Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is projected to defeat Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan‘s open U.S. Senate seat, a closely watched race that capped off a massive night for progressives.
The Associated Press called the race shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday morning with El-Sayed leading by about seven points.
The candidates were competing to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, whose departure created one of the most consequential open-seat contests of the midterm elections. El-Sayed, a former Detroit health director, campaigned on expanding access to health care and lowering costs, while Rogers, a former congressman and House Intelligence Committee chairman, emphasized manufacturing jobs, tax cuts and his alignment with President Donald Trump.
The race took an unexpected turn just two days before Election Day when Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the party’s August primary to El-Sayed, endorsed Rogers during an appearance at a Detroit church.
The endorsement stunned Michigan Democrats, prompting condemnation from party leaders and resignations among Stevens’ staff. Stevens cited disagreements with El-Sayed over Israel and his campaign’s direction, while Democrats accused her of undermining their nominee in a critical Senate contest.
El-Sayed sought to move past the controversy, urging supporters to focus on voting. His campaign reported raising $2.4 million on Sunday, while Michigan Democratic officials said the endorsement had prompted an increase in volunteers. Rogers, meanwhile, highlighted Stevens’ support in the campaign’s final days.
More than 2.3 million Michigan voters had already cast ballots by Monday, according to The Associated Press, raising questions about how much the late-breaking controversy could influence the outcome.
Two years into President Donald Trump’s unruly presidency plagued by endless lawlessness, corruption, self-dealing, executive branch overreach, a lethal immigration enforcement operation and an unauthorized war that has tanked the economy, House Democrats successfully took back control of the House, and, as a result, Congress.
The Associated Press made the call at 1:25 a.m. EST after Democrats officially secured 218 seats and the majority, hours after Democrats’ flip of the Senate became official.
Sen. Susan Collins, the five-term Republican from Maine, called her opponent Troy Jackson, a former logger and state senate president, to concede Tuesday night. The Associated Press called the election just after midnight, with Jackson leading by about six percentage points.
Despite nearly 30 years in the Senate, Collins has been seen as one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, a smaller pebble in the blue avalanche that wiped out MAGA candidates in the midterm elections. She was the lone Senate Republican to represent a state that former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris carried in the 2024 election. She lost despite her efforts to distance herself from President Donald Trump. Her campaign claims she has never voted for the president and reportedly refused his help with her run.
That hasn’t stopped her from often playing a key role in Trump’s agenda, casting a critical vote in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh would later join the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion. Indeed, Collins’ position on reproductive rights seems to have played a key role in her defeat. Collins received support from Trump despite her efforts, according to reporting from ProPublica earlier this year, which revealed how an FBI anti-corruption squad was investigating Collins before Trump killed the case.
As for Jackson, he first ran for office in 2000 as a Republican for the Maine House of Representatives, but lost. He ran again as an independent two years later and won, becoming the first non-Democrat to represent the area since the late ‘70s.
Before delegates at a state convention chose Jackson in July, Collins was originally running against oyster farmer Graham Platner, who won the Democratic primary with support from progressive leaders. But controversies surrounding Platner continued to pile up, and he finally withdrew from the race on July 10 following sexual assault allegations.
Pretend I’m on the ballot, the president of the United States repeatedly told American voters over the last several weeks. Millions of voters did exactly that. Be careful what you wish for, my dude.
The astonishing results of the 2026 midterm elections do not just represent a rebuke or a political setback for Donald Trump. Those neutral-sounding terms of art are not remotely adequate. This was a historic smackdown, a massive, crushing defeat on a scale suffered by no incumbent president in living memory. It represents this nation’s collective awakening — admittedly rather late in the game — to this individual’s uniquely poisonous effects on our public life and civil society.
Many larger political questions will emerge from this epic defeat, which will see any and all surviving elected Republicans (not that there are many) scurrying for cover and trying to establish as much distance as possible from Trump. They will lose his number. They will profess that they were never convinced MAGA believers, or that they secretly disagreed with the ICE reign of terror, with the war in Iran, with the disastrous tariffs, with the ideological assault on liberal democracy.
Is JD Vance still a plausible 2028 presidential contender, having hitched his wagon to this tyrant, who has now been thoroughly pantsed in public and exposed as a pathetic loser? Will Pete Hegseth get even one more opportunity for podcaster-style flexing before the defanged Pentagon press corps? Let’s give Marco Rubio an infinitesimal amount of credit for creeping quietly through the corridors of power and staying out of the headlines. Whether his neocon mouse act is enough to survive the Trumpocalypse moment remains to be seen.
In his inimitable style, Trump is already blaming others for this defeat. He has accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who lost his seat to Democrat Gina Hinojosa in one of Tuesday night’s numerous shockers — of being a RINO sellout. As impossible as it is to talk about honor with these people, that is an act of dishonorable treachery, given how eagerly Abbott has crawled and begged and prostrated himself before the Trumpian throne.
Then again, in an ass-backward way, Trump has a point. He didn’t do this all by himself; no one could have managed that. He loaded up the pipe with bigotry and xenophobia and fear and insane conspiracy theories, and adult Republican humans who used to believe in wrong-headed but somewhat sane political doctrines inhaled it all eagerly, persuading themselves that the resulting high would insulate them from the failure of their ideas. It only made the problem worse — all the problems, really — and they should have seen that coming.
The president corrupted and enslaved a historic American political party with a complicated but illustrious history, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. I’m not the biggest fan of that party either, but it has certainly had its moments, including the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first Black man elected to the U.S. Senate. Trump insisted that it surrender everything to him — its principles, its history and its soul, if political parties have such a thing — and as in every fable about making a deal with the devil, now it has been destroyed.
We don’t know how this election would have turned out in the unimaginable alternate universe where Trump stayed out of it. But he didn’t. He forced Sen. John Cornyn out of the race in Texas, in favor of Ken Paxton. Look what happened. He picked Darline Graham to replace her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, in South Carolina. Look what happened. He picked Mike Collins to run against Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Michael Whatley to run against former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Look what happened. He praised Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s rear end and embraced gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s noxious campaign ad. Look what happened there, too.
And that’s without considering the supposedly ingenious MAGA strategy of redistricting congressional seats in one state after another, with the objective of locking in a permanent Republican majority. How will that play out over the longer term? That’s impossible to say, but in 2026 it seems to have unleashed an extraordinary backlash. Forget all the hand-wringing about purple districts and swing districts; the congressional map is a nationwide wipeout. As I write this, the New York Times is predicting a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives of 256 seats. That may or may not hold up, but however this ends, it’s likely to be the biggest midterm swing in more than 30 years.
Are there still die-hard MAGA Republicans in deep-red exurbs or rural districts who will continue to profess fealty to Trump in the wake of this catastrophe, and perhaps even maintain that it’s all some kind of grand misunderstanding? Yeah, sure. Any cult movement has its true believers and willing sacrifices. Years after his resignation, the postmistress in the rural town where I spent summers as a kid never took down the portrait of Richard Nixon. Then she retired and moved away, someone else took the job and Nixon’s picture wound up out back, in the dumpster.
That’s about where we are. Trump has always been poisonous. Republicans are finally learning that the hard way.
The signs were there from the outset. About 30 minutes after the polls in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District closed at 6 p.m., the first numbers from rural counties began trickling in. It was no surprise that they favored Republican Ralph Alvarado over Democrat Zach Dembo. The district was reliably Democratic until 2012, when Andy Barr, a Republican who is now running to replace Mitch McConnell in the Senate, eked out a win. Since then, the GOP has gerrymandered the district to all but ensure it stayed in the fold.
The real story, though, could be found in the margins. Alvarado was underperforming Barr’s 2024 results by around 20 percentage points — a staggering drop, indicating that a significant number of Republicans had either stayed home or decided to take a chance on Dembo. Off the Democratic map for the last 14 years, by 9:15 p.m., when it was reported that Alvarado had conceded, the district had become a microcosm of what was unfolding nationwide.
The blue landslide, long predicted by pundits but mentioned with fingers crossed by Democrats, was becoming an avalanche.
Further south in Georgia, an earlier-than-expected call for Jon Ossoff buoyed Democratic hopes, followed by a pickup in the North Carolina Senate race, which saw Gov. Roy Cooper projected to defeat former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley. Democrats even put up a fight in ruby-red Florida’s statewide races, with David Jolly, the nominee for governor, and Angie Nixon, the democratic socialist Senate candidate, running ahead of their opponents until the conservative Panhandle’s votes were counted.
Then came South Carolina, where Darline Graham, who was foisted upon the state’s Republican Party by Donald Trump to succeed her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, after his death, went down to an historic defeat. The Palmetto State hasn’t seen a Democrat elected to the Senate since 1998.
Amy Acton, Ohio’s Democratic nominee for governor, routed her opponent Vivek Ramaswamy after he released a widely condemned ad that weaponized a horrific part of her childhood. In Texas, James Talarico is projected for a stunning win over scandal-plagued Ken Paxton, and Gina Hinojosa ousted the incumbent Greg Abbott from the governor’s mansion.
Other elections around the country — Senate races in Michigan, Kansas and Iowa; pivotal House contests and gubernatorial races — appear to be trending for Democrats.
For a decade, the party has wondered when, or if, a reckoning would arrive for Trump and MAGA. That moment has arrived.
Again and again, Republicans have followed the president over the cliff, no more so than during the past 22 months. In 2024, Trump expanded on the coalition that had carried him to success in 2016 by making inroads with Black men, Latinos and young voters. It was a success that, at least in part, led Republicans to launch a national gerrymandering scheme largely thwarted by Democrats, as well as an unfavorable economic climate of the president’s own making.
But Trump also made the grievous error of attacking the very communities that helped return him to the White House. The combination of his assaults on voting rights and Black history, as well as the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, ensured that Black voters turned out overwhelmingly for Democrats. After more than a year of ICE raids, mass deportations and threats against naturalized citizens, Latinos have swung to the Democrats en masse, playing a decisive role in Talarico’s win. Trump’s attacks on civil rights, immigrants’ rights and the social safety net have cut across demographic groups, and have had a strong negative impact on young voters. Drunk on his own power, the president has spent the better part of two years splintering his own coalition — and giving Democrats an opening they were happy to exploit.
The monumental defeat suffered by Republicans offers a sobering lesson for Democrats — to not forget what brought them to this night of victory.
The message voters are sending is loud and clear: They want fighters, leaders who are willing to throw out conventional wisdom and do battle for working-class interests. That’s what Ossoff sensed last fall, when he was considered to be the nation’s most endangered Democrat. Instead of playing it safe, he staked his candidacy on affordability issues, particularly subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. In the midst of the longest government shutdown on record, Ossoff held firm: He would not vote to reopen the federal government unless the tax credits were restored.
