumspect. He’s wary of Democrats. “It’s a whole lot better than Brownbackism or Trumpism, of course,” he told me. “And it was nice to see Marshall’s effort to use the culture wars to cancel people’s economic anxieties—the classic Kansas pattern—fail so completely.”

Hamilton, who studied at the Divinity School at Southern Methodist University, is about to join quite a club of freshman senators in D.C. He and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, senator-elect from Texas, will have a lot to talk about. Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, another religious man (he identifies as a “practicing Muslim”) with advanced degrees, will surely have something to add. But if the cool leftists in Congress ever privately doubt whether Hamilton, with his Ned Flanders–like affect, is rad enough to hang with them, they should fire up “Jesus, Protest, and Repentance,” the 2020 sermon Hamilton gave a few days after the murder of George Floyd.

Hamilton’s tone is mild, but his message is—well, it falls shy of John Brown, but it might have worked as an op-ed in Appeal to Reason. Expressing compassion for even the rowdiest protesters, Hamilton cites Dr. King: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” He says Colin Kaepernick was right, and that Christians must be committed to racial justice. He also shows off an impressive memento: the 1942 rookie card for Satchel Paige, the pride of Kansas City.

This is the sermon that Vice President JD Vance dragged incoherently in September, as he stumped for Marshall. Hamilton, Vance said, believes “it’s a sin to be white and a sin to raise cattle and eat meat.” Vance was bluffing as usual. But Kansans paid him no mind. And a few weeks later they voted Marshall, and MAGA, down.

The result, Trump insisted, wasn’t “a hit on me.” He conceded that the war with Iran played a part in the GOP’s drubbing, reasonable man that he is, but then minimized its role as much as possible.

The war “drove the gasoline up a little bit,” he granted, but then added, without evidence, that this was merely in the “short term.” Soon-to-be-former House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, opted for an even more fatalistic interpretation, saying Republicans would have had to “defy more than a century of midterm history” to hold the House. (It is true that the party that takes the White House tends to fare poorly in the subsequent midterms, but there is an appreciable difference between “faring poorly” and experiencing, as outgoing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the election, “an extinction-level event.” )

At any rate, the subtext was clear: Neither Trump nor MAGA had been rejected on any fundamental level. The outcome was either the will of history, per Johnson, or, per Trump, an example of voters throwing a tantrum in response to a supposedly temporary inconvenience. Either way, both implied, the electorate would soon return to MAGA Republicans.

Democrats, of course, were telling a different story: By their reckoning, the election showed that American voters had decisively and definitively rejected Trump and MAGA, period. There would be no going back.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is all but certain to soon become the first Black speaker of the House in U.S. history, called the results “a stunning rebuke for MAGA extremism.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is likely to once again be master of the Senate, this time at the head of a much larger caucus than during the Biden years, declared that “the days of Trump’s supplicant Senate are over.” And Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who won a smashing reelection and is widely seen as a potential 2028 front-runner, said that “in sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump.”

Now, at this point, you might expect me to adjudicate which one of these narratives is “correct.” But the truth about elections—and especially wave elections—is that their results can never be reduced into a single cause. Millions of people across a vast continent voted; no individual explanation could possibly encompass all of their motivations. So, yes, voters gave the GOP a shellacking because they were furious about gas prices and inflation. And, yes, voters gave the GOP a thumpin’ because they were sick and tired of MAGA’s lawlessness, authoritarianism, and corruption.

This may sound vexing, and I’m sure that pundits and anxious Democratic backbenchers will be providing gossip rags like Axios with endless “Dems in disarray” content as they try to navigate between these two narrative shoals. But I have good news for Democrats, if they’re willing to listen. And it comes from that most unlikely of sources, at least as far as good news is concerned: Hannah Arendt.

In the Trump era, Arendt has been quoted endlessly on the subject of political lying, which is fair enough; no one has written about the subject with more intelligence or contempt. But in “Truth and Politics,” an essay she published in The New Yorker in 1967, she explained why these two human concepts—the truth and politics—are actually frenemies at best. The gist of her argument was that politics is a realm where opinion and emotion, and not facts, reign supreme.

Naturally, that doesn’t mean it’s OK to straight-up lie. It simply means that any clear-eyed politician has to understand that their job is to take the facts and create a story about what they mean. As she put it, “Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth.”

For Arendt, facts and opinions, “though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm.” A fact (her example is Germany’s invasion of Belgium in August 1914) “acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context.” Whoever reports what happened, she wrote, “always tells a story, and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly comprehensible meaning.”

It’s nicer to think, of course, that politics is simply about presenting people with empirical observations and allowing them to use their own powers of reason to draw the right conclusions. But Arendt warns, correctly, that when left on their own, “the mere telling of facts” results in “no action whatever; it even tends, under normal circumstances, toward the acceptance of things as they are.” Facts without narrative create confusion, paralysis, or even fatalism. It’s only when they’re used to tell a fact-based story that collective action becomes possible. It may be true that, as the far right likes to chortle, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But that’s only because facts don’t care about anything. Facts don’t do anything. They have no agency; they’re just facts.

But when people, with all their feelings and opinions and capacity for action, are empowered with a fact-based story, it turns out that facts and feelings can get along very well indeed.

What does that mean, translated from Arendt-speak to the grubby language of partisan politics? It means that Democrats not only do not have to choose between the two competing narratives to “explain” the election but that they should positively refuse to do so. In the name of offering a story that provides that “interpretive context” Arendt calls for, Democrats can—and, indeed, as politicians, must—braid facts from both of these narratives together into a story of their own making and for their own purposes.

There’s one story that does this better than any other: anti-corruption. To many voters, it is the explanation for why gas costs so much; why inflation endures; why education, housing, and health care have become so expensive; and especially why they feel like they can’t get ahead. In an NBC News exit poll, 90 percent said government corruption was a crucial or major factor in their vote. And in Trump, they see corruption incarnate: CBS News, meanwhile, found that about six in 10 voters think Trump puts his own personal interests over the country’s.

Many of the Democratic Party’s most respected strategists have been saying as much already. “The candidates who have been most successful are the ones who have tied the cost of corruption to the cost of living,” Celinda Lake told The Christian Science Monitor last week. And Jesse Ferguson summed up the shift for Politico: “Democrats used to talk about corruption as a crime. Now corruption is the explanation for costs.”

There’s a recent international example of this approach working—spectacularly—as well. After more than 15 years of Viktor Orbán’s kleptocratic authoritarianism, Hungarian voters voted earlier this year in overwhelming numbers for Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which ran a campaign that, as one analysis put it, set out to negate “Orbán’s populist, anti-elitist politics by focusing on corruption.” Magyar didn’t ask Hungarians to choose between their democracy and “kitchen-table” issues. He told them they were one and the same, and the voters agreed.

That is what Arendt meant when she argued that organizing people together to change the world—that is to say, doing politics—requires an approach that rejects outright lying while also avoiding a complacent expectation that “the truth” will reveal itself for voters to follow. The narrative wars have begun. If Democrats are smart, they’ll opt for storytelling instead.

The flashiest contest this cycle certainly wasn’t the race for New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district, spanning most of the southern part of the state. And yet it has a few features that showcase the strength of a blue tsunami that stretched well beyond national headlines. For years, the district was represented nationally by a relatively moderate Republican. Then, in 2018, it flipped to Democrat Jeff Van Drew. The next year, Van Drew became a Republican and pledged his “undying support” to President Trump. The change seemed to track with the district’s rightward-shifting politics. Van Drew was reelected by a 17-point margin in 2024, when New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district swung for Trump by 15 points. With that history, he seemed poised to sail to a comfy reelection this year. Last month, nevertheless, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, the DCCC, added the race to its “districts in play” list and poured in $1.5 million. Van Drew was still expected to easily best his Democratic challenger, Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock. Instead, he lost by three points.

How did the upset happen, and did it have anything to do with the much-maligned data center being built in the heart of the district? Behind thick walls, the concrete firm Northeast Precast and DataOne Vineland—the local subsidiary of a European company—is erecting an AI data center for Nebius, a so-called “neocloud” provider responsible for designing the facility, sourcing the chips, and stewarding its racks and servers. Per the terms of a deal worth up to $19 billion, the end buyer of DataOne Vineland’s computing power will be Microsoft. As I wrote this summer, the project has attracted intense opposition from Cumberland County residents, who have turned up by the hundreds to newly rowdy City Council and planning meetings.

“I think everyone was kind of shocked,” said Matt Williams, a co-founder of SustainSJ, which has spearheaded local organizing against DataOne Vineland. In addition to Mullock’s surprise win against Van Drew, Democrats swept the sheriff’s and county commissioners’ race in Cumberland County, where the data center is located. “People just drew a hard line,” he said, and wanted change “regardless of political affiliation.” In the lead-up to Election Day, Williams said, he saw “Republicans for Mullock” signs dotting yards.

He’s hopeful that the blue wave will create a friendlier environment for the group’s ongoing fight against the data center. In August, an investigation by Floodlight News and The Guardian found that DataOne Vineland had been operating dozens of gas generators without permits from the state’s environmental regulator. New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection then issued a $1.1 million fine and demanded the facility apply for the necessary permits or cease operations by November 6. The project’s developers are contesting the fine, arguing that they don’t need permits. They’ve reportedly continued operating generators as they install gas fuel cells. In recent days, residents have reported that noise emanating from the site is louder than ever.

It’s not hard to connect Van Drew’s loss to residents’ unhappiness with the data center. One of the data center’s developers had called Van Drew’s support for the project “critical” to its being able to get off the ground. Its investors donated to his campaign. And while Van Drew eventually walked back his public support for the project, Mullock dinged him on the campaign trail over it. “My opponent has sold out South Jersey to data centers, to the war in Iran, to doubling our health insurance prices, all for a pathetic undying support to Donald Trump,” Mullock said in the opening statement of his debate with Van Drew last month.

Nationwide, data centers and broader debates around AI were a hot issue this cycle. All but one of the at least 41 local ballot questions to ban data centers and take away their tax breaks passed by healthy margins this election. In case the scale of voters’ repudiation didn’t land the first time: No fewer than 40 of 41 data center restrictions passed. Insurer Allianz now predicts that 47 gigawatts’ worth of planned data center projects are at risk from Democratic governors who’ve backed full or conditional moratoria. In Downe Township, which is also in Cumberland County, 87 percent of voters responded “no” to a nonbinding ballot question asking if they “support data centers” being built there. More than 100 New Jersey municipalities have already banned them.

Democrats looked to tap into that ire at the ballot box. The DCCC pushed for ads targeting Republicans’ records on data centers and AI in nearly half of the races it targeted. NJ-2 was not among them. Mullock certainly hasn’t been shy about where he stands on DataOne Vineland. “I feel really strongly that Vineland got duped and these people got left behind, and you have a company that’s clearly polluting the area and has been fined,” he told me. Yet while Mullock reasons that stance certainly helped win support in Cumberland County—where his vote share was strongest—he isn’t sure how much of a factor it was in his victory overall.

Mullock said the top question he got over the course of the campaign was, “Will you be a decent human being?” Affordability concerns, he believed, were a distant second. Many voters also complained about the Iran war. To the extent that data center fights contributed to his win, Mullock suspects it was thanks to the many issues wrapped up in them, including voters’ concerns about money in politics, corruption, how to regulate artificial intelligence, and the money and power concentrated in Big Tech. “It even gets to the president—his statements on not regulating AI, and the people he chooses to have sitting behind him at his inauguration,” Mullock told me, referencing the coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires who attended the event in 2024. “That says something. Clearly there was a rebuke.”

If these elections were a rebuke of Trump, they were also a referendum on the company he keeps. Just a few years ago, Silicon Valley executives cast themselves as do-gooder liberals who opposed Trump and cared about things like climate change. Just two years into those billionaires’ love affair with MAGA, polling has found that most voters think of tech CEOs as Republicans and of tech companies as the biggest corporate spenders on GOP campaigns. The party didn’t seem to benefit much politically from its associations with Silicon Valley this cycle. Exit polling shows voters trust Democrats more to handle the economy, foreign policy, health care, government corruption, and policies about transgender people. Data centers and AI weren’t top issues for voters on Tuesday, but 57 percent said those technologies will do more to hurt society than help. Seventy-six percent said they opposed building data centers in their communities. Despite the nearly $500 million Elon Musk poured into the midterms on behalf of Republicans, the party suffered some of its biggest losses in living memory.

Hyperscalers now have to reckon with the reputational consequences of having jumped into bed with Trump. Facing prospective material consequences, companies like OpenAI are scrambling to align their messaging with the new political reality. A post-midterms missive from OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane name-drops Franklin Delano Roosevelt and urges aspiring Democratic presidential candidates to embrace “an affirmative, big idea that puts people back in control—not by shielding them from AI but by helping them use it to reclaim agency over their lives.” Democrats may not be so easily convinced that OpenAI—whose president poured millions into MAGA Inc. and GOP candidates this cycle—has their best interest at heart.

As this week’s results show, Democrats may not need tech oligarchs on their side to win big. Centrists, by contrast, have been arguing that their party spent the Biden era being too tough on Big Tech—that overzealous antitrust enforcement, “faculty lounge populism,” and personal snubs had mistakenly alienated Democrats from corporate allies that had helped them win since the 1980s. A group funded by OpenAI—along with Amazon, a16z, and Flock Safety—has made the case that Democrats need to get back in Silicon Valley’s good graces. The Chamber of Progress’s Blue Horizon Project argued earlier this year that if the Democratic Party hopes to “rebuild our coalition and reclaim our legacy as the party of innovation,” it will have to “reset” its relationship with the technology sector.

After an election where Democrats secured historic margins while tearing into Big Tech, the Chamber of Progress has somewhat frantically contended that the election actually had very little to do with that. Like climate change, the group’s executive director, Adam Kovacevich, points out, data centers and AI in this election were what pollsters call a “low salience” issue, i.e., far down on their list of priorities. Data centers, though—which are broadly unpopular—do seem to be an uncomfortably loud and hyperlocal manifestation of lots of things voters care quite a lot about, including income and wealth distribution. The fact that tech industry spending has become so singularly focused on a uniquely resource-intensive model of machine learning development, moreover, has also given its executive a very different set of material interests than they had even during the Obama administration. In their endless hunt for land and electrons, hyperscalers like OpenAI have become fossil fuel–guzzling real estate developers demanding tax breaks and preferential regulatory treatment. It makes sense that their billionaire executives have embraced Republicans too.

Mullock, whose race received backing from the centrist Blue Dog PAC, strongly supports his new colleagues’ calls to subpoena Big Tech CEOs and data center developers. “When you have a president who’s saying that there are no guardrails—that they should come up with the guardrails themselves—that should be disturbing,” he said. And when it comes to AI, Mullock added, “we don’t have a full understanding of what could or could not happen. To me it’s common sense that our elected officials need to have a very clear understanding of where we stand.”

The question after this year’s midterms isn’t whether Democrats need to say nice things about Silicon Valley CEOs in order to win big majorities; clearly they don’t. The party will, however, have to figure out how to deliver for voters who see those executives’ data centers as big, ugly symbols of an economy that makes billionaires richer and their lives more expensive. Here’s hoping it can.

You can see that in progressive victories up and down the ballot across the country, including in the election of rank-and-file union members, not the lawyers or political nepobabies or children of wealth who usually occupy such seats.

“I think historically unions have backed Democrats and Republicans for a long time across the country,” said Neidi Dominguez, executive director of Organized Power In Numbers, a group that helped plan May Day demonstrations around the country this year. “But being backed by workers and then being a worker yourself is not the same thing.… They don’t need a staffer to give them a talking point about the power that it is to have a union and have collective power as a worker. That’s powerful.”

Of at least 17 union members likely to be sworn in as Democrats in Congress next year, 12 turned red districts blue. In Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, for example, firefighter Bob Brooks beat incumbent Republican Ryan Mackenzie by 12 points. “I’ve spoken with people across the Lehigh Valley throughout this campaign who are playing the game the best they can,” he said at his victory speech. “Working hard, punching the clock, doing everything right, and they’re still struggling to get ahead or just get by. They’re sick and tired of waking up every day and getting kicked in the teeth by a broken political system that has left them behind.”

He went through the laundry list of financial burdens crushing working families, but he didn’t just promise relief. He promised a change. “We aren’t going down there to try and piece things back together the way they were before,” he said. “We’re going down there to shake up the status quo, fight for working people, stop the bullshit, and build something better from the ashes.”

Across the border in Ohio, another union member, ironworker Brian Poindexter, beat Republican incumbent Max Miller in his 7th congressional district race. But the Rust Belt won’t be the only region to send workers and union members to Congress next year. New York State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, who joined a union when she started working for Columbia University and has said her union work helped get her into politics, carried New York’s heavily Democratic 7th district with more than 83 percent of the vote. Rebecca Cooke, a waitress and small-business owner who grew up on a dairy farm and started a nonprofit to help women entrepreneurs, is projected to win Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district by just over six points, defeating an extremely MAGA opponent. Trump won her district all three times he ran for president. In Texas’s 23rd district, which encompasses Uvalde, site of a tragic 2022 school shooting, former public school teacher Katy Padilla Stout is projected to win by eight points. Former smoke jumper Sam Forstag is also projected to win Montana’s new 1st congressional district by three points.

And, of course, in the closely watched Texas and Michigan Senate races, James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed were once union members. In Maine, fifth-generation logger Troy Jackson ended Republican Susan Collins’s three-decade career in Washington, D.C., likely defeating her by seven points. “If you’re watching this after getting home from a shift or sitting at the table wondering how you’re going to pay the next bill, I want you to hear something very clearly,” he said in his victory speech. “You are sending somebody to Washington who knows exactly what that feels like.”  

These working people also owe their victories to working people. Democrats won union and nonunion households alike, but they won households with at least two members overwhelmingly, 64 to 34 percent, according to exit polls. The party won every income level, including households making under $50,000 a year by 57 to 41 percent. When it comes to the education divide, the only group Republicans won a majority of were voters who had only a high school education. It was also a win for representation: About half the country is working class, but only 5 percent of members of Congress are.

As Brooks said, they ran not just to get things done—they ran to shake up the system, and the Democratic Party.

What all of these candidates have in common is that they promised to use their union histories to fight for working people in Washington. They said during their campaigns they want to raise wages and make health care more affordable for families. What helping working families means beyond that, exactly, may vary a bit. Valdez is a college-educated progressive in far-left New York City, while other members of this new working-people coalition are representing more moderate districts.

There’s some evidence their backgrounds will make a difference. “Working-class people face significant hurdles running for office, but when they win, they vote in more pro-worker ways than their upper-class counterparts, and use the rhetoric to match it,” said Todd Tucker, director of the industrial policy and trade program at the Roosevelt Institute. If they want to draft good policies, they should focus on hiring staff with the same priorities, he added.

The new union members will also be part of the larger Democratic Party that must decide how its new majorities—at least 54 seats in the Senate and 245 in the House, but with more wins possible—will govern. House Minority Leader and soon-to-be first Black House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries made conciliatory noises on Morning Joe Wednesday, promising to concentrate on affordability. But CNN is reporting that those close to him say he plans to go after CEOs and tax the rich, promising a new era of populism. “The American people are rightly frustrated. They want disruption, they want dramatic change,” Jeffries told CNN.

On that score, he is right. In almost every cycle since the Trump era began in 2016, voters have chosen change, even voting for Trump when they didn’t like or agree with him in 2024, in part because he kept promising to dismantle the system. The system they want dismantled is the one that feels unfair, the one that makes the American dream a broken promise, whoever is trying to achieve it and wherever they live.

Anger about the fundamental unfairness of the economy has been building for years, but voters have been dissatisfied with both parties on their ability to deliver. That’s where next year needs to be different if the Democratic Party wants to use its majority to make working people’s lives better.

There are a lot of policies that could help working people that Democrats have long said they support—like increasing the minimum wage and making it easier to join a union—that they’ve yet to get over the finish line, especially to improve wages. The new working-class members of Congress could make these policies priorities. “Wages are very real to them, and I do think there has been a lack of like real awareness that wages are part of the affordability equation,” said Celine McNicholas, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. 

The fact that these elected officials were in unions also means that they are used to organizing and working with other workers, said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard University School of Law. “Being in a union is a collective activity,” she said. “They are engaging with working people in a way that probably a lot of members of Congress don’t regularly.” Enhancing workers’ ability to join unions would also potentially increase the pool of union members who jump into elected office in the future.

There are changes set to happen next year, like reductions in Medicaid coverage and increases in health care premiums, that will need to be addressed as soon as possible. There are long-term increases in caregiving and education costs, too often left out of affordability discussions, but which people who are used to stretching a paycheck know are more immediate problems to be addressed.

Voters see these not as disparate evils, but a result of the overarching concentration of power at the top. “This is not just about us, like having a sort of silver-bullet policy or one thing, but we need to shift the dynamics of power and unionization and easing the path toward organizing workplaces as a way to really get at those deep structures of power,” said Kate Bahn, the chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a nonprofit research organization. “So when we take trends like AI being integrated into workplaces, or rising health care costs, and things like that, unions shape those dynamics, and so even if it’s a policy area outside of just labor law, having the presence of unions really changes those things.”

Mike Pierce, the executive director of Protect Borrowers, a debt research and advocacy group, also pointed to Talarico’s Senate campaign in Texas, during which he spoke about what it was like when he was younger and struggling with debt, including medical and student loan debt. As a result, he’s supported debt relief and been critical of big credit card companies and banks, he said. “Moving beyond labor priorities, there are economic priorities that these lawmakers share, along with this generation of economic populists that just got swept in, that’s everything from checking concentrated corporate power by taxing billionaires and big corporations,” Pierce said.

Dominguez pointed out that voters also want to see Democrats walk and chew gum at the same time. “People are really angry and really mad and really hurt because they’ve watched their neighbors be murdered by ICE or be kidnapped in the middle of the night,” she said. “Those are real, regular people that other regular working-class people know as their neighbors or co-workers, and so I also do think that people do expect Congress to hold this administration accountable.”

The blue wave this year was so big it likely swept up even more working-class candidates than were on the national radar, and it could create a Democratic Party with a mandate for big, structural change. The party also has to regain trust. McNicholas pointed out that next year will be the twentieth anniversary of when the current federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, was set. “You cannot ignore issues like a right to a union, basic standards like minimum wage,” she said. “Those can’t go decades and decades without any attention. That is political negligence.”

If Democrats don’t deliver, voters will want change again in two years. “The multiracial working class in this country has delivered for them,” Dominguez said. “They have to be cautious to not assume or see that as like, ‘Oh, finally the multiracial working-class is coming home to the Democrats.’ But rather, they’re voting for themselves and their neighbors and their co-workers, and they’re giving you a chance to do better than the other guys. But you better deliver.”

Democrats aren’t strangers to the oligarchy, especially in Silicon Valley, but lately even tech billionaires heavily favor Republicans, on whom oligarchs spent an awful lot of money only to see them lose big. At the moment, it looks as though Democrats spent more overall, because individual Democratic candidates outraised individual Republican candidates. (The final tally may tell a different story.) But oligarchs seldom give to individual candidates, because within a given cycle no donor may give more than $7000 to a particular candidate. For oligarchs, candidate contributions are a quaint petit bourgeois pastime (much like paying taxes). Your oligarch would much rather spend outside money—the “independent expenditures” that the Supreme Court pretends lie outside the control of candidates and parties—because there are no spending limits, and because it’s more strategic.

In the 2026 midterms, Republicans spent $360 million more outside money than Democrats. And yet they lost.

The outside spending vehicle that oligarchs love best is the super PAC. Looking just at super PACs, Republicans spent $670 million more than Democrats. Elon Musk alone spent at least $414 million on Republican super PACs (out of the $474 million that The New York Times calculates he dropped on the midterms overall). The final super PAC tally will likely show a much larger Republican advantage among super PACs and outside money generally. Yet the super PACs, which is to say the oligarchy, got beat.

Super PAC spending seldom gets beat. In 2024, everybody remembers that Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party outraised their Republican counterparts, and that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris astounded the world by raising $1 billion in three months. Yet Harris lost! Less-well remembered is that Republican super PACs outspent their Democratic counterparts to the tune of 65 percent to 29 percent. (My definition of “Democratic” and “Republican” super PACs includes PACs that officially only “lean” Democratic or Republican.) Similarly, in 2016, Hillary Clinton famously outraised Trump two to one. Yet Hillary lost! In that race, Republican super PACs outspent Democratic super PACs 57 percent to 41 percent.

Some might argue that the super PAC steamroller got beat in the 2018 midterms. Republican super PACs outspent Democratic ones 53 percent to 42 percent, and yet the Democrats regained a House majority. But the presidential party always loses some ground in a midterm election, and in the Senate that year Republicans held on to their majority and gained two seats. So it was really a tie. Before last week, this decade’s only true super PAC defeat was in 2020, when Republican super PACs outspent Democratic ones 56 percent to 43 percent, and yet Trump lost. But in that instance, it took a badly mishandled deadly pandemic to defeat the mighty super PACs.

This year, by contrast, all it took to beat the super PACs was having Trump back in the White House.

It would be inaccurate to say that money lost in 2026 because Democrats spent more ($5.5 billion) than Republicans ($5.12 billion), though, again, we don’t yet have a final tally. But oligarch money lost big. According to the nonprofit Open Secrets (on which I rely for most of the figures in this article), in the six Senate battleground states where Democrats have thus far won—Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas—“the more reliable predictor was candidate fundraising.” In all six, Open Secrets continued, “The candidate who raised more direct contributions defeated an opponent who often benefited from substantially greater outside support.” In other words, it wasn’t just ordinary voters who defeated the oligarchs; it was also those petit bourgeois direct contributors with whom no self-respecting oligarch would be caught dead.

In some of these races, it wasn’t just oligarch money that lost, but money, period. In Texas, where Elon Musk spent $224 million trying to elect the Republican crook Ken Paxton, Paxton had twice as much outside spending as the Democrat, James Talerico, and as a consequence, Paxton spent more overall. Yet Paxton lost. The same pattern held for the defeated Republican opponents of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Troy Jackson in Maine.

The oligarchs didn’t lose everywhere. Among billionaire candidates, the results were mixed. Governor JB Pritzker (net worth: $4.2 billion, per Forbes) won reelection in Illinois. Then again, Pritzker is a Democrat, and therefore suspect. More conventionally partisan oligarchs Vivek Ramaswamy (net worth: $2.3 billion, per Forbes) and Rick Jackson (net worth: $1 billion, per Forbes) lost their Republican bids for Ohio and Georgia governor, respectively.

The oligarchs scored a likely victory in California, where Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time five percent wealth tax, appears to be going down, with an incomplete tally of 55 percent to 45 percent. According to Politico, at least 30 California billionaires, primarily from tech, spent more than $293 million to defeat the measure. But let’s face it, Prop 40 was never a great idea.

A more worrisome oligarch victory is California’s likely passage of Proposition 42, which was intended to cancel Proposition 40 if it passed. Now that Proposition 40 hasn’t passed, Proposition 42 can still do damage by blocking much more modest taxes on “business holdings, intellectual property, and financial assets,” according to the nonprofit news website Cal Matters. Narrowly tailored wealth taxes are an accepted fact of daily life; in addition to property taxes, an official state analysis of the measure points out, California charges vehicle license fees for cars. Barring the state from applying such fees to other types of assets will impose yet another burden on a tax system that’s still encumbered by property and assessment rate caps created half a century ago in the madness that was Proposition 13.

A modest progressive silver lining to the California midterm referenda is that Proposition 3, which would extend indefinitely an existing surtax on incomes exceeding $371,000 for individuals and $743,000 for couples, appears to have passed. Most of the funds go to K-12 public schools. And, happily, Proposition 41, a second billionaire-funded measure intended to undo California’s wealth tax if it passed–but which, if it didn’t pass, still threatened to tie up the state’s fiscal decisionmaking in pointless audits–appears to have lost.

More good news (therefore bad news for oligarchs): In Washington state, Initiative 645, which would have repealed a 9.9 percent tax on individual and household income exceeding $1 million per year and prohibited future taxes on income, failed; and in Colorado, Initiative 195, which replaced the state’s 4.4 percent flat personal and corporate income tax rate with graduated (that is, progressive) rates, appears to have passed. In addition, Utah’s Constitutional Amendment B, which imposed an insane 60 percent supermajority requirement on raising taxes by ballot initiative, failed. Oligarchs can take heart, however, that Iowa’s Constitutional Amendment 1, which imposed an even more insane 75 percent supermajority on raising taxes in the state legislature, passed.

Apart from losing the House and Senate, the worst news for oligarchs in Tuesday’s election was passage of Montana Iniaitive 194 by a margin of 31 points. This is a deliberate and highly laudable assault on the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. Citizens United struck down a longstanding prohibition against corporations making independent expenditures to support political candidates or parties. That led to lower court rulings striking down many other restrictions on independent spending, which in turn opened the floodgates to the oligarchs’ beloved super PACs. Montana Initiative 194 is, among other things, a powerful vote of no-confidence in the Roberts court from a red state that Trump won in 2024 by 20 points (though Montana just elected Sam Forstag, a former union leader who campaigned from the left, to one of its two House seats).

Montana has been fighting Citizens United from the start. A year after the decision, its state Supreme Court reaffirmed a 1912 state statute that barred corporations from political giving. The United States Supreme Court struck that ruling down in 2012, prompting voters to pass I-166, which reimposed the prohibition and called for a constitutional amendment to nullify Citizens United. I-166 passed by an even wider margin than the latest measure, 75 percent to 25 percent. But in 2013, it was struck down in state court.

