In today’s edition … The depth of Republican losses is staggering … Dems had a great night in state legislative races … but first …
The big news
Senate Majority PAC, the top Democratic super PAC focused on winning back the Senate, and its affiliated groups spent more than $550 million to flip seven seats and win the majority in the chamber, the group told donors in a memo late Wednesday.
The groups spent $150 million in Ohio, $67 million in Iowa and Michigan, $65 million in Maine, $40 million in Texas, $14 million in Kansas and $750,000 in South Carolina, all states that Democrats carried. The group is still spending in Alaska and Mississippi, where races have not yet been called, and it drew down spending in Georgia and North Carolina, two states Democrats carried handily, after Labor Day.
“Nobody gave us this map at the start of the cycle; we built it, state by state and voter by voter,” said J.B. Poersch, the head of the Democratic organization, who credits likely incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer with recruiting strong candidates. “Seven flipped seats later, that strategy speaks for itself.”
The Democrats’ number is staggering, but it is still significantly less than the $810 million that Senate Leadership Fund, the comparable Republican group, spent. Despite that sum, the GOP lost control of the chamber.
A generational wipeout
The scope of the generational wipeout Republicans experienced on Tuesday is truly staggering.
Democrats won nearly every competitive Senate race. They are well on the way to a House majority that approaches 250 seats. The party swept key gubernatorial races, including the race in Nevada that was called yesterday, and could have total control of state government in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.
To put it bluntly: It was Republican annihilation up and down the ballot, a rout that will have long-lasting implications for President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
“The silver lining is that there is no silver lining,” said Matt Gorman, a longtime Republican operative who helped steer the National Republican Congressional Committee through Democrats’ 2018 wave.
Gorman is right. When a loss isn’t as bad, parties tend to focus on the positive, like in 2022 when the midterms were not as bad for Democrats as expected, leading then-President Joe Biden to believe people wanted four more years of his leadership. But when parties suffer the kind of loss Republicans did this week, that tends to prompt real soul-searching — and change.
“The ability to say there is no silver lining, it allows us to face up a lot clearer and do it as we get into a presidential cycle rather than when we exit one,” said Gorman.
Much of what happens next for Republicans will center on the Republican 2028 nomination process, which has already begun in earnest. Hopefuls are likely to put forward their ideas about what policies and platforms the GOP should embrace.
Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance, seen as an early front-runner , tried to put a little distance between himself and the losses with a lengthy X post blaming the war in Iran for the shellacking, and seeming to suggest Republicans should consider getting out of the conflict.
“X needs to bring back its character limit,” said a Republican operative whose eyes rolled in reading Vance’s long post.
While Democrats are more jubilant, they’re also grappling with an existential question: What now?
This was the focus of a piece I published this morning on how Democrats are grappling with their own future. And it turns out the euphoric party is pretty divided on the way forward, including on what brand of politics deserves the most credit for the party’s wins and whether to pursue impeachment of Trump in the next Congress.
“I am against it,” Rahm Emanuel, a former member of House leadership and possible 2028 contender, said of impeaching Trump. “An impeachment deals with one person and voters are taking a big broad paintbrush to the whole town.”
Emanuel is pushing Democrats to make passing broad ethics reform for the federal government central to their early 2027 plans, arguing these midterms most resemble the 1974 midterms, when Republicans were punished for Watergate.
“This is Watergate, and the common thread is the corruption. And what the Democrats should do is deal with it by passing comprehensive ethics reform,” he said.
Corruption was indisputably a major theme on Tuesday, and several Democrats said their party needs to focus on it.
Mike Smith, head of House Majority PAC, the primary Democratic super PAC that worked to take back the House, said they began to realize in 2025 that corruption could be a major differentiator in the midterms. And they backed that belief with money: 76 percent of the ads they ran were on the economy and 60 percent mentioned corruption, he said.
“The election could not simply be a repudiation of Trump and the party in power,” Smith said. “We gave them a viable alternative, and if we didn’t do that, we are not winning in seats that Trump won by 20-plus points.”
