A Landslide Victory for Democrats

- We just took back Texas. (crowd cheering) - So, South Carolina, I think we just made some history. (crowd cheering) - Thank you so much, Maine. Working people did it. - Iowa, we have proven that the impossible was possible. (crowd cheering) - From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is the Daily. On Tuesday night, the blue wave that polls predicted and the president's unpopularity foreshadowed. Landed with extraordinary force across the United States as Democrats flipped control of both the House and the Senate. - My name is Abdur Rahman Muhammad Sayyid. (crowd cheering) - And I am so proud and honored to stand here as your Senator-elect and the great Senator. (crowd cheering) - Today, Chief Political Analyst, Nate Cohn, and National Political Correspondence, Lisa Lair, and Shane Goldbacher, take us inside a historic shift in power and a new era of American politics. - In sweeping and decisive victories, (crowd cheering) - The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed, lame-duck president, Donald J. Trump. - It's Wednesday, November 4th. - Good morning. - We're counting this as morning. - I mean, it's 1 a.m. - It's early. - It's early. - We're doing great. - It's early Wednesday morning. - Oh, I thought we'd be taping this up three in the morning. - Yeah, me too. - Yeah. - This night required no later than 1 a.m. I are so big and so decisive and so quick was the result. Should we get started? - Let's. - All right. Nate, Michael, Lisa. - Hello. - Hi. - Nate, fill in the blank for me. Tonight was what? - A tsunami. - A blue tsunami. - A blue tsunami. - It's the largest victory in the national popular vote since at least 1976. - In a midterm. - In any congressional election. The Democrats will win at least 54 seats in the Senate, including at least five seats at the president, won by double digits in the last election. No party has managed to flip so many seats that are so safely in the other side's hands. And as far back as I looked and I went back to 1974, I could have gone further, but that seemed far enough to me. So this is big. - Lisa, tonight was what? - Tonight was a prairie fire that just swept the nation, a wildfire. I'm just over the water analogies. - Yeah, Nate tortured it. - Yes, Nate. - On Tuesdays, daily. - Nate went on a long journey with it. - You're going to fire now. - I can go on the fire. - Yeah, okay. I think what I also think the water doesn't capture the level of anger of Americans over all these prices and gas prices, and housing prices, and everything else. And so it felt like-- - A democratic wildfire. - A democratic wildfire, yeah. - Shane, tonight was what for you? - I think it was a punishment. I think that you see the kind of thoroughness that Nate is describing. And it becomes less about the individual democratic candidates or even the Democratic party. - This is a reaction and a rejection of President Trump and his approach and his party's complete bended knee to his approach for the last two years. - In summary, a big old spanking punishment. - Yeah, okay. I want to talk about where and how this tsunami wildfire punishment unfolded throughout the night because there was quite a dramatic chronology and arc to it. Nate, when did you realize what was happening on Tuesday night? - Well, it was clear Democrats were overperforming immediately, even in states like Florida. - Where a democratic socialist was neck and neck throughout the night with a Republican in a really red state. - That's right, but Florida's been closed before. Polls showed that Florida could be close. The thing that told me that we weren't just gonna have a big blue wave, but a tsunami or a wildfire was not too long after that. Maybe 720 went in South Carolina, a state that was certainly thought to be competitive, but very few people really believed would be likely to flip Democratic. When the early vote was just plainly better for Democrat Annie Andrews, then she needed to win. - The Senate candidate. - The Senate candidate, Democrat Annie Andrews. And that meant that we were looking at Democrats not merely winning the states that we had been talking about for the last few months like Ohio and even Texas or Kansas, but another tear beyond that like South Carolina. And not just-- - The outer limits of Trump plus 10 plus 15 red states that once were inconceivable. - Nearly 20 in South Carolina's case. - Trump was plus 20 in South Carolina. - I don't think he was plus 20, but he was close, maybe 18. - And here a Democratic as the president has just prevailed. - And didn't just prevail, but prevailed with room to spare. She won by nearly five points. That is extraordinary. And on the topic of a repudiation of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, darling Graham, who was essentially anointed by Donald Trump to replace her brother Lindsey Graham, her greatest sin in this election is that she was anointed by the president. And that is not what the country was looking to support. - Right, usually in a red state like South Carolina, Trump as Kingmaker is the beginning and the end of a conversation. In this case, that wasn't the story at all. It seemed to backfire. And that was the case, right? Shane, in many of these key Senate races where the Republicans lost and the Democrats prevailed. - I mean, the bad news for me as a political junkie and a political reporter who loves to dive into how the races were run and what