Democrats Take Congress as Mississippi Comes Down to Dozens

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Greetings once again and welcome to Political Science. It's Wednesday, November 4th. Let's see what the hell's been going on.

Democrats won control of both houses of Congress last night, and not narrowly. Republicans walked in holding the House by four seats and the Senate fifty-three to forty-seven. By early this morning Democrats had passed the 218 seats needed for a House majority, and the NBC and CBS decision desks project they will finish somewhere around 258 or 259 seats, a gain of more than forty. In the Senate, the Associated Press tally has Democrats and the independents who caucus with them at fifty-four seats to forty-four, with two races still counting.

The Senate map ran straight through Republican territory. Democrats flipped seven seats: North Carolina, where Roy Cooper won; Ohio, where Sherrod Brown returns; Iowa, Kansas and South Carolina; Texas, where James Talarico beat Ken Paxton; and Maine, where Susan Collins conceded to Troy Jackson, ending her bid for a sixth term, and NBC projected Jackson the winner shortly after. Further down the ballot, Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Governor Greg Abbott, who conceded that "mathematically, we are not going to be able to win this election." She will be the first Democratic governor of Texas since 1995. Democrats also took governorships in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

Exit polls give a fairly plain explanation. CBS found President Trump's approval at thirty-eight percent, the lowest it has measured for a president at a midterm. Eighty-nine percent of voters called the cost of living a major factor, and they voted on the day with the highest average gas price of any Election Day on record. The President's reactions covered a lot of ground in under two hours. On Truth Social he wrote that he wasn't on the ballot and would have won in a landslide if he had been. Then he congratulated Democrats and said he looked forward to working with them. Then he told Fox News he would accept the results, adding, "Why wouldn't I?" He has also said he plans to use his veto freely.

That veto is the practical boundary of this result. When the new Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, a Democratic House under Hakeem Jeffries gets committee subpoenas and a hand on every spending bill, and a Democratic Senate decides which judges and cabinet nominees get confirmed. Neither chamber can pass a law over the President's objection without Republican votes. What changes is who sets the agenda, who gets investigated, and who gets confirmed.

Texas also produced the strangest result of the night. Last year Republicans redrew the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade, aiming to pick up five seats. According to the Texas Tribune, they lost four of the five districts they targeted, and they also lost seats they already held. Tejano musician Bobby Pulido beat Representative Monica De La Cruz in the Rio Grande Valley, and Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez held seats that had been redrawn to include more Trump voters. Spreading Republican voters across more districts works in an ordinary year. In a wave, it leaves more of them exposed. Texas Republicans now look headed for a smaller delegation than the one they started with.

Two Senate races remain open, and one is extremely close. In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom led Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by forty-three votes overnight, out of more than nine hundred thousand cast. Thousands of affidavit ballots still need checking, which can take up to five business days. Mississippi has no runoff in this race, so the plurality wins. Colom would be the state's first Democratic senator since John Stennis won his final term in 1982. In Alaska, Senator Dan Sullivan holds a narrow lead over Mary Peltola. Alaska releases more results over the next two weeks, and if nobody clears fifty percent, the ranked-choice tabulation happens on November 18th. A few dozen House races are also still counting, including New York's 17th, where Representative Mike Lawler has conceded but Westchester County is still counting ballots from malfunctioning tabulators.

Voters also wrote law directly. In Missouri, two years after voters added abortion rights to the state constitution, the legislature asked them to repeal it, in a package that also put a ban on gender-transition care for minors into the constitution. The AP called it for "No" on election night, and the margin is roughly fifty-five to forty-five. Abortion remains legal in Missouri. Nevada voters gave the second approval their abortion-rights amendment needed, while Idaho voters rejected a measure to create a statutory right to abortion.

California's billionaire tax, Proposition 40, is losing. It would have imposed a one-time five percent tax on the net worth of the state's roughly two hundred billionaires. With about half the vote counted, the AP had it trailing fifty-six to forty-four. Opponents spent more than three hundred sixteen million dollars, including one hundred two million from Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The healthcare union behind it says it will try again in 2028.

And in Alaska, voters appear to be keeping the open primaries and ranked-choice general elections they narrowly kept two years ago. The repeal was trailing with about fifty-one percent voting no, with many ballots still to count. In 2024 the same question came down to fewer than a thousand votes, and the late ballots changed the result.

That should do it for today. And remember, if you keep your expectations low, you'll never be disappointed. Thanks for listening, see you next time.