Transcript of A Landslide Victory for Democrats

We just took back Texas.

So, South Carolina, I think we just made some history.

Thank you so much, Maine. Working people did it.

Iowa, we have proven that the impossible was possible.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday night, the blue wave that Polls predicted and the president's unpopularity foreshadowed landed with extraordinary force across the United States as Democrats flipped control of both the House and the Senate.

My name is Abdulrahman Mohammad Al-Sayed. And I am so proud and honored to stand here as your Senator-elect from the great state of Michigan.

Today, chief political analyst Nate Cohen and national political correspondents Lisa Lehr and Shane Goldbacher take us inside a historic shift in power and a new era of American politics.

In sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed, lame-duck President Donald J. Trump.

It's Wednesday, November 4.

Good morning.

We're counting this as morning?

I mean, it's 1:00 a.m.

It's 1:00 a.m.

It's early.

It's early.

We're doing great. Didn't you think we'd be doing this at 3:00 a.m.?

Oh, I thought we'd be taping this at 3:00 a.m.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah.

This night required no later than 1:00 a.m. hour. So big and so decisive and so quick was the result. Should we get started?

Let's.

All right. Nate.

Michael.

Lisa.

Hello.

Thank you.

Hi.

Nate, fill in the blank for me. Tonight was what?

A tsunami.

A blue tsunami.

A blue tsunami. It's the largest victory in the national popular vote since at least 1976.

In a midterm?

In any congressional election.

Mm-hmm.

The Democrats will win at least 54 seats in the Senate, including at least five seats at the president, won by double digits in the last election. No party has managed to flip so many seats that are so safely in the other side's hands. And as far back as I looked, and I went back to 1974, I could have gone further, but that seemed far enough to me. So this is big.

Lisa, tonight was what?

Tonight was a prairie fire that just swept the nation, a wildfire. I'm just over the water analogies.

Yeah, Nate tortured it.

Yes, Nate.

On Tuesday's Daily.

Nate went on a long journey with it. And I think.

You're going to the water

over there.

I can go on the fire.

Yeah, okay. But I also think the water doesn't capture the level of anger of Americans over all these prices and gas prices and housing prices and everything else. And so it felt like.

A Democratic wildfire.

A Democratic wildfire, yeah.

Shane, tonight was what for you?

I think it was a punishment. I think that you see the kind of thoroughness that Nate is describing, and it becomes less about the individual Democratic candidates or even the Democratic Party. This is a reaction and a rejection of President Trump and his approach and his party's complete bending knee to his approach for the last two years.

In summary, a big old spanking punishment.

Yeah.

Okay. I want to talk about where and how this tsunami wildfire punishment unfolded throughout the night, because there was quite a dramatic chronology and arc to it. Nate, when did you realize what was happening on Tuesday night?

Well, it was clear Democrats were overperforming immediately, even in states like Florida.

Where a Democratic socialist was neck and neck throughout the night with a Republican in a really red state.

That's right. But Florida's been close before. Polls showed that Florida could be close. The thing that told me that we weren't just going to have a big blue wave but a tsunami or a wildfire was not too long after that at maybe 7:20 when in South Carolina, a state that was certainly thought to be competitive, but very few people really believed would be likely to flip Democratic, when the early vote was just plainly better for Democrat Annie Andrews than she needed to win.

The Senate candidate.

The Senate candidate, Democrat Annie Andrews. And that meant that we were looking at Democrats not merely winning the states that we had been talking about for the last few months, like Ohio and even Texas or Kansas, but another tier beyond that, like South Carolina, and not just.

The outer limits of Trump plus 10, plus 15, red states that once were.

Nearly 20.

Inconceivable.

Nearly 20 in South Carolina's case.

Trump was plus 20 in South Carolina.

I don't think he was plus 20, but he was close. Maybe 18.

And here a Democratic.

And was going to win.

Has just prevailed.

