We The People 2026: Post-election special coverage Part 2

Welcome to our special coverage, or back to our special coverage, I should say, of the 2026 midterm elections, which are still unfolding as we speak, as you can all tell from watching for the last hour. I'm Jen Psaki. I'm joined here in studio by my still very caffeinated, at the perfect level, the perfect degree, colleagues, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Nicole Wallace, and Michael Steele. And in just a few minutes, we're going to be joined by Annie Andrews, who became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in South Carolina in almost 30 years. It was one of the most interesting and exciting stories in a very exciting political night last night. But first, we're going to do a quick little check-in on the president of the United States because, well, he woke up today after the generational shellacking his party. And his presidency received last night and reached right for his security blanket. Yes, everyone, in case you haven't seen this, Donald Trump decided that after the country told him quite clearly, we hate all the corruption, you know, the corruption under your administration, the best move today was for him to gather reporters for a tour of a symbol of that corruption, his ballroom, his ballroom, of course, his favorite vanity project. And he was super, super into it. I mean, he spoke about its magnificent columns. He encouraged everyone to envision chandeliers all over, to envision marble flooring, claiming this is the greatest, right? Right? I mean, hard to make up sometimes the script here. The ballroom is, of course, just one of many pet construction projects that Trump has sunk or is planning to sink hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into. And yes, it's completely maddening. It's probably why. Many of you went to the polls, some of you, at least yesterday. But your taxpayer dollars have been benefiting Donald Trump and his friends and family in all kinds of ways since he returned to the presidency. And it's almost hard to keep up. So we're not going to give you every single way, but just to give you a sense or a flavor if you were tuning into this. I mean, billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts have gone to companies in which Trump's sons, Eric and Don Jr., are investors. Also, the Trump administration approved over one and a half billion dollars in government funding. For a Kazakhstan mining deal, his sons have ties to. Again, can't make it up sometimes. Also, a $10 billion Pentagon contract went to computer maker Dell after Donald Trump acquired millions of dollars in Dell stock. Also, hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds went to retrofitting the jet that Cutter gifted to Trump and which Trump says he is going to keep after he leaves office, as one does not do as president. Also, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is reporting that he's going to keep the reportedly trying to negotiate a multi-billion dollar Russian oil deal involving the U.S. government, a major Trump donor, and two of Jared's Middle Eastern business partners. Nothing to see there, obviously. Also, a $350 million Pentagon contract went to a company closely tied to one of Trump's appointees at the Defense Department. Also, Trump's former DHS secretary spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars buying planes from one of her donors. Planes? DHS has barely used. Also, Trump's DHS recently bought a private prison from a company that has donated to Trump. The company had previously offered to sell the prison for $75 million. Trump's DHS bought it for nearly a half a billion dollars. Also, Trump tried to create a slush fund to pay out nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money to allies and supporters, including pardoned January 6th rioters. Also, Trump gave out no-bid contracts. Trump's DHS also offered to give out no-bid contracts, which were worth millions of dollars to renovate, badly, I would note, the Reflecting Pool in D.C. One contract, and this detail just never gets old, to his own personal pool guy. Remember that story? And another contract to a company owned by this memorable gentleman you can see on your screen, one of Trump's donors. Remember him? Quite a looker. Those are just a handful of the ways your taxpayer money, your taxpayer money, has reportedly been directed into the pockets of Donald Trump, his family, his sons, his associates, and it doesn't even scratch the surface of all of the other ways Donald Trump has found to monetize the presidency. I mean, take the fact that an actual pardon industry has exploded, has been created and really exploded around Trump and his administration. The pardon industry is not a phrase that even existed, I don't think, before the Trump presidency, but now convicted felons who have $100,000 or a million or tens of millions of dollars to give to Trump entities or Trump lobbyists or Trump cronies, all of a sudden they happen to get pardons. They get them because there's now an industry. Now, I should note the White House, of course, has denied repeatedly that there are any conflicts of interest when it comes to Trump, his family, and any government business that includes allegations about those pardons. Okay, we can all read the information ourselves, I think. Trump's sons say they're just private businessmen whose deals have nothing to do with their dad. And Trump's business says he doesn't control his stocks. It's all just, all of it a lucky coincidence. Coincidence, I guess, I guess. And with the Justice Department and all of Congress