by Anthony Coley | Nov 4, 2026 | elections, Opinion, Politics
Florida entered Election Day with two streaks on a collision course: Republicans had won seven straight races for governor. No Black Republican had ever been elected governor anywhere in America. Only one streak would survive.
We now know the answer.
MS NOW projects U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds has won Florida’s governorship, defying political gravity and breaking a new barrier for a Black Republican candidate. Two other Black Republicans were running for governor Tuesday: Lisa Demuth in Minnesota and John James in Michigan.
Florida entered Election Day with two streaks on a collision course. Only one streak would survive.
Here at MS NOW in September, I wondered if Florida’s Republican advantage would be enough to carry Donalds and pointed out the national political environment hostile to his party and that he was trying to break through a barrier no Black Republican ever had.
Donalds ran as a conservative successor to Ron DeSantis, promising lower property taxes and insurance costs, expanded school choice, less red tape and tougher immigration and crime enforcement. He has also leaned into culture-war fights and portrayed Jolly as offering a blue-state model for Florida.
Jolly focused relentlessly on affordability, led by a state-backed catastrophe fund to lower property insurance costs. He also supported more public-school funding, tighter rules on vouchers, Medicaid expansion, abortion rights, gun reforms, climate resilience and a moratorium on hyperscale data centers. He ran against culture wars and ethics scandals while presenting himself as a former Republican offering a more inclusive alternative.
Play
Trump-backed Byron Donalds, Democrat David Jolly win FL governor primaries
August 18, 2026 / 13:13
In August’s Republican primary, Donalds’ support was notably weaker in rural northern Florida, a region that
by Symone D. Sanders Townsend | Nov 3, 2026 | elections, Opinion
The election isn’t even over, and some people are already trying to lower expectations.
With Democrats favored to win back the House, the familiar warnings are already coming: Senate Republicans will block most of their bills. Trump will veto anything that gets through. And when administration officials refuse to testify, the Justice Department won’t enforce congressional subpoenas.
Those are real obstacles. But some naysayers go further: Since Democrats may not be able to force the administration to cooperate or enact their agenda, they should be wary of investigating it. Voters want their lives to get better, the argument goes, not another “accountability tour.”
In other words, holding the administration accountable for its actions over the past two years won’t work — and Democrats should resign themselves to being powerless before they’ve even taken control.
If voters give them the House, Democrats will have to show what they can accomplish with it.
Come on now. If this is how you approach politics, you should find another line of work.
Back in April, I wrote that Democrats needed to plan what they would do with power if voters gave it back to them. A victory would come with the expectation that they could improve people’s lives. If voters give them the House, Democrats will have to show what they can accomplish with it.
That work would test Hakeem Jeffries as speaker, along with the progressives promising a different approach and the moderates whose victories could make a majority possible. The disagreements that animated contentious primaries would move into caucus meetings, committee rooms and negotiations over which bills get a vote.
Play
‘You’ve still got to vote!’: MS NOW panel reacts to
by Luke Russert | Nov 3, 2026 | Opinion
When Republicans won in 2024, they talked as if they had reshaped American politics for a generation, the way Franklin Roosevelt did in 1932 or Ronald Reagan in 1980.
On election night, President Donald Trump called his win “a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”
Two years later, the promised land has turned out to be a mirage. Trump has lost ground with independents, Latino voters and young men, among other groups who were crucial to his 2024 win.
Republicans mistook voters’ anger for a mandate.
In the final days before the midterms, Republicans found themselves defending Senate seats in states Trump had carried comfortably in 2024, including Iowa, Kansas, Ohio and Texas. Trump’s approval rating is among the lowest in modern polling, while the GOP’s image has taken a hit, with 59% of Americans saying the party is too extreme in a recent Gallup poll.
What went wrong? Trump and his Republican allies mistook voters’ anger with the status quo for a mandate to do whatever they wanted.
They sent immigration agents into courthouses, schools and churches with so few safeguards that they swept up hundreds of U.S. citizens and set a record for deaths in detention. They installed two billionaires to run the Education and Commerce departments and put the world’s richest man in charge of slashing the federal government with little transparency, accountability or regard for constitutional limits. They passed tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy while slashing healthcare subsidies, cutting SNAP benefits and Medicaid coverage, and weakening other programs that working families rely on.