And didn't just prevail, but prevailed with room to spare. She won by nearly five points. That is extraordinary. And on the topic of a repudiation of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate Darlene Graham, who was essentially anointed by Donald Trump to replace her brother Lindsey Graham, her greatest sin in this election is that she was anointed by the president, and that is not what the country was looking to support.

Right. Usually in a red state like South Carolina, Trump as kingmaker is the beginning and the end of the conversation. In this case, that wasn't the story at all. It seemed to backfire. And that was the case, right, Shane, in many of these key Senate races where the Republicans lost and the Democrats prevailed.

I mean, the bad news for me as a political junkie and a political reporter who loves to dive into, like, how the races were run and what were the decisions and there's just one story here, and it's the story of the country rejecting Trump and Republicans, and it's pretty simple. And that's how you end up losing in Texas by potentially close to double digits. It's how you lose by the remarkable margin that Nate's talking about in South Carolina. It's how you get a new senator from Kansas for the first time in nearly 100 years, and you.

A Democratic.

Democratic.

Senator in Kansas. And it's how you oust probably the most enduring moderate Republican in Maine. Let me have you just focus for a moment longer on Texas, Shane, because for the longest time on this show, we debated how real the possibility was that James Talarico could actually pull off a victory there. And he not only pulled off a victory, he pulled off a victory whose scale is a little bit hard to comprehend.

Yeah, you see in the regional shifts there a complete reversal of things that we've talked about, which is the Latino shift toward Trump. It went back to the Democrats and even more. You see him winning in a way that, yeah, was basically unfathomable. And yes, we've talked that his opponent Ken Paxton was a particularly weak Republican candidate, the state attorney general, who has faced a series of scandals. But what you also see is that it wasn't just Talarico winning, but the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa, who beat a fixture of Texas politics.

Yeah, and I think that what those results show us is how much broader this is than any individual candidate. The scale of the wins shows you that this is not about.

Just Ken Paxton.

Ken Paxton, and it's not about Roger Marshall, who wasn't a particularly strong candidate in Kansas. You know, it's not about any individual Republican. It is just this wholesale repudiation.

I mean, Texas redrew its congressional districts specifically to elect more Republicans and specifically all along the border. The entire Texas border with Mexico is going to be represented by Democrats, including one who won one of those districts that was just a reach that no one expected them to even be competing in. And there it has a new Congress member who's a Democrat. Let me just put some math forward for the listener at this hour. Nate, Democrats have won how many Senate seats?

The Democrats have 54 seats at this hour. They won North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Maine. And I think that gets me to the number I need, but I might be remembering another one.

I see Michigan's not quite called yet, but trending toward that 54.

Yeah, not official, but yeah. And.

And Alaska check back with us in two months.

Alaska we'll find out in a while. And it's also worth noting we may find out in a while about Mississippi at this hour, where the race is essentially tied and where in the past, provisional ballots have leaned Democratic. And therefore, I think I could make an argument that the Democrat could realistically flip that state as well, which could give the Democrats, if everything went their way from here, 56 seats in the Senate.

Wow.

Which would represent flipping, picking up how many seats?

That's a lot for me to count at this hour, Michael. They've flipped seven. They have flipped seven. They could get up to nine.

A huge number. Shane, in the House, just bring us at 1:38 a.m. up to date where we are with Democratic control of the House.

Because podcasts are a visual medium, I have a blue Sharpie that I circle all of the House districts as they get called. And you will notice.

A lot of blue circles.

There are basically no red circles anywhere on any of the competitive races. And so the Democrats have won the House majority. They have surpassed the 218 seats that they need, and they're on their way to potentially historically large majorities, probably the largest since the beginning of the Obama era, which took two successive waves to get to. Nate may have more up-to-date numbers on the scale of the national popular vote, but there isn't a competitive House race right now where the Democrats are losing.

