2025/26/27/28 Primaries & General Elections

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GOP blame game

Vice President JD Vance pinned Republicans’ massive midterm losses on the Iran war that President Donald Trump started. The president said that’s “largely true,” but he would do it again.

👀 Live updates: Trump administration gearing up for aggressive oversight

📈 Soaring stocks: Dow has best post-midterm elections day in 44 years A blue tidal wave Texas. Kansas. South Carolina. Ohio. Democratic candidates flipped seats in one red state after another. And after a decade of dismal showings, the party roared back to life in Middle America. 🥳 ‘It’s about time’: Voters celebrate with tears, cheers and disbelief + Seismic shift: How Mississippi became an unlikely Senate battleground Winners and losers Newly elected Black governors and the religious left have a lot to celebrate, along with Democrats across the country of course. The biggest losers? Trump, Vance and Elon Musk — but there’s a lengthy list. CNN’s Aaron Blake breaks it down. 🌏 Foreign policy: What Trump’s setback could mean for Iran, Israel and Ukraine Lame-duck president Trump enters his final two years in office wounded but determined to retain an iron grip on power. Meanwhile the jockeying of potential GOP candidates for 2028 has already begun. ▶️ Watch: Trump boasts about ballroom in first speech after midterms For CNN subscribers A wide swath of the electorate — including women, young voters and independents — shifted their votes toward the Democrats in this midterm election. Here’s what the data shows. 💸 Why the big swing? It was the economy all along + Analysis: Trump is forced to face a damning reality

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At What Cost? (Matt Ramey / AP)

View in browser Democrats were jubilant last night, and for good reason: Few midterms in modern American history have produced such a thorough repudiation of a party as the Republicans experienced in this election. But celebrations have a pesky way of being followed by hangovers. For Democrats, the cause of their morning-after headache is affordability. Across the country, Democratic candidates campaigned and won by railing against Donald Trump’s handling of the economy. When they take control of Congress in January, however, they’ll find themselves with few direct levers to bring down prices. We don’t need to guess what happens to politicians who campaign on affordability and don’t deliver. We saw it last night. Democrats can hardly be blamed for placing affordability concerns at the center of their campaign, alongside discussion of rampant corruption. This was good electoral politics—you want to run against your opponents’ weakness—and also good republican politics: It’s healthy for candidates to respond to voters’ concerns. The price of orange juice is up nearly 25 percent since Trump returned to office. The price of the candy that trick-or-treaters received on Halloween has risen 71 percent in five years. The average national price of a gallon of gas was more than $4 on Election Day for the first time in history. These price increases are a drag on many Americans’ budgets. Real wages—the difference between nominal wage growth and inflation—have declined over the past year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers released this week. For the Democrats, this has been a perverse political godsend. Long the undisputed party of workers, the Democratic Party has recently developed a reputation among voters for caring more about elites and cultural issues than basic economics. Trump demonstrated the power of focusing on inflation in 2024, when he assailed President Biden and Vice President Harris over rising prices. Trump never demonstrated any sort of plan for how he’d bring prices down, but his emphasis on the matter—along with Democrats’ muddled messaging about it—helped him overcome voters’ deep hesitations about his character. Since taking office, though, his lack of any vision for whipping inflation has been obvious. He has not pursued policies to fight high costs. He has demanded, in vain, that the Federal Reserve lower interest rates, which would be inflationary. He has mocked and dismissed the concept of affordability as a “hoax.” And although presidents typically have very limited short-term power to affect an economy, he found a way to make inflation worse by launching an ill-advised war in Iran, which he now has no idea how to end. This made Republicans very vulnerable in the midterms. But even with impressive wins in both the Senate and the House, Democrats will have few ways to bring prices down. On corruption, by some measures the top issue in the election, Democrats have room to hold Trump and his administration accountable using investigative powers. But on affordability, rhetoric and doomed bills designed to send a message are almost all they can offer. If reliable methods of bringing prices down in the short term existed, Republicans in Congress would have tried them this year. With unified Democratic control, Congress will be able to pass legislation, but Trump has already vowed to become “Mr. Veto.” Democrats can and will attempt to pressure Trump to end the conflict with Iran, but as the United States has seen repeatedly this century, starting a war is a lot easier than getting out of one. “People are impatient. They want answers now. They’re economically insecure,” Gina Raimondo told me in an interview last week. Raimondo, the commerce secretary under Biden, is often mentioned as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. “If we’re sitting here in a year and a half and we haven’t done a damn thing about cost and prices, people might say, Well, forget about you; I’m going to try the other guy.” Any parallel with voter rejection of Trump is imperfect. A president tends to shoulder more blame from voters than Congress does, a dynamic that is likely to be exacerbated with Trump, who is compelled to dominate attention, although it is sometimes to his disadvantage. But even if voters don’t blame Democrats specifically, they may still feel disillusioned with all politicians’ inability to bring quick change. That points to another risk for Democrats in 2028: not that people who voted blue in the midterms will turn against them, but that they will tune out entirely, just as the many disaffected Trump voters who opted not to vote in 2026, rather than flipping to Democrats, did. The fact that party leaders are aware of these challenges doesn’t give them any easier answers to the affordability conundrum. Democrats had no choice but to campaign on high costs, but they may still pay a price for it. Related: The simple message that produced a Democratic landslide America’s latest inflation check-in doesn’t look good for Trump.

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Midterm elections crack open political map, putting conservative states back in play

For a decade, the political map has been largely stagnant, locked into the same half-dozen or so political backgrounds, reflecting a polarized, evenly divided country. On Tuesday, voters took a wrecking ball to that map, electing Democrats in states that were long considered reliably Republican. Read More.

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How Trump and Republicans lost the 2026 midterm elections, according to The AP Voter Poll

After more than a decade with Donald Trump at the epicenter of U.S. politics, most voters appear exhausted and exasperated by him, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of midterm voters in all 50 states. Read More.