Other Democratic candidates got the message. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan proved steadfast in linking the billions in federal funding that continue to subsidize Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza to skyrocketing consumer prices on the homefront. Another physician, Dr. Annie Andrews, who defeated Graham, unabashedly campaigned on creating a healthcare public option and gun control measures in South Carolina — and won.
Right now, Democrats are feeling the wind at their backs. But after the excitement fades from tonight’s successes, they will realize they are now facing an even bigger challenge: To stay true to the fragile mandate they have been given by voters, and to not, as they have done so often in the past, slip on the proverbial banana peel that is waiting for them.
Throughout his campaign for the Senate, Paxton was fond of saying, “If we lose Texas, we lose America.” Tonight, Democrats put Texas solidly in their column — and America is still standing.
Supporters of James Talarico react to early election results during a midterm election night watch party at Long Center for the Performing Arts in Austin, Texas, on November 3, 2026. | Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images
Voters just ushered the United States into the post-Trump era.
The ballots are still being counted, and key races are still being called, but here’s the short version of the midterm election: It’s a blue tsunami.
Democrats looked set to take full control of Congress; they flipped crucial seats and won state-level offices where they’d barely been expected to compete. If anything, their performance was significantly stronger than expected — even after weeks of polls showing the party surging, and President Donald Trump’s approval cratering, and mounting outrage over gas prices, the war in Iran, healthcare, and corruption. It’s quite possible this is the biggest midterm wave since Watergate, and it appears likely to send large Democratic majorities to Congress.
What happens now? The historic shift that voters signaled Tuesday goes beyond just the raw numbers. Simply put, Americans are waking up in a different country today — one in which voters have decisively repudiated Trump’s party and opened up a new era of American politics.
Democrats won back groups they lost in 2024, like Latino voters, and made previously unheard-of incursions into MAGA territory, including rural and working-class white communities. Democrats even won the governorship of Texas — Texas!
One potential takeaway is that a new version of a Democratic coalition could be emerging. A more realistic way to see this, though, might be as the latest and loudest affirmation that the politics of the post-Trump era remain highly unsettled, with no voting group or state to be taken for granted by either party.
The incoming class of leaders is a diverse portrait of America in the 21st century, and a picture of the kind of nation that Trump has explicitly been trying to roll back. Georgia elected the nation’s first Black woman governor; New Hampshire will send the first openly gay man to the Senate; and (as of this writing) the would-be first Muslim senator was leading in Michigan. In Kansas, a megachurch pastor won evangelical voters to the Democratic ticket, sending the state’s first non-Republican to the Senate in nearly a century. In an election where the closing Republican arguments often relied on tribal fears around religion, country of origin, masculinity, and gender identity, the results were a loud rebuke to those impulses.
Taken together, the night was also, as election analyst Sean Trende put it, “a complete collapse of the Republican coalition.” Democrats will now have a chance to carry out the mandate they’ve been handed — on affordability, corruption, and foreign policy — and convince voters they can still be trusted with greater power in 2028 and beyond. How Trump responds, and the Republicans who must now balance their loyalty to a vengeful 80-year-old lame duck against a partywide emergency heading into the presidential cycle, will be one of the defining stories of the rest of his term.
Here’s the story of the historic shift so far, and what it will mean for the country going forward.
The House: Democrats are poised to take control in a major way
Many of the Democrats’ newly won House seats could be hard for the party to defend in future elections, but for now the results could have major implications for how the chamber governs.
Both Democrats and Republicans have struggled with narrow majorities in recent years, in which a small handful of members can threaten to withhold their votes and tank legislation or procedural votes. The new Democratic majority is big enough to avoid that problem in the next session. But it also might diminish the influence of the energetic new progressive wing, since their votes would not necessarily be crucial to pass certain measures.
From the very first votes counted in Indiana and Kentucky, in districts that Trump had won by double digits in 2024, it was clear that Republicans’ small House of Representatives majority would likely soon be washed out by a blue wave. But as the night went on, the size of the wave became more and more clear. Democrats were flipping Republican seats across the country, without any particular geographic or regional pattern to speak of.
They flipped Republican-held seats in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina. They looked favored to win more in Arizona, Michigan, Iowa, and Virginia.
Democratic House challengers with mainstream political experience, like Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti (PA-8), won. So did Democrats with military experience, like Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett (NJ-7). And so did Democrats with more against-the-grain backgrounds, like farmer Jamie Ager (NC-11).
The exact size of the Democratic majority wasn’t immediately clear as races remain uncalled, but forecasts on Tuesday night suggested it would likely be enormous — something like a 60-vote edge over the GOP in the chamber.
More votes means more leeway for leadership, which could perhaps give the party’s growing progressive faction, or a soon-to-be considerable moderate wing, less leverage to make demands and more freedom to vote “no” when their conscience or local politics calls for it.
The Senate: Some very weak Republican candidates helped Democrats beat all expectations
Control of the Senate will be hugely important in shaping the final two years of Trump’s presidency — because a Democratic majority would make it much harder for him to confirm controversial nominees to administration positions. It would also likely make it impossible for him to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, should a vacancy arise.
Furthermore, if Democrats hope to achieve their ambitions next time they control the presidency (which they hope will be in 2029), they’d have to start building a Senate majority now — only a third of the chamber is up in each cycle.
The problem for Democrats was that political analysts had long believed the Senate map they faced this year would be forbiddingly difficult. They’d have to hold their own seats, including contests in swing states like Georgia and Michigan.
To win a majority, though, Democrats then had to pick off at least four Republican seats, and some of those would have to be in deep red territory, which meant breaking into states Trump won big, such as Ohio and Texas.
In doing this, they didn’t just benefit from a blue wave. They also got help of a kind from a surprising source: Trump, whose choices and actions often seemed designed to put safe GOP-held seats at risk.
Trump’s attacks on Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) spurred the veteran legislator to retire. Trump backed a primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that resulted in a flawed and scandal-plagued candidate, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, becoming the GOP nominee. And when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died suddenly in July, Trump decided to appoint his sister Darline, a political neophyte, to his seat.
On Tuesday, Republicans lost all three of those races. In North Carolina, the state’s popular Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, easily triumphed over former RNC chair Michael Whatley. In Texas, 37-year-old state Rep. James Talarico became a nationally viral phenomenon with his faith-inflected message and defeated Paxton soundly. And in South Carolina, a pediatrician named Annie Andrews defeated Darline Graham in one of the night’s most shocking results.
But the GOP’s Senate woes were broader. In Ohio, a state Trump won three times, former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) defeated Sen. Jon Husted (R), who Trump had appointed to fill JD Vance’s Senate seat once Vance became vice president. In Iowa, Republicans had viewed their candidate for the open Senate seat, Rep. Ashley Hinson, as one of the stars of the cycle, believing she did everything right. It wasn’t enough. She, too, went down to defeat, to state Rep. Josh Turek (D). In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins (R), who had long defied political gravity, finally lost to former state Sen. Troy Jackson (D).
And yet another shocker ensued in Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton (D) led Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), a one-term incumbent whose campaign was dogged by reports that, back when he was a doctor, he’d sued patients for unpaid bills.
All in all, depending on how uncalled races in Mississippi and Alaska turn out, Democrats could end up with somewhere around 55 Senate seats — an impressive majority, particularly in a year when they weren’t expected to come anywhere close to that.
Governors: Democrats get their chance to lead
Even with significant majorities, Democrats will be limited in how much they can check Trump and enact their agenda in Congress.
But at the state level, Democrats won major gubernatorial victories around the country, giving them an immediate opportunity to pursue policies that could directly affect hundreds of millions of Americans — including in states that they haven’t led in decades.
In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms is set to become the first Black governor, and the first Black woman to govern any state in America, after defeating Republican businessman Rick Jackson. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa rode a backlash over data centers to beat Greg Abbott, long considered one of the most politically successful and influential conservative governors in the country.
In Iowa, Democratic state auditor Rob Sand, who campaigned as a pragmatist, won the governorship. And in Ohio, Democratic public health expert Amy Acton overcame a last-ditch ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy that featured her own mother — who lost custody of a then-12-year-old Acton after her husband was indicted for sexual abuse — to handily win her election.
A bright spot for Republicans is Florida, where Rep. Byron Donalds overcame a surprisingly tough race against Democrat David Jolly and is set to become the state’s first Black governor.
Latino voters gave Democrats a second chance
Underlying some of the night’s most surprising results were powerful demographic currents — for the GOP, not unlike a wave quickly pulling back from the beach. Trump had shocked Democrats over the last 10 years by making steady gains with Latino voters, first with conservative-leaning Cuban Americans in Florida, and then in 2024 with Mexican American and Puerto Rican voters around the country moving right over concerns about inflation and border security.
But Trump’s economic mismanagement and aggressive deployment of ICE helped spur a backlash from early on in his second term that culminated in a massive swing back toward Democrats in key races. From South and Central Florida to rural Kansas to the Rio Grande Valley, Latino voters again favored Democrats, helping power candidates to big wins.
Nowhere was the impact greater than in Texas, where exit polls found Talarico won 64 percent of Latino voters in his race against Paxton, giving Democrats a statewide victory after decades of failure. Trump had won 55 percent of the Latino vote just two years earlier.
The gerrymanders didn’t work. In fact, they sparked a backlash.
Republicans, egged on by Trump, had a last-ditch plan to save the House: Break from the usual once-a-decade redistricting process and gerrymander seats wherever state Republicans had the ability to do so. They got an added boost from the Supreme Court, which overturned decades of Voting Rights Act protections for minority-majority districts in its Louisiana v. Callais decision.
It didn’t work. While the new maps gave Republicans an advantage on paper, the scale of the blue wave was so big that it quickly overpowered it. In Florida, Democrats herded into Trumpier districts appeared to all survive their contests. And in North Carolina, the situation was even worse for Republicans, with the former state house speaker who masterminded the new maps, Tim Moore, trailing in his own congressional run with nearly all votes counted in what was expected to be a solidly Republican seat.
It may have backfired in ways that went beyond the House results. There was a massive surge in Black turnout across the South, where voting rights have long been a touchstone issue, that spilled into statewide races. Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates not only won by wide margins in Georgia and North Carolina, but put up shockingly competitive fights in Mississippi and Louisiana Senate races that only came on the national radar late in the cycle.
The most important takeaway: Voters are really, really, really mad
Americans chose to overlook some pretty glaring concerns with Trump when they sent him back to office in 2024, but they did so with a clear mandate: Get prices down, secure the border, and bring a positive resolution to conflicts abroad.
It’s clear now he blew it, and they aren’t happy.
The scale of voter outrage was the story of the night, just two years after Democrats faced its wrath and arguably far more intense this time. Sixty-two percent of voters in preliminary exit polls disapproved of his job as president, 53 percent of them strongly; 62 percent said he prioritized his own interests more than the country’s; 65 percent believed he had made the economy worse; and 44 percent said their own financial situation had worsened since his election.