I can think of one Florida sort of. Maine too has been on my radar. But when we entered this room, the Democrats were favored in our estimates to win the national vote by 13 points. So again, that's the largest margin since at least 1976. The highest in recent memory was when the Democrats won by 10 in 2008 in the House vote. So this is a real notch up from anything that we've seen in my lifetime. I want to understand what happened to Republican voters, as best you all can tell. Did they stay home or did they turn around and vote for Democrats in the huge numbers that we think they might have?

The answer is both. It's clear from the states where we have great data, like Florida and New Jersey and Nevada, the Democrats had a much better turnout than any election in those states in recent memory. And it's also clear from the same states and other states that many people who are registered as Republicans and voted for Donald Trump voted for the Democratic candidate. Stepping back for a second, this is a total collapse of the Republican coalition. There is no Republican coalition tonight. There was an old Republican coalition that had the support of affluent college graduates and white-collar suburbs that they traded away to the Democrats a decade ago in exchange for support among working-class voters and younger voters and non-white voters.

Wow.

There is nothing left for the Republicans, and that's how you get a wipeout across the map.

I want to talk about Iowa. I understand it's not the prettiest bell at the ball like Texas, but to me, it is so interesting of those kinds of changing coalition politics. In Iowa, you had Democrats win the governor's mansion, the Senate seat, and flip three of the four congressional seats. Why did that happen? Well, guess what? There's a lot of in Iowa, as you know. I know you've spent a lot of time.

Farmers who voted for Trump.

Farmers who voted for Trump repeatedly, three times over, right? And those farmers were just their bottom line was hurt again and again. They're hurt by the increase in diesel prices. They're hurt by the tariffs, which make the equipment more expensive. The feed is more expensive because of the war in Iran. The fertilizer is more expensive.

Because of the tariffs.

Because of the tariffs. And there is just such a direct connection between President Trump's policies and the fall of his coalition. And you know, I don't know that you always see that, right? We always talk about presidents don't control macroeconomic trends, but they get credit or they're blamed for the economy. In this case, actually, President Trump did create the atmosphere on economic conditions that turned his voters against him. And so it's not only that the Republican coalition, as Nate rightfully points out, doesn't exist in these elections.

Tore it apart.

Through his policies, he is personally responsible for tearing it apart. That is really a remarkable political story.

It's an accomplishment to have ever put it together. It's in its own way, perversely, as much an accomplishment to have disassembled.

And it's of course, like President Trump always does things in operatic scale, right? He puts together.

Doesn't do a thing small.

He doesn't do a thing small. And yet again, this is a thing he has not done small.

I mean, I think if Texas is ground zero of this year's defeat for Republicans, I also think Iowa is really interesting because it is where they're going to start their next nominating process. So the next Republican presidential candidate is going to need to win a caucus in that state where the Democrats just won all these things.

Yeah, let's stipulate. In Iowa, Democrats improbably, given the events of the last decade, won a Senate seat and the governor's office. Am I missing anything?

Three. They flipped three congressional seats.

Three congressional seats.

Yeah.

And so this is where the Trump success was in 2016. This was the big white working-class push toward Trump all along the Mississippi River. And now all these people have swung all the way back, as Nate just described. And so the Republican Party is actually going to go to that place and be like, "Okay, where do we go from here?" where they just lost everything. It seems worth spending a quick moment, I think, on some of the governor's races we saw around the country, Lisa and Shane. Which one of those races stand out to you?

Well, of course, the race in Ohio between Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy captured a lot of attention, as I know you talked about on this show with the ad.

Including her mother.

Including her estranged mother. And she is up by right now by six points, a margin that could grow. There's a couple more points of voters that have to be counted. In Iowa, Rob Sand, who was this Democratic star from the moment he announced, he was a Democrat who attempted to run this post-partisan campaign that a lot of other candidates sort of emulated.

And Rob Sand has won.

