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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today explained comes from Quip electric toothbrushes. They're the better electric toothbrush. With Quip, you get brush heads delivered to your door every three months for just $5, but the first set of them things is free when you buy your Quip electric toothbrush at a website that is getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Libby Nelson: The Democrats took the House. The Republicans added in the Senate. That's what everyone said would happen. How many people came out to vote, though? That was something I was trying to figure out. So we won't know for sure until all of the absentee ballots, all of the provisional ballots, and all of the California ballots have been counted.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Although we're taping this early in the morning, it's safe to say California is still going to be counting for a few more days. OK. We know already, though, that it was a lot of people. It was over well over 100 million. That's up from a number in the around 80 million in 2014. The last time we had a midterm election.
--:-- Libby Nelson: It's a pretty stunning level of turnout for elections that historically Americans have not been all that interested in or compelled to vote in. So one of the big themes of this election was that it was the year of the woman. And that is coming true in the House of Representatives, yeah?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. There have already been a historic number of women elected to the House with a few races with female candidates still out being counted. Over 100. Over 100. First time ever. First time ever.
--:-- Libby Nelson: It's a really historic milestone. And those women are almost all Democrats. And one of them, of course, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will be the youngest congressperson at 29 years of age.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, there's now officially a member of Congress who's younger than me, which is not a milestone I thought I was going to be facing already. And there's some firsts too, right? There are a lot of firsts. The first Native American women ever were elected to Congress.
--:-- Libby Nelson: The first women of color elected from multiple districts or multiple states. Representation of LGBTQ women and LGBTQ people went up across the board. It was just a boost for representation of a lot of folks who 10 years ago, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, weren't seeing themselves reflected in politics in this way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the Senate, we got a bunch of fresh new white guys, yeah?
--:-- Libby Nelson: We sure did. We have Hawley in Missouri who defeated Claire McCaskill. Braun in Indiana who defeated Joe Donnelly, I guess another white guy. So we've had a change of white men there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was looking last night like Rick Scott was elected in Florida and he declared victory. But as votes have continued to come in, that margin has narrowed and it looks like now that it's headed for a recount.
--:-- Libby Nelson: And then Kevin Kramer in North Dakota beat Heidi Heitkamp, who was the most endangered Democrat going in. And the outcome really bore that out. And Ted Cruz, of course, in Texas. And Ted Cruz in Texas, somebody we have grown to know and maybe not love based on his public reputation over the last few years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he pulled it out in the end. How big a disappointment was that for Democrats in their efforts to turn Texas purple? It was really a roller coaster, I would say.
--:-- Libby Nelson: Beto O'Rourke was a candidate a lot of people were excited about. He raised a lot of money. The fact that he made that race as close as he did, as late as it was when you were seeing Democrats getting their clocks cleaned and a lot of other red states, is really an impressive thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I suspect we're going to be hearing more about O'Rourke in the weeks and months and possibly years to come. The other major races we were looking at, of course, last night were the governorships.
--:-- Libby Nelson: And Democrats didn't win those across the board, certainly, but picked up a few big ones. Yeah, they had a stronger showing overall in governorships. There are still quite a few out, though. Georgia is still too close to call.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's been a rash of moderate Republicans doing fairly well in blue states. Georgia obviously was really, really closely watched. And Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate there, is not going to concede and wants to force it at least into a runoff election if neither one got over 50 percent of the vote.
--:-- Libby Nelson: And to everyone who has already poured your precious time and energy and hard earned dollars and your love into this campaign, I say thank you. And I urge you to stay with us. Because Georgia, friends, friends, we are still on the verge of history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about the big ones like Wisconsin and Kansas? What went down there? Yeah. So two sort of bogeymen for Democrats went down. Chris Kobach was defeated in Kansas by Laura Kelly.
--:-- Libby Nelson: And then Scott Walker was defeated in Wisconsin by Tony Evers. Democrats also picked up the governorships in Maine, in Michigan, in New Mexico, Nevada, in Illinois.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So while it's not, you know, there certainly were some states that they didn't retain. It's a much better picture than the Senate races were. Might those wins for Democrats mean that some of the structural advantages Republicans have had in states through gerrymandering start to change now?
