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As Trump and the Republicans try to take stock of their midterm losses, Hakeem Jeffries is asking House Democrats to elect him speaker. His proposed first 100 days include reversing the Medicaid cuts, restoring food-assistance funding, extending the Affordable Care Act tax credits, ending Trump’s tariffs, stopping the Iran war and banning members of Congress from trading stocks. As of late Wednesday, Jeffries said he hadn’t spoken with Trump or House Republican leaders since the election.The question is how much Democrats were elected because voters believe in Democratic leadership and how much they were elected because voters wanted a check on the Trump administration. If you listen to Jeffries, what Democrats essentially want to do is restore the funding that was removed to pay for the Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts.That gets back to the problem Democrats have whenever they talk about affordability and why people don’t tend to trust them on the economy. It’s not that they’re proposing tax increases here. They want to restore cuts that were made to fund tax cuts. Whether voters read that distinction into it, we don’t know. Democrats will have a large enough majority to move what they want through the House. The question is whether any of it gets signed, beginning with the December 11 government-funding deadline.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On the other side of the aisle, Mike Johnson won’t seek the House Republican leadership job in the next Congress. Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan are competing to lead Republicans in the minority after both unsuccessfully pursued the speakership in 2023, before Johnson emerged as the compromise choice. Austin Pfluger is also challenging Tom Emmer for whip as Republicans prepare for their November 10 leadership election.There’s jockeying on the Senate side too. Chuck Schumer appears to have the votes to remain leader, but Elizabeth Warren may try to move into the number-three position and become whip. Other Democratic senators could use the moment to extract guarantees from Schumer, including whether he’ll let them eliminate the filibuster. If Hawaii and Mississippi hold as they currently stand, Democrats would only need four Republicans to reach 60 votes.Finally, the first — but almost certainly not the last — Trump administration official has resigned. Harmeet Dhillon is leaving the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, saying she made the decision weeks ago but was asked by the White House to wait until after the midterms. She says she wasn’t pushed out and wants to return to private practice. There are also rumors around Marco Rubio. I’ve long said he wasn’t leaving the State Department until there was an American flag flying over Havana, but maybe the Iran war has dragged on as far as it’s going to and he no longer has the juice to do anything in Cuba. We’ll wait and see.Chapters00:00:00 - Intro00:01:55 - Interview with Kirk Bado00:26:10 - Update00:27:18 - GOP Leadership00:28:59 - Democrats00:30:18 - Vance00:31:56 - Interview with Kirk Bado, con’t00:58:46 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe

(This episode is the final chunk of a four-hour election night livestream.)This is a blue tsunami — an absolute wipeout of Republican power in the House and Senate. When Talarico is winning Texas by 20 points, Democrats are leading in Kansas and South Carolina is competitive, there’s nobody safe outside of maybe Tennessee and Kentucky. Democrats have a real shot at ending up with somewhere around 53 to 55 Senate seats, possibly more depending on races like Alaska and Iowa. I thought polarization would keep these midterms closer, and I was wrong. Justice for pollsters — they did the damn thing. Take your vibes and shove them.Republicans are going to have to look back at a campaign that went to the culture-war well again and again without understanding why those messages worked in 2024. The “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” ad worked because it combined public money, an unsympathetic person and something voters viewed as frivolous, all overlaid on doubts that Harris knew what she was doing. This time, Republicans just screamed that Democrats were going to transition your children. Nobody bought it. The border had already been “solved,” the Iran war never had a clear explanation, and Republicans let Democrats completely own affordability. Everybody said, “Let the man cook.” Well, the meal’s on fire, the kitchen’s on fire and everybody got burned.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This is the end of peak Trump power — the end of Trump as a cult-of-personality force capable of clearing the field and holding the party completely in line. He’ll still have a segment of the population that finds him persuasive, and Republicans will try to recobble parts of his 2024 coalition, but that version of MAGA is over. Now Democrats inherit the worst position in global politics: power. They can check Trump, force votes and attach priorities to government funding or defense authorization, but the real question is whether they fight for something effective or fight just to look like they’re fighting. They’ll call this a mandate for Democratic power. I think it was a vote against Republicans. Either way, the playtime’s over — the wide-open fight for 2028 begins now. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe

