Not in Kansas any more: Republicans get a thrashing

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1:28It's midnight and the energy is pretty intense. I'm in the New York City suburbs and Mike Lawler, the incumbent congressman here, just conceded in what was expected to be a toss-up race. He didn't even make it to midnight. I'm here at James Tallarico's election night watch party. The energy here is electric. It is almost 1am and I am at Troy Jackson's victory speech in Portland, Maine. One after another, congressional seats flipped to the Democrats, starting with North Carolina. Tonight we showed the country that when everyday people come together, we can make change. South Carolina too. Texas.

2:16Ohio. Kansas. First Democratic senator since 1932. 1932. Before anyone was even really sleepy, Democrats had secured the House and the Senate, and the keys to quite a few governor's mansions too, in Texas and Ohio again, and in Georgia and Iowa.

2:36All this may be more than just a win for Democrats. As Annie Andrews in South Carolina hinted, just maybe it's a win for America's whole political vibe. You have shown the nation that in this era of partisan divides, of vitriol and name-calling, that we will not bow down. Chief among the dramas that weren't, it all ran smoothly. No serious claims of chicanery or intimidation at the polls or hastily filed court challenges. Donald Trump just rolled with it. and on a call with the New York Times went further. I am absolutely willing to accept those results here. We'll work with the Democrats, no problem with it.

3:25There is a lot to chew through here, so time to call in the experts. From New York, I'll be speaking to Charlotte Howard, our U.S. editor, and in London, Edward Carr, our deputy editor. Hello, Charlotte. Hello, Ed. Hi, Jason. Hi, Jason. Charlotte, you've been up all night watching things roll in. And tell us what you make of what you've been seeing. It is an extraordinary win for Democrats. There were lots of discussions ahead of this election about how Democrats were almost surely going to take the House and probably take the Senate. But it was just a complete wipeout. I thought that we might not have the Senate results for weeks if it came down to Alaska, where votes take a while to tally and where there's been some legal machinations in recent days over a ballot stacking scandal.

4:10But instead, it looked like we were going to call the Senate before the House. We saw an absolute trouncing by John Ossoff, who was expected to win in Georgia, the Democratic incumbent. But Georgia not long ago was a red state, and then it became a purple state. Now it looks like a blue state, with Democrat winning the governor's seat as well. A stunning win for Tallarico again in Texas, where it was clear that he might be able to eke out a win over the Republican, Kent Paxton, in part because Ken Paxton was such a bad candidate. South Carolina, which is a surreal state of affairs, a very reliably Republican state.

4:47So you just go across these states and it was a really remarkable set of victories for Democrats. Well, it is. And the swing has been across all groups of voters, particularly among young voters and Hispanics, but across all voters, which is startling. And for me, the thing that really stands out is how many southern states have flipped. North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, a hold, but a big win in Georgia where the governor for the first time is a black woman. And even a very, very close race in Mississippi is an extraordinary thing. And you have to go back to, when was it Charlotte? Like 1974, just around Watergate to see such a big repudiation of a president.

5:30And one of the key races that we've been watching for some time, one that we previewed last week was the Senate race in Texas. Rebecca Jackson, our Southern correspondent, was at James Tallarico's campaign headquarters for the night. Lina! Lina! Lina! Lina! What the hell is going on? And Tallarico is declared the winner.

5:57I'm here at James Tallarico's election night watch party. For hours, people have been standing outside this enormous outdoor space overlooking the Austin skyline, eating pork and beef tacos and eating ice cream, even Talafrico-flavored ice cream. The energy has been just electric. When the results came out, then not only did James Tallarico win a Senate seat, but Gina Hinojosa won the governorship here. People were just in disbelief. They were hugging each other. People were crying. Are you from Texas? I lived here for my whole adult life, which is 40 years. Did you believe this was possible tonight?

