President Donald Trump's decision to name hard-line loyalist Stephen Miller as his top aide cemented what many Republicans were already privately fearing: There will be no party-wide GOP reckoning with this week's midterm bloodbath.

Instead, with Trump still in office for another two years, most have grown resigned to the reality that the president is going to lean in on a confrontational approach with Congress — and is not willing to change course.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration are questioning how and whether they can break with the president now after having green-lit much of his agenda, according to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, senior aides and Trump officials interviewed for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about the party’s future.

Trump's decision Friday to elevate Miller, the architect of his unpopular mass deportation policy and an advocate of fierce partisan confrontation, crystallized the frustration.

“There needs to be some self-reflection for Republicans,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) said in an interview about the midterm losses Friday morning. “There should be some heads rolling at the White House because we lost badly.”

Hours later, heads did roll. Trump announced Miller would replace Susie Wiles as his new chief of staff.

“Horrible decision,” Stutzman said in response.

One House Republican, when informed that Trump had named Miller his chief of staff, replied: “Please tell me you’re lying to me right now, just to get a reaction.”

The immediate aftermath of the election has sharpened the GOP’s core issue for the past decade: They are struggling to navigate the man who they reshaped their entire identity around, and whose record low approval with voters helped to fuel generational losses within the party.

The Iran war is another area where some Republicans are having regrets. Vice President JD Vance identified it as the main reason for the party’s defeat in his election post-mortem.

The problem with Vance’s assessment, one senior Hill Republican said, is, “we’ve been fucking voting for the war since March — because they told us to.”

Republicans and Trump advisers expect the president to wield massive influence in the 2028 GOP primaries, another reason many are staying quiet.

"Everyone is staring at each other and wondering who will speak up and blame Trump first," said one GOP operative who worked on a battleground race Democrats won. They, like others in this article, were granted anonymity to speak candidly. "But we've been here before. I'm not holding my breath. He still controls the party and its primaries, at least for now." 

The White House responded to POLITICO's request for comment by referring to Trump's praise for Miller on Friday. The RNC declined to comment.

Miller wrote on social media that he is "honored beyond words to serve as [Trump's] White House Chief of Staff" and "the mission now is more clear than ever: Fight with all of our soul to support our President."

How much lawmakers will distance themselves will be put to the test quickly: House Republicans will have an immediate opportunity to break with Trump and the war next week, when Rep. Thomas Massie said in an interview with POLITICO he will trigger his articles of impeachment against Secretary Pete Hegseth. “There are a lot of questions about Hegseth,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said Friday.

Some senior Republicans are privately nudging Trump officials to ditch Hegseth before the vote, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. The White House is sticking by Hegseth so far, however.

House Republicans will also have a chance to elect new leadership next week, including a new chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. But in a sign of what’s to come, none of the candidates — including Reps. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) and Rudy Yakym (R-Ind.) — nor any other GOP leadership candidates have publicly suggested doing more to break with Trump.

A small group of Republicans on Capitol Hill have privately declared, as of Tuesday night, that “MAGA is over,” and it’s time for a “reset,” as one House GOP aide put it — and yet it’s a sentiment no prominent Republican is willing to say publicly.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), one of the longest-serving members of the House, said he wasn’t going to “blame” others for Tuesday’s losses, which left him as the sole GOP incumbent survivor in his home state. Asked if Republicans were dragged down by the president, Smith replied: “I don’t want to answer that.”

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) went a step further. He declined to name Trump, but he said in an interview that he was tired of GOP leaders “ignoring” voters — a remarkable position for a party that Trump transformed into a working-class coalition.

"We had a lot of Republican leaders out there saying ‘everything's fine.’ And you kind of had the boomer generation saying, 'Well, yeah, back in my day, interest rates were 15%, so everything's good,’” said Davidson, a 56-year-old former Army Ranger. “Well, you had a lot of hardworking young people who felt really ignored, and they they went to the polls and said, 'Stop ignoring us.'"

Davidson said Republicans need to start discussing their problems quickly, or suffer the electoral consequences again.

"Bad news doesn't get better with time. So avoiding talking about something doesn't solve the problem," he said. He said Vance “walked a pretty good line” by being “candid” in his election post-mortem Wednesday.

Vance and other potential 2028 presidential contenders like Sen. Ted Cruz don’t have much time to waste if they want to chart a new path away from Trump. Cruz issued his own post-mortem that included a call to focus more on voters’ economic concerns. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “this midterm was a rebuke of the president and Congress.”

French Hill, the powerful Financial Services Committee Chair who narrowly survived a strong Democratic challenge in his own deep-red Arkansas seat Tuesday night, pointed to “President Trump’s unfavorability” which hit “races across the country.” Hill added: “He will be considered a lame duck, and that often has members of both political parties looking out at who will be the standard-bearers in the 2028 presidential election.”

Most others have remained silent in public.

