Midterm wave reshapes Washington — and the map

Van Hollen might be kicking the tires on a 2028 run, but ballots in the 2026 midterms aren't even totally in yet. So let's look ahead about what we know about the 120th Congress and more with my first guest tonight, Scott McFarland, chief Washington correspondent for Midas Touch, up late with me tonight here on The Final Five. Welcome back, my friend. Good to be here. OK, what a night it was. First of all, for you and your cohorts, you got like three and a half million views. With your streaming coverage, but now you're back here in the house with us, so let's talk about it. Big surprises. Any big surprises now that we're past Tuesday here? There's a range of surprises. It's hard to measure which is the most shocking of all. But before I say that, Chris Van Hollen is going to become more powerful. All the local Democrats, Virginia and Maryland, are going to become more powerful. They become chairman. They have gavels. They have the ability to, through the force of legislation, to make things happen locally. So he's got some good time coming ahead. So do the other Maryland and Virginia Democrats. No surprises here. We knew those two Virginia seats were prone to be flipped, not because there's anything peculiar to Virginia. It's just the national wave is going to shift things towards Democrats everywhere, here included. Biggest shocks, we've talked about being in Texas and South Carolina. Those things didn't even pause at purple when they went from red to blue. They just shifted. I'm really taken with North Carolina, where six house seats are about to flip. Six in North Carolina. Is crazy. And respectfully, that's overcoming a gerrymander that was supposed to prevent that from happening in North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Kansas. These are places Democrats were out in the wilderness for a long time and they suddenly have a North Star. One of those maps I saw, Indiana, where they wanted to redistrict there and the Republicans, the Republicans stepped up and said, we're not going to go through with that. The map, the way it came out, had they gone with the Republican gerrymander. Republicans would have lost every seat but one. They were lucky they didn't. And in Tennessee, they barely escaped problems with the redraw. Florida and Texas did them no good despite that very controversial mid-decade redistricting. So Maryland passes the ballot measure. Maryland voters say we can do this next time if we need to. They've got to be having second thoughts at the state level in Maryland about whether it's a wise decision because these things can backfire if you're not certain about how the lines are going. And in North Carolina, it backfired. Texas, Florida, didn't go the way they hoped. Well, in California, though, too, they put that on the ballot. The voters had their say, which they did in Virginia, got struck down in Maryland. But I want to talk about what's outstanding right now. Mary Peltola, neck and neck with Daniel J. Sullivan. Daniel S. Sullivan. Daniel S. Sullivan. Darn it, Scott. You're so close. I was so close there. That's happening. But Mississippi, that is the shocker of the night there, where you have Cindy Hyde-Smith down now by 1,300 votes of Scott Colburn. We knew something was up when President Trump and the surrogates went to Mississippi in the last week. You know, the polls weren't great out of Mississippi. I mean, in terms of volume of them or quality of them, not that the numbers had any indication. There wasn't a lot of polling there. Scott Colom has a roughly 1,200 to 1,300 vote lead. As the night ends tonight, that's a lot when there's very little left to count. That's a lot if you're thinking about a recount. It seems like a tiny amount when there's hundreds of thousands of votes. But I'm not sure how Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, makes up that ground. Democrats think they're going to win that. And remember, that's a six-year hold they have on Mississippi. And also an indication, Jim, that as they move forward towards 2028, maybe time to start investing more in the South, giving up on always clinging to those Midwest battleground states of old. Are you surprised at this point that we've not heard, because it's predictable at this point in this cycle, in the era of Trump, where everything's rigged, it was fixed, there were irregularities, voter fraud. We have not heard that from people of consequence in the Republican Party, all the way to the president right now. It's hard to make an argument broadly that there be any rigging when there was an historic election that had an unequivocal message of we want change. This ain't working for us. There's going to be an isolated case. The president makes about Alaska. He is going to keep fighting about having those two Dan Sullivan on the ballot. That's not going to impact balance of power in any way. It's certainly going to impact a few years of Alaska leadership. That's going nowhere. And I think the most telling thing on that point, Jim, was as the day concluded here. They got rid of the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon. That was the big story today. She was the one pushing these election insecurity arguments, trying to get voter rolls. It didn't work. She couldn't stop any of this. She couldn't prove her case. She's gone. All right. In our last minute here, we always see changes on the cabinet level after a midterm. It happened with Obama. It happened with Trump. I mean, when are we going to start seeing this? Harmeet, that seems to be the first domino right now, but will there be more to fall? Not the last. I mean, there's an open question about... Impeachment hearings against Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. You can ward that off by quitting or getting moved to a new job. There's an inevitability to an impeachment vote in the House against Pete Hegseth next week if things don't change and they think it's going to pass, which pushes it to the Senate for hearings and a trial. It gets messy. There's an argument to be made if he quits, he averts that, or if they move him to a new job. There should be more to come, but in the meantime... The House speaker just demoted himself. Mike Johnson's not going to be the House Republican leader anymore. He had his fingerprints all over that loss. There are more consequences to come. Does Mike Johnson, quickly, is he going to be comfortable being just the congressman from Louisiana at this point? Is he long for the world? Nancy Pelosi's done that for the last few years. She's been the congresswoman from California. She retires in January, but she's no longer the speaker. It can be done. It has been done in the minority. There's very little to fight for other than a message, communicating and trying to win the majority back. Mike Johnson's comfortable at least communicating and getting out a message. All right. Scott McFarlane, as always, we appreciate you, Mike. Thank you. Back after this here on The Final Five.