were the decisions? And there's just one story here. And it's the story of the country rejecting Trump and Republicans and it's pretty simple. And that's how you end up losing in Texas by potentially close to double digits. It's how you lose by the remarkable margin that Nate's talking about in South Carolina. It's how you get a new Senator from Kansas for the first time in nearly 100 years. And you have-- - A Democratic. - Democrat Senator in Kansas. And it's how you house probably the most enduring moderate Republican in Maine. - Let me have you just focus for a moment longer on Texas, Shane, because for the longest time on this show, we debated how real the possibility was that James Tolerico could actually pull off a victory there. And he not only pulled off a victory, he pulled off a victory whose scale is a little bit hard to comprehend. - Yeah, you see in the regional shifts there a complete reversal of things that we've talked about, which is the Latino shift toward Trump. It went back to the Democrats and even more. You see him winning in a way that was basically unfathomable. And yes, we've talked that his opponent Ken Paxton was a particularly weak Republican candidate, the state attorney general who has faced a series of scandals. But what you also see is that it wasn't just Tolerico winning, but the Democratic candidate for governor Gina Hinoosa who beat a fixture of Texas politics, Greg Abbott, who's been governor for more than a decade is out of power. And so Democrats don't just have a Senate seat. They control the governor's office. - Yeah, and I think that what those results show us is how much broader this is than any individual candidate. The scale of the wins shows you that this is not about Ken Paxton and it's not about Roger Marshall who wasn't a particularly strong candidate in Kansas. You know, it's not about any individual Republican. It is just this wholesale repudiation. - I mean, Texas redrew its congressional districts specifically to elect more Republicans and specifically all along the border. The entire Texas border with Mexico is going to be represented by Democrats, including one who won one of those districts that was just a reach that no one expected them to even be competing in. And there it has a new Congress member who's a Democrat. - Let me just put some math forward for the listener at this hour. Nate, Democrats have won how many Senate seats and then I wanna turn Shane and Lisa over to where things stand in the House before we then talk about some of the governor traces around the country too, Senate Nate. - The Democrats have 54 seats at this hour. - They won North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, and I think that gets me to the number I need. But I might be remembering another one. - Another one is not quite called yet but trending, not a 50, but yeah. - And Alaska, check back with us in two months. - Now that's two months. - Now that's two months out in a while. And it's also worth noting we may find out in a while about Mississippi at this hour where the race is essentially tied and where in the past, provisional ballots have leaned democratic and therefore I think I could make an argument that the Democrat could realistically flip that state as well which could give the Democrats if everything went their way from here, 56 seats in the Senate. - Which would represent flipping, picking up how many seats? - That's a lot for me to count at this hour, Michael. - They flipped seven. - They have flipped seven. - They could get up to nine. A huge number, Shane in the house. Just bring us at one 38 a.m. up. date where we are. I mean, Democratic control of the house. Because podcasts are a visual medium, I have a blue sharpie that I circle all of the house districts as they get called and you will notice. A lot of blue circles. There are basically no red circles anywhere on any of the competitive races. And so the Democrats have won the house majority. They have surpassed the 218 seats that they need. And they're on their way to potentially historically large majorities, probably the largest since the beginning of the Obama era, which took two successive waves to get to. Nate may have more up to date numbers on the scale of the national popular vote. But there isn't a competitive house race right now where the Democrats are losing. I can think of one for the sort of main two has been on my radar. But when we entered this room, the Democrats were favored in our estimates to win the national vote by 13 points. So again, that's the largest margin since at least 1976. The highest and recent memory was when the Democrats won by 10 in 2008 in the house vote. So this is a real notch up for anything that we've seen in my lifetime. I want to understand what happened to Republican voters as best you all can tell. Did they stay home or did they turn around and vote for Democrats in the huge numbers that we think it might have? The answer is both. It's clear from the states where we have great data like Florida and New Jersey and Nevada, the Democrats had a much better turnout than any election in those states and recent memory. And it's also clear from the same states and other states that many people who are registered as Republicans and voted for Donald Trump voted for the Democratic candidate stepping back for a second. This is a total collapse of the Republican coalition. There is no Republican coalition tonight. There was an older