Democrats on Tuesday won control of both houses of Congress and a decisive mandate to put a check on Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency, a victory propelled by voter anger over high prices, corruption and the unchecked spread of data centers. Some of the same concerns helped to lift Democrats to victories in statehouses, where they gained a majority of the country’s governorships for the…
Source
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* As Wednesday morning has progressed, Democrats have continued to receive some good news about highly competitive races, including Nevada’s gubernatorial race, which state Attorney General Aaron Ford has won, defeating incumbent Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo.
* On a related note, the Democratic Party will now control a majority of the nation’s governors’ offices for the first time in nearly two decades.
* Democrats also scored a series of important state legislative victories in the midterms, flipping 12 state legislative chambers according to a tally from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
* In Texas, Democrats won five of the state’s most powerful elected offices for the first time since 1961. That list includes Jon Rosenthal defeating Bo French in the race for railroad commissioner, which is a powerful position that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry.
* There were all kinds of important ballot measures worth watching in the midterm cycle, including four focused on abortion rights. As MS NOW reported, sizable majorities in Virginia and Nevada backed constitutional amendments to protect reproductive rights, and in Missouri, 55% of voters opposed reinstating an abortion ban that voters struck down through a ballot measure in 2024.
The exception was in Idaho, where an abortion rights measure was defeated.
* In Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, Democratic Sen.-elect Sherrod Brown is returning to Capitol Hill, just two years after losing a re-election bid. His race was technically a special election, and unlike other Senate winners from the midterms, Brown will take office in December, during the lame-duck session, narrowing the Republican majority to 52-48 in the current Congress’ remaining
Missouri voters rejected an effort to overturn their state’s abortion protections, according to a projection by Decision Desk HQ, ensuring that the procedure will remain legal and enshrined in the state constitution despite dedicated efforts by Republican leadership. Amendment 3 would have reversed the results of a 2024 vote that enshrined abortion protections into the state constitution and…
Source
It’s easy to forget that after a group of House Republicans successfully ousted then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy three years ago, his successor, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, was not the GOP’s first choice.
Or the party’s second choice. Or its third. Or its fourth.
Rather, Johnson was the Republicans’ fifth choice when he was elected, stumbling into a job for which he was not fully prepared. He nevertheless managed to hang on to his gavel, largely by becoming a rather pitiful lapdog to Donald Trump.
But as the midterm elections approached, and it appeared all but certain that the GOP would lose its House majority, Johnson faced awkward questions about whether (and how) he would maintain his Republican leadership post in the aftermath of failure.
As recently as three weeks ago, the House speaker told CBS News, “In the unlikely scenario where we lost the majority, I would expect my colleagues would ask me to continue leading this conference, even if we have divided government.”
The morning after a historic voter smackdown, his colleagues did not ask Johnson to continue leading the conference. On the contrary, as MS NOW confirmed with two House GOP leadership sources, the outgoing House speaker told his staff on Tuesday morning that he wouldn’t run for House minority leader, ending his tenure as a congressional leader.
Whether Johnson intends to abandon his congressional seat altogether is not yet clear, but for now, the Louisianan is paying a real price for failure.
There will be plenty to say about his hapless time with the speaker’s gavel, but in the short term, there’s a more immediate question to consider: Who will lead the House Republican minority in
About a week ago, The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, the newspaper’s top elections data analyst, reviewed four possible scenarios for the midterm elections. The fourth was easily the worst-case scenario for the Republican Party.
In this scenario, Cohn wrote, Democrats would win a large majority in the House, “maybe 250 seats,” and 53 or more Senate seats, marking “the beginning of a new chapter of American politics.”
“In today’s polarized era,” the analysis added, “it can be hard to believe that any party could win in this kind of tsunami.”
As the dust settles on Election Day 2026, according to MS NOW’s projections, Democrats are on track to hold at least 250 House seats and at least 54 Senate seats. The outcome that seemed “hard to believe” has actually happened.
The magnitude of the Democratic victories is so stunning that the political world is struggling to settle on the best disaster metaphor. “Wave” is common but insufficient. “Tsunami” works, and I’ve seen a lot of “earthquake” headlines. The National Review, a prominent conservative magazine, went with “Armageddon,” which certainly brought a dramatic flair, and Punchbowl News embraced a related theme, describing the results as “an extinction-level event for President Donald Trump’s party on Capitol Hill.”
In the coming hours, days, weeks and months, Republicans will try to absorb their historic smackdown, fixating on counterfactual “what if” questions.
What if Trump had spent his first two years working on border security and his golf game, while letting the strong Biden-era economy continue to hum along?
What if “Liberation Day” hadn’t happened, there had been no White House trade tariffs and the economy had been able to grow
For months leading up to Tuesday’s election, President Donald Trump repeatedly delivered a simple ask in rally after rally: pretend I’m on the ballot.
Voters across the nation appeared to follow his guidance on Tuesday, but not in the way the president intended.
Democrats wrested control of the House and Senate in a stunning victory poised to shake up the balance of power in Washington and have an early impact on the 2028 elections.
Play
‘End of the Trump Era?’: Historic blue wave engulfs Trump
November 4, 2026 / 06:46
Despite the president’s pleas on the campaign trail for people to vote as if he were running, by Tuesday night, Trump was dashing off Truth Social posts saying he had not been on the ballot — if he had been, he claimed, Republicans would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE.” His aides, acknowledging the resounding and widespread losses to Democrats, argued that MAGA voters didn’t show up at the polls because Trump wasn’t actually on the ticket.
“This is pretty much worst-case scenario,” one White House official said late Tuesday as the results rolled in. This person, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the mood inside the White House, said many Trump aides were “shocked” by the margins in numerous statewide races, which in many cases surpassed even the most pessimistic polls gauging Republican support.
But as White House officials tracked returns inside a downbeat East Room watch party Tuesday night, they sought to rewrite history and distance the president from his prior statements and decisions.
“President Trump was not on the ballot, and it’s proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot,” another White House