Montana Initiative 194 follows a new strategy of marshaling the very traditional state power to incorporate. Go ahead and contribute to candidates and parties, the new law tells corporations (also nonprofits, trusts, trade associations, unincorporated associations—anything classified as an “artificial person”). But if you do so, forget about doing business in Montana. “Corporations, LLCs, and other artificial entities are creations of state law, and Montana can define the powers they receive,” argued the supporters of Initiative 194. “Those powers do not include spending money to influence Montana elections.” Montana is actually the second state to enact such a law; Hawaii was the first, earlier this year, when its Democratic state legislature adopted Senate Bill 2471. Governor Josh Green, also a Democrat, signed it into law in May.

“This is not going to stop Elon Musk from writing a big fat check to some election in Montana,” Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who developed this legal strategy, told Fortune. “What it will stop them from doing is laundering the money through a dark money group,” because such groups will not be permitted to do business in Montana. The Supreme Court, according to Moore, can rule that a corporation may give political money. But it can’t decide what gets to be a corporation in the first place. “For more than two centuries,” Moore writes, “the power to build them—to define their form, limits, and privileges—has belonged to the states and only to the states.” Put that in your originalist pipe and smoke it.

Hawaii’s S.B. 2471 is the subject of two legal challenges in federal court, one of them by the United States Chamber of Commerce. We’re no doubt seconds from the chamber suing Montana as well. I am not a lawyer and won’t predict the outcome. But at least within the electoral realm, oligarchs are losing control over this issue much as they’ve lost control over the composition of Congress. They won’t stay down forever, of course. But let’s savor it while we can, and think about other ways to take back our country not just from Trump, but also from Elon and the rest of the Forbes 400.

America’s paper of record was particularly invested in this account. “In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build—a multiracial, working-class majority,” then–New York Times columnist David Brooks declared the day after the election. “Democrats are seeing their margins among non-white voters erode and vanish,” said Times columnist Ezra Klein in March 2025. A month later, Times polling analyst Nate Cohn wrote, “The Democratic Party has major problems, from big-picture messaging and policy questions to its struggles among specific demographic groups, like young men and nonwhite voters.” The next week his colleague Thomas Edsall wrote, “Trump didn’t just defy the liberal assumption that his demonization of immigrants would cost him Hispanic voters; he turned those expectations upside down.” “Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right” was the title of a July 2025 piece in the paper’s opinion section, complete with splashy graphics.

Never mind some (or all) of that. Exit polls and other surveys suggest that around 90 percent of Black voters, 70 percent of Asian Americans, and 64 to 70 percent of Latinos backed Democrats in this year’s elections. Combining those three groups, about 72 percent of voters of color backed Democrats, 26 percent Republicans. Around 40 percent of Democratic voters were people of color, compared to 20 percent of Republicans. We have a multiracial party—it’s the same one as long before.

Looking at some key state races, Texas Democrat James Talarico trailed his Republican opponent Ken Paxton 38–59 among white voters, according to a Times analysis. But Talarico won 89 percent of Black voters, 70 percent of Latinos, 67 percent of Asians, all of whom combined to put him over the top. In Georgia, Jon Ossoff lost the white vote 37–63, according to the Times, but won more 95 percent of the state’s large Black electorate.

Those numbers are fairly similar to elections from 2012–2020. It is not unusual or surprising that the majority of white voters in competitive states chose Republicans while voters of color delivered the winning margins for Democratic candidates. But the post-2024 coverage implied that America’s racial politics had fundamentally changed.

None of these writers could have anticipated that Trump would start a war with Iran that spiked gas prices. That obviously hurt him badly with all voters, including those of color. But it was fairly obvious that the results in 2024 among voters of color (and Americans overall) were in part driven by inflation during Joe Biden’s presidency and by anti-incumbency sentiment. So Democrats would likely rebound among voters of color in 2026 and perhaps in the future. And it wasn’t hard to anticipate Latino voters being turned off by Trump’s immigration policies once he enacted them in office.

I suspect these pundits and other experts will either cite Iran and gas prices as the explanation for their narrative being wrong or argue that the Democrats “moved to the center” to better appeal to voters of color. Or they might say, wait until 2028, when one Democrat has to win the presidency.

But the reason I’m harping on how wrong their analyses look 18 months later is because it reflects broader problems in how U.S. politics is covered. Even in 2024, at the height of GOP success with voters of color, minority voters weren’t the ones putting Trump and Republicans in power. Trump won the white vote nationally by 16 percentage points in 2024, while losing among African Americans (by 73), Asians (by 23), and Latinos (11). Cohn highlighting Democrats’ “major problems” with nonwhite voters but not whites creates a misleading picture of the electorate.

A group of 10 Trump 2024 voters would include eight white people. It wasn’t a particularly multiracial right.

Despite continued claims from many pundits that American politics is largely about an education divide (college graduates back Democrats; those without degrees Republicans), the data keeps rejecting that explanation. Sixty-six percent of white people without degrees backed Trump in 2024, compared to 34 percent of people of color without degrees. In 2026, Republican candidates won the votes of 59 percent of white people without college degrees, compared to 22 percent of voters of color without degrees. “Non-college voters” is a coherent political group only in the minds of some commentators. It is entirely obvious to anyone who resides in the real world that Black women and white men without degrees vote entirely differently.

Why does political analysis that diminishes the enormous racial divides in U.S. elections and amplifies the small number of Republican voters of color persist? The most innocent explanation is that journalists and other experts simply want to tell new stories. That people of color, particularly African Americans, favor Democrats, and whites, particularly in the South, favor Republicans are decades-long patterns.

Now the more damning explanation. If race is a huge factor in American politics, the journalists and other experts chronicling elections would need to be well versed in racial issues and fairly eager to discuss them. Politicians would need to address racial issues—or explain why they aren’t. And if white people are consistently providing the margin of victory for an authoritarian, plutocratic party, you would need to regularly state that America’s largest racial group either doesn’t value freedom and equality or is so uninformed that it can’t tell which party would provide that.

Since U.S. political discourse is largely white journalists covering white politicians (and politicians of color beholden to white donors) for white audiences, there are few incentives to tell a more honest, racially conscious story of American politics. I have lived this. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2014–2020 at first spurred more demand in the news media for stories about racial issues and therefore great prominence for journalists of color, who were often more informed about such issues than their white colleagues. But there was a backlash within news organizations and then diminished opportunities for journalists of color as they keep trying to tell a more racial-centric story of America.

I’m not asking journalists or experts to ignore changes or shifting dynamics in the electorate. I suspect over time that these racial voting patterns will diminish. Perhaps Latinos and Asians will become majority Republican in my lifetime. It would be great for the country if we had a Republican Party interested in creating a more socially and economically equal nation and thereby competing for and winning Black voters at a large scale. But at this moment in time, let’s face it—that’s a fantasy.

In the real world, I’m asking and really demanding prominent political commentators stop ignoring and downplaying fundamental realities of American politics. Black men who voted for Trump in 2024 are 1 percent of the American electorate. White college graduates who voted for him are 15 percent of the electorate. People who spent 2025 constantly mentioning the former and never the latter should start covering politics better or stop being read by people who want to actually understand American politics.

America had a blue wave because voters of color voted so overwhelmingly Democratic that they made up for America’s white majority voting Republican. Like every other recent blue wave.

“When we return next week, we’ll get 218 signatures for Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which guarantees a vote,” Massie wrote Thursday on X. “Survivors will be able to get their own records, State Attorneys General can prosecute crimes, and we can take the DOJ to court for keeping critical files hidden.”

Massie, who has made an enemy of Trump by opposing the Iran war and pushing for the full release of the Epstein files, first passed the Epstein Transparency Act in November 2025. And though President Trump signed it into law, Massie, Democrats, and a few Republicans argue that his administration didn’t fully abide with what the act required.

“The Department of Justice has flagrantly and consistently ignored EFTA’s disclosure requirements,” Massie wrote earlier this summer in his announcement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, co-sponsored by Democratic Senators Ben Ray Luján and Jeff Merkley, and Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna and Teresa Leger Fernández.

“The Department of Justice continues to unlawfully withhold over 3 million Epstein files that should be released to the public,” he continued. “In addition, the DOJ is unlawfully maintaining heavy redactions on the files it is releasing. State attorneys general and victims should have the right to sue the Attorney General of the United States to compel compliance with a transparency law President Trump signed.”

Speaking on MS NOW Wednesday night, Representative Jamie Raskin, who is poised to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the several law firms that struck deals with Trump could expect to receive subpoenas next year.

In the early days of Trump’s second term, the president issued several executive orders revoking the security clearance of and threatening to pull all federal contracts from large law firms that had supported clients and causes he felt were contrary to his agenda. In response, nine firms agreed to degrading deals that gutted their work on certain policy areas such as immigration, ended company DEI programs, and required them to provide pro bono legal work for Trump’s administration. Altogether, the deals signed with the president amounted to nearly $1 billion worth of free legal work.

“There are major law firms in America, including Paul Weiss, that have capitulated to these coercive tactics from Donald Trump and have basically surrendered and made all sorts of outrageous concessions,” Raskin said on MS NOW.

Trump’s executive order had targeted Paul Weiss over the work of Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who previously oversaw the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into Trump’s alleged financial crimes. As part of bowing to Trump’s threat, the firm acknowledged that Pomerantz had committed wrongdoing, and agreed to stop making decisions about hiring and promotions based on considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The current ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Raskin had requested information from several firms about the exact details of their agreements; the answers they provided indicated that the president may have gotten the short end of the stick. While the firms had reportedly agreed to provide millions of dollars of pro bono work for specific causes, many asserted that they had total authority over the selection of their clients.

A group of Democratic lawmakers sent another series of letters to law firms earlier this year, warning that the Trump administration’s scheme to use “coercive and illegal measures” to blackmail firms could potentially violate federal laws against bribery, defrauding the public, and even racketeering.

The number of early votes cast for the Democratic nominee totaled more than 1,728,000, besting the total number of votes cast overall for his Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, by roughly 85,000 votes, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. By the time the polls closed, Whatley received 1,643,000 votes, while Cooper received nearly 2,468,000 in total.

Cooper managed to flip the seat blue, helping the national caucus obtain a majority in the upper chamber. He will replace outbound North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement earlier this year.

Speaking to a crowd at his victory party in Raleigh on Tuesday, Cooper pledged to orient his focus in Washington toward affordability and ending the war in Iran.

“I am still a prisoner of hope,” Cooper said. “I truly believe that our best days lie ahead, that we can make the course correction that our great country so badly needs. That North Carolina and the United States have a future teeming with possibilities.”

Cooper previously served as the Tar Heel State’s governor from 2017 to 2025, but his election on Tuesday was just one component of a blue wave that swept over the historic battleground state.

Despite a gerrymandered map that was intended to give Republicans a steep advantage on Tuesday, Democrats gained at least five House seats and are projected to win a sixth. Five districts in the state have yet to report their final vote counts, but so far, Republicans have won zero seats. (Current forecasts estimate they will win four.)

Republicans’ only remaining hope to thwart Democratic majorities’ plans rests in Trump’s veto power. However, the president’s veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority congressional vote, equivalent to 290 votes in the House and 67 votes in the Senate.

Democrats are projected to win at least 250 seats in the House of Representatives, and are reportedly on track to win roughly 260 seats total, meaning that they will only need to convince 30 Republican lawmakers in order to bypass the president’s official objections. Twenty-nine House races remained undecided Thursday.

As the results rolled in Tuesday night, and a Democratic majority appeared imminent in both chambers of Congress, Trump posted an image of a red MAGA-style hat that read “VETO.” Now, it seems that the president can’t even count on that as the Democrats continue to defeat his party members.

Iowans were so pissed off with Republicans on Tuesday that they elected Eric Armstrong to the state House. The catch: Armstrong, a retired railroad executive, pulled out of the race in September due to health issues.

Nonetheless, he bested his Republican opponent, Keith Jones, by roughly nine percentage points, or 865 votes, according to results tabulated by the Associated Press.

On September 7, Armstrong posted to his Facebook account that he would step away from the race effective immediately.

“Running a successful campaign requires immense physical and mental energy. Recently, I have been facing some personal health issues that require my full attention and immediate care,” he wrote at the time.

“Because I must prioritize my health and recovery at this time, I am stepping down from my campaign, effective immediately,” he continued. “This was a deeply difficult choice. However, I know it is the right one.”

Armstrong was still elected to fill a state House position vacated by Josh Turek, who managed to flip Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday.

It’s an enormous change of pace from how Iowa’s 20th House of Representatives district was feeling even two years ago, when it swung in favor of Donald Trump by a margin of 20 percentage points. Beyond that, Iowa’s politics have been about as Trumpian as it gets: The state voted to send the MAGA leader to the White House all three times he was on the ballot.

Speaking with The New York Times via phone Wednesday, Armstrong said he would “do my best to represent” Iowa’s 20th district.

“But I still have health issues, that’s what I’m struggling with,” he noted.

Even if he has to miss votes, local political experts argue it won’t be a huge cause for concern.

“Iowa has a part-time legislature that meets from January to May or so,” University of Iowa professor and expert on Hawkeye State politics Timothy Hagle told Newsweek. “If he had to miss some time it probably won’t be a major concern given that Turek missed a lot of votes this year,” given the priorities of Turek’s Senate campaign.

Politico, citing an October 29 memo, reports that Hegseth has authorized the National Guard to begin using Humvees, light medium tactical vehicles, several dozen marked police cars, and boats in the district—though there isn’t a clear reason why.

Soldiers with the National Guard still aren’t allowed to pursue suspects or make arrests, and the vehicles Hegseth is allowing were used in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The memo states that the boats will be conducting “perimeter security” for police targeting suspected gang leaders and drug traffickers in Anacostia, the southeastern corner of the city, but won’t be surveilling U.S. citizens. Federal officers “must always be on board” the boats “to help arrest a criminal suspect,” according to the memo.

On Wednesday, D.C. police charged a man with “threats in a menacing manner” and assault on a police officer for allegedly pretending to shoot at National Guard troops by making a “finger gun” gesture. Those kinds of headlines are what make the National Guard’s presence in the city unpopular, and beefing up their vehicles will only make them further seem like an occupying army to D.C. residents.

While the memo was drafted before the finger-gun charges and Republicans’ historic defeat in the midterm elections, this kind of move would seem to be a direct challenge to the new Democratic-controlled Congress, as well as Washington’s Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George, who is on record as opposing the deployment of the National Guard in the district. This move could hasten an impeachment vote against Hegseth and set up a showdown between George, backed by Congress, and President Trump.

“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us,” he wrote in an open letter Thursday. “I know we cannot execute people in our imperfect legal system and remain true to our core values, first among them justice and human decency.”

Those on death row will instead serve life without parole. The California Supreme Court must now review the commutations of death row inmates with multiple felony convictions,, a process that has no clear timeline.

California has more inmates waiting to be executed on death row than any other state, representing one-quarter of death row inmates in the entire country. Newsom’s office noted that of the 548 people on death row, 220 have waited 15 years or more for legal representation to fight their cases. The last person to be put to death in California was 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen in 2006.

This move also comes as Newsom decides whether or not to run for president in two years.

“This will always weigh heavily on me. As Governor, I alone bear the responsibility for this decision and its impact, just as I alone would bear responsibility for each execution,” Newsom concluded. “For this reason, I am compelled to follow my conscience and, as authorized by our Constitution, take this action for the welfare of the state of California.”

This story has been updated.

There are lots of questions circulating about Schumer’s future in Senate leadership. Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan declared on election night that it’s “time for new leadership” in the Senate. Senators-elect James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed have also expressed doubt in Schumer’s future as leader, with El-Sayed even introducing Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen as the “next Senate majority leader” earlier this summer. Van Hollen himself said on Wednesday that “no one should be committing to anybody as the next Democratic leader” without having a conversation around a bold agenda. “It’s not a time for incrementalism. It’s a time to move forward a very bold kitchen table agenda.”

Jeffries hasn’t escaped without criticism, either. A Change.org petition to replace Jeffries and have an open election for House speaker has reached over 500,000 signatures. House Democrats start with a party vote to select a speaker before that candidate is confirmed by the larger House in January. 

“Hakeem Jeffries currently serves as House Democratic Leader and has previously been nominated by House Democrats for Speaker. If his name is put forward again, House members will have a choice to make. Hakeem Jeffries is simply not the right choice,” the petition, which was shared by actor Mark Ruffalo, reads. “We believe the Speaker should represent the Democratic voters, not just the Democratic establishment.” 

Nicole Whitted, the petition’s creator and a Change.org ambassador who receives compensation for the petition, explained her opposition to Newsweek.* “After historic wins on Tuesday, I believe the Democratic Party and our country as a whole is at a crossroads. My opposition to Hakeem Jeffries is about more than any single policy disagreement,” she said. “Hakeem Jeffries has longstanding political and financial ties to corporate interests and influential pro-Israel lobbying organizations. He also held a private meeting with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and outside advisor, who himself is being investigated by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. These relationships and decisions raise serious questions for me and many of those who have signed this petition about transparency, political influence, and whose interests Democratic leadership is ultimately serving.”

Opposition to Jeffries’s potential speakership grew even louder after his strangely conciliatory comments on Wednesday regarding whether the Democratic Party will retaliate against the Trump administration’s corruption and violence now that it has a staunch majority. 

“The American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf,” Jeffries told MS NOW, specifically ruling out impeachment as a top priority. “We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.”

Hakeem Jeffries on Morning Joe: The American people don't want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive.

We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it's our job to govern on affordability. pic.twitter.com/b5ieQUbMRO

— Clipping Wings (@ClippingWings) November 4, 2026

That notion was met with quite a bit of backlash. 

“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you can focus on affordability issues—and— hold criminals accountable,” Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D’Arrigo wrote. “When you don’t hold criminals accountable, you’re giving them a strategy to be more successful next time.”

“This isn’t even about revenge or politics, it’s about the reality that if there aren’t consequences & prison time for quite a few people, all the worst parts of the last decade will keep happening,” writer Kylie Chueng added. “He fundamentally misunderstands the moment & can’t be speaker.” 

“Let’s be clear here: conducting meaningful oversight to expose waste, fraud, abuse and corruption isn’t about getting even, it’s about being watchful stewards of taxpayer dollars,” Texas Democratic Party adviser Kurt Bardella wrote. “It’s the job.”

“They fired all the black and gay people, cut cancer research, cut healthcare for millions, cut food for starving children, killed hundreds of schoolgirls, separated families, put kids in camps, and shot people in the street,” a large liberal account wrote. “We better get fucking even.”

Newly elected democratic socialist Representative Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania has already declined to endorse Jeffries’s speakership, saying that he needed to address issues like Medicare for All first—which Jeffries currently opposes.

Jeffries was also criticized for his deep ties to Israel. Jeffries is one of the strongest Democratic supporters of Israel, and one of AIPAC’s top recipients, as the majority of Democratic voters oppose more aid to Israel in the wake of its genocide of Palestinians. A clip of Jeffries declaring, “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!” at a 2014 rally—a paraphrasing of infamous racist former Alabama Governor George Wallace’s 1963 demands for segregation—has also begun to recirculate. 

Hakeem "America is back" Jeffries, who is set to become Speaker of the House, said at a 2014 rally:

"Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!" pic.twitter.com/aud5JeBMxu

— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) November 4, 2026

To make matters worse, after the election, AIPAC praised the Democrats who would remain by Israel’s side, mentioning Schumer and Jeffries by name and promising to keep funding candidates of either party as long as they continued to support Israel.

“AIPAC congratulates the hundreds of pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who won their elections last night,” the controversial lobbying group wrote on Wednesday. “We congratulate Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on the resounding victories for their caucuses.… Our community will increase its support for Democrats and Republicans who recognize that a strong partnership with Israel helps keep both countries secure, advances peace and stability, promotes democratic values, and grows our economy through trade and innovation.” 

“Bye,” newly elected California Representative and Democratic Socialists of America member Angela Gonzales-Torres replied.  

* This story has been updated to reflect the compensation of the Change.Org petition creator.

Speaking on The Five Wednesday, host Jesse Watters spiraled out about the many groups of voters that had evidently defected from supporting Republican candidates.

“The coalition has totally collapsed. You lost whites. Whites!” Watters cried. “You can’t do that if you’re a Republican. Men! Hispanics, big-time! And so it’s gonna take a while to put the coalition back together because it’s in the heartland.”

Co-host Greg Gutfeld tried to spin the disaster for Republicans, suggesting that it would be “fun, fun, fun” to watch Democrats struggle to fix all of the problems Republicans had created.

“I think you’re missing the bigger picture, is that the American people, young, men, white, Americans, said screw you Donald Trump, said screw you to the Republican Party in places in the deep South, in the Midwest. And that’s not just something that happens all of the time, that’s a problem that the Republicans have,” Watters said.

Speaking on his own show later that night, Fox News’s Sean Hannity ranted bitterly about Hasan Piker, the left-wing political commentator.

“Now before, nobody in the Democratic Party stood up to Hasan Piker, and that wing of the party, but the inclusion party, they did kick out Haley Stevens. She’s out of the party. That’s what we’re dealing with,” Hannity said.

Hannity blamed Piker for Democratic lawmakers who urged Republicans to “LAWYER UP” ahead of a flood of congressional investigations. “Now, perhaps they were taking inspiration from the Democratic Party’s spiritual leader Hasan Piker who wrote, quote, ‘We’re gonna put your ass in jail, everyone get more woke right now.’”

He then urged Republicans to “stay away from finger pointing or blame.” I guess for Hannity, that only applies when the problems are caused by Trump.

Fox News reports that Dhillon resigned Thursday following Democrats’ landslide victory in the midterm elections. She reportedly told allies that she planned to leave after the elections, according to Bloomberg Law.

Dhillon is the first top official to leave the Trump administration following the election. She overhauled her division at the DOJ to actually weaken civil rights, and on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, said, “Either DEI will end on its own or we will kill it.” She also staffed the civil rights office with the worst lawyers, including people with criminal records, misconduct allegations, a love of conspiracy theories, and a history of hacking election sites. Dhillon also led a sweeping campaign to force states to turn over sensitive voter information, a crusade repeatedly shut down in court.

In September, Dhillon proudly announced that the DOJ had dropped more than 50 desegregation cases, most of which were in Southern states with Jim Crow histories. On her watch, the office focuses on everything but civil rights, looking at election rolls, immigration, and alleged antisemitism on college campuses.

Dhillon’s departure could be the first sign of people fleeing a highly unpopular, lame-duck administration. Others could be fired, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whom Trump has been considering giving the axe. White House adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller has plenty of enemies upset that his hard-line immigration policies made Republicans massively unpopular.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is preparing to resign from the Trump administration as he lays the groundwork for a potential 2028 presidential campaign, The Independent reported Thursday.

Insiders in Washington and the British government told the newspaper that Rubio needs to distance himself from Trump’s controversies—including the wildly unpopular war in Iran—to improve his odds at the ballot box.

The news would be a major snub to Vice President JD Vance, who has been teasing his own presidential bid for months and has long been viewed as Trump’s only clear successor.

Both the White House and the State Department refuted reports of Rubio’s forthcoming exit, telling the Independent that the allegations were “baseless.” But the possible Republican challenge may not have come as a surprise to Trump himself, who speculated to reporters Wednesday that “maybe [Vance] won’t run.”

“We’ll see what happens. Everybody—You don’t know who’s talking about running. You could have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people running, maybe nobody is gonna run. Maybe he won’t run. I don’t know who’s going to run,” Trump said, before adding that he “wouldn’t have done nothing different” regarding the Iran war.

If Rubio does decide to leave, he will leave behind a shattered and broken White House that is on the cusp of losing even more Cabinet members as Trump looks for places to lay blame for his shoddy second term.

Last month, Trump reportedly called several close confidantes to assess the potential of using White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, his former campaign manager and famed “Ice Maiden,” as a scapegoat for a major midterm bust. He’s also made the rounds to check current attitudes about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine as the Iran war drags on into its eighth month.

But even more heads could roll after January, when Democrats retake both chambers of Congress. Liberal party leaders indicated Thursday that they plan to make Washington a very different place in the new year. Some Republicans seem to be in agreement: Representative Thomas Massie plans to resurrect his articles of impeachment against Hegseth, and several members of the GOP believe it will pass.

Outgoing Representative Thomas Massie told CNN Wednesday that he plans to trigger a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns next week. Multiple GOP sources said they expect the measure to pass. 

Massie introduced his impeachment articles in mid-September as a privileged resolution, requiring the House to vote on it within two days. House Speaker Mike Johnson called an early campaign-season recess in order to kill the measure, but Massie told a reporter that he’d take up the effort after the midterm elections. 

Following previous reporting that Donald Trump intended to oust Hegseth as the fall guy for the Republicans disastrous midterm elections, the president told ABC News Thursday that he had “every intention to keep him.”

Massie had his own response. “If Trump’s going to replace appointees like Hegseth, he should do it while he can still get the replacements confirmed in the Senate,” he wrote on X Thursday.  “Also, my Hegseth impeachment resolution is a much gentler version of what’s coming when Dem’s control Congress. They’ll have hearings & trials.”

The previous evening, Massie had warned, “There is one contingency in which I won’t reintroduce the articles of impeachment: Hegseth resigns.” 

While House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has suggested that Democrats are not interested in “getting even” with Republicans, he indicated Thursday that the Defense secretary would be a potential target when he became House Speaker. 

“Why is Pete Hegseth still around?” Jeffries wrote on X. 

The president suggested making an eyebrow-raising change to the Alaska Senate race, writing on Truth Social on Thursday that the votes cast for independent candidate Dan J. Sullivan Jr. should be tacked on to the vote count for incumbent Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan.

“The vote totals for the Fake Dan Sullivan, plus the other ‘slug’ that the Dems put on the Ballot, should be immediately given to the REAL Dan Sullivan, and the Election is over—He easily wins,” Trump wrote. “There is no other fair solution!”

Sullivan is currently neck and neck in the Alaska race with his Democratic opponent, Mary Peltola. As of the time of publication, Peltola has 48.17 percent of the vote, while Sullivan has 47.88 percent. Sullivan Jr., meanwhile, has 1.68 percent of the vote. Combining the results for the two Sullivans would squeeze the Republican ahead of Peltola, though actually doing so would violate the law.

Alaska is still tabulating its votes, however: Just 74 percent of the Last Frontier has reported its Election Day results. The state also uses ranked-choice voting, meaning it could take longer to count the rankings, as well.

Whether Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher, decided to enter the midterms by his own accord is currently in doubt. The New York Times reported last week that he was recruited by individuals connected to Peltola’s campaign. On Saturday, CBS News reported that the political independent had left his hometown and flown to Anchorage. In his own words, Sullivan wrote on Facebook in June that he entered this race because he was “unhappy with the 12 year record of the current Senator” and felt that “we need a change.”

“It’s that simple,” he said.

Republicans didn’t buy it. Party leaders have since accused Democrats of election fraud and of attempting to brew confusion about the ballot ahead of Election Day. Alaskans, in turn, have argued that they’re not confused by the situation at all. One Anchorage resident told CNN last week that the controversy had not shaken his vote, informing the network that you can “absolutely” tell who’s who on the ballot.

“And I don’t even have my glasses on,” he quipped. “It’s pretty clear. It’s in black and white.”

But the Trump administration is still trying to change the record. In other panicked missives, Trump has called for criminal prosecution of Peltola, and directed the Justice Department to sue Alaska and its election officials in a flagrant attempt to block the certification of the vote if the Republican Sullivan loses. The DOJ has already issued letters to a number of prominent Democrats informing them that they may be targets of a federal investigation.

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.

“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.

Sen. @ChuckGrassley (R-IA): "One of the reasons that 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." pic.twitter.com/YuIZytnt35

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 26, 2026

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.

Inside Washington

“As other states shift left in a brutal cycle, Florida does what we do best—we held the line,” former Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler wrote on X on Wednesday morning. “THANK GOD I LIVE IN FLORIDA!” Democrats, on the other hand, are disappointed that the night’s successes didn’t extend to the Sunshine State. On a giddy, “blue wave” evening when even states as improbable as Kansas and Texas elected Democratic senators, both Angie Nixon, Democrats’ Senate nominee in Florida, and David Jolly, the gubernatorial candidate, lost to their Republican opponents. This disappointment, some say, was preventable. And perhaps more importantly, it holds some lessons for 2028.

“We think that Angie could have won with any kind of substantial investment made over the last month,” said Ravi Mangla, press secretary for the Working Families Party, which was the first national organization to endorse Nixon. Ultimately, Nixon came closer than polls predicted, losing to GOP Senator Ashley Moody by less than three percentage points. Jolly’s margin against Republican Byron Donalds was even tighter—he lost by less than two percentage points.

Though Nixon received support from groups like the WFP, which spent more than $200,000 on her race, as well as from national political figures like Senators Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy, she received very little from the national Democratic establishment. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee included the Florida Senate race in its $40 million Win the Senate program but prioritized states like Maine and Texas instead.

Texas and Florida are, to some extent, mirror images of each other. Both are southern states that Democrats have counted out in recent years. Both have large Latino populations. But while Florida stayed red on Tuesday night, Texas’s Senate race, gubernatorial race, and all of its statewide offices flipped blue. “I don’t think there’s any question that Texas received the investment it needed, but we didn’t see that same commensurate investment in Florida,” Mangla said. “And I would hope that had the DSCC chosen to invest and put its resources behind Angie, that we would be celebrating a really historic win today.”