Republican coalition that had the support of affluent college graduates and one white collar suburbs that they traded away to the Democrats a decade ago in exchange for support among working class voters and younger voters and non-white voters. And that coalition, that new Trump coalition, not only abandoned them, it's even more democratic than it's ever been before. I would guess the Democrats won 70 plus percent of young voters. There is nothing left for the Republicans and that's how you get a wipe out across the map. I want to talk about Iowa. I understand it's not the prettiest bell at the ball like Texas, but to me it is so interesting of those kinds of changing coalition politics. In Iowa, you had Democrats win the governor's mansion, the Senate seat, and flip three of the four congressional seats. Why did that happen? Well, guess what, there's a lot of, and Iowa, as you know, I know you've. Farmer's who voted for Trump. Farmer's who voted for Trump repeatedly, three times over, right? And those farmers were just, their bottom line was her again and they're hurt by the increase in diesel prices. They're hurt by the tariffs, which make the equipment more expensive. The feed is more expensive because of the war in Iran. The fertilizer is more expensive because of the tariffs. Because of the tariffs. And there is just such a direct connection between President Trump's policies and the fall of his coalition. And you know, I don't know that you always see that, right? We always talk about Presidents don't control macroeconomic trends, but they get credit or they're blamed for the economy. In this case, actually, President Trump did create the atmosphere on economic conditions that turned his voters against him. And so it's not only that the Republican coalition, as Nate rightfully points out, doesn't exist in these elections, it's that Trump, the guy who created this new Republican party, tore it apart. Through his policies, he is personally responsible for tearing it apart. That is really a remarkable political story. And, you know, accomplishment to have ever put it together, it's in its own way, perversely, as much an accomplishment to have disassembled. And it's of course like the President Trump always does things in operatic scale, right? He puts together. He doesn't do a thing small. And yet again, this is a thing he has not done small. I mean, I think if Texas is ground zero of this year's defeat for Republicans, I also think I was really interesting because it is where they're going to start their next nominating process. So the next Republican presidential candidate is going to need to win a caucus in that state, where the Democrats just won all these things. Yeah, that's simply, in Iowa, Democrats, improbably, given the events of the last decade, one, a Senate seat, and the governor's office, am I missing anything? Three, three congressional seats. Three congressional seats. Yeah. And so this is where the Trump success was in 2016. This was the big white working class push toward Trump all along the Mississippi River. And now all these people have swung all the way back as nature's described. And so the Republican party is actually going to go to that place and be like, okay, where do we go from here? Where they just lost everything. It seems we're spending a quick moment, I think, on some of the governor's races we saw around the country, Lisa and Shane, which one of those races stand out to you? Well, of course, the race in Ohio between Amy Akten and Vivek Ramaswamy captured a lot of attention. As I know you talked about on this show with the ad, including her mother, including her estranged mother. And she is up by right now by six points, a margin that could grow. There's a couple more points of voters that have to be counted in Iowa, Rob San, who was this Democratic star from the moment he announced. He was a Democrat who attempted to run this postpartisan campaign that a lot of other candidates sort of emulated. And Rob San has won. Rob San has won by looks like 10 points or so. And then the other big win is, of course, in Texas, Regina Hinoosa, bested grad abbot, who as Shane pointed out, is really a bastion of that states Republican party. You know, it's interesting because in a lot of these places, there'd been a lot of discussion on ticket splitters. This would be the idea that in Texas, you could vote for James Heloriko as a Democratic candidate for Senate, but then you still might vote for Greg Abbott as governor. Right. And we really didn't see that. We just saw Democrats winning. So that again is just another thing that speaks to like the scale of the win. I think the most interesting governor's race outside of Texas is in Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms is about to become the first black woman in American history to ever be a governor. And she did it by a wide margin. The conversation in political circles had been, oh, can John Ossoff's win, drag her over the line? She's winning comfortably in what had been a perennial swing state for Democrats. And really raised the question of is Georgia changing at this moment because that just hasn't happened before. He's winning by easily into the double digits and she's winning comfortably. This is going to dramatically change like Texas a state's entire complexion. We may be getting a little bit of ahead of ourselves here, but it is worth noting that the Democrats did really well in a lot of