One thing is certain: The utter devastation in deep-red seats is stirring deep anger among many Hill Republicans, who believe something needs to change.

It’s fueling private recriminations at Trump’s political operation that his advisers didn’t take early warnings seriously about the extent of the damage in states like North Carolina. Trump’s now-former chief of staff Susie Wiles will join his political operation, the president announced Friday.

Trump's team has blamed "candidate quality" for the losses, instead of the president himself.

“Candidate quality matters. Unless you’re running for the U.S. Senate. They apparently don’t care if you would lose to a pinecone,” said a House Republican, referring to Trump's hand-picked North Carolina Senate nominee Michael Whatley.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declined to comment.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who leads the Senate campaign arm and saw Democrats flip a Senate seat in his own state, did not answer reporters’ questions on Thursday. The South Carolina Republican has a policy of not talking to reporters in the halls — and he didn’t start when POLITICO and others asked why Republicans lost so badly.

Back in August, some Republicans in seats Trump won by double digits were already telling the White House to keep the president away from their districts. Others publicly broke from the White House on mass deportations and the Iran war.

NRCC Chair Richard Hudson had largely dismissed those concerns when POLITICO asked him in a hallway interview on Sept. 1.

“Based on our polling, the president's a net positive in every district. And I've been encouraging him to get out and do events and do rallies. I'm going to continue to do that,” Hudson said. “I think the more he talks about his record and incredible achievements he's made over the last Congress, I think the better.”

Then, Hudson lost his own reelection bid. He is the first ever NRCC chair in history to be defeated in a general election.

Mia McCarthy, Andrew Howard and Samuel Benson contributed to this report.

Even the head of House Democrats’ top super PAC didn’t fully anticipate the size of their massive midterm wave.

Heading into Election Day, House Majority PAC president Mike Smith told POLITICO Tuesday’s results, which have netted them a whopping 252 House seats with more yet to be called, was “on the very high end” of the group’s expectations.

The group spent at least $283 million on ads this cycle, per ad-tracking firm AdImpact, making them the largest Democratic spender in House races this cycle and a significant force behind the party’s big night.

As Democrats turn their attention to 2028, Smith remains optimistic the party can hold on to its majority.

His confidence stems in part from a projection that Democrats will respond to the affordability concerns that were the core of the party’s promise to voters.

If Democrats don’t make efforts to address the rising cost of living, “then it's a totally different story,” Smith said.

Q: How were you feeling in the final days before Tuesday?

Obviously this would have been on the very high end of what we expected. Over the last three months, overall our polling has been pretty consistent. Our whole thought was, with the right environment, if we have the right message and the right types of candidates in, not just the 50-50 districts, but like deeper in the map, that we could put those seats in play and we could potentially win.

Going into Election Day, our whole feeling was there's a clear path to like 235-plus [seats]. We were playing in districts that, if you were to rank them from like one to 435, some of those districts were like 250, 255, right? And I would throw IN-05, CO-03, KY-06, SC-01, some of the Florida races. SC-01 wasn't ever going to be seat 225. That was always in the 240s and maybe even 250s. But we took a chance because we saw what the national environment looked like. We saw what the data was coming back in within these individual races. So I think we were optimistic. But to be totally honest, in our heads, you have to play in seat 255 to get to seat 240. You have to spread out the map. You have to force Republicans on their heels, and then you start piecing together how you get to the 240-245 range. Once the numbers started coming back, that was the best case scenario for us. Everything came together.

You guys cut reservations in some reach districts, only to go back up in the final few days. On the outside, it appeared like cutting spending in those reach districts was a bad sign. What went into those last-minute spending decisions?

A lot of the places we made reservations back in April, and then continued to add on to that over the course of the summer. Partners and allies in a bunch of different places took over our reservations. We tried to be smart by locking in the lowest possible rates in very expensive markets, [so that] even if HMP wasn't the entity spending, we still had partners and allies that were taking over their reservations. In doing all that we saved about $130 million that we could reinvest.

The challenge with some of the races was by a week out, our money was spent. And in some of those districts, there weren't any partners willing to step up and do it. Florida is a good example of that.

That’s where we just had to make a decision that there weren't the resources there, and we had to leave the reservations on the table. Around that time, Mayor Bloomberg was like, "We can't let these races get away from us. We need to do everything we can," and that's where we went back into some of those places.

Did you feel the need to adjust your messaging at all once MAGA Inc. and Elon Musk’s PAC joined CLF on the airwaves?

The short answer is no. The messaging was fairly consistent. Early on, our whole feeling was we need to reframe how voters perceive Democrats. When voters think about what Democrats are fighting for, the first thing we want them to think about is cost of living, the economy. At the same time, bringing to light Republican policies that are increasing the cost of living, or focus on things that are anything but that.

Over several months, we did a bunch of battleground research looking at ‘how does corruption tie into that,’ which culminated in what we would describe as the cost of Republican corruption, and how that is impacting your day to day and your cost of living. That's what we went into Election Day with.

