US midterm elections 2026

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      Saturday Night Live: Druski hosts and James Talarico cameos, but where’s the post-election comedy?

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      SNL booking comedian Druski post-midterms felt misbegotten in low-energy episode failing to capture historic ‘blue-nami’Four days after the historic “blue-nami” midterms, Saturday Night Live opens at Democrats’ headquarters, where party leaders Hakeem Jeffries (Kenan Thompson) and Chuck Schumer (Sarah Sherman) celebrate, even as they vow to hold on to power in spite of the wishes of their energized base.Their toast is interrupted by the man responsible for Republicans’ shellacking, Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson). The president, who is “now lame duck”, accepts the results, “which is scarier in a way”. But he’s also resigned to focus on the ballroom, even as he laments having to work with millennial Democrats (this leads him down a long diatribe about the show New Girl). We get quick walk ons by a defeated JD Vance (Jeremy Culhane) and extra-aggro Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost), only for Trump to get a taste of his own medicine when James “Telefreako” Talarico interupts him. Texas’s new senator-elect speaks to one of the big issues of the day: “It’s clear people want something new, they want something different. I’m talking, of course, about SNL’s cold opens. How many of these Trump freezes are they gonna do?” Continue reading… More

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      ‘The light of dawn is on the horizon’: the best moments from US midterm victory speeches | Ted Widmer

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      Tuesday’s winners offered a new politics at a time when ‘there is something broken in America’As the US election returns came in throughout the night on Tuesday, there was ebullience at the size of the margin. It was comparable to the significant thumpings over the years. Yet bigger.In 2006, Americans were exhausted by the war in Iraq (by simply changing the last letter to “n”, we have a similar situation today). But even that big win paled in comparison. Continue reading… More

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      Centrism did not win the Democratic party the election

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      The blue wave, while a rebuke of Trump’s policies, was also a referendum on the party’s status quoOn election night I stood in a crowd at Harlem Tavern, a restaurant in New York City, at the electoral party for Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and congresswoman-elect from New York’s 13th congressional district. The crowd cheered as what came to be called the “blunami” rolled in: Iowa blue, Kansas blue, Talarico in Texas, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, House, Senate, gubernatorial races overwhelmingly going for the Democratic party.The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country.Heba Gowayed is an associate professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College and Graduate Center and author of the book Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential.
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      Healthcare, tariffs – but not Trump impeachment: Democrats chart next two years of power

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      Midterms success gives party potent leverage over Trump – expect tough campaigns of investigating and lawmaking“Costs, chaos, corruption”: after almost two years spent relentlessly criticizing Donald Trump for failing to address those three, broad political concerns, Democrats won a monumental return to power in Tuesday’s midterm elections that will give them potent new leverage over the president.Now the question becomes: what will they do with it? Continue reading… More

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      Trump’s shattered ‘mirror world’: American voters roundly reject president’s alternate reality

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      President claimed to have ushered in a ‘golden age’ even as prices soared and war dragged on – and midterm voters did not buy his looking-glass narrativeA new “golden age of America” is under way, Donald Trump repeatedly declared in his final pitch to voters before the US midterm elections.The war in Iran was not really a war, because “we’ve done very little fighting”, the US president stressed. The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs. “They’re saying,” he said, that on his watch the US has become “the hottest country anywhere in the world”. Continue reading… More

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      ‘People are active, they are fed up’: young voters fueled the Democratic wave

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      After helping Trump to victory in 2024, young voters swung decisively toward Democrats, helping deliver a wave of midterm victoriesThe 2026 blue tsunami owes a lot to the youth vote.According to data from Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (Circle), which monitors youth civic engagement, early estimates show the second-highest youth turnout in a midterm election in 30 years, second only to 2018, when an estimated 31% of young voters turned out during Donald Trump’s first presidency. Continue reading… More

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      Did the Bay Area just save its transit system from the brink of certain death?

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      Voters approved two measures to save the region’s financially distressed public transit agenciesVoters in the San Francisco Bay Area overwhelmingly approved two transit measures this week that advocates hope will save the region’s financially distressed public transit agencies from a potential death spiral that could have had massive repercussions for the area’s residents and its economy.The Regional Transit Measure (RTM), a 0.5% sales tax across four Bay Area counties and a 1% sales tax in San Francisco, will generate approximately $1bn annually to fund the region’s four largest transit operators. It received a strong 62.2% support across all five counties that voted on the measure, winning with a landslide of 78.6% in San Francisco. Continue reading… More

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      Flip voters discovered that Trump’s racism and xenophobia are expensive

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      Maga’s regret voters were all-in for Trump’s racism. Then they found out they couldn’t afford itFor the first time in a decade, election predictions far exceeded public expectations. What pollsters anticipated as a blue wave billowed into a blue tsunami. Wins that held ground for already blue seats eased nerves, and the flips of swing states like Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio energized the blue base. But red-belt-busting wins in Republican strongholds like Texas, South Carolina and Kansas alongside pending races in Alaska and Mississippi left mouths agape. The explanation was that Democrats turned out far more supporters than their regulars, and that the “regret voter” (both swing voters and partisan Republicans) expanded the wave across districts Trump previously won. Elation and sighs of relief rolled over consistently Democratic voters who suffered multiple sucker punches from recent years of Republican upsets. Regret voters, who run the gamut from gen Z men to Latinos, farmers and the white working class, hope a different party can deliver on the economy Trump promised them.Blue voters look at the dismantling of democracy, multiple wars, mass deportations and Trump’s unchecked power in these last two years and see how it all could have been avoided. Regret voters, however, either co-signed or conceded to Trump’s naked racism and brutish bullying of marginalized people, but switched their votes as soon as the consequences hit their pockets. While some of the president’s backers may have been turned away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gunning down American citizens, the final straw for most wasn’t ICE’s brutality, but rather the price of eggs. Some may have been upset by the Tomahawk missile assault that killed 120 schoolgirls in Iran, but most fumed at the rocketing costs at the gas pump that followed. Few demanded answers for the nearly 60 deaths of innocent people detained in DHS detention centers since the start of 2024, but many felt scorned by lost immigrant labor that cut into owners’ profit margins. Maga’s regret voters were all-in for Trump’s racism. Then they found out they couldn’t afford it. Continue reading… More