potential sunbelt battleground states like North Carolina, Georgia and Texas. Many of their weakest performances were in more traditional Northern white battleground states like Minnesota or Michigan remain. And I'm not saying they did badly in those states tonight and there are candidate factors to consider as well. But it's worth stepping back for a second and imagining what some would have said 10 years ago if I told them that the Democrats were going to do a lot better in Texas than Michigan and North Carolina and Georgia than Maine. And Minnesota, there is something happening here in the sunbelt and it may be where the Democratic party's next opportunity is as we look at the wreckage of the Trump coalition at this low point in Trump's presidency. We'll be right back. Lisa, you wanted to respond to something Nate said by put the break. Nate correct me if I'm wrong. It seemed to be that in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, some of the Democratic candidates leads and even their victories were not as big as a place like the sunbelt. And I wonder if it's because the candidates running in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, the Democrats tended to be more progressive. Yeah, I think Nate was talking about the difference between how candidates fared in the sunbelt and sort of these northern states, Minnesota, Michigan, and Maine. And I think it is worth pointing out that those are states where Democrats ran self-proclaimed progressives, candidates who saw themselves on the more left flank of the party. And the candidates who ran in places like Kansas and Texas and Iowa saw themselves as postpartisan that they tried to put distance between themselves and the Democratic national brand. They cast themselves as centrist as people who want to work across the aisle. So you have two different brands of Democrat, really, who won tonight. And I think a part of what you're seeing is a big Democratic tent, which is of course what Democrats have wanted and talked about wanting since. Not let Miss Tess, letting lots of different kinds of Democrats run for the places where they're running. But sometimes big tents can cause big intra party fights underneath them. So I think we'll see a continuation of this debate that Democrats have been having at this point for many years over what the direction of their party should be in a midterm. It's enough to just run against a unpopular president. Presidential campaigns are contested about the future of the country. And Democrats will need a vision, a shared vision to put forward in those races. And we'll see them fight it out over what that should be. Right. The Democratic victory you're saying basically doesn't necessarily resolve any of the big internal questions and battles inside the party. I think that there is a north and south realignment happening. And you can really see it tonight that the Democrats party's ceiling is lower in the old industrial Midwest in Ohio where Sherrod Brown had been a popular Democrat forever and is retaking a seat in the Senate is not performing as strongly as some of these Democratic candidates in the South. So there seems to be a higher ceiling where John Ossoff is in Georgia than where the Democrats seem to be able to reach in that upper Midwest area. And I think that tells you a little bit where the party's future could be. So I wonder if the results that we're talking about here would in any way tip the scales when it comes to this debate about progressives, Democrats, Socialists in favor of the centrests or if that's just like not the right conclusion to draw given the scale. My text messages tonight would suggest that everybody is declaring victory, right? The left is saying we almost got a Democratic Socialist in Florida, right? And the centrests are saying look at all the actual people who won all of these hard braces. So everybody's declaring victory and everybody has just enough to hang their hat on an election like this where again, the election was not about the Democrats, the election. That's right. Was that about the Republicans? The contrary and take here is that no one should feel good about themselves. They're just benefiting from the least popular president since 1946. And this is still a discredited party that voters don't trust us all the name. And there's plenty of indicators of that in our own polling, right? Where you see that Trump is unpopular, Trump is unpopular. And Democrats have improved their numbers on a lot of issues, most centrally like who is trusted to handle the economy, which is very important always and particularly important in this election. But when voters are asked questions about how much they trust the Democratic Party, is it too far the left, too far the right? They're still pretty mixed on it. Yes, voters are voting, casting their ballots for Democratic candidates. Are they flocking to the National Democratic Party? I'm not sure we can draw that. I know we can't draw that conclusion quite yet. Well, one thing that happened tonight, that if you're a Democrat, seems like a very important and hopeful sign, is that a new generation of, especially Senator Alex, a Senator James Telleriko, a Senator John Assoff, a Senator Abdul Al-Sayed on and on that has come up in the Trump era. They're so digitally native. They're so ubiquitous in the way that they campaign. This is a future of a Democratic Party that no one was even thinking about five, six years