Midterm: Governors and Legislatures

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The vote count is not quite over, but it is already clear that 2026 ranks among the most consequential midterms.

For the first time in 16 years, Democrats are poised to control more state governments outright than Republicans. Democrats are on track for 22 state government trifectas, their most in at least 34 years. The political map that Republicans built in 2010 is unraveling. https://t.co/TOWftVVVQr

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) November 9, 2026

Katy Owens Hubler at NCSL:

Ballots are still being counted, and results are not final until certified by election officials, but as of Thursday, Nov. 5:

Legislative Chambers

Pre-Election: 39 Democratic, 58 Republican, 1 no majority
Post-Election (anticipated): 52 Democratic, 46 Republican, 1 no majority

Legislative Control

One party controls both chambers.

Pre-Election: 18 Democratic, 28 Republican, 3 divided
Post-Election (anticipated): 25 Democratic, 21 Republican, 4 divided

Governors

Pre-Election: 24 Democratic, 26 Republican
Post-Election (anticipated): 30 Democratic, 20 Republican

State Control

One party controls the executive and both chambers.

Pre-Election: 16 Democratic, 23 Republican, 10 divided
Post-Election (anticipated): 23 Democratic, 17 Republican, 10 divided

Still More Midterm Items

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The vote count is not quite over, but it is already clear that 2026 ranks among the most consequential midterms.

 Bayliss Wagner at NYT:

Kylee Wilson, a part-time bartender in the blue-collar town of Prairie City, Iowa, turned to the bar and broke the news to one of her regulars. After voting three times for President Trump, she pulled the lever for Democrats this year.

“Tim, don’t hate me for this,” she told the customer, Tim Charls, 64. But Mr. Trump had become “too brash,” too bellicose, too tied up in the war in Iran, she said, all while she and her family struggled with rising costs and health care cuts.

“Trump put a target on America’s back,” said Ms. Wilson, 29, who works in sales support at a heavy machinery company during the day. She said she was concerned about “the state of the country and the world.”

All across the country, millions of white, working-class voters such as Ms. Wilson shifted toward Democrats in the midterms, part of a lurch to the left across demographic groups that propelled the party to its biggest rout in a generation.

While a clear majority of white voters without a college degree favored Republican House candidates over Democrats (59 percent to 40 percent), the margin was 14 percentage points smaller than Mr. Trump’s was in the 2024 presidential election, according to Times Voter Trends data.

Bruce Mehlman:

Our larger midterm deck (40 slides): The 2026 Midterms

What to expect in post-election Washington: The Road Ahead

Congressional oversight plans: The 12Oversight Congress

The bigger macro challenges: Mind These Gaps

 

Turnout and the Midterm

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The vote count is not quite over, but it is already clear that 2026 ranks among the most consequential midterms.

Elaine Kamarck and William A. Galston at Brookings:

Turnout in midterm elections is always lower than in presidential contests, but the party that wins the midterms enjoys the smallest falloff from the previous presidential election. Throughout 2026, Democrats enjoyed a substantial lead in polls measuring the likelihood of voting, and the actual votes reflected this edge. As election season progressed, expectations increased that turnout would be high. As of the end of October, early voting totals had surpassed the totals seen in 2018 and 2022. The all-time highs for the 21st century midterms were 2018 (53.4%), when Democrats took over the House of Representatives, and 2022 (52.2%) when Republicans took over the House.

Although national turnout numbers are not yet available, the results from three large red states are suggestive. Compared to the 2024 presidential election, votes cast for Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott fell 30% from President Trump’s total while his challenger, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, exceeded Kamala Harris’ vote by 8%.1 Republican Byron Donalds fell short of Trump’s total by 32%, while Democrat David Jolly finished 14% behind Harris. And in Ohio, Democrat Amy Action received 5% fewer votes than Harris while Vivek Ramaswamy’s total fell short of Trump’s by 36%. Meanwhile, only 6% of Republicans crossed over to support Democrats in races for the House of Representatives. Discontented Republicans didn’t abandon their party in 2026; they stayed home, opening the door for highly motivated Democrats to score massive gains.

More Midterm Items

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Peggy Noonan at WSJ:

A rising 10-year-old coalition came apart. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and others had slapped its platform together based on what got cheers at the rallies of 2016. They made it up as they went along. But it takes a kind of genius to spy, imagine and build a coalition and make it hold for a decade, and it means plenty that it collapsed.

Mr. Trump was the author of the ruin. He picked the candidates to back, made the decisions on strategy, decided what to say and when to spend the money in his war chest. (Late in the election, according to the New York Times, when the price of ads had been jacked up; he considered it “my money.”)

He is fuming and casting blame—it was Fox News’s polls; if he’d been on the ballot it would have been “a landslide”; Greg Abbott is “a RINO.” Please. It was you, Fredo.

Yuval Levin at AEI:

The American electorate has been repudiating the status quo again and again, but our political leaders have refused to offer something different. Trump’s election in 2016 was a rebuke of the increasingly culturally radical Democratic Party of Barack Obama’s final years. Joe Biden’s election in 2020 was a rebuke of Trump and his ridiculous approach to governing. But in its place, Biden offered a return to exactly what voters had rejected by electing Trump to begin with. So in 2024, voters rejected that cultural progressivism yet again, but all they were offered in its place was literally the return of Donald Trump. Now they’re rejecting that again, and presumably the next two years will only make them more eager to put it behind them.

In each case, the public rendered a negative verdict on the loser, not a positive verdict on the winner. We have been living through what you might call a politics without winners.

As I wrote two years ago, in the immediate wake of Trump’s win, which his supporters hailed as ushering in a grand new Republican coalition for the ages:

This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.