Overall, we ran, I don't know, 1300 different types of ads, whether TV, digital, direct mail, or whatnot. 76% of those ads talked about the economy. 60% of those ads focused on corruption, because in so many of them, those two things were interlinked in voters' minds.

Republicans continued to focus on the same thing. It was trying to paint Democrats as out of touch or extremists. And again, the theory of the case from the beginning was us focusing on economic concerns, especially when we figured out we could tie that corruption lens into it. That's going to be more important to voters than folks talking about socialism or anything else.

Democrats were able to prevent Republicans from capitalizing on their redistricting gains. Are you worried about those gains bearing fruit in a less favorable environment, maybe as soon as 2028?

In a different environment, these races are going to come together in a much different way. So I do think it's something that we need to be hyper-focused on. That said, I don't think redistricting is going to go away.

I'm actually pretty hopeful that these huge shifts across every demographic group that we just saw, as long as Democrats continue to focus on the issue that matters most to voters.

If we don't, then it's a totally different story.

Are you saying the fate of Democrats' House chances in 2028 to keep these seats is predicated on Congress passing something, even with the current president still in the White House, that addresses affordability issues?

I wouldn't say passing. Soon-to-be Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, since we won, his message is that Democrats are focused on three things: costs, care and corruption.

When we come into power, we are going to be hyper-focused on fighting to bring down the cost of living for voters. I think Donald Trump is still this outsized X-factor in everything. He's still the sitting president in the White House. So I wouldn't say it's like, “Oh we have to pass 300 bills. That's the only way we're going to be successful.” I think we just need to show voters that we are willing to get stuff done, and in instances where we need to, work across the aisle to pass stuff that's going to be helpful to voters. I think if we do that, then I think we're setting ourselves up for success going into ‘28, both with the White House and the House and the Senate. Donald Trump is still going to be this huge factor in all of this, and I don't think voters are going to be like, “Democrats weren't able to accomplish this,” and think that that was us. They're going to continue blaming Donald Trump going into Election Day 2028.

To go back to redistricting, do you want Democrats in these states where they have newly-won trifectas to take up redistricting even if Republicans don’t push for it again?

I think Democrats need to do everything that it will take to win, and if that means that in states where we control the state house, the state senate, a governor's race, we have an opportunity to redraw the map, I think we need to do it.

What were the seats Democrats flipped that surprised you the most?

I would say NJ-02 [Rep. Jeff Van Drew’s seat], It was a district where we had looked at it — we did not think that it was credibly possible, to be totally honest.

I'd say North Carolina as a whole, probably. We felt good about NC-01, NC-11 for a while…. [NRCC Chair and North Carolina Rep.] Richard Hudson, we looked at that district. There was a clear path to winning it. There just wasn't money, at the end of the day. NC-13, NC-14, same thing. The makeup of the districts, they're not bad targets for Democrats. It was just, how much can we spread resources out? But the total implosion in North Carolina by Republicans at the federal level, at the state level — that was probably one of the biggest surprises.

A version of this article first appeared in POLITICO Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.

The Clyburn test

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Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here's an offering of the best of this week's crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

Brutal red-state losses are raising alarm among Republicans about the 2028 presidential battlefield.

Democrats’ midterm blowout is upending the political calculus for future presidential campaigns, more than a dozen strategists on both sides told POLITICO. Republicans are stressing the ramifications of a major tranche of once-reliably Republican Electoral College votes being in jeopardy, while Democrats are weighing how much surprise wins on red turf should reshape their electoral strategy.

“Last night undoubtedly made the mechanics of winning in 2028 harder for Republicans,” said former Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien.  

Stepien lamented that Republicans had lost both once-swing Midwestern states like Ohio that Trump had brought toward the GOP, as well as formerly red Sunbelt states like Georgia and Arizona that have moved steadily left in the Trump era.

And then there’s Texas.

"Waging a campaign for president in Texas is big, expensive, and not something Republicans have had to do for a long time,” he added. “The impacts of last night are real."

Trump had rearranged the electoral map for the past 12 years with a blue-collar coalition that moved Ohio and Iowa safely into Republicans’ ledger, turned Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania into true swing states and did enough in the Sun Belt to keep Texas from being in play. But that all fell apart this week as Democrats romped across the map. If things don’t change fast after Tuesday’s results, Republicans fear that the party’s next nominee will confront a bleak map akin to 2008 or 2012, when the GOP had an excruciatingly narrow path to victory.

Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, compared this year’s GOP gutting to Republicans’ 2006 midterm shellacking, which foreshadowed Democrats taking the White House and building massive majorities two years later.

“[Republicans] didn’t bottom in 2006, you bottomed after 2008,” said Short.

Democrats know that recreating their historically large estimated 14-point national popular vote blowout isn’t likely in the 2028 presidential election, and that Trump’s historic unpopularity was a major factor in the midterms.