6:37Not on my rise of stripes. What do you want Democrats to do here? I want them to tell ICE to get the fuck out of our city. And then I would like them to take us. I would want Tallarico, and I want Gina to take a stance against the war in Iran. That's going to be a major shift, a political earthquake, Texas-sized political earthquake. So let's use that Texas result as a sort of wider lens here. What do you make of what happened in Texas? Well, there are a few things that are really interesting about Texas. One is, and I could go on for hours probably, but I'll choose two for now. One is that Hispanic voters really swung towards Trump in 2024, and that was not at all an enduring change.

7:20They swung again away from the president this time, in part because he didn't deliver on his promise to lower prices and boost economic opportunity, and also because of the ferocity of his deportation campaign. I mean, you heard one supporter there who clearly had a strong view about the presence of ICE in her city. But more broadly, ICE has been very active across communities in Texas, and it's different to want a strong border than it is to want ICE agents rounding people up. The other thing in Texas that was also true in some other states, including Florida, is the absolute failure of Republicans to protect seats through mid-cycle redistricting.

8:01So usually it's the case that a party can redistrict congressional seats after a census. It is unusual to do so right ahead of an election. Donald Trump encouraged states to do this, encouraged Republicans to do this with the hope of keeping the House. And what we saw instead is that these redistricting efforts actually yielded some Democratic seats. So did the opposite of what they were intended to achieve. And so I think in both cases, you see a pattern in Texas that was evident in other states, but absolutely helped to deliver this win for Tallarico. Another thing that was president in Texas that we saw in other states is a handpicked Republican candidate who had narrow loyalty to the president and absolutely lacked broad appeal to the electorate in the form of Ken Paxton.

8:46You saw that pattern repeated elsewhere where the president elevated a politician whom he liked, but voters found to be problematic for one reason or another with Ken Paxson. There were stories about marital infidelity. He also had been allegedly involved in various corruption schemes. So again, it's just an instance in which there were a few attempts by Republicans to tilt the scales in their favor that ended up doing the opposite. Yeah, I think Charlotte's completely right here. I mean, we have got used to the idea that American democracy is in peril largely because the negative partisanship's meant that people vote because they hate the other lot.

9:24People have been sorting into these tribes who really are incredibly hostile towards each other. One of the refreshing things about this is to see in Texas, as Charlotte says, with Ken Paxson, a truly awful candidate, how people weren't prepared just to vote for him because they hated the other side so much. And he saw it in Ohio in the governor's race where Vivek Ravaswamy, who had this particularly unpleasant, vicious advertisement against his opponent, Amy Acton, that got the candidate's mother out to accuse her of lying, even though she had a terribly sad history of being abused by her stepfather, that that ad didn't help his campaign.

9:59In fact, it worked against him. And also, as Charlotte said, the gerrymandering attempt to try and shift boundaries in order to gain seats in an aggressive way, that backfired too. In all of these senses, you've seen people willing to switch parties, rejecting these techniques of very aggressive partisan politics. I think that's incredibly refreshing and it creates an opportunity.

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11:43Now, we've talked about the results. Let's look at the broader picture that we're left with. What do you make of the fact that Donald Trump seems to have accepted the result, seems to be willing, for as much as we've heard, to work with Democrats? Well, it's obviously very encouraging. I mean, I think it's largely a consequence of the fact that the result was so sweeping, there's very little ambiguity for him to play with. So he chose not to pick a fight he couldn't win. But that is encouraging. And I think it's beholden upon Democrats to test him and to see whether he is willing to work with them and to find legislation and programs that they might be able to cooperate on.

12:24I have to say, I don't hold out a huge amount of hope here. He also has called himself Mr. Vito since the vote. So that may be a more accurate description of what happens next. But it's something that people want to try because clearly voters want politicians to get things done. They want them to begin to solve their problems. They're tired of the over theatrical hostility that they show to each other the whole time. And, you know, politicians need to understand that part of satisfying them is to get things done. Yeah, I think that one of the fascinating things about American politics is that for a long time, it has been mainly about politics rather than governing.

