Today’s notice: Congratulations, you made it to the end of the midterms. Or, maybe just the beginning of the end. And: Check out our Election Night special coverage! Details below.
ELECTION DAY
Closing arguments: The president vs. not-the-president. Standing near the Lincoln Memorial yesterday, Donald Trump made his final national election pitch like this: “We’ve cleaned hundreds of sites of graffiti, fixed over 2,300 lighting fixtures in Washington, D.C., cleaned and renovated over 83 statues and fountains and monuments, removed hundreds of squalid homeless encampments.”
Democrats across the country closed with if you’re tired of that, have I got a candidate for you. In Michigan, Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed tried to hit every disaffected electorate with a closing spot featuring the voice of Sen. Bernie Sanders, a lot of talk about costs and a clip from Fox News’ Jesse Watters.
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El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, closed out with the gift he got Sunday from Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens. The Washington Sun’s Christa Dutton was at his final rally last night: “Our Sunday wasn’t really planned to look like it was, but someone else had enough courage to believe that that” — pointing to the American flag on the wall — “was more important than party,” Rogers said. Stevens did not actually attend the rally.
Game time has arrived.
Expectations game: Believing polls, again? “I think the biggest thing that I want to remind people now is we shouldn’t trust any polls,” Mallory McMorrow, whose Senate hopes in Michigan ended after a fake poll showed her tanking, told The Sun’s Ellie Fivas.
What about those early voting numbers everyone’s going on about? Analysts warn that the early vote has never predicted the result, The Sun’s Ayah Ali-Ahmad and Andrew Van Dam report (with charts!).
Speculation game: The world of Wednesday. What will Trump 2.0 be like if the polls are right? “The president really won’t give a fuck after November and will be focused solely on his legacy,” one Republican strategist close to the White House told The Sun. Our Ben T.N. Mause, Jasmine Wright and Joe Gould report on what people are planning for the next months or years (again, if the polls are actually right for once).
Money game: Was it worth it? OpenSecrets projects congressional races will cost about $11.9 billion — a $1.7 billion jump from 2022 after adjusting for inflation, The Sun’s Kyle Chouinard reports. Corporations and individual billionaires both spent record amounts.
Legal game: Will this midterm get decided in the courts? The Justice Department has sought to dictate how states count ballots, preemptively challenged the outcome of a Senate election and threatened election officials with prosecution. No charges have been filed, and the DOJ has lost nearly all of its legal fights so far, including at the Supreme Court, which last night declined to hear the California ballots case. The Sun’s Derek Hawkins and Adora Brown report on what might come next.
Drinking game: D.C.’s nerdiest bars tonight. The Sun’s Metro desk has a list of watering holes where you can watch returns and drink to your party’s sorrows or its good health — or possibly both, depending on the Senate map.
HOW IT WILL UNFOLD
Our guide to election night: The Sun’s Hunter Riggall and Paul Kane offer a guide to which major races to watch as the polls close. If tonight is the blue wave Democrats are hoping for, they write, control of Congress could be called by midnight. But a closer contest could mean we won’t know the balance of power for days or weeks because California and Alaska exist.
What the redistricters are watching: The Sun’s Manuela Silva has been reporting extensively on the Republican effort to redraw the House map this cycle, as well as the Democratic response, which was to also redraw.
Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, told Manuela he’s watching North Carolina’s 1st District (aka the most expensive House race ever), Texas’ redrawn 35th, which he says is the “median of all the pickup opportunities” in the state and the margins in all the districts the Republicans redrew in Florida — especially the 14th, which includes Tampa, “a Republican district, but competitive,” he said.
John Bisognano, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, told Manuela to look for those East Coast redistricted seats where results could come in the fastest: the Florida races, as well as North Carolina’s 1st and 3rd districts. Another one on his list is Alabama’s 2nd District, which we told you this week could be a possible GOP dummymander.
OUR COVERAGE
The Washington Sun newsroom will be assembled tonight and posting the most interesting electoral nuggets and results on our Election Night Liveblog starting after the polls close. Some are calling it the finest dual-screen opportunity of 2026: TV on C-SPAN, phone on the blog. Know everything you need to know, plus a lot of stuff you didn’t know you needed to know.
More: Trump Unlocks Disaster Funds for Republican Districts in California and Minnesota • Mysterious New Websites Are Showing Up in AI’s Midterms Answers • ‘Prepare Yourself’: Election Day Doomsday Messages Hit a Crescendo
NOT US
- A state-by-state guide to poll-closing times and how fast ballots are counted, by Nathaniel Rakich for VoteBeat
- I Interviewed Haley Stevens at 11 PM on Her Fiancé’s Couch, by Olivia Reingold for The Free Press
- “Chaos” in the Air: Five Ways Voting Could Be Disrupted on Election Day, by Jen Fifield and Peter Elkind for ProPublica
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The newsletter was produced by Thomas Burr and Andrew Burton.
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