ago. Yeah. I mean, now I think Democrats have a wealth of people who could run for president. It's going to be a packed race. They have a very, very stocked bench of candidates. And in some ways, it feels to me like the beginning of a new political era, if you sort of look at 2006, which is another great, resurgent midterm year for Democrats ushered in this era of Obama, which remade that party, the backlash to that ushered in Trump in the magma movement, which remade Republicans. And now it feels as if we're at the end of that 20 year cycle. And we're at a point where both parties are going to be looking forward to something new. Democrats have these new emerging stars. Republicans have to figure out who they are at the beginnings of what could be a post-Trump moment, although we all always hesitate to say that anything is ever post-Trump. It does feel now like he's a lame duck president. Republicans are going to have to find a way forward to keep what's left of their coalition together. So I do wonder if we're sort of at the beginnings of something new for both parties and for the country's politics. Where does this all leave the president's party, the president's movement? What is the state of magma this morning? What is the Republican Party this morning? The Republican Party was destroyed by Donald Trump in 2016. He was reassembled around himself. And now he's the least popular political figure heading into a midterms since 1946. And his party just suffered the worst, dropping in a half century. Where do we stand right now at all? Yeah. I think about how much we discussed the depth of the whole that the Democratic Party found itself in after 2024. And even in that whole, everybody knew they had one big bright light, which was this coming midterm election. The Republican Party today doesn't have that bright light. They have a wide open presidential primary without a clear leader. And it's harder to rebuild at that moment than it is when you can just unite around stopping Trump. Perhaps especially when the president still has a tremendous amount of clout within his party. In our last poll, a majority of Republicans still said they wanted to see the Republican Party continue in the Trump direction, even though two-thirds of the country very much wants the Republican Party to do something completely different. So Donald Trump is still a huge limiting factor on the ability of the Republican Party to go in a new direction in the next two years. Nate, what you just described, this nub of what's left of the president's support is what I think we long understood to be a culture personality. The coalition that you all at this table have said basically disintegrated tonight was what he borrowed and put together beyond that nub. It was based on policies and promises and on Tuesday night, a lot of hooters of both parties felt that those promises were not kept, those policies hurt them and they moved away from him. But there still is at the core, this group that won't move away from him, that probably keeps the rest of the party from being able to move away from him too. Or no. That seems to be the central question. The Republican Party is in a really tough spot, Donald Trump destroyed it as we knew it, and he remains the center of gravity. Everyone is stuck in orbit around him, even though it now feels like a political black hole for them that they can't escape from, even though they'd love to. I think that the president has clearly lost basically the entire periphery of his coalition, all of the young and non-white voters who put him over the top in 2024, many of the white working class voters that put him over the top in 2016. And even some of the moderate Republicans, who may be back Nicky Haley and belong before Mitt Romney, who had been consistent Republicans all along, and reduced him just to this core of Maga Super fans and the most consistent Republicans who had never considered voting for the Democratic Party. And the core problem is that may still be a majority of the Republican primary electorate. I mean, the ones picking the candidates who run as Republicans. Think about this year, you could not win a Republican primary this year without President Trump, and then you could not win a general election with him. That's a big ol' conundrum. That's the trap. Friends, it is 2.10 AM, and as a final question to all three of you, I want you to talk about your big questions this morning, as we enter a new political landscape, maybe even a new political era, in which the United States House representatives and the United States Senate are comfortably controlled by Democrats in the final two years of President Trump's second and final term. What are the big questions you have in your head, as we look forward to the next few months, the next two years? Shane? I mean, I want to know about JD Vance. Oh, that's good. I think that nobody encapsulates that Trump trap more. He is the sitting vice president, the front runner, to be the next nominee, and yet there is probably no one who can maneuver less away from Donald Trump than JD Vance. And how does he navigate this moment coming once, if he campaigns, as most people presume he will? Come on, Harris. Talk about his valuable lesson about what happens when you are the closely aligned figure to an unpopular or declining political figure in the president you're under. I think one of the big questions is, what does the Democratic Party become? I think for a