This article is being updated regularly
Welcome to Times Opinion’s midterm election round table discussion. In this article, Times columnists and other Opinion writers who have been writing and bickering and bantering about the 2026 cycle offer rolling commentary, analysis and observations on what they are seeing on election night — and what that might mean for America today and in the coming months and years.
Our columnists and contributors — Kristen Soltis Anderson, Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Cottle, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Matthew Yglesias — will be debating live in written conversation as the night goes on. We will update this article as results come in.
To tee us up on Monday, Nate Silver, the founder of the newsletter Silver Bulletin, and Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor in chief of Reason, offered their thoughts and prognostications. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Next up, the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Times contributing Opinion writer, a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups. Michelle Goldberg, a Times columnist, and Matthew Yglesias, a contributing Opinion writer, joined.
Scroll on to read the conversations or jump to their thoughts about how corruption mattered to voters, what happened in South Carolina, the shifts in Florida and the election of the first female Black governor.
PUBLISHED 11:09 P.M. e.S.T.
‘The Democratic Party, as it becomes bigger, is going to get more heterodox.’
Michelle Goldberg and Matthew Yglesias talk about what the Democrats will do next year and how the results might shape 2028. They are joined by Michelle Cottle and David French.
John Guida: Annie Andrews has won a Senate seat in South Carolina. It looks like Democrats are going to have a lot of new faces in their midst, and from surprising parts of the country.
Michelle Goldberg: The other side of the Republican Party becoming smaller and more purist is that the Democratic Party, as it becomes bigger, is going to get more heterodox. Some of these red state senators will, I’m sure, have policy priorities that make liberals unhappy, but there’s a fair amount of consensus on things like expanding access to health insurance.
Matthew Yglesias: It’ll be interesting to see to what extent party leadership manages to keep the caucus united on those kinds of consensus issues — expanding health insurance, ending the war in Iran, oversight on Donald Trump — versus finding the agenda dominated by intraparty fights. There’s a block of left-wing House members who’ve made it clear that they intend to try to demand that Hakeem Jeffries hold votes on stuff they know moderates won’t vote for, less to pass the bills than to set up future primary challenges.
It seems as though the size of the Democratic majority will be large enough that Jeffries can’t be held hostage by six to nine members, but the basic tension between the practical benefits of unity and the reality that there are big issues folks want to hash out in 2028 is going to be challenging to navigate.
Goldberg: Will it, though? Right now, everyone wants to end the war. I think you’ll see a lot of consensus on impeaching Pete Hegseth if he sticks around, and on investigating the really flagrant Trump family corruption. And all the Democrats will, I’d imagine, vote to restore the Affordable Care Act subsidies Trump slashed.
Guida: What two or three issues will act to unite this new, reshaped Democratic Party, particularly with many new members from red states?
Michelle Cottle: The House Democrats have already announced their plan for a first 100 days agenda, with an eye toward broadly popular issues that unify the caucus. They are aware that, in policy terms, they have been elected to deal with affordability issues — the thing that Trump has dismissed as a hoax. Rolling back the Medicaid cuts and restoring the A.C.A. tax credits are high up there, as is ending the Iran war and killing Trump’s tariffs. Running on a parallel track will be holding this out of control president and administration officials to account. It will be a tricky juggling act, even trickier in the Senate. But they intend to come out hard and fast on these items to signal that they have heard the voters.
Yglesias: Agree with all that — one tough question for Dems is going to be what ending the Iran War looks like in practice. That’s hard to do from Congress even as it’s a total no-brainer as a message.
Guida: As the new Democratic majorities settle in, the 2028 presidential race will be quietly and then not so quietly emerging. How much will the demands of the presidential primary shape the politics of the new congressional majorities?
Yglesias: A huge known unknown hanging over this is does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez want to run. And if she doesn’t, who picks up the baton as the heir apparent to the Bernie Sanders movement. Ro Khanna seems to be “next in line” but people don’t like him nearly as much. If she’s in, she’s very formidable and her campaign will necessarily end up intersecting with the factional battles in the House in a way that will make life complicated.
Cottle: Tonight’s results look like they are going to allow every corner of the caucus to claim victory — which means the internecine tensions will grind on. And unlike a midterm, a presidential election really requires a party to offer a message and plan about what they stand for and how they intend to lead — as opposed to sticking with what they are running against. That’s OK. Democracy is supposed to be messy.
