Good morning! I don’t normally send posts on Thursdays, but there’s enough news right now that I thought it merited a special edition.
In this newsletter, I’ll catch you up on how Tuesday’s breathtaking results are reverberating here in Washington — from the White House, to the Hill, to the Supreme Court, to the 2028 campaign trail.
I’m planning to send out a mailbag column tomorrow, so please send me any and all questions about the 2026 results and what comes next. Hit me up with anything you’re thinking about after the midterms, and I’ll try to answer it.
As always, you can drop questions in the comments below, by clicking “reply” to this email, or by using our anonymous Q&A form.
I have a bunch of ideas for angles I want to explore over the next few days, but I also want to make sure I’m answering your questions and covering the topics that are on your mind.
With that, let’s dive in!
Overview
Democrats currently sit at 54 Senate seats to Republicans’ 44, with two races uncalled.
In Alaska, 78% of the votes have been reported and Democrat Mary Peltola has a narrow lead of 637 votes (or 0.3%) over Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Alaska accepts absentee ballots mailed from within the U.S. for 10 days after Election Day, and ballots mailed from overseas for 15 days, so it will take some time for all the votes to trickle in there.
Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, which means that after the 15th day post-election (this year, November 18), if no candidate has more than 50% of the vote (as is expected), Alaska will begin eliminating the worst-performing candidates and transferring their support to whoever their voters ranked second, until someone gets above the 50% threshold. Don’t expect a call in Alaska before then, although we’ll continue getting a better idea of the outcome as more results roll in.
The other uncalled state is Mississippi, home to perhaps the biggest surprise of this election (although South Carolina gives it a run for its money). With 96% of the votes reporting, Democrat Scott Colom is leading Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 1,138 votes (or 0.1%). Mississippi continues to accept mail-in ballots for five days after the election, and there are also provisional ballots to consider. (If someone arrives at a polling place without the proper ID or with their registration having been flagged as inactive, they cast a provisional ballot which is only counted after officials examine to ensure everything checks out.) Mississippi is the only state in the country without a recount law, which could lead to some complicated legal battles if the results remain close after all the remaining votes are counted.
In the House, Democrats have been declared the winners in 240 districts, to Republicans’ 147. That already gives Democrats a larger majority than their 235-seat win in 2018 — with 48 races still left to be called. NBC News now projects that Democrats will land at 259 seats, which would be the largest majority won by either party since 1990.
Finally, Democrats have been declared the winners in 28 gubernatorial races, to Republicans’ 20. Democrats have already flipped five governor’s mansions (Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, and Texas). The two outstanding races are Alaska and Kansas. This is the first time Democrats have controlled a majority of governorships since the 2008 elections.
There are so many other fascinating results, too. Democrats are poised to control a trifecta in Arizona for the first time in 60 years (in addition to new trifectas won in Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). Democrats won two statewide offices in Indiana (secretary of state and comptroller), after going 14 years without winning any. Alaskans seem to be narrowly opting to keep ranked-choice voting after a referendum. Missourians rejected a Republican-drawn congressional map that Trump had promoted. Even states with positive results for Democrats saw ballot measures restricting transgender sports participation succeed. Data centers were rejected in almost every city or state where they were on the ballot.
Congress
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced yesterday that he won’t be seeking the post of House Minority Leader after the GOP shellacking, which means House Republicans will soon have their fifth leader in 20 years. (Democrats have only had two in the same timespan.)
Johnson’s No. 2, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), has already launched a bid for Minority Leader, as has House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). Jordan is more pugnacious and closer to House conservatives, while Scalise is a longtime leadership hand. Importantly, though, both are very close to the president, which makes it unlikely that either would do much to change the House GOP’s close alliance with Trump in light of Tuesday’s results.
There will also be a fight one rung down on the GOP leadership ladder: House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) and Republican Study Committee chairman August Pfluger (R-TX) are competing for the role of Minority Whip.
So far, neither Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) nor House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) are facing any opposition to become Senate Majority Leader and House Speaker, respectively.
Supreme Court
If Republicans had kept control of the Senate, President Trump almost certainly would have been able to nominate two more Supreme Court justices, to replace Justices Samuel Alito, 76, and Clarence Thomas, 78.
That would have meant he had appointed five justices to the court, more than any president since FDR; since the oldest of them (Brett Kavanaugh) is 61, that probably would have meant that the court would have been controlled by a majority of Trump appointees for around 20 years, which would have been (by far) Trump’s longest-lasting impact on American policy.
But, as we know, Republicans did not keep control of the Senate, which means it is now unlikely that Trump will get any more SCOTUS appointments — unless Alito steps down during the lame-duck session. (Thomas is widely expected to remain on the court at least until 2028, when he will become the longest-serving justice in U.S. history.)
However, the New York Times reported yesterday (citing sources “close to him”) that Alito does not plan to retire before January, during the last two months of Republican control of the Senate.