--:-- Libby Nelson: So the real difference that's going to be made there is not so much at the state legislature level where there were some modest gains but not enormous ones for Democrats but through a few states that have decided to change how they draw their congressional districts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you saw ballot measures pass in Colorado and probably most consequentially in Michigan which would take drawing legislative districts out of the hands of state legislators and put it in the hands of an independent commission.
--:-- Libby Nelson: And Michigan also did this as part of a package of overall voting reforms Residents will now have the chance to register to vote when renewing their driver's license, get an absentee ballot with no reason, and this will reinstate the option of a straight ticket vote for all candidates of a political party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, and Michigan obviously is part of those Midwest states that were considered to be part of Hillary Clinton's blue wall, but where Trump put up a really strong showing. And so any change to the rules in Michigan in particular, I think, is something we're going to be watching very closely.
--:-- Libby Nelson: The president talked a lot about this being a referendum on the president. That idea wasn't captured better in any state than Florida, and that didn't really go so well for the Democrats. Yeah, last night, Florida really started to feel like a replay of 2016.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The numbers initially were coming in really strong for the Democrats. And then as the night went on, it was becoming, oh, you know, they still have a lot of votes out in these populous counties. But do they have enough votes? And no. By the end of the night, it was looking like Gillum didn't have the votes, although it may go on to a recount.
--:-- Libby Nelson: And like Bill Nelson didn't have the votes, although that is much more likely at this moment to go on to a recount. Yeah. But Amendment 4 passed. Yeah. And that's a big deal. That restores voting rights to about a million people who lost them for life in Florida because of felony convictions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's a pretty major expansion of the electorate even in a big state. What might that mean for future races in the swingiest swing state in the union that over a million people might now have the right to vote restored?
--:-- Libby Nelson: It depends a lot on what they end up doing with it. Obviously, Florida is a state where elections are close enough that a few hundred or even a few thousand votes can make a big difference. But they have been sort of slowly restoring felons voting rights, a few dozen or a few thousand at a time over the past couple of years.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what we've seen in that is, first of all, they don't break down neatly along partisan lines. Classic Florida. Classic Florida. Black people with felony records tend a bit more democratic than white people with felony records.
--:-- Libby Nelson: But overall, it's not like, oh, this is a big gift basket of voters to one party or the other. The other thing we've seen is they don't tend to register and they don't tend to end up voting. Either maybe they're not aware that they can vote. Maybe they're just from communities that have lower voter turnout in the first place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what you're looking at ends up being a fairly small margin. But as we've seen time and again in Florida, a fairly small margin can be enough to really make a big difference. And as we know, historically, Florida's full of surprises. Florida is full of surprises.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up next on Today Explained, Vox's Matthew Iglesias breaks down what all these results mean for the next two years of American politics. We all know the drill. You can get your quip at getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- [Music transitions to a new segment]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Your first set of refills are free. After that, you're going to pay about $5 every three months to get your subsequent refills. But I told you I have this quip sitting on my desk and I don't really know what to do with it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and I asked you to email me at sean at vox.com and tell me what you think I should do with it. And you delivered. A lot of you had the brilliant idea that I give you the quip, but some of you were a little more generous. Some of you were saying, hey, listen, my girlfriend has this wackadoodle toothbrush.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She even sent me some photos. This is what it looks like. Maybe send it to her as a cute gift. There were some less traditional ideas too. Someone said, let's find out how durable the quip is. Let's try and destroy it and see how that goes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Someone said, let's find out how the battery life on the Quip works. Let's turn it on and measure how long it takes before it turns off. Before I figure out what exactly I'm going to do with it, I'd love to hear what else you have to offer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So let's keep it going for one more day. Sean at Vox.com. If you've got any ideas for what I should do with the Quip sitting on my desk, let me know. Getquip.com slash explain is the website if you want to buy one in the meantime.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: Matthew Glacius, host of the Weeds podcast here at Vox. What does it all mean? My mind is a little blown this morning reading President Trump's victory lap tweets because the most important thing that happened is that Republicans went from a majority in the House of Representatives to not having a majority in the House of Representatives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's the biggest headline. Lots of other things happen that matter and some of the things that happen are good for Republicans. But the biggest thing at stake by far was control of the House.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: Democrats will have control of the House. That means the Republican Party legislative agenda is completely dead and it means that Trump's free ride on congressional oversight is done for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Other things happen. Republicans knocked off some incumbent Democratic senators. That is a testament to the sort of power of some of Trump's personal campaigning in those red states.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: So I see why he does not feel like personally humiliated by this. But in terms of the actual consequences for the country, that is the biggest deal. There is now an effective check on Donald Trump and on the Republican Party legislative agenda
