As of Wednesday morning, there’s a lot we don’t know about specific election outcomes. But one thing we do know is that the confident predictions of a huge Republican wave were flatly wrong, and there should be a lot of soul-searching among the pundits and reporters and, frankly, Democratic politicians and operatives who made those predictions. Especially those who acknowledged that Republican firms were flooding the polling averages with polls of questionable quality, yet still defended the choice to include those shoddy surveys in the averages.
There’s still a lot to come, and we’ll keep tracking it.
This we know: John Fetterman won in Pennsylvania, a key Senate pickup for Democrats, and Josh Shapiro won the gubernatorial race in that state, a major hold. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were both reelected. Massachusetts and Maryland elected Democratic governors—and historic ones. Massachusetts Gov.-elect Maura Healey will be one of the first, if not the first, openly lesbian governors in the nation, and Maryland Gov.-elect Wes Moore will be just the third Black governor elected in United States history, following Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and Douglas Wilder of Virginia.
There were plenty of disappointments—Senate wins for Republicans J.D. Vance in Ohio and Ted Budd in North Carolina, for instance, and state supreme court losses for Democrats in Ohio and North Carolina. But many of the disappointments were only disappointments in the context of a night that was going so much better than most Democrats had dared hope: Darn, we didn’t get the reach states that would have been tough in a blue wave year.
Vermont, California, and Michigan voters put abortion rights in their state constitutions. Washington, D.C., voted to give tipped workers a raise by eliminating the tipped subminimum wage. Nebraska voters raised their state’s minimum wage.
Michigan didn’t just vote for abortion rights and Gretchen Whitmer—its state legislature flipped to Democrats.
