🗳️ As Tuesday’s midterm election results rolled in, Zeteo’s Mehdi and Prem livestreamed throughout the night from Michigan. Did you miss it? You can catch the full replay now. If you’re a free subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to unlock all that Zeteo has to offer, from in-depth reporting to acclaimed documentaries. You can also support our work with a donation.
Happy Wednesday! Swin and Andrew here. You’re right now waking up to a post-2026 midterms America, and holy mother of god, was that bad… if you have an “R” next to your name and official title. Was it catastrophically bad for Donald Trump and the Republican Party? Yes. Was it somehow a more painful night for them than they thought it would be heading into it? Also yes.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we dive right into the epic conclusion of this year’s high-stakes election cycle, and what the Democratic Party’s victories and the GOP’s electoral slaughter mean for the next two years of Trump’s fascist presidency. Plus, we round up some of the night’s other key results.
Let’s read in.
‘Utter Bloodbath’
On election night, Mehdi and Prem livestreamed from Michigan. Andrew was covering Troy Jackson in Maine. And Swin was at the Ohio Democratic watch party in Columbus, Ohio. All three states are now sending Democratic senators to Capitol Hill next year – and that was just the tip of the night’s anti-fascist iceberg. Throughout the evening, there was one word that Swin kept hearing and reading from panicking Republican sources – those in the Trump-Vance administration, longtime GOP operatives working on competitive races, big-time conservative donors, and so forth:
“Bloodbath,” or, as one Trump adviser put it: “Utter bloodbath.”
By the middle of the evening, the White House and the larger constellation of national GOP power knew how bad it was. It was a staggering catastrophe for the Trump presidency and his MAGA-fied Republican Party – a stunning repudiation by the American people of President Trump’s agenda of senseless war, ravaged economy, wholesale corruption, and constant barbarism at home and abroad.
Trump’s party lumbered into election night knowing it would be bad, perhaps even really, very bad. But many of these Republicans, as they told us as the clock ran well past midnight, were not predicting Tuesday’s midterms would be this titanic of a disaster for the Republican Party. For instance, several of them told us their worst-case scenarios for Tuesday did not involve Texas swinging as hard toward the Democrats as the GOP stronghold did on Election Night.
“That was worse than we imagined,” a senior Trump administration official told Swin in the middle of the night.