Democrats flipped control of both the Senate and House on Tuesday. Though we’re still waiting on some results from places like Alaska and Mississippi, losses there wouldn’t take much away from the very comfortable margins Dems secured in both chambers until the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

Now comes major shifts in Congress.

Besides the obvious majority-minority flip, we’re already seeing dynamic shifts in caucus leaderships. Outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced he would not be running for Minority Leader in a private call `Wednesday. That job will be up for grabs.

There will, of course, be a new speaker. Likely Hakeem Jeffries, who would make history by becoming the first Black Speaker of the House.

Follow along with us as we enter into GOP’s last chance for passing anything for the foreseeable future — the lame duck session — and some possible internal races for majority and minority leadership positions in both chambers.

In Mississippi, the midterms have exposed a contradiction rooted in the country’s most complicated and enduring legacies. 

Democrats had a big night on Election Day. The bluenami was also filled with tons of nationwide firsts, with many candidates breaking the so-called glass ceiling.

Here are some notable ones:

When President Donald Trump took over for the second time, things looked interminably bleak for Democrats. 

Americans had willingly reelected a man who encouraged a mass of his followers to sack the Capitol and prevent the certification of an election he’d lost. And the first opportunity for a Democratic comeback, in a long two years, was anything but certain: While the Republicans’ House majority was small, the path to Senate control was riddled with states Trump had won three times. 

Then Trump started governing. Some combination of tariffs, ICE brutality, the Iran War and his fixation on construction (and demolition) projects in D.C. created a Pig-Pen-like haze around him so toxic that his approval plunged into the low 30s. Combined with Democrats’ newfound popularity with diehard midterm voters, the Trump miasma was too strong for Republicans to hold the upper chamber, even with a map so friendly they may as well have designed it themselves.  

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Ranking Member Alex Padilla (D-CA) announced Senate Democrats recruited and trained more than 100 staffers to monitor voting and ballot counting during the upcoming midterm elections.

The official congressional election observers will be deployed to polling sites across nine states with closely contested Senate races in November, Schumer and Padilla told reporters on Wednesday.

Can the Democrats Really Be Doing This Well?

With three weeks until Election Day, those who evaluate the electoral landscape — race raters and prognosticators — are bringing their analyses of various contests in line with the ongoing wave of rosy polls for Democratic candidates. Toward the end of last week, one race rater, Cook Political Report, moved its assessment of 18 House contests toward Democrats. Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, another race rater, changed its assessment of Alaska’s governor and Senate races, which it had rated as “toss-ups,” to “leans Democratic,” and shifted four House races toward Democrats.

TPM also obtained a not-previously-reported memo from Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy that advises hedge funds and institutional investors about what to expect from global elections, among other topics. It upgrades the odds for Democrats in both chambers of Congress. The consultancy now places the odds that Democrats flip the House at 90% (up from 85%) and the odds that they flip the Senate at 60% (up from 55% at the end of September).

It predicts a growing likelihood (40%) of Democrats winning a 20-plus seat majority in Congress, based in part of Democrats’ growing numbers on the generic congressional ballot. That’s a far cry from the outlook for the GOP last spring, amid its post-Callais gerrymandering onslaught. And the memo predicts that Republicans’ last-minute deluge of money is “probably too late” and will not be enough to save them. “Evidence that spending has swayed voters is scant,” it reads.

This is all going on as the Democratic Party’s approval rating remains not-great, though recent polling shows it to be rising. Here at TPM, we have a theory of what’s going on there: Voters are not happy with how Democrats have fought Trump. That does not mean they are happy with Trump — in fact, the Democratic Party’s low approval, per this theory, is an outgrowth of Trump’s low approval. It leaves room for voters to rally behind new Democratic candidates while maintaining their discontent with the party writ large.

But that could, of course, be wrong, and, under other theories, it may speak to weakness in Democratic support that the polls are not otherwise flushing out.

The Eurasia Group memo sees Republicans’ best hope now as the possibility of a massive polling error. “We think that polling misses in 2020 and 2024 mostly resulted from underestimating Republican support, especially among voters without a college degree, when President Donald Trump was on the ballot, and that there is no reason to expect similar bias this year,” it reads. “However, this kind of polling error is impossible to predict in advance, and the possibility that it recurs is a major reason our odds for Democrats are not higher.”

Trump and His DOJ Go All In In Minnesota

This electoral backdrop is essential for understanding the latest travesty in Minnesota, where Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D) house was raided Monday as part of a criminal investigation that “Border Czar” Tom Homan teased a month ago.

• Reports suggest the investigation focuses on immigration paperwork Omar’s father filed on her behalf decades ago.
• The right has been agitating for awhile to denaturalize Omar, with Fox News and the New York Post even publishing explainers on why doing so would be so hard in order to keep their readers’ expectations in check.
• The November election looms over all of this. Some polling has suggested the contest between Peggy Flanagan (D) and Michele Tafoya (R) in Minnesota is close. Trump has, accordingly, been stoking anti-Somali hate in the state, as we noted on Friday. That continued over the weekend, with Trump stating in Ohio: “The Republican Party, we believe that Somalia bandits, third-world gangs, and jihadist sympathizers do not belong in Ohio, they do not belong in America. We got to get them the hell out of here.”
• The DOJ typically has a “blackout” period within 60 days of an election during which it refrains from taking steps in political cases. That was ignored here, with Attorney General Todd Blanche, per the Washington Post, signing off on the raid.
• TPM will have more on this developing story later today.