Polls showed broad majorities of Americans disapproved of these policies. But
by G. Elliott Morris | Nov 3, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion
Election Day is finally here, and the polls, early voting and general electoral dynamics are practically now all in agreement: You should expect a big “blue wave” in the midterm elections that is large enough to give Democrats the House, and might be large enough for them to flip the Senate. But how much faith should we put into that consensus?
Here’s a final look at our election forecasting model at FiftyPlusOne, MS NOW’s exclusive partner for polling data and election analysis, to prepare readers for the potential outcomes of the elections this year.
The House
Our final forecast gives Democrats a 99% chance of winning the House, with a median of 240 seats.
The forecast implies a national House vote margin for the Democrats of about nine percentage points, in line with our generic ballot average of D+8.7. This would be larger than the margin for either party in any House election since 2008. Though unlikely, if the polls understate Democrats modestly, they could approach the levels reached in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, when their vote margin lead was in the mid-teens.
Republicans would need the polls to be off by more than they were in 2016, 2020 or 2024 to change that.
Across those years, the polls overestimated Democrats on the House generic ballot by about 3.9 percentage points. Plugging that into our forecasting model, a poll miss that large still leaves Democrats with a projected 226 seats and an 82% chance of a majority. A miss the size of 2020’s — about 5 points — left them at 71%.
Play
‘Who decided this was a good idea?’: Reaction to Trump’s speech on Reflecting Pool
by Glenn Kessler | Nov 3, 2026 | elections, Opinion, White House
Consistency has never been President Donald Trump’s strong suit, but he has been consistent about one thing: If Republicans do poorly in Tuesday’s midterm elections, as polls suggest they will, he is prepared to blame Democratic cheating. Over and over, Trump has outlined — falsely — the ways he says Democrats will manipulate the vote.
On Aug. 5, for example, Trump was already warning of a rigged election in Michigan. Commenting on the vote count in the Democratic Senate primary, he wrote about Wayne County: “Don’t discount all of those fake mail-in ballots that will ‘surprisingly’ show up at the last moment. Get ready for another Rigged Election.”
Two months later, he released a video with a different message: “Vote early, vote by mail or vote in person on Election Day.” The caption went further: “Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, we must ‘swamp’ the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout!”
Play
‘The law is clear’: Trump administration sets stage for challenges to Alaska election results
October 31, 2026 / 11:55
When I ran The Washington Post Fact Checker, I compiled scores of prewritten fact checks, totaling 30,000 words, based on my familiarity with things Trump said and his habit of uttering exaggerated, misleading or fully made-up statements.
So here, as a prebuttal, are five accusations that Trump will likely make after Election Day, based on a review of his election-related statements in speeches, news conferences and Truth Social posts in 2025 and 2026.
Myth No. 1: Late-counted mail ballots erased Republican victories
Media coverage of vote counting can create the impression that candidates are jockeying for position in real time when, in fact, the
by Ja'han Jones | Nov 3, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion
When it comes to Black voters, this year’s midterm elections have underscored that conservatives’ strategy is more steeped in trickery and suppression than persuasion.
At Donald Trump’s urging, Republicans enacted Jim Crow-style gerrymanders earlier this year that diluted Black voter power in several states. This is not the behavior of a party that wants to compete for Black voters by winning them over with compelling arguments.
And in this election cycle, conservative campaigns and donors have characteristically leaned on straight-up deception and manipulation in their efforts to target Black voters.
The list seems to grow with each passing day: The Black progressive in Ohio whose independent Senate candidacy Republicans have been propping up to try to peel off Black votes from Democratic nominee Sherrod Brown; the Texas Republican who shared an AI-generated video depicting Black voters backing his campaign; the Turning Point activists trying to boost Andy Biggs’ gubernatorial bid in Arizona by placing “Democrats for Biggs” billboards in Black neighborhoods in the Phoenix area.
And how about the super PAC — funded by a white GOP donor — that has been bombarding Black residents with propaganda about Michigan’s pivotal Senate race? Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing off against Republican Mike Rogers, who has basically treated Black people like props while running one of the most bigoted Senate campaigns in recent memory.
As The Washington Post reported:
The text from “Ben with Empowering Black Americans” landed as Alisha Jackson walked a majority Black neighborhood trying to encourage reluctant voters to show up to the polls.
It warned her that Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat she wants elected to the Senate, “has been disrespectful and dishonest with Black