under Trump's control, there has never been a real investigation into any of the corruption allegations against Donald Trump. But after last night's blowout Democratic victories, that's about to change. And the House Judiciary Committee is about to be led by Congressman Jamie Raskin. And if you know anything about Jamie Raskin, and you probably do if you're watching us all right now, you know he has already been thinking about how to ensure that the Judiciary Committee under his chairmen. Is a serious force to be reckoned with. Joining us now is Congressman Jamie Raskin, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It is great to see you. I hear you are a grandfather newly this morning as well. So you've had a very big 24 hours. Very exciting. And quite a birthday, too. Let me start by asking you. He was waiting for the Democratic majority to come in, I think. That's always, that joke's never going to get old. You're going to be telling it at his wedding. Let me start with this. I mean, I just tried to do my best there of summarizing just some of the conflict of interest and corruption stories that we've all been covering. We've all been talking about. It's a lot. And part of your job is going to be investigating what you've described accurately here as a historic mountain of corruption. Where are you going to even start? So, Jen, thank you for having me. Look, the House Judiciary Committee. It is the home of a lot of the greatest federal statutes in our history. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 came out of the Judiciary Committee, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Freedom of Information Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act. And we're living in another period of dramatic historical change. This election is a sea change in American politics, and it was exactly what we needed to bring ourselves back to where we are today. We're back from the brink of authoritarianism, and corruption is a permanent way of doing business. And so our committee is going to have to both shine a light on all of these different domains of government that have been absolutely poisoned and contaminated by quid pro quo corruption and pay-to-play government and coin-operated public policy. We have to move away from that. But what that means is we're not only going to just, you know, give everybody that extra size and exposure, but we're going to have to put forward the laws that we need to establish strong guardrails around the executive branch of government. James Madison said that Congress is the predominant branch of government. It is in Article I for a reason. We've got the power to declare war. We've got the power to appropriate money. We've got the power to control federal buildings and installations, not Donald Trump, if he can rightfully bulldoze the east wing of Congress. The White House, without anybody's permission, he can bulldoze the west wing. He can just burn the whole thing down. He can't do it. It's not his house. It belongs to the people, and it is Congress that controls it. So we're going to be advancing a whole series of investigations and hearings to shine a light on the corruption and then advance the laws that we need to shut this down for good. I'm sitting next to my colleague Michael Steele here, who's dying to ask you a question, too. We've all been talking about your chairmanship. Go ahead, Michael. Yeah, no. Congressman, it's good to see you. Congratulations on the wins in the great state of Maryland last evening. So you and I have had this conversation, and here's where I have a little bit of an issue and that I'm really hoping that as the gavel is passed and, as you just noted, the investigations begin, that there is some force behind it, because at the end of the day, like with the Supreme Court, like with other institutions, Donald Trump really doesn't give a rat's you-know-what about your desire for information or your concern about what he's doing with the East Wing. So how do you enforce it? When you send the subpoena, when you send the summons to come to have a secretary or department head or maybe even the president himself come and explain his dealings and his behavior, how do you enforce that? How do you make sure that you get the answers that they make? American people have won it. you the Epstein files. The law is very clear on what this administration was required to do under letter of law. And this administration has basically said, yeah, OK, whatever. Well, the framers established what every citizen ultimately knows and every bureaucrat knows, that the power of the purse, the power to control the money is the ultimate leverage within government. And so far, it's been Mike Johnson and the Senate Republicans who've controlled the power of the purse. We've not been able to cut them off. We control every dollar that's spent in the White House and the Department of Justice. Now that's our power. We've got the power of oversight. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that it is crucial to the process of legislation because we've got to know what's going on in government and what's going on in society in order to pass the right legislation. We will exercise the power of oversight through subpoenas. We will exercise the power of oversight through subpoenas, through Congress's own inherent powers of contempt, through judicial action if need be, but also through the flood of whistleblowers who are running away from the wreckage of the Trump administration and also from subpoenas that we issue towards private parties, corporations, businesses that might be involved in a lot of the corruption that we're talking about. And finally, we have other kinds of powers, including impeachment, trial, you know, conviction, civil from office and so on. But we don't even need to get there right now because we control both houses of Congress. We control the power of the purse and we're going to use it every single day. We're bringing in, you know, maybe 50, 60, 70 new colleagues. Who knows at the end of it? These are brilliant, public policy oriented, public interested people who are raring to go. And every committee in Congress is going to be on fire to get the job done, both to deliver results to the American people, to bring health care to the American people, to save our environment from the plunder and rapaciousness of the corporations that Donald Trump's been giving everything away to, and also to get to the bottom of this corruption so we can shut the swamp down for good. Congressman, it's Nicole Wallace. Congratulations on your new addition and thank you for being here with us. The inner circle of the corruption is either a Trump kid, a Trump son-in-law, people that Trump might be able to identify and pardon along the way. But the next ring seems to be. This group of people who know better, corporations who gave millions to the destruction of the East Wing, law firms who capitulated and seem to be in agreement to serve under Boris Epstein and do work for Donald Trump. How interested are you in that second circle of people who may want to exist in public life in a time after Trump? And what do you want to know from them? Well, we are hugely interested in it. One thing we've been able to accomplish by sending the much reviled strongly worded letters, which is, you know, one of our major instruments here. We've sent strongly worded letters to a number of large corporations that have used nondisclosure agreements as a form of coercive leverage over local governments. And we have told them we intend to ban that practice and we intend to have hearings on that practice. And three of them so far have told us that they are going to voluntarily refrain from using NDAs in the context of placing data centers in people's communities. So that's a that's a victory that we've had in the minority simply by using the sternly worded letter that everybody makes fun of. But we will not hesitate to go after the private corporations that are collaborating in all of the lawlessness with Donald Trump. And we've done it before and we will absolutely do it again. The law firms you mentioned, we know that there were many heroic law firms that have stood up against all of the lawbreaking and then the attempt to shake them down for the time of their partners and their young associates. And yet there are major law firms in America, including Paul Weiss, that have capitulated to these coercive tactics by Donald Trump and have basically surrendered and made all kinds of outrageous concessions. We've sent a number of letters to those law firms, and they have been not forthcoming. Up until now. But when we have the power of subpoena and we have the power to conduct oversight, we believe a lot of these law firms are going to be coming forward and telling the truth. Otherwise, they are law firms that have no respect for the rule of law. And we're going to make sure that they comply with a congressional subpoena. It is the exact same legal force as a judicial subpoena does. Subpoena means under the power or under the penalty of law. Congressman, we're asking it's Rachel Maddow. Just one quick question. For you, I'm thinking about the behavior of the Department of Justice, particularly in the lead up to these elections and the the innumerable irregular actions taken by Todd Blanch to try to influence or seize control of the conduct of the elections to try to menace candidates for election and even their families and all of these other things that that that Todd Blanch did, even just looking at that lead up to the election. Is there a case to be made that Todd will face potential impeachment investigation? Well, thank you for bringing that up, Rachel. First of all, as you know, I spent a lot of my time out on the road. I went to a majority of the states in the union during this campaign, and I usually close my speeches by saying that because people were very worried about the DOJ's constant interference in the election, the attempt, remember, to run all state vote tallies through the post office and to essentially set the post office up as the national election board. People would ask about it, and I would explain the legalities of it. I would tell them that there's a great 501 C three not for profit law community mobilized on that, that the Democrats under Mark Elias and different state party lawyers were mobilized for that. But I would always say in the final analysis that our best insurance policy against a stolen election is a landslide election. And the voters, the American people delivered a landslide repudiation of all the lawlessness, corruption, but guess what? We shouldn't need a landslide in order to have a real election in America where the votes are counted. We should be able to win even by, you know, 5 million votes instead of 30 million votes or whatever it turns out to be. We should have a real election and imagine what they would be doing right now if it were a narrow election and not a broad one. So I would say, yes, add that to the list of things that this attorney general has done that are constitutionally repulsive, starting with. Starting with all of the cover up and suppression of the truth in the Epstein case where they got in Donald Trump's former personal attorney, Todd