Rob Sand has won by, looks like, 10 points or so. And then the other big win is, of course, in Texas, where Gina Hinojosa, best of Greg Abbott, who, as Shane pointed out, is really a bastion of that state's Republican Party. You know, it was interesting because in a lot of these places, there had been a lot of discussion on ticket splitters.

This would be the idea that in Texas, you could vote for James Talarico as a Democratic candidate for Senate, but then you still might vote for Greg Abbott as governor.

Right. And we really didn't see that. We just saw Democrats winning. So that, again, is just another thing that speaks to, like, the scale of the wins here.

I think the most interesting governor's race outside of Texas is in Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms is about to become the first Black woman in American history to ever be a governor. And she did it by a wide margin. The conversation in political circles had been, "Oh, can John Ossoff's win drag her over the line?" She's winning comfortably in what had been a perennial swing state for Democrats. And it really raises the question of, is Georgia changing at this moment?

We may be getting a little bit of ahead of ourselves here, but it is worth noting that. Go for it.

The Democrats did really well in a lot of potential Sunbelt battleground states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Many of their weakest performances were in more traditional northern white battleground states like Minnesota or Michigan or Maine. And I'm not saying they did badly in those states tonight, and there are candidate factors to consider as well. But it's worth stepping back for a second and imagining what someone would have said 10 years ago if I told them that the Democrats were going to do a lot better in Texas than Michigan and North Carolina and Georgia than Maine and Minnesota.

We'll be right back.

Lisa, you wanted to respond to something Nate said right before the break. Nate, correct me if I'm wrong. It seemed to be that in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, some of the Democratic candidates' leads and even their victories were not as big as a place like the Sunbelt. And I wonder if it's because the candidates running in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, the Democrats tended to be more progressive.

Yeah, I think Nate was talking about the difference between how candidates fared in the Sunbelt and sort of these northern states, Minnesota, Michigan, and Maine. And I think it is worth pointing out that those are states where Democrats ran self-proclaimed progressives, candidates who saw themselves on the more left flank of the party, and the candidates who ran in places like Kansas and Texas and Iowa saw themselves as post-partisan, that they tried to put distance between themselves and the Democratic national brand. They cast themselves as centrists, as people who want to work across the aisle.

Not letting miss tests, letting lots of different kinds of Democrats run for the places where they're running.

But sometimes big tents can cause big intra-party fights underneath them. So I think we'll see a continuation of this debate that Democrats have been having at this point for many years over what the direction of their party should be. In a midterm, it's enough to just run against an unpopular president. Presidential campaigns are contests about the future of the country, and Democrats will need a vision, a shared vision to put forward in those races. And we'll see them fight it out over what that should be over the next few years.

Right. Big Democratic victory, you're saying, basically doesn't necessarily resolve any of the big internal questions and battles inside the party.

I think that there is a North and South realignment happening, and you can really see it tonight, that the Democratic Party's ceiling is lower in the old industrial Midwest, in Ohio, where Sherrod Brown had been a popular Democrat forever and is retaking a seat in the Senate, is not performing as strongly as some of these Democratic candidates in the South. So there seems to be a higher ceiling where John Ossoff is in Georgia than where the Democrats seem to be able to reach in that Upper Midwest area.

So I wonder if the results that we're talking about here, would it in any way tip the scales when it comes to this debate about progressives, Democratic socialists, in favor of the centrists? Or if that's just, like, not the right conclusion to draw given the scale of Democrats.

My text messages tonight would suggest that everybody is declaring victory, right? The left is saying, "We almost got a Democratic socialist in Florida," right? And the centrists are saying, "Look at all the actual people who won all of these hard races." So everybody's declaring victory, and everybody has just enough to hang their hat on an election like this, where, again, the election was not about the Democrats. The election.

That's right.

Was about the Republicans.

The contrarian take here is that no one should feel good about themselves. They're just benefiting from the least popular president since 1946. And this is still a discredited party that voters don't trust to solve the nation's problems.