“It’s not fait accompli that any of those voters that came over will stay with us, in the same way that they didn't stay with Donald Trump after this last cycle, or they didn't stay with Joe Biden after 2020,” said Dan Kanninen, former battleground states director for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. But the electoral map suddenly looks a lot different to strategists than it did a few days ago.

"In this environment, every state eventually becomes a swing state,” said Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist who advised Hakeem Jeffries this cycle.

Democrats' Texas Triumph

Democrats are particularly excited about their breakthrough in Texas, which — like Arizona and Georgia before it — has been trending to the left for years, driven by demographic change and suburban voters’ realignment. The state’s rapid Hispanic growth meant the swing in Hispanic voters back toward Democrats pushed the state especially hard towards them this cycle. “If we weren't already considering Texas a swing state in 2028, we are now,” said Melissa Morales, the executive director of SOMOS PAC, a Latino voter engagement group.

Democrats swept Texas’ statewide offices on Tuesday despite being massively outspent, with Sen.-elect James Talarico leading the way with a 12-point blowout victory.

Talarico told POLITICO after his win that Texas is “absolutely” on the presidential map for 2028, and said he would “urge every 2028 candidate to vigorously compete in our state.”

Some Democrats urged party leaders to press their organizing advantage in Texas, seeing the state’s Black and Latino voters as central to the future of the party in a state where the Republican machine had helped keep the state out of reach for Democrats.

Democrats’ Midwestern Bounceback

Republican collapses in Ohio and Iowa, two longtime swing states that President Obama carried twice that had moved hard right under Trump, have panicked some GOP strategists in those states. Democrats won Senate and governor’s races in both states Tuesday, as well as flipping a half-dozen House seats between them as they romped across the region. Republicans in both states warn that the era of GOP dominance might have been more closely tied to Trump’s unique populist appeal and could be competitive in two years — an appeal that has taken a major hit since he returned to the White House.

“You lived off Trump’s brand, and Trump’s brand did a lot of good for the state of Iowa. We won a lot of things here. But you can also die by the brand as well,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in Iowa.

In Ohio, ancestrally Democratic blue-collar areas rebounded hard back to the left.

“Ohio should be considered a battleground,” Ohio GOP strategist Curt Steiner said. Republicans see the massive losses in all the future presidential battlegrounds as a huge blow to their organizational infrastructure in those states. Stepien said he would regularly lean on GOP governors in battleground states for guidance and strategy while helming Trump’s 2020 campaign, which he called a “massive advantage.” “You're going to save time, you're going to save money, you're going to have to put less staff into the state. You're going to have more local know-how,” Stepien said. “It is an automatic advantage to be able to tap into something that's existing and that's been tested.”

After Tuesday’s victories, Democrats hold the governor’s seats in all 10 presidential battleground states.

Dasha Burns, Adam Wren and Jason Beeferman contributed to this report.

Tuesday’s blue wave didn’t resolve either party’s internal divides. In fact, The POLITICO Poll shows they may even get worse.

Even ahead of Election Day, Republicans were already torn over how much to blame President Donald Trump for the scale of the defeat, weeks of polling show. While Trump distances himself from the electoral blowout — saying the loss was because he wasn’t on the ballot himself — some Republicans are beginning to weigh what a post-Trump GOP looks like.

Democrats, on the other hand, have scored a large-enough victory that instead of being united, nearly all factions of the party can claim it as evidence of support for their agenda, according to the surveys conducted by PF Global. Tuesday’s decisive wave, therefore, has done little to move them past the moderate and progressive infighting that has shaped much of this cycle.

One thing is clear: Both party’s leaders have a lot of work to do to stitch together a winning coalition ahead of a critical 2028 presidential race.

Here are some key takeaways from what voters were telling us right before they delivered a historically heavy blow to the president. (We’re polling them again soon to see how they may have shifted in the wake of the election.)

Republicans voters were torn over whether the midterms would divide their party

Before the elections, Republican midterm voters told The POLITICO Poll they were confident about a victory in the House and the Senate. Despite that, 29% felt that the GOP would come out of the elections more divided, while another 29% said it would come out more unified.

That’s compared with 45% of Democratic voters who said they expected more unity in their party after the election results — even before they knew what would happen.

Republican strategists and lawmakers have already issued stark warnings about the future of the GOP if the party doesn’t learn from voters’ frustrations with the economy, the Iran war and the Trump administration.

“Tonight’s shellacking should be a wake-up call,” Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) wrote in a lengthy Substack post on Tuesday night. “But if our response is to blame the media, the polls, or the voters, we’ll have learned absolutely nothing. We might start by looking in the mirror."

Trump’s coalition shattered — and many of his voters want to distance from him

Some Republicans are directly blaming Trump, who saw his coalition shatter on Tuesday night. The blue wave spared no region: Red counties and blue counties, Hispanic-heavy counties and white counties, urban areas and suburban areas all shifted to the left.