Blanch, who would later become his personal attorney general, zeroed in on the Epstein files, had them moved from the Southern District to D.C. where they sat on them, nothing happening for six months. And then right after the 4th of July, I believe it was July the 7th, they sent a letter to the Supreme Court. And they sent a letter to the Supreme Court saying that there is no evidence in the entire Epstein file, no evidence at all that would justify even an investigation of people who might be accomplices or co-conspirators. I mean, just a patently outrageous and false assertion, which we debunked a couple of weeks ago in a report that we put out demonstrating not only that there's lots of evidence that would certainly support investigation, but evidence that would support an investigation of Donald Trump himself. Because of all of his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and all of his involvement in their network. So, yeah, I would say that this attorney general has been doing nothing other than acting in his old capacity as a personal criminal defense attorney to Donald Trump. Look at all of the fraudulent prosecutions that they've engaged in against people like James Comey, like Letitia James, like Adam Schiff, like Mark Kelly, like Maggie Goodlander. And Jason Crow and on and on against my constituent, Davey Hearn, the three-time Olympic canoeist who dipped his hand in the reflecting pool is pounced on by federal agents and they charge him with felony destruction of federal property and want to set him to jail for 10 years. Now, the judge basically excoriated the Trump administration for bringing this case and said he would dismiss the charges with prejudice. But meantime, the Department of Interior already knew that it was Trump's pool guy. Who was behind it, along with the insider no-bid contractor who's gotten more than $25 million of our money. I know that's small change as their corruption goes. But nonetheless, it's exemplary of what's happened. And Todd Blanch has been there overseeing all of it. The Department of Justice has clearly become a department of injustice, an instrument of revenge, political revenge for the president and an instrument for the suppression of criminal cases that may affect the president. We're his family and friends. That's exactly right. Yeah. And one way to make sure that changes is to let him know that he can't get away with it. Congressman Jamie Raskin, you are going to have a very, very, very busy year. Thank you for starting it off the first night after the election with us. And congratulations on the new addition to your family, sir. It's a great, great blessing. I appreciate it. All right. I will say that Todd Blanch moving Ghislaine Maxwell to minimum security is itself like one of the bigger impeachable offenses that you would identify in any other presidential administration. But that's just like, they want to talk about it. Like if there's nothing else to investigate it. Yes, honestly. The new Democratic senator-elect from South Carolina, Annie Andrews, is going to join us here live next. We have so much to ask her. We've got a lot to get to still tonight. We'll be right back. Before last night, no Democrat had won the South Carolina Senate race since 1998. That changed, of course, with Senator-elect Annie Andrews. And it was a shockingly competitive race in a state that Trump easily carried three straight times, thanks in large part to a strong campaign from Andrews, a pediatrician by trade, as well as a particularly, truly, almost historically weak Republican nominee. That would be incumbent Senator Darlene Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who was appointed. She filled out his term and then who Donald Trump and Sean Hannity decided should be a senator for six years. Damn, whatever the people of South Carolina thought. Trump himself visited the state three times to shore up Graham in her special election primary, twice to sump for her in the general election. It didn't work. Dr. Annie Andrews won decisively. Not close, not a squeaker, not 11,000 votes by four and a half points. A margin of nearly 100,000 votes. In her victory speech, Andrews, insisted that unlike Graham, she will be beholden to no one but her constituents in Congress. Nobody in Washington recruited me to run. Nobody handed me a seat in the United States Senate. And nobody wrote me a script. I owe no one in Washington anything. I owe. I owe South Carolina everything. And that's exactly who I'm going to answer to. And Dr. Annie Andrews, South Carolina Senator-elect, joins me now. First of all, congratulations on your victory, Senator-elect. It's wonderful to have you here. When in the night did you know that this was happening? Well, thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here. You know, I think it was around 10 o'clock. My team did a really good job of keeping me out of the weeds. I wasn't getting frequent updates, but I knew that the vibes at the party were really good. I knew that the energy around me, I was with my family and my kids. I knew that people were feeling good. And it was just, I'll never forget that moment of hearing the news that I won and being able to share that with my kids and then being able to celebrate with that wonderful crowd we had last night. You actually had run for office before you actually challenged Nancy Mace in a congressional race. And, you know, that outcome was kind of what you would expect in a quote-unquote normal election, right? You're the Democrat, you're in a district that's like Trump plus 15 or plus 20 and you lost by a ton. What did you learn from that