It’s a complete loss of confidence, and a sharp contrast to his — in comparison now, modest — rebuke in the 2018 and even 2020 election, when voters still credited his economic stewardship even as they rebelled against his personal behavior and broader agenda.
Both parties now know just how poisonous the current Trump brand is. The question is whether Democrats can offer a compelling alternative vision now and — above all, after years of anti-incumbent sentiment — prove they can deliver tangible results. Even on a historic night, a majority of voters told pollsters they held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party.
Bei den Midterms in den USA erobern die Demokraten das Repräsentantenhaus und auch ein Sieg im Senat ist wahrscheinlich. Donald Trump poltert bereits. Helge Fuhst, Vorsitzender der Chefredaktionen von POLITICO, Welt und Business Insider, berichtet direkt aus Washington über den Wahlschock für die Republikaner, die Auswirkungen in der Innen- und Außenpolitik und wie es jetzt mit Blick auf die Präsidentschaftswahl in zwei Jahren weitergeht.
Wenn Hacker nicht mehr auf Kraftwerke zielen, sondern Supermarkt-Kühlsysteme auf 50 Grad erhitzen, wird Cybersicherheit zum direkten Alltagsproblem. Tonnenweise verdorbene Lebensmittel in ganz Europa werfen eine drängende Frage auf: Stecken russische Akteure hinter dieser neuen Form der Sabotage? POLITICO-Expertin Anouk Schlung von „Technologie & KI am Morgen“ ordnet ein, warum bei diesen Angriffen klassische Lösegeldforderungen fehlen und wie sich die kritische Infrastruktur nun wappnen muss.
Während die Welt auf die US-Midterms blickt, wächst in Europa der Druck, sicherheitspolitisch auf eigenen Beinen zu stehen. Die Grünen-Co-Parteichefin Franziska Brantner wirbt auf ihrer Reise nach Litauen und dann nach Polen für eine europäische Verteidigungsunion und eine Koalition der Willigen bei der Rüstungsbeschaffung. Warum ausgerechnet wichtige Partner wie Polen bei gemeinsamen Waffenkäufen blockieren und wie Europa seine Abhängigkeit von den USA verringern kann, darum geht’s im 200-Sekunden-Interview mit ihr.
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The results will probably set in motion investigations into the war in Iran, the running of the FBI and, of course, Donald Trump’s family business dealings. Think Bill Clinton’s Whitewater scandal and Trump’s first impeachment rolled into one, with Iran-Contra thrown in for extra froth.
How will these seismic political shifts impact Europe? From energy prices to the war in Ukraine, the continent has a lot riding on what happens in Washington. Here are five things to watch out for.
Europe risks bearing the brunt of Trump’s frustration
Some seasoned observers think this is not only possible but highly likely. “We need to brace ourselves for not more harmonious transatlantic relations but more acrimony and even more Trump demands on Europe,” warned Wolfgang Ischinger, the veteran German diplomat and longtime chair of the Munich Security Conference.
Democrats will have more opportunities to challenge Trump through appropriations procedures and by being more aggressive in oversight hearings and probes. They will also likely start attaching stricter conditions to legislation the White House wants.
But a U.S. president has considerable constitutional discretion over foreign policy, diplomacy and national security — as well as trade policy — and Trump has unabashedly grabbed more by using edicts and developing novel, contentious legal maneuvers to bypass Congress.
“[Trump] leads military force. He has control over tariffs and trade deals. He has the bully pulpit. Even if Democrats take both houses, he can veto bills,” Phil Gordon, former national security adviser to ex-Vice President Kamala Harris, told Brussels Playbook.
Expect more confrontation. Trump will likely want to show he’s still the boss and a master of the universe — and he has more chance to do that on the international stage. Europe has long been in his crosshairs and those of MAGA stalwarts, who shed crocodile tears for the continent, saying they want to save Europe from itself.
They now only have two years to do so. Pedal to the metal!
Breathing space for Ukraine
Most leading Democrats have consistently backed sending aid to Ukraine, framing it as a defense of global democracy and international law — as well as being in America’s national security interests.
The Democrats can begin to create the circumstances to assist Ukraine. But don’t “expect instant salvation for Zelenskyy,” said Bronwen Maddox, director of the U.K.’s Chatham House think tank. “Because even if the Democrats decide to start sending Kyiv more things, including money, that really will take months to unfold and even possibly years,” she said
Ukraine needs immediate assistance, especially Patriot missiles for its air defenses, to get through this winter under Russia’s continuing bombardment.
A Trumpian peace deal
Trump has framed himself as the president of peace and loudly claims to have ended eight international conflicts. He’s said Ukraine should have been the easiest peace deal to conclude and has increasingly blamed the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for failing to reach an agreement.
Former U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker reckons Trump will ignore protests from Kyiv and European allies and “start lifting sanctions and doing business deals with Russia.”
He said: “I can very well see him doing that unilaterally and directing the U.S. Treasury to refrain from implementing sanctions and trying to get more deals on energy with Russia. He’s been talking with Putin about getting the U.S. majors back into Russia.”
But when it comes to NATO and following through on threats to reduce U.S. deployments on the continent, Volker expects Trump will be more bark than bite. “With NATO, I think not much is gonna change much when it comes to pulling out of NATO or force posture reduction. Trump is really alone on this in the U.S. — he doesn’t have support from Democrats, Republicans, Congress, or the media.”
A fall in energy prices
Will energy prices plummet? Don’t bet on it. On Monday, oil prices fell at their fastest pace since August — though Brent crude, a key international benchmark, still traded at $108 a barrel.
Unless Trump strikes a peace deal with Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the prolonged energy shock that’s spiking power costs in Europe and adding to the cost-of-living crisis will continue — skewing European politics. On air travel and the airline industry, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary warned that without a deal, the industry will be “facing a real crisis by next March or April.”
Trump doesn’t have good choices on Iran: relaunch military operations in the hope the Iranians will back down or the theocratic regime collapses; back down himself; or walk away and say others — i.e. the Europeans or Asians — need to solve the problem.
Resuming military operations and spiking energy prices even more will be highly unpopular in the U.S., but the electoral damage has already been done.
Just chaos — with not much time for anywhere else
There’s also a chance that the U.S. will become so distracted and consumed by the political warfare in Washington that neither Trump nor the Democrats have much time for anything — including foreign policy.
Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, has urged fellow Democrats to avoid a “food fight” and to focus legislative priorities on affordability, raising the federal minimum wage and developing new ethics rules for all three branches of government.
Despite the pleas, Washington has seldom avoided vicious food fights.
And the political bloodletting is likely to wash up everywhere, with some of the biggest fights inside each party, forecasts POLITICO’s John F. Harris. “Both major parties face acute choices about how to present themselves to voters in the coming post-Trump era of politics,” Harris argued.
Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms defeated Republican billionaire Rick Jackson in Georgia‘s gubernatorial election Tuesday, becoming the first Black woman elected governor in American history and ending more than two decades of Republican control of the state’s highest office.
The contest pitted two sharply different candidates to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whose departure opened the governor’s office for the first time in eight years.
Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and adviser to President Joe Biden, campaigned on expanding access to health care, improving public education and addressing the rising cost of living. Jackson, a billionaire health care executive and political newcomer, emphasized cutting taxes, reducing government spending and bringing his private-sector experience to state government.
Jackson invested more than $200 million of his own money into the campaign, making his bid one of the most expensive self-funded gubernatorial campaigns in American history.
The election also ended Republicans’ decades-long control of Georgia’s governorship. The last Democrat elected governor was Roy Barnes in 1998. Barnes lost his reelection bid to Republican Sonny Perdue in 2002, and Republicans have held the office since Perdue took office in January 2003.
Georgia’s changing political landscape added another dimension to the contest. Once a reliably Republican state in presidential elections, Georgia narrowly backed Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 before returning to President Donald Trump in 2024. Democrats also captured both U.S. Senate seats in 2021, with Raphael Warnock subsequently winning a full term in 2022.
On Tuesday, Georgia voters also reelected Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, demonstrating the state’s continued willingness to support Democrats in statewide contests.
Bottoms is the first Black governor elected in Georgia, the first woman to hold the state’s highest office and the first Black woman elected governor anywhere in the United States. She is also the first Democrat to win Georgia’s governorship in 28 years, breaking a Republican winning streak dating back to 2002.
President Donald Trump fumed at Fox News on Election Day, accusing the conservative network of turning against him, giving Democrats too much airtime and driving away its own viewers.
“FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me.”
Trump insisted his own popularity remained strong, claiming his numbers were “better than they have ever been” and citing a CNN poll that he said showed overwhelming Republican support for him.
The president also accused Fox News of deliberately undermining him through its polling.
“The FoxNews Poll, always the worst, is so insulting with the questions they ask,” Trump wrote. “Every question is a hit job, and every answer is ‘BULLS***!'”
His grievances extended beyond the network’s programming. Trump questioned why Fox Corp. was financially supporting Democratic politicians and organizations, naming House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Reps. Jamie Raskin, Ted Lieu and Pete Aguilar, along with several Democratic campaign committees. He did not provide figures to substantiate his allegations.
Trump also singled outJessica Tarlov, the Democratic strategist and co-host of Fox News’ “The Five,” with a personal insult while watching the network’s election coverage, a complaint he brought up in previous posts.
“I can’t stand Jessica Tarlov’s voice — DUMB AS A ROCK, but it’s the voice that gets me,” Trump wrote, adding that he would change channels until she was off the air.
Fox News has experienced a ratings decline, although Trump’s explanation for the drop is unsubstantiated. Nielsen data showed the network’s total-day audience fell 27% in October compared with the previous year, according to TheWrap. Fox nevertheless remained the most-watched cable news network.
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdochattributed the decline to viewer fatigue during an earnings call Monday.
Trump, however, insisted the network’s coverage of him was responsible.
“They’re way down, not because of me, but because they are AGAINST me!” he wrote. “This happened once before, and Fox almost collapsed. It’s happening again!”
Among all the gruesome details of allegations both old and new of rape and sexual abuse, there’s one four-word phrase in the new congressional report on Jeffrey Epstein that says a lot about why Donald Trump seems especially unhinged these days: “No statute of limitations.” Led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released their findings on the president’s long and close relationship with the deceased sex offender. The report, citing testimony from 11 women, “indicates that Trump abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most infamous sex trafficker in history.”
The media response to the allegations was muted, despite compelling new evidence about the extent of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, suggesting more powerful men were involved than have faced legal repercussions. Perhaps the report was overshadowed by the midterm elections. Or maybe there’s a sense this is “old news” and won’t move the needle. But if Raskin has his way, we’ll all look back to this release as the opening chapter in a season of accountability not just for Trump, but also for various administration figures and MAGA cronies who have enjoyed the legal shield of a Republican congressional majority.
Democrats are expected to win control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in the midterm elections. If they do, they’ll have access to a lot more power to investigate not just Trump and the White House, but also various Republican donors, right-wing business interests and other MAGA-aligned power players.
