Thursday, November 5, 2026 · Evening Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. Voters handed the ruling party a historic beating. Democrats [flipped seven Senate seats, nearly 30 House districts, five governorships and up to 12 state legislative chambers while Republicans flipped none](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/04/democrats-2026-midterm-election-results.html), handing Democrats both chambers of Congress and reshaping the balance of power in Washington. In the statehouses — where abortion, labor and tenant law actually get written — Democrats took at least 12 new majorities and at least 300 seats previously held by Republicans. Commentators called it the death blow to Trump's coalition.

The rout was built on the administration's own record. The Post traces it to a campaign that put a distracted Trump front and center, and a war no one asked for, running into a wall of voter anger, but it was the cost of living that finally delivered the rout. Capital could not buy its way out: young men swung away from Trump even after tech billionaires spent a record amount on the midterms, and strategists credit voters of color as the driving force. In California, Democrats won House races up and down the state under the new maps approved by Proposition 50.

The machinery of coercion read the moment too. ICE was secretly ordered to stop all immigration raids on Election Day, with an activist who monitors enforcement reporting the least activity observed all year. Where the right held ground it was through engineered maps: in Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee and the legislature carved the state's sole district in which white voters were not a majority into three.

Trump now enters a lame-duck phase, promising to use his veto power, and would rather change the subject to the ballroom and Iran. His allies dig in: Justice Alito does not plan to step down before the term's end, even as Democrats are set to seize the Senate in January, while Fox went to painful lengths to blame everything but the president. The incoming majority is already preparing to investigate Trump and the companies in his orbit.