I’ve seen a few comments over the last couple days to the effect that our system turned out to be more robust, stronger than some of us feared. Trump tried to tamper with and rig the 2026 election. But he mostly failed. I would put it a little differently. We turned out to be — the American people — stronger, more robust than many of us feared. This may seem mawkish or merely semantic. But it’s more than that and the difference speaks directly to the current debates about accountability and how it should shape the next Congress and the next two years.
The singular lesson of the Trump Era has been that no system can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow and enforce the rules that govern it. It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. No constitution or system of laws and protections can be stronger than its participants’ willingness to follow the rules that govern it. Trump was faced with the big challenge that states control the administration of elections. But the White House came up with numerous quite ingenious angles to overcome those obstacles. It took an immense amount of work by voters, elected officials, judges, lawyers, countless Americans in myriad positions and professions to stop it. A governmental system provides a framework, a playing field. But as the authors of the federal Constitution debated and largely decided: there is no machine that runs of itself. It lives or dies, degenerates or perseveres, based on the people, the citizens who make it up.
The clearest signal from Donald Trump at the moment is the lack of any signal. His public comments have ranged from resigned to cooperative to boasting. His affect is disorganized, enervated, sometimes light. It’s one of the few times we’ve seen Trump seemingly unable to figure out how to react. This appears to apply to the whole White House.
We’re seeing Republicans wrestle their way toward a first reaction to Tuesday’s genuinely historic electoral collapse. We saw it most clearly, with a heavily “nationalist” tinge, in JD Vance’s Tuesday sleight of hand about Trump’s Iran War. Vance’s argument is that Trump Two was basically going great, both substantively and politically, until Trump launched his war on Iran back in February. So the problem isn’t Trumpism but not sticking to Trumpism with enough resolve. They only went wrong with the Iran War and even more Israel.
Let’s start by noting that Vance’s gambit is just warmed over TuckerCarlsonism, or TuckCarlsonism without all the charisma. That is, racial/religious nationalism which has a specific beef with both Jews and Israel as part of a broader argument that America is a white and Christian country where non-whites and non-Christians are at best guests. You see this in Vance’s frequent references to “heritage Americans” and attacks on “ungrateful” Blacks and non-white immigrants who should be kicked out of the country if they don’t express gratitude clearly enough. This is a reality that deserves a lot of attention from Jews who are rightly concerned about antisemitism of various sorts on the left. Vance is not only clearly an antisemite personally but he is signaling that he plans to use that animus as a central lever of his drive to power.
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There’s a point of diminishing returns on non-definitive updates on the still outstanding Mississippi Senate race. But I’ve kept looking at the mix of outstanding votes, where they are, historical precedents, etc., and I’m pretty confident that Scott Colom is going to win this race and be the next senator from Mississippi. If it were callable it would be called. And it may take days or even a week to get a final verdict. But I just can’t find any argument that the remaining ballots don’t heavily favor Colom and he’s already up by almost 2,000 votes. (The AP numbers which most sites use are out of date.)
Assuming that is true we’re likely looking at a 56-seat majority for the Democrats — technically 54 seats plus the two independents who caucus with the Democrats, if you want to be picky. That’s not only good news on its own for Democrats. It puts them in a good position to hold the Senate majority through the remainder of this decade.
A number of you have written in to ask how the polls ended up doing in the 2026 midterms. I think we know that they underestimated Democratic strength. But how much? How consistently? What I’ve assembled below is just a provisional, back-of-the-envelope read. Others will do this more comprehensively, looking across all polls, comparing them with the final certified results and then adding additional fancy numbers stuff. But I wanted to come up with a provisional read.
I took 12 Senate races that by the widest measure appeared to be contested. I took the final poll average in each from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin and I compared them to the current posted results on The New York Times results page. Votes are still being counted, but margins won’t change much. With the poll average and the final result I rounded to the closest whole number before comparing them to find the amount of error or miss.
As I mentioned last night, the data analysts I trust think Scott Colom is more likely than not to win the Mississippi Senate race. A short time ago I noticed that DecisionDeskHQ has more votes reported than most reporting sites which mostly use the data feed provided by the AP. DDHQ is a several year old upstart elections service which has aimed to compete with AP’s data service. They’re legit. They provide data to RCP and many other sites, but not as many as the AP. I’d still like to see these numbers confirmed by another source. But I’m pretty sure they’re real. They now show Colom opening up a lead of 1,864 votes. Add to this that the remaining votes appear to be in Colom-friendly areas. We can’t be sure of the outcome yet. But his odds look good.
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Republicans’ mid-decade gerrymanders did not withstand Tuesday’s bluenami, as Democrats hung on to nearly all of their targeted seats. In some states it actually backfired, delivering Democrats seats exceeding their pre-redistricting total.