That puts conservatives in dicey territory. Now that Alito and Thomas won’t be able to be replaced for the next two years, if Democrats win the presidency and keep the Senate in 2028, the two justices would not be able to be replaced by a Republican president until at least 2033, when Alito would be 83 and Thomas would be 85. If anything happens to either of them before then, the 6-3 conservative majority on the court could start to shift.
Cabinet
Republicans are casting around for a fall guy for their midterm losses, and many seem to have found one in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
According to CNN, “many Republican lawmakers and allies alarmed by Tuesday’s wipeout are moving swiftly to pin blame for the election results on Hegseth, arguing behind the scenes that he played a chief role in convincing Trump to attack Iran with no exit strategy — and no plan for managing the inevitable political fallout.”
Per CBS News, Trump is quizzing his advisers on whether he should fire Hegseth, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) emerging as one possible replacement (though one has to wonder if DeSantis’ post-election commentary would complicate that). Trump told ABC News that he has “every intention” to keep Hegseth — though he said similar things about Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem before they got the axe, and Trump also acknowledged that if he wants a new SecDef, it would be easiest to do it now, since Democrats are unlikely to confirm one for him come January.
If Hegseth remains in office, he is likely to be a top investigative target for Democrats in their new majorities. In fact, even before Democrats take over, the House is poised to hold an impeachment vote on Hegseth next week, during the lame-duck session, triggered by a motion from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). (It only takes one House member to force an impeachment vote.) Massie’s articles of impeachment charge Hegseth with “waging war in contravention of the War Powers Resolution,” among other accusations.
With so many House Republicans on their way out the door, and having little to lose, it could make for an interesting vote.
2028
And, finally, we arrive at what I believe is the single most interesting development of the last 24 hours: this X post from Vice President JD Vance.
I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself, but here’s the gist:
Vance said that the Republicans’ main problem was not turnout: “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”
He said that, according to a pollster he trusted, the four main messages from those Trump 2024 voters who defected were: “1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel”
More directly, he added, “The reason we lost is the war.”
Vance then heavily implied that he agreed the war should not have been waged. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so,” he wrote. “Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
I’ll be honest: this shocked me.
Not because I thought Vance supported the war: it has been widely reported for months that he did not. And not because it’s surprising to see Vance distance himself from an unpopular presidential policy ahead of the 2028 election: I expected Vance to start doing that eventually.
But to see him do it this publicly, this quickly: I did not see that coming.
It is incredibly uncommon for a sitting vice president to break with the president in this way. In the post, Vance essentially breaks with his own administration’s signature foreign policy initiative (the Iran war), while also suggesting that the administration has not done enough to focus on inflation (directly contradicting Trump) and suggesting that its policy towards Israel has been incorrect. He does some of this subtly, but honestly: not that subtly.
This is the tweet that launched the 2028 election and — even more than Tuesday’s results — that officially rendered Trump a lame-duck president. I would have thought that Republican criticism of Trump, at least from levels as high as his own vice president, would not have broken out in full until closer to 2027 or early 2028. This post from Vance is a signal to every Republican that criticism of Trump and the Iran war is now fair game, much earlier than I would have thought those floodgates would be broken open.
Will the gambit work for Vance? I’m not sure. I do think it’s a better tactic politically than the one Kamala Harris took when she was a vice president saddled by an unpopular administration, and chose to take the position that there is nothing she would have done differently from her boss. Vance is doing the exact opposite: making clear, early in the 2028 process, that he is distancing himself from unpopular decisions by his president. However, even though it’s early 2028-wise, it may still be too late: at the end of the day, it will be hard for a vice president to separate himself from decisions that were made while he was in office.
But whether or not it pays off for Vance, I’m fascinated by what this says about the Republican Party, and for what it means for GOP support for Trump and for the war in the coming months, especially since Democrats are sure to make Republican lawmakers vote on the war again and again come January.
For his part, Trump was also much more sanguine about the criticism than I would have expected. Asked yesterday about Vance pinning blame for the midterm losses on the Iran war — at an event that, true to form, was largely about the White House ballroom — Trump replied: “Well, I think it’s largely true, because it drove the gasoline up a little bit, short term, and probably that’s, uh, probably it’s true.”
However, Trump (unlike Vance) stood by the decision. “But at the same time, if I had it to do again, I’d have to do it again because long term, it’s the only answer. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.” Asked specifically if he felt waging the war was worth it, even if it lost the Senate, Trump said: “I do, yeah, I mean, well, you have no choice. I mean, I thought the oil would go up a lot more and I did it on that basis. You have no choice, you have to do it. You can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon, or everything that you see here, someday might not exist.”
I’ll be paying close attention in the coming days to whether other Republicans publicly share Vance’s diagnosis — for one thing, what does Marco Rubio think? — and whether this portends a shift either in how Trump plans to conduct the war, how congressional Republicans respond in the coming months, or both.
That’s all from me for today, but I’ll have a lot more post-election analysis coming your way tomorrow and next week. Don’t forget to send in your questions for the mailbag issue. Talk to you tomorrow! — Gabe
Great summary! Thank you.
After reading Vance's post I would like to know: Does Trump have a way to force Vance to resign as VP?