On Wednesday, Nixon expressed sadness about her loss but optimism for the future. “We invested in grassroots organizers and partnered with candidates down ballot. I’m so proud of the work we did helping to flip 17 House Seats,” she wrote on X. “Imagine what would have happened if we had more investment early on.” She also hinted at the possibility of running again in two years, saying “2028 is around the corner” in her concession speech.

While the lack of national spending might be part of why Nixon and Jolly lost on Tuesday, acknowledged Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, other factors were at play, as well. For example: Republicans have more than 1.5 million voter registrations than Democrats do, which happened “very rapidly” in recent years. “We had a blue wave,” Jewett explained, but it still wasn’t enough. Republicans didn’t have great turnout, but they “had good solid turnout,” and “that’s all they needed.”

While Latino voters swung toward Democrats in both Florida and Texas, Cuban Americans in Florida ultimately voted for Moody. In contrast, Mexican American voters, who make up 40 percent of the population in Texas, were more likely to swing for Democrats this year in the aftermath of ICE raids targeting their communities.

Looking ahead, some experts share Nixon’s optimism for 2028. Republicans’ “price per vote was a lot higher than Jolly’s price per vote, or Nixon’s,” said Jared Nordlund, the Florida State director at UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights nonprofit, comparing the total spending numbers in the race and laying them against how well each candidate performed. “I think seeing that out there tells you that the Republican vote isn’t guaranteed.”

James Talarico’s success in Texas and the close margins in Florida could spark more investment in 2028. And for some, that’s the big takeaway from this election, regardless of how it played out in individual races: Democrats need to rethink their assumptions about the electoral map. Would more funding have turned the tide? “If you don’t think you can win and you don’t invest, then you almost always don’t win,” Jewett said. “Whereas if you invest, sometimes you might.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

A year that began with clergy members being arrested en masse in subzero ICE protests is closing with five Democratic ministers headed to a newly blue Congress. In deep-red Kansas, Methodist megachurch leader Adam Hamilton stunned the country by thumping Republican Roger Marshall in their Senate race. In Iowa, Lutheran minister Sarah Trone Garriott and Presbyterian minister Lindsay James flipped the 3rd and 2nd congressional districts, respectively, shrugging off months of right-wing attacks suggesting they weren’t real Christians. In Texas, Friendship-West Baptist Church pastor Frederick Haynes won the 30th congressional district seat. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses for the clergy; Anna Golladay lost in Tennessee, and Robb Ryerse lost in Arkansas. But it’s hard to dispute the prominence of progressive visions of Christianity in some of the biggest flips of this election. Former Presbyterian seminarian and Senator-elect James Talarico quoted both scripture and his grandfather, a Baptist preacher, in his victory speech after becoming the first Democrat to win a statewide Texas election in 32 years. Rob Sand, who won Iowa’s gubernatorial election, also talked extensively about his Lutheran faith on the campaign trail.

What do the results of races across the country mean for Washington, D.C.—the city that President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to take over and is doggedly trying to turn into one giant construction site? The Washington Post has outlined a few ways that newly elected Democrats could mess with the construction plans, at least. In addition to two Democrats now joining the review panel that has so far approved Trump’s projects, a newly Democratic Congress could “file suit to block Trump’s most controversial projects” and “also rein in Trump’s spending” on said projects. Meanwhile, D.C.’s socialist mayor-elect, Janeese Lewis-George, has said she’s “willing to work with this administration to the benefit of D.C. residents” but is also “willing to stand up to this administration.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Public Citizen celebrated election results on Wednesday by publishing an “Oversight Agenda Roadmap” for the new Congress. “The American people are demanding much more than grandstanding and ritual condemnation of the most corrupt administration in American history,” said Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman in the organization’s press release. The punchy first suggestion in the report: Hold hearings interviewing food bank leaders, health care providers, and more about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s “real-world impacts” while also investigating “how corporations used the financial gains from OBBBA, including decisions related to layoffs, wages, hiring, domestic investment, executive compensation, stock buybacks, and shareholder distributions” and determining “whether the economic promises used to justify OBBBA—including job creation, wage growth, and business investment—have materialized.”

On Thursday at 10 a.m., the Brookings Institution will host an online-only conversation asking, “What’s next for U.S.-Israel relations?” Former U.S. Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr will offer opening remarks, after which Haaretz’s U.S. bureau chief, Ben Samuels, will moderate a conversation between J Street’s Ilan Goldenberg, University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, and the Hudson Institute’s Joel Rayburn.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

The first Latino governor in the United States was Romualdo Pacheco of California. In what decade did he ascend to that office? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

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.

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.

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.

Musk, the world’s richest man, spent $474 million on Republican campaigns. On Tuesday, he posted “Vote red today!” on X. Then he deleted it. His own artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, confirmed the post was scrubbed.

“He hasn’t said why. Archives and multiple reports confirm the Election Day ‘Vote red today!’ post (plus an earlier pinned one urging Republican Senate votes) were removed after results showed major GOP losses, including Texas races he heavily funded,” Grok wrote online. “Other recent pro-GOP posts and RTs remain visible.”

The election results must have been incredibly alarming for Musk, who has dumped nearly $1 billion into influencing U.S. elections in the past two years. And even more troubling for him is that the cornerstones of his business operations—both SpaceX and Tesla—are located in Texas. Musk chose to flee to Texas from California, believing it was safe from Democrats. And it was—until Tuesday. Now Musk will have to deal with Democratic Governor Gina Hinojosa and Democratic Senator James Talarico. The state’s newly minted Democratic Attorney General Nathan Johnson has already stated his intention to investigate the SpaceX Starlink grants that Texas awarded Musk, while Hinojosa plans on enacting a data center moratorium across the state, two policies that will have a direct negative impact on Musk’s business ventures.

“Want to be clear that in 2024 Elon was so sure he was a political mastermind everyone loved he felt confident enough to do a winky nazi salute twice on national television, and then since then he totally failed in his role in the White House, lost a Wisconsin special election, burned half a billion dollars losing the midterms, and is now pretending he never said anything all,” a large liberal X account wrote. “What a massive downfall.”

People like Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott were serious allies for Musk, allowing him to do essentially whatever he wanted in the state. Now they’ve been wiped out, even as he gave their campaign hundreds of millions of dollars. That may explain the deleted post.

And it got even better as the results came in. The number of times Kornacki greeted breaking news about this race or that with, “Wow!” was uncountable. If your drinking game was to take a sip every time he made such an exclamation, you’re still recovering from it. As the night wore on, the results got even more eye-popping, the reactions more extravagant—like the scene in Jurassic Park where Laura Dern and Sam Neill first lay their eyes on living dinosaurs.

An impressive array of villains got their just deserts. I simply lack the space to list them all, folks. We got a two-for-one on mendacious Republicans named Collins, thanks to Jon Ossoff and Troy Jackson. Ken Paxton, who has gotten away with so much over his political career, finally saw his bill come due, going down to James Talarico. Smarmy reptile Vivek Ramaswamy went down hard—and Amy Acton reportedly didn’t take his concession call. (Good for her.) Oligarchs backing the GOP set their cash on fire. They had money, Democrats had people. There were 41 ballot measures on data centers and Big Tech lost 40 of them. It was a bad night for people fleeing other places (Flavio Bolsonaro to America; Elon Musk to Texas). Haley Stevens can go kick rocks with her tiresome fiancé and her stupid hats.

A Blue Texas feels miraculous. Back in August, TNR contributor John DeVore invited readers to start dreaming about a Blue Texas. “It is my birthright,” he wrote, reminding us that “Texas hasn’t always been red.” What seemed like cockeyed optimism then is a dream fulfilled now. Last night was an array of staggering results—Senate wins in Iowa and Kansas, a similar flip in South Carolina, the fact we woke up Wednesday morning with the Mississippi Senate seat still in doubt—but Texas has long been the Democrats’ white whale. Democrats are basking in victory largely because of a massive shift of Hispanic voters back to their side, which has become something of a vibrant trend. And one thing I heard Tuesday night was that the organizing efforts have been singularly great in Texas, with two groups in particular—Texas Organizing Project and Texas 4 All—being singled out for praise.

Democrats met the moment on corruption. As you no doubt heard, in the days leading up to the midterms, corruption had become one of voters’ top issues, and eye-wateringly so: As The Guardian reported at the end of October, a Harris poll found that “nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem, according to the survey.” The New York Times added some interesting analysis the next day, noting that voters’ views of corruption had shifted from a resigned “both sides do it” to something they uniquely associated with Trump and the GOP. As Alex Shephard wrote, Democrats did a good job on anti-corruption messaging with which they started seeding the earth on the early side of the year. And Democrats’ hunger has not dimmed. The message from Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee on X: “Lawyer up.” His counterpart on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden, simply posted, “Subpoenas.”

Election Day doomerism was a bad bet. If you’ve spent any time in online spaces where liberals and leftists gather, you probably got your share of doomy takes on Election Day. Trump was going to unleash ICE on polling places! They’ll snatch people out of line! They’ll steal the vote. The Trump administration did deploy an unprecedented number of election monitors across the 50 states, and they got to sit there and watch the GOP get stomped. About the only hinky thing that happened at a polling place was the incident in Westchester County, where the paper on which the ballots were printed was too thick—a “you had one job” all-timer. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie spent a lot of time this year dismissing the doomers’ concerns, and this week, he was vindicated.

And what of Donald Trump? By all accounts, the White House was a grim place on Tuesday night. It’s fair to say that over the course of the evening, the president cycled through some toxic emotions, barracking his fellow Republicans and Fox News for the losses and bragging that if he’d been on the ticket, the GOP would have won in a “landslide.” By the end of the night, he was more subdued, announcing that he’d work with Democrats to achieve various nebulous deals. Then he woke up to learn that his vice president had shivved him, stating publicly that it was the Iran war that cost the Republicans the election. From here, who knows where Trump goes. Perhaps he’ll retreat into his various home decorating and monument-building projects. Maybe Stephen Miller will fill the vacuum Trump leaves behind. Trump’s a lame-duck president, but the gallery of goons he’s assembled could still make this a dangerous and daunting time in American politics.

Now the hard work begins. The Democratic Party is in an interesting place today. It won big last night, all across the country, running up vote tallies that were often mind-blowing. It also remains saddled with low approval ratings. The American people have extended their votes to Democrats, but not necessarily their affection. But Democrats will have a good chance to earn it over the next year. They’ll have to decide if dealmaking with Trump would be productive or damaging. They may actually want to have a stack of vetoes to point to in two years’ time, to tell voters that the next Democratic president will sign these into law. They’ll have to become more adept at using the modern media. And as I’ve said before, they need to get voters on board with packing the Supreme Court, whose 6–3 majority possesses a line-item veto on any kind of liberal governance. As TNR contributor Aaron Regunberg explains, the big looming debate is how big Democrats will go in the next few years to prove themselves.

For years I’ve thought of Democrats in Washington as the sufferers of twin maladies: the belief that the party must focus like a laser on one issue at the expense of all others, and an enervating caution that trained them not to take on tough votes because if you don’t “win” then you’re a “loser.” But I think that an interesting variety of Democrats are coming to power: There are some good communicators, some accountability hounds, some unconventional populists, and some lawmakers blessed with the ability to simply find out what voters want and then run on fixing those problems. Democrats need not worry about the legislative wins and losses, they need only bring the fight.

As TNR contributor Dan Froomkin reported, the affiliated organizations flying under the “No Kings” banner plan to continue their work after the midterms. They’re well aware of the limitations that Trump’s veto places on the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda. Still, they feel that they can help guide the party onto a bold agenda—a statement of intent for the future, if you will—while keeping expectations right-sized. That means, of course, that there is a role in this movement for you to play as well, whether it’s organizing, or protesting, or guiding Democratic lawmakers down the right path with timely praise and necessary constructive criticism. The way I see it, Tuesday night was a good time. Let’s keep the party going.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The Democrats won overwhelmingly in this week’s elections. What policy ideas and messages on the campaign trail got voters behind them? Which voters in particular? What role did activist groups and movements play? Elizabeth Wilkins, president and chief executive of Roosevelt Forward, and Hahrie Han, a political scientist at John Hopkins University, discussed these questions in the latest edition of Right Now. They both cast the results as voters rejecting the political system and the status quo more than embracing Democrats or repudiating Republican ideology. Wilkins says that Democrats in the states that the party controls should spend the next two years enacting policies that could be implemented by the next president. Han argues that liberals must create not only new policies but also new institutions where people connect with one another.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, and this is Right Now on The New Republic. We’re here right after the election, not even 24 hours. I have two great guests. A first for this podcast, Hahrie Han is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. She won the MacArthur Grant, more commonly known as the Genius Grant. We have had many intelligent people here on this podcast, but I think she is the first officially designated genius.

And I would note that Elizabeth Wilkins, our other guest, from the Roosevelt Institute, she’s the president of that think tank in Washington. From my talking to her and her work, she is also a genius, too, just MacArthur has not gotten to her yet. So Elizabeth, Hahrie, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Hahrie Han: Thanks for having us.

Elizabeth Wilkins: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Bacon: So the results were so surprising, and to me, so good. I probably came into this, when I talked to you about coming on, thinking, “Oh, Democrats will have a narrow majority in the Senate. They’ll have a narrow majority maybe in the House.” I didn’t get up thinking Texas. We’re talking about Mississippi today. So just give me your reactions. Elizabeth, start with you. Your reactions to what happened last night.

Wilkins: Yeah. It’s pretty incredible. Let’s just start with wow. Can we just for a minute, wow.

And then a couple of things I am really struck by. One, this was the most expensive election in history, between 11 and 12 billion dollars spent to prevent this result, and yet it happened anyway. So that is a real people over money power story right there.

Bacon: Let me pause a little bit, Elizabeth. More than 2024? I don’t think I realized it. The most—

Wilkins: Most expensive period.

Bacon: Period. OK. That’s helpful to know.

Wilkins: Yes. So a real over money power story there. That’s one.

Two, as you say, Democrats won in places that they haven’t won in decades. In Kansas’ case, not in 94 years, I think is the stat. Which says to me not just that this is a rejection, but that there was something going on where people who have not believed in possibility of change came out for this election.

And that we found some messages that were really exciting even across the South and the Southwest, and that those messages really had to do not just with affordability, which is clearly true, like the living, but also something deeper, like the sense that we feel economically precarious.

They feel like they don’t have agency or control, and that they are connecting that to who’s causing it, which is the folks who are trying to buy their elections, the folks who are creating marketplaces that feel extractive. And they want change. And I think all of those things are super, super exciting.

Han: Yeah, I would echo a lot of what Elizabeth said. To me, what this is the biggest sign of is that this is a wave of dissatisfaction. I think people are fed up with the status quo, and they came out in droves to express that dissatisfaction. And so in some ways, I think the mandate, if there’s any, is really that people want their everyday lives to improve. People don’t like the way that this kind of moment of tremendous turmoil that we’re in is just not reaching people in a lot of ways. So that’s one point.

I think the second point that I really took away, or that the election results really reinforced for me, is that the electorate is not fixed in the ways that I think we commonly hear about. And so this gets to Elizabeth’s point about, Democrats were winning in places that we wouldn’t have thought were even in play. And why do we not think that they’re in play?

It’s because so often the way that we talk about politics, we reduce people to geographies, to demographic categories, to these kind of groupings that sort of remove their humanity from the abstractions that we create. And I think what we’re seeing is that we’re in this really dynamic moment, and people are making choices about how they want to respond in ways that aren’t necessarily predictable based on some of those categories that we’ve long been using.

Bacon: Let me follow up, Hahrie. I think you said rejection of the status quo, something like that. So is that—we’ve seen every election in the US since 2012, pretty much every election has been rejection of the incumbent party. In Britain, in Italy, almost every country is seeing the incumbent party losing.

Is that this, or is this—because I walk into the election thinking it would be another anti-incumbent, the party in power always loses the midterms. But Democrats won a lot of seats. So is this a rejection of the incumbent or about MAGA? Because those are different things.

The party in power always losing is one thing. The party in power’s ideology being rejected is another. I know it’s hard to disentangle, but talk about that dynamic.

Han: So there’s a way in which this is historically a disjuncture and historically continuous, OK? It’s a disjuncture in the sense that we haven’t seen a wave this big since Watergate, basically, right? In terms of the big swing from one party to another. And so that’s a big deal, right? That was 50 years ago.

But on the other hand, what is very continuous is that we have been, throughout the twenty-first century, in this era of unstable majorities, right? The pattern that we see in American politics is that every time one party kind of gains a majority or unified control of the federal government, then in the next election, we see a bounce back. Now, this is a much bigger bounce back than we have seen in the past, but that pattern of instability, I think, is what is continuous.

But it’s not continuous throughout American history, right? So if you look at the twentieth century, instead what we had was periods where you had stable party control, right? The New Deal era, the Reagan era, different things like that, where there might have been little blips here and there, but you had one party that captured a stable majority of the American population, and then they governed with that stable majority for some period of time.

I think what we see right now in the twenty-first century, and this is to me the part that is continuous, is that neither party has captured a stable majority of the American population, right? So what that means is that every time one party gets control of government, they do a bunch of things that make people mad, because the electorate is not fixed in the ways that we talked about, then people react in the next election.

And so I think that’s the pattern that we’re seeing, which is why I would read this much more as a wave of dissatisfaction than a blue wave or something like that, because I think that the electorate is still up for grabs, because they don’t necessarily feel like either party is necessarily speaking to their interests.

Bacon: Elizabeth, let’s talk about this, too. I agree it’s not a pro-Democrats wave. I think I agree with that. Is it an anti-incumbent wave or an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA wave? Talk about that question.

Wilkins: I have to say, if it’s an anti anything, to me, I think it’s an anti-system wave, right?

Bacon: You cut out. Anti-system. OK. Thank you.

Wilkins: Sorry. My sense is Trump is a symptom of a system gone horribly wrong. He is the proximate cause, and it is the thing that people are immediately mad about. But people have been mad for decades about their eroding economic position, about their eroding economic power, and this just feels like consolidation, right? To Hahrie’s point, this swinging back and forth has been happening for a while because it’s increasing frustration with the way things are.

And I just want to put—one thing, Hahrie, that you said that I think is so important. FDR and Reagan were both presidents who ushered in a new political order. They governed long enough to change the institutions of government, to change the prevailing economic theory, to change the relationship between public power and private power.

And when we think about what would it take to truly change the system that people feel like is rigged, we have to figure out a way to govern power that is long after we’re in a different kind of political system.

Bacon: Let me ask quickly about the geographies. What do you make of what happened in—the South is a big region. I live in Kentucky. Kentucky’s now like Texas, which is now like Florida.

But I think you did see a general trend of Democrats did better in the South than they have in a long time. Winning Texas, Keisha Lance Bottoms winning in Georgia, Mississippi being close, Florida being close.

Let’s talk about what did you make of the results in the South, which I think is the most Republican region in the country, generally assumed in some ways maybe the most anti-union, anti-Black, what I would say. What did you make of the results in the South specifically?

Wilkins: I think this is super exciting. I think watching what happened in the South, and also a couple of other demographic things, Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. The expansion of the map and the calling in of some of the people who have been most disaffected means to me that I think that there is a moment that we really need to not miss. To not let those voters down, right? We have a bunch of people who came out in a really different way because they are so angry about what’s happening.

And if you look at what people were running on, if you look at a Talarico, or if you look at an Angie Nixon, even though she lost, but she came so close and her margin was not very different. If you look at Hinojosa, they are running a true kind of economic populist message that is appealing across racial lines, right?

It is like the original understanding of identity politics, which was not so much representational politics. It was, “I have a particular view about how bad class politics are because I’m at the absolute bottom,” and what we really need is a true anti-system orientation towards upsetting the current status quo.

And so to me, if we are exciting voters in Georgia, in Mississippi, in Florida, in South Carolina, it is because there is a multiracial coalition for real epic systemic change, if we can harness it.

Bacon: Hahrie, on the South? Anything with the South distinct to you?

Han: First of all, I’ll just say, I grew up in Texas, so Texas is my home state. And I will say that I won a 30-year bet last night, which is relevant to the answer to your question. I had bet a friend that Texas would go blue in our day, in our lifetimes, right?

Bacon: In our lifetimes. I was curious about that. That’s interesting.

Han: Yeah, win back kind of statewide office. And my friend thought no, it wasn’t going to happen, right? And the reason why I made that bet 30 years ago, when people would’ve said, “Oh, Texas is a solidly red state. What are you talking about?” is that if you actually look at the demographics in a lot of states like Texas, or other southern states, there is a lot of heterogeneity that’s masked by some of the kind of Republican reign that we’ve seen in these states.

And so in Texas, the major urban population centers have long leaned blue, right? And then you had these big Hispanic populations in like the Rio Grande Valley and other places like that, that really have been swinging back and forth over many elections. And we just saw in this election you had a particular set of candidates and a particular kind of set of economic and political conditions that pushed that over the edge.

But I don’t think it was out of reach necessarily in previous moments. Which again, I think just reinforces this point that in thinking about political strategy and moving forward, a lot of what we have to be thinking about is, how can we reconnect the parties to meet people where they are? And to be grounded in the complexity of people’s human needs that don’t necessarily fall neatly on these left continua that we sometimes use to define them.

Bacon: Elizabeth mentioned policy, and I want to come back to that now. Obviously we’re talking about policy a lot in this conversation, but be specific about it.

I think you could probably say Talarico, Sherrod Brown, this sort of economic populism, that is one theme you saw, in a lot of even quote unquote moderates were running on the billionaires have too much money and that kind of thing. I think you saw that. You had the El-Sayed, Troy Jackson version, which is more Bernie, Medicare for All-ish.

You had Ossoff doing something which was a little bit different, which was also the billionaires have too much money, there’s too much corruption, but also a little bit of this sort of, Donald Trump is racist and we need to get the racist. That was a little more pointed on the partisan end of it. And then you had Roy Cooper, who said stuff costs a lot, but he ran a campaign Bill Clinton could’ve run. And that’s not a criticism. Bill Clinton won two elections, and good for him.

So I think there was a range of stuff that was going on, and I want to emphasize it only to say, start with you, Hahrie. What are the policy implications of this election? I agree that people don’t like high gas prices, so let’s concede that and not spend much time on that. But beyond that, are there any policy implications that you see from the races?

Han: So all we have right now is the exit polling data, which is always fuzzy in the ways that we all know. But if we look at the exit polling data, the top issue that voters named was the economy. The second issue, which was a pretty close second actually, was democracy. Which, to me, as a political scientist, I’m like, “What do people mean when they’re answering that question?”

And my gut, and I don’t necessarily have a data point I can give you on this, my gut is that what people are fed up with is a sense of corruption. And so it goes hand in hand with this idea that we have this concentrated economic power, right? That is making choices that raise gas prices, that bring data centers into people’s communities, all these kind of things that we see this reaction against. And that people feel like there’s a different set of rules for one class versus the other. And so I think both of those things are what people are reacting to.

And so what’s the kind of policy agenda coming out of it is to try to restore what I always understood as the original promise of democracy, which is that you overcome inequality of resources with equality of voice, right?

And so I think when people are saying, “I’m mad about the economy and I’m mad about democracy,” it means that I have no voice and the inequality is just out of control, right? And so you have to equalize those things to restore the kind of world that people want to live in.

Bacon: Elizabeth, I also want to hear what you think about the policy implications. That’s where you live.

Wilkins: Yeah, so just starting, I couldn’t agree more. There’s a connection between the affordability cost of living econ stuff and the democracy stuff. The corruption is where that comes together. This idea that, I don’t know, man, I think that our political leaders and our corporate leaders might be in bed together to pull the drawbridge up behind them, and whatever they’re doing, it’s not going to benefit me, right?

Whether somebody in a political science way says this is democracy or whatever, I think they’re connecting, the American promise isn’t working for me, and it’s working for those people over there, and they are using their advantages to maintain that power.

So to me, that means policy going forward has to be laser focused on those two things. So quality of life economic conditions, economic security for people, and the ways in which concentrated power both directly—so how do you deal with your health insurance company? How do you deal with your bank, et cetera, and are they extracting gains from you? And also, when is it that concentrated power means that somebody can buy the political outcome that they want, which is beneficial to them and not to me?

I think the peril of this moment is to understand it as a traditional democracy rejection of this administration, and to spend the next two years doing kind of very administration-oriented oversight.

The promise or the opportunity is to say, All right. We will show you what a different kind of governing would look like. We will show you that we are willing to take on the powerful interests that are affecting your daily life. We will go after the ways in which uniquely certain corporate leaders and certain political leaders are in bed together to make sure the pharma companies get their profits. What are the ways that corruption actually directly affects your daily lives?

So to me, that policy means thinking about the sites of power that people want to see their political leaders fighting, and then figuring out how to lay the groundwork for something I think is really complicated, which is, changing the economy is not something you deliver in one year or two years, right?

You both have to have some policies that recognize that people have to pay their bills next month, at the same time that you are building will for those long-term structural changes.

Bacon: Hahrie, you write about and you cover movements a lot, so I want to ask about the next—when I think about 2026 and 2025, I think the winners to me, the people who drove this, are not the Roy Coopers and the Jon Ossoffs, they get all the credit.

But the people in Minnesota, or the people who were protesting ICE in Chicago, or in Los Angeles, or the people who were in the Indivisible rally saying, “We will stand up to this,” when Hakeem and Chuck Schumer were not sounding as sharp as I would like them to sound, or as they sound right now.

So talk about that. When you look at this, what role do movements have in the result last night?

Han: Yeah. Actually, maybe I’ll just link it back to an earlier part of our conversation, when we were talking about this idea that we’re in this era of unstable majorities, right? Where partisan control keeps flip-flopping back and forth.

And so a logical question that would come out of that is, if neither party has captured a stable majority of the American public for a generation, why has one party not seen the opportunity and then done the work to capture a stable majority? It flies against all of our theory, because it’s completely irrational for both parties to keep doing this thing that keeps causing them to lose every other election, essentially, in a way.

And there’s a political scientist at Stanford named Mo Fiorina, and the argument that he makes is that the reason why it’s happening is because there’s been this growing gap between the people who are basically the producers of American politics, and then the vast majority of the public that are invited to be constituents of it, right?

And so the people who are the producers are obviously the policymakers and the party leaders, but also people like us who are part of the chattering class, as you might say, journalists, big donors. People who feel like they have some say in shaping the choices that are available to ordinary people, right?

And Fiorina estimates that’s about 15 percent of the public. But the other 85 percent of people, they feel all they can do is go to the grocery store and choose Chex or Cheerios, and then go to the polling booth and choose this candidate or that candidate, and maybe they don’t really like either, and so we keep seeing these kind of flip-floppy elections.

And so to bring that back to, what role did all the movements that we’re seeing play, I think what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to close that gap between producers and consumers, right? They’re trying to say the only way in which you can hold that producer class accountable is not just at the polling booth. You can do it through your actions throughout the year, right?

And we can build power if we act together, which is exactly what social movements and organizers do, so that we can reclaim our ability to have some say in shaping the choices that we’re given.

And there’s been a lot of talk in this cycle about the DSA wing of the Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. And I actually do think that—

Bacon: We will come back to that for sure. But go ahead, yes.

Han: Here’s what I’ll say, because I’ll say it right now. I actually think that a better kind of distinction is the parts of the party that are ensconced in this sort of system of consultants and so on, that have run campaigns and elections for a lot of years, and the new candidates that are coming up that can win only by being really grounded in movement.

And a lot of those movements are part of the DSA, but not all of them are, and so we see candidates like Talarico, who was able to build his own kind of momentum, drawing on some of these other kind of moments of mass collective action that we’ve been seeing.

Bacon: Elizabeth is not only in the movement now, but her family’s been in movements for a long time, so I want to hear what you think. And people should look up her biography and her parents and grandparents. Anyway, go ahead, Elizabeth, talk about the movements and the role in this election particularly.

Wilkins: Yeah. I’m going to do that terrible thing where I’m going to answer the question I want to answer and not the one you asked me. But I will just say one of the things that I am thinking about in terms of what we would need to build coming out of this election is, this is exactly right. There’s a gap between the political and policy elite, and the people that ecosystem is supposed to serve.

And so one half of the equation of fixing that is to actually use movement to get candidates and leaders who feel actually accountable. There’s another piece of it, which is, what do we do with this existing ecosystem of policymakers and leaders and governing institutions, and what kind of reorg of that ecosystem and those institutions do we have to do to make them responsive again, right?

Just like I think of a policy campaign, the right kind of policy campaign being like an inside-outside campaign, where you have movement pushing for a certain set of policies, and you hopefully have some allies on the inside who are trying to figure out, “How do I help make this happen as the forces are for the status quo.”

I think we need something like that for the future of our institutions more broadly, right? We need movement-oriented candidates. We need movements that can hold people accountable. And we also need a group of folks who are dedicated to doing policy and institutional work a different way, who know what time it is and say, “We need to rebuild our institutions not to be what they were 20 years ago.” Say, what would institutions responsive for this moment look like? What would making policy that would shift look like?

So one thing that I’m excited, if we understand in part this election to be a movement election, how can we use that to prod the insider ecosystem to rise to the moment as well?