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what does it mean that Democrats now control oversight of the government oversight of Donald Trump? So, you know, congressional committees have the authority to issue subpoenas and to really find out what's going on with regard to various kinds of things.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: House Republicans declined to use that authority, right? So they didn't look into questions about what is the Commerce Department doing in the 2020 census and why are they changing the counting methods there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They also didn't look into things like what is going on with the lobbying for exemptions from tariffs, right? Or what kind of financial flows are coming into Donald Trump and the Trump organization from foreign countries or from businesses that are lobbying the government.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: The question of Donald Trump's personal tax returns has come up a lot in this context. Are we finally going to get to see them? We may well see them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That would be interesting. You could also imagine hearings where under oath the women who have accused Donald Trump in the past of sexual assault are invited to testify, offer sworn testimony that is difficult for Republicans to just shrug off.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: And in terms of new things that happen, we will be able to really look into – if anything happens in the future like the child separation incident, there will be a congress that is there to demand that people come in and answer questions and produce documents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We will probably see a lot of litigation because I bet the White House will try to resist producing that kind of thing. But it should be a real meaningful change that will make life uncomfortable for Donald Trump.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: What does it mean that Republicans advanced in the Senate? The main thing it means is that not only do Republicans have a larger margin in the Senate, but with Jeff Flake and Bob Corker gone and John McCain having passed away, it's going to be a very Trumpy group up there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if Donald Trump wants to start hiring and firing cabinet and subcabinet officials, he's going to be able to do that much more easily. He came in originally in January 2017 without a really strong bench of people to appoint.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: So he got all these people in these various jobs. Some of them like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. he's been very much at odds with, but he's also hesitated to fire them because the confirmation fight in a 51-49 Senate could be very, very difficult.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It now should be a lot easier for Trump to put in, I don't want to say like literally anybody to these jobs, but he will have much more flexibility to exert his personal control over the executive branch and that personnel.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: And he will be able to continue putting judges on the bench, which is very important to the sort of Trump interest group coalition, right? Whether you're talking about anti-abortion activists, gun rights activists, or the US Chamber of Commerce, they're all really into Trump's judicial picks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so that means they will be getting an important amount of what they want from the Donald Trump presidency. This was the country's first referendum on the Donald Trump presidency. What does it mean that he didn't do terribly in that referendum? I mean, he did pretty terribly.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: I mean, if you want to get a sense of how do people feel about Donald Trump, right? So Republicans lost the vote in the House by about eight or nine points. It's a gerrymandered map, right? So the average House district is about six points more Republican than the country as a whole.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Democrats don't have a huge majority of House seats, but they do have a majority based on a huge majority of the vote. And the other thing is, you know, Donald Trump, of course, only won 46% in 2016.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: But he became president because he won Pennsylvania, he won Michigan, and he won Wisconsin. All of those states elected Democratic governors. All of those states elected Democratic senators.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So nothing is guaranteed for 2020. But basically, you know, the majority of the voters and the key swing region of the country went against Donald Trump, even as he scored up some wins in very red places like North Dakota and Missouri.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: You know, he's got a real problem. This result does not track to a Donald Trump re-election. He needs to improve on this margin. Now, of course, he can do that. Presidents improve on their midterm results all the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But he will have to do something different to make himself more popular again in those upper Midwestern states. Or the Democrats would have to nominate someone who plays very poorly in that region.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: Well, since you brought up 2020, I wonder, on that note, it feels like some of these Democrats who lost last night in major Senate or gubernatorial races have a lot more momentum and excitement behind them than your Warrens, Bookers, Sanders, Gillibrands.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Might people like Beto O'Rourke or Andrew Gillum have their eyes on the 2020 presidential race now? I mean, that's a thing that people say. It seems implausible to me.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: What I do think is striking is that one reason liberals wake up this morning with mixed feelings is that a lot of the things that went well for them Tuesday night were things that were not incredibly high profile, right? So they flipped both houses of the New Hampshire state legislature.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They won state-level trifectas in Nevada and New Mexico. They made big gains in Michigan in the governor's race. But Beto O'Rourke, Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum were three statewide candidates who had really caught the imaginations of a national audience of Democrats.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: And they all lost narrowly, right? Stacey's still sort of up in the air. Maybe in there. Maybe Don count it out But they underperformed a little bit their polling or their expectations
