Dems win big in midterm elections

0:03It is the NPR Politics Podcast at 1.20 a.m. Wednesday, November 4th, the day after Election Day. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith.

0:15Tamara Keith: I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And Domenico, heading into last night's, today's, I can't, I don't know what time it is right now. You know what? It's okay. It's okay, right? We're doing it late. Heading into this election, Democrats were favored to take the House. The Senate seemed like a 50-50 proposition. This has ended up looking like a blowout, right? It not only looks like a blowout, it is. I mean, there's going to be a word that's used. I'm not sure what they're going to choose. But Barack Obama called it a shellacking when they lost 63 seats in the House in 2010.

0:53George W. Bush called it a thumping in 2006 when they lost 30 seats in the House. This is going to be between both of those, it looks like. And you've got Democrats now, now at this hour, with seven flips in the Senate, which is more than enough to take control of the Senate and more than 2006. It's really quite remarkable and a huge wave of what happened here with people breaking late moving toward Democrats. Yeah, I mean, it is absolutely stunning.

1:26Tamara Keith: I think when we came into tonight, it was like, oh, well, there's a bunch of toss ups. Well, they're all blue now on our on our board. Everything. And that's what they you know, that's the way waves work. Right. Typically, everything breaks in the same direction. It doesn't always necessarily break by a huge margin. But actually, we're looking at huge margins in some of these races. Yeah. And look, I mean, the fact is, it turns out when you wage the kind of war that you said you wouldn't get into, that drags on, that raises gas prices when people were already feeling the pinch. Big picture here.

2:00You just can't do that politically and think that you're going to survive or your party is going to survive politically. It's a huge problem that Trump caused himself. A war of choice, tariffs of choice. And there was a huge backlash to that. And we've seen that up and down the ballot across the country in blue, purple and red states. I mean, we know that midterms are always considered a sort of referendum on the party in power. But how much is this result directly tied to Trump, Tam?

2:28Tamara Keith: President Trump told voters repeatedly, we've talked about this many times, he said, vote like I'm on the ballot. And I guess people did vote like they were like he was on the ballot and they didn't they weren't happy with him. They were voting against him. This is this is very much a rebuke of the president of the United States, his policies, his party. And we saw this in the House of Representatives, too. We're still waiting on a lot of races to be called, but we've seen just a huge number of flips, more than 15 something in the name. Domenico, you might have the number now, but obviously the number is going to continue to change.

3:04Tamara Keith: There are just so many House districts that were represented by Republicans, including like in Pennsylvania, you have Brian Fitzpatrick, who has survived multiple blue waves. He gets taken out by this wave. And this was, you know, the president always knows that when there's a midterm election, the president's party has trouble. So they did this mid-decade redistricting to try to build a firewall around the Republican Party, to build a firewall in the House. And the fire overtook the wall. And I feel like it became clear very early, right, where we were literally slacking in the 7 p.m. hour as the results are starting to come in about the Florida results that were coming in some of those districts that were redrawn to be more friendly to Republicans, districts that were Trump plus 12, Trump plus 14.

3:58And Democrats were winning those districts.

4:01Tamara Keith: Yes. Districts that were drawn to be won by Republicans, that were drawn to be easy, became incredible battles. And then in the end, Democrats won. Now, we don't have all of the race calls yet in all of the races, but the trend is incredibly clear. Yeah. And look, the fact is here that this absolutely was, you know, a midterm election that was a referendum on the president of the United States. And when the evidence for that is in the data here, 43 percent of people said that they voted to express opposition to Donald Trump in the voting poll for the national election pool of the early voters plus the exit polls combined.

4:4716 percent said that they voted to express support for Donald Trump. So you're talking about 59 percent of people who one way or the other said that Trump was the factor for them to vote in this election. Only 40 percent said that Trump was not a factor. So you're talking about the big majority of people saying that Trump was the reason that they voted here. And President Trump put himself at the center of this thing.

5:12Tamara Keith: He went to states with competitive races. He held rallies, long rallies, rallies that got covered by local television and by national media. And he delivered a speech again and again every night. Obviously, it weaved all over the place, lots of different things. But it was for the people in the arena, for the people on the tarmac. It was it was his old jokes. It was his greatest hits. He was giving them one last great show, like a goodbye tour from a president who is now officially going to be a lame duck. But you have to speak to the whole country. You can't just speak to the people who show up at the rally.

5:51Tamara Keith: And the message that voters were getting was like, why is the president talking about John Husted's butt everywhere he goes? Like, truly, why? I had a swing voter text me like, why is he commenting on Nicki Minaj's butt? Like this is, you know, when people are hurting and that is the overwhelming message here is people are not happy about the economy. They feel like they can't get ahead. They can't catch up. They can't buy a house. They can't afford basics. They drive by a gas station and it's four dollars a gallon. And then the president's holding comedy routine rallies and saying that high gas prices are a small price to pay for the war in Iran.