Bacon: We touched on demographic groups a little bit, but I want to come at that a little bit more, because in 2024 you had this election and the big message was, I think every Black man who voted for Donald Trump was personally interviewed by the news media. So we had a big focus on—and I’m joking, because most Black men voted for Kamala, and I think it’s 80 something.

But anyway, there was a real movement. There were Black men particularly, Latino men, more likely to vote Republican than before. Young voters, you saw this drift to the right among them. And I haven’t read all the polls yet. It looks like you had a drift back.

So I’d be curious, Hahrie, and Elizabeth afterward too, is there any demographic story? I know we don’t necessarily want to break down people in blocks, but since we’ve already done that, let’s at least—and I think you also saw the sort of white working class, I don’t love that phrase, white people without college degrees to be more precise, who have been very Republican, were a little less Republican in these races too. So talk about any of those groups and any demographic story you came away with from this election.

Han: Honestly, I think because the swing was so decisive across all groups, the wave, however we define that wave, swamped all these other trends that we saw.

Bacon: The tsunami or whatever.

Han: Yeah. And what does that tell us? I think what it tells us is we’re in this moment of tremendous economic, political, technological, climatological uncertainty of every kind. And I think people are hungry for ways to navigate and make meaning of all that uncertainty that they’re facing, right? The precarity that they’re experiencing in their individual lives, and the uncertainty about how to make choices.

And so just from the movement perspective, what I’ll say is, if you look at colleagues of mine who’ve studied movements on the right and movements on the left, on all these different kind of things, the movements that are growing across the ideological spectrum are the ones that are providing a home where people can find belonging and then make meaning of this tremendous uncertainty that we have.

Now, does that mean that necessarily then they map exactly onto the political partisan agenda of these different movements? Certainly that’s what the movement is trying to draw them into, but I think we have to understand that process of meaning-making as being related to, but distinct from, that process of partisan mapping. And that’s a little bit what we’re seeing, is that there is—

Bacon: Give me an example of a group that’s doing meaning-making, belonging. Does that mean DSA? Does that mean evangelical churches? Just give me a couple examples of people in mind.

Han: I’ve done the most work on evangelical megachurches, right? And so here’s a couple data points I’ll give you. We collected, my team and I, every sermon delivered in the 1,500 largest megachurches in America from 2020 to 2026, right? It’s 7.5 billion words, right? It’s a ton of words, so it’s a ton of data.

And what percentage of these churches do you think mention the word Trump, right? This is from 2020 to 2026, and the answer that most people give is usually a lot higher. It’s about 15 percent or less, with the sole exception of when there was the assassination attempt on him, where half the churches mentioned him. But that was mostly in the context of, we should pray for him.

What that means is that outside of that assassination attempt, 85 percent of these churches never mentioned him, right? When he was running for president, when he was being elected, and then when he was serving.

And instead, what they’re doing is they’re tilling the soil for collective life, right? They’re doing the meaning-making. They’re pulling people into communities of belonging. And then that sort of mapping onto political identity is happening elsewhere.

Another data point that I’ll give you on the evangelicals is that about 20 percent of evangelicals believe that to be a good Christian means being a good Republican. But most people believe that 70 percent of evangelicals believe that to be a good Christian means being a good Republican. Which means there’s a 50 percentage point gap between perceptions and reality, right?

So that’s just making the point about the difference between the kind of place where meaning-making happens, and then the sorting and mapping onto political identity.

Bacon: Elizabeth, I asked about demographics. You already taught me a lot of it in a bit, but you can talk about that meaning-making or about demographic groups, either way. I’m curious what you think.

Wilkins: Let me see if I can do a little of both. So I’m thinking a lot about Roosevelt’s former fellow Dan HoSang, who’s at Yale, who thinks a lot about this question of, where’s their meaning-making.

And he thought a lot about the demographics of the 2024 election, and what all of those stories, why were there so many people of color who voted for Trump, et cetera, et cetera, and this question of belonging. Studied Turning Point.

And he has said multiple times, “I send my students to go to these events, and some of my minority students, some of my queer students say that they feel more welcomed in these Turning Point spaces than they do in any of the left liberal spaces which are purportedly agreeing with their politics,” which is really saying something, right?

There’s spaces that obviously at some point have a political orientation, but they start with a welcoming place that speaks to people’s need to connect in a moment of uncertainty, as we were talking about.

And there is something about both the organizing spaces of belonging and the crosswalk with what has become of our racial politics and culture wars, that we have not figured out how to do both of those things at the same time.

We have not figured out how to create welcoming communities that are authentic, and that there is no, we don’t vote you off the island if you say the wrong thing. We welcome you in, and we have hard conversations, and some of those hard conversations are about identity, and that is not about losing our values, right? We stand very comfortably in our values, at the same time tolerate spaces where we have disagreement and difference, and we fight them out.

And I’ll just go back to the Mamdani election, right? One of the things that was incredible about his election, he got, I don’t know, like 10 percent of the Trump voters in New York switched over and voted for him. And what he did in his politics was he was econ forward. He spoke to people’s insecurities. He then created a space of meaning and joy.

So not just railing against a terrible system, but being a place where people wanted to be. He didn’t drop any of his values, not a single one, about immigrants, about foreign policy. He did not run away from core values, but he was front-footed about the things that brought people together. He did the scavenger hunt, right? He created a place where people wanted to be.

So this is a little bit less about the actual demographics of this election, but I do think all of this points us a little bit towards where we need to go, which is, how do we create spaces of joy and connection? How do we figure out what the right relationship is between those spaces and our political spaces, such that we aren’t making vote you off the island lines in all of our spaces, right?

We’ve got to be able to create coalitions that admit difference while still being authentic and standing in our values. And figuring out the right connection between those meaning-making spaces, political campaigns, and our policy, I think is part of what we need to do to figure out what our governing coalition going forward looks like.

Bacon: So two more questions. The first, Elizabeth teed up. Elizabeth made a distinction between identity politics, which she defined in the way it was written, not in the way it’s become bastardized, and representational politics. I think it’s a very helpful distinction, between identity politics defined by its creators, and representational politics.

But I do want to ask you, what should we make of—I’m happy there’s a Black woman governor. I’m not afraid to say that, and I assume Elizabeth is too and Hahrie is too. So talk about those representational things a little bit last night, which is that we have the first Black woman governor in the history of the United States. Unfortunately, it took so long.

We had the first Muslim American senator last night as well, in a very hard-fought campaign, which unfortunately Islamophobia from all Republicans and unfortunately occasionally a few Democrats too.

And so talk about those things. Are those important things without being too focused on representation? There were moments in 2008 where we got overly focused on, Barack Obama winning did not eliminate racism. But are those things important still? Talk about those, Elizabeth.

Wilkins: Yeah, look, obviously I’m not going to take away from anybody the idea that it makes a huge amount of difference that someone who looks like me could sit in the governor’s seat. I talk about this all the time.

I have a seven and a nine-year-old, and we live in Washington, DC, and they don’t understand that mayors aren’t Black women. That’s real, right? They are little. They are imagining who they could be in the world, and they appreciate that they could be anything because there is representation in a lot of places.

I don’t want to cheapen the value of that, and I am over the moon, not only for the firsts, but we have a Native American governor now. We have a Native American senator. There are just so many. It is genuinely exciting.

The thing that I think we shouldn’t get confused about is going back to the thing that Hahrie said about the gap between elite spaces and where people are. It turns out that Black folks and Brown folks and queer folks and everybody else can be just as susceptible to being a part of that distance from people that they are supposed to represent as anybody else.

So when we confuse simple representation in the identity sense with continual results for communities in an era where there are deep divides between the political elite and the insider game and where people are, we get into trouble, right?

It is true actually, that for a long time, Black representation in the halls of Congress, and Black representation in the South, has meant really important gains for Black communities. But the more we have leaders of color who don’t feel accountable to their base, the less that’s going to be true.

So what I am looking for is, yes, I am so glad for my daughter that she now knows that she can be that. That is incredible, and I wouldn’t take away anything from that. It just doesn’t then solve this representational problem of the elite versus the rest, and how we reconnect that democratic accountability regardless of the color or nature of our representatives.

Bacon: Hahrie.

Han: I would totally agree with every word that she said about that. And as a political scientist, of course I’m tempted to talk about the data, but it’s yes, the data on descriptive representation is that it’s real, that for Elizabeth’s children and my children and other people, seeing people who look like them does absolutely make a difference, and that’s wonderful that we’re seeing that expand.

At the same time, it’s not enough. And I think that sometimes when we talk about representation, I worry that we have such a thin version of how it’s understood. Either I want someone who looks like me to be in there, or I am represented only when you do what I want. And neither of those is actually how democratic representation works, right?

Democratic representation should be a situation in which people can exercise voice and express their interests and act with others to try to realize their interests in policy, even if they don’t always win, right? And being able to equalize that playing field depends a lot on the kind of accountability that Elizabeth is talking about.

Bacon: The last question. I’m going to talk about what this means for the future. We’re going to have, I’ll be very blunt, we’re going to have a Democratic primary very soon. And I assume people will start announcing, maybe six weeks from now. I think Raphael Warnock almost said he was running last week.

So here we are. But my initial reactions were, people who say that only I can win are really leaning into winning, including my governor, Andy Beshear, who I respect. If a lot of Democrats can win, you’re going to have to have a little bit more of a platform than I can win.

And he’s going to have one, but I think the only I can win is going to be a hard argument if Democrats don’t win in Mississippi. And it might be easier for AOC to say, “I can win Michigan,” since Abdul El-Sayed just did. So those would be my initial reactions.

But I’d be curious, I assume yours will be less personality based, but I’d be curious what you all sense of what this means, if anything, for this primary we’re going to see. And maybe also our friend JD Vance also came out with some thoughts about the primary.

He pretty much criticized Donald Trump in this very long post on Facebook and said the Iran war, and we didn’t do enough with the economy. Which, I don’t remember a lot of VPs trashing the president, but he knows where he has to go in the future, and he may be making a smart political calculation.

So I’ll start with Elizabeth on what this means for these upcoming primaries.

Wilkins: Yeah. We haven’t talked as much about this, but there really were some major policy proposals that people ran on that got people excited, and specific fights that won, that people were willing to pick.

One thing that I think is incredible, there were 44 measures to ban data centers, to have data center moratoria across the country. 43 of them won.

Bacon: What is the one bad state? Now I’m just curious. What’s the area that likes data centers?

Wilkins: Some tiny little tech haven somewhere. I think it’s North Dakota, but you’ve got to fact check me there.

So we have to have people who are credible in willingness to put the public back in the driver’s seat around how technology is going to affect people’s lives, and how the wild concentration of wealth that is following this technology is going to be controlled and distributed. I think that’s table stakes from what we are seeing around the country.

I saw a whole bunch of people campaigning on healthcare costs. People are pissed off. But I will say, not only are they like, “Please restore my ACA premiums.” I just think if we think what is going to cut it is promising to go back to what was status quo ante, that is not the level of what people are asking for.

We saw people campaigning on breaking up big medicine, on saying, “No, your health insurance company can’t own the pharmacy benefit manager, and the pharmacy, and your doctor.” “No, you can’t have private equity own your home.” We saw a whole bunch of people voting for those kinds of agendas.

There’s two ballot initiatives that won, one in Michigan and one in Montana, that were about campaign finance reform. The Michigan one was no utility money in politics. It wasn’t just a rejection. People voted for an agenda that was around unrigging the economy, unrigging our democracy, creating a sense of not just economic security, but agency and control over people’s lives.

So I think that means to anybody who is interested in getting the seat in 2028, they have to be not just responsive to, but bold and visionary about what it would mean to respond to those demands.

I would love for everybody to vote on policy. But I also think people are looking for authenticity. The candidate quality kind of did matter in this election, and people were looking for folks who could credibly carry those messages, who could look you in the eye and say, “Yes, I get where you’re coming from, and I’m going to do something about it.”

And then I would say, I’ve been spending some time looking at which midterm this is analogous to. So, professional hazard, we think a lot about FDR and the New Deal. An interesting one to look at is the 1930 midterms. Hoover is president. People are obviously very upset about their economic circumstances. FDR is reelected governor in 1930, and he spends 1930 to 1932 doing the pre-New Deal in New York.

He creates a system of public power. He works with Frances Perkins to do what would become the ideas for Social Security. He does basically a public jobs program. A lot of the seeds of the New Deal you can see in the two years that he was governor.

There’s a lot of people who run states right now who probably are wanting to throw their hat in the ring. I would say we have two years now, again, not just to say we don’t like Trump, but to say this is what alternative governance would actually look like.

Attitudinal standpoint, I am willing to stand up to the forces in your life that you feel too small to stand up to. And here’s what an affirmative agenda would look like, so that you wouldn’t feel like things are out of control and taking over your children’s education, so that you wouldn’t feel like your healthcare company owns you and you can’t get a person on the line, et cetera.

There is a lot in what was actually run on in this election that I think points the way to folks who want to win in the next two years.

Bacon: I like that. And if Josh Shapiro or J.B. Pritzker or Wes Moore’s staff is listening to this, I think Elizabeth is saying you might want to spend January, February, and March doing stuff more, and flying to New Hampshire to do events less.

Wilkins: Do your jobs, guys.

Bacon: Running for president’s part of their job, when they’re doing it, but I think doing your job and using that power is a very important thing.

All right. So 2028 is what I asked about, and I like the answer she gave is more about policy and less about personalities. Personality is interesting too.

Han: So here’s where I’ll take it in a slightly different direction. Candidates do matter. I think this election showed us that candidate quality obviously does matter. But actually on the 2028 question, I’m less interested in the candidate right now than I am in the kinds of things Elizabeth’s been talking about, but also one more piece of it, which is what you were just saying about governors who can choose to stay in their home states and actually do the work, as FDR did, or kind of fly to New Hampshire.

To me, that represents a difference between this discussion that we’ve been having about the system as it currently works and the system as it could work, right? And the system as it currently works is kind of grounded in this politics of spectacle, right? Where it’s, everything is fly to New Hampshire and do a big event and make sure it looks good on TV and get the right people on stage.

And it turns politics into a spectacle that then people get to choose to consume or not in a variety of different ways. And I think this comes out most vividly in the way that people campaign.

And The New Republic ran a great article last week or a couple of weeks ago about the fundraising machine that feeds the consultant industry that underlies this, right? For every dollar raised, 70 cents goes back into feeding that same machine. It’s crazy when you think about that.

And so for me, what I’d be really interested in is thinking about, the candidates are not going to be our savior, right? Instead what we need to do is rebuild an infrastructure that moves us away from this politics of spectacle, right? And instead knits us into a kind of politics of practice that goes on year-round even when elections aren’t happening.

Because the other thing that I worry about when we talk about the policy is just that, one of the trends that we’ve seen is that the data on the state of the economy and people’s experience of it aren’t necessarily moving in line, right?

That just because Biden delivered some big policy changes, people didn’t experience it that way. And so what that means is that you need that policy work to be really knit with an infrastructure of meaning making and all this other stuff that’s happening on the ground.

So I’m most interested in candidates who are doing that right now, who are investing in that early on, because this is the moment when you should be doing that, so that you can then reap the benefits of it in the six months leading up to 2028.

Wilkins: I just want to add on to this. I think about this a lot, that if what people are demanding is systems change, right, that doesn’t happen in two years, right? And the political feedback for that doesn’t exist. What does it mean to tackle big systemic problems, but also deliver in the near term such that you are actually building trust again with people? And how do we actually plan for that in a governing moment?

And some of that is exactly what you’re saying. It is, how do you knit back together the policy process and the sense that people have some agency and that there is some accountability in the political system. And then I think there’s also really some policy work to do to say, what are the down payments that we can make to people that are shorter term, but that are directionally right for the kind of reform that we want to see?

So rather than what we saw in the last administration, which I was a proud member of, which was basically, I don’t see what your problem is. We’re doing all of the right things for you. You should be happy about it. That didn’t work out so well, right?

Again, going back to FDR, two things. One, persistent experimentation and action. I love this example. The Civilian Conservation Corps versus the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. Civilian Conservation Corps, FDR said, “We will have people in jobs in four—I don’t care what happens. We will make mistakes. There will be scandals.

We will take risks, but people will be clearing the forests and making us national parks within four months.” And then the WPA took two, three years to put together, because it was more complex work that they were being put together on.

You actually have to have a portfolio of policy that you’re delivering for people, some of which is short-term and maybe not structural, but is in the direction. Let’s actually ban non-compete clauses again this time. Let’s go after things like overdraft fees.

None of these are going to reshape the economy, but they are meaningful for people’s pocketbooks, and they show that we are willing to fight, right? They are fall-forward kind of short-term policies that help build the will for those long-term structural changes.

And then the other thing, I think, is FDR. Turns out we did not actually get out of our economic depression until we went to war, right? But he won elections anyway, and part of that was his fireside chats, right? Part of that was constant communication with the American people.

If you are not going to win in one year or two years or three years, rather than communications that say, “But I did all these good things for you,” communications that actually say, “This is hard. I’m fighting. Here’s why it didn’t work. Here’s what we’re going to do next time.” There actually has to be a more honest conversation between leaders and their people. And some expectation setting. We can’t promise the moon and then deliver it tomorrow, and that’s not actually how trust is rebuilt. Trust is rebuilt by repeated interactions where you do what you say you’re going to do over and over, and you start small until you have enough trust to go big.

So thinking about a theory of campaigning and then a theory of governance that actually takes that interaction between leaders and the governed into account, I think is really important.

Bacon: This has been a great conversation, because we’ve gotten beyond the who won North Carolina by how much. We’ve talked about politics in a more fundamental way than the way I wanted to.

I want you all to close by just giving you an opportunity, since I got to lead the conversation, anything you want to say or anything you want to plug that the organization is doing, or anybody else’s work that you want to say, “Please read this piece.” Hahrie, I did not pay her, but she did note a New Republic piece by my friends Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica that I do recommend people read, about the problem of the consulting class. Thank you for that.

But anything else, I’ll start with Hahrie, so anything else you want to talk about or plug, I’ll give you an opportunity to do that.

Han: Yeah, no, I agree. Just to reiterate, it’s a great piece that’ll set your hair on fire in a good way.

And the only thing, actually it just builds a little off of what Elizabeth was just saying, is yes, it’s a yes, and. I agree with everything that she’s saying, and I just want to knit together these different pieces of our conversation, which is that we need policies that are going to enact real changes in people’s lives sooner rather than later. We also need places where people can go and make meaning of those changes.

So it’s not like things change and I’m like, “Oh, I know exactly where to attribute causal links to.” It’s people make meaning relationally with each other. And I think where I spend a lot of my time is thinking about, where are those places in America where we’re bringing people together at scale, where people are really making meaning. It’s similar to what Danny HoSang has said on the right, but just looking across the whole spectrum of different places.

And I think that one of the most important things we can do right now is just investing in the kind of local entities where people gather with each other to figure out how they want to understand this turbulent, crazy world that we live in. And that’s going to start happening tomorrow. And it’s not a communications game.

To me, you have to ground whatever communications are coming from leaders in the lived experience of people who are interacting with each other and coming to understand how they make sense of all the changes that we’re seeing.

Bacon: We will have to have another discussion about movement making spaces, because in this conversation we have mentioned that a few times, both of you. We’ve mentioned evangelical churches and Turning Point, and for our audience, those places are not places they’re going to go. They might go to one of them, but definitely not the second. And so I want to come back to, what does it look like for people who might have more liberal points of view? But another time.

Han: Yes, but I think that’s an important point. I have a lot of thoughts on that one.

Bacon: Yes, I’m sure you do. I know Elizabeth’s got to run her think tank, so let’s finish up here with her thoughts, any final thoughts she has.

Wilkins: One thing I just want to say, Perry, is I just so appreciate this conversation, and hopefully you’re going to be OK with this characterization. I feel like you have an insider outsider strategy right here on this screen almost.

Han: As it should be.

Wilkins: Right? Exactly. It’s, what kind of new set of relationships should political leaders have to the people they represent and the systems around them? So the institutions that political leaders exist in, the ecosystem, the policymakers, the consultants, that’s one side of it. And then the other side is, what is the civic infrastructure and the thickness of civic life that we need for a healthy democracy?

You’ve got to do both of those, and actually you need to connect them back together. And conversations like this that put in conversation folks who are thinking about how do we need to change and evolve the insider ecosystem, and folks who are thinking about how do we need to change and evolve the outside ecosystem, both those conversations are super important, and they have to happen together if we are actually going to create a sustainable and equitable democracy going forward. So just kudos to you. I think that this is such a cool pairing for thinking about holistically what kind of political system we want going forward.

And then the second last thought I have is just, I am so excited about the magnitude of what happened last night, and also totally terrified that we will misunderstand the moment. People are like, “Oh, is this a rejection or is it a mandate?” I don’t think this is a mandate.

It’s an opportunity. People have given us the opportunity to show them that we are worth trusting and investing in again, right? And really shame on folks if they do not understand the opportunity and act accordingly.

And just making this point about, we have had swings back and forth from incumbents for so long because the disaffection has run so deep. But true systemic change and political orders come from sustained governing power for a long time. So we have to have a theory of how you turn a moment like this into actual sustained momentum long enough to solidify a political order that truly does restructure some of the economic and democratic systems that we’ve been talking about today.

Bacon: All right, good. Elizabeth, Hahrie, great conversation. Thanks for joining me. Thanks everybody who tunes in. See you later.

Han: Thanks for having us.

Bacon: Bye-bye.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The epic catastrophe the GOP suffered this week appears to be seriously straining relations between Donald Trump and JD Vance. The vice president posted an extraordinary statement on social media in which he blamed Trump’s war for the outcome, while carefully avoiding any direct criticism of Trump himself. Trump, meanwhile, fired quite a warning shot at Vance, in effect putting him on notice against distancing himself from Trump in any way. That will make it very hard for Vance to maneuver and get space between himself and the war.

All this has really important implications for how our country can move forward and get past Trump. So we’re talking about all of it with Nick Grossman, who has a good piece discussing the centrality of Trump’s illegal war to the epic midterm loss. Nick, good to have you on.

Nicholas Grossman: Great to be here. Great day to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with JD Vance. He put out a long statement on X that’s pretty remarkable. He admitted that the main problem in the election was that a whole lot of voters who had backed Trump and Vance in 2024 voted Democratic. And Vance said this: “The reason we lost is the war.”

Vance then went on to strongly suggest that the war wasn’t worth losing Congress over. Nick, your reaction to that?

Grossman: I’ve never seen a vice president do this before, of break with the administration. And I think he’s probably right, in that the Iran war was a major factor in Republicans’ loss. Another major one was corruption, and JD didn’t mention that at all.

But it’s still remarkable for any vice president to kind of publicly shiv, even if indirectly, a president like this. And it might reflect something of also administrative infighting, or him positioning himself in the future. But it still shows the depth of the Republican midterm loss, and how quick Vance is to try to blame somebody else.

Sargent: He understands that it’s an utter catastrophe for his 2028 chances. That’s what this really shows as well, doesn’t it?

Grossman: It does, because Republicans are so much weaker in various places, and because Vance will be tied to the administration. But he seems to be trying to say that he wasn’t, that he wasn’t a part of the Trump-Vance administration, or at least he opposed whatever you don’t like about it and he did whatever you do like about it. And it’s also just so different from the way he was campaigning for Republicans just days ago.

Sargent: That is a really good point. There was a really interesting moment as well where Trump was asked about JD Vance and the war, apparently in the context of these massive electoral losses. Listen to what Trump said.

Donald Trump (voiceover): I mean, we’ll see what happens. You don’t know who’s talking about running. You can have people running. You can have a lot of people, maybe a lot of people running. Maybe nobody’s going to run. Maybe he won’t run. I don’t know who’s going to run. But I can tell you that, as far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different.

Sargent: I read that as a serious warning that Vance has to be extremely careful about how he interprets these election results. What did you think of it?

Grossman: I thought so too. Everybody in his administration, everyone in the Republican Party, is supposed to be defending him no matter what. That’s priority number one. And Vance is not doing that.

He’s suggesting, at minimum, that maybe Trump did something that was wrong. And I don’t expect Trump to—well, if he did take that and kind of let it go, or take it to heart, this would be the first time.

Sargent: It would. And I think Trump was really knifing Vance in the back very clearly here, letting all of MAGA know that it’s now open season for 2028, don’t you think?

Grossman: Yeah, and it could be a lot of different people that are jockeying for a post-Trump Republican Party. And with these midterm results, that became something that now looks a lot sooner than it used to.

Just, I don’t know, a year and a half or so ago, there was talk about, will Trump run for a third term, and he was playing coy with it. And now a lot of Republicans are treating him, at least in the immediate aftermath, as more of a lame duck.

And Vance also mentioned being less supportive of Israel, which I noted was something that Trump said in the very last moments before the campaign, that he was going to reduce aid to Israel. And I doubt that would actually happen.

But still, that seems to reflect a sense that the Republican Party is not happy with that, at least a faction of them. Vance, someone like Tucker Carlson too, is going to run against the Iran war and against supporting Israel.

Sargent: You’re referring to Vance’s statement, in which he said that one way forward for Republicans to repair the breach with MAGA voters is to, “put America first and change our relationship to Israel.”

I do think that that shows Vance essentially hoping to salvage a way forward for himself by attaching himself to the Tucker Carlson constituency within MAGA. I think he actually is really more desiring of doing that, and essentially changing the relationship with Israel, than Trump is. I think Trump couldn’t really give a shit one way or another. He’s perfectly happy to be as pro-Israel as he’s being.

Grossman: The Republicans seem to be splitting on the question. There are still a lot of the hawks, the strong supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu. The white evangelical Christian support of Israel is in part tied up in prophecy and in part tied up in racism. And a decent amount of that is probably going to stay around.

But the other wing, this kind of Vance, Tucker Carlson, nationalist America First—they’re also more openly white nationalists. You can think to the Charlottesville marchers saying Jews will not replace us, and also that great replacement conspiracy theory.

Both Vance and Carlson have pushed that. So I think on the substance of it, Republicans will have this split. I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but people like Vance are going to try to do that.

And it also gives them an excuse to not totally blame Trump for the war. As in, hey, I wasn’t wrong for supporting Trump, you weren’t wrong for supporting Trump, the problem was the Israelis Bibi and others made him do it. It’s kind of a stabbed-in-the-back thing, and that will get him out of it.

Sargent: Nick, what exactly is the America First vision? You’ve been pretty good on this. I think we should talk a little bit about what utter bullshit it is, in a certain way, in the sense that there’s a tendency out there to interpret it as isolationist or even anti-war, but it’s not anything like that. It’s hyper-militaristic.

It’s essentially, we’ll do whatever the fuck we want in the world, and you can screw off if you don’t like it, or maybe we’ll just blow you up if you don’t like it. And in fact, Trump actually does say that fairly regularly, right? He says something almost exactly like that.

And it’s also a shrugging off of international alliances and commitments, human rights commitments, basically. It’s a declaration that we’ll just blow people up in the Caribbean with no due process if we decide it’s good for us. But so, what is this kind of foreign policy vision that fuses that with this anti-Israel ideology? What is it?

Grossman: So I think for America First, probably sometimes it’s called, you know, “isolationist” or “anti-war,” and it really isn’t either of those. It’s probably best understood as anti-internationalist. So where this is, you know, throwing off a lot of those commitments, of not respecting things like international law or human rights, of being really disdainful of alliances, and especially of democratic allies, in part because those are also ones that uphold things, or at least advocate things, like law and rights. And yet also being very aggressive.

And at times it seems like it just means somewhat similar to Trumpism: easy bullying victories, and not screw-ups or not hard things. So America First doesn’t seem to really object to, say, the boat bombings in the Caribbean, or the takeover of Venezuela and stealing of oil from Venezuela, and didn’t really object to the Iran war at the very start either. It was only once it turned bad that they ended up doing that.

So no one who was actually anti-war would support Trump. But there is something about the simplicity of the slogan and the pitch of it that was read by people as, like, let’s not do the Iraq War again, what Obama did with Libya wasn’t great, and let’s just sort of avoid that.

And that had some political appeal. But as an actual action, it’s just been internationalist bullying, nobody can tell me what to do, lined up with authoritarianism, and in some attitudes pretty fascist.

Sargent: And how does the Israel piece of this connect to that?

Grossman: The Israel piece is weird, because it depends on whether an American kind of sees them as us or them. There are some American hawks that really, especially on the right, that really see Israel as kind of an us—for example, us against the Muslims or something together. And there are some that see Israel as, like, the white evangelical Christians have seen it as sort of an us, in terms of in part biblical prophecy and in part things like racial or cultural or theocratic links between the two, or appeal between the two.

So there’s some of that. But Israel itself fits in very oddly to that, because it does mean that compared to other U.S. allies—and Trump has broken a lot of these—the U.S. relationship to Israel is a lot more of the U.S. giving to Israel than Israel giving back.

Sargent: Vance seems to think that he can actually find a way forward here by allying himself with the Tucker wing. He’s going to run into some trouble with the evangelicals and the hawks, who are, I think, maybe going to be—at least the hawks will be—somewhat emboldened by Trump’s failures, right?

I mean, I think you’re going to actually start seeing some Republicans coming out and saying, we’ve got to stop playing footsie with Putin and Russia.

And so I have trouble seeing how Vance goes forward here and represents the whole Republican Party, when there are going to be big-time knives out for the
“America First” vision among some of these Republican hawks, and the white evangelicals may not even be on board either. What do you think of that?

