Vancouver, British Columbia, is the next battleground for municipal socialism in North America. On October 17, Vancouver voters decisively evicted their right-wing mayor, replacing him with the Green Party’s candidate. But more consequentially, they also tossed nearly all of the pro-corporate incumbents from all three municipal legislative bodies — city council, the school board…
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For the last decade, Donald Trump tormented Democrats and defied expectations of what it meant to lead and endure in American politics.
On Tuesday, the old rules finally caught up with him.
Trump wasn’t on the ballot, but he made the midterms emphatically about himself, urging his supporters to turn out as if he were. After a decade in which he dominated the national narrative, the voters who had sided with him so often before appear not to have followed him en masse.
Democrats were projected to retake both the House and the Senate from the Trump-led GOP. They won governor’s races in red states and were closing in on upsets in deeply conservative congressional districts that, just days earlier, had looked all but unwinnable.
Plenty of races remained uncalled at 1 a.m. But the early returns pointed to one of the best nights for Democrats — if not the best — since Trump ran for the White House in 2016.
If those projections hold, the rest of Trump’s term will look very different. A Democratic House and Senate would be able to stall his agenda and investigate his administration, and the Senate would decide the fate of his nominees, including to the federal courts. That could be a significant check on a president who has already reshaped the Supreme Court.
The night also suggested that Trump’s appeal doesn’t transfer. Candidates he embraced or campaigned for lost in deep-red Kansas and South Carolina. Vivek Ramaswamy, an ardent ally of the president, lost the Ohio governor’s race. Trump’s conservative magic, it turns out, doesn’t extend to the candidates further down the ballot. That’s an uncomfortable reality for
President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House has helped end Susan Collins’ Senate career.
Collins, Maine’s five-term Republican senator, has lost her bid for a sixth term to Democrat Troy Jackson. The result gives Democrats a long-sought win over a senator who had overcome national political dynamics and more than one hostile political wave.
Democrats’ difficult path to a Senate majority ran through Maine. Collins was the only Republican incumbent on the ballot this year from a state that is neither a presidential battleground nor reliably red.
Collins is one of the few Republicans left in Congress who voted to convict Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Even so, Republicans recognized that she was their best, and perhaps only, chance to hold the seat in Maine, which is a more reliably blue state.
On paper, she was among the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country. Yet Democrats’ handling of the race gave Collins, a formidable campaigner, openings, even in a national environment that favored the party out of power.
Months before the primary, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee lined up behind Gov. Janet Mills, 78. It did so even though Graham Platner, a progressive oyster farmer and Marine veteran, had entered the race first. In a cycle when voters showed a clear appetite for outsiders, Platner drove Mills from the race well before the primary.
After the primary, Platner was accused of sexual assault. He denied the allegation but eventually dropped out. Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate, quickly replaced him as the Democratic nominee. Jackson had run for governor earlier this year as a Bernie Sanders-aligned
The Trump administration’s attempts to discount the votes of tens of thousands of voters it has dubiously deemed ineligible to participate in this year’s midterm elections hit two major roadblocks on Wednesday, as officials in Washington state and a judge’s ruling in California challenged the White House’s reasoning. In August, the administration issued a report claiming that 24,000…
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Texas Republicans chose Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn this year despite Cornyn’s warning that Paxton could put the seat at risk. Now they have lost it.
Democratic state Rep. James Talarico defeated Paxton, the impeached and acquitted state attorney general. He is the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas since 1994 and the first to win a Senate race there since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988.
The race was the most expensive of the midterms, with more than $500 million spent overall, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Paxton easily won the May runoff with a late assist from President Donald Trump, but it quickly became clear he would need significant help to hold the seat.
After the 2020 election, Paxton led a failed lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn former President Joe Biden’s victories in the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In 2023, the Republican-led Texas House impeached him over allegations, among others, that he “misused public resources.” The state Senate acquitted him.
Democrats’ hopes of turning Texas blue had gone unfulfilled for years, and the state had moved further from them since the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election. But concerns about Paxton in both parties helped Democrats end their long losing streak. So did a midterm electorate looking to rebuke Trump.
Talarico capitalized. He vastly outraised Paxton, according to federal campaign finance records, even as Trump and his allies worked to keep Texas red.
That Texas was competitive at all showed how difficult the midterms had become for Republicans midway through Trump’s second term. When the cycle began, Democrats faced a daunting Senate map: Their path to
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and other Republicans are including Christian nationalist themes in their messaging and campaign rhetoric in the final days before the midterm elections. This past weekend, Johnson appeared on “The Week on Capitol Hill,” a right-wing Christian program hosted by Tony Perkins. Perkins asked Johnson what advice he’d give to conservatives “who are…
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