6:32Tamara Keith: Well, it just was a major disconnect with where voters were. Turns out that butts, ballrooms and pronouns is not a winning argument in this 2026 midterm election. The fact is here, Donald Trump had a 38 percent approval rating in the voter poll. That is very low. It's historically bad. Corruption was a big issue for a lot of people, started to really get very high in polling that we hadn't seen previously. They asked, which does Donald Trump prioritize more, his own personal interests or the country's interests? Guess what? It mirrored his approval rating. Sixty two percent said that he prioritizes his own personal interests over the country's interests.

7:19That is a really tough pill to swallow if you are president of the United States.

7:23Tamara Keith: And then he delivers his closing remarks, you know, like, here's my closing argument. And he goes to the reflecting pool in Washington, D.C., and spends 25 minutes talking about renovation projects. I feel like you really couldn't make that up. I feel like when it was announced, when I was even watching on television as he's making this speech, it felt a little bit on the nose. I want to ask, Domenico, as I'm looking at this live results page of the Senate, Iowa, Kansas, Texas, South Carolina, all states that a few months ago, any of those states would have felt shocking that Democrats have won and they've won all of them.

7:59Is there a specific result here as you're looking at these results that is especially surprising to you? I mean, it's hard not to be surprised by Texas and maybe not that James Tallarico won the Senate race there, the Democrat, over Ken Paxton, a uniquely flawed candidate who's the Republican who Donald Trump, by the way, decided to endorse over the incumbent Republican John Cornyn, whom Republicans told me that they felt he would win much more easily. And they really lobbied President Trump to try to endorse Cornyn. It didn't happen because Paxton came out and endorsed the Save America Act that Trump was all about because of his belief that elections are rigged in the country and he wants all these different rules to go into place.

8:44The fact is, James Tallarico got 55 percent of the vote. Ken Paxton got 43 percent of the vote. Texas is a big state. That means James Tallarico won by more than a million votes in Texas. For the first time, a Democrat in Texas going to the Senate since 1988. That is a long time. And, you know, if Texas this is Texas has always been the white whale for Democrats because it's been a majority minority state for a while. There's going to be a lot of money spent to figure out whether or not Texas is legit in play or if this was an asterisk election. Because if suddenly Texas is on the map in a presidential election, you're talking about 40 electoral votes.

9:29That is a huge change. And we've seen the Sun Belt really move in Democrats' direction because of demographics. Reminds me a little bit of how Georgia shifted, right, a couple cycles ago. And now you're looking at states across the South where that's a possibility. Or is it just a midterm? I think that's a big question to ask. I will say, while the wave and a lot of these states fell, you know, all in unison, in large measure because of the president and because of the national political environment, Democrats also had uniquely good candidates who are authentic to those states. And that matters, too.

10:06Tamara Keith: And Republicans had uniquely bad candidates like Ken Paxton, who was scandal plagued and all of these things. And and so many of the Republican candidates. And I will say someone at the White House sent me a text that said, you know, candidate quality was an issue. It's like, OK, candidate quality. President Trump personally picked a bunch of the candidates who caused the biggest headaches for Republicans where they were like in some cases they just pulled their money out because there was no way they could win like Michael Watley in North Carolina or Mike Collins in Georgia. And there are downstream effects when that happens.

10:47Tamara Keith: When you don't have a compelling race at the top of the ticket, then suddenly you have House races that shouldn't have been in play start falling towards Democrats as well. And, you know, in Texas, though, you know, it's not just James Tallarico who won the Senate race. You also have Gina Hinojosa winning the governor's race and not by a narrow margin. Yeah. And it seems like Hinojosa and Tallarico sort of complimented each other and pulled each other over the finish line in different ways. Hinojosa is from South Texas. Democrats were able to win huge margins with Latinos. It's a huge story in this election.

11:27They swung back again toward Democrats. This is the swingiest swing group in the country that everyone's going to be watching in 2028. I also have to say money isn't everything.

11:38Tamara Keith: Yeah. I mean, that was a big question coming into this race. Like there was so much. Republicans were pulling up truckloads of money. Elon Musk, how much did he put in? Elon Musk spent more than$300 million. He's the single largest donor to Republican candidates and super PACs. But the number that just is going to stick in my head forever is$412 million. That is how much money Republicans spent in Texas on this Senate race, on just the Senate race. There was more than a billion dollars in ads for the entirety of everything that happened in Texas. But$412 million to lose a seat, that is epic. I thought it was pretty interesting seeing what the president posted on Truth Social tonight.

12:24Tamara Keith: Which of the many things? Well, the one while we're talking about Texas, we talked about how he handpicked Paxton, who is getting shellacked, for lack of a better term, in that Senate race. And yet the president seems to think it's the governor, Greg Abbott's fault for losing Texas, which I don't know. What do you make of the president's response both there and just more broadly tonight, Tam? OK, so let's start with his Truth Social post where he says, I wasn't on the ballot. And if I was, we would have won in a landslide. Then he criticizes Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas. He says he became a rhino.

