THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

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.

The last time South Carolina elected a Democrat to the Senate was in 1998, and until around 8 o’clock tonight, there wasn’t a lot of reason to think that streak would end any time soon. The Palmetto State has been steadfastly Republican, launching the careers of some of the biggest stars in GOP politics, including the late Senator Lindsey Graham. With Graham’s sister running to succeed him, a continuation of Republican dominance seemed all but assured.But tonight, South Carolina, where Donald Trump won by almost 18 points two years ago, sent a Democrat to the Senate. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, flipped a seat held by the Republican Darline Graham, who took office after her brother died in July. “I don’t imagine you’ll find anybody in South Carolina who will say, Oh, I knew this was going to happen,” said Kaye Koonce, a member at-large for the Democratic National Committee.So what did happen? Andrews benefited from a convergence of factors that seemed impossible just a few months ago, including a Republican candidate who struggled with the realities of electoral politics, a historically favorable environment for Democrats, and downballot organizing that helped turn out voters across the state. “The stars aligned,” Jaime Harrison told me. (The former chair of the DNC ran to unseat Lindsey Graham in 2020 and lost by more than 10 percentage points.) “We had a superior candidate. Darline Graham may be a very nice woman, but she wasn’t ready to be in the United States Senate.”[Read: Repudiation]A majority of South Carolinians appeared to agree. Darline Graham was a surprise pick when Trump tapped her to fill out her brother’s term soon after his death. Graham then stunned many by announcing she wanted to run to serve a full term. A political novice, she struggled on the trail and made early gaffes that haunted her, including saying “national security is not my thing” in a primary debate against her opponent, Representative Ralph Norman. At times, it seemed almost as if Graham didn’t really want the seat. She hardly campaigned and she didn’t raise a lot of money. (Graham pulled in less than $600,000 during the first two weeks of October, while Andrews raised $4.5 million.)After polls showed a tightening race, Trump stumped in the state twice last month to try to save Graham. But it wasn’t enough—and, in some areas, his presence may have even hurt her. ( Civiqs’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Campaigns are billion-dollar contests to define the choice facing voters, but no election season this century has closed quite like this. President Trump approached his task with sarcasm and shiny objects, asking voters desperate for financial help to think only of him. If Republicans did not vote, they would “go to hell,” he said with a smile. If Republicans won the House and Senate, they would get a $5,000 check that even some of his allies dismissed as fiscal absurdity. Then he told them stories, endless stories, for hours at a time—about rounded butts, strong hands, “Dumocrats,” transgender swim meets, the Vietnam War, and the blue paint he had reapplied to the Reflecting Pool. “At this point, they are not even trying,” one Republican consultant told us about the White House in the final days of the campaign. Trump would do it his way, just as the Frank Sinatra song on the president’s iPad playlist advises.Hakeem Jeffries, the next House speaker, answered Trump’s Borscht Belt tour with relentless repetition. He declared on Fox News last month that “costs are way too high” just hours before Trump interrupted a campaign rally to ogle what he’s called the “pile of muscle” on the rump of Ohio’s junior senator. Days later, Jeffries pledged yet again that Democrats would “relentlessly focus” on affordability while Trump boasted about the nation “making a fortune” from rising gas prices. After the president joked about the high cost of a hamburger at Mar-a-Lago, Jeffries listed his priorities as “housing, health care, and the cost of gas and groceries and goods.”The New York congressman delivered the same message nearly every day—precise paragraphs punctuated with syncopated gesticulation and excessive alliteration. Rarely had two men atop the political pyramid been more opposite. In place of Trump’s billionaire power suits and cascading bouffant, Jeffries dressed in the capsule wardrobe of middle management, his white-soled dress sneakers unscuffed, his hair always trimmed a millimeter or two shy of a clean shave. By the final days of the campaign, the Democratic leader could barely contain his delight. “They’re talking about ballrooms and body parts,” Jeffries told a roundtable of Black pastors outside Richmond, Virginia, last week while campaigning in a district that Trump won by five points two years ago. “It’s more of the same—extremism, foolishness, and corruption—or it’s dramatic change.”Tonight Democrats won control of the House and the Senate—and vindicated the discipline of… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Paola ChapdelaineFor decades, Texas has been the foundation of the Republican Electoral College map, holding up the red bloc of midwestern and southern states like a pedestal. Democrats have long dreamed of winning it back, only for their hopes to be crushed in election after election. And now, suddenly, James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa have accomplished what no Democrat could for more than a generation: winning statewide elections in Texas. Whether or not Texas is truly a battleground state now, a few things have become clear. Republicans can no longer take Texas voters for granted. Donald Trump harmed his party’s chances by propping up a weak Senate candidate in Attorney General Ken Paxton. And even Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, couldn’t buy the result he wanted. Heading into election day, polls showed Talarico with a modest lead over Paxton, while the incumbent Republican governor, Greg Abbott, was favored to fend off Hinojosa. But not long after the polls closed, it became clear that both Talarico and Hinojosa would win comfortably. The Talarico Election Night party was jubilant, with cheers erupting every few minutes as new races were called for Democrats and updated results continued showing him with a sizable lead. James Edge, a Republican mayor pro tem from Bryan, Texas, stood eating a cookie and enjoying what he was seeing. He had endorsed Talarico just after Labor Day. “My party, the Republican Party, needed a kick in the pants,” he said. “This is uncharted waters. If it holds, it’s an earthquake like we’ve never seen.” [Read: Trump has pushed some Texas Republicans too far]At Paxton’s Election Night event in Dallas, party activists groaned as Fox News updated its ballot totals and the magnitude of the loss began to sink in. The Democrats even won the race for Texas railroad commissioner—a job held by Republicans for the past 36 years—as Jon Rosenthal easily defeated Bo French, who ran a race-baiting campaign that outraged the state’s growing Indian American population. Jarrod Atkinson, a Dallas-area Republican activist, walked out of the ballroom where Paxton was scheduled to speak, looking stunned. He laid the blame squarely on Trump. “The fact that he keeps telling everyone to vote like he’s on the ballot is absolutely insane,” he said. “He has said some of the dumbest things that have ever been uttered.”Before tonight, Texas had not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, and had not… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump has been the dominant political figure of this century. He pulled off one of the most unlikely campaign victories in American history, and then staged the greatest political comeback. He has altered the United States’ relationship with the world, rewritten the rules and expectations of the presidency, inflamed the nation’s divisions, and changed how—and how often—Americans think about his office. He is omnipresent, and draws his power from that ubiquity.But tonight, Trump has been forced to face his political mortality. He asked voters to make these midterm elections a referendum on him, to imagine that his name was on the ballot. They listened—and then rejected him. It is a stunning, widespread rebuke. Democrats appear poised to win the House and, if trends hold, could also capture the Senate after Americans registered their strong disapproval of the direction in which the president has taken the country over the past two years. Trump will now likely have to deal with congressional Democrats who could block his agenda and wield the power of the subpoena. He also must face the possibility that the political party he remade in his image may soon start looking beyond him. Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly a lame duck.But we haven’t heard the last of him. He remains the commander in chief, dominates global affairs, wields the expansive power of executive orders, and remains unequaled at capturing attention. He has escaped the political graveyard more than once before, and emerged stronger. Yet for all his power, for all his volume, he cannot browbeat the unrelenting calendar: The next national election will be the one to replace him. Trump will before long begin to slip in the headlines, pushed off the front page by the presidential campaign. He’ll face the possibility of being succeeded by a Democratic president who could employ the Department of Justice to plumb the previous four years and look into Trump’s allies, friends, family, and businesses. And he’ll confront arguably his greatest fear: irrelevance.Trump will not go quietly. It is not clear whether he and fellow Republicans will even accept the midterm results—and he has defied expectations so often that it would be a foolish exercise to set any. Tonight’s expected losses will not humble him. But they mark the beginning of the end.Trump’s midterm campaign ended in the most ridiculous, yet predictable, way possible. For months, the president had been… [TheTopNews] Read More.