How Historic Were the 2026 Midterms?

FEATURING JEET HEER - The November 3rd midterm elections were historic on many fronts. Not only were there many firsts in positions of power, from Michigan's Abdul El Sayed becoming the nation's first Muslim Senator to Gina Hinojosa becoming Texas's first ever Latina governor, the overall scale of the Democratic Party’s victories was far greater than polls predicted. As of this recording, Democrats appear to be heading for a 54-seat Senate majority and 254-seat House majority. 

How much of this was the result of voter disaffection from Trump versus attraction toward the liberal party? And, more importantly, how will the coming battle between the Democratic Party’s centrist old guard and its rising left flank play out?

Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” He spoke with me about what the midterm results meant and what they can lead toward.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's first talk about the historic nature of the elections. There's a lot of people who equate the Democratic Party to progressives in general, progressive issues in general, and they see what happened on November 3rd as a huge victory for the nation as a whole. Others are far more cynical, far more skeptical, and see the Democrats as still part of the problem and never to be trusted with actually doing anything that's worth paying attention to. What do you make of last week's election? How do you put them into context?

Jeet Heer: Yeah. Well, first of all, the results of the election are truly historic in a way that I don't think has been fully metabolized by people in the public at large. Because I think people are used to midterms where the party that's in power suffers losses, and that certainly happened in 1994 with Bill Clinton and the Democrats losing, in 2006 with George W. Bush, in 2010 and 2014 with Obama and the Democrats, and in 2018 with Donald Trump.

So there's this historical pattern of a seesaw. But those other midterm swings, which were large, tended to be around the neighborhood of 6%, 7%, 8% of the electorate goes for the opposition party. What we're seeing now is right now it's at 13%. The Democrats won the national vote in the House by 13% right now. But people should remember, there's lots of places in America that are very slowly count, including vote-rich California. And it's actually looking like right now in California, it's already a Democratic state, but it became even more so...