decade, they have organized themselves in opposition to Trump. He's been the biggest energizer for their voters, and that's been like a central organizing principle of being a Democrat. And now, for all the reasons we said, Trump is going to be declining in power, declining as an organizing force in our politics. And that leaves Democrats trying to figure out with all these wins, what does their party stand for? And what is their coalition? And who do they become in an era where Trump is no longer the dominant force? If they can answer that question in a way that enough Americans like, they have a shot at the White House. And if they cannot answer that question, it's going to be really hard to win in 2028. Those were two great answers. And I won for Democrats and won for Republicans. Let me offer then the backdrop that maybe they'll both play off against as they try and chart their future. I'm interested to learn whether any Democrat offers a fundamentally different answer to what the nation's problems are. We have an argument from Democratic Socialists that says the party basically needs to move to the left. And we have a bunch of mainstream establishment Democrats who in some ways represent a continuation of the same Democratic message that we've heard in various forms, send Obama. And when I think back to the last time a party was really discredited after 2008, the Republicans really struggled to come up with something different. They kind of just tried to rerun being a Reagan-Romney Republican in 2012. And it took Donald Trump coming up with a totally different theory of what the nation's problem was to break up this old system that had been kind of discredited. And I don't know whether a Democrat is going to come up with that in 2028, much as no one came up with it for the Republicans in 2012. But I think as we enter this new era of American politics, someone's going to come up with that new theory and new message and new policies that will try and address whatever it is that's going to define American politics in the ears head. And you think it could happen in this moment. Things are changing. When things change, that's when politicians and politics of the opportunity to change response. Only in change, and Lisa, thank you for being here at this really, really late hour, early hour, depending on which way you see it. Appreciate your time. Thank you for having us. On Tuesday night, my colleagues, White House respondents, Erica Green and Tyler Pager spoke with President Trump by phone from the White House, as the President was still processing his party's sweeping losses in the midterm election. I'm just looking to these results, as I'm talking about you. Including the defeat of the Republican Senate candidate in South Carolina, Darlene Graham. That's amazing. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he read Trump conceded that higher gas prices from the war he launched against Iran had upset voters. They don't mind being Iran, but they probably weren't happy. But he insisted that had he himself been on the ballot, Republicans would have performed far better in the election. Everybody saying the same thing, I was it on the ballot. Two years ago, when I'm on the ballot, we won all of these states by a lot. Erica, push Trump on one of the biggest questions hanging over the midterms. I just wanted to make sure you aren't prepared to accept the results of the election. You've talked a lot about it all the time. No, I think the results were fine from the standpoint of cheating. Despite the President's long history of denying electoral losses, Trump said that he would accept Tuesday's results. But he said he was prepared to work with the new Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, even if they sought his testimony for congressional investigations into his administration. Well, work with the Democrats, and we'll, you know, before it to work with them, we'll probably work something out. Thank you, Mr. President, for your time. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In a potentially major change to U.S. foreign policy, President Trump said that the bulk of American aid to Israel, about $4 billion, would be cut off at the end of this year. In an election day interview with Fox News, Trump described his motivation for the change as taking away a powerful talking point from the left wing of the Democratic Party, including Senator elect Abdul-El-Sahed of Michigan. Why? Because they don't need it, President. And I asked them because they don't need it, and because why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an L-S-I-I when they don't need it? It's a bad talking point. In the aftermath of the October 7th attacks and Israel's response in Gaza, both Democratic lawmakers and candidates have become increasingly critical of U.S. military aid to Israel. Trump said that the decision to cut off the aid was made with the consent of Israel's leadership, but the announcement appeared to catch some Israeli officials by surprise. Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley, Stella Tam and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Devon Taylor, with help from Paige Coward, contains music by Alicia B. E. Tube and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley and Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Wonderly, special thanks to Tyler Pager and Eric Agreeon. That's it for the Daily, I'm Michael Barrow, see you tomorrow.