Grossman: To the best I can tell from afar, I think Vance is banking on the kind of white nationalism carrying the day. Vance has always been into that sort of stuff. And it is not totally unreasonable to look at the Trump era and say that those various—the hawks, maybe more establishment figures—that they’ll go along with whoever the Republican nominee is.

So that as long as Vance can get the far right on his side, and get kind of the white nationalists and the racists and the bigots, and get that on his side, get the nomination, then the rest will come along.

That’s probably his best shot at the nomination now, and at the presidency. I mean, I can’t think of a better path for him than that. So it’s basically either quit or try that. And it seems like he’s trying to get in early on.

Sargent: So a lot of this is coming as Republican anger at Donald Trump is really mounting big time. Politico reports that Republicans are really starting to point fingers at Donald Trump over what happened here. There was a really striking quote from the failed Maine Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles, who said this: “I’m optimistic for the future, because Trump’s going to be gone in two years.”

Now, I have a little trouble seeing how this is going to unfold, because Donald Trump is essentially saying, nobody will hold me responsible for anything that happened here. Nobody’s allowed to say that my war or my agenda or anything I’ve done has had any political consequences of any kind. Yet Republicans are now trying to figure out a way forward to rescue their party and rescue themselves. And Vance is doing that in his own way.

So it seems like the tension here is not really resolvable in some fundamental sense. It’s just going to have to crack up. And I have trouble seeing how Vance manages that, because if Vance goes too far in pulling away from Trump, then Trump will just sink his political ambitions by saying, you can’t be the nominee. How do you see this unfolding?

Grossman: I think that’s probably it. I mean, maybe this is being a little overly hopeful here, but it looks like a split, where the only options for them are either all of them abandon Trump, which I find extremely unlikely, or that they all rally around him again and sideline the ones that are critical.

And given how bad this loss was for them, and how far we are into the Trump era, and how exhausted some people are from it, and also how strong the argument is that it really is his fault that they lost—I don’t know how that one would happen either. So it seems like they’re headed for a split.

And psychologically, Trump has never been someone who either acknowledges error or admits any sort of mistake, or who is OK with anybody else being influential in the Republican Party anywhere near a level that he is. As much as he treats America now like his personal property, he’s been treating the Republican Party like it is his personal corporation for 10 years at least.

And so this idea of Vance coming out and saying sort of it was him, or a governor candidate that lost saying it was him—that he and some of his people are going to push back on that, that they don’t want to, otherwise he’s a total lame duck and just slinks away, and it would be out of character. And so both hopefully, and it sure looks to me like this is the path for it, Republicans are going to react to this by splitting. And if the midterm was closer, they might have been able to better hold together.

Sargent: I really wonder whether JD Vance actually ends up running. It strikes me that he’s deeply damaged goods at this point. And it’s easy to get a little seduced by the present, right? So I want to guard against that. Things can change, people can rehabilitate themselves, find new paths forward, they can rebound and so forth and so on.

But here’s a situation where JD Vance very clearly placed a bet on the idea that MAGA was a culturally dominant force. He was going to ride that all the way to the presidency himself. And now that idea’s just been blown to smithereens. And it’s a little hard to see how he gets back on track after that. What do you think?

Grossman: I don’t see how he can. I mean, he has always been somebody who lacks charisma, kind of doesn’t have the juice, in a way that, you know, say what you will about Trump, but one thing he’s always been good at is working a crowd and being able to interact with them and doing things that they think is funny, that they cheer. And Vance has all these awkward moments. So he doesn’t have the charisma.

He’s tied to a lot of Silicon Valley stuff, and the opposition in this election also was to tech oligarchs, data centers, and AI was a component in it. And so that is who got him in the vice presidency in the first place. The only reason how he became a senator in Ohio and then the vice president was, Peter Thiel threw tons of money at the primary.

It was many candidates. Vance squeaked by with less than a quarter of the vote, I’m pretty sure it was, and then still got the nomination because there were so many candidates. And then it was Thiel, Musk, Tucker Carlson, and apparently Don Jr. that were the big advocates for Vance as the VP.

And so when you add his personal lack of charisma, his name is in the administration that is very unpopular and doing unpopular things, where he’s going to have to pick a lane in a Republican Party that seems to be splitting, and he’s tied to the tech oligarchs—I mean, I think that he might end up running anyway, because one is the delusion of, hey, maybe it’ll work. And two, because if it doesn’t work now, this is probably his best shot. Or at least he could think that. So I think he’ll take a shot at it.

But no, I’ve never thought that JD Vance has the juice, and that kind of the only way that he could end up being president is either, you know, something like Trump dies in office, or that the Trump stuff in the Trump-Vance administration is popular.

Like, the economy is really good and he manages to squeak by as sort of a Trump legacy person. But no, I think his political career is in quite a bit of trouble. And if anything, it’s possible to read his statement as an element of desperation, in that, about how, I better quickly get distance from this or I’m screwed.

Sargent: And then Trump, of course, responds instantly by saying, you take one step away from me and you’re dead.

Grossman: Mm-hmm. And Vance should know that, given who he’s been around this whole time and who he’s kissed up to this whole time. He could either run as Trump’s successor, or he has to take on Trump directly. And if he’s going to pick something big, like, your signature foreign policy is why we lost, then that means taking him on.

And the weasely way—you know what, if anything, knowing him, he’s going to try to weasel his way through it and do both sides, and that’ll be even less appealing.

Sargent: A hundred percent. I think we’re only seeing the very beginning of the bloodletting, man. Nick Grossman, always awesome to talk to you. Great stuff today. Thank you so much.

Grossman: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Democrats are currently poised to obtain a majority of at least 54 seats in the U.S. Senate, far surpassing most expectations going into Election Day this week. (Alaska and, if you can believe it, Mississippi are currently too close to call.) They overcame an extremely difficult map to put themselves firmly in control of the upper chamber. Had the party only won 50 seats, Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote would have given the GOP a functional majority. A 51-vote Democratic majority would have raised concerns that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who has increasingly sided with Trump in recent years, might defect from the party. (He is up for reelection in 2028.)

Winning in 2026 has profound implications for the stakes of Senate elections in 2028 and 2030, as well. Only one-third of the Senate is up for reelection at a time every two years. Let’s hypothesize that Republicans manage to hold on in Alaska and Mississippi and the Democrats stay at 54 seats. Under that scenario, there is no obvious path for the GOP to retake the Senate in 2028. Of the 16 Democratic-held seats that will be up in two years, they are predominantly in deep blue territory. Only five seats are in states that Trump won in 2024: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. All five of those states swung hard against Trump on Tuesday night.

Republicans would have to either run the table in those five races to get an outright Senate majority or win four of the five seats and hold the presidency. That is a daunting ask after Tuesday’s results. The Ohio seat will be contested by Senator-elect Sherrod Brown, who is currently ahead by a quarter-million votes with 95 percent of precincts reporting. (His victory this year was to fill out the remainder of the term vacated by Vance two years ago.) Georgia voters will be asked to reelect Senator Raphael Warnock after already giving him a full six-year term in a difficult cycle for Democrats in 2028. With Trump’s lame-duck twilight already underway, it is extremely unlikely that the national political environment will be as favorable for the GOP as it was in 2022 or 2024.

Things only get worse for Republicans from there. If the GOP doesn’t retake the Senate in 2028, it will be almost impossible in 2030. That cycle’s map is as formidable for Republicans as this year’s map was for Democrats. Only two of that year’s seats—the other Arizona and Nevada seats—are held by Democratic senators in states that Trump won in 2024. The rest are in sapphire-blue states, most with incumbents who would be hard to dislodge.

Whoever wins the presidency in 2028 will have a profound impact on the 2030 electoral landscape, of course, and it is perilous to comfortably assume anything that far out. (At this point after the 2018 midterms, for example, the Covid-19 pandemic was beyond anyone’s imagination.) But for GOP officials looking ahead in the cold light of day right now, there is little reason for optimism. All of this math also gets considerably more brutal if Democrats pick up the uncalled Senate seats in Alaska and/or Mississippi.

Four other things beyond the basic math of Senate control stand out. First, a 54-seat Democratic majority blocks Trump from nominating new conservative judges to the upper federal courts in 2027 and 2028. This will be the first time that the White House and the Senate have been held by different parties since Republicans captured the chamber for the final two years of Barack Obama’s presidency more than a decade ago. Republicans only confirmed 30 Obama nominees to federal judgeships in 2015 and 2016, and only in cases where they had significant bipartisan support.

But the GOP also famously refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination to replace the late Antonin Scalia in 2016. Judicial confirmations at all levels have become increasingly partisan affairs since then. Democrats will likely invoke the Garland precedent for the next two years to refuse to confirm any conservative nominee to the Supreme Court or, at minimum, to an important federal appeals court. If you are a red-state attorney general or a conservative law professor, the doors just closed on any chance that you’ll become a federal judge anytime soon.

Second, the results could lead to a much more aggressive Senate Judiciary Committee. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, who did not run for reelection this year, would have returned as chairman after spending the last two years as ranking member. Durbin ran a fairly cordial committee in the Biden years. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the next-seniormost Democratic member of the committee, is a much more outspoken critic of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, as well as the conservative legal establishment and the “dark money” donors that prop it up.

Whitehouse has proposed legislation in recent years that would require the high court to adopt a binding code of ethics, stricter recusal rules, and more expansive disclosure requirements. He has also demanded investigations into conservative justices for their alleged ethical violations. In 2024, for example, Whitehouse and Oregon’s Ron Wyden publicly urged then–Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate potential tax law violations by Justice Clarence Thomas. Whitehouse also submitted an ethics complaint against Justice Samuel Alito in 2013 over revelations that Alito had accepted luxury vacations from a right-wing billionaire. Nothing came of those efforts. But with few judges to confirm over the next two years, a Whitehouse-led committee would have plenty of free time for investigations of its own.

Third, the state-level losses for Republicans wiped out key portions of conservatives’ legal-political infrastructure. Perhaps the most consequential downballot result of the night in the entire country was Nathan Johnson’s victory in the Texas attorney general’s office. The state attorney general’s office is one of the largest in the country with a staff of 4,000 employees and roughly 750 attorneys. It is a behemoth, on par with the powerful attorney general’s offices in California and New York.

Many of those lawyers work on internal Texas cases with no partisan valence. But Ken Paxton, who lost his state’s Senate race and served in the attorney general’s office for more than a decade, also helped transform the office into a hub for right-wing litigation against Democratic presidents. Paxton filed 107 separate lawsuits against the Biden administration to challenge nearly all of its major policies and regulatory changes. Those cases often went before friendly right-wing federal judges in Texas who regularly enjoined Biden’s major moves, making it effectively impossible for liberals to govern.

If a Democratic candidate wins the 2028 presidential election, they will still have to worry about Republican attorneys general in other states challenging their policies. But the loss of the Texas attorney general’s office—and its highly favorable judicial environment—is a major blow to right-wing litigation campaigns that won’t be easily filled by other states. It also does not bode well for right-wing figures with a penchant for legally dubious behavior—such as Elon Musk, who moved the bulk of his businesses to Texas in the Biden era seeking a more favorable conservative legal landscape.

Fourth, the results are bad news for conservative judges in the lower federal courts who are nearing retirement. Roughly two dozen federal appellate judges appointed by Republican presidents are currently or will soon be eligible for senior status. A federal appellate judge who takes senior status can keep hearing cases, but the change opens up a vacancy for a younger replacement. Trump and the GOP still have a tenuous grip on the Senate for another two months, but at least 20 pending judicial nominees are currently working their way through the confirmation process. Others will have to wait a while—and perhaps a long while.

That brings us to the fifth and final shift after last night’s Senate earthquake: the futures of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Legal conservatives have looked at the two men with some anticipation and apprehension in recent years, hoping that the two right-wing stalwarts would step aside and allow a younger jurist to take their place. Those hopes were in vain. Thomas, who is 78 years old, is rumored to have his eye set on surpassing William O. Douglas’s record for the longest tenure on the Supreme Court. That would require him to stay on the bench until May 20, 2028.

Alito, who is 76 years old, was seen as more likely to retire first. He raised speculation of an imminent preelection departure with a major book release in October and a valedictory media tour of sorts. Last month, however, Alito publicly ruled out the possibility that he would step down before the end of the court’s current term. Supreme Court justices are typically loath to retire midway through one of the court’s October-to-June terms since it seriously disrupts the court’s work. (The next two oldest justices, Sonia Sotomayor and John Roberts, are 72 and 71, respectively—a spry middle age in Supreme Court terms.)

The scale of the Democratic victories on Tuesday changes the actuarial math for the future of the Supreme Court. If Thomas and Alito had retired earlier this year and been replaced by younger conservative justices in their early-to-mid-fifties, Democrats would not have a natural shot at a Supreme Court majority until the 2060s. Tuesday’s results make it significantly more likely that the court will not get younger or more conservative until 2032 at the earliest. If both men step down for health reasons in the next six years and Democrats win the presidency in 2028, America could see its first liberal Supreme Court majority since the 1960s.

What if one or both of the justices change their minds in the next two months? That ship may have already sailed. The GOP majority in the Senate right now is 53 seats, with Vance available to cast a tie-breaking vote. But it is a brittle majority in functional terms and especially in judicial terms. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is not a reliable “yes” vote, having voted against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2018. Maine’s Susan Collins voted against Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in 2020. (She lost her seat on Tuesday in part for voting for Kavanaugh two years earlier.) Kentucky’s retiring Senator Mitch McConnell is in very poor health.

The GOP Senate majority will shrink by one seat a few weeks early when Sherrod Brown replaces John Husted on December 15 under Ohio law. (Everyone else gets sworn in on January 3.) Even if Thomas or Alito were now more inclined to retire in the next two months, in other words, the uncertainty about having enough votes to confirm a successor may be enough to deter them. None of this guarantees a major ideological shift on the Supreme Court in any direction anytime soon. But Tuesday’s Senate victories for Democrats have tilted the playing field in their favor for at least the next four to six years.

Preventing the conservative majority from replenishing itself could end up shaping decades of Supreme Court control to come. 2016 was a very, very bad election for liberals who care about the court to lose, as they have painfully learned in recent years. The 2026 midterms happened to be a very good one for them to win.

Democracy has survived. The republic has been saved. After two years of Donald Trump’s second administration, we can finally begin the long, arduous process of returning America to the deeply dysfunctional country it was before he arrived.

Democrats have promised sweeping change. And with their new congressional majorities, they finally have the power to hold hearings to determine why sweeping change just isn’t possible right now.

We are on the verge of restoring things that, until recently, were considered routine functions of a modern civilization. Scientific research. Public health. Educational opportunity. Foreign aid. The radical notion that government employees should possess some familiarity with the agencies they run. Imagine the possibilities.

One day, the Centers for Disease Control might once again be run by someone who believes in diseases. The husk of the Department of Education could return to the controversial business of education. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health might be allowed to conduct experiments without first determining whether the results would upset a podcast host.

Of course, Trump remains president. Which means that, for now, Democrats can investigate the wreckage, subpoena the wrecking crew, and introduce legislation that will eventually arrive on his desk for a ceremonial veto. There will be speeches. Emotional reunions with congressional oversight. Perhaps a commemorative postage stamp celebrating the return of basic competence. And we will applaud.

It’s déjà vu all over again. The Tea Party seized control of the Republican Party in 2009 before devolving into incoherence. MAGA took over in 2016 and descended into fraud and economic absurdity. But Trump has managed something even more remarkable: He has made mediocrity aspirational.

Ten years ago, health care was unaffordable. Housing was increasingly out of reach. Wages struggled to keep pace with the cost of living. Millions of Americans were one medical emergency away from financial catastrophe. And those were the good old days.

Now, after watching the federal government undergo the administrative equivalent of hiring arsonists to run the fire department, we’re preparing to celebrate the restoration of the very institutions that presided over those problems.

Democrats will assure us that real change is coming. Not immediately, of course. First, there will be committees. Then bipartisan working groups to determine whether the committees have been sufficiently bipartisan. By 2028, we may have a comprehensive framework for developing a road map toward the possibility of affordable health care.

The American people demanded transformational change. What they may receive instead is a carefully worded statement expressing deep concern about the need for transformational change. And a fundraising email. Because nothing says democracy has been saved quite like an urgent request for $5 to save it again.

To be clear, restoring competent government matters. But competence is supposed to be the starting point, not the destination. We’ve lowered the bar so dramatically that future presidents may be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom simply for not tripping over it. And here’s the remarkable part. We’ll be deliriously grateful. I know this because of my bathroom.

Recently, water damage in my second-floor bathroom destroyed part of the ceiling in my office below. And the bathroom itself was a total loss. What followed was six months of insurance negotiations, contractors, estimates, delays, displaced belongings, and the general indignity of living in a house that resembled a storage facility with plumbing.

Then, finally, the work was completed. The bathroom was beautiful. The office ceiling was repaired. The stacked boxes were gone. My house was whole again. That first morning when I stepped into my newly renovated shower, I experienced an almost spiritual sense of joy. It was over!

Six months of frustration had culminated in this glorious moment. I stood beneath the warm water, overwhelmed with gratitude. And then a thought occurred to me. Before the bathroom declared war on the house, I’d been considering replacing the kitchen counters and cabinets. And wasn’t I going to get the roof inspected? It’s pushing 15 years.

Wait a minute. I had a perfectly functioning bathroom six months ago. I hadn’t gained anything. I’d endured six months of misery to return to a condition I’d previously taken for granted. Yet emotionally, it felt like one of the great achievements of my adult life. And to think, I was prepared to nominate my construction supervisor for president.

That’s when I understood American politics. We are a nation conditioned to celebrate the recovery of things we should never have lost while quietly abandoning our expectations of things we should have gained. Trump has created enough institutional wreckage to keep his political opponents occupied for years. He has made the restoration of yesterday’s disappointments look like tomorrow’s triumphs.

And Democrats are more than happy to accept the assignment. After all, repairing what someone else destroyed is easier to explain to voters than fundamentally reimagining what government ought to accomplish. You don’t have to convince anyone that a better world is possible. You just have to remind them that things used to be slightly less terrible.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and automation are transforming the labor market. Health care remains a financial obstacle course. Housing increasingly resembles a luxury product. Wealth inequality continues to widen.

We could be having ambitious national conversations about universal health care, universal basic income, affordable housing, and what a dignified human life should look like in an age when technology can produce unprecedented abundance. Instead, we’ll spend years celebrating the restoration of institutions that existed while those problems keep getting worse. And the politician who restores those institutions will be called a hero. The politician who proposes building something fundamentally better will be called unrealistic. Or a socialist.

We’ll congratulate ourselves for getting our bathroom back while a kitchen cabinet door hangs by one hinge and the roof leaks. And when someone suggests renovating the rest of the house, we’ll explain that now is not the time for unrealistic expectations.

Perhaps that’s Trump’s most enduring accomplishment. He didn’t just change the direction of the country—he changed what we consider a victory. But I understand the celebrations this week. I’ve stood beneath the warm water, steam fogging the mirror, marveling at the miracle of a functioning shower. Oh, to live in a world of hot showers.

The best-case scenario promulgated by much of the pundit class was Talarico narrowly snatching victory from his opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Hinojosa valiantly crashing against the cold certitude of incumbent Governor Greg Abbott’s five-to-one spending advantage. Instead, Texas Democrats made history. They swept every single statewide office. They’re on track to control the state House for the first time since 2002 and flip all four of the Texas Supreme Court seats that were up for the taking this year, rewriting what’s possible in the Lone Star State overnight.

At Cactus Cove, a West Houston bar where area Democrats gathered, the night’s early tenor was uncertain. Everyone knew the odds—or at least, they had learned through each painful loss over the years that hope was a dangerous thing to have. Then came the results from the East Coast time zone: South Carolina, perhaps one of the most prototypically Southern states begrudgingly roped back into the Union, looked poised to select a Democratic senator for the first time since 1998. If they can do it, why can’t we?

As reality set in, people took to the streets. Cars parked outside the state Capitol in Austin and laid on their horns, waving the Texas flag. In the Rio Grande Valley, folks gathered in a strip mall parking lot for what’s called la pitada, an impromptu parade usually saved for Dallas Cowboys wins, hoisting large Hinojosa banners over a nearby pedestrian bridge. (Hinojosa, Texas’s first Latina governor, was born and raised in the Valley: puro pinche 956.) Tarrant County, the largest urban Republican stronghold in the state (Fort Worth), flipped both up- and downballot. Ditto Collin County, Paxton’s suburban Dallas home base.

In Houston, thousands of voters planted their “I voted” stickers on the memorial site where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by an ICE agent. This was regime change—it was not bloodless, lest we forget—which even those who hoped for it hardly expected to happen this way: slowly, then all at once.

No doubt Texas Democrats can thank national tailwinds for a good portion of their success last night, but Texas Republicans also had to contend with the slow erosion of people’s quality of life under their watch for the past 30-plus years. From the 1990s onward, they were the beneficiaries of a truly globalized economy: Allied with oil magnates, crossbred with neoconservative hegemony in Washington, and drawing boundless corporate investments at the expense of people’s everyday existence, all while blaming immigrants of basically every nationality for their own utter malfeasance.

Elon Musk burned at least $212 million to keep it that way (while reportedly seeking to purchase an entire state park). Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey Yass spent $12 million-plus to privatize Texas’s school system. The oil industry has for years “deferred” environmental fines while engorging itself on state grants, effectively reshuffling money back to itself, all under the auspices of GOP leaders.

Ken Paxton was in many ways the poster boy of this generalized—metastasized—corruption. The top of the ticket deserves most of the blame here; beyond his seeming inability to recoup his primary opponent’s country club Republican base, he also ran a “swagless” campaign, per Texas Monthly. But Abbott was part and parcel of the late Texas GOP, the sun around which apparatchiks obediently revolved. On my way to Cactus Cove last night, my rideshare driver was preoccupied by recurring calls from her aunt, who was trying to help her pay her electric bill, which she’d already restructured to pay in chunks. “It’s those new data centers,” she told me, exasperated—which Abbott had welcomed with open arms, no questions asked, until the backlash had reached a fever pitch. (Evidently, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI’s endorsements for his “guardrails” on the industry didn’t win voters over.)

In truth, parts of the Texas GOP are now likely eager to cosplay as resistance fighters. It was becoming played out, the establishment constantly pretending to “fight” the establishment, year after year. Whatever comes post-MAGA, be it the proto-Rhodesian fringe à la Bo French, or something closer to Abbottism—selective populism with a plutocratic bent—Republicans will likely maintain a majority in the state Senate, and the right’s online media apparatus will, with renewed zeal, showcase just how ugly and conspiratorial it can be.

Life will be hell for Hinojosa and her fellow statewides. She and Talarico’s 32-ounce Whataburger drinks had better have been strong. The moment will last forever in photos, but one day it’ll only be a page in a textbook.

Heading into Election Day, after months of progressive groups organizing election defense and Democrats war-gaming election-interference scenarios, there was ample reason to believe we would be facing down another attempt to overturn an election result Trump didn’t like, although what exactly that looked like might be different this time. As the Brennan Center warned, “A new threat to free and fair elections has emerged: the federal government itself.” A redux might look more like a “white-collar January 6,” as the hosts of the podcast Posting Through It suggested earlier this week. Stop the Steal could be coming from inside the house.

Certainly there were bad signs. In January, there were Trump’s threats about canceling the midterms that press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed were “jokes.” Trump appointed Ed Martin, a key 2020 Stop the Steal leader, as an acting federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., after which he served in other Justice Department roles, until departing in August 2026, in order to, according to Trump, “go outside to fight Legal Battles for the upcoming Midterm Election.” Tina Peters, a leading election denier who was imprisoned in Colorado, met with Trump in the Oval Office with her attorney, who said he wanted Trump to essentially declare martial law. At the same time, it seemed that talk of a “stolen” election was down, with claims of a “rigged” election taking more prominence, noted Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket, a shift to narratives claiming that the law made it “too easy” for disfavored groups to vote. Old hand James O’Keefe, once of Project Veritas, tried to make a scandal out of Minnesota’s legal process by which a registered voter can vouch for an unregistered voter, but it didn’t seem to get much traction. It was almost comical how many high-profile Stop the Steal leaders were competing with one another to influence Trump to declare a “national emergency” in order to take over the election.

Then came Election Day. At first, Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, the prominent right-wing X account that had pushed 2020 election conspiracy theories in the past, attempted to transform news of a handful of minor incidents into evidence of wrongdoing. She shared a CBS News post explaining that not all results may be known on election night, claiming, “Only someone who plans to cheat would say this.” But when she eventually posted news of Democratic wins, it wasn’t to suggest election theft or fraud. It was to do what she built her account on: point her audience at a name and photo of a trans woman, or a Muslim man, or a socialist. In this case, however, these posts were about newly elected state representatives and a U.S. senator.

Even the dedicated election-denier Kari Lake, who in 2022 refused to concede her loss in the Arizona governor’s race, broached election theft or fraud only as a question. “Americans, do you think our elections are honest?” she posted on X, at 12:38 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. “Did we properly deal with election fraud after the 2020 stolen election after the 2022 stolen election and after the ’24 rigged elections?”

As for Jack Posobiec, he chalked the election losses up to Trump’s Iran war. The morning after, JD Vance struck a similar note. In place of the stolen election conspiracy theory, there were concessions: They lost, they were admitting, and they lost for a reason.

There was one alternate conspiracy theory offered that may not have immediately read as such. The wins, as Chaya Raichik explained them, were because “Democrats imported millions of foreigners, handed them a bunch of free shit, and then registered them to vote.” This is the so-called “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as mainstream now as JD Vance. Raichik didn’t call for patriots to seize ballots or storm counting sites; instead she called on the state. “If we ever want to win again,” she posted, “we need deportations and denaturalizations ramped up on steroids.”

In this election, with wins so vast, there was simply no room for Stop the Steal. Even election deniers lost their races last night. There’s a victory in that—not so much because “democracy held,” as some said, but because people worked hard to make it hold. At the same time, as one particular narrative about stealing elections recedes, we can see more clearly the racism and xenophobia that was always a part of it. Such white supremacism should have been more obvious when (soon to be former) Texas Governor Greg Abbott hired a Stop the Steal guy, the Christian nationalist pastor Nate Schatzlein, as an “election integrity” adviser, only for him to be far more focused on scapegoating Muslims. Far-right influencer Mike Cernovich made it impossible not to see in an X post on Wednesday: “Republicans have a choice. Court the white vote or suffer personal defeat.”

Perhaps the bottom line, though, is that without Trump on board, there is no next step. Trump quickly claimed it wasn’t his loss, and did not contest the results. Without Trump, there was only one other figure to turn to. “God can override,” said the self-described prophet Julie Green on Rumble on Wednesday. “God can overturn. God can throw out. God’s also talked about martial law.”

By winning control of the governor’s office or state legislature this week, Democrats will have trifectas in six additional states: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (A trifecta is control of both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s office.) That puts Democrats at trifectas in 22 states, whose combined populations are about 54 percent of Americans. That’s up from around 40 percent of Americans living in Democratic trifectas preelection.

Blue America can no longer be treated as synonymous with “the coasts,” since so many states where Democrats are setting policy are far from oceans.

And with Democrats winning gubernatorial races in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and the majority of seats in both houses of New Hampshire’s state legislature, about 24 percent of Americans will live in states (18) where Republicans control all levers of power. That’s down from around 40 percent preelection.

That’s huge too. Texas is the second-largest state by population, with 32 million people. Ohio is seventh (12 million). Georgia eighth at 11 million. Democrats winning the governorships in those states will have massive effects. Atlanta, Austin, Columbus, and other major cities will now have a governor who wants to work with them, not attack them. Texas’s Greg Abbott was perhaps the most MAGA politician in the country, infamously busing unauthorized immigrants to Northern cities without their consent. His defeat by Democrat Gina Hinojosa is perhaps the most important single election result this week.

Overall, to reiterate, 54 percent of Americans will live in Democratic-dominated states over the next two years, compared to 24 percent in Republican ones. (Some states still have divided governments.) That’s a big Democratic advantage, far bigger than they will have in Washington.

These state results really matter. Few major bills pass in Washington, even when one party has total control, because of the Senate filibuster. Now, with Democrats controlling the House and the Senate, Trump’s agenda is (thankfully) mostly dead. And issues such as education are largely decided by states anyway. What happens in blue trifecta states? Workers get higher minimum wages and paid leave. People struggling financially have easier access to unemployment benefits and Medicaid. Local public schools and transportation systems are better funded. Policies aren’t passed that make it harder to vote, get an abortion, or seek medical care that affirms your gender identity. The candidate who wins the most voters is quickly declared the winner of elections.

What happens in red trifecta states? Districts are gerrymandered to ensure that African Americans and other left-leaning groups have as little representation in state capitals and Washington as possible. Cities are stripped of powers to run their local police departments and schools and regulate businesses in their communities. Public schools are defunded while upper-income families get state-funded vouchers to pay for private schools that often discriminate against LGBTQ students. University professors are barred from speaking honestly about racial and LGBTQ issues. Elections that Democrats win are questioned.

Even if you don’t live in Red America, you should care about what happens there. Your fellow Americans are denied civil rights and economic opportunities—and no, everyone can’t and shouldn’t have to move to a blue state. Republicans use their redistricting powers to make it as hard as possible for Democrats to win control of the U.S. House—even though that failed miserably in the 2026 cycle.

