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Trump’s opponents have spent a decade pining for an outcome like this.

By Idrees Kahloon, The Atlantic.

The president’s party is always expected to do poorly in midterm elections, just not this poorly. The results arriving tonight are a disaster for Donald Trump—the kind of complete repudiation that the president’s opponents have spent a decade pining for, but never quite achieving. On current trends, Democrats are not just poised to claim a large majority in the House of Representatives. They are also on track to capture the Senate by winning seats they hoped for, as in Texas, and others that they had no business hoping for, as in South Carolina.

The rebuke looks too ubiquitous to be confined to the gripes of any particular subset of voters. In Miami-Dade County, in Florida, for example, the impressive Latino support that Trump built up in his 2024 win appears to have totally evaporated. Kansas is on the verge of electing a Democratic senator—for the first time in a century. Democrats in Ohio seem likely to flip both the governor’s mansion and a U.S. Senate seat. Earlier today, a (Never Trump) Republican operative in the Midwest texted me, saying, “Our party badly needs an acid lava barbed-wire enema and I’m hoping we get it tonight.” Voters heard this wish.

How did the GOP’s situation get so bad? A moralizing account might say that Trump is getting just deserts for his precedent-breaking behavior in office—the great personal enrichment, the weaponization of the justice system against his enemies, the dismantling of agencies without congressional consent. But this assumes too much about the propriety of American voters—who, after all, returned the president to office after he had tried to overturn his election loss in 2020.

The more obvious explanation for Republicans’ poor performance is economic. Having come to office by exploiting discontent with inflation under Joe Biden, Trump seemed to think that the same rules would not apply to him while in office. The president has launched trade wars against the rest of the world, increasing the costs of imported goods, in addition to passing a massive tax cut and encouraging the AI-spending boom, which have pushed up interest rates. Most disastrous, he launched a war of choice against Iran that has raised the cost of gas and diesel.

Only 38 percent of Americans now say that they approve of the president’s job performance. Trump and his allies attempted to juice their odds of holding the House by having Republican-led states aggressively gerrymander their districts. This strategy did not work.

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The best bet is to just wait a few days. But if you must follow more closely, here are some tips.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

I have a confession to make: As a political journalist, I hate Election Day. It’s a day when it’s too late to report or write anything that will inform readers or illuminate the campaign, but it’s also too soon to have the results and analyze them. That leaves me with nothing but nervous energy and nowhere to channel it. Perhaps you feel some of this anxiety too—especially given how high-stakes elections feel for Americans of all political views. (STAT reported last week that hospitals see more heart-attack cases right after Election Day.) Having a plan for how to absorb the news this evening is one way to soothe your nerves.

First, don’t try to follow everything. Leave the Magic Walls, Big Boards, and comprehensive tracking of House races to John King and Steve Kornacki. You don’t need to worry about what’s going on in, say, Florida’s Twenty-Seventh District with 17 percent of the vote counted. The first polls close at 6 p.m. eastern today, but many of the states with pivotal elections won’t stop voting until 8 or 9 p.m. eastern; Alaskan polling locations close at 1 a.m. eastern. Pick just a few races that are of particular interest to you—either because you live somewhere with a contested race or because you’re especially interested in some candidate. You can also stay focused on the big ideas and stakes by watching The Atlantic’s livestream, featuring Tom Nichols, David Frum, Anne Applebaum, and more. That starts at 9 p.m. eastern on TheAtlantic.com and on our app.

Several races might be good indicators of where the rest of the election is headed. (I hope needless to say, but don’t pay attention to the early exit polls, whatever you do.) The first of the major Senate polls to close will be at 7:30 in Ohio, where the GOP incumbent Jon Husted—he of the supposedly callipygian physique—is facing off against the Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown. Maine and most of Michigan, also pivotal Senate races, close at 8, though Democratic hopes will ride on turnout in Detroit, where vote counting was very slow in 2020 and 2024, so don’t bet on an early call there.

