Nov.11

electoral-vote.com

Dem 54

Ties 2

GOP 44

Winners of the 2026 Midterms

Sorry, this is a little bit of a cliché format, but we want to run down a list of the 10 biggest winners of the midterms, as we see it. We'll do losers on Friday:

1. Democracy: Donald Trump and his goons are fundamentally both anti-Democratic and anti-democratic and did many things to put their fingers on the scales to swing the election to Republican candidates. That said, the administration did not pull out all the stops. For example, there was no attempt to declare martial law, or deploy troops or any of that. We don't know if courage was lacking, or if Trump couldn't find enough people willing to break the law, or if they just aren't competent enough to pull something like that off. In any event, the elections were about as fair and as smooth as was possible, under the circumstances.
   
   Beyond that, however, the two most anti-democratic institutions in the government in the past decade have been Trump himself, and the Supreme Court—with its shadow docket, and its unsigned rulings, and its gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Trump, and in particular his underlings, will now be subject to a lot of oversight. And there's an excellent chance that the two most anti-democratic members of the Supreme Court, namely Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, will not keep their seats long enough to avoid being replaced by much more moderate judges. The Democrats might also have the momentum and the mojo to implement some Supreme Court reforms. A ban on accepting RVs and other such lavish gifts would be a strong starting point.
   
   
2. Centrist Democrats: "Centrist Democrat" has become something of a four-letter phrase in the minds of many members of the Party, primarily due to folks like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, not to mention Sen. John Fetterman (D?-PA). Now, the party is going to have a whole bunch of centrists in the Senate and in the House.
   
   Our gut feel is that they won't be quite the impediment that Manchin and Sinema were, and Fetterman is. First, because there are plenty of policy issues that the Democrats can embrace that really shouldn't be a problem for the centrists—regulation of data centers, anti-gerrymandering, restoration of food aid, anti-corruption, etc. Second, because there are a bunch of them. A skilled whip can ration the "no" votes, so that a handful of centrists can avoid being on the "wrong" side of an issue when doing so would not play well back home. Also, any one of them will have considerably less power to derail the whole agenda, and thus considerably less motivation to grandstand, in contrast to the way Manchin/Sinema/Fetterman have behaved when they were trying to achieve... whatever the heck it was they were trying to achieve.
   
   
3. Progressive Democrats: There are going to be 25 new members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, most obviously Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI), which will bring the size of that Caucus to at least 105 members. Most of them campaigned on Medicare for All, and they might soon get it. We have noted several times already, and will note many more times, that support for single-payer healthcare is now above 60% among the members of the voting public.
   
   
4. Black Democrats: Black Democrats have been the backbone of the Democratic coalition for multiple generations, and they showed up in force for this election. One result, of course, is a dramatic increase in the number of Black officeholders, including four newly minted Black governors. Another result is that Black voters in Southern states have seen that if they show up, big things can happen. South Carolina just elected a Democrat on the strength of Black votes, and Mississippi could be on the cusp of doing the same. The road to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 runs substantially through Black voters, particularly Black Southern voters, and they've earned the right to have a major voice in the process.
   
   
5. Never Trump Republicans: You would not be too far off to refer to 2026 as the "Bulwark" election. A whole gaggle of the kind of shady Republicans that are hated by the still-conservative folks at The Bulwark were washed away by the blue tsunami. MAGA is still with us, and is digging in (see above). But this is surely the first time that normie Republicans can see a potential light at the end of the tunnel.
   
   
6. Texas Voters: This may seem an odd, or perhaps partisan, inclusion, but democracy tends to work best when both parties are putting up good and viable candidates. In single-party states, you tend to end up with candidates who are either extreme or who are bland and unexciting. In Texas, Ken Paxton should be a convicted felon, but instead, he was elected the state's top law enforcement officer three times. In California, nobody seems to know what Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra (D) is going to do, because he never had to say much about what he stands for or what his priorities are. Once he overcame the mediocre primary field, he was a shoo-in, and really didn't have to campaign at all.
   
   In the new, blue Texas, Republicans will (hopefully) have to moderate, and stop putting up candidates who are corrupt sleazeballs, like Paxton and Greg Abbott (Abbott is not a crook like Paxton is, but he most certainly abused his powers). Meanwhile, promising Democrats will be willing to run for statewide office, since that will not be a guaranteed loss, and probable end-of-career. If all goes well, voters in the Lone Star State will have a lot better choices on their ballots than they've generally had for the last 20 years.
   
   
7. Mike Johnson: Being speaker is a tough job. That is even more true when you've got a very small majority. It's even more true still when a fair chunk of that majority is the Freedom Caucus. Johnson has generally looked pretty miserable the past 2 years, and the only part of the job he's really good at is saying, "Yes sir, Mr. Trump." We don't know if he'd admit it publicly, or even privately, but he's gotta be relieved that he is giving up his gavel, and that herding this pack of wild hyenas is now someone else's responsibility.
   
   
8. Canada: The tariffs are likely on life support, and will be gone, probably sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, the absolutely overwhelming victory of anti-MAGA forces has to send a message to Canadians that, just maybe, their southern neighbor hasn't completely lost its mind, and that there may be a day when the two countries can be true partners and friends once again.
   
   
9. Sen. Jon. Ossoff (D-GA): Jon Ossoff said that he is not interested in running for president in 2028. Maybe that is true, maybe it's not. But the magnitude of his win, in a Southern swing state, has everyone else thinking about him mounting a bid. And it surely has to have him thinking about it, as well. We tend to believe that Barack Obama, circa January 1, 2007, did not know for certain that he was going to throw his hat into the ring. But eventually he did, of course, because he realized the time was ripe, and that the road to the White House is littered with the bodies of would-be presidents who decided to bide their time to the next election, and then never got a shot.
   
   If Ossoff does jump in, he'll have instant frontrunner status. He has all the upsides of someone like Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY), but now with greater name recognition, thanks to Thursday's results. The election also aided Ossoff in one other very important way. Because Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms (D-GA) would pick his replacement if he had to resign to become president, an Ossoff presidential run would no longer put a Democratic-held Senate seat at risk.
   
   
10. The Democrats' 2028 Presidential Hopes: We're going to do a full item about this eventually, but we need to at least mention it here. Every cycle, there are a bunch of those "road to the White House" maps, that show the various plausible state combos that would put the Democrat or the Republican over the top. With all the states that just went blue, the Democrats now have a veritable cornucopia of "roads to the White House" they might pursue, depending on the candidate they end up nominating. Most obviously, if Texas actually goes Democratic in 2028, it is near impossible for the GOP to win. Meanwhile, the Republicans are going to have to defend all kinds of territory they did not previously have to work hard or spend much money to defend. They will have to choose very wisely which baskets they put their eggs into.
    
    On top of this, the Democratic presidential bench, which was already deep, just got a bit deeper. Meanwhile, the Republican bench is shockingly thin. We could probably name 25 Democrats who would not shock us if they were nominated in 2028. For the Republicans, we might be able to name half a dozen such candidates.

Our 10 biggest losers will be unveiled on Friday. (Z)