Texas led the way as Democrats have swept back into control of both chambers of Congress and statehouses nationwide.
Democrats routed Republicans in battleground races, with flips of GOP Senate seats in Texas, Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina, along with picking up at least two dozen House seats.
In Texas, James Talarico became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in nearly four decades, defeating Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Democrats also won a majority of governors’ offices for the first time since 2010, including Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who defeated Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the Lone Star State.
In the House, Democrats began Tuesday with 214 seats and needed four more to win the majority. By Wednesday morning, they held at least 228 seats with several dozen races still undecided.
Democrats’ wins were historic on several fronts, as the party captured seats in longtime Republican strongholds, delivering a massive rebuke to President Trump.
The GOP had hoped to build a cushion through an unprecedented round of mid-decade redistricting, but those plans backfired, with Democrats in Florida, North Carolina and elsewhere winning seats that had been drawn to favor Republicans.
The voting played out amid an unprecedented crusade by Trump, who assailed mail-in ballots, noncitizen voting and the time it takes to count the votes. Turnout appeared to be heavy, with early voting easily outstripping the 2022 midterm elections. And aside from scattered reports of ballot printing issues, there were no signs of widespread problems.
Locally, Janeese Lewis George made history as the first socialist to be elected mayor of Washington, D.C., while Maryland Gov. Wes Moore strolled to a second term.
Lewis George secured a comfortable victory shortly after the final voters left polling locations, winning 84% of the vote over Robert Gross, the candidate for the Statehood Green Party, and Rhonda Hamilton, the independent candidate.
Moore was projected to win his race against Republican challenger Dan Cox almost immediately after polls closed at 8 p.m., in a rematch of their race four years ago.
The Supreme Court has waded back into the realm of religious liberty, hearing a case testing whether states can ban Catholic schools from a universal preschool program because those schools exclude families that don’t adhere to the church’s teachings on homosexuality.
At issue is Colorado’s universal preschool program, which lets parents choose private schools at a cost covered by the state but prohibits discrimination, including against transgender students or children of same-sex couples.
Several Catholic parishes challenged the law, saying it would bar them from participating in the program. Both sides framed the dispute as a confrontation between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights, against a backdrop of conflicting Supreme Court precedents.
And finally … President Trump says U.S. aid to Israel will be cut off at the end of this year as part of an understanding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump said he and Netanyahu “made a deal months ago that we’re stopping” the annual U.S. aid, a total of roughly $4 billion.
The president framed the move partly as a way to remove a talking point from Democratic candidates. It’s unclear whether he will go through with the move following Republicans’ overwhelming losses in the midterm elections.
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