and why did you want to do it again statewide? I mean, I learned so much in my first race. And I think the lesson is every fight is worth fighting no matter how uphill the battle seems. When I got in this race 18 months ago, there were very few people across the country who saw even a slim pass. But I kept at it every single day. We spent 18 months building this broad coalition of support across South Carolina. Not just Democrats, but of course a lot of Republicans and independents who were looking for something different, who rejected the idea that Washington, D.C. was going to pick their senator. And so I'm definitely, I was a much stronger second-time candidate. Of course, the political environment was very different. And I'm really proud of the race that we ran and just really excited to get to work on behalf of South Carolina. You are, you're a pediatrician. Tell me when we spoke just a few days ago about how working in a children's hospital is the best way, the best ground's eye view of a society to see what's going on at a place, to work in a children's hospital. The head of HHS is RFK Jr. He's an individual that you have described, I believe, as your arch nemesis. I think that's the word that you used. How do you want to use the experience you have, specifically in oversight or working on health? How do you want to use the experience you have, specifically around health care issues, specifically around children's health and maybe children's vaccination when you get to Washington? Yeah, on the oversight front, I want to hold RFK Jr. accountable for the damage that he has done to America's public health system. He is the reason that Spartanburg County, South Carolina, had a measles outbreak just last year. He has done grave damage to trust in the public health system in America, and he needs to be held accountable. And I think no one is better prepared to do that than me, a pediatrician with 20 years of experience. But the problems in our health care system are much bigger than that. Of course, so many people in South Carolina don't have access to affordable health care where they need it and when they need it. So we need to do something about the cost of prescription drugs. We need to hold our insurance companies accountable. Number one, we need to stop the Medicaid budget cuts. That will be my priority when I get to D.C. There's so much work to be done to fix our broken health care system. And I look forward to using my lived experience working within that broken system to make a system that actually meets the needs of everyone. Everyone in America. Have you you represent a state, obviously, that has one Republican senator, Tim Scott, as a majority Republican congressional caucus. One of those states appears flip last night. Have you gotten calls from Tim Scott, from other congressional Republicans, from statewide Republicans congratulating you, telling you they want to work with you? Yes, I got a call from Senator Tim Scott today congratulating me. We had a relatively brief conversation, but we talked about the fact that. Although we disagree on a lot, we both love the state of South Carolina and we owe it to South Carolinians to build a productive working relationship. And we're going to find time later next week to sit down and really talk about what this is going to look like moving forward. All right. Senator elect Dr. Annie Andrews, man, what a what a wild few months you have ahead of you. It's very exciting and and a remarkable race you ran. Thank you so much for making a little time tonight. Thank you for having me. It's an amazing political achievement to have a Democrat winning in South Carolina. It is also a really important thing for our country for a pediatrician who sees RFK Jr. as her arch nemesis in public health to be ascending Capitol Hill at this moment. Yes. I don't know if RFK Jr. is going to is going to survive the viper's nest thing that's happening right now inside the cabinet. But if he does, he's about to meet her. And also one more thing on it. It's just that there was this crazy narrative back in 2024. When Trump won that, like the vibe shift was everyone hated vaccines all of a sudden that there was some huge mandate. It's like, no, childhood vaccination is an 85, 90, 10, like 85, 15. And it not only is it a popular thing to vaccinate your children, it stops children from dying. And we didn't there's no there's no constituency for children to die of preventable deaths. Like, what are we doing here? And I'm so glad that she in that state can say, yeah, he's responsible for the. The outbreak that happened in our state. And I'm willing to hold I'm going to hold him accountable for it. And I'm going to fix this stuff. She also I mean, it is like a poster child that race for running on issues that people actually care about. I mean, she ran on being a pediatrician. She ran on the closure of rural hospitals. She ran on the importance of extending premiums. And they ran anti-trans ads against her. I mean, it was kind of like, what are you even talking about here? This is what we're experiencing. And they were just on another culture war planet. So it's just, again, a reminder of humanity, but also of how people actually care about the things that impact them. Pretty simple. Real quick. It's going to be very interesting to see where Tim Scott lands on the issue of vaccinations and child health, et cetera. Given is he going to be staying with Republicans on this issue? He's up in 2028. He's up in 2028. He's up in 2028. And Andrew is about is starting about to start six years in the United States Senate from the position of strength that