Inside the GOP’s midterm bloodbath
Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed speaks onstage at an election night party at in Detroit, Michigan, early on November 4, 2026. | Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images
It’s hard to put into words how good Tuesday night was for Democrats: “Blue wave” falls short, and even “bluenami” may not be apt for an election in which Republicans lost Senate races in Kansas and South Carolina, along with every major statewide race in Texas and too many more to count across the country — often in places that voted for President Donald Trump by double digits just two years ago.
But one thing is abundantly clear, Vox’s Astead Herndon argues: This was “the best night that Democrats could have hoped for. And more importantly, I think, a resounding rejection of this administration from the American public.”
Astead spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram on Tuesday morning to discuss Democrats’ overwhelming victory, how it happened, and the races they were watching most closely as the results rolled in.
They also discussed where the Democratic Party goes next with 2028 already on the horizon and what the results mean for Trump, who’s now facing two years as a lame duck with “no space to hide” from his role in Republicans’ election losses.
Below is an excerpt of Astead and Sean’s conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Sean: Which were the biggest wins? Which were your favorites, since you were watching so many of them?
Astead: If I think about some of the ones that surprise me the most, I’ll start with South Carolina, where Darline Graham, the Republican there, was ousted.
I think the scope of victories that Democrats had in the Senate are obviously the big takeaway of the night. The wins in Kansas, wins in Iowa, even the margin for Angie Nixon in Florida — all of that points to something that was happening across demographics, across the country.
I was looking at the New York Times data around demographic shifts from 2024. And it had literally every demographic moving to the left based on the 2024 election. I think it finally put an end to some of the things we have heard about 2024 being some permanent shift in working-class multiracial coalitions. We should think of these communities as swinging between parties rather than as firmly housed in either one.
Sean: This did really feel like a referendum on our present politics, on our president, more so than, “The country really loves Democrats now.” But did you see any particular races — House, Senate, gubernatorial, whatever it may have been — that suggested, like, wow, Democrats really do have some solid footing here?
Astead: I think there’s a lot of fresh faces from Democrats or fresh messages. I’m thinking about Talarico and Ossoff in Texas and Georgia, who really leaned into that corruption message. We saw that really be successful.
I’ve talked about candidates who backed a data center moratorium. And I think that really speaks to some of the issues that were making up this populist backlash. You have affordability, you have AI, and I think that those things really drove Democrats to have a bottom-versus-top election rather than right versus left.
Although there are a lot of encouraging signs for Democrats, that certainly does not mean they’re about to cakewalk to the White House in 2028. But at the same time, I think there’s a lot of seeds of a message that will get them closer to a more unifying theme that they weren’t at three or four months ago.
Sean: We spent a lot of time talking about redistricting, gerrymandering, this war for every last seat that was going on in the months before this election. Ultimately, last night it felt like it didn’t matter that much. Why didn’t that pan out for the Republicans?
Astead: It still matters because their margins could have been even bigger. I think we should say it still has an effect, even though Democrats were able to overcome some of those gerrymanders. But you’re right. Democrats won several districts that were specifically drawn for Republicans to win in Florida, in North Carolina, in Texas, in Alabama.
I think it actually shows how Trump’s rigging of the game caused an electoral backlash. We can’t overstate that he tried to win these midterms months ago when he was trying to redraw these maps in Republicans’ favor. He tried to win them two months ago when he was leaning into voter intimidation and state voter roll purges.
He has taken the anti-democratic option at every turn here. And we’ve seen people respond to that. I think that we’re seeing a kind of electorate that really did not like the anti-democratic games that Republicans were playing here. And they saw folks really come out to stand up on that front.
I have to say, I find that a little heartening. I think that we sometimes assume in political journalism that these rules and these structures cannot be overcome. And I think in the results yesterday, we see that that’s not matching up with the public.
Sean: So you wouldn’t say that the gerrymandering didn’t work. You would just say that the turnout trumped it.
But what about the money? Because that’s the other thing people were really worried about — how much money Elon Musk was pouring into Texas. Did political spending not ultimately matter in the most expensive election that we’ve ever had?
Astead: We really saw that money flop. Elon Musk poured millions into specifically that Texas [Senate] race. The GOP had a huge spending advantage. And it was around a couple issues. They tried to wage this tech war and support candidates who were backing less regulation on crypto or less regulation on prediction markets.
And I would say that you also had them really lean into the culture war — all of those ads were about “Tala-freako,” they were about masculinity, they were about causing and stoking trans panic.
And we haven’t really seen that really move people in maybe the ways it did three, four years ago. I think there was a projection that some of this anti-wokeness message was forever resonant with the public, and I just don’t think that’s true.
If anything, I think that what they were using the money on was not a message that was resonant to people. And to your point, no amount of that spending was really able to overcome the things that people already knew. They knew they had less money in their pocket. They knew the gas prices were higher.
Affordability really has been the Democrats’ calling card throughout the year. Now, I think it’s important to say that that’s not where Democrats started. Even when Donald Trump announced his tariffs, there were a lot of Democrats who were hemming and hawing about whether that should be something that they push back against.
Really, the Democrats embraced that message in full after Mamdani’s win in New York in 2025. And that worked for them. It actually repositioned the party from the bigger culture war focus of three, four years ago back to things that mattered most to people.
We saw that intertwined with some other policy issues too. Corruption was really intertwined with affordability. It wasn’t just that Donald Trump was conducting an open grift. It was that he was doing it as things were becoming more unaffordable for you.
Sean: Trump told voters to vote as if he were on the ballot. He told reporters last night that he would be happy to work with Democrats. And then also last night he posted a MAGA hat that said “veto” on it. He’s clearly in his feelings. How bad was his night, on a scale of one to 10?
Astead: It was an 11. If you’re Donald Trump, there’s no space to hide here.
His hand-picked candidates lost. He put Republicans in a tougher position. And then you had a kind of margin on the House that’s going to give Democrats some wiggle room to really follow through on some of these accountability measures. And so I think Donald Trump is going to go through the stages of grief here.
The first step might be, you know, maybe I’ll work with them. Does he follow through on that? Does he use his executive power to really try to insulate himself from Congress?
I think that we don’t know those answers to the question yet because this is a president who could respond to these results not through moderation but through escalation. And I think we should be really wary of taking what he says in that initial response as something that he’ll still believe in a month or two.
Sean: All sorts of Democrats won last night: progressives, religious Democrats, moderates, DSA people. Was there any particular type of Democratic win that really stood out to you or told us something about where the electorate’s at right now?
Astead: I don’t think that we can ascribe success to one faction or the other. Affordability grew out of [now-NYC Mayor] Zohran [Mamdani]’s message in 2025. That’s now something that’s been adopted by the party. So is that a moderate or a progressive message? I don’t think it’s clear to say.
You could also talk about data centers as something that really grew out of a progressive outcry, but became something that James Talarico or others were also backing. I think if you’re a Democrat looking at the macro takeaways, there is a call for universal healthcare. There is a call for a pushback against ICE. But I don’t think you can just say that one side of the party or the other had a good night.
I think that actually matters more for the moderate wing of Democrats, because they’ve made that electability pitch so central to their primary arguments. They’re not really competing in the contest of ideas. They haven’t really met the moment when it talks about meeting people at the scope of their problems. Their argument has been, ‘We’re the ones who can win in these states.’
I think after a night like last night, it might become a little harder to think they’re the only ones who have an exclusive claim on electab