David French: I can imagine a short-lived Democratic consensus on two points — inflation and corruption. If the unmistakable mandate from the voters centers on those two issues, it would be very smart for Democrats to make Republicans take tough votes on tariffs, for example, and perhaps the impeachment of Hegseth. Make Republicans stand with Trump (again) on two of the most unpopular aspects of his administration.
But I absolutely see Michelle’s point. Every corner of the Democratic caucus is going to do well tonight, and so each faction will be able to claim an extraordinary electoral victory.
PUBLISHED 10:46 P.M. e.S.T.
‘Basically, the people versus the billionaires.’
Michelle Goldberg and Matthew Yglesias talk about James Talarico, populism and taxes.
John Guida: It’s still early, but given what a terrible night it looks like for the G.O.P., what is your early assessment of how this changes Republican politics, if at all?
Matthew Yglesias: It certainly ought to prompt some rethinking about the political merits of tariffs, the wisdom of so much deference to Donald Trump and the increasing entanglement of Republican Party politics with right-wing edge lord meme culture. But defeat often produces paradoxical results by leaving behind a congressional caucus that is smaller and more extreme, made up almost exclusively of people with supersafe seats.
Michelle Goldberg: Matt, I hear you about rump parties becoming more extreme, though in this case some of Trump’s most unpopular policies — tariffs in particular — were also unpopular with conservative Republicans. And everyone is going to be jockeying to chart a post-Trump course.
Guida: Let’s talk about populism for a minute. Barack Obama made the most of his appearances on behalf of Abdul El-Sayed and Jon Ossoff. Michelle, you wrote a great column about the Cheesecake Factory affair and what it suggests about Democrats and populist politics. Are Democrats rediscovering something about Obama’s politics? Or is this an evolution of Obama politics?
Goldberg: Some of the most successful candidates this cycle, especially James Talarico, spoke to a hunger among voters for a more elevated and less divisive politics, much as Obama did in 2008. The difference, I think, was that they tied it to a much more populist economic message — basically, the people versus the billionaires.
At the kickoff rally for his Senate campaign, Talarico said, “The people at the top — the Elon Musks, the Rupert Murdochs, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world — they spend so much time and energy keeping us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power.” It’s like Obama’s speech from the 2004 Democratic convention mixed with the language of Occupy Wall Street.
Yglesias: The question of what kind of populism Michelle is talking about will actually amount to is one of the most interesting questions going forward. I’ve seen Gina Hinojosa’s campaign in Texas described as an example of the populist theory of politics, and I get what that is about.
At the same time, I saw her swear she’d never implement an income tax in Texas. Democrats seem set to win a trifecta in North Carolina, but a property-tax-cap ballot measure is likely to pass. There’s an incredible level of public anger at billionaires and economic elites, but it’s not manifesting in what I would consider to be a classic political ethic of solidarity, where we embrace higher taxes and a stronger social safety net. It’s going to get a lot harder to build a data center, but that’s not going to fundamentally alter people’s economic experiences.
Goldberg: I agree that Democrats have glossed over the need for more tax revenue. But while there might be policy limitations to their everybody-versus-billionaires politics, it was enormously powerful electorally.
And in Texas specifically, people were enraged about both data centers and school vouchers, which were pushed by billionaire donors. Both are things that a new governor can do something about. More broadly, people feel like these oligarchs are remaking the world without any sort of democratic input. The results will, I would think, make politicians more wary of giving them carte blanche.
Guida: What would fundamentally alter people’s economic experience? Matt, you wrote a guest essay that got at that question recently. With divided government, do you see the next two years as possibly laying the groundwork, or at least entertaining competing ideas within and between parties on that topic?
Yglesias: The sort of downer thesis of that column was that if we want to address affordability in a sustainable way — bringing the rate of inflation back down to 2 percent while bringing down interest rates so people can get mortgages and auto loans again — it’s going to require unfashionable ideas like deficit reduction. I really don’t see much evidence that politicians are inclined to go in that direction — Democrats have become more progressive in a lot of ways over the past 10 years, but also more averse to raising taxes. Republicans seem to have totally lost interest in economic issues other than touting mass deportation as a cure for all problems.