The POLITICO Poll shows there’s been a critical split between Trump voters who identify as MAGA — his most loyal supporters — and those who don’t, who make up the softer part of his 2024 coalition.

A majority of MAGA Trump voters said they would see a midterm election loss as a reason to move closer to Trump’s agenda. Non-MAGA Trump voters said the opposite: For them, a defeat in the House and the Senate was a reason to break away.

The fracture will persist beyond the election results — and it reflects the fact that Republicans’ voter base has been falling apart on a number of issues over the course of the last year. The POLITICO Poll has repeatedly shown that non-MAGA Trump voters break away from their MAGA bedfellows on everything from affordability to ICE to the war in Iran to data centers.

“It’s time to consider what life is going to be like after Donald Trump,” said Jonathan Fletcher, register of deeds and former GOP chair of Gaston County, North Carolina, where failed Senate nominee Michael Whatley’s watch party was held. “Trump has done some excellent things, and I appreciate that, but it can't be the party of Trump forever.”

Democrats are not on the same page about what major wins mean for party direction

The Democratic Party needs to brace for some fiery discussions of its own. Our polling showed that the scale of the victory would shape the direction Democratic voters would want to see from the party.

A plurality of Democratic midterm voters said a massive victory Tuesday would be a reason to run progressive candidates.

But that was driven by self-identified progressives, 61% of whom take that position. Moderate Democrats were more torn, with 35% saying the party should run more progressives in that scenario, and 36% saying the party should run moderates.

Already in the aftermath of the election, both sides of the party’s ideological civil war began to claim victory.

“As the Democratic Party looks to the next presidential election, the lesson from this cycle is unequivocal: high-quality Democrats in the middle were the majority makers in 2026 — and they are the model for 2028,” the centrist Democratic group Third Way wrote in a memo published Wednesday.

Moderates are pointing to Democratic wins in red-states — from Adam Hamilton for Kansas Senate to James Talarico for Texas Senate to Josh Turek for Iowa Senate — as examples of the middle-of-the-road approach they need to take to hold onto those victories and set themselves up for 2028.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, for its part, argued “labels like ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive’ obscure a clear throughline,” according to a memo published after the election. “The center of gravity in the Democratic Party has shifted in an economic populist direction.”

They have their own wins to point to, including Troy Jackson in the Maine Senate race and Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race.

There’s another core problem for Democrats: It looks likely that the strongest coalition they built was centered on backlash to Trump. Even in the final POLITICO Poll before the election, over half of Democratic voters (53%) said they were casting their ballots to vote against Trump, rather than for or against their local candidates.

That means the Democratic Party has work to do to ensure their new voters stick around once Trump is gone.

Seb Wride is the head of polling at PF Global, the London-based firm that runs The POLITICO Poll.

Jim Clyburn gives his reaction to Dems’ historic midterm win

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Abdul El-Sayed ran well behind other Michigan Democrats in places with more Jewish voters, according to a detailed POLITICO analysis of precinct-level results.

Statewide, the progressive senator-elect only ran two points behind Democratic Gov.-elect Jocelyn Benson, getting 52.5% of the vote compared to her 54.5%. But the gap was much larger in heavily Jewish communities: In Huntington Woods, a Detroit suburb that is roughly two-thirds Jewish, El-Sayed ran nearly 15 points behind Benson, getting 65.3% of the vote compared to Benson’s 80%.

In West Bloomfield, the site of the March synagogue attack that shook the Senate primary and a town where roughly a quarter of residents are Jewish, El-Sayed ran 8.8 points behind Benson.

El-Sayed faced blowback from some Jewish Democrats during his campaign, particularly over his calls to end U.S. military support to Israel and his remarks after the synagogue attack that “hurt people hurt people,” for which he later apologized.

El-Sayed, who will be the first Muslim senator in U.S. history, told POLITICO on Wednesday that he hoped he could “earn support” from Jewish voters who hadn’t backed him in this election.

“One of the big issues of disagreement that kept showing up when it came to the Jewish community was my position on Israel,” El-Sayed said. “I'm not going to change my position, but …I intend to lead on all the issues that we agree on — whether it's the right to a union or the right to health care, clean air, clean water, or religious pluralism, and respect for the Constitution — and I hope that over time I can earn [their] support on those issues.”

El-Sayed had worked to make inroads with Jewish voters over the course of his campaign, pledging to stand up to antisemitism and for Jewish safety. Still, some Jewish leaders and activists in the state urged voters to blank their ballots in the Senate race, or back Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers.

His former Democratic primary rival, Rep. Haley Stevens, also switched her endorsement from El-Sayed to Rogers days before the election, citing concerns over antisemitism and the Democrat and his allies’ views and rhetoric around Israel. She pointed to an ad put out by a prominent El-Sayed supporter tying high grocery prices to U.S. aid to Israel, which El-Sayed and his campaign distanced themselves from.