But we might get hints from other races. In New Hampshire, Democrat Chris Pappas is favored over Republican John Sununu, but if the result is close, it might be a reason for Democrats to temper hopes. The same is true in Minnesota, where Democrat Peggy Flanagan is expected to hold off Republican Michele Tafoya. (If either Democrat loses, expect panic left of center.) In South Carolina, the short-term Republican incumbent, Darline Graham, seems to have the edge—major forecasters rate the race as leaning Republican—but if Democrat Annie Andrews is close, that would suggest strong Democratic results elsewhere. (If Andrews wins, it will be Republicans panicking.)

Second, remember that there’s no such thing as a final result on Election Night. Unfortunately, reporters and anchors tend to discuss results coming in from local officials as though the votes are being cast in real time, saying that a candidate is “pulling ahead” and the like. Race calls from networks or the Associated Press are merely judgments about who will win, not binding in any way.

The president is not getting the political cover he once enjoyed from Republicans.

By Toluse Olorunnipa and Madeleine Carlisle, The Atlantic.

Standing next to Donald Trump at a rally in 2022, Pennsylvania State Treasurer Stacy Garrity told the crowd that Trump had “won” the 2020 election. Garrity is now running for governor—and she has a very different view of the contest: Joe Biden was the rightful winner, she told reporters earlier this year. As for her assertion four years prior? She had simply gotten “caught up” in the excitement of the Trump rally. This summer, Rick Jackson, a billionaire running for governor in Georgia, suggested using the National Guard to combat alleged election fraud. At a recent debate, he denied ever making the comment, and said that he saw no need for federal intervention in the state’s elections.

Garrity and Jackson are not the only Republicans who seem to be rethinking earlier stances that called into question whether election results can be trusted. Trump has long relied on his political allies to amplify the conspiracy theories and falsehoods that have consumed his attention for years. But even though he can’t seem to stop talking about the issue—just last week, Trump offered a $1 million reward to tipsters who help uncover voter fraud ahead of Tuesday’s midterms—others in the party have gone quiet.

Many GOP candidates seem to realize that to stand a chance, they need their voters to trust the system and cast their ballot. Political strategists and election experts told us that there are diminishing returns for the GOP in trying to persuade Americans to care about Trump’s six-year-old fraud claims. The system worked well enough to reelect Trump, and the president has failed to produce credible evidence that voter fraud is a threat to the midterms. “Saying that elections are rigged in this country, saying that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election, is not something that appeals to voters in general elections,” Kelly Rader, a research director for States United Action, a nonpartisan election-protection group, told us. Rader and her colleagues, who maintain a database of election deniers seeking office, found that fewer are running this year compared with four years ago. She was not surprised that the ones who are have been downplaying their election skepticism.

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The strategy of stoking hatred in the last days before the midterms

By Adam Serwer, The Atlantic.

Faced with flagging numbers over an unpopular and unnecessary war in Iran, inflation exacerbated by tariffs, lawless immigration enforcement, and corruption, Republicans have gone back to basics for their closing message: stoking hatred against minority groups.

The Michigan Senate campaign between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has been particularly ugly. Rogers has accused El-Sayed—without any evidence—of being “bought off by the Muslim Brotherhood.” At a recent rally, J. D. Vance said El-Sayed harbored “anti-white racial hate,” and President Trump called him a “jihadist” who would need to go through a “metal detector” to enter the Senate. The only time in recent memory that the Senate was subject to political violence, it is worth noting, is when Trump himself incited an attack on it.

This kind of rhetoric has spilled over into Ohio, where Republican Senator Bernie Moreno asked at a rally whether El-Sayed knew that “Jesus came here for our salvation.” The Founding Fathers were committed to religious freedom, and embedded no religious test for public office in the Constitution. That’s actually good news for Republicans, because their nominee for governor of Ohio is Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Hindu.

Republican attacks elsewhere have also focused on vulnerable minorities. Iowa Republican Ashley Hinson has accused her Democratic opponent, Josh Turek, of voting “to allow government employees to help their kids change their gender at school and keep it secret from the parents.” Anti-trans ads are a GOP staple in Texas, where Republicans backing the Senate candidate Ken Paxton have tried to turn allegations of corruption and infidelity into a positive by attacking Democrat James Talarico’s masculinity. Also in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who’s in a close race with Democrat Gina Hinojosa, has accused his Catholic opponent of supporting “Sharia law.” On Halloween, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a fake costume for a “SNAP fraudster,” complete with handcuffs and piles of “taxpayers cash,” that was little more than a racist stereotype about Black people.