And there's plenty of indicators of that in our own polling, right, where you see that Trump is unpopular, Trump is unpopular. And Democrats have improved their numbers on a lot of issues, most centrally, like who is trusted to handle the economy, which is very important, always, and particularly important in this election. But when voters are asked questions about, you know, how much they trust the Democratic Party, is it too far to the left, too far to the right, they're still pretty mixed on it. Yes, voters are voting, casting their ballots for Democratic candidates. Are they flocking to the National Democratic Party?

Well, one thing that happened tonight that, if you're a Democrat, seems like a very important and hopeful sign is that a new generation of especially Senator-elects, a Senator James Talarico, a Senator John Ossoff, a Senator Abdul El-Sayed, on and on, that has come up in the Trump era, they're so digitally native, they're so ubiquitous in the way that they campaign. This is a future of the Democratic Party that no one was even thinking about five, six years ago.

Yeah. I mean, now I think Democrats have a wealth of people who could run for president. It's going to be a packed race. They have a very, very stocked bench of candidates. And in some ways, it feels to me like the beginning of a new political era. If you sort of look at 2006, which was another great resurgent midterm year for Democrats, ushered in this era of Obama, which remade that party. The backlash to that ushered in Trump and the MAGA movement, which remade Republicans. And now it feels as if we're at the end of that 20-year cycle, and we're at a point where both parties are going to be looking forward to something new.

Where does this all leave the president's party, the president's movement? What is the state of MAGA this morning?

What is the Republican Party this morning? You know, the Republican Party was destroyed by Donald Trump in 2016. It was reassembled around himself. And now he's the least popular political figure heading into a midterm since 1946. And his party just suffered the worst rubbing in a half-century. Where do we stand right now at all? Yeah, I think about how much we discussed the depth of the hole that the Democratic Party found itself in after 2024. And even in that hole, everybody knew they had one big bright light, which was this coming midterm election.

Perhaps especially when the president still has a tremendous amount of clout within his party. In our last poll, a majority of Republicans still said they wanted to see the Republican Party continue in the Trump direction, even though two-thirds of the country very much wants the Republican Party to do something completely different. So Donald Trump is still a huge limiting factor on the ability of the Republican Party to go in a new direction in the next two years.

Nate, what you just described, this nub of what's left of the president's support is what I think we've long understood to be a cult of personality. The coalition that you all at this table have said basically disintegrated tonight was what he borrowed and put together beyond that nub. And it was based on policies and promises. And on Tuesday night, a lot of voters of both parties felt that those promises were not kept, those policies hurt them, and they moved away from him.

The Republican Party is in a really tough spot. Donald Trump destroyed it as we knew it, and he remains the center of gravity. Everyone is stuck in orbit around him, even though it now feels like a political black hole for them that they can't escape from, even though they'd love to. I think that the president has clearly lost basically the entire periphery of his coalition, all of the young and non-white voters who put him over the top in 2024, many of the white working-class voters that put him over the top in 2016, and even some of the moderate Republicans who maybe backed Nikki Haley and long before Mitt Romney, who have been consistent Republicans all along and reduced him just to this core of MAGA superfans and the most consistent Republicans who would never consider voting for the Democratic Party.

I mean.

The ones picking the candidates who run as Republicans.

Think about this year. You could not win a Republican primary this year without President Trump, and then you could not win a general election with him.

That's a big old conundrum.

That's the trap.

Friends, it is 2:10 a.m. And as a final question to all three of you, I want you to talk about your big questions this morning as we enter a new political landscape, maybe even a new political era, in which the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate are comfortably controlled by Democrats in the final two years of President Trump's second and final term. What are the big questions you have in your head as we look forward to the next few months and the next two years?

I mean, I want to know about JD Vance.

Oh, that's good.