But tariffs seem like a likely short-term flashpoint. As Michelle was saying before, this particular Trump initiative has always been controversial among Republicans, and while some more progressive Democrats used to agree with Trump on trade, they’ve really realigned on that — Abdul El-Sayed was in some ways the strongest soldier for free trade during this campaign. There’s also a bipartisan energy bill pending before Congress that really could help people with energy costs. But I feel a big disconnect between this kind of wonky discussion of policy and the basic mood of the public, which is really angry and doesn’t seem very oriented around technical details.
Goldberg: I’m not sure if this is the right time for a wonky technocratic conversation, because there’s only so much Democrats can do as long as Trump is president. Eventually, they’ll have to muster the political will to raise taxes on the rich, and not just the megarich. There’s a lot they can do to, say, expand the housing supply and thus bring down costs. I also think people just want to see their leaders trying. One reason Zohran Mamdani is so popular in New York is because he seems like he’s constantly running around trying to fix things. A lot of the material changes have been relatively minor, but there’s a real sense of hope and even buoyancy in the city because things seem to be moving in the right direction. Sometimes vibes count for a lot.
PUBLISHED 10:09 P.M. e.S.T.
‘Democratic voters are looking for people who will stand against the corruption and unethical behavior of the current administration.’
Kristen Soltis Anderson and Jamelle Bouie talk about the ethical dimension of some of the races this year. They are joined by Matthew Yglesias.
John Guida: Jamelle, you said, in talking about some of the Democratic candidates this cycle, that there is a sense “of maybe a politics that is less about division, less about hatred, more about trying to understand each other,” as well as “a sense of a politics of morality, of ethical commitment.” With the results so far, do you get the sense that this thought is being confirmed? Kristen, do you get any sense that there is a desire for such a shift in our politics?
Jamelle Bouie: Looking at the way that Jon Ossoff has cruised to victory — and the strong likelihood that James Talarico and Adam Hamilton will as well — the results have very much vindicated the idea that Democratic voters are looking for people who will stand against the corruption and unethical behavior of the current administration. I’d say that might go for other groups of voters as well, given the extent to which they have said that they view corruption as a major issue of concern.
Kristen Soltis Anderson: Voters have long said that they want candidates who are ethical, willing to build bridges and so forth. The trouble is they sometimes don’t vote that way, or they wind up feeling they must choose between the lesser of two evils. What I’m struck by in some of the pre-election polls in races like Texas is that most of, say, Talarico’s voters said their vote was actually more a show of support for him rather than just to oppose Ken Paxton. Ideally, as a party, you want to elevate candidates who aren’t just viewed as the less bad people who will drag your ideological priorities across the finish line — you want to give people someone to vote for.
Guida: Is this one of the better Senate classes of candidates for Democrats across the board in recent midterms?
Anderson: Democrats had a very red-state-heavy map they were staring down in the wake of Donald Trump winning in 2024. The wake-up call that Democrats experienced from that defeat, combined with the reality that they’d need people who could win in red territory, meant they needed to pick the right people.
In 2010, Republicans did well, but they messed up some of their opportunities with candidates who were poor fits (e.g., Christine O’Donnell). So far, though there are some candidates who caused Democrats heartburn — Troy Jackson as an unimpressive follow-up to the Graham Platner debacle, Abdul El-Sayed and the split in the party in Michigan — the wave may be more than enough to sustain them. I’m not seeing any races where Democrats are actually leaving seats on the table because they picked a bad candidate for the seat.
Matthew Yglesias: I guess if you wanted to second-guess one of these races, it would be Florida Senate, where Angie Nixon seems pretty dynamic but not a great fit for the state.
Anderson: Yes, Matt is right about Angie Nixon in Florida, though I’m not wholly convinced that her primary opponent Alexander Vindman would have won, either.
Yglesias: Agreed. Dems just never had a very strong contender in the field here.
PUBLISHED 9:53 P.M. e.S.T.
‘It’s good evidence that Donald Trump’s political instincts are not that strong.’
Kristen Soltis Anderson and Jamelle Bouie talk about the South Carolina Senate race and the implications of the Georgia race.
John Guida: Jamelle, with Keisha Lance Bottoms’s win for governor of Georgia, that could have implications for Jon Ossoff in terms of any consideration of a 2028 presidential run, right? Kristen, what do you make of the results in Georgia and the way the South Carolina Senate race is developing?