Jewish voters, who make up roughly 1.4% of the Michigan electorate, have historically backed Democrats by large margins. But disagreements over support for Israel and how the party should respond to rising antisemitism are testing that voting bloc — both in Michigan and across the country.

A poll of Jewish early voters in the state found that a majority still backed El-Sayed, but roughly one in four who had supported Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024 switched to back Rogers.

With Michigan in Democrats’ early primary window for 2028, El-Sayed said his statewide win showed voters were aligned with his positioning on Israel — and that he hopes the next presidential nominee takes note.

“If you want to be where the voters are, if you want to be on the side of peace and on the side of justice and transparency, I believe that that is around holding Israel accountable to its war crimes and on making sure our tax dollars get used to do good things here rather than bad things somewhere else,” he said.

In a post-election memo, El-Sayed’s campaign touted an outside analysis finding that he only ran slightly behind Slotkin’s 2024 performance in predominantly Jewish precincts. The memo also noted he was outspent heavily in both the primary and general elections, including by “MAGA billionaires, AIPAC, Elon Musk, and corporate interests determined to elect candidates who would defend the status quo.”

But he won in a blue wave while Slotkin, who is Jewish, overcame a tough year. El-Sayed’s margins were far better than Slotkin’s numbers across nearly all of the state, suggesting Jewish voters moved in the opposite direction of most Michiganders.

On the other hand, El-Sayed particularly surged in areas with more Muslim voters, who make up roughly 2.4% of Michigan’s electorate. In Dearborn, for example, he won 82.5% of the vote compared to 78.7% for Benson. Two years ago, Slotkin won 41.4% in the city while former Vice President Kamala Harris received just 36.3% of the vote.

Lansing Mayor Andy Schor, a Jewish Democrat who supported Stevens in the primary and did not endorse El-Sayed, said he was unsurprised by that split screen. He expressed hope about El-Sayed’s relationship with the Jewish community going forward, but also said Jewish leaders should continue to raise their concerns to the incoming senator.

“Everybody has to keep talking to him. His views aren’t going to change, and we know what they are,” Schor said. But, “I hope he’s open to hearing the concerns of some of his constituents.”

Nonnegotiable Michigan, a group of Jewish activists that pushed El-Sayed on issues of Jewish safety and Israel, also said in a postelection statement that it was “prepared to work with” El-Sayed “even as we continue to hold elected leaders accountable when antisemitism enters our politics or political discourse.”

El-Sayed made clear he has no plans to change his views on Israel, but said he will be straight with voters — and that he’ll “show up for you when you need me” regardless of their differences.

“With me, what you see is what you get. And I've never once gone and told somebody that I was anything but what I am,” El-Sayed said Wednesday. “We're going to disagree. I'm going to be honest, specific and direct. And over time, I hope that I can earn support for leading on the issues on which I hope to lead and [by] serving everybody.”

In 2016, two populist revolutions threatened to remake American politics. Donald Trump’s conquered the Republican Party and delivered him the presidency. Bernie Sanders’ fell short against Hillary Clinton, but introduced a populist economic vision that, at the time, much of the Democratic establishment dismissed as politically impractical.

Ten years later, Trump and MAGA were hit with a devastating midterm repudiation, as candidates across the country in blue and red states echoing versions of Sanders' message broke through in places that once seemed beyond Democrats' reach.

Sanders, as cantankerous as ever, isn’t surprised.

“If you're asking me, am I shocked by that? That the argument about economic justice and taking on oligarchs and fighting for the working class is working in Texas, is working in Ohio, is working in Montana, is working in Florida, is working all over the country — no, I am not shocked,” Sanders said in an interview Wednesday, fresh off over 20 rallies in October alone. “That is what I’ve always believed.”

Sanders’ laser focus on economic populism in 2016 faced criticism from his own party during his contentious primary against Clinton for being too dismissive of identity politics — often couched as his lack of support among Black voters. Now, his brand of relentless focus on corporate and billionaire election interventions and income inequality proved a winning formula not only for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, but for James Talarico in Texas, Sam Forstag in Montana and Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin.

“Bernie normalized the kind of campaigning that really is about making a direct appeal to working people,” El Sayed told POLITICO. “Wherever I went in Michigan, there are people who remember Bernie 2016 and Bernie 2020 — we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Given the booming results on Tuesday and the breadth of wins for the left, Democrats will test whether they can avoid the same pitfalls that ultimately dogged them following their last major win in 2020 with Joe Biden’s blue-collar charm at the top of the ticket, after which the party gradually slipped back down the culture war slope.

To avoid that, Sanders said the party can do both, but that Democrats need to have the “courage” to focus on the day-to-day needs of working families, no matter what the billionaires funding the Democratic Party say.

“It's not either or. You can fight against bigotry and discrimination, but you have got to have the courage,” he said. “The courage now to say to the billionaires who are funding the Democratic Party: ‘Thank you very much for your help, but right now we are going to focus on the needs of the working families of this country, whether you like it or not.’”