13:04And one of the messages of this election was that voters really care about whether a president and a Congress can deliver results. It's not like Americans have enormous confidence in Congress. It's fewer than one in 10 think a great deal of Congress. So expectations on one level are pretty low. Nevertheless, the turnout and the unequivocal nature of the message that voters send to Congress is clear. And so the question, I think, for Democrats is they have been very consistent on the campaign trail and disciplined about making this election about the economy and saying that they will help Americans address issues of cost of living.

13:46And they have been very consistent also in pointing to the desire to hold the president to account on what they say is his own self-dealing and connecting those two things. Tallarico, very, very explicit about connecting American struggles to corruption in Washington. What are they going to do about that once they have this majority? Actually, it's really hard. It's going to be really hard to pass legislation to deal with cuts to healthcare. It probably will not happen. The Trump administration probably will ignore subpoenas. I think they'll be more successful at shining a light on this administration.

14:22But it will be difficult to do what Democrats promised they would do. And so they have to work really hard and they'll have to try to find some areas of bipartisan cooperation. And we'll see if they manage it. Well, if I can just stop things there for a moment, our Midwest correspondent, Daniel Knowles, has spent the night in Michigan waiting for votes to be tallied there. And this is what he heard from the Democratic candidates headquarters. The goal is to use that seat to transform our policies.

14:50Because it's how fast time that we get money out of it. What's that game for? Beauty and soul of America is that we the people are what America is all about. We deserve an America for all of our kids. It's a mission. Let's go. Thank you so much.

15:15Abdel El-Sayed, the winner of the Michigan Senate race, just came off stage. This seat was earlier in the year thought to be one of the best chances the Republicans had to flip a Democratic Senate seat. It was not to be El-Sayed, a populist leftist Muslim, somebody who in his own words would be a hard sell, won comfortably. And the crowd is now seeking out. They're all happy. They've been watching a huge wave. You're saying he's like the future of the Democratic Party. He is, he is. I mean, just like Duran is. Just like Duran is. You know, maybe a young, energetic, brilliant, wise, not just smart, wise.

15:57Because I definitely would be smart and wise. Very few people are smart and wise. I think he is by far the most talented candidate in a very, very long time for any of it. I actually tell my friend he's like our generation JFK. Now, once again, can we use this as a lens? Charlotte, what do you think of the result there with Mr. Al-Sayed? Al-Sayed won by a much smaller margin than did the Democrats who are less partisan in deep red states. So it's in some ways a more interesting examination of the party to look at Tallarico, Ossoff, because they managed a bigger win in states where they should have had no business having a bigger margin.

16:44Tallarico, part of his thing is that he is, you know, for good and ill, this was a potential weakness in the campaign, is that he seemed too pious. So, you know, it's been this balancing act of wanting to seem strong and firm, but really presenting to voters a less partisan image, which is how they won in Republican strongholds. They just weren't going to win with a very, very partisan message. And so I do think that that political backdrop and the fact that their reelection will be contingent on continuing to win those traditionally Republican voters presents a different kind of opportunity for a way of governing in the Senate than we have recently seen.

17:21There's a kind of symmetry here, isn't there? Because on the Democratic side, You've seen exactly what Charlotte's just said, but on the Republican side, some of the really MAGA-ist candidates, particularly in Senate seats, have been rejected. I think the electorate sending a clear signal that Charlotte says they want Congress to do things. They're fed up with this sort of incredibly aggressive tribal politics that puts performance above accomplishment. But in the spirit of actually governing, collaborating in governing, do you think that's what Democrats will choose to do here? We won't immediately get into moves to impeach or other kinds of confrontations?

17:58I think that Democrats will face a lot of pressure from the base to impeach. And I think the message here is just very obviously about trying to deal with cost of living concerns. I think they will have to take some votes that will prove to be ceremonial, but they will advance votes on health care, restoring health care cuts, to Medicaid, subsidies on the Obamacare insurance. exchanges. There will be steps to try to wind down the war in Iran, which is deeply unpopular. And it's clear that the American public doesn't have confidence in the president's ability to see that to a satisfying end. So I think that it absolutely is the case that there'll be a lot of pressure and there's a real possibility that the Democrats get bogged down in an impeachment fight that won't go anywhere, I don't think.