Kristen Soltis Anderson: Georgia is much less of a seismic development than a South Carolina race call would be; Georgia already had two incumbent Democratic senators and went for Joe Biden in 2020. But both races have significant 2028 implications. For Georgia, it puts a spotlight on both of the states’ senators who have been floated as possible presidential contenders. And in South Carolina — my goodness, if Annie Andrews wins there, she will have a very busy dance card of 2028 Democratic candidates seeking her favor, given that state’s place in the primary calendar.
But also, I just feel like the decision to pull Darline Graham into this contest was so clearly the wrong move on Donald Trump’s part. I can’t imagine losing my brother and suddenly having the president of the United States pulling me into this race. There were alternatives Republicans could have put forward.
Jamelle Bouie: With Lance Bottoms’s win, the main implication for Ossoff is that, if he runs (and Raphael Warnock as well), she’ll be able to replace him with a Democrat, and so an Ossoff run does not jeopardize a Democratic Senate majority. I want to agree with Kristen that the choice to elevate Darline Graham was just a huge, needless error. And it’s good evidence that Trump’s political instincts are not that strong.
Guida: Kristen, what do you make of some of the Democratic candidates this cycle? Do you see a “candidate quality” discrepancy between Republicans and Democrats?
Anderson: Democrats were able to find some candidates to run in red states who would plausibly run on a message that sounded nonpartisan or even conservative in some places. They did not have great candidate quality across the board, but in a wave election, everyone looks like a genius who has the recipe for success in the future. (Recall the wrong lessons Republicans learned from their wins in the Tea Party election of 2010.) What will be fascinating to watch is whether this midterm will be seen by the Democratic base as proof that Democrats need candidates who can play to the right or whether the big wave proves the Democrats should be unafraid to run boldly to the left.
PUBLISHED 9:25 P.M. e.S.T.
‘The blue wave that the polls forecast appears to be building.’
Kristen Soltis Anderson and Jamelle Bouie focus on the early results from Georgia, North Carolina and across the country.
John Guida: The Senate races in Georgia and North Carolina have been called for the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Roy Cooper. New Hampshire as well. What are your reactions to the results so far?
Kristen Soltis Anderson: Think about this election as a battle of competing forces. On the one hand, President Trump’s poor job approval, voters’ dim assessment of the economy, frustration over corruption, bad candidates and significant Democratic voter enthusiasm were knowable ahead of time. But unknowable was how strong the force of partisanship would be. You can think of a state like Texas or South Carolina as being held in place by a strong magnet. It would take an enormous collection of forces to knock these states off their partisan axis.
So far, it appears those countervailing forces are quite strong. The blue wave that the polls forecast appears to be building. The incursions into deeply Republican territory are significant.
Jamelle Bouie: My main reaction to the results is that this is total vindication of the argument that the 2024 election was a narrow, limited and contingent victory for Trump. There was no “vibe shift” or MAGA cultural consolidation; voters wanted lower prices and cheaper essential goods. And the extent to which Trump could not — and would not — deliver that proved to be fatal to his coalition. These results are a reminder of the fact that political gravity exists, and that a party should not get high on its own supply.
Guida: Kristen, you mentioned that the incursions into Republican territory are significant. In an election preview, you mentioned the race in Florida’s Ninth District. Why did you identify that one? Anything to do with your Gators affiliation?!
Anderson: I’m from Central Florida, so there’s a little bit of home court advantage for me when I’m analyzing that area. Darren Soto has long represented the part of Orlando where I grew up, but his redrawn district would be a test case of two big Republican gambles: that many Latino voters would stay in the G.O.P. coalition and that new district lines would net a few Republican seats in the House. So far, the gerrymander appears to have borne little fruit, and early evidence suggests that Latino voters are trending back away from Republicans across many places across the state.
Guida: Kristen, beyond Latino voters, what other elements of Trump’s 2024 coalition might be crumbling tonight?
Anderson: Younger voters are another group where, to borrow Jamelle’s framing, some Republicans got high on their own supply. After losing young voters by bruising numbers during the Obama era and early in Trump’s first term, Republicans did remarkably well in 2024 with these voters. It was true that Democrats had lost younger voters’ confidence and Republicans capitalized, becoming culturally relevant and leveraging new channels like podcasts. But many mistook that for a conservative realignment of millennials and Gen Z that I never saw borne out in any data on their actual issue positions. Lo and behold, younger voters seem to have returned firmly into the Democrats’ camp.
