As Tuesday’s midterm election results rolled in, Zeteo’s Mehdi and Prem Thakker livestreamed throughout the night from Michigan. If you missed it, you can catch the full replay on YouTube. Meanwhile, enjoy Zeteo’s deep dive into the epic conclusion of this year’s high-stakes election below, and discover what the Democratic Party’s victories and the GOP’s electoral slaughter mean for the next two years of Trump’s fascist presidency.
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Holy mother of god, was that catastrophically bad for Donald Trump and the Republican Party? Yes. Was it a more painful night for them than they thought it would be heading into it? Also yes.
As the U.S. midterm election results rolled in, the Zeteo political team was out in force: Mehdi and Prem Thakker livestreamed from Michigan; Andrew Perez was covering Troy Jackson in Maine; and Swin Suebsaeng was at the Democratic watch party in Columbus, Ohio. All three states will be sending Democratic senators to Capitol Hill next year – and that was just the tip of the night’s anti-fascist iceberg. Throughout the evening, there was one word that Swin kept hearing and reading from panicking Republican sources – those in the Trump-Vance administration, longtime GOP operatives working on competitive races, big-time conservative donors, and so forth:
“Bloodbath,” or – as one Trump adviser put it: “Utter bloodbath.”
By the middle of the evening, the White House and the larger constellation of national GOP power knew how bad it was. It was a staggering catastrophe for the Trump presidency and his MAGAfied Republican Party – a stunning repudiation by the American people of President Trump’s agenda of senseless war, ravaged economy, wholesale corruption and constant barbarism at home and abroad.
Trump’s party lumbered into election night knowing it would be bad, perhaps even really, really bad. But many of these Republicans, as they told us while the clock ran well past midnight, were not predicting Tuesday’s midterms would be this titanic a disaster for the Republican Party. For instance, several of them told us their worst-case scenarios for Tuesday did not involve Texas swinging as hard towards the Democrats as the GOP stronghold did on election night.
“That was worse than we imagined,” a senior Trump administration official told Swin in the middle of the night.