Sanders’ reach is perhaps nowhere more evident than in New York City, which has emerged as the mecca of American progressivism, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani — once a Sanders-endorsed local official — is now perhaps the heir-apparent to Sanders’ progressive mantle.

The man behind Mamdani's seismic rise, progressive wunderkind Morris Katz, had more than most on the line this week. After his top client Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race in Maine earlier this year amid scandal, Katz worked this cycle for Gina Hinojosa in Texas, Randy Villegas in California and Brian Poindexter in Ohio, while his firm, Fight Agency, worked with El-Sayed and Pennsylvania’s Bob Brooks.

The day before the election, The Atlantic published a 3,500-word piece that put “Katz’s theory of politics” on the ballot.

“A lot of people wanted to know what I’d say if we lost,” Katz said, referencing an infamous Kanye West quote on Wednesday and running on 45 minutes of sleep. “I guess we’ll never know. That’s about how I feel today.”

Like Sanders, Katz sees a progressive future laser-focused on economics as the clear way forward — and nowhere is that more clear than in Texas.

“Hundreds of millions were spent against James and Gina trying to tag them on a trans issue,” he said. “It failed in epic fashion because there was no room for misunderstanding or ambiguity over what they stood for, because they had grounded themselves in such affirmative and positive economic messaging.”

“Those attacks have succeeded in the absence of an affirmative message,” he added. “Once you’re able to define yourself and provide a message, it's just a lot harder for that to work.”

It's the same formula Mamdani rode to Gracie Mansion — and, Katz argues, the lesson Democrats finally absorbed. “For a long time, politicians accepted the realities of how people felt about the economy but refused responsibility for having to take an active role in changing it,” he said. “There's no room for that anymore.”

Katz sees his and Sanders’ theory of politics as having won out across the Democratic spectrum — not just on the left flank, but among the moderates who once resisted it.

“The more moderate wing of the party has changed the definition of what a moderate is. I think that’s great,” he said. “We should be a big tent party, but you are seeing a big tent that is unified in opposition to the oligarchy, that is unified in opposition to corruption, and that is united in a pursuit of fundamental and structural change. And that’s going to be really encouraging if that can carry over to 2028.”

For Sanders, it’s vindication of an argument he's made for years and that Democrats have ignored — despite what he says is its simplicity.

“Focusing on the needs of the vast majority of American people who are struggling in the richest country on earth, while the very rich are getting richer, man, you don't need a Ph.D. in economics or political science to figure that out,” he said. “That is the issue. How do we create a decent standard of living for all of our people? How do we end the corrupt campaign finance system? That is exactly what Democrats have got to do.”

At 85, Sanders campaigned this cycle like a man running out of time.

In the wake of Trump’s historic return to power in 2024, Sanders launched the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which came when many democrats were on the sidelines but provided a lot of the arguments, and even helped discover actual candidates, who a year later would swamp races earlier this week. Since the tour, Sanders has held 58 rallies during the midterms, endorsed more than 150 candidates across the primaries and general election, spent north of $16 million on organizing and deployed staff and volunteers into key Senate states including Michigan, Minnesota and Florida, an adviser to Sanders told POLITICO.

“People say, ‘you know, Bernie, you’re not 21 years of age. What keeps you going?’” Sanders said. “What keeps me going is you look at the people who we have just elected yesterday, and look at the hundreds of other people who we have elected in school board and city council. You have wonderful people, black and white and Latino, coming from rural areas, urban areas.”

“I hope the Democratic leadership has seen what's happening around the country,” he added.

Looking ahead to 2028, progressives see Tuesday as evidence the left’s economic politics can win anywhere — and that any doubt from moderates that a progressive should run for president should be laid to rest.

“I think we’ve got to rethink politics,” Sanders said. “We can win over millions of Republicans and independents who are struggling economically if we focus on the issues that are important,” he added, pointing to Villegas in Bakersfield, “a Republican town,” along with Forstag, Cooke and others who flipped Republican-held seats.

“These are people who ran on a progressive agenda, taking on a Republican district, and they won,” he said.

Katz said Tuesday was proof that heading into 2028, voters want candidates who look nothing like Washington — the kind he's helped elect from Texas to California.

“You saw a hunger for a different kind of candidate — on congressional [level], teachers and waitresses and firefighters and iron workers and smokejumpers. And on the Senate level, pastors and doctors and teachers,” he said. “This hunger for expanding who is in Congress, who's in the positions of power, feels real.”

What progressive candidate can pick up the left’s momentum heading into 2028 remains a question, but Katz said he viewed Tuesday’s results as more evidence that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who closed out Villegas’ campaign in California a week before the election and stumped in Michigan, Montana and Pennsylvania — should consider running for president.

“You’d be hard pressed to look at the results of the election and say they're anything other than encouraging in the context of her ability to win nationwide,” Katz said.

Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.