you just saw her articulating on those issues. Right there. Just incredible. All right. So many states last night saw the kind of Democratic victory that hasn't happened in my lifetime. And I am as old as trees. I am really old. No place saw more of it up and down the ballot than Texas. Our colleague Rosa Flores has been reporting this Texas story on the ground for months now. She's going to join us live from Austin next. First, though, I've just been told we have yet another race call for you. This has just happened within the last minute or so. I've been watching this one. This is Nevada. Nevada, too. Nevada's second congressional district drawn explicitly to be a bulletproof conservative district in Nevada. David Flippos, the Republican candidate there, he, A, does not live in the district. B, did not win a bronze star with valor, despite his claims to the contrary. And C, did not spend Operation Desert Storm in the desert. He spent it in college, despite his claims to the contrary. But Teresa Benitez Thompson in a very, very, very. Republican-heavy district has defeated David Flippa, one of the most embarrassing and scandal-ridden Republican candidates. The Republican Party scared up for this race in Nevada. She has defeated him handily tonight. That has just been called by the Associated Press. All right, we're going live to Austin next. Stay with us. Okay. Texas. statewide. office in Texas. Besides the governor and lieutenant governor and obviously the two U.S. senators, the state of Texas elects a bunch of other statewide offices. The Texas Attorney General, a guy named Ken Paxton, you might have heard of him. The Texas State Comptroller, the Texas Land Commissioner, Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Texas Railroad Commissioner. Before last night's election, every single one of those offices was held by a Republican. Every single one. After last night's election, every single one of those statewide offices has turned blue. And you have probably been hearing, I'm so glad that whistle worked. That was like a really high stakes gambit at that point. I could have very easily just gone. Anyway. I love a whistle. Thank you. You've been hearing a lot about how Democrats haven't won statewide office in Texas since 1994. But that's true. But what you're looking at here, Democrats in control of all of these statewide offices at once. This doesn't just not happen since the 1990s. This has not happened since the 1960s. It has been 66 years. And not for nothing, Democrats flipped the seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, right? Putting the first Democrat on the Railroad Commission in 32 years. That is hugely important, not just in terms of statewide office, but because of the oil and gas industry in Texas, which is a thing. It is hard to understand the seismic nature of what happened in Texas last night, but we can at least start to understand what caused it. Look at this. When Trump ran for president in 2024, he won Latino voters in Texas by 10 points. Last night, Gina Hinojosa and James Tallarico each won the Latino vote in Texas by more than 30 points. That is a swing of more than 40 points in the Democrats' favor. Among Latino voters specifically. Absolutely seismic. Joining us now is MSNOW national reporter Rosa Flores, who is in Austin tonight. Rosa, you and I had a moment last night during election coverage where you were in the middle of an absolute cacophony, both knowing the results, knowing the people behind you were only just about to figure them out, bringing us original reporting on a concession that hadn't previously been nationally reported. And I was like, what? Rosa, can you explain more? I knew that I wanted to talk to you again, both about what it was like to do that reporting last night, but also about being a native Texan and being in the middle of this story. Please just tell me how this has been for you. Oh, my God. First of all, thank you so much, because I think I relied on you so much last night, Rachel. And I'm so glad we shared that moment together, because I knew that with you in the chair, girl, I was going to be good. That's wonderful. All of us who knew that. You know, Rachel, I've been, yes, yes. I've been thinking a lot about this. And I think the best way to explain that moment, and for all of those people in the room, a lot of them were from the Rio Grande Valley, where I grew up, is by talking about the American dream in the Rio Grande Valley. I grew up there. I'm a valley girl. I grew up on a dirt road, on food stamps. I didn't know how to speak English. And my American dream when I was three years old was to go to the Rio Grande Valley. And I didn't know how to speak English. I didn't know how to get on a yellow bus to go to a Texas public school, because I knew that if I could learn how to speak English, I could be anyone I wanted to be when I grew up. And that was the strength of the American dream. And that was the root of the American dream. And that was in the 80s and 90s. And so fast forward time, in the past two years, a lot of young girls, little girls like myself, in the Rio Grande Valley, what they saw were masked agents ripping families apart, their parents, their grandparents. And so the American dream was shattered in a lot of these communities. I reported from there, like you mentioned, the construction industry was destroyed. A big part of the American dream is you work hard, Rachel, you work really hard. Like, that's the whole point. And if you can't go out and work because you're afraid, you're afraid of being racially profiled. And you see individuals