Democrats are expected to win control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in the midterm elections. If they do, Raskin and investigators will have a lot more power to investigate not just Trump and the White House, but also various Republican donors, right-wing business interests and other MAGA-aligned power players who have been taking full advantage of the atmosphere of corruption the president has created. The Epstein report is likely just the beginning. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Democrats “are laying the groundwork for an array of inquiries into President Donald Trump, his family and his administration.” Various business and political leaders are meeting with their lawyers, worried about what Democrats could uncover with this new power.
“I haven’t seen this much investigative activity in anticipation of a change in control of a house of Congress ever,” Michael Bopp, who runs a congressional investigations division for the law firm Gibson Dunn, told the Post.
There are plenty of signs that it’s dawning on people around Trump that he will be out of office in two short years and that, as the latest Epstein report indicates, the statute of limitations has not run out on many possible crimes committed under the White House’s protection. A recent Zeteo profile of Stephen Miller showed that the White House deputy chief of staff is worried about going to prison if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. Congressional Democrats keep talking about impeaching Pete Hegseth, and the defense secretary is clearly anxious, reportedly making calls and begging Sen. Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat if, as expected, she wins the Tennessee governor’s race this week. Having a Senate seat would not only prevent impeachment; it could make prosecuting him for alleged war crimes much harder as well.
In October Elissa Slotkin of Michigan set off a massive panic on the right when she suggested that there should be a focus on “signature cases” against “people who enabled” Trump. The Michigan senator wanted a “deterrence message” for anyone considering working for Trump, letting them know that committing crimes or otherwise assisting in illegal or corrupt activity might result in “a ton of problems” for them that aren’t worth the risk of legal liability. Fox News and other outlets tried to spin this as Slotkin threatening the mass arrest of young staffers, but the hysteria belies their real worry: Democrats might be able to compile enough evidence that prison is a real threat for many of the people working for Trump.
Slotkin’s remarks clearly rattled the White House. Since then, Trump has repeatedly put out word that his underlings should not have to worry about obeying the law because mass pardons are on their way. A few days after Slotkin’s warning, sources inside the White House told the Washington Sun that administration lawyers are looking at “blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade.”
Still, the White House is facing serious staffing issues. A September report from the Partnership for Public Service found that people Trump hires quickly leave. Not only have there been a record number of resignations, nearly half of the quitters worked less than a year for Trump.
On Monday, Trump himself also told the New York Post that widespread pardons are on the table, not just for his staff, but for allies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk has good reason to be worried. His brief tenure running DOGE has raised a whole host of questions about what laws were broken by him or by staff carrying out his orders. He’s also under suspicion of messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access, crippling its defenses against the invading Russian military. This may explain why Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars — more than any single donor in history — trying to tilt the elections in the GOP’s favor.
Trump and his family members should also be sweating. Trump has often interpreted the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity as all-encompassing, but as Raskin told the New Yorker, he doesn’t see it that way at all. He outlined how the president has made billions in office, roughly $1 million a hour, and that there’s a great deal to learn about where that money is coming from. The Supreme Court’s decision technically only covers crimes committed during the commission of official presidential duties. By definition, Trump’s external money-making enterprises aren’t that. His children are deeply involved in the family business as well. And as the Epstein report made sure to note, some of the crimes Trump and his associates have been accused of committing with his old friend Epstein carry no statute of limitations.
It’s tempting to wave all this off as inconsequential, because Trump and his cronies were able to escape severe ramifications the last time around. But to dismiss this talk would be a mistake, in no small part because Democrats need their feet held to the fire. The corruption this time around is far worse than it was in Trump’s first term, more flagrant as the air of lawlessness led to a level of carelessness that creates more prosecutable evidence. The next Democrat in office may not be like Joe Biden, who shied away from aggressive prosecution of Trump and his allies. Some of the politicians whose names are being bandied around — like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York or Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia — have been highly focused weeding out MAGA corruption.
Then there’s the matter of political will. Before now, it was hard to drum up sufficient political support for accountability because voters simply didn’t care enough about corruption. But as the New York Times reported last week, the issue is a rising source concern for voters. Democrats, for one thing, are doing a better job of linking Trump’s self-dealing to the economic problems of ordinary people. For another, the Epstein scandal has broken into national consciousness, and even Republicans are struggling to sufficiently explain why Trump, despite signing a bill to release all Justice Department files related to the case, is refusing to do so.
With these winds at their back, Democrats have a much better chance of being able to conduct thorough investigations — and pursue criminal consequences for those found to have broken the law.
Across the country, voters are making their way to the polls in the climax of a vitriolic midterm election cycle set against the backdrop of an electorate souring on Donald Trump and Republicans. Inflation is up, consumer confidence is down, gas and diesel prices are through the roof, largely due to the president’s war of choice in Iran. The cruelty of his MAGA agenda has roiled the country and left a bad taste even in the mouths of some of his erstwhile supporters.
Each election is billed as being consequential; this one lives up to the hype. As we await the results, it’s worth taking note of several questions:
How big will the blue wave be?
A tsunami, a trickle — or something in the middle? All are possible, but signs are pointing to significant Democratic gains, likely up to 25 seats in the House, as well as a Senate majority. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed looks increasingly likely to win in Michigan, and James Talarico has Democratic hopes up in Texas. Senate races in Maine, Kansas, Iowa and Alaska are in play, and it’s worth keeping an eye on South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana as well.
One sign will come at 6 p.m. when polls close in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, where Democrat Zach Dembo is facing off against Republican Ralph Alvarado. Once a Democratic stronghold, the seat went Republican in 2012 and, despite a close call in 2018, has remained in GOP hands since. Although the district has been gerrymandered to favor Republicans, the energy on the ground is with Dembo. If he posts and maintains a healthy lead, look for significant Democratic gains to unfold throughout the night.
What effect did redistricting have on the GOP’s chances?
The midterms will be the first test of the GOP’s redistricting strategy, which saw the party redraw congressional districts in Florida, Texas and other states, partly in response to the gains Trump made with Black and Latino voters in 2024. But polls show those margins have been largely erased as the electorate has turned on the president after nearly two tumultuous years in office, while Democratic legislatures in California and Virginia have imposed their own gerrymanders. According to a Politico poll, the GOP increasingly sees the coalition that returned Trump to office as “crumbling,” and may have gained little or nothing from all this adventurous map-drawing.
Will progressives be bolstered or chastened?
Losses — or even narrow wins — by progressive candidates could be used as more evidence by the party’s establishment wing of the need to tack toward the middle ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Larger wins would provide rocket fuel to the movement.
The size of the blue wave could well come to be seen as a measure of progressives’ influence and power within the Democratic Party. Losses — or even narrow wins — by progressive candidates could be used as more evidence by the party’s establishment wing of the need to tack toward the middle ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Larger wins — and victories in unexpected places, such as Michigan’s 7th Congressional District where William Lawrence, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, stands a real chance of unseating incumbent Republican Tom Barrett — would provide rocket fuel to the movement.
Progressive groups are already on the offensive, getting a head start on spinning tonight’s election results, particularly in anticipation of a narrow El-Sayed win in Michigan. “Expect to hear narrow victories cited as evidence of weak electability,” a Progressive Change Campaign Committee memo obtained by Politico reads. “But a candidate’s first winning margin is not their electoral ceiling.”
Will the Haley Stevens drama matter in Michigan?
Haley Stevens, the Democratic congresswoman who narrowly lost to El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary, has brought the drama in the race’s closing days. As late as Saturday night, she pledged to colleagues and friends that she was backing El-Sayed, only to turn up hours later at a church service with his Republican opponent Mike Rogers, and endorse the former congressman in a video. The cold-dish move has virtually drowned out El-Sayed’s closing message, with Stevens being formally kicked out of the Michigan Democratic Party.
The question now is if any of it will matter, especially in light of a New York Times/Siena poll taken before Stevens’ move that showed El-Sayed leading Rogers by 11 points. Michigan Republicans seem to think it won’t, telling Politico they wish the congresswoman had crossed the aisle earlier. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report agrees, moving the race in their ratings to “Leans Democratic,” a shift that was already in the works before Stevens detonated her bomb.
Still, the results in the state’s Democratic primary were far narrower than the polls showed, with El-Sayed besting Stevens by only 1%, or 14,893 votes.
Will Elon Musk get his money’s worth?
The New York Times reported yesterday that the world’s first trillionaire has dropped a staggering $474 million this election cycle, an historic first. The amount has been spread out across a variety of groups, PACs and funds, but it doesn’t include the “dark-money donations” the Times reports he has also made. Most of the $168 million he contributed to the Senate Leadership Fund has served to shore up Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee for Senate in Texas, who is locked in a tight race with Talarico.
Musk has a lot riding on Tuesday’s results. Beyond the simple math of whether he got enough bang for his buck, there is also the issue of what will surely face him in the event of a Democratic congressional majority: investigations.
Musk has a lot riding on Tuesday’s results. Beyond the simple math of whether he got enough bang for his buck, there is also the issue of what will surely face him in the event of a Democratic congressional majority: investigations. If the blue wave materializes, Musk can expect congressional inquiries of his activities, including his reported interventions in Russia’s war against Ukraine and his leadership of DOGE during the early months of Trump’s second administration.
Where will the surprises be?
Each election brings surprises. Think not one but both of Georgia’s Senate seats going to Democrats in 2020, or Republicans making big gains in New York two years later.
This is the year we could hear the echo of Georgia’s 2020 election results in another Southern state. Despite boasting large Black populations, Senate seats in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana have long been out of reach for Democrats. But there is now a path to victory for the party’s candidates in each of those states.
In South Carolina, the GOP incumbent Darline Graham, who was appointed to the seat at Donald Trump’s command following the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, has proven to be a lackluster candidate, alarming even some Republicans with her performance in debates and on the stump. Democrat Annie Andrews has run a more nimble campaign, and between Graham’s performance and the national state of affairs, she appears to have narrowed the gap.
Mississippi’s incumbent GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has also run a lazy campaign, expecting to coast to victory. But the national political environment under Trump, coupled with campaign gaffes, large Black turnout in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act and clever campaigning by Scott Colom, her Democratic opponent, have helped to put the race in play.
Louisiana is also a wild card. The state, which is one-third African American, has also seen a surge in early voting among Black residents, and according to a recent poll, the race between Republican Julia Letlow and Democrat Jamie Davis, who is Black, is tied.
Polls are not predictive. The political history of these states continues to favor Republicans, but any of them could deliver one of 2026’s electoral surprises. If that happens, it will signal that the blue wave has become a blue tsunami.
An aerial view shows a campaign billboard depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump in Tel Aviv, Israel, on October 26, 2026, on the eve of the Israel's legislative elections. | Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
During an Election Day interview with Fox & Friends, Trump said of Israel, “We were giving them $4 billion but it’s cut off at the end of the year.”