Guida: Jamelle, in a preview, you also identified three races you were paying close attention to — all in the South. How are they looking? Are you seeing any results so far in these areas that suggest strong support for Democrats from Black voters?
Bouie: I have to say, a Democratic win in South Carolina would be one of the most earth-shattering results I have seen in some time. And when we look across the South — at Roy Cooper’s easy win in North Carolina and Jon Ossoff’s in Georgia, at Keisha Lance Bottoms’s win for Georgia governor, at the fact that Mississippi is still quite competitive and the fact that Florida almost flipped — we see the impact of the striking mobilization of Black voters, as well as the slow but real erosion Republicans have had with white votes in the Deep South.
Oh, and it should also be said that Lance Bottoms’s win makes her the first Black woman elected governor in American history.
PUblished 7:30 P.m. E.S.T.
‘Trump has done basically everything that you’re not supposed to do.’
John Guida: Most polls have dropped, and the campaigns have basically ended. With election results coming in, let’s level-set.
Obviously, the polling has been very strong for Democrats. Still, the election analyst Sean Trende recently offered some perspective. He wrote: “A great Democratic year doesn’t mean Democrats take the Senate. An awesome Democratic year doesn’t mean Democrats take the Senate. It takes an extraordinary year for Democrats to win the Senate.”
Is this looking like an “extraordinary” year?
Nate Silver: I’m a big fan of Sean’s, but I slightly disagree. The big thing about midterm elections is that waves are kind of the default outcome, and it’s mostly a question of their magnitude. President Trump’s approval numbers and the G.O.P. position on the generic ballot have steadily worsened in a way that evokes past waves, like the one in 2006.
The one thing Republicans really have going for them is the very red territory in which the Senate states are being contested. It’s not obvious from first principles whether an otherwise big Democratic year necessarily translates to flipping a Senate race in a state Trump won by 14 points, like Texas.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Every election is the most important election of our lifetimes, right? That’s what we’ve been told, anyway. I do think this one is important. I don’t know if this is an extraordinary year, though. It’s a weird year. I’m more than a little worried about what Democrats might decide a “tsunami” means in terms of how they should govern, if or when one happens. A big blue sweep doesn’t mean voters love Democrats’ policy proposals; it most likely means they’re sick to death of Republicans.
Guida: What are you going to be looking for as results start to come in?
Silver: Kentucky is one of the first states to close its polls, and the Sixth District in Lexington is competitive, basically a pure tossup in our model, even though Trump won it by 15 points. It’s the Republican states that generally count faster. It could be an early bellwether for a Democratic wave or a polling miss.
Beyond that, I think people need to be careful about how many conclusions they draw early in the night, because with all these different tranches of votes — mail, in-person early voting, Election Day voting — what order states report their votes in matters, and that differs a lot from state to state. There will be some red and blue mirages.
Mangu-Ward: I’m kind of obsessed with the Alaska Senate race, where the outcome is going to hinge at least somewhat on the state’s unusual open primaries and ranked-choice voting. So I guess that means I’ll be up awfully late. Like so many pundits, I have full-fledged PTSD about jumping the gun from early results. I’ll be looking for Nate Silver to tell me what to think.
Guida: Right, so let’s talk about Nate and his gut … and the Silver Bulletin model. Nate, both the model and your gut have pointed in the same direction: a very strong night for Democrats, with your Senate forecast on Monday back up to 53 seats for Democrats. I assume that hasn’t changed? Katherine, with all these Senate races showing super-close contests, how are you assessing the elections?
Silver: Especially in the New York Times/Siena polls, there have been favorable trends for Democrats in the blue states: Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan have been expanding their margins, and Troy Jackson in Maine has had some of his best numbers recently (though polls are more mixed there). So there’s pretty strong evidence that Democratic voters are coming home. And you don’t see that evidence in the red states for Republicans, or at least not consistently. Probably a bit in Alaska, but that may be about the various Mary Peltola controversies than any sort of improved morale. The polls are going the wrong way for Roger Marshall in Kansas, though, and to a slightly lesser extent for Ken Paxton in Texas.