I defy anybody to feel like they have an accurate read on the vibes going into these midterms.The polls look electric for Democrats, even if there’s a general belief that they’re overrepresenting Democratic support. Republicans seem depressed as they realize that Trump beat the party into submission, and that the coalition that won in 2024 could only be unlocked by tying themselves completely to him. MAGA Inc. has spent money and Trump has been on the road, but the war in Iran is unpopular, inflation remains a problem and the economy hasn’t been solved. Then, with Democrats gassed up to the nines, Michigan broke completely loose: Haley Stevens endorsed Republican Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed.El-Sayed beat Stevens in a primary that ended much closer than many people expected, and Stevens initially played the good soldier. But El-Sayed has run a campaign committed to his own point of view, even when reaching out could help him with voters who might have to hold their noses to support him. This is a common trait among the first candidates to break through from an electrified ideological movement. They’ve spent years believing the establishment strangled their momentum, so once they reach the big stage, they have a hard time shaking a hand. It’s something Trump is actually good at: he’ll scream a million nasty things while trying to win, but if the deal is the deal, he’ll shake hands afterward. El-Sayed hasn’t done that, and he’s struggled to make inroads with the Black community in Detroit and the Jewish community in the suburbs — precisely the voters for whom Stevens should’ve been a useful surrogate.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The situation boiled over after El-Sayed was asked during a debate whether Israel or Iran posed the greater danger to the United States. He called it a ridiculous hypothetical. Then Rebellion PAC aired an ad suggesting Americans couldn’t afford groceries because their money was going toward killing Palestinians, before ending with a play on Trump’s “they/them” ad. The “they” and “them” in this version weren’t pronouns — they were Israelis, Jews or Zionists, depending on how you interpreted it. Stevens saw the ad as rank antisemitism and demanded that El-Sayed denounce it. His answer was that he had nothing to do with the ad. That wasn’t good enough for her.In another era, somebody with institutional power inside the Democratic Party would’ve removed Stevens from the situation before it reached this point. Eleanor Roosevelt would’ve put her on a one-way trip to Hawaii with a belly full of lithium and told her she could come back when permitted. It wouldn’t matter whether Stevens was right or wrong — she simply couldn’t be allowed near the race. But nobody has that power now. Stevens’ fiancé announced that he was voting for Rogers. Stevens went on CNN and said theirs was a split household but that she was still voting for El-Sayed. El-Sayed responded that she was insisting on relitigating a long-decided primary. Party elders tried to arrange a unity event, nobody could get the camps to shut up, and Stevens ultimately went to a church with Rogers instead.The professional Democratic class is aghast because politics is a team sport. If Stevens put herself ahead of the team, then she betrayed everybody. But I’ve also heard from Never Trumpers who see her decision as proof that politics isn’t all sociopathic laundry — that people don’t have to walk blindly toward whichever candidate has the correct letter beside their name. If Stevens genuinely believes there’s an antisemitism problem inside the Democratic Party, then she shouldn’t have to stand beside El-Sayed when he won’t make even a minimal peace with her or the voters who supported her. That primary was close, and El-Sayed still needs some of those people.I’m leaning toward this not mattering in Michigan. I still suspect El-Sayed will win, even if it’s close, and he’ll take that as a mandate to purge the Haley Stevens wing of the party. But if he loses, the stories coming out of that campaign will be like somebody turning off the containment vault in Ghostbusters — ghouls flying everywhere. This is a loser-leaves-town match now: either Stevens is finished in Democratic politics, or El-Sayed gets fired into the sun. The larger question is about coalitions. We’re in a warlord era with very little allegiance to the greater party, and “me over we” can look either righteous or cowardly depending on where you stand. If Democrats begin chasing away high-propensity Jewish voters, it may not decide this election, but over time it could put states in play that wouldn’t normally be there.Chapters00:00 - Intro05:10 - Haley Stevens30:54 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe

I’ve talked to a lot of really intelligent, analytical people, left, right and center, and nobody believes Republicans will keep both the House and the Senate. It’s a silly scenario. Dismissed. That leaves two possibilities: “win in name only,” with Democrats gaining 15 House seats and taking control but falling short in the Senate, or “my blue heaven,” with Democrats gaining more than 15 House seats and taking the Senate, too. On a bad map, that would be quite a big deal. A lot of the states now in play voted for Donald Trump by eight, nine, ten, fifteen points and up.As I think about my prediction, I can’t help but have Chuck Schumer on my mind. He didn’t begin the second Trump term feeling good. His party had lost the Senate, and other Democrats thought he was asleep at the wheel, part of an older generation that wasn’t going to get things done. He was forced into positions he wouldn’t otherwise have taken. He had to shut down the government twice after repeatedly destroying Republicans for doing exactly that. He’d been the adult in the room, and now, he had to righteously shake his fist in anger. That might not seem like a big deal, but senators take pride in their records. Every vote matters. Trust me — they keep track.