When asked to explain this position, Trump said that Israel was a “very successful country” that didn’t need Americans’ money — and that the aid had become an “easy target” for “lunatics like [Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul] El-Sayed” in the midterm elections. Trump also suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed with this reasoning and supported a cessation of US aid to his country.
Of course, Trump says a lot of things. If all of his policy declarations could be taken at face value, then US soldiers would now be patrolling the streets of Gaza,while American hoteliers redeveloped its coastline.
All this said, Trump didn’t pluck his Election Day rant out of thin air. Rather, his remarks actually reflect a prominent strain of thinking among Israeli leaders and security experts. In their view, America’s cash may no longer be worth the political blowback that it invites.
Given this Israeli sentiment — and the souring of American public opinion toward Israel — the United States might very well draw down aid in the near future (although, probably not as soon as “the end of the year”).
The Israeli case against US aid to Israel
During a May interview with 60 Minutes, Netanyahu said he would like to “draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.”
Amit Halevi, a lawmaker in Israel’s parliament and member of Netanyahu’s party, spelled out the logic of his position last year. In a pamphlet outlining his vision for the US-Israel relationship, Halevi said US military aid “creates a false narrative of dependency, weakens Israel’s global standing and subjects it to political pressure.” Halevi met with the leadership of the Heritage Foundation — arguably, the GOP’s most influential think tank — in 2025, shortly after Heritage had released its own controversial call for the (very gradual) phasing out of US aid to Israel.
Many on the Israeli right believe that such aid compromises Israeli sovereignty. As the retired Israel Defense Forces general Amir Avivi told Breitbart in 2024, aid “puts on Israel lots of restrictions,” which prevent it from pursuing its security interests with a free hand. Similar concerns have been voiced by former Israeli Prime Minster Naftali Bennet and ex-Israeli ambassador to Israel Michael Oren.
Their argument boils down to two observations:
There are many forms of US support that Israel would struggle to do without — but financial aid is not one of them.
Direct financial aid provokes political blowback in a way that other, more essential forms of US assistance do not.
There is evidence for both these points. In 2025, Israel spent about 7.9 percent of its GDP on the IDF. To sustain its 2025 level of military funding — without American cash — Israel would need to dedicate 8.5 percent of GDP to its military. This might irritate Israel’s taxpayers. But it would scarcely threaten Israel’s ability to pursue whatever foreign policy it sees fit.
By contrast, Israel doesneed access to American military hardware. It has the money to fund its own military. But to adequately provision it, Israel must be allowed to purchase American-made fighter jets, among myriad other forms of martial technology. And the Israelis would also have a tough time doing without its broad military, diplomatic, and intelligence alliance with the United States.
That alliance has attracted some criticism on the American left and right this year — particularly, after the US partnered with Israel to launch a war against Iran.
But Israel’s American critics seem to have found the aid issue uniquely politically potent. Which makes sense: A voter doesn’t need to have any strong opinion about the Israel-Palestine conflict to oppose sending billions of dollars to a wealthy foreign country. Unlike proposals for an arms embargo or sanctions, cutting off aid speaks directly to Americans’ material interests; that money could be going to US citizens but is flowing to the Israeli military instead.
In his Senate race, Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has tried to tap into this isolationist sentiment, describing his plans for slashing aid to Israel — and increasing benefits for US citizens — as an “America First” agenda.
Meanwhile, in a controversial ad, an outside group supporting El-Sayed’s candidacy made this argument in blunter terms, portraying a couple forced to pare back their grocery list, in order to save enough money for “killing Palestinians.”
New @RebellionPac ad dropping in Michigan. We have to suffer here at home, so Israel can get all its wars. That’s why they buy politicians like Mike Rogers. He promised to serve Israel “unconditionally,” but never made that promise to you. pic.twitter.com/mtgVOyNczg
US aid to Israel is not actually responsible for Americans’ rising grocery bills (although, the war in Iran plausibly is). But the broader isolationist argument has wide resonance. In a recent survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a majority of Americans favored either reducing or ending aid to Israel. And whether or not Trump’s aid comments referred to a solid plan, his political aides swiftly used them to reclaim the “America First” banner from Democrats like El-Sayed.
Faced with these dynamics, it isn’t hard to see how an Israeli leader might think it best to beat a strategic retreat on financial aid.
A phase-out of US aid may be coming, whether Israel likes it or not
To be clear, Israel’s leadership is by no means united in favor of Trump’s impromptu proposal. Indeed, even those who support winding down US aid have insisted that this withdrawal of financial backing must be gradual. And Gadi Eisenkot, the man most likely to become Israel’s next prime minister, is a staunch advocate for indefinite US aid. On Tuesday, Eisenkot assailed Netanyahu for his purported agreement with Trump about winding down such assistance. Both Israeli leaders are currently trying to cobble together a parliamentary majority through alliances with small political parties, after each failed to win such a majority outright in Israel’s recent elections.
Still, it is quite plausible that Netanyahu genuinely told Trump that he was open to phasing out US aid, given the Israeli prime minister’s public remarks on that subject.
In any case, authority over US spending ultimately lies with the American people’s elected representatives, not Israeli officials. On the US left, right, and center, political winds are blowing against aid to Israel. With some of that country’s own leaders and admirers bowing to such gusts, the draw down of American aid to Israel might now be a matter of when, not if.
First, we’ll have referenda today on both President Donald Trump and on the polling industry. Going into 2024, there were a few outliers, like Iowa’s Selzer poll, that were giving Democrats false hope. Now, nearly everything that is coming out is showing a good night for Democrats. Scarred by a decade of unpleasant surprises, Democrats don’t want to trust that overall impression. They may be right, but, if they are, it’ll be time for the polling industry to take a hard look at how it’s been doing things in a more online, more atomized, more reactionary and more distrustful time.
Second, as David Kurtz writes this morning, the Trump administration has been facing a cascade of defeats in court. Especially notable to me is the Supreme Court’s rejection yesterday, without comment or any noted dissents, of the administration’s appeals in its effort to mess with California’s election, claiming some 20,000 possible noncitizen voters. Here’s what David had to say about that:
The Supreme Court — in a move for which legal experts could not immediately recall a precedent — unceremoniously smacked down a request from Trump Solicitor General D. John Sauer before it even heard from the opposing side. Sauer was seeking a Supreme Court order for California to sequester and not yet count mail-in ballots from a dubious list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. The Trump DOJ had already lost in the same case twice at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and once at the district court.
[…]
Justice Kagan referred the solicitor general’s transparently insufficient application for an injunction pending appeal to the full Supreme Court, which didn’t even ask for a response from the other side before rejecting it, with no dissents. The refusal by the six-justice conservative majority to entertain the latest bad-faith nonsense from the Trump DOJ captured the tone of the day.
(The Supreme Court also sent a clear message in September on Trump’s plan to take over mail-in voting via the Postal Service, continuing to show that, while it will imbue Trump with king-like powers, there are some schemes John Roberts’ conservative majority is not ready to rubber stamp.)
As cheering as the Trump administration’s brutal loss record is amid its assault on democracy, it’s worth remembering that during the 2020 election-theft attempt, Trump’s allies filed 60-some lawsuits challenging the results. They won only once, and that win was overturned by a higher court. Still, they built a movement around their claims of mass fraud.
The court filings were key evidence for Trump-aligned conspiracy theorists. The fact that wild claims were touted by lawyers, before a judge, apparently made it all seem official. That judges soon dismissed these lawsuits — for lack of standing, lack of evidence, or other flaws — was little noticed and, when it was, was evidence of the grand conspiracy against Trump. This whole operation to disseminate disinfo via the courts was not accidental; it was an explicit strategy. Emails among Trump’s lawyers reviewed by TPM showed an effort to get as many states contested in court as possible in order to give legislators something to point to on Jan. 6 when they objected to various swing states’ slates of electors.
My message here is not that even when Trump’s opponents win they lose. The media is rife with this kind of doomerism. I’m saying something different: With this administration, we should expect Trump’s fight to continue after Election Day, using lawsuits — even and perhaps especially the ones the administration just lost — as evidence that something has gone awry, something isn’t right. As Mike Rothschild, who writes about conspiracy theories for TPM, recently observed, the Trump fans that still remain in his movement don’t seem very interested these days in boosting his efforts to create new, conspiratorial mythologies. In defeat, that might change. MAGA loves to be the loser and the victim; it has less idea how to use power when it achieves it. So, for better or worse, it’ll be important for us — journalists, and the rest of us too — to remain vigilant in the months ahead, if the polls are right and Democrats bruise the reactionary ego tonight.
As I wrote yesterday, we can already see a kind of Jan. 6 2.0 taking form in an effort not to seat Alaska’s Mary Peltola if she wins. The stakes are lower than 2020’s presidential election, though they’re still quite high. We’ll follow that closely at TPM, and whatever else Trump’s allies manage to cook up.
A Weird Closing Message
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 02: U.S. President Donald Trump points to an image of reported damage to the Reflecting Pool as he delivers remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on November 02, 2026 in Washington, DC. With one day left before Americans go to the polls in consequential midterm elections, President Donald Trump is making a last push to hold the GOP’s control of the House and the Senate for the remainder of his second term in office. (Photo by Finn Gomez/Getty Images)
As you no-doubt saw, President Donald Trump delivered his closing message in front of a small audience of what appeared to be government employees at the reflecting pool. He spoke mostly about the mechanics of how the reflecting pool operates, touching on such topics as pipes and algae.
A representative quote, from Hunter Walker’s write up of the event: “This is a massive piece of — piece of pool. There’s never been anything like — when you look at the side — it’s the biggest anywhere in the world by far and was treated with a lot of love.”
JD Vance and Don Jr. hit the campaign trail with a series of interesting remarks. In upstate New York, JD Vance called the Democratic candidate, Blake Gendebien, an “asshole” and a “lunatic.” “It is unbecoming for the office, but he can call me whatever he wants to, because I’m focused on what really matters to families in the North Country,” Gendebien told TPM.
JD Vance offered a too-on-the-nose caricature of the Trump administration’s cynical racism this election cycle, warning Ohio voters that, “there are illegal communities of illegal immigrant Somalis who are coordinating to flood the polls and drown out your vote.” The only way to stop these marauding hordes was for Ohio Republicans to also vote.
Loss aversion is a phenomenon in psychology and behavioral economics. Defined simply, it means that the pain experienced from a loss is felt twice as much as winning. In politics, that intensity manifests itself in motivation. If you take something away from people, they are going to feel it more acutely than promising them something, and the theft produces a backlash.
That’s what appears to be happening right now with Black voters. Across the country, they have been lining up to vote early, presumably against Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s MAGA agenda, in astonishing numbers, particularly in the South. That this comes only six months after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais should not come as a surprise.