States run by Democrats are far from perfect. They often have massive income inequality, public schools segregated by race and class, and super-high housing prices. And many state legislators and governors are unwilling to push policies that help lower-income people because they are carrying out the interests of corporations and the superwealthy.

But blue trifecta states are at least largely trying to create some version of multiracial equalitarian democracy. Having more of them is good. And seeing Republican trifecta America shrink, particularly the GOP losing control of Texas, makes 2026 a truly monumental election cycle.

The Republicans desperately needed a topic to focus on in the election. They settled on demonizing transgender people, with more than a little help from Elon Musk.

Polling has shown that opposition to transgender women participating in sports and transition-related surgeries for minors are among the very few issues where Republicans enjoy a public opinion advantage over Democrats. Since 2020, the American Principles Project, a right-wing culture-war pressure group, has pushed the GOP to make transgender people its top target. A staggering 224 million advertising dollars were spent on anti-transgender ads by Trump in 2024, such as the “Kamala is for they/them” advertisement, which ran over 55,000 times.

The New York Times estimates that Musk has spent $474 million supporting Republicans in the midterms, even more than he spent in 2024. Just like in 2024, hundreds of millions went into advertisements attacking transgender people, or accusing Democratic candidates of being too supportive of transgender people in general. You would be hard-pressed to listen to a speech where Republicans didn’t mention “men in women’s sports” or, as Trump ungrammatically put it, “transgender mutilization.” Nearly every one of Trump’s stump speeches includes the ridiculous accusation that young children come home from school with a sex change.

The problem with this Republican strategy is that, while the American public wasn’t supportive of transgender people, most didn’t really care about the issue because it didn’t affect them or anyone they knew. Republicans found out that you can only wave a boogeyman around for so long before people stopped believing him/her/them.

Every poll I could find that asked voters what their top priorities were had transgender issues at the bottom. This makes sense, given that there are effectively zero transgender athletes competing at the NCAA or professional level in the United States (and the few who are competing are transgender men who were born female). No one performs “bottom surgery” on transgender youth. The only procedure being performed is breast reduction, and that is exceptionally rare: only perhaps 250 to 300 per year. A Harvard study found that 97 percent of all breast-reduction surgeries on teens were performed on cisgender (non-transgender) individuals.

What made this bet even worse is the YouGov polling that found that the public trusts Democrats (52 percent) on transgender issues more than Republicans (23 percent). In other words, the people who rated transgender issues as a top priority were more likely to be pro-transgender Democrats than anti-trans Republicans. The GOP bet that they could win an election based on fear and loathing directed at less than 1 percent of the population, on an irrelevant issue that Democrats care more about than the Republican base does.

The results were entirely predictable.

Tuesday night delivered an epic loss for the GOP. It was a curb-stomping for the ages; the sum of all Republican fears. Texas went blue. The House is projected to wind up with 255 seats held by Democrats. If Mary Peltola wins in Alaska and Scott Colom in Mississippi, Democrats will end up with an astounding 55 or 56 seats in the Senate. They came within a whisker of winning Florida and Louisiana, as well. By my own estimates, the polls underestimated Democrats by an average of about three points. This could be the worst loss we have seen in national politics since Ronald Reagan obliterated Walter Mondale.

It is impossible for anyone to say that Republicans made the right choice in focusing their campaign on transgender people. I suppose some (like Musk) would argue that loss would have been worse if not for the anti-transgender ads, but Republicans lost in basically every state where the ads were in heavy rotation, and hung on by the skin of their teeth in states no one thought would be competitive.

It’s also impossible to say that the few Democrats who threw transgender people under the bus profited from it. Some, like Amy Acton in Ohio and Annie Andrews in South Carolina, won in red states; on the other hand, they had comparatively weak opponents like Vivek Ramaswamy and Darline Graham. Ohio Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur, who had some nasty things to say about transgender people in her political ads, brutally underperformed, being on track to win her district by only 6.8 points in a D+11 year.

It’s also difficult to say that supporting transgender people hurt Democratic candidates. Abdul El-Sayed doubled down on his support for transgender people on 60 Minutes on Sunday. He handily beat Mike Rogers by 7 percent in a campaign marred by rampant Islamophobia. Similarly, in Montana, Sam Forstag stood up for trans people during a mid-October debate with his right-wing opponent; he was projected to win his conservative district by two points at the time of writing. Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota was a staunch supporter of the transgender community, and she beat polling expectations by even more than the national average.

Polling suggests that when pressed on the issue, it’s Democrats, not Republicans, who were more likely to say transgender issues are a priority. Additionally, polling indicates that the public thought Republicans were talking way too much about this issue. Regardless of whether Democratic candidates threw their transgender constituents under the bus, however, Republicans still attempted to smear them with accusations of supporting trans people.

The only thing it did was anger a core Democratic constituency. Some Democratic candidates who did flip seemed surprised at how much anger and dissent their transphobic platform created. Dealing with the fallout was a distraction and headache for them and their staff in the waning days of their campaigns. Thus, one could also make the argument that had these candidates not done a heel turn, they would have done even better given the lack of evidence that this was the issue that drew in centrist voters.

I suspect that Democrats will be delighted if Republicans choose to make transgender people the centerpiece of their pitch to the American people in 2028 again. Republicans might do it anyway, if Musk and his hundreds of millions of dollars in support for the GOP are predicated on it.

In 2024, Republicans ran on transgender issues and mistakenly assumed they won because of it. They didn’t seem to realize that they rode into the White House on the back of public discontent over inflation under Joe Biden (which he handled better than any other G7 nation).

Since then, Trump has driven up prices everywhere with his tariffs and wars, while delivering tone-deaf “let them eat cake” speeches. The GOP hitched its wagon to Trump again, made that same bet on campaigning against transgender people in 2026, spending more money than it did on the 2024 election; and then found out the hard way that it was always the economy, stupid. As the kids say these days, Republicans FAFO-ed.

In a lengthy post Wednesday on X, Vance spun the GOP’s massive defeat by blaming the administration he serves in—and the president he serves under, in particular—for launching a deeply unpopular war on Iran. The veep’s goal is barely concealed: He wants to succeed Donald Trump in two short years, and he doesn’t want the stink of Iran or the 2026 midterms on him. So he publicly threw his boss under the bus in an essay on Elon Musk’s hellsite. It has to be one of the boldest and most shameless things a vice president has ever done.

Vance, ever the clumsy retail politician, starts with an anecdote. He takes us behind the scenes to the days leading up to the midterms. The polls were looking bad then, though they ended up considerably underestimating Democratic margins, and the vice president wanted to know what was up. Was there any reason to hope?

Vance turned to the “smartest data guy I know” to ask if his party had any shot in hell. “No,” that man—who may or may not actually exist—allegedly responded. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”

This was “prophetic”—and not in a good way. “The main problem is not turnout,” Vance wrote. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.” Hence the blue wave. Hence the X post.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. Vance then goes to a pollster—maybe the second-smartest data guy he knows, maybe not. This person gives him a list of the priorities of the defectors: “The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: (1) End the war (2) Focus on cost of living/inflation (3) Put America First (4) Change our relationship to Israel.”

That is essentially a repudiation of the president and his administration, which (1) Started the war and can’t figure out how to end it (2) Has not brought down the cost of living, and indeed has made it worse (3) Is putting Corporate America first (4) Has steadfastly defended Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Vance then drops the hammer: “The reason we lost is the war.” The vice president attempts to temper this this by saying that Trump himself acknowledged as much last night. But that’s not really true. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal early Wednesday, Trump said Iran was a “piece” of why they lost. Vance is saying something altogether different: that the war Trump started, in part due to his close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is why Republicans were just handed the worst midterm defeat in half a century. And not only that, Vance is all but saying that he opposes the war.

This borders on insubordination. Vance has been playing a weaselly game since the start of the war, offering tepid public support while his team anonymously leaks to the press about his supposed opposition. Whether he’s genuinely opposed to the war, or simply plotting his political future, is not clear. But he clearly understands that the war has turned a blue wave into a total wipeout and that he need to wash his hands of it if he wants to stand a chance in 2028.

But Vance’s decision to blame the GOP’s midterm collapse solely on the Iran war is especially interesting. “Everyone knows why we lost,” he wrote, referring to voters’ anger over the war. “And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.” It’s undoubtedly true that the war and the resulting spike in prices—particularly oil and gas—played a major role in Tuesday’s results. But one could point to a host of other possible factors: the administration’s violent immigration crackdown, its self-destructive tariffs, or its alienation of longtime allies and coddling of dictators.

Vance doesn’t do that, however, and it’s not hard to see why: He’s walking a tightrope. He has to acknowledge the defeat, but he cannot see it as a rebuke of MAGA–America First. As wily an operator as he is, it’s too late for him to disown the movement: As Trump’s vice president, he is one of its main inheritors. So he is trying to rescue MAGA from the president.

The choice to single out Iran is notable because it’s an obvious area in which the president deviated from his campaign platform, which at least paid lip service to not starting endless foreign wars. It allows Vance to suggest—albeit subtly—that Trump betrayed his own movement. In his telling, the people want immigration crackdowns and (in the abstract) tariffs; they just don’t want wars and high prices. Another subtext of Vance’s post is that Trump is simply too erratic and incompetent to be trusted—and that Vance can be. (One delicious wrinkle is that the post was approvingly quote-tweeted by Donald Trump Jr., who, in a particularly Succession-y move, commented with several “100” emojis.)

It’s hard not to read Vance’s post in the context of a rather odd column Wednesday in The New York Times by Christopher Caldwell, one of the global populist right’s few interesting thinkers. Caldwell blames Trump for squandering the mandate he was handed in 2024, suggesting that the Republicans lost because Trump “chose swagger over rational argument. Instead of allowing his policies to have their effect, he squandered his energy humiliating his opponents.” He suggests, for instance, that Trump should have calmly, coolly laid out the case for sending goons to Minneapolis. It’s an unconvincing argument. Swagger and humiliation are central to Trump’s political appeal; rational argument is for RINOs and libs.

And JD Vance. Caldwell’s column makes more sense if you read it as being addressed to the vice president. Indeed, in some ways it lays out a conceivable version of what the last two years would have looked like if Vance had been in charge of this fascist administration. (Spoiler alert: It’s not pretty.) Vance is now making the case that he can give the people real Trumpism: the immigration and economic policies they want without all the chaos, incompetence, and buffoonery. That, ultimately, is what is so extraordinary about his X post: It’s a bid to take over the political movement Trump launched 11 years ago and fundamentally change its direction. It’s audacious, but also consistent with everything we know about JD Vance. He only has one loyalty, and that’s to his own ruthless ambition.

Providence voters passed Question 7, a ballot measure that forces the city to end investments in “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide”—like Israel. 

The initiative, first submitted by the Providence for Palestine Coalition, received 75 percent of the vote, with 81 of 82 polling places partially counted. The measure does not name Israel specifically.  

David Morales, Providence’s recently elected democratic socialist mayor, campaigned in favor of the measure, and has promised to enforce it. His failed primary opponent Republican incumbent Mayor Brett Smiley campaigned against the issue alongside the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island. 

But not all Jewish Americans agreed, with many voters backing the measure. 

“Oh hey the ballot question to divest Providence’s pension funds from genocide and apartheid passed with 75% of the vote, and is winning in every single precinct, including across Providence’s very Jewish East Side,” organizer and New Republic contributing editor Aaron Regunberg wrote online. 

“The measure in Providence to divest pension funds from any foreign country committing human rights abuses is dominating in Jewish precincts,” Drop Site News editor Ryan Grim noted. “The narrative about Jewish voters told by the national media simply isn’t right.”

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis blamed Republican lawmakers for making bad votes, like opposing legislation that would ban stock trading, and for the botched release of the government’s files on disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Florida saw Republicans narrowly keep control of the government, but in Texas, DeSantis said, “not only did they lose a very highly publicized U.S. Senate race, they lost everything.”

“Let’s just be clear, that is going to hurt, not just for the next two years. That’s something that can reverberate for the next decade or more,” DeSantis said. “And if the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor then we are not going to be viable nationally.”

Republicans may not be able to retake the Senate in 2028, DeSantis warned, and it was “probably not viable” to retake the House. This was the “worst-case scenario,” he added.

Texas Senator John Cornyn, who will be succeeded by Democrat James Talarico, declared that his party had forgotten what really mattered.

“Last night, Republicans lost the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and my home state of Texas, a conservative cornerstone for more than three decades, because our party forgot the basic rules of coalition politics: 1. Add, don’t subtract 2. Be likeable 3. Do what you promised 4. Character & integrity still matter,” he wrote on X.

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney also weighed in on his party’s clear miscalculation.

“Bad policy, bad character make bad politics: erratic tariffs, impulsive Iran war, blanket pardons, apparent corruption, weaponized justice, ICE brutality, mountainous deficits, hiding Epstein, abandoning allies and coddling enemies. Hoping for a course correction, for the country and for my party,” Romney wrote on X Wednesday.

Earlier Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance opted out of a mea culpa, instead blaming Republican losses on President Donald Trump’s unpopular war against Iran. Strangely, even Donald Trump Jr. agreed.

If passed by enough states, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would effectively nullify the Electoral College and, with it, the possibility of a candidate being elected president without winning the popular vote. Since the compact was introduced in 2006, 19 states have passed it, agreeing to assign their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote. That amounts to 222 of the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win the presidential election.

On Tuesday, Democrats took control of state legislatures and governorships in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada, all states that haven’t agreed to the compact. If all five vote to join, then the total number of electoral votes apportioned based on the national popular vote jumps to 283.

That all depends on whether Democrats in these states think that the compact is a priority. Democrats in Michigan failed to pass the compact when they held a trifecta from 2023 to 2024, and Nevada’s Democratic governor vetoed the compact in 2019, saying that it would hurt the state’s role in presidential elections.

There are also potential constitutional issues. In Article 2, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3, the Constitution says that states can appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” But in Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, it also prohibits interstate compacts without the consent of Congress.

The Democratic takeover of Congress would seemingly make this moot, and in theory, if the compact comes to a vote in the House and Senate, it wouldn’t even need the president’s signature. But Democrats still don’t have a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes in the Senate, and with their dwindling national popularity, Republicans would undoubtedly try to block nullifying the Electoral College. After all, four of the five presidents who have won the presidency while losing the popular vote were Republicans, including President Donald Trump in 2016.

But Trump’s fury has proven illuminating. Because the logical extension of his own claims is that the MAGA movement will almost certainly not be sustainable going forward, at least not in anything like its current form.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump seethed as the results came in. This statement is true in only one sense: The Trump coalition really didn’t show up to the polls, and by his own accidental admission—since he’s now a lame duck—it never will again.

The MAGA coalition basically disintegrated on Tuesday night. Democrats flipped at least five Senate seats in states Trump carried by double digits, which could rise to seven if Democrats win in Alaska and Mississippi. Trump’s 2024 gains among Latinos and young voters—which were central to claims that MAGA had become a multiracial, multigenerational working-class realignment—evaporated.

Indeed, exit polls show that Democrats won Latinos and young voters nationally by extraordinarily lopsided margins. Democrats almost reached parity with Republicans among non-college voters. Democrats increased their vote share among working-class whites by 14 points relative to 2024. They won white women, notably reversing Trump’s 2024 victory among them.

Meanwhile, Democrats forged deep into MAGA country. Many Senate seats they flipped—Iowa, North and South Carolina, and possibly Alaska, where they’re favored—are among the more rural states in the country. Importantly, throw in Texas, and many of the biggest wins were in the South. Democrats recaptured places like Mahoning County in Ohio, the archetypal Obama-Trump county and the epicenter of Trump’s capture of ancestral unionized working-class Democrats. En route to winning well over 250 House seats, Democrats flipped districts in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Appalachian North Carolina. The public rejection of Trump and his agenda was monumental and decisive.

Yet as the bad news rolled in, Trump raged at … Fox News. He insisted that Fox “bears responsibility for these losses” because it sometimes features the “Dumocrat opposition” on the air. He fumed at Fox for its history of publishing polls that displease him. He even called in to Fox to complain.

In all this, too, you can also see a deeper revelation of MAGA failure. Fox has functioned as a major disinformational support system for Trump and the MAGA movement. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters details, it has propagandized on behalf of his Iran war, sanitized his ethnic cleansing campaign, and hidden his corruption and self-dealing from public view, among many other things.

Central to this has been the maintenance of plausible deniability. Fox does feature Democrats and does have a sterling polling operation. That’s all fine, but it’s also allowed Fox to obscure its role as a propaganda operation for Trump and his movement. The Fox-Trump alliance has in a sense operated as a bigger experiment in running totalitarian-style state propaganda on behalf of a dictatorial presidency.

This whole project failed spectacularly on Tuesday night. Trump’s criticism of Fox is actually an attack on Fox for not doing enough to deceive its viewers. And that’s true as far as it goes: Fox could not deceive them to the degree that Trump and MAGA needed it to. It could not sell them on the idea that the war was worth fighting—or on the notion that Trump’s economy and presidency have constituted world-historical successes.

Every indication right now is that the constellation of policies loosely described as “Trumpism” helped unleash this disaster on the GOP. As Ron Brownstein writes, exit polls showed public opposition to his tariffs and his personal corruption alike to be broad and deep. All signs are that Trump’s mass deportation campaign helped drive away Latinos. Tariffs, white nationalism, and the freedom of Dear Leader to pillage the public to his heart’s content are all key pillars of MAGA. Adam Gurri adds the essential point that this massive electoral rebuke was nothing less than a repudiation of the authoritarian consolidation at the core of the whole MAGA project. No amount of propaganda and lies from Fox could make any of it palatable. Nor will they be able to, going forward.

In this context, it’s notable that Trump also privately raged at his own advisers over the losses. As The New York Times reports, Trump “vented his frustration at political aides and accused them of giving him bad information about polling in the lead-up to the elections.”

What Trump really means by all this is that his MAGA agenda cannot fail. It can only be failed. Only the messengers for it—Fox, GOP candidates, his own consultants—can possibly be to blame if it faces national rejection. His presidency has deeply alienated national majorities, but to Trump this simply cannot be so by definition.

The natural heir of MAGA is of course JD Vance. But as Jonathan V. Last writes, Vance’s only hope of getting the 2028 GOP nomination is to keep Trump happy. If so, he can apparently only go so far in admitting to the Trump presidency’s record of extraordinary failure in order to recalibrate. If he even edges in that direction, he very likely cannot be MAGA’s standard bearer.

Note that Trump already fired a warning shot at Vance along these lines:

Trump on JD Vance: "Maybe he won't run" https://t.co/tRgmtAE3Yu

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 4, 2026

Yet as Tuesday’s thrashing suggests, the MAGA agenda cannot appeal to anything close to national majorities in its current form, either. Maybe someone out there can pick this lock. But if Trump’s sound and fury signifies anything, it’s that it’s very hard to see where this movement goes from here, or what must happen for it to endure.

The president offered brief remarks on the GOP carnage following a baffling ceremony at the construction site of his controversial White House ballroom.

“Sir, you held 30 rallies across the country, gave your final speech in front of the Reflecting Pool,” a reporter asked, referencing the way Trump centered himself in so many of the failed House and Senate campaigns. “Do you have any regrets about the way you closed out the campaign?”

“No, look if I were on the ballot we would’ve won. You saw the people, they were packed. Thousands and thousands of people at every rally. And if I was on the ballot we would’ve won.… There was such love at those rallies, it was incredible. We weren’t able to transfer the love to candidates.”

Q: Do you have any regrets about the way you closed out the campaign?

Trump: No. If I were on the ballot, we would have won pic.twitter.com/sTRgHpBjTQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2026

When asked if he was concerned about the prospect of impeachment from a Democratic-controlled Congress, the president replied, “Not even a little bit.”

“I think it would destroy the Democrat Party if they did that. It’s impeachment for no reason. What, for having a successful country? Our country is more successful now than at any time in its history.”

“Watch the beam go up,” he suddenly declared, before pointing to a large piece of metal being hoisted into the air over the construction site.

Q: Are you concerned about impeachment?

Trump: Not even a little bit. I think it would destroy the Democratic party if they did that. Impeachment for what? Having a successful a country? pic.twitter.com/mIGZdMNwvv

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2026

The president also said he would’ve “done nothing different” regarding the Iran war—despite acknowledging it lost Republicans the election, as Vice President JD Vance noted. He also said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s job was safe for the moment, even as other reports reveal Trump has been considering firing him and blaming him for the Iran war.

Q: When will the war end?

Trump: Whenever I want it to. pic.twitter.com/srCL3IV8rw

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2026

CBS News reports that the president has been asking advisers if Hegseth should keep his job due to the Iran war going so poorly, a fact that swayed many voters. NBC’s exit polls showed that 74 percent of voters saw the Iran war as a crucial or major factor in how they voted. Hegseth was already in the hot seat before the midterms, with many in Congress calling for his impeachment, including outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie.

Hegseth was reportedly hoping Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn would be elected the state’s governor so that she could appoint him to fill the seat. That way, he could have a graceful exit and avoid the mess of being impeached or fired. Blackburn did win her race, but Hegseth would still face competition from other hopefuls such as Republican Representative Tim Burchett, who campaigned for Blackburn.

If Hegseth goes, one of CBS’s sources said that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis could be a possible replacement, and could get a speedy confirmation by the lame-duck Republican Senate before the end of the year.

Trump hasn’t made his decision yet, however, and some of CBS’s sources in the White House think that he might direct blame at other military leaders, such as Admiral Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that Hegseth had Trump’s full confidence, praising military efforts in Venezuela and the Iran war while also touting Hegseth’s attacks on “DEI and woke ideology.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Trump gave Hegseth a vote of confidence, saying outside of the White House, “I think he’s doing a very good job.”

When asked if he wanted Hegseth to fill Blackburn’s Senate seat, Trump said, “I actually think he’d be very popular if he did that, but I haven’t heard that at all.”

Despite making new maps to boost Republican candidates in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Alabama, and Utah, voters in those states by and large still chose Democrats to represent them.

For more than a year, local legislators in the Lone Star State were explicitly pushed by Donald Trump and his allies to forgo tradition and create a new congressional map for the 2026 election. State Republicans complied, carving up five historically Democratic districts into supposedly MAGA-friendly inventions.

But the plan backfired spectacularly. Republicans lost four of the five supposedly GOP-friendly seats they had created, as well as another two of their own.

Alabama voters also rejected the state GOP’s gerrymandering efforts, opting to send Democratic Representative Shomari Figures back to Congress.

Earlier this year, Governor Ron DeSantis redrew 20 of Florida’s 28 U.S. House districts. At the time, four newly created districts were expected to turn red. But they didn’t, and Florida Democrats remain poised to retain their targeted seats. Representatives Jared Moskowitz, Kathy Castor, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz were able to fend off Republican challengers, while first-time candidate Pia Dandiya outcompeted Republican nominee Casey Askar. The results for Florida’s 9th congressional district have not yet been called, though Democratic Representative Darren Soto has a slight lead.

Democrat Ben McAdams turned the tide in Utah’s redrawn first congressional district, besting Republican nominee Riley Owen by a margin of 47 points.

Ohio voters not only stuck to their Democratic incumbents despite similar redistricting efforts, but the liberal party also gained two more House seats (with potentially a third on the way, according to the Ohio Capital Journal). Democrats won big in Ohio’s gubernatorial and Senate races too, electing Dr. Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, respectively.

Democrats enjoyed a landslide victory in North Carolina, despite voting under a new map that should have easily handed an additional House seat to Republicans by massively reconfiguring congressional districts 1 and 3. At the time of publication, just four out of 14 races have been called by the Associated Press, though Democratic Representative Don Davis was leading by more than 4 percent with 99 percent of the district votes counted.

Voters outright rejected a new congressional map in Missouri, where Republican leadership had prematurely decided to rely on a redistricted map during its primary election in August, effectively stripping many Missourans of the opportunity to elect their congressional nominees. The courts ultimately ordered Missouri to use the state’s original 2020 congressional map for Tuesday’s election. After the votes were tabulated, Democrats had gained an additional House seat.

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, the top two performers in the state’s 6th House district are headed to a December runoff race. They include Democrat Chauna Banks and Republican Blake Miguez.

But it wasn’t a unanimous Democratic victory. Tennessee’s decision to carve up Memphis into three separate congressional districts effectively thwarted the city’s historically Democratic vote. At the time of publication, Republicans were projected to win in three of four House races in Tennessee, while Democratic nominee Victoria Broderick peeled ahead by just fractions of a percentage point in Tennessee’s 4th congressional district.

“I doubt there’s a ballroom in the country [with] a 50-foot ceiling,” Trump said outside the construction site of his ballroom on Wednesday, just barely more than 12 hours after Democrats took control of both the House and the Senate in a resounding rejection of his administration’s policies and ideology.

You’d think a president would offer words of encouragement to his party or righteous anger in such a desperate moment. Instead, Trump went full lame-duck mode. “There has never been anything built like this, and it’s for the country, and it’s free, we got it free of charge, thank you very much.… When it’s completed it’ll be the best anywhere in the world.”

Trump on ballroom: The kitchen is going t be top of the line. There has never been anything built like this and it is for the country. When I was in China, we went to the great hall of China, and it is incredible. This is actually larger. pic.twitter.com/S4nQ9MDTrt

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2026

The president appeared with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

“Why does Trump spend time on the White House? Well, first of all, it’s very little time. Second of all, I like it. It’s good. For me it’s relaxing.… I love construction,” Trump continued. “That’s what I do, I like beautiful things.”

Trump went on to speak about the ballroom’s kitchen, staircase, roof, and marble veining.

It’s incredible that Trump—who seemed particularly calm at the event—can simply act like nothing happened, after his own unpopular decisions in office resulted in a midterm sweep that could cripple the Republican Party for the next decade. His own vice president, JD Vance, admitted that their war on Iran, the cost of living, inflation, and the administration’s close relationship with Israel lost them the election. But rather than address any of that, the president would prefer to talk about buttresses.

Just hours after Democrats seized control of Congress and swept state elections across the country, Vance promptly threw the president under the bus.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance wrote in a lengthy post on X Wednesday, blaming the Iran war without mentioning Trump by name.

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” he wrote. “But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

In the early days of Trump’s military onslaught, Vance had expressed some reluctance about the president’s war plans. But that quickly gave way to the spineless sycophantism we’ve come to expect from the vice president.

In his post on Wednesday, Vance claimed that Republicans’ main problem is that many people who supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election had flipped to support Democratic candidates.

Vance claimed that a pollster—”one of the smartest people I know in politics”—found that voters would return to supporting the GOP if they ended the war in the Middle East, focused on the cost of living and inflation, “put America First,” and changed the U.S. relationship with Israel.

Trump’s eight-month-long “six week war” in Iran has proven to be a major political liability. His military campaign has resulted in the deaths of 22 U.S. service members, and hundreds more injured. Trump’s war is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians, including 120 schoolchildren. The president also oversaw the destruction of multiple U.S bases in the Middle East, a series of deadly military morale issues, and the depletion of the U.S. weapons stockpile, leaving the country more vulnerable to foreign threats.

The war effort has already cost American taxpayers an estimated $47.1 billion. That’s enough to pay for one year of Medicare coverage for 5.84 million people, based on previous figures from the Center for American Progress. That doesn’t include the skyrocketing price of gas and consumer goods thanks to the war.

In the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” It seems that Vance is finally catching on to just how damaging this war has been.

It was a wildly successful night for Democratic candidates in Congress, but Americans also voted to install Democrats in their state governments across the country.

In Wisconsin, Democrats flipped both the state’s Assembly and Senate. In the state’s Senate, Democrats flipped to an 18–15 majority, an exact inverse of the chamber’s current makeup. In the state Assembly, Democrats secured a 53–46 majority. And Democratic candidate David Crowley was elected to the governor’s office, securing the party an electoral trifecta for the first time in 16 years.

In Minnesota, Democrats clinched majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. In the House, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has won 72 of 134 seats thus far, surpassing the 68-seat majority. In the state’s Senate, the DFL party held onto its 34-seat majority. When coupled with DFL nominee Senator Amy Klobuchar’s victory in Minnesota’s gubernatorial race, Democrats have achieved trifecta control of the state’s government.

In Michigan, Democrats flipped the state’s House of Representatives. In the 110-seat House, Democrats ousted at least five Republican incumbents to secure at least 50 seats. In the 38-member state Senate, Democrats ousted two GOP incumbents, growing their majority from 20 to 23 seats. Democratic candidate Jocelyn Benson was elected to the governor’s office, securing the Democrats’ electoral trifecta in the state.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats also achieved a trifecta by flipping the state’s Senate for the first time since 1993. Ahead of the election on Tuesday, Republicans held a 27–23 majority in the 50-seat state Senate. Democrats flipped three seats on election night. Democrats also increased their majority in the state’s House of Representatives from 103 to 111 seats.

In North Carolina, Democrats flipped control of the state’s House of Representatives for the first time since 2010. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats held 66 seats in the 120-seat House. They needed to flip 12 seats to retake a majority, and by the time all the votes are counted, it’s possible they will have flipped 20. Going into the election, Republicans were just one seat short of a supermajority in the chamber.

As if that wasn’t enough, a few other states appeared to still be on their way to turning their state legislatures blue.

