US Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed greets supporters during a midterm election night watch party on November 4, 2026, in Detroit. | Salwan Georges/Getty ImagesWelcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.One big ideaTuesday night, in a midterm election for the ages, Democrats notched sweeping victories across the country. They took back both chambers of Congress, and possibly broke the spirit of a Republican Party that has been firmly in President Donald Trump’s grip for the last decade.Early race calls in Georgia and North Carolina. Finally ousting Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. Historic wins in Texas and Iowa. Surprise wins in Kansas, South Carolina, and (maybe) Mississippi?This was a bloodbath. A tsunami, not a wave. And it was a vindication for pollsters who had been flagging signs of Republican underperformance all year.Most importantly, it was the clearest message the American public could send to Trump’s administration: This president, his priorities, and his war of choice in Iran are out of step with public opinion. Trump wasn’t on the ballot, but he repeatedly told people to vote like he was. Americans accepted the challenge and largely retired the GOP candidates functioning as his proxy.Thinking about our reporting on America, Actually, where we’ve been charting the path to America’s post-Trump future one episode at a time, here are five lessons I’m taking from the results. They apply to the coming legislative fights in Congress and to the 2028 presidential primary.1. It really was a populist backlashThroughout the year, candidates from James Talarico to Abdul El-Sayed said this election wasn’t about right versus left, but top versus bottom. The results bore that out.For two years, Republicans and their allies claimed Trump’s 2024 coalition was a firm realignment, a fundamental break from Democrats by working-class voters. Fast-forward to this week: The New York Times’ voter analysis shows every big demographic moved toward Democrats, including men (17-point swing, Latino voters (28-point swing), and Asian voters (17-point swing).Two things drove this. First, Trump flopped, breaking his promises to lower prices and avoid foreign conflicts, among other things. Second, Democrats refocused their message, especially after Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral win in New York City, on affordability and tangible economic concerns. That brought back voters they lost in 2024, and reinforced the multiracial coalition they needed to overcome Republican advantages: a GOP-leaning Senate map, heavily gerrymandered districts, and a massive spending edge driven by big donors.None of it mattered.2. Issues that won: Affordability, anti-corruption, anti-data centersSo how did Democrats drive the bottom-versus-top message? Universally, with affordability, and by highlighting the choices Republicans made to follow Trump into the political abyss. Tariffs were the original sin. The Iran war made things worse.When we were at a Speedway in battleground state Pennsylvania, even Trump voters were frustrated with the price of gas. Everyone, and I mean everyone, could draw the line between the war in Iran and the cost at the pump. When Pennsylvania voters are talking about the Strait of Hormuz, that’s a problem. It’s also a clear sign the GOP plan to blame the 2026 economy on former President Joe Biden wasn’t working.Here’s what one voter said: “I blame the president because he indicated to us he’s gonna drop all these costs. I know it can’t happen overnight, but when is it gonna happen?… It’s outrageous.”Two other issues carried the populist mood:CorruptionDemocrats across the country began hammering Trump on corruption earlier this year, and there’s real evidence the message was potent. We heard it in Virginia, and candidates like Jon Ossoff and Talarico made it their calling card. It wasn’t just that Trump was for sale. It was that he and his family were profiting from big business while things got more unaffordable for you.Data centersThe third ingredient in this populist stew. Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa in Texas, Senate candidate Annie Andrews in South Carolina, and House candidate Will Lawrence in Michigan made a data center moratorium central to their campaigns. All three won. Data center moratoriums went an astounding 43-1 when put directly in front of voters, a sign of just how unpopular the issue has become.And like affordability and corruption, the data center message was never about just one thing. Voters were mad about the secretive process. Anxious about what artificial intelligence means for the future of work. And particularly enraged that big technology seemed to be profiting at their expense.All of that came out at the polls.3. Issues that lost: The GOP culture warThe GOP had a huge spending advantage this cycle, and so much of that money went into ads painting Democrats as extreme, particularly on social and cultural issues. “Talafreako” in Texas, who they portrayed as an effeminate vegan. The Hasan Piker obsession in Michigan and the openly anti-Muslim and bigoted ads and rhetoric there and in places like Minnesota as well. And repeated hammering of a tactic that worked for Trump in 2024: stoking panic about transgender rights or “biological males” in women’s sports.It flopped in 2026, and there’s no way around it. The spending spree didn’t just fail to pan out; they seem to have lit their money on fire, given how roundly Americans rejected the pitch. To the electorate, the most offensive thing wasn’t progressive overreach or nonbinary pronouns. It was Trump’s attacks on diversity and inclusion, and his party’s refusal to align its priorities with those of everyday Americans.The GOP also had a timing problem: They ran a 2024 playbook against a 2026 Democratic Party that was much better positioned to beat back the caricature of progressive zealots.Beau Bayh in Indiana and El-Sayed in Michigan made direct appeals to the “bro” vote with weightlifting videos.Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas, both religious liberals, put faith at the center of their campaigns.These weren’t coastal elites. They were tailored to the district and the state. They spoke to the everyday person, not the Ford Foundation. And in doing so, they wrote a playbook against GOP attacks.4. Standout demographics: Latino and rural votersTwo groups stood out to me: Trump’s collapse with Latino voters, and Democratic gains with rural voters.Latino votersThe numbers are staggering. The Times estimates Hispanic voters were D+39, a 28-point swing leftward from 2024. Results in Texas, Nevada, and Arizona, and even the tightness in Florida, show the impact of Trump’s collapse with the all-important swing demographic. As we reported this summer, two issues drove Latino voters away from Republicans: the administration’s credibility collapse on the economy, and a backlash to the interior push for deportations.Here’s what Stephanie Valencia of Equis Research said: “It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things.”Rural votersWhen we covered the stakes in state legislature races, and specifically Democratic efforts to win trifectas (governor plus both chambers) in states like Wisconsin and Nevada, rural voters were front and center. Democrats pulled off the trifecta in Wisconsin: Gov.-elect David Crowley, plus a flipped Senate and Assembly, the first Democratic trifecta there in 16 years. By early tallies, they also won trifectas in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Nevada.It reminds me of what Francesca Hong told me when we met her on her tour of rural Wisconsin a few months ago: The midterm stakes weren’t just federal but state-level. Democrats won both.5. 2028 winners and losersCaveats apply: We should pump the brakes on extrapolating too much from the 2026 midterms to the 2028 presidential primary. But I think there are some things we do know.Winner: Non-Vance RepublicansIf you’re Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or another Republican with credentials in Trump’s orbit who has also kept some distance, last night’s result helps make your case. Trump dragged the party down in Texas, South Carolina, and Ohio, where he and Vance defended Vivek Ramaswamy’s deplorable ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother.Going forward, Vance has to walk a tough line between acknowledging the country’s Trump distaste and not angering the president he serves under. His initial reaction to the midterm losses was to blame the Iran war first and foremost, notably without saying whether it was the wrong decision by his boss. But he’s spent the last two years all in on Trump mimicry, even defending the ICE shootings in Minnesota earlier this year. Is that a winning message anywhere? I’m not so sure.Winner: Fresh faces on the Democratic sideWhether moderate or progressive, Democrats embraced younger candidates with new messages and bold ideas that match the scope of voters’ problems. That’s bad news for candidates who represent a specter of the past, mainly former Vice President Kamala Harris, who has courted speculation about another run through a series of media interviews.There is no way to read these results as a desire to relitigate the same fights of 2020 or 2024. It’s a call to write a new story entirely. One thing I’m hearingIn an election night full of surprises, perhaps the biggest of them all was in Mississippi, where Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is poised to possibly win his race against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, with the two separated by just dozens of votes with thousands more left to count as of this writing. We reached out to Mississippi Today reporter Michael Goldberg, fresh off covering a press conference with Colom on Wednesday, to walk us through what happened. Mississippi barely seemed to be on the national radar until the final weeks. What signs did you see in your reporting that this result was possible?Colom began to pick up steam rapidly as the election entered its closing weeks, drawing an infusion of resources from national Democrats and a brigade of Democratic stars filing into Mississippi for campaign events. But while the national attention ramped up in the election’s home stretch, Colom ran a tireless campaign from the beginning, crisscrossing the state for in-person events and trying to run a digitally savvy campaign that captured attention online. Also, former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Brandon Pressley came within 4 points of winning the 2023 governor’s race, and many local Democrats have been urging the national party to take Mississippi seriously ever since. How big a factor were the Callais decision and voting rights? How did those issues come up in your conversations with voters?Colom campaigned with US Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat and lone Black member of Mississippi’s congressional delegation, who would be a likely target of a future redistricting push by the Republican-controlled state legislature. Colom has called the Callais decision “a threat to our democracy” the country hasn’t seen in decades. This fall, voters packed public hearings on redistricting and expressed their anger and dismay. What is Scott Colom like on the campaign trail? What was most distinctive about his campaign compared with other Mississippi Democrats?Colom campaigned hard. He traversed the state from end to end and, in the election’s homestretch, engaged in a near-nonstop media blitz aimed at galvanizing any voters tuned into traditional cable news shows or following the race on social media. In viral ads, he mocked Hyde-Smith for suggesting voters upset over the rising price of beef should “pick another protein” and riffed off the Oscar-winning movie Sinners, which is set in Mississippi.On the ground, Colom mobilized the Democratic base through energetic rallies and appearances with high-profile national Democrats. He also tried to persuade skeptical Republicans. In one 24-hour span just over a week before Election Day, Colom roamed the line outside a Trump rally in northeast Mississippi, spoke to some of the president’s supporters, then headed to the other end of the state for a rally with former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Mississippi is often overlooked in national politics because it’s considered so reliably Republican. What’s the biggest thing people outside the state misunderstand or don’t know?Many this morning have argued that regardless of whether Colom wins narrowly or loses narrowly, his campaign showed that with investment from the national party and the right candidate, Mississippi Democrats have a fighting chance of winning statewide.