In the Trump era, Republicans have become experienced at taking rights away from the American people. For women, it was the roll back of their constitutional rights when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, sparking a backlash in that year’s midterm elections. Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, immigrants have come under assault from a xenophobic administration intent on carrying out mass deportations via masked, secret police rampaging through neighborhoods. The LGBTQ+ community, and trans people in particular, have seen their rights stripped away.
To many Black Americans, the GOP’s agenda and behavior will not have come as a surprise. After all, it’s been at the core of their history going back to before the country’s founding.
These policies have come as a shock to some Americans who never thought Trump would go there, and they have also opened the eyes of others to the cruelty at the heart of MAGA, overseen by the highest court of the land. But to many Black Americans, the GOP’s agenda and behavior will not have come as a surprise. After all, it’s been at the core of their history going back to before the country’s founding.
Black Americans know what it means to have their civil rights taken away from them. They understand fully the fear of being targeted by brutal, marauding gangs of armed men. In the decade following the Civil War and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, Black people began to participate fully in civil society. Mississippi elected two Black U.S. senators and a lieutenant governor, and former slaves and their offspring enjoyed freedom of speech, movement and opportunity. But the white members of Southern society would not let that stand, and as soon as the federal government withdrew its troops, they stepped in with legal and social barriers to deny Black Americans their rights, this time backed by vigilante and state violence that became Jim and Jane Crow.
Almost a century had passed by the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a period characterized by subjugation and violence by the white majority. But Black America kept fighting, against all odds, until they won.
This year, we have seen yet another attempt by reactionary politicians and judges to turn back the clock. After the Callais decision, several Southern states reverted immediately to form and radically redrew their congressional districts to favor the white majority, making it much more difficult for voters to elect a Black federal and state representatives.
They may come to regret that decision. This isn’t 1955 (or 1855) anymore, as much as Donald Trump would like to make it so, and the Black community is once again mobilizing. According to experts, early voting data is showing something unexpected: The vote is being driven by young voters rather than just those who went through the earlier battles. It’s muscle memory for the Black community.
After 2024, when Trump won a surprising 15% of the Black vote — nearly doubling his share of 8% in the 2020 election — Republicans thought they were defying history to make great inroads within the community. Then, incredibly, the administration began attacking Black America. The result is what some politicos are calling a “Blacklash,” and it could very well be decisive in some places where nobody expected the Democrats to do well. And even if it doesn’t result in flipping seats, it’s a shot across the bow.
In Mississippi, prosecutor and former judge Scott Colom, who is Black, is running an excellent race against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the GOP incumbent. Colom has made some very clever advertisements which have garnered a lot of national attention, but Republicans and Democrats alike had largely ignored the race until just a couple of months ago. Polling has tightened, and the GOP has dispatched an influx of luminaries, including Trump himself. For the first time in years, Democrats from Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris, along with a long line of senators, have descended on the state to support Colom. Former President Barack Obama even cut an ad for him. Mississippi has the largest population of Black voters of any state in the country. If Colum gets a big Black turnout with just enough disaffected whites, he could win.
Louisiana, after giving birth to the case that saw the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gut the Voting Rights Act, has been winnowed down to one majority Black district in a state that is one-third African-American. But there has been a surge in Black participation akin to what is seen in presidential years, which could prove decisive in a race for Louisiana’s open Senate seat that has been a sleeper until the last couple of weeks. According to a recent poll, Republican Julia Letlow and Democrat Jamie Davis are tied. Among voters who have already cast their ballot, Davis — who is Black — holds a six-point advantage, and 34% of early votes have been cast by Black Louisianans.
Then there’s South Carolina, which has seen Trump make three desperate appearances to shore up Darline Graham’s torpid campaign. The endangered incumbent, foisted upon South Carolina Republicans by the president himself following the sudden death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, is not getting the job done. As numbers cruncher Nate Silver pointed out, a recent New York Times poll showing the race essentially tied is not an outlier; she is in deep trouble. As of late October, the Times reports, “Black voters accounted for around 28 percent of early votes, while making up around 20 percent of the overall electorate in recent cycles. The trend is not unlike what we’re seeing in Georgia and North Carolina thus far.” If that holds true through Election Day, we could see the biggest upset of the whole campaign, largely due to Black South Carolinians saying “Enough is enough.”
In a few short hours, all the ads, mailers, signs and rallies will mercifully come to an end. I am cautiously optimistic, but like many, I’ll never celebrate prematurely again. There is good reason, though, to feel more positive than we have in a long time. Trump and his acolytes have overreached. Opting for the big tech credo of “move fast and break things,” they vastly overestimated their abilities — and the American people’s tolerance.
They have also aroused a group of Americans who know what it is to lose their rights and privileges. With all that history and so many battles, Black Americans have shown what it takes to never give up.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) walks with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in May 2026 in Washington, DC. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
The outcome of the midterm elections is perhaps the single most important factor in determining how the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency will play out — and what impact it will have on people’s lives in the United States and around the world.
If Republicans defy the polls and hold both chambers, Trump would have the chance to pass more sweeping legislation on party-line votes, confirm more loyalist nominees to important positions, and continue remaking the judiciary, all while keeping oversight to a minimum. Democrats would have limited tools to object, Republicans would keep a free hand to run Washington, and Trump would be able to cite the results to maintain party loyalty. Practically and politically, the next two years would look a lot like the last two.
Conversely, the better Democrats do, the more power they will have to block Trump’s agenda, check his power, investigate his administration, and advance priorities of their own on issues like the economy, healthcare, the war in Iran, immigration enforcement, corruption, and more. But they’d also face significant limits on their power, from the Senate filibuster and Trump’s veto pen to White House tactics that could delay or derail oversight.
Key takeaways
Even if Democrats romp in the congressional midterms this week, they won’t be able to do whatever they want; however, if they use their powers creatively, they could achieve real and meaningful accomplishments.
Legislative accomplishments would likely happen in one of three ways: through confrontations on “must-pass” bills, through bipartisanship, or by laying the groundwork for bills a future Democratic president could sign.
House or Senate majorities would give Democrats subpoena powers, but the Trump administration will likely refuse to comply; Democrats would have to think outside the box in how to make their investigations succeed.
A Senate majority would make it far more challenging for Trump to confirm nominees and would slow his judicial confirmations to a trickle, if that.
So what are the real midterm stakes? Which moves from a Democratic Congress would be symbolic and which could have an immediate impact on real-world outcomes? And what might prevent them from achieving their goals?
To get a better sense of what Democrats could actually do if they won power in Congress, I spoke to current and former congressional aides as well as plugged-in outside experts. They generally painted a picture of a grim slog akin to trench warfare. Some believed the expectations of the Democratic base would far outpace what could realistically be achieved, and that frustration and disappointment were inevitable.
But some also expressed surprising optimism that, if Democrats played their cards right, they could score real and meaningful accomplishments — in driving policy change, in bringing wrongdoing to light, and in laying the groundwork for far more ambitious goals in the near future.
Whether they can do this will depend in part on politics and messaging, but also on how they use the formal tools that would be newly available to them with a congressional takeover: legislation, investigations, and — in the case of a Senate win — the confirmation process.
Legislation: How new Democratic majorities could legislate in a way that actually matters
House Democratic leaders are proudly talking about the bills they plan to quickly pass if they win the majority on topics such as healthcare, tariffs, and the war in Iran.
But the reality is that, so long as the Senate’s 60-vote requirement for ordinary legislation to advance remains in place, such bills aren’t going to make it to Trump’s desk without winning significant Republican support. (And even if they do make it to Trump’s desk — say, via the special budget reconciliation process — he could veto them.)
Instead, for Democratic majorities to do meaningful things with legislation under Trump, they’d likely have to pursue one of the following three approaches.
1. Confrontations on the must-pass bills
Lots of bills go nowhere in Congress, but some are viewed as “must-pass.” Some have practical consequences for failure after a certain deadline: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the country will default on its debt with potentially catastrophic consequences; if government funding bills aren’t passed, the government will shut down, as it did for 43 days last year.
Often, if one or both chambers flip in the midterms, a bold new majority tries to use one of these bills to make policy demands on the president, believing the bill’s “must-pass” status gives them leverage. Then, a showdown unfolds, as both sides play chicken before a looming deadline.
So if Democrats win the majority, they will have to decide: Which much-pass bills do they want to make demands over, what do they want to demand, and just how hard do they want to demand it?
Experts I spoke to were skeptical Democrats would push too hard on the debt ceiling. “The Democratic position in the past has been, ‘We don’t threaten the full faith and credit of the US government,’” Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-aligned think tank, told me. The consequences of default seem, to them, too devastating to risk, and they’re historically reluctant to legitimize Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a weapon under Democratic presidents.
Some sort of fight seems likelier on government funding — after all, even while in the Senate minority, Democrats used the filibuster to shut down the government late last year, demanding that Republicans extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. They could run that playbook again, saying they won’t fund the government unless Trump agrees to their demands on healthcare (such as rolling back Trump’s Medicaid cuts), ICE (where they’ve demanded new accountability measures and restrictions), or other issues.
Many are skeptical that Democrats will successfully strong-arm Trump into making concessions in this way. When last year’s shutdown stretched for over a month and its consequences — for unpaid government workers and recipients of government benefits — grew more acute, enough Democrats eventually gave in even as they seemed to have the upper hand in polling. But it’s likely that the party’s base will urge them to try again — and if they do, their theory that they have more leverage over Trump this time will be tested.
2. Bipartisanship
The alternative to trying to shake the president down is to actually try and get Republican votes — passing measures with bipartisan support.
Some of these bills were standalone; others became law because they were attached to must-pass bills, such as government funding, or the National Defense Authorization Act. That’s a potential way to get something Trump doesn’t like into law — get enough Republicans on board, and hope that either Trump will conclude it’s too much of a headache to veto it, or that support in Congress is so strong his veto will fail (two-thirds of both the House and Senate can vote to override a veto). There’s precedent from this year’s bipartisan housing bill, which Trump allowed to become law without his signature.
Matthew Fiedler, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that Democrats could try to add riders on appropriations bills that block certain controversial Trump administration regulatory actions. “That feels potentially achievable to me,” he said. But, to get those bills to Trump’s desk, they’d have to get the consent of Republican negotiators in Congress.
Bipartisanship can be achieved through working with the other party and compromising with them. But another route is through political pressure — say, if a proposal is so popular and politically potent that the other party feels they have no choice but to go along. “Bipartisanship is not always the signal of a kumbaya environment,” Charlie Ellsworth, a former aide to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer who currently advises the advocacy group Public Citizen, told me.
That’s what happened with Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) bill to release the Epstein files last year; GOP leaders tried to hold it back, but the dam broke and it eventually passed with overwhelming majorities in both chambers. If Democrats win the majority, they could similarly put pressure on the GOP by forcing votes on issues where the party might be divided — like tariffs, or the Iran war.
