by G. Elliott Morris | Nov 5, 2026 | Congress, elections, Opinion, White House
The Democratic Party is on track to win its biggest midterm victory since 1974, when a wave of anti-Republican sentiment followed the Watergate scandal. Pending final counts in about two dozen seats, the Democrats will emerge from the 2026 midterm elections with at least 250 seats in the House of Representatives and 54 seats in the Senate — and with as many as 260 and 56 in the House and Senate, respectively, if votes break their way.
The victory represents a monumental crackup of the coalition that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2024. According to a review of vote-choice estimates from the MS NOW Voter Poll among a dozen demographic groups, the Republicans lost the most ground with Latinos, young people and lower-income Americans — three groups that also swung hard to Trump from 2020 to 2024. My analysis of county-level returns also shows Democrats making disproportionate gains with these groups.
An anti-Trump re-realignment
The backlash against Trump and the Republican Party is largest among Latino voters. According to estimates calculated by the Pew Research Center, Latinos gave 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a 3-percentage-point margin over Trump nationally in 2024. But the MS NOW Voter Poll shows Latinos giving Democrats a whopping 27-point margin last night. My best guess, based on a statistical model extrapolating the current election results to counties without final vote tallies, is that the Democrats will end up with a 14-point margin in the House popular vote, an increase from their current 10-point margin. (This could be as low as 12 or as high as 15 points, depending on how ballots break in California,
by Steve Benen | Nov 4, 2026 | 2026 election, elections, Maddowblog, White House
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
by Zeeshan Aleem | Nov 4, 2026 | elections, Opinion, White House, World
During an Election Day interview with Fox News, President Donald Trump made the surprising announcement that a recurring $4 billion aid package to Israel will be “cut off at the end of the year.” Trump remains under fire for joining forces with Israel in an unpopular war with Iran, and his Tuesday statement sounded like a Hail Mary attempt to help the GOP win over swing voters who oppose aid to the U.S. ally.
If that particular aid package is ended, it’s likely to be replaced by a more covert policy of arming Israel with U.S. weapons. But Trump clearly recognized that it could be politically advantageous to appear to be severing aid to Israel. A slow-moving but seismic shift is taking place across American politics: Progressives are gaining real power in the debate over Israel. Expect them to be even louder as 2028 politicking kicks off.
Trump said on Fox that the $4 billion aid package would end at the end of the year because the Israelis “don’t need it.” But as he continued, he referred to Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and he made his political strategy clear: “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an El-Sayed when they don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point, because when you say ‘Why don’t we give everybody four billion dollars,’ Israel is our number one, we give them more than anybody else, and they no longer need it, we’ve been doing it for years.”
To the extent that Trump was motioning at a real policy idea, he may have been referring to a memorandum of understanding that provides $3.8 billion in
by Hunter Woodall | Nov 4, 2026 | Congress, elections, News, News Analysis, White House
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
by Steve Benen | Nov 3, 2026 | Maddowblog, White House, World, World News
Over the weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a press conference in Atlanta, where he confronted a good question about his boss.
Q: The president has been very active on the campaign trail saying he’s glad that Denmark gave Greenland to the US. That is being perceived differently in Denmark and Greenland. So h as the president misunderstood the agreement?MARCO RUBIO: I’m not sure what comments you are referring to — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-31T17:07:52.890Z
Donald Trump, the reporter noted, has been “very active on the campaign trail” in recent weeks, telling voters how glad he is that Denmark “gave Greenland” to the United States.
“Has the president misunderstood the agreement that was made?” the reporter asked.
“Yeah, I’m not sure what comments you’re referring to,” Rubio replied, adding that the president is “fully apprised of” the latest details.
It’s curious that Rubio, who recently became the first and only secretary of state ever to hit the campaign trail in support of a political party, claimed to have no idea what his boss has repeatedly said about the U.S. taking control of an arctic island. But making matters worse is the idea that Trump is “fully apprised of” the details surrounding U.S. policy toward Greenland — because if that’s true, it suggests his relationship with reality is irretrievably broken.
In fact, as Election Day got underway for American voters, the Republican president appeared via phone on Fox News, where he falsely declared that Europe “just gave” Greenland to the U.S., which most certainly did not happen. (Lawmakers in Greenland did vote on Tuesday to approve a recent trilateral security agreement with the U.S. and Denmark,
by Steve Benen | Nov 3, 2026 | Iran, Iran Tensions, Maddowblog, White House
On the eve of Election Day 2026, Donald Trump did a live telephone interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and when the discussion turned to the ongoing war with Iran, the president said something unexpected.
“This is not much of a war, Sean, because there hasn’t been shooting for months,” he said.
The Republican made similar comments several hours earlier during a bizarre pre-election event at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where he declared, “We had a war with Iran, we won. We had a war with and, you know, I don’t know if you even call it a war, because we haven’t been doing any fighting for months.”
Trump’s timing could have been better. As The Wall Street Journal was the first to report, “The U.S. attacked Iran’s Qeshm Island on Monday, U.S. officials said, in the latest of a series of limited strikes Washington has secretly carried out against the country in recent weeks.”
Observers were left to wonder whether the American president was trying to deceive the public with his rhetoric on the same day, or whether he simply didn’t know about the latest U.S. military operations in the war he initiated eight months ago.
Making matters slightly worse, in the Hannity interview, Trump also said, “I heard a very stupid congressman on Fox, on, I think it was ‘Fox & Friends,’ saying about we spent $30 billion on this war with Iran. Well, that’s peanuts.”
Putting aside the fact that $30 billion is a lot of money, it’s just as notable that every cost estimate of the conflict, including the Trump administration’s, is far in excess of $30 billion.
Hours before the Hannity