This election should teach both parties that lesson again, but it will still be hard to learn.

 Irie Sentner at POLITICO:

Voters between the ages 18-29 supported Democrats this cycle 70% to 28% — an overwhelming margin of more than 40 points and a 32-point shift from 2024, per NYT data. That trend was even more pronounced among young men, whom President Donald Trump targeted in 2024 and won with 56% of support. In Tuesday’s elections, the figures flipped: 58% of young men supported a Democratic House candidate, according to an analysis by Tufts’ CIRCLE.

The results represent a homecoming for Democrats of a group the party once considered among its most reliable voting blocs. But activists and analysts who spoke with Playbook today gave their party what’s becoming a familiar warning: they ought not take the shift for granted.

Charles Lane at AEI:

For all that, there was a ray of hope for the Republicans on Tuesday night, should they choose to perceive it. Two New England moderates, Phil Scott and Kelly Ayotte, won re-election as governors of Vermont and New Hampshire, respectively. Their victories point the party in a more sensible direction.

 

Wipeout

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 Sean Trende at AEI:

This was an absolute disaster for Republicans. There’s no mincing words, rationalizing, second-guessing, or beating around the bush: However bad you thought that last night could be for Republicans, it was worse. It’s the worst election for a party at least since 1974. Republicans have lost seven Senate seats, with Alaska and Mississippi (!!!!) hanging in the balance. Kansas elected its first Democratic Senator since 1932. South Carolina elected a Democrat to the Senate. Texas didn’t just elect a Democrat statewide for the first time since 1994; the entire Republican statewide slate lost (a shift that is likely to hold somewhat into 2028).

In the U.S. House, Democrats look poised to win around 260 seats, their largest House majority since 1990. The bloodshed was widespread. In North Carolina, Tim Moore has likely lost to Lakesha Womack, who had raised $59,000 by mid-October and had $5,000 in cash on hand. Cyril Jefferson seems to have defeated Addison McDowell in the 6ᵗʰ district. He raised $250,000 and had $11,000 on hand. In Tennessee, Scott DesJarlais is losing to Victoria Broderick, who raised $84,000 and had $8,000 on hand. The closest thing I can think of is in 1994, when Mike Synar lost to Virgil Cooper, a retired school principal who campaigned by placing business cards under the windshield wipers of cars. That was a primary. Republicans lost multiple governorships, gave up several governing trifectas, and lost dozens of statewide races. It’s just an utter catastrophe for the party, top-to-bottom.

It’s the worst popular vote loss in decades. Right now, Republicans are losing the House popular vote by almost 12 points. If this holds, and the deficit seems likely to grow rather than shrink, it’ll be the worst popular vote loss for a party in Congress since 1982, and possibly since 1976. Even that doesn’t tell the entire story, since the Republicans weren’t competitive in much of the South at that point.

Epstein, Epstein, Espstein, Corruption, Corruption, Corruption

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  In 2024, the book explains, the Democrats' problems involved reality, not just messaging.  Two years later, Republicans own the reality problems, including the Iran quagmire and the resulting economic pain.

Corruption is another.

Kevin Breuninger at CNBC:

Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices, according to the final CNBC All-America Economic Survey before the Nov. 3 midterm election.

The finding follows a monthslong messaging effort by Democrats to link widespread economic dissatisfaction with what they allege is rampant corruption by President Donald Trump and his Republican allies.

CNBC’s survey of 1,000 registered U.S. voters found 36% of respondents pointing to government corruption as one of the most important issues facing the country right now. The cost of food and groceries came second with 34%, followed by protecting democracy and the price of gas, which garnered 23% each.

Katie Robertson at NYT:

A federal judge on Saturday once again threw out President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over its reporting that linked the president and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The president had argued that The Journal had maligned his “character and integrity” when it published an article in 2025 about a lewd birthday greeting that Mr. Trump appeared to have written to Mr. Epstein more than 20 years earlier. Mr. Trump denied writing the greeting and sued The Journal, asking for $10 billion in damages.

On Saturday, Judge Darrin P. Gayles of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida granted The Journal’s request that the complaint be dismissed, writing that the president “has failed” to prove that The Journal had “acted with actual malice.”

Actual malice is a legal standard that must be met by public figures in defamation proceedings. It means the defendants knew what they were publishing was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.

“In effect, President Trump argues that once he declared the Letter a ‘fake,’ Defendants should have disregarded everything else they learned in their investigation and not published the story,” Judge Gayles wrote in a 20-page decision. “But that is not what the actual malice standard requires and runs afoul of the First Amendment.”

Judge Gayles dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the claim cannot be refiled again.

AI (obviously lol): #Epstein thanks #Trump and Congress. https://t.co/U5LNdtqcMY

— #Anonymous (@TheStripesGirl) October 31, 2026

Weird Twist in Michigan

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Eric Berger at The Guardian:

Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens’ shocking last-minute endorsement of Mike Rogers, a Republican Senate candidate, has sparked fierce backlash from members of her party.

Stevens, who narrowly lost in the Democratic primary for Senate to Abdul El-Sayed, announced her support for Rogers after a feud with the El-Sayed campaign over an outside group’s campaign ad that blamed the high cost of living on US support for Israel.

Stevens had said she would appear at a campaign event if he denounced the advertisement, El-Sayed’s campaign disinvited her.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, a Democrat from New York, described the move as “a despicable betrayal”.

“Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors,” Schumer posted on social media.

here's the entirety of the seeming mental breakdown Haley Stevens just had on CNN. One of the most bizarre and incoherent political interviews I can recall. Note how she's completely unable to explain why she changed her mind from supporting Abdul El-Sayed last night to endorsing Mike Rogers today.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 2, 2026