3. Groundwork for the future
The other route for legislating to really matter in the next session is more forward-looking — Democrats could be crafting bills that they truly intend to pass in 2029, if a new Democratic president is sworn in and the party holds Congress.
The idea here is that the next president may have a limited window to pass major legislation, so he or she will be looking for ideas to take off the shelf. And the more serious legislative work that gets done in this Congress, and the more Democratic consensus is built ahead of time, the better-prepared certain bills could be for that opportunity.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, for instance, included several provisions that House Republicans had crafted during the Biden administration. Similarly, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included prescription drug provisions that House Democrats had crafted during Trump’s first term.
“There’s a lot of consequential prep work that can happen during these time periods, even when there’s not a real prospect of the legislation becoming law in this term,” Fiedler said.
The flipside is that if Democrats flock to unworkable ideas in this Congress in order to appease an interest group or win a messaging fight, they may feel pressure to follow through in the next Congress — and problems may result. Take the first year of Trump’s first term, when he and the GOP felt compelled to deliver on their longtime vow to repeal Obamacare — but since they hadn’t come up with a specific proposal to do it that was politically viable and hadn’t seriously grappled with the many potential downsides for patients, the effort ended in failure.
“Democrats need to be cognizant that if you’re going to do a test run and draw a contrast between what Democrats are for and what the president opposes, you should expect the American people will ask you to deliver when you have the power,” Ellsworth said.
Investigations: How Democrats could think creatively to get around Trump’s stonewalling
Winning control of either the House or Senate is crucial to these efforts because it would give them a hugely important investigative tool: congressional subpoena power. Democratic majorities would be newly able to issue legally binding requests for documents and testimony. (Currently, stuck in the minority in both chambers, all they can do is ask nicely.)
Why do investigations matter? One goal can simply be to unearth new facts about what’s been going on inside the executive branch, which can help determine their next steps. A second can be to spur criminal investigations, though this seems unlikely while Trump is in power, given his co-option of the Justice Department.
A third can be to pave the way to impeachment if significant wrongdoing is exposed. That said, in contrast to Trump’s first term, Democrats sound far less eager to impeach him this time around, though some have floated potentially impeaching Cabinet officials.
Finally, a fourth goal can be to use hearings and other activity to focus the press and public’s attention on certain topics and potentially build momentum for action in response. Many Democrats feel that their 2021-2022 House January 6 committee, which featured dramatic public testimony and audiovisual presentations, was an innovator here.
The catch is that the Trump administration could — and likely will — just refuse to comply with subpoenas aimed at officials or agencies. In Trump’s first term, he vowed to fight “all the subpoenas” from House Democrats, and for the most part the administration followed through, declining to cooperate or asserting executive privilege.
If faced with this stonewalling, the usual next step is for Democrats to sue, and hope courts will compel compliance from the administration. The perennial problem, though, is that such lawsuits often take a long time to resolve — and could well stretch on into the next president’s term.
“It is unfortunately possible for the recipients of congressional subpoenas to resist and drag out these proceedings,” Tim Heaphy, the former chief investigative counsel for the House January 6 committee, told me. “And lawyers knew that, so they could run out the clock.”
Anticipating this resistance, Democrats have floated that they may focus their subpoenas on people or companies outside the government who they think might have information about executive branch malfeasance.
These potential subpoena targets include donors to the White House ballroom construction effort, investors doing business with the Trump family, private companies that have gotten federal contracts, lobbyists that have helped secure presidential pardons for their clients, and law firms that made deals with the Trump administration.
The administration may still at least attempt to cite executive privilege to try to quash these subpoenas. “I’ve heard that there’s already some discussion about whether the executive branch would have standing to object to a subpoena handed to a government contractor,” Heaphy said. Democrats also hope to get cooperation from whistleblowers and government officials who actually want to share what they know.
But some have called on congressional Democrats to do more to try and ensure there will be consequences for defying subpoenas. For instance, Congress could theoretically assert a power known as “inherent contempt,” ordering noncompliant officials to be detained (or, potentially, fined); this power has not been invoked since 1934. If they tried to use this power against administration officials, a major constitutional battle would ensue. Others have suggested the less dramatic approach of making government funding contingent on agencies’ or officials’ cooperation with investigations.
Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor and an expert on congressional power, told me that, to succeed with investigations, Democrats would have to think creatively. Simply litigating the Trump administration’s defiance, he said, was “a fool’s errand.” He added: “If they follow that playbook, they’re going to get the same results — which is, nothing will happen in those investigations over the next two years.”
Confirmations: A Senate takeover would have big stakes for how the Trump administration functions
If Democrats manage to win the Senate, there will be another major consequence — Trump will need their approval to confirm judges and many administration officials.
Trump has nominated several extreme or controversial figures to his administration; and, because the GOP Senate majority was inclined to defer to their party’s president, the vast majority of them were confirmed. (Sorry, Matt Gaetz.) These nominations can have very real consequences: if Trump had selected someone other than Pete Hegseth, who was only one vote away from not being confirmed, as defense secretary, perhaps he would have heard more warnings about the risks of war with Iran.
A Democratic Senate would be far more skeptical of confirming particularly controversial nominees for administration positions. But more broadly than that, all Trump nominees would face tougher scrutiny. “The administration’s going to find it very hard to get pretty much anyone confirmed,” Chafetz said.
The official line from Democratic leadership is that they will be happy to confirm qualified Trump nominees — but that Trump is simply nominating unqualified people. “If the nominees are as crappy as his present ones, very few of them are going to get through,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — the likely majority leader, if Democrats win the Senate — told Semafor last month.
A confirmation blockade wouldn’t lead to an urgent crisis, since Trump’s administration is full of confirmed appointees already. But as various officials leave the government — voluntarily or involuntarily — Trump will want replacements. Democrats will have to weigh just how far they want to go in slow-walking or delaying Trump nominees. Some Democrats will also want to use nominees as bargaining chips in their dealings with the administration, while others may think obstructing noncontroversial nominees is antithetical to how government should function.
Trump would likely respond by trying to rely more on “acting” appointees for key roles, as he did in his first term — but there are legal limits on who can be appointed to an acting role, and how long they can serve there.
Judicial nominees, meanwhile, serve for life if they’re confirmed. So a Democratic Senate majority would be most skeptical about confirming Trump’s judge picks, particularly at the circuit court level and certainly at the Supreme Court should any vacancy arise.
For the Supreme Court, this is most consequential; conservatives currently have a 6-3 majority. But there are four Supreme Court justices in their 70s, with the oldest being 78-year-old Clarence Thomas and 76-year-old Samuel Alito.
If Republicans hold the Senate, either could retire confident a right-wing successor would be confirmed. But if Democrats take over the chamber, they’d likely follow the precedent set by the GOP when they refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee for the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat in 2016 — holding it open for the next president to fill.
That said, there may be a brief window for Republicans to try to confirm a justice in the final session before the new Senate majority is sworn in, if one or more do decide to step down.
The political stakes: In Trump’s last two years in power, will he be hemmed in — or emboldened?
Finally, looming above and affecting all these issues, is the political reality that the midterms will deliver what’s taken as a verdict on Trump’s second term so far.
If Democrats’ win is huge, Republicans will engage in a frenzy of finger-pointing and blame-casting as the party grapples with what comes next for them after the Trump era, especially with a presidential contest starting up in which he won’t be on the ballot. Practically, Trump will be more hemmed in, and though he will surely stoke further controversies and crises, he will be a weakened figure facing constant challenges from Congress.
Conversely, if Trump’s GOP defies the polls and holds both chambers, he’ll likely treat it as a complete vindication of his second-term approach — and feel emboldened to plunge ahead on his most controversial agenda items, from ICE crackdowns to the Iran war, confident Congress will do little to stop him and the next Republican nominee (whether Vice President JD Vance or someone else) will take his side.
President Donald Trump speaks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2026. | Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is closing out the midterms by talking about anything but.
What’s happening? If polls bear out, Republicans are a day away from a catastrophically bad midterms result, potentially losing control of both chambers of Congress.
Trump, however, has other things on his mind. On Monday, he made his final midterms pitch in a nearly hour-long press conference with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, where he focused heavily on the state of the newly reopened Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and his other DC construction projects (both planned and underway).
“This is a massive piece of pool,” he said. “And it was treated with a lot of love and then it was treated with a lot of hate, and we’re going to stop the hate.”
What else has Trump been saying? Monday marked the culmination of the president’s strange campaign season, which has been heavy on disjointed rambling and musings about the posterior aspect of incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted (among others).
Trump has also spent the past few months urging Americans to vote in the midterms as if he were on the ballot — but polling suggests he may be more of a drag than a boon to Republican candidates locked in close races.
What’s the big picture? We won’t know for sure how the midterms will turn out until polls close Tuesday night (and maybe not for a while after that, depending on how some key races turn out).
Trump, though, briefly acknowledged on Monday that things are looking bleak for his party: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” he said, “but we gave this a very strong shot.”
And with that, it’s time to log off…
This is a few days late in coming, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share my colleague Ian Millhiser’s tribute to the late Patrick Stewart and his iconic role on Star Trek as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. You can read the full story here with a gift link.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow for the big day!
President Donald Trump took the stage on Monday afternoon, in the closing moments of the midterm election, to deliver an extremely important message: the reflecting pool on the National Mall has, as he put it, “struggled with leaks, and algae, and very severe problems having to do with weather, and heat, and cold.
“Believe it or not, it’s never worked,” he said of the famed decorative body of water, which has sat in the nation’s capital for decades. “And it’s never worked because it was always loaded up with leaks and problems.”
Ahead of the speech, it was assumed that the president’s remarks from the National Mall would be a final argument for the campaign, which is widely expected to end in a massive blowout for his Republican Party. However, the majority of Trump’s speech was focused on the pool and his troubled efforts to renovate it. Trump presented himself as an expert tactician and shared details about pool construction and care with the nation. Overall, the president said he was “very proud” of the botched renovation and described the event as “the official opening of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.”
“The pool is now better and more beautiful than it’s ever been before,” Trump declared.
Of course, anyone who’s followed the saga of Trump and his pool over the past several months might recall that it was seemingly fine prior to his attempt to give it a makeover. That effort, which was led by a business owned by a Trump donor, was plagued with issues that saw the pool taken over by bright green algae.
Trump responded to that mess by making questionable and unproven claims of vandalism. His administration even pursued a criminal case against one alleged culprit that was ultimately dropped by prosecutors. During his remarks on Monday, Trump repeated his assertion that dastardly mischief makers were behind the muck. And, once again he failed to provide any convincing evidence to back up these claims.
“We went through a lot with vandalism,” Trump said. “The vandalism was unprecedented.”