If Republican turnout is strong, that could offset some of the votes that Democrats have already banked in early voting. It might not be enough to save the Senate for the G.O.P., depending on how many independents and other Trump disapprovers are flipping, but that would make for a long night, maybe even a recount or two. If those Republicans who feel ambivalent about Trump don’t show up, that’s when you get into the tsunami scenarios.
Mangu-Ward: One more thing about the Alaska Senate race is that they’re voting on whether to keep that unusual mechanism! That seems like a case where Alaska is performing its designated role as a laboratory of democracy quite well. There has to be a better way to do this whole elections thing.
But mostly, Trump decided to make himself the protagonist of every story and every race. Republicans are discovering the downside of that. When things aren’t going well — as they are not — Americans are going to place the blame with the man who said he was in control and vote accordingly.
Guida: Katherine, you said you do think this midterm election is important. Why? Nate, does it strike you as a consequential election as well?
Mangu-Ward: Both parties are looking to claim a mandate of some kind, which isn’t really on offer. If Democrats have an extraordinary year, it is almost certainly a straightforward case of the public engaging in a traditional midterm ritual of throwing the bums out. Should Republicans hold on, they’ll be even more unrepentantly MAGA during Trump’s final two years. One thing libertarians understand better than most is that sometimes all you can do is vote against something.
Silver: Like I said on “The Ezra Klein Show,” it’s basically the last chance for voters to repudiate Trump, and that inherently makes it momentous. Trump had a bad 2018 and lost in 2020, but I’m not sure either of those really produced the catharsis Democrats were hoping for. Republicans held control of the Senate in 2018 and there was a big polling miss in 2020, even if it wasn’t enough to cost Joe Biden the Electoral College. People have just seen the movie so many times where Trump is counted out and then returns. The bottom can fall out of presidencies in lame-duck terms, however, which is why 2006 makes for a natural comparison.
Guida: Nate, you said in that discussion that a rough night for Republicans “would mark the end of the Trump era.” You also noted that as soon as the elections are called, “the 2028 election campaign begins.” As the dust settles on 2026, what will that look like or mean for both parties? Katherine, how do you see the final two years of Trump’s presidency going?
Silver: People should be careful not to extrapolate too much from 2026 to assume Democrats will win in 2028, even if polls are right and they have a good night. But Trumpism without Trump has repeatedly been a losing proposition for Republicans. They didn’t have a good 2018, and they also had a fairly poor 2022, considering Biden’s bad approval ratings. They usually lose things like special elections, runoffs and ballot propositions. The infrequent voters that Trump has some magical gift for turning out tend not to participate in midterm-type environments.
Mangu-Ward: If Democrats do well tonight, and especially if some of the more progressive or Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates do well, that will tempt fringe Democrats into the 2028 presidential primary. I don’t think that necessarily reflects what the electorate wants. Meanwhile, if Democrats in Congress spend the next two years going after Trump with various investigations, hearings and possible impeachments, they’re not going to have any policy achievements to run on in 2028.
Guida: Trump’s fingerprints have been all over this election, and not just because he is sitting in the White House and has largely set the policy agenda of the past year and a half. He has also shaped, directly or indirectly, Senate races in North and South Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Is there an alternate universe where this midterm cycle could not have been so squarely a referendum on him?
Silver: Midterms are always a referendum on the ruling party broadly and the president specifically, but Trump has done basically everything that you’re not supposed to do by making himself the center of attention instead of keeping a lower profile. It was probably a coincidence, but the big shift in the polls that took the Senate from a tossup to leaning Democrat came right after his midterm convention. Republican candidates are barely mentioning him in ads, but he’s never been one to take the hint.
Mangu-Ward: I can no longer remember or imagine a world where Trump is not the main character. It’s been a decade, and we have a couple of years to go. But this is the problem with a locked-down two-party system. To vote against Trump’s tariffs, you might have to vote for a protectionist Democrat. To vote against Trump’s war, you might have to vote for a moderately hawkish Democrat. To vote against Trump’s executive overreach, you might have to vote for someone who was happy to hand those same powers to Biden or Barack Obama. There’s no way to use your major party vote to convey that you’re sick to death of all of it or communicate your real policy preferences.