In Texas, the House races remained too close to call on Wednesday morning, but the Democrats were closing in on control of the lowest chamber for the first time since 2003. As of Wednesday morning, Democrats needed to flip at least 14 seats but had already flipped six seats, and they were leading in at least a dozen more Republican-held districts. Meanwhile, Republicans maintained control of the state Senate.

In Arizona, Democrats were poised to take control of the state legislatures for the first time in 60 years and potentially achieve yet another electoral trifecta for the Democratic Party.

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.

First reanimated by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and reaffirmed since then by a lack of imagination and initiative from the Democratic Party’s center, the DSA left wing is now firmly entrenched within the Democratic machine. Eleven DSA House and mayoral candidates won Tuesday after running on platforms emphasizing affordability, ending U.S. aid to Israel, and expanding access to health care. As a whole, with down ballot races included, DSA-endorsed candidates won 149 of the 294 races they ran in, with 37 races still undecided. Eight of them will be in the U.S. Congress next year. Here are the biggest victors:

Nithya Raman — Mayor of Los Angeles

Janeese Lewis George — Mayor of Washington, D.C.

David Morales — Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island

Angela Gonzales-Torres — House of Representatives, California

Melat Kiros — House of Representatives, Colorado

Donavan McKinney — House of Representatives, Michigan

Darializa Avila Chevalier — House of Representatives, New York

Claire Valdez — House of Representatives, New York

Chris Rabb — House of Representatives, Pennsylvania

Rashida Tlaib — House of Representatives, Michigan

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — House of Representatives, New York

This story has been updated.

Impeachment

Let’s start here first, since it’s at the top of everyone’s mind.

Democrats now have the numbers to impeach Trump or any of his Cabinet members. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has headed the disastrous, destructive, and expensive war on Iran, is reportedly the Democratic majority’s top target.

The impeachment process can begin in the House of Representatives with a simple majority, which Democrats now have. The trial then moves to the Senate. To actually convict and remove, they will need a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which means the Democrats will need some Republican votes.

While impeachment of Trump is certainly a possibility, there is a greater likelihood that Democrats will be able to convict and remove someone like Hegseth, who has been losing Republican allies over the course of the Iran war.

Investigations

The Democrats could also open a wide array of investigations into the Trump administration, much like they did last time they controlled the House in 2018.

This is certainly the most corrupt administration in modern history. Some top investigation targets could include:

The Epstein Files

This issue won’t be going anywhere, especially with a Democratic-controlled Congress. The party has called for a renewed push to reopen investigations into the world of infamous sex predator Jeffrey Epstein—and the Trump administration’s botched rollout of the files. Just last week, House Judiciary Democrats released a report on the cover-up, noting that “DOJ and FBI shut down investigations and withheld evidence while claiming no basis to prosecute or even investigate any additional Epstein co-conspirators.”

The UAE chips affair

In May, a firm of Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan gave $2 billion to World Liberty Financial Group, a crypto company controlled by the families of Trump and his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. Two weeks later, the Trump administration completed a deal to give the United Arab Emirates hundreds of thousands of the world’s most valuable AI chips—in an extremely questionable display of ethics.

Jared Kushner

Last month, a new book reported that the president’s son-in-law had his phone hacked during the first Trump administration, which revealed Kushner’s control of foreign slush funds filled by the leaders of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The report exposed how Kushner appeared to make deals with those governments to violently transform Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and the greater Middle East region.

Trump selling early access to Truth Social

Trump and his aide Natalie Harp were sued in September over the “Truth API” program, which offers Truth Social users early access to posts from government officials in exchange for $100,000 a month. Watchdog groups alleged that Trump is using the media company that he uses as a personal bulletin board to run a pay-to-play scheme, offering crucial information that affects global markets and policy decisions to whoever can afford it.

Heavily Impede the Trump Agenda While Pushing Their Own

At a bare minimum, any Republican bill or policy is all but guaranteed to die in Congress, as Republicans will need Democratic votes every time to pass anything. The Democrats’ majority allows them to go on the offensive, and it has been reported that they have a “First 100 Hours” agenda focused on ending Trump’s antagonistic and expensive foreign tariffs, reviving expired Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies, and reversing almost $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts. They could also make efforts to impede the Iran war.

Unfortunately, to make their bill veto-proof, Democrats will need a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate, meaning they will need Republicans to join them. Whether Trump will veto will depend on his own temperament, as he may be likely to reject legislation from a Democratic Congress in his lame-duck era, regardless of how popular or bipartisan it is.

Speaking on MS NOW’s Morning Joe Wednesday, Jeffries laid out his priorities for his party’s newfound leadership in the House of Representatives.

“The American people don’t want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive,” Jeffries said.

Hakeem Jeffries on Morning Joe: The American people don't want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive.

We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it's our job to govern on affordability. pic.twitter.com/b5ieQUbMRO

— Clipping Wings (@ClippingWings) November 4, 2026

Ahead of the election results, Jeffries similarly made clear that impeaching Trump was simply not a priority.

“I’ve made clear from the very beginning that our top priority is going to be to drive down the high cost of living,” the House minority leader said on Fox News Sunday.

While it’s clear that Democrats have more than their fair share of damage to undo, it’s not clear why they’d need to draw the line at impeaching the most corrupt president in American history. While we’re at it, why not pick off his Cabinet of cronies one by one?

If anything, voters have delivered a clear mandate against Trump’s entire reign of corruption. After two years of Republican control in Congress, and Trump’s disastrous leadership, voters don’t just want to get even—they want everything.

With these electoral triumphs, Democrats have seized the initiative. Now they have to decide what to do with it—and already we are seeing very different answers to this question.

On one side is Team Small Potatoes. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii went on CNN recently to articulate this uninspiring view. “I do not think it is time to propose things that the president of the United States is guaranteed to veto,” said Schatz, who is in line to be the Senate’s next Democratic whip and is a favorite to eventually succeed Senator Chuck Schumer as leader. “I think that’s a bit of wasted energy. If we want to be more aspirational, if we want to make more bold policy changes … that’s for 2028. Right now it’s about stabilizing the country itself.” Soon-to-be Speaker Hakeem Jeffries signaled a similar perspective in August when he preemptively announced his opposition to Medicare for All.

On the other side of the debate is Team Go Big, who are refusing to cede ground to the Small Potatoes crowd. Congressman Greg Casar, who is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, went so far as to directly respond to Schatz’s statement, saying he “100% disagree[s].” Casar warned that Democrats “cannot be the party of nervous lawyers who just tinker around the edges” or they will “sleepwalk into President Vance 2028.” On election night, Senator Bernie Sanders similarly declared that holding Trump accountable is not enough: “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, we must do more. We must aggressively fight for working families.”

These arguments raise an obvious question for Small Potatoes advocates like Schatz: Why, exactly, is it “wasted energy” to propose and pass legislation that President Trump might veto? Democrats have a wide array of extremely popular economic policies at their disposal: anti–price gouging laws to bring down the cost of food and housing, an excess profits tax on Big Oil to crack down on fossil fuel profiteering, paid sick leave and family leave and vacation leave, a congressional stock-trading ban, a data center moratorium and AGI kill switch—the list goes on. What is the downside to daring Trump to veto bills like these that are supported by 70 to 80 percent of Americans?

As Congressman Ro Khanna posted in response to Schatz’s statement: “Make him veto Medicare for All. Make him veto a $25 living wage. Make him veto free childcare. Make him veto Block the Bombs to Israel.” If Trump does veto these popular policies, great—that demonstrates which side is fighting to bring down prices and end corruption, and which side is standing in the way. And it provides the clearest possible pitch for why voters need to put a Democrat in the White House in 2028.

While Team Go Big’s approach is all upside, Team Small Potatoes’ strategy has very real costs. Though Tuesday’s election results represent a major backlash to Trump’s garbage fire of a second term, the Democratic Party is still severely unpopular, and many working-class voters do not trust it to fight for them. If Democrats’ response to winning big majorities in both the House and Senate is to timidly spend the next two years focused just on “stabilizing the country,” as Schatz suggested, they will once again be aligning themselves with the status quo.

Americans are furious with the status quo. Democrats already tried a “nothing will fundamentally change” strategy—not once but twice, in 2016 and 2024. Both of these bad bets threw the door open to the fascists. To repeat this catastrophic mistake again—after an election in which voters sent such a clear message that they want change—would be madness.

Of course, there’s another reason establishment Democrats might not Go Big in tackling corporate profiteering and corruption: Many don’t want to. They oppose passing these policies not because Trump will veto them but because they’re scared of having to vote on bills their corporate donors hate. The problem is that they, like Trump, are on the wrong side of supermajority issues—which doesn’t matter if a bill is never brought to a vote but becomes quite uncomfortable when you actually have to pick a side.

We need to be crystal clear about this dynamic. There is no political rationale for failing to advance incredibly popular policies. The Democrats who oppose these populist measures are not trying to improve their party’s political position—they’re trying to protect their own pro-corporate interests, at the expense of the Democratic Party’s future prospects.

Voters don’t want small potatoes. They have made abundantly clear that they aren’t looking for leaders who will just manage a broken system. They want leaders who will change it for the better—who will go big. That’s the lesson of this week’s blue tsunami, and if Democrats don’t heed it, they will blow a historic opportunity that this party may not get again for decades to come.

The Louisiana Republican announced on Wednesday morning on an all-staff call that he will not run for House minority leader for the new Congress next year, following Tuesday’s historical Democratic landslide takeover of the House of Representatives.

It’s not clear yet if Johnson has anointed a successor to lead the Republican caucus. Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has already thrown his hat into the ring and announced he’s running for House minority leader. According to Punchbowl News, Jordan’s pitch will be that new blood is needed and that he specializes in investigations.

The current number two Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise, also announced that he is running for caucus leader.

“Scalise will be announcing his run for Republican leader for the next Congress today,” a source told The Washington Sun. “His number one goal will be to lead the conference back into the majority. He is a proven and tested leader who is ready on day one. He’s spent his career unifying Republicans and he is prepared for the big legislative and oversight battles ahead. The conference knows him, how he fights, and that he’s a trusted leader.”

Johnson’s tenure has been marked by his unwillingness to stand up to President Donald Trump, repeatedly playing dumb about new developments from the White House. Under Johnson’s watch, Trump took away congressional authority from controlling funds and levying tariffs, and Johnson supported—either openly or by inaction—every piece of Trump’s agenda. That proved to doom Republicans on Tuesday, and Johnson’s successor will have to choose between protecting Trump by fighting against an overwhelming Democratic majority, or actually trying to help the American people.

This story has been updated.

“It sounds a little ironic,” Republican Bobby Charles, who lost Maine’s gubernatorial election, told Politico, “but I am nevertheless optimistic for the future because Trump’s going to be gone in two years.”

The chair of the Licking County Republican Party in Ohio, Matt Dole, told the publication that “there’s a little bit of a reckoning in the Republican Party about where they go.”

“I think you’re going to see a part of the Republican Party advocate for a return to normalcy, which is not repudiating Trump’s ideology and policies, but will repudiate Trump’s style,” Dole said. Licking County is a staunch Republican county in the Buckeye State.

Trump himself was defiant, calling Fox News around midnight to complain that the network’s polls showed that he wasn’t popular. In response, host Bret Baier pointed out that “tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed.”

Trump disagreed, saying, “Well, I don’t know about that,” and he maintained that he had the “greatest two years in the history of the presidency,” despite the disastrous Iran war and faltering economy.

White House adviser Alex Bruesewitz said poor candidates were responsible for Republican losses, slamming them as “uninspiring, lazy, and thoroughly ineffective communicators.” He specifically mentioned Georgia Representative Mike Collins’s failed Senate campaign. But an unnamed Republican operative told Politico that candidate quality was a “lazy excuse.”

“This is more than just one lazy candidate here. I mean, the chair of the … NRCC is losing his election,” the operative said, referring to Representative Richard Hudson losing North Carolina’s 9th congressional district to Democrat Richard Ojeda, the first Democrat to represent the district since 1963.

“We are beyond candidate quality. It’s a bloodbath,” another senior Senate GOP official told Politico. “Trump did this.”

Communities across the nation voted on 41 data center-related ballot initiatives on Tuesday. The measures were introduced in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

At least 33 of those municipalities voted to keep data centers out, according to votes tracked by Data Centers on the Ballot. At least six localities specifically voted to ban data center construction and halt the development of all planned facilities. Just one measure in Harwood, North Dakota, counted as a victory for the industry, as voters decided against restricting data center construction

The vast majority of the data center-related ballot initiatives were introduced and decided in Ohio, which has recently become a buzzing hub of activity for tech companies looking to build the water-zapping facilities. Over the last year, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent AI firms have poured millions of dollars into races across the state and on both sides of the aisle in an apparent effort to influence the region’s politics.

Exactly why AI-backed money was funneled into the Ohio race boils down to a perfect confluence of factors across the state. Ohio has relatively cheap land, plentiful resources, and enough power plants to fuel the data centers required to support the AI industry’s seemingly imminent boom.

But the same can be said for many other regions in the country. In Kansas, where land is similarly cheap and plentiful, voters adopted some of the most restrictive proposals on the table. One such measure banned the construction of “high-impact data centers” (facilities that use more than 100,000 gallons of water per day) for 10 years, stipulating that the decision could only be reversed by public vote, according to an analysis by Multistate.us.

Mounting evidence that the public actually hates data centers doesn’t bode well for Donald Trump, who has spent months attempting to convince Americans to let the industry build as he cozies up to major tech executives.

Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

More jurisdictions are expected to take a stance on the issue in the coming weeks. Voters in Arkansas and North Dakota will vote on whether to finance or prohibit data centers on December 1 and December 15, respectively.

First, a trickle of positive results: With a fraction of the vote in, gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton was way ahead, as was Sherrod Brown in Ohio’s Senate race. People cheer, then wait. Later in the night, a deluge: A group of Democrats, ostensibly gathered to support three candidates at a different Montgomery, Ohio, tavern, cheered over the Georgia governor’s race, called for Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms. Then Annie Andrews took South Carolina’s Senate seat. Dems secured control of the House—a wave of screams.

Though MS NOW was still waiting, a voice across the tavern shouted that Bloomberg and NBC had called it: Amy Acton had won the governor’s seat. A statehouse rep in the room won reelection, so did a judge. Within a minute, another shouted message: Dems were on track to win multiple new seats in the Ohio House, breaking the supermajority. It started to be hard to hear why everyone was bursting into elated cheers. Talarico won in Texas! On the TVs in the tavern, Acton’s image filled the screen, final confirmation she had won. Thunder. Relief.

Vivek Ramaswamy spent $79 million (including $41.3 million of his own money) to lose a governor’s race in which the billionaire showed himself to be so out of touch, he thought it would help his campaign to dig Acton’s estranged mother out of the cobwebs for an unconscionable attack ad that drew resounding disgust from across parties (with the notable exception of Donald Trump and JD Vance). The grossest campaign in America lost last night. Ohio, which hasn’t swung left in a governor’s race since 2006, just did.

I suspect, though, that the result, while certainly part of a national referendum on Trump and Republicans who’ve kowtowed to him at every level, is also a reflection of Democratic candidates who activated an impressive grassroots campaign. Every time Ramaswamy skipped across the state (or out of state) in his private jet or invested millions in cartoonishly evil attack ads, Acton was on a family farm, or on a union picket line, or at a diner, leaning in to talk to voters regardless of party. And down-ticket candidates did the same. Ohio was won by making the race not about party but about Ohioans, writ large, winning.

Ohio used to be a key swing state, but highly effective gerrymandering has carved us into right-locked districts that have produced increasingly extreme candidates and a Republican supermajority in the statehouse. Ohio has had a Republican trifecta (governor’s office and both chambers of the statehouse) for 28 years since 1992, and in that time, Ohio’s schools have suffered (now forty-fifth in the nation for our state share of public school funding). Ohio’s economy ranks thirty-ninth, and we’re thirty-fourth for health care. Our infrastructure and water scores low too. The relative security of Republican seats surely contributed to our dark money–fueled FirstEnergy bribery scandal, which landed former Ohio speaker of the House Republican Larry Householder in prison for racketeering.

Sizable sums wash in and out of the state, but not often to benefit the common good. Tens of millions in PAC money was donated from outside billionaires, such as Elon Musk and Jeffrey Yass, to sway votes for Ramaswamy. (Over 95 percent of Acton’s donations totaled $100 or less.) A projected $11.6 billion was spent on Ohio’s midterm election this year, with more than half a billion on the U.S. Senate race alone.

Our gerrymandered maps and millions of dollars have been invested in chopping up Ohio to ensure Republican power. And in some parts of the state, the partisan divide still strains.

In rural Shelby County, Democratic Party Chair Christopher R. Gibbs has been busy trying to help Democratic candidates understand rural voters who regularly feel ignored, sidelined, and taken for granted. I met him on a family farm whistle-stop for the Acton campaign. Gibbs, who used to be the county’s Republican chair, left the party in 2019. It “no longer shared my core values.”

Anecdotally, Gibbs says in Shelby, one of the reddest counties in Ohio, there is a visceral hate for Democrats, based on locals’ perception of national Dems. But data centers, a significant rural issue, isn’t yet partisan. Over 200 data center projects are planned or under construction, and 21 initiatives were on the ballot yesterday (the most nationally). Both Acton and Ramaswamy campaigned on tighter rules around data centers after, in May, current Governor Mike DeWine ordered a pause on tax exemptions on the centers—which had already surpassed $2 billion in 2025. Across the state last night, a number of data center bans passed.

Electoral maps and MAGA aside, Ohioans may have been united by practical realities. I passed a gas sign that read “$4.17/gallon” for regular unleaded, yesterday driving between polls. Big Tech has planted data centers that slurp up our energy, land, and water. About one in eight Ohio families lives under the poverty line and, according to the United Way, another 23 percent live above the poverty line but can’t afford basic expenses.

We are, collectively, done. And the billionaires could not buy this election.

Acton often talks about how people in Youngstown who didn’t have much would share with those who had less. Desperation communicates across boundaries, if we can really see each other. Maybe the current state of the country and Ohio has finally made enough of us too tired to hate each other.

At my own polling location, in Wyoming, Ohio, hometown of the Democrats’ incoming lieutenant governor, David Pepper, two middle-aged women stood side by side just off the lawn outside our community Civic Center. One held blue handouts of the Democrats’ slate; the other held the pink Republicans’. Voters swept in and out. It was nice to see the two chatting volunteers, holding opposing slates, getting along so well. I said so. The woman holding the Republican slate said of course they were friendly, they live in the same neighborhood.

But the stakes were still obvious.

I ran across voter Michael Robinson on my way to grab a bagel. His hair is dappled with grey, and his hoodie was adorned with an “Ohio Voted” sticker. The sticker is important. His mother-in-law insists upon photographic evidence, though Robinson wouldn’t miss a vote. His parents and grandparents lived in Washington, D.C., before the majority-Black city was allowed to vote in presidential elections. His paternal grandfather grew up in South Carolina as a sharecropper who could not afford the poll tax. Robinson, an Ohio resident for 26 years now, was born in the Nation’s Capital, and at 18, voted in the District’s first home rule election in 1974. He tells me his grandmother drilled into him that education and the vote were the two things no one could take away, “That’s how you have power … that’s what they wanna take away.” (A voter ID requirement passed today in Ohio too.)

In the Cincy suburb of Montgomery, Ohio, two men, each holding slates of opposing parties, chatted in a friendly way at a church entryway, a polling site. A father and young daughter come out, and the Republican asks, “Is it her first time voting?” It was indeed her first time tagging along. She got a sticker. Everyone cheered. At the other entrance, though, from the Democrats, I hear the police were called earlier because a man was berated by a volunteer for a Republican candidate after voting. A Republican volunteer tells me it’s been a beautiful day. She says, “It’s up to how God turns the hearts and minds of men. But I do hope they choose his values over their own desires.”

I know it’s not what she meant, but I kind of suspect many would say they did.

Outside Norwood Community Center, shortly before polls closed, I open my car door to Rihanna. There was no line, but the music was pumping. The DJ, Bizzy Bizz (Rodney Hayes), is part of DJ at the Polls, a good-vibes-only, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort. Under the thump of “This Is What You Came For,” Bizzy Bizz tells me that it has been an incredible day. After the past few years, the positivity he’s seen at the polls, people coming together to vote, “honestly, it’s restored my faith in humanity.” As the music plays, this, he says, “this is what this nation needs.”

People who are stressed over how they are going to stock their kitchen cabinets have been subjected to a dizzying demonstration of disqualifying behavior from candidates who seem to have lost the plot on human decency. Congressman Max Miller, who represents a Northeast Ohio district, has been accused of domestic abuse. Despite a delay in speaking out, our other senator, Bernie Moreno, whose daughter happens to be Miller’s estranged wife, finally did pipe up, saying Miller needs “psychological help,” that he holds his breath whenever Miller has custody of his granddaughter, and calling for Miller’s resignation from Congress. Miller’s opponent, Brian Poindexter, a union organizer and ironworker, was named the presumptive winner overnight.

Longtime U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown lost his seat in 2024, after $251 million in attack ads that largely weaponized trans rights and lied about Brown’s positions. This time, as he ran against Jon Husted, a widely debunked attack ad claimed that “Sherrod Brown supports sex change surgery for minors.” However, the woman in the ad who claimed she got surgery without her parents’ consent as a minor is actually from Texas (not Ohio) and was 19 when she had her double mastectomy. This time, many Democrats, including Brown, have strategically pivoted from getting bogged down in a culture war over trans rights, either pointing out the inaccuracies in such ads or redirecting away from the vanishingly small handful of trans youth in Ohio school sports. (It’s debatable whether it’s better to have your identity weaponized or ignored, both for political ends.) Instead, Democrats’ energy has largely focused on pocketbook issues, which affect almost all of us (yes, including trans Ohioans).

At 11 p.m., CNN called it for Ohio’s Senate race: Mr. Brown is going back to Washington. The tavern where I was watching results erupted. The local TV news happened to cut away and fill the screen with an image of Amy Acton. More cheers. A chant of “O-H, I-O.”

Acton took the stage in Columbus behind a “Governor-Elect Acton” sign, saying the state had chosen “unity and decency over division and hate. The healing begins today.” As Acton took the stage for her acceptance speech, for a moment, I had the heart-pounding sensation of witnessing a local girl done good.

I grew up a couple miles down a long cross-county road from where Acton grew up, once she and her brother settled in with their father. This was after she spent time hungry and homeless, living in a tent over winter in Youngstown, after escaping her sexually abusive stepfather and a mother who skipped town with him after his indictment for Acton’s abuse. We come from this place, where steel still runs in people’s veins, generations since the mills closed, decades since opportunity was anything people could count on. A place where those who could were often coached to go away to school, get out. Acton, with Brown, held her last campaign stop in her old high school. “I’m a scrappy kid from Youngstown,” she said before hundreds as the high school gym erupted in applause.

Her reprise, this entire campaign, has been a stubborn fixation on the issues “99 percent of Ohioans can agree on.” She talks like she was aiming for, not a blue wave, but enough to drink for everyone.

As we were each growing up, our corner of the state was a Democratic stronghold, but give a place a couple generations of broken promises of change, grown kids moving away, and those who stayed staking a sad, fierce loyalty to a place of want, and the region was ready for a new promise-peddler when Donald Trump ran in 2016. Youngstown’s Mahoning County switched from reliably blue to red.

But Acton and Brown both won there last night.

When people vote, they choose a person to represent them in government, but they also approve the person who publicly represents their interests, their values. They represent us as a people.

When Acton started campaigning, she was bothered that on the internet, young people used phrases like “That’s so Ohio” as a catchphrase for things that were bad or cringe. Acton suffered as a child in Ohio, but her ambition and effort were also rewarded in Ohio. She learned in the great public schools that have been quietly underfunded and now are being siphoned of over $1 billion per year for private school vouchers. She served the state over Covid, and even after enduring the brunt of blowback, she put her hand up for more service as governor.

She had the cruel indignity of campaigning to serve this state and getting sideswiped by her mother, a woman who has failed her over and again. As the nation has looked to Ramaswamy with a collective “WTF,” Acton told me recently that since the attack ad, she has been stopped at event after event by survivors whose worst moments were dredged up by Ramaswamy’s disgusting campaign ploy. The swipe could have derailed most people. Others might have become overwhelmed by the disclosures of abuse, but what Acton took from it was that there are more survivors of sexual assault in the state than most people realize.

Ramaswamy’s campaign tried to destroy her; Acton’s empathetic heart found an additional policy front.

When I was young, people called Ohio purple, a reliable mix of red and blue. As went Ohio, so went the nation. For a long time, we’ve been painted red by state and congressional maps, and a lot of us got used to officials who extracted their power and influence from the state but failed to see us, on rural farms now in the shadow of data centers, or striving for more in the three C’s (Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati), or for kids growing up in towns where almost everyone struggles. If they saw our dreams, it was just to exploit them. A lot of pundits may tell the story of 2026 as a blue wave, but from here in Ohio, it looks more like the first gulp of an enormous storm, skies cracking open after a long, hard drought.

Four states had abortion on the ballot. Nevada and Virginia voted in favor of allowing abortions within state lines. Missouri voted against repealing a constitutional amendment supporting abortion access that was introduced via a ballot initiative in 2024. Idaho was the sole exception on Tuesday as voters sided against a citizen-initiated statute that would have enshrined abortion access as a statutory right.

Nevadans, Virginians, and Missourans voted 63 percent, 62 percent, and 55 percent, respectively. Idahoans, meanwhile, voted by 56 percent.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority in June 2022, abortion has become a nonstop losing streak for Republicans, pitting the party’s long-standing policies against their increasingly dire ramifications.

States that enforced aggressive abortion restrictions saw medical brain drains, with large swaths of medical professionals moving elsewhere. Other states with such rules witnessed the horrific reality of allowing the legislature into the doctor’s office (see: the case of Adriana Smith, a Georgia nurse who died in 2025 but nonetheless was forced to remain on life support as an incubation chamber after doctors discovered a nine-week fetus in her abdomen. Her family had no say in that matter).

The bad PR has led to a quiet stripping of pro-life policies from conservative platforms across the country, with the GOP futilely attempting to ditch the “pro-life” branding altogether in an effort to skirt more electoral losses.

National surveys indicate that the vast majority of the country supports abortion access. In a poll published by the Pew Research Center in March, 60 percent of respondents said abortion should be legal in pretty much all cases, while only 38 percent said it should be illegal in most cases.

Inside Washington

Democrats have won a massive majority in the House, and amid the celebrations, different factions of the party will be clamoring to claim credit for the blue tsunami. Was it the progressives, the centrists, or even the Bernie dogs who carried the party to victory? And which faction will be calling the shots come January?

The answer, to some extent, depends on who you ask. “A Democratic majority is really going to be built on the back of moderate candidates in the House,” said David de la Fuente, deputy director for politics and research at the centrist group Third Way. He pointed to moderate candidates who eventually won on Tuesday night, like Jared Moskowitz in Florida’s 25th congressional district or Bobby Pulido in Texas’s 15th congressional district.

Meanwhile, Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of progressive group Justice Democrats, argued that progressives brought the energy and policy platforms that turned the tide. “The mandate from voters across this country is for this majority to look like what many Democrats finally learned to campaign on, which is taking on corporate interests to deliver on an affordability agenda that actually helps working class communities,” he said. “They finally listened to the left.”

Andrabi pointed to Justice Democrats’ massive wins this cycle; it was their most successful year by far. The group is poised to send at least seven leaders to Congress, including Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, and Melat Kiros in Colorado. These electeds will be joining fellow progressive firebrands like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Greg Casar in Congress. As it stands, the Congressional Progressive Caucus currently has 101 members, while the New Democrat Coalition, which includes more centrist lawmakers, touts 114 members. While it’s too soon to say definitively how those numbers will change, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC suggested that the caucus might be adding “over 20” new members, according to an email the group sent previewing a later press call.

“Typically, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is bigger than the New Dems when Republicans control the House, and the New Dems are bigger than the progressives when the Democrats control the House, and that’s because, essentially, the New Dems tend to be the majority makers,” de la Cruz said. The term “majority maker” comes from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who famously called the moderate-to-conservative Blue Dogs the “majority makers” for their success in unseating Republicans and contributing to the Democratic majority.

But some progressive candidates overturned that orthodoxy on Tuesday. In Michigan’s 7th congressional district, Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence prevailed despite running in one of the most competitive districts in the county, and facing the most Republican spending of any House candidate this cycle—more than $23 million. Similarly, in California’s 22nd congressional district, Randy Villegas declared an early victory over Republican Representative David Valadao, a testament to the size of his win (usually, California results trickle in slowly).

Trying to tally up the number of seats that will soon be held by progressives versus moderates creates another problem: “It suggests that there’s just a kind of monolithic progressive ideology and a monolithic centrist ideology, and in my experience, it’s not quite that simple,” Democratic strategist Oliver Libby said.

This year, that question became even more complicated with the emergence of a number of so-called Bernie dogs—candidates endorsed by both the Blue Dogs and Senator Bernie Sanders. Those candidates include Sam Forstag in Montana’s 1st congressional district, Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district, Brian Poindexter in Ohio’s 7th district, and Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania’s seventh district. All four won.