18:51But I also don't think Democrats are so dumb as to focus only on that because the message out of this election is just so obvious. And what about from the Republican side? What lessons do you think will be drawn here? Or what sort of response would you expect from the party? Well, yeah, I think this is going to be the cause of enormous bloodletting within the party. This is a rejection of important aspects of the Trump brand of politics. plenty of ambitious Republicans have felt marginalized and have either bitten their tongue or have not really participated. And they will be thinking about how they approach 2028.

19:32And I would say that the Republican field is much more open now as a result of this election than it was if, let's suppose, the Republicans had held on to the Senate, let alone the House. So I think we're going to see a really quite tumultuous time within the Republican Party as there is a battle over how to interpret these results and what lessons to take from them for the future of republicanism. I think one of the remarkable things that, you know, you and I have spoken about this, and I always remember clearly sitting next to you during the Republican National Convention in 2024, is the way in which Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his image, and how the party is just a bit of a shell now in many ways, where it was Trumpism.

20:22And then in the course of the past year and a half, almost two years since Trump has been president, I think it's become even less coherent. He was for lowering prices before he was for raising them. He was against forever wars before he began this war in Iran. What does MAGA stand for? And I think, or what does Republicanism stand for? I mean, is it a populist party? Is it ever going to go back to being what we might conventionally define as being a conservative party? The range of outcomes here is potentially quite broad, and there are those within the party who have very fierce views for the direction in which it should go.

20:57And presiding over all of this is a president who has conceded this election, we know is not entirely consistent in adhering to one plan. And I think that it may be that he He decides to be conciliatory and shows that he wants to cement his legacy in a way that is productive. That's possible. It's also possible that he takes the ample power that he still retains in the White House and uses it in ways that are erratic and draws some Republicans to him and drives others away. So I think, as Ed said, it's just very wide open within the Republican Party. and I think it's going to take lots of different kinds of twists and turns.

21:41I mean, there'd be people around Trump who have a very strong agenda, people like Stephen Miller. Of course, yeah. Who will be thinking now the time for him to change America, which is what he wants to do, is now limited. And he will certainly be redoubling his efforts or will be doing everything he can in order to pursue that agenda more aggressively. Trump himself, he will be feeling very hurt and his reaction when he's hurt in the past has been to fight back. He'll be more conscious that his legacy now is in peril and he will want to do everything he can to ensure that he really does go down as the president he thinks he deserves to go down as, which is one of the great presidents.

22:21He will be working very hard to do that. To my mind, the question is whether that effort gets sort of channeled into various self-glorification projects inside Washington, including golf courses and triumphal arches, or whether it can find expression, particularly in foreign policy, in sort of grand gestures. And I think he may, although Charles is completely right, his power in foreign policy is sort of much less constrained by checks and balances. I think he may find that it's just quite difficult to get really big things done in foreign policy because you have to apply yourself consistently over a long period of time, not great Trumpian strengths.

23:02And my hope is that he's kind of channeled into the self-glorification route. But he will try both. I mean, Jason, it's amusing. I've heard from a lot of people in the past few days, like, oh, I just hope he focuses on bathrooms. And I really, I hope he's focused on the reflecting pool. I mean, it's quite a surreal state of American politics at the moment. But that is a hope that I've heard. I suppose I should look forward to our segment on presidentially commissioned bathrooms, perhaps for the moment, Charlotte Ed. Thank you both very much. Thank you. Thanks, Jason.

23:40Now, no rest for the weary. We will, of course, be keeping you posted on further developments, and you can find lots of analysis on the Democrats' stunning gains in this week's episode of Checks and Balance, our sister show on American politics. It's available to subscribers this and every Friday.

24:08This show is supported by Odoo. Business software is expensive. And when you buy software from lots of different companies, it gets confusing, slow to use, and hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. There are no hidden costs and no limits on features or data. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

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