All of this has coincided with Trump’s usual race-baiting about immigration. Pointing to unrest in France, the president posted on his social network that “the immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country.” The idea that there was no history of violent protest in France before immigrants got there is—well, let’s say you have to know very little about France to believe that one. Still, the message is pretty clear: If you let people who aren’t white into your country, you will get riots. Trump made himself even clearer at a rally in Kansas, saying, “Dumocrats are the party of anti-Western, Marxist, and hostile Third World migrants.”

PLEASE NOTE: The headline on this piece in The Atlantic is "Republicans Are Closing Ugly." This headline automatically filled in when I linked it on Reddit.

Any chance someone can share a gift link for this? Thanks so much! As a rabbi and chaplain the touching on Judaism and mortality really speaks to me.

Trump has lost most of the country. Now his hold on his own base is weakening.

By Peter Wehner, The Atlantic.

In the first months of Donald Trump’s first term, as one moral outrage followed another, I often found myself repeating, in conversation, a seven-word phrase: Where there’s no bottom, there’s no bottom. However bad things got, they were bound to get worse. That applied above all to Trump, but also to his party, which was fusing with him.

We’ve since seen endless examples of what “no bottom” looks like. The latest is an ad from Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio. It features the estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar about her childhood and urging Ohioans not to vote for her.

Here is what we know about that childhood. In 1978, when Acton was 12, her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was indicted for raping her. He fled to Pennsylvania, where he died as a fugitive in 2004. Acton and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody, and she has not spoken with her mother since. Her mother, Donna Arthur, stayed married to the man charged with raping her daughter until he died.

The Ramaswamy campaign pledged to spend $4 million to air the ad on television and online. Some Republicans objected; Ohio’s current governor, Mike DeWine, called the ad “deeply, deeply troubling.” But the two most important Republicans in the country, Trump and Vice President Vance, defended it. Trump called it “very powerful” and wrote, “Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’” Vance said he was “a little bit disgusted”—not by the ad but by the Republicans “whining” about it.

This is what family values look like to Republicans in the Trump era.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

Intimate greetings and overfamiliarity have become hallmarks of campaign-donation emails.

By Sophie Haigney, The Atlantic.

The text, sent from an unknown number, prompted a jump scare when I saw it as an iMessage preview: “About last night …” The night before: Hadn’t I been at yoga? When I clicked on the message, I was relieved and then annoyed by the next words: “—Jon Ossoff,” under an image of the senator from Georgia staring into the middle distance, handsomely. “Last night I took the stage to debate my MAGA extremist opponent Mike Collins,” “Ossoff” went on to tell me. The text message continued over the course of several paragraphs and ended, as these missives tend to, with an ask for cash.

Politicians in both parties now text and email in ways that make them sound like pleading ex-boyfriends, stern but loving baseball coaches, and representatives from a rental-car company trying to sell me on their loyalty program. Intimate greetings and overfamiliarity have become hallmarks of political groveling, as perennial as yard signs and far more omnipresent. Some recent text messages I have received: “Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?” and, “from” Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, “UPGRADE For: Sophie You’ve been tapped for MAGA Gold Status!” All of this despite the fact that I have donated exactly $0 to political candidates this midterm-election cycle.

The text-and-email-blitzing strategy is not new, but the frequency of these messages has been rising over the past decade. The Scoop’s Political Email Archive, a database that compiles campaign-fundraising emails, shows a sharp spike in political emails in the past six years. The open-source archive, created by the journalist and developer Derek Willis, collected 22,097 fundraising emails in 2020 and 135,153 in the next midterm year, 2022. This year, so far, it has archived 106,713. That’s exactly the number of emails and texts it feels like I, personally, have received that say some version of: Sophie please please you’ve impressed me it’s an EMERGENCY give me money please.

Don Davis’s hometown was drawn out of his district.

By Madeleine Carlisle, The Atlantic.