Guida: One of the key phrases of the 2026 midterms has been “candidate quality.” As in, with a few exceptions, Democrats seem to have fielded very good candidates in key races across the country, and Republicans … not as much. Nate, is there a way to quantify what someone like Adam Hamilton in Kansas brings to a race? Katherine, any idea why there has been such a discrepancy between the parties on candidate quality?
Silver: For the most part, the narratives about candidate quality are actually supported by the polls this year. Ken Paxton in Texas and Marshall in Kansas are underperforming by several points each; Susan Collins is overperforming; Abdul El-Sayed is slightly underperforming; and so on, as compared with both the partisan base lines you’d expect given the overall (blue) political climate and the respective gubernatorial races in those states.
Mangu-Ward: At Reason, we have been documenting Trump’s yearslong campaign to push out anyone who is even remotely principled or heterodox from the Republican Party. In a profile of Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, who occasionally broke with Trump, I wrote about how Massie was a dying breed — and then he lost his primary. After a decade of Trump, the G.O.P. is essentially growing a monoculture of candidates. It’s fields of MAGA as far as the eye can see. And like all monocultures, it’s vulnerable to changing conditions or pestilence.
Guida: Are there particular candidates you are rooting for or against tonight?
Silver: I have to be honest: I have my preferences as a citizen, but I’m mostly rooting for candidates that will make our model look smart. And I suppose I am rooting for candidate quality differences to matter. It would be better for the country if voters were less reflexively partisan.
Mangu-Ward: No, and given how things went for him after I said nice things about Massie, I’m not sure any candidates would even want my praise at this point.
Guida: The races for governor have not received as much attention as who will hold power in Congress. Yet Americans tend to like their governors very much. Right now, there are only two governors in the country whose constituents view them unfavorably. Are there any races for governor that have caught your eye or interest you?
Silver: The Vermont governor’s race might be the most subtly interesting one in the country. Republican Phil Scott won by more than 50 points in 2024. (Vermont governors have two-year terms.) But the polls are all over the place, with some showing a tie or even a lead for the Democrat, Amanda Janoo. I’m happy it’s a low-profile race because it’s not one that I’d want to stake a lot of credibility on.
Mangu-Ward: Data centers have been a major issue in the Ohio governor’s race, and I hold the increasingly unpopular position that they are mostly good. (It’s one of vanishingly few things about which I agree with Trump.) Both candidates in that race offered different forms of opposition to data centers. Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president on a surprisingly pro-tech platform, but in the Ohio governor’s race he backed off on data centers, perhaps in an attempt to appease the public. I wonder if that will work?
Guida: What most surprised you about this year’s midterms? Were there issues that were overlooked or candidates that underperformed?
Silver: In some ways, what’s surprised me the most is how long people in the news industry took to come around to the proposition that Trump has left Republicans in a highly perilous position. Talk of a conservative “vibe shift” should probably have died out sooner, especially after Democrats’ strong results in New Jersey and Virginia last year — and after Trump started a war with Iran, which was exactly the sort of conflict that he promised to avoid.
On the individual races side, I’ve been surprised by polls showing Democrats as competitive in South Carolina and — if you believe internal polls, which you probably shouldn’t — even in Louisiana. Those states are typically rather sticky, without a lot of swing voters. It would take a huge turnout differential among Black voters, which would be the reversal of the usual pattern in midterms. I’m not sure I buy it, although there is some evidence for it in the early voting data.
Mangu-Ward: Every election surprises me anew with how little policy actually gets debated. Trade, war and immigration are all signature issues for Trump. A Democratic “tsunami” could make a substantial difference in how those policies play out. But the election seems to be mostly vibes and scandals in its final days. This is partially a consequence of the fact that the G.O.P. is no longer anchored in ideology and Democrats are divided on their ideological commitments.
Guida: Thank you. Enjoy Election Day (and beyond).
Kristen Soltis Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer, is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups. She is the author of “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up).”
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
Katherine Mangu-Ward is the editor in chief of Reason.
Nate Silver, the founder and former editor of FiveThirtyEight and the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” writes the newsletter Silver Bulletin. He is a part-time adviser for Polymarket.
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger” and the newsletter Slow Boring.
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The post ‘Everyone Is Going to Be Jockeying to Chart a Post-Trump Course’: Opinion Writers Assess the Midterms appeared first on New York Times.