like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, who a lot of the people that I interviewed, and I can tell you personally, we all see that man. And what we saw were our fathers possibly being racially profiled, whether they were U.S. citizens or not. And so all of those emotions, you bring all of those emotions. And what you have is, for me, when I was a little girl growing in the United States, up in the 80s and 90s, my role models were my mother, my teachers, and a fancy lady in Austin with big Texas hair, and her name was Ann Richards. And so yesterday, what you saw in that room were a lot of women who have daughters, a lot of men who have daughters and, you know, young boys. And what they're going to be able to say is that their role models are their mom, their dad, and the governor of Texas, Gina Hinojosa. So there's so much emotion there. So when you look at the turnout of the Latino vote, just think about that. It's the idea of the return of the American dream for so many little girls like myself, who for I don't know how many years thought that that American dream was dimming or had died. And now we see it again. Rosa, I can't tell you, it's just incredibly moving to hear you talk about it in those terms. And what strikes me, because what we're talking about is, I mean, a shift from what Trump did in 2024 to what happened last night in Texas, as we were just talking about, a more than 30 point shift among Latino voters in Texas. And that doesn't just take kind of eyes on the prize. That continue to dream the American dream and to try to attain it for your family and for your kids and for your grandkids. It also takes faith that the democratic system can deliver it, that it is worth the risk, that it is worth defying the cynicism, that it is worth defying how hard it is to vote in Texas. And that in a state where in my lifetime, it's never been possible for a Democrat to break through at any level in Texas. It's never been possible even for all of these very inspirational, very capable candidates to break through. It took believing that this was worth doing and worth getting out for. And that's a feat of organizing, right? That's a feat of, that takes political skill to get people to, yes, I can and yes, I'm gonna. And I guess I wanted to ask what you can help us understand about that feat of political organizing, about the political skill, about just the work, the shooting. It took to get people to actually get out in those huge numbers. You know, I think of a few things. One, the quality of the candidates, how hard they worked. I mean, we followed them crisscross this state. They identified with voters, Rachel, in a way that was very genuine. I witnessed it. They would look people in the eye. They would listen. They would listen to the issues that they were facing and the problems that they were facing. And I think that's what it's all about. It started building hope. It started giving Texans hope. And hope is a really powerful thing when we're talking about the American dream, when we're talking about your children having a chance, your grandchildren having a chance. And Rachel, I got to tell you, I talked to so many people in this state, and I always like to understand the human emotion. And so I would ask him about it. I would ask him about that emotion, what emotions took them to the polls. And a lot of people were in tears, Rachel, telling me about ice ripping families apart, affordability. And I don't even like using the word affordability because it's so much more than that. The way that it was explained to me by Texans is like, Rosa, how am I going to put food on the table? How am I going to buy medicine? How am I going to pay rent if I'm in a fixed income? And Republicans win. Voter suppression, Rachel. Think about Tarrant County and how Republicans there cut polling places in areas in black and brown communities where nearly 11% of the people don't have access to a car. And those communities coming together and saying, you're trying to take our right away to vote and to change our government. Well, then that's going to motivate me even more to vote. So it's those very emotional things. And the last one that I'll mention, because this one was so, so powerful for so many Texans. And I feel like they felt the weight of this election. And that is the future of our democracy. I don't even know. I can't even find the words, Rachel, to explain because so many Texans feared that if this didn't happen, what we're witnessing right now, this blue tsunami across this country and, of course, this state, they didn't know what tomorrow would bring. They were worried about their children. They were worried about their grandchildren. And they wanted to do what they needed to do, which was vote and exercise their right to vote to make sure that the next generation has the America that you and I know. That's right. The way you stand up for your democracy is by using your democracy with an exclamation point right now in Texas, with an exclamation point in the front and the back of the word Texas. Rosa Flores, MSNOW National Correspondent. Rosa, we are so lucky to have you. And I personally just value you as a colleague so much. I can't even put it into words. Thank you so much. And thank you for sharing some of those reflections with us tonight. Thanks, Rosa. Wow. Thank you, Rachel. Wow. Oh, man. OK. The other nail-biter of a Senate race this year is playing out right now in Alaska. We do not know who's going to win in Alaska. The latest from that great state is just ahead. Stay with us. Oh, it's about time. I'm telling you, I've had enough of this crap. I've had enough of this crap.