In my day, it was progressive to worry about plastic. Now, it gets you accused of being a right-wing nut.

The blue wave didn't just hand Democrats control of the House and Senate. They've won back favorable terrain on the future of the federal judiciary.

Democratic gains at the state level give the party new influence over redistricting. They could also offer a chance for the party to rebuild its brand with voters.

Iranian leaders have hailed what they say is Americans' rejection of the war, while Republicans look for answers and Democrats decide what's next.

From the Keystone XL pipeline cancellation to carbon tax proposals, Democrats have a long history of policies that have driven gas prices higher.

The Clyburn test

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Victory for Democrats could alter the course of peace negotiations and a war nearing its fifth year.

Among those elected to Congress on Tuesday are a mathematician, a microbiologist and a chemical engineer. They plan to take on a White House that has threatened funding cuts to research.

Young people powered Democratic candidates, joining global demands for generational change from a cohort weary of older people sitting on jobs and devouring resources.

On a visit to Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch, a cub reporter learned why it pays to get out of Washington.

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.

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