As he spoke before a small crowd that seemed mostly composed of government workers, Trump also claimed that prior presidents had failed to adequately maintain the reflecting pool. He suggested one of their solutions involved river water. And, while Trump wouldn’t explicitly say why the waterways in the Washington D.C. area were inappropriate water sources for a decorative display, his comments certainly seemed like an oblique reference to the human waste that can be discharged into the Potomac.
“It became a very dirty, filthy, stagnant mess. It was a real problem,” Trump said of the pool, in the past. “They actually tried using the water from the Potomac — and the water from the Potomac doesn’t work because of certain reasons that I won’t go into.”
Yet the strangest thing about this speech may not have been the improbable mysterious vandals or even the roundabout presidential references to fecal matter. The fact that Trump was focused on touting his renovations and pool maintenance chops on the eve of a consequential election that will decide the balance of Congress was simply extraordinary.
At multiple points during his remarks, Trump did try to bring up his larger efforts to swarm Washington D.C. with federal law enforcement and to beautify the district with monuments that some see as dog whistles for white nationalists. Even when it came to these things, he continued to make bizarre and improbable claims, like suggesting crime had been virtually eliminated in the capital city. His boasts on that front went far beyond the figures touted by his own Justice Department in August when they cheered a 45 percent drop in homicides after federal troops took to the streets.
“We’ve actually fixed 83 statues and fountains throughout the city,” Trump said. “Maybe the most important thing we fixed is the crime, because the crime is down close to 90%. It’ll be 100%. If there is such a thing.”
Yet, whenever he briefly referenced issues beyond the reflecting pool, Trump quickly returned to the topic.
“We fixed the leaks. We resurfaced the bottom in a beautiful dark blue — very dark blue. They call it ‘American Flag Blue,’ but it’s very dark,” explained Trump. “If you had a regular blue — like, I personally love the lighter color blue — but then you wouldn’t have any reflecting. It wouldn’t be a reflecting pool.”
At points, Trump even pulled out visual aids, large before and after photos of the pool prior to his passion project. His background in real estate development and his love of decoration was clear when he showed these off while delivering a long, rambling discourse on “joints,” “pipes,” “rebar,” and the difficulties of color-matching granite.
“We installed 330,000 square feet of a very strong coating — not strong enough to withstand box knives and knives — but by normal standard pretty, pretty much the strongest coating you can get,” Trump said.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 02: U.S. President Donald Trump holds up an image of reported damage to the Reflecting Pool as he delivers remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on November 02, 2026 in Washington, DC. With one day left before Americans go to the polls in consequential midterm elections, President Donald Trump is making a last push to hold the GOP’s control of the House and the Senate for the remainder of his second term in office. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Even as he circled back to the alleged vandalism, Trump’s various photo displays included no proof of the supposed perpetrators. Along with blaming these unseen villains, Trump suggested the two Democrats who have preceded him in office were at fault for many of the pool’s woes.
“The joints that were here that we took out, they were put in there a long time ago and we took it out,” recounted Trump. “Obama and Biden put in much of it, but it was all very defective material. And that’s one of the reasons it leaked so badly.”
Trump then turned to the grass around D.C.’s national monuments. He showed pictures indicating how this had indeed been vandalized with “86 47,” a slogan that Trump argued was inspired by one of his greatest rivals: former FBI Director James Comey. The Trump administration has been engaged in an effort to criminally prosecute Comey, who previously investigated the president, for making a social media post with the phrase, which is rooted in restaurant industry parlance for removing a troubled customer. But for Trump, it’s so much darker than that.
“This was sad because this was the grass and it was totally vandalized up here,” Trump said as he held up photos of the scorched earth. “And this was put out on the surface ‘8647.’ You know what that means? That was a Comey phrase. 8647, that means ‘kill 47.’ That’s a mob expression that Comey, I guess, was the first one that I heard put it out. So, not nice.”
That incident was evidently particularly painful for Trump since he truly appreciates vibrant foliage.
“Like the human being, grass has a life also,” the president said.
In general, Trump framed the alleged attacks on the reflecting pool in highly emotional terms.
“This is a massive piece of — piece of pool. There’s never been anything like — when you look at the side — it’s the biggest anywhere in the world by far and was treated with a lot of love. Then, it was treated with a lot of hate,” Trump said, adding, “We’ve got to stop the hate.”
After over 20 minutes that were largely pure pool, Trump did indeed address tomorrow’s midterm elections. The president, who is facing historically low approval ratings amid spiking prices and an unpopular war he launched with Iran, touted his own record on foreign policy and the economy. He also trashed the Democratic Party candidates running against his allies using highly exaggerated and questionable accusations.
“These are the most dangerous candidates ever put up. There’s never been anything like what we’re seeing jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood members and people that nobody can even believe what we’re looking at,” Trump said.
Trump suggested voting for his fellow Republicans was a vote for the American way of life.
“We have to keep our Congress strong, free — a little bit of apple pie, there’s something very nice about that,” said Trump.
Yet, time and again, he returned to the theme of the pool and his various beautification projects in the nation’s capital. He claimed the makeover had stopped a wave of deadly attacks surrounding the city’s famed tourist attractions. While he didn’t share any real world examples, Trump spun a graphic vision of these horrific incidents from his mind.
“We’re not calling people now from Iowa to tell them that their son has been killed, he’ll be coming home in a casket. Somebody from Indiana — family from Indiana — ‘I’m sorry to inform you, but your son was standing at the base of a very beautiful monument and he was killed instantly and he’ll be coming home to you in a coffin.’ We don’t do that anymore,” said Trump.
Overall, the president made it painstakingly clear that he believes there are very violent forces swirling around D.C. — especially in the pool.
“Look, it’s not an easy thing,” Trump said as he recounted the renovations. “The algae is brutal. It forms easily.”
The Trump administration’s final bid to get the Supreme Court to interfere in the midterms, at least before Election Day, focuses on California. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Here’s a hot take: The outcome of the 2026 midterms is unlikely to turn on close races in California. California has no statewide races that are expected to be close, and it is a solid blue state that recently redrew its US House maps to maximize Democratic gains.
So it’s a bit baffling that the Trump administration’s final bid to get the Supreme Court to interfere in the midterms, at least before Election Day, focuses on California. On Monday, the eve of the election, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department asked the justices to order California to “segregate” as many as 20,000 ballots and place them in a special pile where they may never be counted.
The case emerges out of a list of over 20,000 names that the Trump administration first sent to California on October 13, asking election officials to separate their ballots and verify the voters’ eligibility. The administration claims that these individuals are “likely” noncitizens, but that they are nonetheless registered to vote in California.
But it is unlikely that many — or even, potentially, any — of the names on this list are actually noncitizens who are registered to vote in California. Shortly after receiving Trump’s list, Los Angeles County officials took a sample of 200 names from the list to see if they are actually noncitizens who appear on the state’s voter rolls. In their preliminary review, they determined that nearly 40 percent of the names on the list belong to people who were born in the United States (and thus are almost certainly US citizens), and that 56 percent of the individuals on the list either canceled their registration or their registration is no longer active. Over 70 percent have never voted in California.
Again, this is only a preliminary review. It is likely that further investigation will determine that even more of these individuals are either citizens or not actually registered to vote in California.
This high error rate, moreover, closely mirrors a similar drama that played out earlier this year in Nevada. The Trump administration initially claimed that as many as 16,000 noncitizens appear on that state’s voter rolls, but when they later flagged a list of supposed noncitizen voters for Nevada officials, only 185 names appeared on the list. Nevada later determined that all 185 of these individuals are, in fact, citizens.
So Trump wants the Supreme Court to interfere in the 2026 midterms based on a list of 20,000 names that is completely unreliable, and that may not identify a single actual person who is both registered to vote in California and a noncitizen. And even if all 20,000 of these individuals did cast a vote in the upcoming midterms, moreover, it is unlikely that they would change the result of any election. Just shy of 11 million people voted in California’s 2022 midterm elections, so the 20,000 people identified by Trump’s administration are a tiny fraction of the California electorate.
And, on top of that, Trump’s lawyers are not even asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise these 20,000 people — at least not yet. At this early stage of the litigation, Trump’s lawyers merely seek a court order requiring California to set these individuals’ ballots aside to determine if they are citizens or not.
None of what Trump’s lawyers are asking for is legal. But the most striking thing about this case, which is known as United States v. California, is its weakness. Even if the justices agree with the Trump administration’s extra-legal claim that it can require a state to set aside ballots based on a highly dubious allegation that some of those ballots might belong to a noncitizen, that decision is unlikely to change the result of any 2026election — although it could potentially allow this administration to sow chaos in 2028.
Trump’s legal arguments are garbage
Just in case there’s any doubt, there is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever for the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Trump’s administration.
For starters, Trump’s lawyers rely on a statute which makes it a federal misdemeanor for some noncitizens to vote in a federal election. Notably, nothing in this statute regulates the state of California, or any other state. It does not prohibit state officials from counting any ballot, or require them to segregate any ballots into a special pile. This statute merely empowers the federal government to bring criminal charges against an individual noncitizen who votes illegally.
If the Trump administration actually believes that any of the 20,000 names on its list are noncitizen voters, in other words, then its recourse is to gather enough evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that one of those individuals violated federal law. Then it can charge that individual with a crime and potentially obtain a conviction. The statute simply does not permit federal courts to order segregation of ballots.
Meanwhile, a separate federal law requires states to “complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” So it’s actually illegal for California to comply with a request to remove the supposed noncitizens from its voter rolls, because this request came within 90 days of a federal election.
Additionally, as the Supreme Court said less than two weeks ago in Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy (2026), federal courts “should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” Trump’s lawyers filed their brief to the justices in the California case on the literal eve of an election.
Finally, as Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, explained in an opinion arguing that Trump must lose this case, it is unlikely that California could comply with an order requiring it to segregate the contested ballots even if it wanted to. The state says that segregating these ballots “would be a logistical and administrative nightmare” because the list “does not contain the information necessary to identify voters; the Registrar has no established system for segregating ballots; and trying to create one now risks shutting down the system the Registrar needs to run the entire election.”
Additionally, Bennett writes, California “also lack[s] the ability to verify voters’ citizenship status before December 4, 2026—the deadline for counties to certify their election results to the Secretary of State.”
Given these flaws in Trump’s case, it is unlikely that even this Supreme Court will order California to set aside the contested ballots. And, if Trump somehow does prevail, it is also unlikely that such a decision would change the result of any 2026 race.
That said, in the unlikely event it does happen, a decision favoring Trump in California could allow him to interfere with the 2028 election — because it would enable the Trump administration to harass state election officials by sending them fabricated lists of “noncitizens” that the state would have to scramble to process while it was also trying to run an election.
But it is still unclear what Trump is trying to accomplish by bringing the California case to the justices on the day before an election, when even this Supreme Court is unlikely to rule in Trump’s favor.
If this is the extent of Trump’s efforts to overturn an election that is expected to end badly for his Republican Party, then those efforts are unlikely to amount to anything at all.
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