Editors’ Blog
We hope you will join us tonight starting at 8 p.m. eastern for our live videocast as we bring you live election results and commentary. It’ll be me and TPM Publisher Joe Ragazzo and pretty much the whole TPM cycling through to discuss different races over the course of the evening. We’ll also be answering your questions in real time over the course of the evening. You can either watch on our TPM YouTube page or right here at the website where the live feed will be embedded on the front page. Can’t wait to see you this evening.
We’re now down to nothing to do but wait (and, obviously, pore over day-of indicators that mostly won’t mean anything). So with that in mind, a couple quick observations.
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Two years on from Donald Trump’s 2024 second election to the presidency we can identify clear patterns separating Term One and Term Two. I’ve noted at other times that for all the norm-busting, outrages and crimes of Term One, if you were a regular person who didn’t pay much attention to politics, very little of it intruded into your life. And the economy remained buoyant. The fact that Trump inherited a strong economy doesn’t matter in terms of public tolerance.
Of course, Trump still got quite unpopular. But to the extent that the Trump opposition kept up that resigned refrain “Nothing matters” there was a reason: If you simply didn’t pay attention to politics, most people could say, ‘Yeah, he’s weird but how is it affecting me?’ And at least before COVID there was much less — in terms of things that are materially affecting your life today — that many Trump foes allowed.
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It is a given of the 2026 midterms that a wave of still-uncertain magnitude is likely because of Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity. What gets less attention is how much the Senate races themselves — like who is running and whether an election is even being held — have been shaped very directly by his actions. Ohio, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Iowa all, amazingly, fall into this bucket.
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With the pro-fascist wing of Senate Republicans threatening not to seat Mary Peltola if she’s elected to the Senate, I wanted to give you a short primer of how all this works, not just in Peltola’s case but in the larger terrain of GOP denialism.
First, the House and Senate are fundamentally different. The senate is a “continuing body”; so Republicans are in some position to refuse to seat Peltola. The House on the other hand reverts to what we might call a parliamentary state of nature every two years. When the House reconvenes in January, there won’t be a Republican majority and Mike Johnson will not be Speaker. Everyone shows up with their state certifications in hand and it’s the clerk of the House who examines those credentials on a ministerial basis. Then everyone votes on who the Speaker will be. That’s why we had that drama with Kevin McCarthy a few years ago.
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