13:01Tamara Keith: And if he hadn't become a rhino, he wouldn't have lost. And then he says, I'm going to become a political pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these candidates won and lost. He hasn't followed up much with that. But what I will say is that in an interview on Fox and also an interview with The New York Times, he said that he would accept the results of this election. That was a question coming in because he had said, oh, I'll only accept it if it's fair. I mean, like, this is like, I don't know, the abominable snowman accepting snow or something like I'm not coming up with the right analogy here.

13:39Tamara Keith: But like this was so overwhelming that I don't know how he couldn't accept it, but he is accepting it. Well, the thing that I'm most curious about with Donald Trump and the Republican Party going forward is if Donald Trump was supposed to be the kingmaker for 2028, I think we can think again. There's going to be a lot of Republicans now who maybe were thinking maybe it's going to be J.D. Vance, the vice president. Maybe it's going to be, you know, Marco Rubio. I think there are going to be a whole lot of other Republicans who are starting to think about maybe it's me. Right. Maybe I have the vision to lead this party going forward.

14:15Because Trump, while important and speaks to a very strong slice of the party, maybe he's not enough to get the party where it needs to go to win a majority.

14:27Tamara Keith: Trump likes winners. Trump doesn't like losers. Trump doesn't like losing. And now he has the stench of losing all over him. And I'm not sure what that is going to do to his power within the Republican Party. But my guess is that, as with all lame duck presidents, his power is depleted and will continue deflating. Now I'm mixing things, but will continue deflating as his time in office winds down. There's going to be a lot of time over the next couple of weeks and months to talk about what the next two years looks like with the Democratic controlled Congress and a Republican president who seems OK with having an adversarial relationship with those Democrats.

15:12Right. Based on another one of the truth social posts, I think he posted something that said like Mr. Vito or something.

15:18Tamara Keith: Oh, he posted a red hat with the word veto embroidered on it. Yeah. Maybe AI. I think he missed an opportunity. Maybe it could be Vito Corleone. Oh, there you go. Well, I do want to hear your guys' thoughts before we go just on what that dynamic is going to look like. Any thoughts on what this Democratic-controlled Congress is going to try to do or what this relationship is going to look like? This is a majority that went through red states and went through districts that are heavily weighted towards Republicans, at least under past elections. And so they are going to be under a fair amount of pressure to try to govern, to try to use this midterm to build towards 2028 and not to have whiplash go back and, you know, have Republicans gain power again in two years.

16:11Tamara Keith: Exactly how that shakes out, I'm not sure, but there are lots of areas where there could be bipartisan work that's done. But also there are going to be investigations. There are going to be a lot of investigations. There's going to be oversight of this war and how it's been executed. There have been so many hearings that would have been done if Republicans were in control and it was a Democratic president. Well, now it's a Republican president. Democrats are going to be in control of Congress. Democrats are going to have a lot of questions. These results don't mean the country is enamored with the Democratic Party.

16:45Right. These results mean that the country was really upset with Donald Trump and the Republican Party and registered that frustration on election night. But the Democratic Party has to be careful because they're going to have to create a governing agenda, if just for messaging, even if those things aren't going to be able to be put through Congress or toward Mr. Vito or whatever Trump is calling himself now in the last two years. I feel like in my head that's what the true social post said, but I guess it's not what it said. Yeah, he said something quite similar to that. Yeah. And the reality here is that people are feeling really uneasy about this economy.

17:28It's a really, really, really hard ship to turn around. Right. And while presidents get more credit and more blame than they deserve on the economy, Trump took active measures to make things worse. that it's going to be hard for Democrats to say, here's everything we're going to do that's going to make things better, especially if they don't have partners in the Republican Party that are going to compromise, negotiate, because we know that the districts in this country just do not incentivize compromise because there are so few swing districts, although tonight maybe shows that those swing districts can swing pretty hard.

18:07Tamara Keith: We should just say, Domenico, that we had like a list of key races. And it wasn't long enough. It exploded. Yeah, it was it was hard. But I will say Democrats have to be careful because when we talk about investigations, there's another I word and that's impeachment. And I you know, there's been history here where Republicans and, you know, in the late 90s faced backlash because they went through with long investigations and impeachment of President Clinton back then. Democrats have impeached Trump twice. I don't know that there's I don't know that there's an appetite in the country for that. There, you know, again, it seems like the country was upset that Trump wasn't focused on the things that are making them upset about the economy.

18:55Well, Democrats have to be careful about what it is they're going to be focused on and how to message that and reflect that to the American people. All right, we'll leave it there for now, but we will be back in your feed later today with more analysis. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

19:09Tamara Keith: I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.