The ReturnsUpdated through the countAs of 5:30 a.m. ET

At first light the dog got up.
The fox heard the chain fall.

Enoch · the Ownership Desk

Trump loses the House and the Senate.

Seven Senate seats on our card changed hands, and eleven House seats. Thirty-two races are in; all thirty-two ran blue of his 2024 line. The new Congress takes the gavels in 60 days. He keeps the nuclear codes for 808.

The Wave Meter

BLUE WAVE

The median race ran 15.9 points blue of Trump’s 2024 margin.

32 of 32races in ran blue of his 2024 number

1Republican won and still ran behind him

THE RULEEvery race is held against what Trump did there in 2024. A Republican who wins by less than he won is blue water. A Republican who beats his number is red. A Democrat who runs behind Harris is red too.

A dot is a race: large Senate, small House. The wave is the same races, drawn as a crest.Democrat wonRepublican wonSeat flippedStill counting

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk

Thirty-two races are in. Thirty-two of them ran blue of the line he set in 2024. One Republican on this card won a seat and still came in 13.9 under that line, in the one state where the name opposite was an independent.

The word is impairment. A thing may not be carried at more than it will now fetch; the holder marks it down and says the figure out loud. Texas was carried at Trump +13.7. On Tuesday it went at D+11.7. That is 25.4 points, written off in one night, in public. A margin is not a possession. It is a price somebody else sets. The write-down is taken. The seat goes with it.

The tide tableThe same rule, every midterm since 2006: the national House vote against the last presidential margin. It has not once run toward the president’s party.

200610.5 blueagainst Bush

201014.1 redagainst Obama

20149.6 redagainst Obama

20186.5 blueagainst Trump

20227.2 redagainst Biden

2026countingagainst Trump

The Senate

54to44Democrats held 47

Democrats take the chamber. 2 still out, hollow.

The House

231to144Democrats held 215

Democrats take the chamber. 60 still out, hollow.

The Senate, all fourteen on the card

State	Winner	Margin	2024	The tide
Texas	D Talarico over Paxton	D+11.7	Trump +13.7	25.4 blue	FLIP
Mississippi	Colom leads Hyde-Smith	0.0	Trump +22.9	22.9 blue	COUNTING
North Carolina	D Cooper over Whatley	D+19.6	Trump +3.2	22.8 blue	FLIP
South Carolina	D Andrews over D. Graham	D+4.4	Trump +17.8	22.2 blue	FLIP
Kansas	D Hamilton over Marshall	D+4.8	Trump +16.2	21.0 blue	FLIP
Georgia	D Ossoff over M. Collins	D+18.0	Trump +2.2	20.2 blue	HOLD
Iowa	D Turek over Hinson	D+4.1	Trump +13.2	17.3 blue	FLIP
Ohio	D Brown over Husted	D+4.8	Trump +11.2	16.0 blue	FLIP
Nebraska	R Ricketts over Osborn	R+6.6	Trump +20.5	13.9 blue	HOLD
Alaska	R Sullivan leads Peltola	R+0.8	Trump +13.1	12.3 blue	COUNTING
New Hampshire	D Pappas over Sununu	D+14.3	Harris +2.8	11.5 blue	HOLD
Michigan	D El-Sayed over Rogers	D+6.8	Trump +1.4	8.2 blue	HOLD
Minnesota	D Flanagan over Tafoya	D+10.1	Harris +4.2	5.9 blue	HOLD
Maine	D Jackson over S. Collins	D+7.7	Harris +7.0	0.7 blue	FLIP

Called races only carry a Hold or a Flip. Each name links to the call.

Mississippi is tied at 0.0 and still counting

By LouOne More Question

There is a zero on this page and it is going to bother me all night. Mississippi, the Senate row: 0.0. Not close. Not within something. Zero, and the board still says counting.

The pump at the station on my corner rounds. I spent two winters trying to stop it on an even number, and the one time it happened I went inside and showed the kid at the register, and got told the pump does not stop there, it only prints there. Which is a different sentence than the one I thought I had been reading for two winters.

And forgive me, I am sure there is a simple answer. A hundred seats, ninety-eight of them called, two still out. Mississippi at 0.0, in a state Trump carried by 22.9. Alaska 0.8 apart, in a state he carried by 13.1. The Senate has already been called at 54. I am not saying the call is wrong — the people who make those calls do it for a living, and I do it once every two years.