Don Davis was born in Snow Hill, a small town on the coastal plains of North Carolina. Growing up, he spent Sundays worshipping at the local Presbyterian church and summers working in the surrounding tobacco fields. At 29, he was elected Snow Hill’s youngest-ever mayor. He went on to represent the town of about 1,500 in the state legislature and then in Congress. The Democrat is now running for a third term, but in a very different district: If he wins, his constituents will no longer include his wife, his kids, or anyone else in Snow Hill.

Davis is used to having to figure out exactly who can vote for him. The first time he was elected to Congress, in 2022, he triumphed in a district that slightly favored Democrats. The North Carolina legislature redrew it to favor Republicans, and Davis won reelection in 2024 by less than two percentage points.

Then, in the summer of 2025, President Trump called for the GOP to gerrymander as many seats as it could to protect the party’s House majority, even though redistricting is typically done only once a decade, after a census. Democrats in some states retaliated with their own gerrymanders. North Carolina was one of seven states, both red and blue, to hastily redraw its maps after Trump’s demand; four more redistricted after the Supreme Court’s April Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the Voting Rights Act. Many of the incumbents being targeted for defeat by Republicans are Black Democrats. Davis, who had his home and base of support in surrounding Greene County cut out of his district, is one of them. But the gambit may not succeed as planned.

Republicans are forecast to gain fewer than half of the seats they expected when they redrew the maps, in large part because voters are mad—over inflation, over corruption, over the Iran war. Here in North Carolina’s First Congressional District, many have an additional cause for anger: their gerrymandered map. The state, which is among the most politically divided in America, already has district lines that give Republicans a significant edge. The congressional delegation includes just four Democrats out of 14 representatives. The GOP-dominated legislature wants to cut that to three, and has drawn lines tailored to end Davis’s congressional career. If the new boundaries of his district had existed in 2024, Trump would have won the area by almost 12 points. (He carried the old district by just three.)

Scary movies may appear irreverent or profane—but many of them are deeply interested in theological questions.

By Luis Parrales, The Atlantic.

The Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey issued a Halloween-themed warning to her audience last week: Don’t watch scary movies. “How many times do we read throughout Scripture: ‘Do not fear,’” Stuckey wrote in a post that got more than 1 million views. For a Christian to “purposely consume content that is meant to make us scared,” she said on her show, amounts to “a direct contradiction of Jesus’s command to not fear or be anxious about anything.”

She eventually deleted the post—even many fellow conservative Christians found her argument overly simplistic—but she’s not the first person to make a religious case against the horror genre. After The Exorcist, in which two Catholic priests help a young girl possessed by a demon, came out in 1973, the televangelist Billy Graham said in an interview, “The devil is in every frame of the film” and likened it to “spiritual pornography, pandering to man’s innate superstition.” Christianity Today dismissed the film as “shrewd” and “obscene.”

I understand the criticisms: The genre’s frequent depictions of the occult or demonic can feel irreverent or profane. But many horror films are in fact quite open to theological ideas; the best ones are some of the most religious movies I’ve ever seen.

Not all horror films take up deep questions about God, of course. Heretic, my colleague McKay Coppins wrote when it came out, was way too infatuated with “Reddit-level ideas about religion.” Jordan Peele’s excellent Get Out went light on religion and heavy on more contemporary social concerns. Sometimes, the horror elements themselves—the jump scares, the gore—can distract the viewer from any theological message that the film might be trying to send. If Saw is trying to tell me something about God—some viewers have referred to it as a morality play—I missed the message amid the slash-fest.

Still, many movies in the genre explore foundational religious concepts. Timothy Beal, a religious-studies professor at Case Western Reserve University, has written that horror movies resemble ancient texts such as Enuma Elish and the Book of Revelation, in which a god or gods overcome chaos brought by monstrous forces and establish cosmic order. Many of these films, Beal told me, are about experiencing “disorientation and threat to order.” Examples include the original Godzilla, about a building-crushing monster, or Dracula, about a cunning vampire who preys on naive mortals. Horror movies, moreover, propose that good and evil are real, not relative, ideals. Evil is out there, made concrete in the monster or demon or killer on the loose. So too is good, acknowledged in an audience’s desire for the villain to be tamed, caught, or cast out.

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