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And something Democrats are going to have to think about in 2020 is a potential mismatch between the kinds of candidates that most speak to them and their souls and the kind of candidates who perform best objectively in the battleground terrain
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: I did not read very many excited profiles of Gretchen Whitmer who just won governor of Michigan by a very healthy margin. And I have not read over the past four years that he's been governor a lot of profiles of Governor Tom Wolfe in Pennsylvania.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There isn't like crazy national enthusiasm for Debbie Stabenow reelected handily in Michigan. But there is a model of upper Midwestern Democratic Party politician who does very well in those places.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: And the coastal backlash against Donald Trump is so incredibly strong that anybody like that would get the votes of coastal liberals. And, you know, there may just be a mismatch between a tactical imperative to go with somebody who speaks to that upper Midwestern political culture versus the kinds of candidates who are most exciting to Democrats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did the maps change significantly last night or is it still, you know, Democrats do well in big population centers and Republicans control the majority of the real estate? Like does that map still look the same?
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: I mean we largely reaffirmed and in some cases even exacerbated some of the national trends that we've seen before, right? That eight years ago, Virginia and Ohio were both swing states.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Ohio went to being a little bit more conservative to now clearly more conservative than the average American state. And Virginia, just the opposite direction.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: Democrats seem to have strengthened their narrow grip on Nevada, whereas Republicans, the same on Florida. But again, in the key Midwestern battleground, right, the map that we got last night looked a lot like the map of the world in which Hillary Clinton became president, right, in which we were all saying Donald Trump mobilized an unprecedented backlash among, you know, Appalachia and rural America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the blue firewall held. Hillary carried out wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, as well as a narrow victory in the popular vote. And thus she became president, right? And we know we've all been telling the opposite story.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: And I think you have to keep two ideas in your mind, right? Like one is that in most of the country, most of the people did the exact same thing that they did two years ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in that critical battleground region in the Midwest where Donald Trump prevailed very narrowly and completely upended American politics, instead Republicans fell short. Sometimes very narrowly like Scott Walker and sometimes by pretty big margins like in Michigan.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: So it's the same country but it's a different outcome. So what does this mean? Like the Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump federal government mean for major legislation, mean for immigration, mean for healthcare?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are we going to see? I mean, you know, events are going to matter. It's going to matter what the White House decides. In theory, you could imagine a bipartisan infrastructure bill of some kind.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: In theory, look, the Trump administration has this laundry list of immigration restrictions that they say they want to impose. The way to do that, if you're like a grown-up, would be to say, okay, maybe we can get Democrats to give us some of the things on this list.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in exchange, we will give them something. Trump has never shown any real indication to do that. I don't know if that pattern will break in this new alignment.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: It seems like it probably won't just because it's always good to assume that people aren't going to fundamentally change their spots. But it is true that throughout American history, divided government has sometimes produced compromises and real changes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just don't see the mood for that. I don't think that the Democratic base wants to see Nancy Pelosi shaking hands with Donald Trump. And I also don't think Donald Trump has the level of interest in policy details to really sit down and make that happen.
--:-- Matthew Yglesias: So I would anticipate that unless there's a crisis, right, sometimes external reality forces the government to do something. But on any given week, probably just nothing will happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Matthew Iglesias is one of the hosts of the Weeds podcast from Vox. You can hear a special election episode of the Weeds in your feed today featuring the other hosts of the Weeds podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, they'll be Ezra Klein and Sarah Cliff, also from Vox. It's kind of like the conversations we just had, but they get much more unabashedly into the weeds. Find it in all of the places you find podcasts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos-Vurham. This podcast is Today Explained. The Quip electric toothbrush is backed by over 20,000 dental professionals. That's like a DNC or RNC's worth of dental professionals, depending on your party affiliation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Quip starts at just $25, and if you go to getquip.com slash explained right now, you'll get your first pack of refills gratis with your Quip electric toothbrush.