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.But even while he was embattled, Schumer hung on to probably his most defining foreign policy position: his support for Israel. He also has a long history of supporting corrective action against Iran, specifically in tandem with Israel and particularly over a buildup of missiles. Then the president ordered military strikes on Iran. That’s a tremendously unpopular position within Schumer’s party, so there’s only so much he can say publicly. But I’d have to imagine privately he wasn’t sad about it. And then a funny thing happens.That war spiraled into a series of blockades, driving up the price of almost everything in America and sending Trump’s approval ratings through the basement. Schumer went from being chased around by his own party to getting his cake and eating it, too: a war with Iran, and he gets to run against it. It’s good to be Chuck. Suddenly Democrats are asking whether they can win Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi or South Carolina. If only a few fall their way, Schumer gets to be Senate majority leader again.And when it comes to my prediction? I think he will. I’ve stuck with “win in name only” this entire time. I correctly picked Trump and the Republicans in 2024, and I’ve had to be dragged toward changing my mind now. But here’s the thing: I thought we’d see the polls close as Election Day approached. I expected Republican enthusiasm, in a time as polarized as this, to pick up as voters started thinking about Supreme Court nominations and the possibility of losing Texas. I thought they’d press their voter advantage in these states. But we haven’t seen it. At a certain point, intellectual honesty requires a decision: Do I believe we’re in a polling-error cycle where everybody is wrong, or do I believe this tsunami real?I don’t quite understand a polling environment that puts Trump below where he was after January 6th, and I don’t fully believe Texas will flip blue. But my final prediction is that Democrats will gain more than 15 House seats and win at least 51 Senate seats. Schumer becomes majority leader again. This is an eleventh-hour change of heart, but I think my blue heaven is going to happen: a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.Chapters00:00:00 - Intro00:02:05 - Final CNN Polling00:05:24 - Interview with Reese Gorman00:40:43 - Economy Growth00:42:36 - California Ballots00:44:25 - Vivek-Acton Polling00:47:04 - Justin’s Final Predictions00:57:10 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe

Two-thirds of Israeli voters had cast ballots four hours before polls closed Tuesday, the highest turnout at that stage since 1973, according to Axios. Election officials ordered polling stations to accelerate voting after reports of long lines, saying anyone arriving by 10 p.m. local time would be allowed to cast a ballot. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks another term, with 61 seats needed for a parliamentary majority. This is Israel’s first election since the October 7th attacks in 2023.I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in the Knesset or Israeli coalitions, which will essentially decide who becomes prime minister. It does seem, at this hour, that Netanyahu will end his extraordinarily consequential reign at the helm of that nation — one that looked like it was over right before October 7th. I don’t know if the guy coming in will make anybody who didn’t like Netanyahu happier. The issues they seem to disagree on are more domestic issues, not what Americans who talk about Israel a lot particularly care about. He’s probably more aligned with Netanyahu on prosecuting the war in Gaza, at the very least. The question would be how far it extends into Iran and what victory against Iran would be defined as.Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Still, if this is indeed the end for Bibi, it’s been a hell of a ride. I don’t know if anybody other than Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir would be more consequential leaders for that nation, but I’d leave that up to the Israeli scholars. We don’t know the outcome yet, but it does, at least right now, look like curtains for Netanyahu.Meanwhile, President Trump has changed the list of Canadian products subject to an additional 50% tariff, with revisions taking effect Friday, October 30th. A proclamation on the 23rd removes some products from duty and adds others. Republican Susan Collins says nine exempted categories will help Maine’s blueberry, potato, apple and seaweed industries. Those categories include packaging materials, refrigeration equipment and agricultural machinery. The exemptions apply to the additional duty imposed over Canada’s treatment of American vehicles. Separate tariffs remain in place.There’s also late-breaking reporting that negotiations are underway to try to avert some of the steel tariffs between the two countries. I’ve thought this would be brought to a brink and then eventually resolved. I tend to still think that’s the case, but we’re getting a little late in the innings to assume so.Finally, Marco Rubio said street protests wouldn’t produce democracy in Venezuela following opposition leader María Corina Machado’s return to Caracas. Machado is demanding elections in 2027, while U.S. officials want changes to the Supreme Court and Electoral Council, along with progress on debt, before a vote. Rubio said the current authorities were meeting agreed deadlines but didn’t publicly specify an election date, warning against derailing the process.Chapters00:00:00 - Intro00:02:18 - Midterm Map Madness, Part One00:47:52 - Update00:48:26 - Israel’s Elections00:51:16 - Canadian Tariffs00:52:36 - Venezuela00:55:00 - Midterm Map Madness, Part Two01:39:37 - Wrap-up This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.politicspoliticspolitics.com/subscribe