Bernie’s populist moment

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AUSTIN — Texas. Florida. Pennsylvania. Colorado. Arizona. Nevada. California.

The historic landslide of Latino voters toward Democrats hit battleground after battleground Tuesday, crumbling the coalition that helped carry President Donald Trump to victory just one cycle ago.

“This is an earthquake,” Democratic Latino operative Sergio Gonzalez told POLITICO on the sidelines of Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa’s victory party in Austin. “Latinos were angry. They were angry this election.”

While the entire country shifted toward Democrats, nowhere shifted as dramatically as predominantly Latino areas. Across the nation Latino voters of all backgrounds — Mexican Americans and Central Americans in the Southwest, heartland and on the West Coast, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Pennsylvania, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Florida — unhappy with the economy and furious over Trump’s immigration enforcement fled the party in droves.

In a single cycle, Democrats appeared to reset Republicans’ gradual decade-long gains with Latino voters.

Latino voters who “broke for President Trump in historical numbers [in 2024] … had to make a hard change because their paycheck wasn't moving fast and far enough for them,” said Trump’s former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in an interview Tuesday night. “And Republicans ran out of runway on that.”

The epicenter of the earthquake was Texas, where a turnout surge — especially among younger first-time Latino voters — helped Democrats sweep Texas’ statewide offices — the first time since 1994 they’ve won any at all. Republicans won only one of the five House seats they had gerrymandered.

“What we're seeing today is a political realignment,” said Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who romped to a 30-point victory Tuesday night in a newly redrawn district Trump carried by double digits two years ago.

“Republicans were renting the Hispanic vote — yet governed like they owned it,” said Giancarlo Sopo, the GOP strategist behind Trump’s viral2020 Spanish-language campaign jingle.

But Democrats have been here before. Then President Barack Obama and his Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton posted similarly strong numbers with Latinos, before Trump’s blue-collar populism helped break through for the GOP.

Some Democrats warn that their party should not misread this week’s results to assume that Latinos are once again loyal Democratic voters.

“Tonight ought to scare the hell out of both political parties,” said Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, on Tuesday. “Americans are running out of patience, and the politicians who keep mistaking their votes for unconditional loyalty are going to find themselves unemployed."

Latinos’ swing right two years ago had been fueled by frustration over inflation combined with some voters’ dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s border policy. A cycle earlier, in 2020, Trump made significant inroads in Florida and Texas as well. But growing economic woes under Trump, combined with his hardline interior immigration enforcement, swung those communities hard this time around.

“In the Hispanic community, the hyper-aggressive ICE raids, I think, will go down as one of the darkest blemishes in modern history,” Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who cruised to reelection Tuesday in a seat Trump had won by 10 points, told POLITICO Tuesday night. “The American people are struggling right now, and and and they delivered a very heavy punishment at the ballot box today.”

Heavily Latino counties swung more toward Democrats than any other type of place, according to preliminary returns. A handful of counties in Texas that are more than 90 percent Latino swung more than 25 points toward Democrats from 2024, the results show. Latino-majority Miami-Dade County in South Florida swung nearly 20 points.If current results hold, roughly half of the 10 Latino Republicans who served in the last Congress won’t be returning, while Democrats’ Latino caucus will grow significantly.

“We put in the hard work. Talk to Latino voters early and often, and they're showing up,” Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ BOLD PAC, told POLITICO. “They trust Democrats more on the economy now. They see us as real champions and fighters.”

Trump won Starr County, Texas — part of Cuellar’s district — with 58 percent of the vote two years ago, the first time in more than a century that a Republican had won a presidential election there. On Tuesday, Democrat James Talarico won 77 percent there.

That county, like many others in the Rio Grande Valley, had long favored Democrats but moved toward the GOP during the Trump era. That’s now all been erased, as Brownsville native Gina Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic governor of Texas since it became a U.S. state. “We've called the RGV a bellwether for so long,” Melissa Morales, the executive director of SOMOS PAC, told POLITICO. “But to actually get the first Latina governor of Texas from the RGV I think is a bellwether in its own of what the next generation of leadership looks like.”

In California’s 22nd District, a Central Valley district which is roughly three-quarters Latino, progressive Democrat Randy Villegas was leading incumbent GOP Rep. David Valadao 66%-34% with roughly two-thirds of the vote in. A handful of rural majority-Latino counties in Kansas — Seward, Finney and Ford — that Trump had won by more than 30 points in 2024 were narrowly won by Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton. The counties were among those shaken by ICE raids earlier in the fall.

“Recent ICE activity in southwest Kansas turned around the electorate out here,” said Republican state Sen. Bill Clifford, who represents Finney County.

The results are a vindication for Democrats who’ve been clamoring for more investment into Latino voters.

“I think this would be a wake-up call to the Democratic Party in general that investing in Latino outreach, communication, and good candidates makes a big difference, especially in areas that you think were considered red back in the day,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO Tuesday night.