THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Last night, in the streets of Austin, Democrats honked their horns and hung from their windows, like it was V-E Day. In the nation’s capital, they blasted “Party in the U.S.A.” near the White House. But in southeast Iowa, the blue revolution came quietly.The Democrats of Des Moines County—a place that does not actually contain the state capital, but a small, industrial river city and rural areas along the Mississippi —have not come to associate Election Night with joy. The half dozen white-haired Iowans at the Burlington office’s “watch party” were blinking in disbelief at the TV as MS NOW election alerts flashed across the screen. Their party had retaken the governorship of Ohio—and somehow won a Senate seat in South Carolina? Texas was within reach. So, it seemed, was Kansas? “This might be a very big night,” Tom Courtney, a 79-year-old former state senator and former leader of the county party, told me, in what was already sounding like a colossal understatement.Iowa’s results had yet to come in. He and the other Democrats in the room seemed to be experiencing happiness only distantly, like birdsong from deep within a dark wood. This county, which had elected Barack Obama by about 23 points in 2008, was one of 31 Iowa counties that swung to Donald Trump in 2016. Two years ago, Trump won Des Moines County by 15 points, and Democrats began speaking of the “river counties” in the past tense—pieces of Iowa’s blue wall, lost forever.Courtney was on the phone. He paced the office, passing lawn signs, a cooling pot of chili, and the final slices of a Casey’s taco pizza. Then, suddenly, gasps. The countywide results were in, and a map of election results showed Des Moines County faintly—yet undeniably—blue. The county’s voters had opted to send a Democrat to the state house and another to the U.S. House; they’d also voted to make Rob Sand the state’s first Democratic governor elected in 20 years. “Did you hear that?” Courtney asked me, from across the room.By the end of the night, Iowa would also send Josh Turek to the Senate, plus three Democrats to the House. Kansas would send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since the invention of beer in a can. In Ohio, the party would send Sherrod Brown back to Congress, and Amy Acton to the governor’s mansion. At the office in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Heading into the midterms, everyone who follows American politics had the same question: Were the polls correct, or would they underestimate Republicans once again? The answer turned out to be neither. This time around, the polls undercounted a different kind of voter: Democrats. According to the Silver Bulletin polling averages, Democrats were on track to win the U.S. House popular vote by nine points and narrowly flip a few Senate seats in states that Donald Trump had won by double digits. Democratic voters across the country saw these numbers and braced for disappointment. They remembered the polling misses of 2016 (which underestimated Trump by about three points on average) and 2024 (which did too) and believed that they could be watching another blue mirage.  In fact, even this year’s seemingly incredible poll numbers turned out to significantly understate Democrats’ strength. Democrats are now expected to win the House popular vote by 13 points, the largest such victory in 50 years. And that four-point national polling error was small compared with the miss in certain states. In South Carolina, polls underestimated the Democratic candidate by five points on average; in Mississippi, by seven; in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, by nine. As a result, what was already expected to be a great night for Democrats turned into a rout of historic proportions.Polling is hard and getting harder. Americans used to reliably answer surveys. Now simply finding people willing to pick up the phone is an uphill battle. As response rates have declined, so has pollsters’ ability to reach a representative sample of the electorate. In 2016, pollsters underestimated Trump’s support among white voters without a college degree because they couldn’t poll enough of them. In 2020, the industry made a concerted effort to reach more of those voters. And yet the polls underestimated Trump by even more. Pollsters reasoned that even if they were now reaching the right educational groups, they must be missing certain personality types that were disproportionately likely to prefer Trump. More judgment calls needed to be made. Ahead of 2024, pollsters made a point of ensuring that their samples included enough 2020 Trump voters. That didn’t do the trick either—they managed to underestimate Trump yet again. This cycle, pollsters introduced even more bespoke solutions. In their jointly run polls, The New York Times and Siena College devised ways to discount respondents they deemed unrepresentative—rural white college-town residents, for… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last month, in Minneapolis, I visited the homegrown memorials that still stand in the spots where Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by federal agents. To me, they looked like living organisms fed by pain and hopefulness—handfuls of teddy bears with matted fur, crayon drawings of the victims, fresh daisies, tall red candles, cloth banners bearing expressions such as Only Love. Yesterday, on Election Day, these shrines were refreshed—this time by I voted stickers.The symbolism of these new offerings spoke succinctly to what the election seems to have meant to many voters. This was a chance for vindication, a response not just to Donald Trump’s policies but to the harsh and forbidding worldview he has come to represent. Pretti and Good were killed while monitoring an aggressive, armed, and often indiscriminate crackdown on their immigrant neighbors. Last night, more than 1,000 miles away from those memorials, in Austin, Texas, most of the people gathered for a victory speech by Senator-elect James Talarico held signs that read Love Thy Neighbor. You might chalk these placards up to Talarico’s lefty Christian point of view, but they also felt like a modest plea, not the kind of thing you’d hold on a triumphant night: the expression