I think that nobody encapsulates that Trump trap more. He is the sitting vice president, the front runner to be the next nominee. And yet there is probably no one who can maneuver less away from Donald Trump than JD Vance. And how does he navigate this moment in the coming months if he campaigns, as most people presume he will?

Kamala Harris taught us a valuable lesson about what happens when you are the closely aligned figure to an unpopular or declining political figure in the president you're under.

I think one of the big questions is what does the Democratic Party become? I think for a decade, they have organized themselves in opposition to Trump. He's been the biggest energizer for their voters. And that's been like a central organizing principle of being a Democrat. And now, for all the reasons we said, Trump is going to be declining in power, declining as an organizing force in our politics. And that leaves Democrats trying to figure out, with all these wins, what does their party stand for, and what is their coalition, and who do they become in an era where Trump is no longer the dominant force?

Those were two great answers, one for Democrats and one for Republicans. Let me offer.

Final for Nate?

Let me offer then the backdrop that maybe they'll both play off against as they try and chart their future. I'm interested to learn whether any Democrat offers a fundamentally different answer to what the nation's problems are. We have an argument from Democratic socialists that says the party basically needs to move to the left. And we have a bunch of mainstream establishment Democrats who, in some ways, represent a continuation of the same Democratic message that we've heard in various forms since Obama. And when I think back to the last time a party was really discredited, after 2008, the Republicans really struggled to come up with something different.

And you think it could happen in this moment.

Things are changing. And when things change, that's when politicians and politics have the opportunity to change in response.

Well, Nate and Shane and Lisa, thank you for being here at this really, really late hour, early hour, depending on which way you see it. Appreciate your time.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

I'm here with Erica Green.

Hello, Mr. President.

Hi.

On Tuesday night, my colleagues, White House correspondents Erica Green and Tyler Pager spoke with President Trump by phone from the White House as the president was still processing his party's sweeping losses in the midterm election.

I'm just looking at these results as I'm talking about here. I see that Darlene lost, well.

Including the defeat of the Republican Senate candidate in South Carolina, Darlene Graham.

That's the man's beach. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?

Trump conceded that higher gas prices from the war he launched against Iran had upset voters.

They don't mind the Iran, but they probably weren't happy they weren't happy with the Iran price. So, you know, it's one of those things, but.

But he insisted that had he himself been on the ballot, Republicans would have performed far better in the election.

Everybody's saying the same thing. I wasn't on the ballot. Two years ago, when I'm on the ballot, we won all of these states by a lot.

Erica pushed Trump on one of the biggest questions hanging over the midterms.

I just wanted to make sure you are prepared to accept the results of the election. You've talked a lot about integrity.

Oh, of course. No, I think the results were fine. You mean from the standpoint of cheating?

Despite the president's long history of denying electoral losses, Trump said that he would accept Tuesday's results.

But I am absolutely willing to accept those results, yeah.

And he said he was prepared to work with the new Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, even if they sought his testimony for congressional investigations into his administration.

We'll work with the Democrats, and we'll, you know, look forward to working with them. We'll probably work something out.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your time.

Okay, thank you, Bob. Have a good time.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need tonight or today. In a potentially major change to U.S. foreign policy, President Trump said that the bulk of American aid to Israel, about $4 billion, would be cut off at the end of this year. In an Election Day interview with Fox News, Trump described his motivation for the change as taking away a powerful talking point from the left wing of the Democratic Party, including Senator-elect Abdul Al-Sayed of Michigan.

Why? Because they don't need it, Brian. I mean, I asked them because they don't need it and because why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like an Al-Sayed when they don't need it? It's a bad talking point.

In the aftermath of the October 7th attacks and Israel's response in Gaza, both Democratic lawmakers and candidates have become increasingly critical of U.S. military aid to Israel. Trump said that the decision to cut off the aid was made with the consent of Israel's leadership, but the announcement appeared to catch some Israeli officials by surprise. Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley, Stella Tan, and Jessica Chung.