A more useful way of analyzing the Democratic majority—and predicting what they might do come January—could be to look directly at what policies they ran on, regardless of how they identify ideologically. That could help reconcile the simultaneous successes of moderates, progressives, and Bernie dogs, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee suggested in an Election Day memo. These winning policy platforms—including anti-establishment fights against data centers and surveillance tech, oversight of AI companies, and affordable health care—could ultimately provide a roadmap for Dems in 2028 and beyond.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The humble “I Voted” sticker could turn out to be one of the enduring images of this election. On October 19—the first day of early voting in Texas—Ronaldo Salgado cast a ballot and placed his voting sticker on Houston’s makeshift memorial to his father, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer this summer. Amid a historic rise in early voting, hundreds of other voters proceeded to follow Salgado’s lead, leaving “I Voted” stickers or other messages at the memorial to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. On Tuesday afternoon, MPR News and other outlets reported that the practice had spread to Minneapolis, with local affiliate Fox 9 reporting “dozens” of “I Voted” stickers at the memorials for Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both of whom were shot and killed by an ICE agents in January.

Elsewhere:

• James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, and Nathan Johnson won the Senate, gubernatorial, and attorney general races in Texas last night—breaking a 32-year Dem losing streak in statewide races. But if we’re talking long losing streaks: No Democrat has held a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission—an underappreciated body with huge and little understood power to regulate the fossil fuel industry—since 1990. On Tuesday, though, Democrat Jon Rosenthal claimed victory over Republican Bo French, a candidate so prone to nakedly racist rhetoric that even Karl Rove denounced him in The Wall Street Journal in September and vowed to vote for Rosenthal.
• As of publication time for this newsletter, the race in New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district has not been called. Multiple outlets have reported, however, that four-term Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew has conceded to Democrat Zack Mullock. This is another race that longtime watchers of Democratic politics are going to be talking about today—particularly if a formal winner emerges. You can read more about this race—Van Drew, who used to be a Democrat, “has certainly earned the everlasting animosity of Democrats in the district,” Micah Rasmussen said—in Emma Janssen’s prior TNR Blue Book reporting here. Just a few weeks ago when this was written, analysts that she talked to still thought a Mullock victory was a long shot. Early Wednesday morning, Mullock led by nearly 8,000 votes, with 92 percent in.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

If Scott Colom wins in Mississippi, he’ll be the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, when two Black men were elected to the Senate from the state. Can you name either? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

Fifty-eight percent of Washingtonians voted against Initiative 645, an effort to repeal the state’s millionaire tax led by right-wing donors and PACs, including Let’s Go Washington. The PAC, headed by conservative hedge fund executive Brian Heywood, was the most active group in the $13.1 million failed effort to overturn the 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million a year.

“I can’t tell you how many people have left the state,” Heywood told The Guardian in October. “My business partner moved to Arizona. I probably know 50 people that are deca- or centi-millionaires that have left the state.”

The millionaire tax, which was signed into law in March, uses the funding to expand eligibility for the Working Families Tax Credit, allowing 460,000 more households a cash rebate of up to $1,330.

Michigan elected its first Muslim senator, choosing Dr. Abdul El-Sayed over Republican candidate Mike Rogers. El-Sayed ran a shrewd campaign, canvassing across the state and overcoming a nasty strain of Islamophobia while holding earnest, intelligent conversations with conservatives and liberals alike.

Halfway across the country, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won her bid for Georgia’s gubernatorial office, making her the first Black woman to hold a governorship in U.S. history. Her winning campaign platform promised to push back on the White House, to find relief for inflated gas and grocery prices, to eliminate state income tax for public school teachers, and to impose a moratorium on data center development.

In Illinois, voters chose to send Juliana Stratton to the Senate. Stratton’s admittance to the upper chamber in January will mark the first time in U.S. history that three Black women have served in the Senate simultaneously. She joins Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland. The previous record was set in 2025, when Blunt Rochester and Alsobrooks joined the 119th Congress.

Nearby, Ohioans elected Dr. Amy Acton as their first woman governor, besting billionaire tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy’s final campaign push centered around a disturbing ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother declaring that something was wrong with the 60-year-old Democrat.

She wasn’t the only gubernatorial first. Deb Haaland, who served as secretary of the interior under former President Joe Biden, became the first Native woman to be elected governor when New Mexicans cast their ballots Tuesday.

The diversity achievements also extended to Texas, where civil rights attorney Gina Hinojosa became the first Latina governor in the nation.

Other candidates that broke the mold include former Minnesota state Representative Peggy Flanagan, who became the first Native woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. The Native community’s groundbreaking moment could be made that much sweeter by a win for former Representative Mary Peltola, who is currently fractions of a percentage point behind Republican Dan Sullivan for Alaska’s Senate seat as the Last Frontier continues to tabulate its ballots.

Delivering a speech from St. Paul, Minnesota, Flanagan noted that her victory signaled a breakthrough in the nationwide fight against Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

“You said no more war. No more health care cuts. No more taking away food from children and seniors. No more selling this country off to the highest bidder. And no more masked goons shooting our neighbors,” Flanagan said, according to the Minnesota Reformer.

And nearly 50 years after Harvey Milk was elected as the country’s first openly gay lawmaker, New Hampshire elected former Representative Chris Pappas as the first openly gay man to become a U.S. senator.

The measure, known as Question 3, passed 60 percent to 40 percent, with 77 percent of votes counted.

The measure does not enact a new map, but gives Maryland state legislators greater powers in drawing congressional district boundaries. Maryland has eight congressional districts, and all but one, the 1st district, are represented by a Democrat. The state Constitution currently requires compact districts that respect “natural boundaries,” and the 1st district, represented by Republican Andy Harris, is mostly confined to Maryland’s eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay.

Republicans fought the ballot question in court, but in September, the state Supreme Court allowed the amendment to be put to a vote in November’s elections. In the weeks leading up to the election, Maryland’s Democratic Governor Wes Moore campaigned for the measure, and former President Barack Obama lent his endorsement, filming a video ad urging voters to approve it.

Missouri also voted on redistricting Tuesday night, and the Show Me State’s residents blocked a Republican-led effort to gerrymander the state in favor of conservatives.

Last year, Donald Trump began pushing Republican-led states to gerrymander their districts in order to prevent a Democratic majority in Congress from investigating him. This set off a gerrymandering war, and Republicans successfully put new maps in place in seven states: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Ohio. That was helped by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act in April, allowing Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts.

Until now, Democrats only had one successful redistricting effort in California and a favorable ruling from a federal judge in Utah, who rejected a Republican-drawn map in favor of independent redistricting reform approved by voters in 2018, creating another Democratic district. For 2028, it appears that Democrats are on their way to picking up another congressional seat in Maryland.

Proposition A would have redrawn the state’s map to favor Republicans and push Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose district currently comprises most of Kansas City along with nearby suburbs, out of office. The vote follows months of television ads mostly opposing the new map drawn by Republicans last year, according to St. Louis Public Radio.

Republicans tried to force their new map through before the midterms, but the Supreme Court halted their efforts in an unsigned order in September. In the months since then, Democrats successfully canvassed across Missouri in an effort to defeat the measure, while Republicans, who were hoping to have the map in place already, had less enthusiasm.

Trump began pushing for rapid redistricting last year in an effort to keep a Republican majority in Congress and prevent Democratic investigations of himself and his administration. That set off a gerrymandering war, with Republicans successfully getting new maps in place in seven states: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Ohio. The effort was helped by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act in April, allowing Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts.

Democrats were only able to respond with one successful redistricting effort in California, and picked up a seat in Utah thanks to a federal judge rejecting a Republican-drawn map in favor of independent redistricting reform approved by voters in 2018. In Missouri Tuesday, voters sided with Democrats, but the redistricting fight will continue there and across the country for 2028’s presidential election.

The president called in to Fox News around midnight to complain about the conservative media behemoth’s polls, which reflected Trump’s tanking approval ratings.

“And then I read at Fox that I’m not popular. The Fox polls are terrible. You ought to get yourself a good pollster ‘cause your polls are the worst,” Trump said live on air.

Host Brett Baier pushed back: “But tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed.”

But Trump wasn’t willing to confront reality. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he snipped.

Democrats won big all over the country—even in historically deep red districts—taking control of both chambers of Congress in the process. Despite the obvious blow, Trump told Fox News that he had the “greatest two years in the history of the presidency.”

An NBC News exit poll found that more than half of voters saw the election as an opportunity to rebuke Trump and his MAGA agenda, which has thus far included an aggressive foreign policy that tied Americans to a wildly unpopular war with Iran, economic tariffs that vastly inflated the cost of living, and a militaristic deportation scheme that has pitted federal agents against the general population.

Republican candidates saw the writing on the wall months ago, but were unable to successfully peel their campaigns away from the president’s influence. Instead, the president urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” By late Tuesday, Trump was already trying to rewrite history.

In a separate interview Tuesday night, Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns that his party would have won big if he was on the ballot.

“I wasn’t on the ballot, and we didn’t get the people out, but I wasn’t on the ballot,” Trump said. “If I was on the ballot, we would have won. We would have won it all very easily.”

“But Mr. President, you told voters that you were on the ballot, to vote as though you were on the ballot,” Burns reminded him.

“I said, ‘Think about me being on the ballot,’ but they didn’t agree and they didn’t like the candidates in most cases. Just one of those things,” Trump said.

He then offered that he didn’t want to blame any one individual, but that he watched the results roll in with “great interest” and that he “learned from it.”

“What did you learn, sir?” Burns pressed.

“Well, we’re going to work with the Democrats, to make sure things go well for our country. They’ve already called and—I have the right to veto everything, but I don’t want be just sitting there vetoing everything,” Trump said. “We have a lot of friends in the Democratic Party.”

Musk took to his X platform in the early hours Wednesday morning, offering some lame observations as his preferred candidates were trounced. At about 1:12 am, Musk posted, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” before following that up with, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time 🤷‍♂️” a minute later.

A couple of hours later, he commented, “Interesting” on a repost of exit polling purporting to show that voters supported the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but massively opposed the Iran war.

It’s not clear where that polling is from or whether it is credible, but in any case, Musk appears to be trying to cope with the negative results as best as he can. Stocks in his Tesla and SpaceX companies are plummeting Wednesday despite other tech companies doing well in early trading. His plan to merge SpaceX and Tesla might now hit some obstacles in a Democratic-controlled Congress, which has already signaled that investigations of the tech oligarch are on the way.

Plus, Musk moved his companies from California to Texas to escape Democratic oversight, only to now have a Democratic governor in the Lone Star State, Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned against Musk. She also called for a moratorium on new data centers and an end to tax breaks for the industry. Now Democrats in Texas, as well as across the country, have him and other tech barons in their crosshairs.

“They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” posted Democratic Senator Ed Markey Tuesday night.

El-Sayed is the first Muslim American ever elected to the Senate. There will probably never be a large number of Muslim senators, since followers of Islam are only around 1 percent of the U.S. population. But being Muslim is arguably a bigger barrier to success in America, particularly in electoral politics, than being Black, Latino, female, gay, or a member of another group whose members often face discrimination. Anti-Muslim sentiment in America is actively stoked by the political right and in many ways tolerated by the rest of our society. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 42 percent of American adults said that Muslims have a negative impact on the United States, 43 percent said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans. Fifty-one percent said that Islam encourages violence more than other religions, including 76 percent of Republicans and, yes, 29 percent of Democrats. 

In Michigan, 39 percent of voters said that a candidate being Muslim makes them less likely to vote for that person, according to an October survey conducted by the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. In contrast, only 10 percent said they were less likely to vote for female candidates. These numbers likely vastly underestimate Islamophobia, since some who hold these views might be leery of acknowledging them to a stranger calling from a polling company. 

Islamophobia has been a powerful force affecting the most important political figures of this era. In his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama, who spent some of his childhood in heavily Muslim Indonesia and whose middle name is Hussein, repeatedly emphasized that he is not Muslim, no doubt aware that Islamophobia is even more widespread than anti-Black racism in America. Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, rose to power in part by promising during his first campaign to limit the number of Muslims entering America, casting their mere presence as a danger to the country. 

Trump won in 2016 even as the media openly called his proposal a “Muslim ban.” And in both of his terms, Trump’s administration has intentionally restricted immigration from majority-Muslim countries, with little pushback from Dems, the national media, or voters. 

El-Sayed was facing both that backdrop of anti-Muslim sentiment and specific tensions around his religion throughout his campaign. Trump and Republicans constantly implied he was supportive of terrorism and potentially even a terrorist himself. The news media repeatedly asked El-Sayed about the Muslim Brotherhood and other issues related to his faith that were not relevant to the Michigan primary. 

A significant bloc of Democrats slammed his relationship with political commentator Hasan Piker, and his positions on Israeli-Palestinian policy, namely El-Sayed describing Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide, calling for a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, and questioning the idea of a state where Jewish people always have political control over Palestinians. Some claimed he was insufficiently concerned about antisemitism. 

Perhaps these Democrats would have celebrated a pro-Israel Muslim candidate, or at least a candidate who sidestepped the issue. But it’s hard to disentangle these critiques from El-Sayed’s faith. American Muslims are deeply concerned about Israel’s actions in Gaza over the last three years, so expecting Muslims politicians to soft-pedal that issue is asking them to essentially deny their Muslim identity. The party establishment also regularly undermines and lodges antisemitism accusations at Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, three of the other most prominent Muslim politicians in America. 

A week before the election, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, both a party elder and supposedly deeply committed to fighting Republicans, blasted El-Sayed over his Israel views and hinted that he would lose because of them. The party got fully behind El-Sayed only two days before the election, after Stevens’s shocking decision to actually endorse Republican Mike Rogers. 

El-Sayed overcame all of that. The main reason he won is that Democrats everywhere did, as the election was a backlash against Trump. But that doesn’t take away from the importance of his victory. Obama won in  2008 in large part because of hatred of George W. Bush and the Iraq War, but America electing a Black person president was still a major step forward in our democracy. A Muslim candidate winning a swing state shows that many Americans, particularly Democrats, truly want us to be a nation based on our shared ideals and values, not a country dominated by white people, men, and/or Christians. 

The resistance to El-Sayed, from both Republicans and some Democrats, of course, wasn’t just about religion or Israel policy. El-Sayed has long been aligned with Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others in the party’s progressive wing. The party’s left backed his 2018 gubernatorial primary against center-left favorite and eventual Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

In the Senate primary earlier this year, the party’s center-left largely backed Stevens and hinted that El-Sayed could not win a general election. Progressives went all in for El-Sayed. They wanted an ally in the Senate. But they also wanted to prove that a fairly progressive candidate could win in a swing state like Michigan. Centrist Democrats constantly say progressive views and politicians should be ignored because the left doesn’t understand how to win elections and therefore keep Republicans out of power. 

Game changed. A candidate calling for Medicare for All and fighting billionaires while welcoming Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders to campaign for him in the general election has won Michigan, the quintessential swing state. And several other progressive candidates won in swing districts and states too. This is a big blow to centrist arguments about electability. And they know it—prominent center-left Democrats spent the weeks ahead of the election demanding that El-Sayed win by as much as more centrist candidates in Michigan and around the country or they would diminish his win. That discrediting will be less effective after Stevens spent the days right before the election actively trying to defeat El-Sayed. She proved progressives’ arguments that centrists’ electability claims are often a pretext to mask their deep ideological opposition to progressive politicians and causes. 

One direct result of the Michigan results is that I expect Ocasio-Cortez to run for president. El-Sayed and others who won in swing districts and states ran on the anti-billionaire, working class–centered approach that the New York congresswoman has helped pioneer. Those victories will help Ocasio-Cortez rebut arguments that she could not win a general election. And the party’s progressive wing will likely want to push its own candidates at a time when it appears as if the electorate is deeply skeptical of billionaires and Republicans and might consider more nontraditional candidates. 

“Democrats everywhere, including moderates in swing seats, are running ads centered around a pro-working class message, opposing billionaires, foreign wars, corruption, and corporations,” said Evan Brown, executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s PAC, in a memo released on the eve of the election. 

Even if Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t launch a presidential campaign in the next few months, El-Sayed’s victory opens up new possibilities. Or more accurately, he reminds us that these possibilities exist. No one expected Obama and Trump to be elected president a few years before they were. Despite the confident claims of pundits and center-left Democrats, politics is not an exact science. A left-wing man named Abdul becoming the senator from Michigan doesn’t just prove that progressives or Muslims can be elected but that timing and circumstance really matter. Perhaps the next president will be Ocasio-Cortez. Or perhaps it’s someone none of us are thinking about right now. 

This is not 2008. Abdul El-Sayed will not be running the country. But even more than Obama, El-Sayed overcame deep skepticism about his faith, policy positions, identity, and patriotism—including from many Democrats. The biggest story of November 2026 is Democrats winning across the country, including in red states like Nebraska. But another huge story is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed’s triumph in a country that twice elected Donald Trump. 

The ’90s gave birth to the so-called “New Democrats,” the centrists who’d jettisoned the old liberalism and adopted a more corporate-friendly aspect. For decades, you had to be a New Democrat to be taken seriously. But this week, we entered a new era.

El-Sayed and Talarico were never supposed to win these races. Talarico took positions in the past—notably on transgender rights, an issue that is supposed to be poison for Democrats—that the ’90s conventional wisdom would say there’s no way he could overcome, especially in deep-red Texas. El-Sayed was vehemently opposed by establishment Democrats, some of them because of his views on Israel, but many (and, in my anecdotal experience, most) of them on the grounds that he was too far left and absolutely unelectable in a swing state like Michigan. I had a number of conversations with Washington Democrats earlier this year in which I heard it said that if he was nominated, the party was just giving that Senate seat away.

But both candidates ran as aggressive economic populists, attacking billionaires and vowing to fight on behalf of working-class people. El-Sayed was ceaselessly on-message: Money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for All. And Talarico, while he did walk back some of his more progressive stands on cultural issues, never wavered on economics and delivered what for my money was the single most memorable riff of the campaign: “The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. We are focused on the wrong one percent. Trans people aren’t taking away our health care. Muslims aren’t defunding our schools. Immigrants aren’t cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.”

People who talk like that aren’t supposed to win Senate seats. But they both won and won fairly handily. Those inclined to disagree with my thesis will jump in and point out how lucky the candidates were. Talarico faced a uniquely appalling opponent. El-Sayed faced an uncharismatic opponent and gained ground after Haley Stevens’s Wagnerian self-immolation over the weekend. And of course, they benefited from Trump’s massive unpopularity and a bad economy.

Fine. All that’s true. On the other hand: Both had some $200 million thrown into vicious attacks on them and their character. Talarico was unmasculine, gay, nonbinary, whatever. El-Sayed was a jihadist, even a terrorist. And according to the old Democratic conventional wisdom, those attacks are supposed to work.

But they failed. And from this day forward, no one in the Democratic Party can credibly argue that the only way to win a Senate seat in a purple or red state is to nominate a corporate, cautious, centrist Democrat. You might say the Erskine Bowles era is over.

Who? Erskine Bowles was a good Democrat—of his time. He was a chief of staff in the Clinton White House. After Clinton left office, Democrats in his home state of North Carolina needed a known-name candidate to run for Senate against Elizabeth Dole. He was exactly the kind of candidate the Democrats of that era wanted—a white, moderate businessman from a Tarheel State political family who’d buffed and shined his corporate credentials, in his case spending years at Morgan Stanley.

Dole swamped him, by nine points. Two years later, he took one more shot. That time, he came a little closer, but he still lost to Richard Barr by nearly five points. Later, during the Obama era, Bowles co-chaired a commission that advised Obama to stop all that liberal spending nonsense and attack the deficit. Over the years, he’s sat on the boards of Morgan Stanley, General Motors, Norfolk Southern, and—dum da dum dum—Facebook.

I don’t mean to pick on Bowles. I single him out because he’s emblematic of the kind of person the Washington Democratic establishment types all agreed in their wisdom for three decades the party simply had to put forward for the Senate in swing states (in fact, even in many blue states). The national political media, by the way, by and large parroted this line.

They weren’t always wrong at the time. There were plenty of moderates who won Senate races in swing states. And of course some moderates will still win such races, as indeed some have in these midterms. But the point is that, as of Tuesday, that’s not the only way to skin the cat. And this is a hugely important development.

If El-Sayed can win in Michigan and Talarico can win in Texas, it means that economic populists can win in a lot of places where Democratic conventional wisdom said they could never win. It means that come 2028, when populist Democrats are running in Senate primaries in Wisconsin or Iowa or North Carolina or Florida or maybe even Missouri—all states where Republican incumbent senators will be up for reelection two years hence—no one can say they can’t possibly win.

It’s an absolute sea change inside the Democratic Party—the erasure of 30 years of conventional wisdom that’s been running on fumes for at least 10 of those years—and it means that by 2029, if there’s a Democratic president and the party controls both houses of Congress, they may actually have a critical mass of legislators who are ready to fight for working people.

This will be a fraught moment for their coalition. Trump’s approval ratings are in the low 30s. The Iran war remains insoluble. Trump cannot achieve victory through conventional strength of arms. He lacks the credibility and temperament to reach a permanent agreement with Tehran. The Iranian government, for its part, seems content to watch high oil prices choke the life out of the American economy.

There will be a temptation for Republicans to propose doing Trumpism the right way, to achieve their goals without the errors that beset Trump’s second term. This is a fool’s errand. Trump’s mistakes were not a deviation from Trumpism; they were Trumpism. His political movement is, at its core, based on a rejection of knowledge and expertise. As a result, it is inherently self-destructive.

The problem began in 2016. Trump’s first term was a fluke. The president and his allies were not expecting to win the election. Trump repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the results before Election Day to soften the ground for his anticipated defeat. His team was reportedly shocked that they narrowly won enough votes in key states to eke out a narrow victory in the Electoral College.

As a result, Trump and his team put minimal effort into mapping out what his first term would look like until it was necessary. The president was still a relative newcomer to the party infrastructure and had to rely on more experienced Republicans who shared his policy beliefs—though not necessarily his ideological vision of governance.

What did that mean in practice? Basically, when Trump wanted to do self-destructive things, he was often either sidestepped or talked out of it by people who knew better. Special counsel Robert Muller’s report on the Russia investigation is a catalog of incidents where Trump asked aides to commit obstruction of justice or some other crime and they essentially ignored him. Trump threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico to all trade at one point in 2019, only to back down after advisers warned him of the calamitous economic repercussions that would follow.

Other reversals foreshadowed his second-term mistakes. He constantly claimed that he would soon impose tariffs on all goods from China and from other countries as a negotiating cudgel, only to back down before doing so. After Iran shot down an unmanned U.S. drone in 2019, Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran while his top aides pushed for diplomacy. “The United States is not looking to go to war with Iran,” then–Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said at the time.

Trump chafed at these restrictions, especially the ones that prevented him from exerting any direct control over the Justice Department. He fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his most ardent Cabinet supporter on anti-immigration policies, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, which eventually led to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. The president repeatedly pressured DOJ officials to cast doubt on the 2020 election results, which they refused to do. Those entreaties became part of the criminal case against Trump in 2023. (The Supreme Court had to invent new parts of the Constitution to save him from it.)

At least some voters cast ballots for Trump in 2024 hoping that electing him would magically make it February 2020 again, with no pandemic inflation but everything operating more or less the same. They drastically misread the political situation. Trump and his allies had spent the four-year wilderness crafting governance plans that would cut loose many of the restraints that bound the president during his first term. There would be no more deep-state bureaucrats undermining Trump’s agenda at federal agencies, they thought, or weak-willed warfighters who wouldn’t intimidate foreign adversaries. Only fervent loyalists would carry out the president’s will.

Now the Trump administration can’t seem to do anything right. The USS Abraham Lincoln spent so long stationed in the Persian Gulf this year that basic ship amenities began to fall apart and multiple sailors reportedly attempted suicide. The administration’s cuts to food safety inspections led to a nationwide cyclospora outbreak over the summer; Taylor Farms executives reportedly tried to delay a recall of its contaminated lettuce by calling the White House directly to ask for the president to intervene. That, apparently, is how the country works right now.

By far the worst thing that could happen to the Trump administration was also its greatest success. In early January, U.S. military forces extracted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his palace in Caracas in a nighttime raid with no American casualties. He currently awaits trial for alleged narco-terrorism crimes, in New York City. The raid, from which Trump would have been dissuaded by more conscientious advisers, went better than anyone could have hoped. When Iranian protesters rose up against the government in Tehran the following spring, the administration—pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—saw an opportunity to do the same thing in the Middle East.

A more sober set of national security advisers would have warned Trump that attacking Iran would likely consolidate public support around the country’s beleaguered government. They might have pointed out that, if the attack didn’t succeed at overthrowing the government, the surviving leaders would be even more hard-line than their predecessors. They might even retaliate by attacking U.S. military bases in the region or U.S. civilians overseas. They could even try to cut off oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and destroy neighboring countries’ infrastructure.

Unfortunately for the world, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was at the helm of the Pentagon instead. Hegseth, a former Fox News host who was confirmed despite multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, had promised to end “wokeness” in the American military. This meant purging Black soldiers, firing a disproportionate number of women and minority generals and admirals, and blocking promotions for qualified officers who happened to not be white men. He also exonerated U.S. soldiers who committed war crimes against Native Americans in the nineteenth century and renamed military bases after Confederate leaders.

In between these adventures, Hegseth and Trump failed to overthrow the Iranian government by force, blew through most of the U.S. military’s stockpile of advanced munitions, and retreated from the constellation of military bases in the Persian Gulf to escape Iranian retaliation. Tehran now has its hand on the jugular vein of the global economy, and it shows no sign of relenting. In deference to how incredibly unpopularly a new war in the Middle East landed among American voters, Trump has held off on major strikes until after Election Day.

More than a few Trump voters in 2024 hoped that returning him to power would bring down the cost of groceries. It did not, and it could not. Trump began his second term by imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on America’s top trading partners, ranging from China to the European Union. The president evinced no knowledge of how tariffs actually work. He consistently lied about who pays them—it’s American businesses and customers, not foreign governments—and how a trade deficit works.

Trumpism is not a protest against how the world works. It is a rejection of the very concept of knowing how the world works. Ignorance is a virtue, and knowledge is a vice. All that matters is what Trump thinks, regardless of whether it can be independently verified or held accountable. By electing Trump, many of his movement’s adherents hoped to prove that their lack of expertise was as good as any credential that some liberal egghead could obtain from a woke, biased university.

Now we are living through their dreams come true. Trump has waged war against the nation’s universities, with some close allies openly calling for the de-intellectualization of Americans because it would be beneficial for the GOP’s electoral chances. He has laid waste to our nation’s scientific and technological research infrastructure out of some obscene desire by apparatchiks like Russell Vought to wield ideological control over it. His administration has purged thousands of scientists, experts, and lawyers from the federal civil service because they refused to unfailingly carry out the president’s whims. An anti-vaxxer who has espoused eugenic sentiments now sits atop the nation’s public health infrastructure. It has been a two-year triumph for people who love to be wrong and can make themselves rich by doing it.

These actions have a dire cost for ordinary Americans, who are now on track to be poorer, sicker, and less educated at the end of Trump’s second term than they were before it. Even their “successes” are failures. In September, top Trump adviser Stephen Miller shared a graph on Twitter claiming that the country’s foreign-born population had dropped by 2.9 million over the past 18 months. “The first sustained negative migration in 100 years, and picking up speed,” he crowed. The graph also showed that the overall number of immigrants in the U.S. hadn’t dropped below the levels they were at in January 2024. In other words, the Trump administration has wrought all this damage and destroyed tens of thousands of immigrants’ lives to bring the number down to … Biden-era levels. They can’t even do mass deportations right.

Someday soon, a Republican presidential candidate will campaign on the premise that he can deliver the “good” parts of Trumpism without the collateral damage of its namesake’s mistakes. They will be lying. All of this damage flows naturally from an exaltation of ignorance and the demonization of expertise. They will merely be promising easy solutions to make a quick buck and hoping to outrun the harms they cause. Hopefully, future generations of Americans will see through the con more easily than past electorates.

El-Sayed beat Republican Mike Rogers with 51.89 percent of the vote, Decision Desk HQ projected, with 77 percent of the votes counted.

“You’ll notice I always say ‘Inshallah’ [God-willing],” El-Sayed said in his victory speech Tuesday evening. “Tonight, we can turn that ‘Inshallah’ into ‘Alhamdulillah’ [Praise Be to God].”

El-Sayed survived a brutal election campaign beginning with the state’s Democratic primary in which millions of dollars in outside money was spent to try to defeat him, particularly from donors and organizations affiliated with the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC.

In the end, El-Sayed’s message that money spent on the Iran war and on aid to Israel should be used to help struggling Americans propelled him to victory over Rogers. The former Detroit and Wayne County health commissioner also fought off Islamophobic attacks from Rogers, President Trump, and Vice President JD Vance.

“JD, habibi, there’s a delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January,” El-Sayed said in his victory speech.

Last month, a Republican plant at a Michigan town hall attempted to trip up El-Sayed by asking him to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood, only for El-Sayed to turn the tables on the questioner, and create a viral campaign moment about his allegiance to the Constitution.

President Clinton, who inspired El-Sayed to go into politics, went to Michigan to campaign for El-Sayed and condemned the Islamophobic attacks on him in a powerful speech in late October. Former President Obama also campaigned in Michigan for El-Sayed, as did Vice President Kamala Harris.

El-Sayed’s victory in a close battleground state that Trump won in 2024 is even more good news for Democrats’ control of the Senate, but also for whoever the Democratic nominee for president will be in 2028. In order for Democrats to take back the White House in two years, they will almost certainly need Michigan’s electoral votes.

This story has been updated.