How Democrats flipped key Senate states and took control of Congress

Welcome back. 722. So Democrats have flipped some key Senate states blue taking control of Congress. Some of those flips are pretty shocking happening in some states that have long been supporters of the Republican Party. So what drove this change? We're taking a deep dive into all these questions and who better to answer those than political science professor Stephen Maynard Caliendo. What do you think was the big driving factor here? Well, this was a referendum on President Trump. We've talked about this several weeks in a row now that incumbents typically lose seats, their party loses seats in midterms. But even more so this time because President Trump put himself out there, not only on the campaign trail, but by saying, imagine that I'm on the ballot. In fact, even the interview he gave this morning on Fox News, he said, if I were on the ballot, it would have been a landslide. He might be right, but maybe not in the way he thought. This was definitely a referendum on the policies of the first two years of the second Trump And all we can take away from that with respect to Republicans is they're going to have to shift gears. And when we talk about some of these, I mean, some of these were deeply red states. Deeply red states. I mean, we were just talking during the break for Texas, for example. I mean, the Democratic Party has tried for years to do what Tallarico did last night. So my question is, what has changed? Is the Democratic Party putting forward people that the voters are aligned with or are voters Are they changing? What's more important to that? Where's the switch happening? It's a great point, Liz. Look, if all that happened was that Tallarico would have won last night, my answer would have been really bad candidate selection on the Republicans' part. They should have stayed with the incumbent. They shouldn't have done it. But when Greg Abbott loses, Greg Abbott was fairly popular, right? But he was very much tied to President Trump. And so that was, again, it's a referendum on President Trump. The other thing we learned in Texas is that money doesn't always matter. Oh, yeah. I mean, in both of those races, the Republicans dramatically outspent the Democratic candidates. And the race did not go their way, including, of course, we've talked about Elon Musk dumping a couple hundred million dollars of his own money. The other thing is that the Republican Party has drifted away from core conservative values and more toward authoritarianism. And I think that it's hard to build a coalition. It's easy to do when you have sort of antipathy for the other. You can sort of build a short-term coalition around that. But I think the rejection of what people saw in the streets during some of the ICE raids, along with the tariff policies, along with sort of the federal government being in charge of everything, that's not typical for Republicans, right? They're really the government closest to the people is the government that should govern. And that's not what this administration is about. It's about centralized federal power, and it's about centralized power in the executive. We saw a rejection of that last night. What is your takeaway with regard to what the polls predicted versus what we saw yesterday? Does this lend credence to the fact that, hey, polling is still a thing? The polls were right in direction, but they were so wrong in magnitude, right? And I think a lot of the pollsters were worried because we have seen over the last decade, particularly with Trump on the landscape, that Republicans were underperforming in polls. They did better at the ballot box than they did in polls. That's not what we saw last night. And it's not actually what we saw in the first, in the 2018, in the first midterm election that President Trump had. Democrats actually outperformed their polls. They absolutely did so last night. So the pollsters sort of got it right. And I'm not going to say it was lucky, it's just a difficult time to be a pollster right now. I also want to ask, I mean, you mentioned it with the Texas race, millions of dollars being dumped into those races. And then in Ohio, we had that attack ad that made national headlines. So we're talking about these, to me, they feel like old school political tactics, the dirty attack ads, the shoving money into elections. Are voters getting smart? Are they getting smarter than that? Because you said some of these things. Did not work that usually works. That's true. You know, attack ads in particular are so interesting because we all say we hate them. When you poll voters, they say they hate attack ads. They would like to see positive ads, not negative ads. But they work. They typically work. And I don't know that they didn't work this time on the whole. I think there's gonna be some social science that's gonna bear out there. What didn't work was going past some sort of parameter of of kindness or parameter of decency, and that's what we saw with Vivek Ramaswamy. I think it's interesting, I think Ramaswamy pulled down the Senate candidate in Ohio, Husted, and I think in the other direction, I think it was Paxson that sort of pulled down Greg Abbott. So even though they're opposite, you would think top of the ticket a little bit, but both, they're both statewide elections, and I think poor candidate performances, Really affected the other race in both of those states. Okay, so at last count, 54 is the number that Democrats now have in the Senate. They're going to take the House again. Right. What do you think the impact is going to be on these final two years of the Trump administration? Well, I think the president's correct when he says he's gonna be looking to veto a lot of things if legislation gets passed from both bodies. I think, but the Democrats understand that. They're gonna be in a bad position in two years because the things that they had run on, they're not gonna be able to deliver. I mean, Democrats aren't gonna fix gas prices just because they take control in January, especially if the war keeps going. What they are gonna be able to do is have oversight over what's going on currently and then what they perceive as being corruption over the last two years. And so there's gonna be lots of hearings. We'll probably see some impeachments. I don't know that they'll go so far as to impeach President Trump for a third time. They certainly don't have the numbers to remove him in the Senate. But I think there's cabinet members, for instance, who may be impeached. And certainly lots of folks are gonna be coming to the Hill for hearings. A number of key Democrats last night were tweeting, lawyer up. Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, I did see that. Yeah. There's some talk about Hegseth. It's gonna be oversight. Yeah, and it's not only Hegseth, but yes, he's gonna be the most prominent, I would imagine. But I think also members of Trump's family, who have really gained a lot financially over these last two years, questions about sort of how that all happened. I guess that is my question, because if you have voters who were this energized for the midterms, and you kind of mentioned it. It's really hard to get things done in the government. Things move slowly. How do you keep those voters energized for the upcoming elections instead of them, you know, dropping out in two years and saying, well, who I voted for didn't help me. So that's right. I do think about that. Yeah. And when President Trump has done well in the polls, it was 2016, 2024. It's when he didn't have. Power. He didn't do well in 2020, didn't do well in 2028, and he didn't do well this year. It's hard to run on a record because there's other things. Presidents don't control the economy. Right? You're gonna get blamed for it if it doesn't go well. You get too much credit for it probably if it goes well. Democrats are gonna be in a tough spot. The one thing I do know, and we'll talk about it in the next spot, is that... President Trump is not going to be the person who taps the next Republican nominee on the shoulder. I think folks are going to have to be pulling away from President Trump to gain the confidence of the American people and the Republican primary voters to see who's going to run for president in 2020. We have so much more to talk about. And the good thing is, you alluded to it, we get to check back in with you in about an hour. Sounds good. Thank you very much. We love having you here. Thank you. Appreciate you. Absolutely. All right, we're gonna-