Whether they focused on corruption, or other topics, the one through line that connected the Democrats I spoke to was the feeling that, while describing problems won the midterms, their party now needs to actually do something.
“We saw Democrats running across the country [on] ambition for what government can do, as opposed to a sense that our job is just to describe working people’s struggles,” New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on Wednesday. “Our job is to deliver on those struggles.”
Despite Mamdani representing the left wing of the party, centrist Democrats have shared similar messages.
“It’s about addressing issues that people care about,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, a moderate Arizona Democrat considering a presidential run who traveled the country stumping for Democrats. “If you can’t feed your kids, you don’t care about a lot of other things.”
As the party organizes its majority and moves into the 2028 cycle, I think that vision could get broad buy-in from a swath of Democrats. It just remains to be seen if they can stay focused.
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From across the newsroom
- Democrats face a choice on Trump come January: Confrontation or compromise, from Alexei Koseff, Anna Liss-Roy, Mariana Alfaro and Dan Merica.
- Trump wants his arch approved Thursday — and to immediately start work, from Dan Diamond.
- GOP’s losses will raise pressure on conservative Supreme Court justices to retire, from Justin Jouvenal.
- Far from Washington, Democrats forge huge state-level gains, from Brady Dennis, Amber Phillips and Patrick Marley.
- Trump’s favorite economic policy was among Tuesday’s biggest losers, from David J. Lynch.
- GOP’s defense of its gerrymandering: The rout could have been even worse, from Isaac Arnsdorf, Dan Merica and Patrick Marley.
- El-Sayed’s first step to ‘transform’ politics: Erasing money’s influence, from Erin Cox and Dan Merica.
What I’m watching
State legislative race results are still being tallied nationwide. But one trend is clear: Democrats had a historic night.
Democrats famously lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures during Barack Obama’s presidency, dealing a generational blow to Democratic politics that the party has struggled to recover from.
For Heather Williams, the head of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which works to get Democrats elected at the state level, the wins feel personal.
“Still feel like I haven’t found my footing on fully comprehending what this has meant for work that I have done for so long,” she said, audibly giddy at the results.
Democrats have flipped at least six state legislative chambers, according to Associated Press data, and could win five others. If races break the party’s way, Democrats could have unified control in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all major presidential battlegrounds in 2028.
“If you scale this up and think about what it means on the national stage, we are talking about Democrats controlling a majority of state legislative chambers,” said Williams. “The scope and scale of these wins mean change is coming.”
When Democrats lost all those state legislative chambers, there was a sweeping conversation about how a generation of talent was lost and how the party’s future governors, senators and congresspeople were in that pile of lost state legislative races, crushing the party’s bench for years to come.
Williams says Republicans now find themselves in that wilderness.
“We are entering into an era of Republicans being in the minority and they have never not known power,” she said. “This is a huge wake-up call for Republicans around the country.”
From you
I asked what you’d like the new Democratic majority to prioritize, and you all were divided.
But the consensus was that the party should focus on legislating and lowering costs.
“I’m hoping that [in] the next Congress, Democrats will focus on getting things done, especially things that help the people in the middle. Lowering prices where they can, getting more lower cost rentals and homes built, supporting smaller farmers, getting rid of tariffs and similar efforts. I also hope that they end the Iran war by shutting off the money for it,” wrote Pat Lachman.
“As much as I’m super looking forward to Trump’s impeachment, I think we should start by improving the economy by dismantling whatever Trump has done to hurt our standard of living,” Jim Dwyer said.
Many of you seemed concerned about Trump’s ability to veto anything.
“I would like to see them introduce and pass bills that would benefit the American populace,” added Rick Seidenstein. “I say bills and not laws because what they pass may very well be vetoed by President Trump. But it is going to be important to see that they are trying to work for the American people.”
“If Trump wants to show that he’s working with the Democrats, then he will not veto any proposed legislation. If he does, then hopefully the Congress will override his veto,” wrote Janet Pape.
Send a reply
Do you think President Donald Trump should be impeached? Or should Democrats focus on other issues like affordability? Let me and your fellow Early Brief readers know at [email protected].
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