of a desire for politics that spoke of simple values or, as Talarico himself put it, “love.”The election was about many things, and the polling clearly showed that economic pain topped the list, intertwined with concern about corruption. But alongside it ran a mushier motivation for the blue wave (or tsunami or earthquake or volcano; the metaphors in last night’s newscasts were as tired as they were plentiful) that impressed itself even on David Axelrod, the famously brass-tacks Democratic strategist. “We’ve been in a season of such cynicism and such anger,” he said as midnight neared and the results became definitive. Sounding more like a preacher than a pundit, he said the strong Democratic showing was evidence of our “common humanity.” People want, Axelrod said, “a season of decency.” Even some on the right could recognize, as Ben Shapiro did, a change in the “gestalt,” as he put it. To channel James Carville, it all felt like the genesis of a new truism about politics: It’s the morality, stupid.You don’t have to believe that Democrats’ hearts are somehow purer for making arguments premised on civility, or for promoting candidates who campaigned on restoring decency. Whether it… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The realization that Susan Collins would lose her bid for a sixth Senate term dawned slowly on the Republicans gathered last night in a hotel ballroom in Bangor, Maine. Democrats were notching victories up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and the wave was quickly spreading to Kansas, Texas, and points west. But Collins had confounded the doomsayers before. Republicans here believed she would undoubtedly do it again. “She’s sure to win,” a conservative activist, Tom Burpee, proclaimed to me shortly after 9 p.m. A few minutes earlier, another Republican had marched through the ballroom with a similarly confident prediction: “Maine,” he told me, “isn’t that stupid.”Collins, too, betrayed no hint of concern. Around 9:40 p.m., she made a long, beaming pass through the party. As Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” filled the room, Collins accepted hugs and handshakes, small gifts and words of encouragement. She peered at the laptop screen of a Republican staffer who showed her a rosy analysis of the latest returns. Maine counts its votes at an agonizing pace, and as Collins worked the crowd, it was still possible for Republicans to believe she might defy the odds one more time.Collins’s stroll around the ballroom was, in retrospect, not a victory lap but a farewell. She would not return to the party. Shortly after midnight, she called the Democrat Troy Jackson to congratulate him on his win. By that late hour, the ballroom throng had thinned to just a few dozen people, and Collins made no concession speech. She was the longest-serving Republican incumbent to lose a reelection bid last night. With almost 90 percent of votes counted this morning, Jackson was up by nearly eight points. “It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Maine in the United States Senate,” Collins said in a brief statement.Democrats in Maine were only slightly less surprised to have finally ousted the most resilient of Republican senators. As Jackson pulled ahead of Collins in the polls during the closing weeks of the race, many Democrats found their optimism tempered by memories of the last time they tried to defeat her. Heading into Election Day in 2020, Collins was projected to lose to Sara Gideon, a well-funded former legislative leader in Maine. But Collins won, defeating Gideon by nearly the same margin—about nine points—that Joe Biden had when he prevailed over Donald Trump in Maine that year.This… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Midterm elections typically go poorly for an incumbent president’s party. But the 2026 election delivered the kind of resounding rebuke that feels more like a reckoning. Across America, a blue wave has crested deep into red territory, washing through many of President Trump’s formerly safe spaces, endangering his preferred candidates and putting his presidency—and his broader MAGA coalition—at risk of a historic collapse.If this is America’s response to what has been almost two years of a president flouting norms, driving up prices, breaking promises, raking in billions of dollars, and running roughshod over ethical guardrails, it is an unmistakably emphatic one. Democrats, independents, and Republicans turned out in massive numbers to showcase their displeasure with Trump and his party, flipping the Senate and making the GOP sweat even in contests that were not previously considered competitive.An easy win by Senator Jon Ossoff, in what was once expected to be a tough race was an early sign of what was to come throughout election night. “The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump,” the Georgia Democrat said to raucous cheers at his victory party. “The first light of dawn is on the horizon.”Ossoff’s victory itself wasn’t a particular surprise for Democrats, but the fact that his watch party could celebrate to the strains of Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration” before 8 p.m. set the tone for the night. The deluge of Democratic gains quickly flooded across the South. In South Carolina, which has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998, Annie Andrews prevailed over incumbent Senator Darline Graham. Andrews’s ascendance was a sign of how quickly the political winds have shifted in Democrats’ favor just two years after Trump’s victory left the party rudderless and despondent. “It’s about the pain people are feeling, decisions that are being made in Washington, D.C. that have resulted in record high gas and diesel prices,” Andrews told my colleague Madeleine Carlisle on Election Day.Across the border, Roy Cooper won his race handily in North Carolina—a state Trump carried in 2024. The state’s former governor had run perhaps the most boring and low-key campaign of all Democrats vying for the Senate in competitive states. Cooper’s victory appeared so assured that top Republican super PACs shifted their spending away from the contest toward defending seats in traditionally solid red states, including  Kansas, in early October.… [TheTopNews] Read More.