Oh, one more thing and then I will let you get back to the board. 0.0. That is the printed number. Underneath it are two stacks of paper in a county office and one of them is taller. So, last question: is 0.0 a result, or is it where the screen stopped?

This reporter returns to the political desk

By GusFilling in, the Political Desk

Corrected by TrudyThe Sports Desk

Every call in this box is wrong. The correction under it is the record.

Texas CORRECTED Texas goes, and this reporter is prepared to stake a career of unblemished accuracy upon it, to Eugene Victor Debs, campaigning from a federal cell in Atlanta, by a margin of forty-one points.

TRUDY: Talarico, by 11.7. Debs did run in 1920 from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, with campaign pins that read Convict No. 9653, and Debs died in 1926. The 1926 part is what is going to give us trouble tonight. The record.

Nebraska CORRECTED Nebraska, and this reporter calls it without hesitation for William Jennings Bryan, the Boy Orator of the Platte, in a landslide they will be studying for a century.

TRUDY: Ricketts, by 6.6. Bryan ran three times and lost three times — 1896, 1900 and 1908, dead in 1925. A century of studying is exactly what he got. The record.

Minnesota CORRECTED Minnesota belongs, as it has belonged since this reporter stood at the back of that hall in a borrowed overcoat, to the Farmer-Labor ticket, and the margin is thirty points if it is one.

TRUDY: Flanagan, by 10.1. The Farmer-Labor Party merged into the Minnesota Democrats on April 15, 1944, with Hubert Humphrey chairing the committee that arranged it. Flanagan ran on the ticket that merger produced, so the call is only eighty-two years late. The record.

Ohio 9th CORRECTED Ohio's 9th, and this reporter has seen enough: it is Victoria Woodhull's, the first woman ever to stand for the presidency, by a figure I decline to read aloud out of respect for the loser. This reporter has also not left this chair since the polls closed and the chair is aware of it.

TRUDY: Kaptur, by 5.4, on lines redrawn to Trump +10.5. Woodhull did stand, in 1872, and she died in 1927. Somebody bring a towel to the gentleman in chair four, and bring the second one with you. The record.

Wisconsin 3rd CORRECTED Wisconsin's 3rd goes to Fighting Bob La Follette and this reporter will hear no argument on the point, by a margin not seen since the Progressive wave crested over this very desk.

TRUDY: Cooke, by 6.6. La Follette did run in 1924, carried exactly one state, Wisconsin, and died the following June. Put the stopwatch down, sugar, and lie flat in a dark room until it passes. The record.

Iowa 1st CORRECTED Iowa's 1st is James Baird Weaver's and the Greenback ticket's, called by this reporter at nine o'clock sharp from memory alone, memory having failed him on no occasion to date, and the chair can file its own report in the morning.

TRUDY: Bohannan, by 9.2. Weaver of Iowa ran on the Greenback ticket in 1880 and the People's Party ticket in 1892, and died in 1912. That is the fifth candidate you have seated tonight who is in a cemetery, and we are not off the House board. Did we take everything the bottle says this morning? The record.

The House, the twenty-three on the card

By SalStaff Writer

You know what Texas 34, Ohio 7, Ohio 9, Florida 14 and Florida 25 all have in common? Every one of them is a seat somebody redrew before a single vote was cast, and the friendliest of those five new lines still ran Trump +9.1. Five for five on Tuesday, the other way. The phrase for it is "mid-decade redistricting," which is what you call moving the goalposts when you also own the stadium, the grounds crew and the man with the chalk — and Florida's own supreme court let that map stand in June, six to one. The lines were drawn to add four seats. The two on this board are still Democratic.

Seat	Winner	Margin	2024	The tide
CA-22^†	D Villegas	D+31.2	Trump +1.8	33.0 blue	COUNTING
TX-34^†	D V. Gonzalez	D+15.8	Trump +10.1	25.9 blue	HOLD
NC-11	D Ager	D+15.8	Trump +9.5	25.3 blue	FLIP
OH-7^†	D Poindexter	D+9.8	Trump +11.0	20.8 blue	FLIP
IA-1	D Bohannan	D+9.2	Trump +8.4	17.6 blue	FLIP
PA-8	D Cognetti	D+8.8	Trump +8.4	17.2 blue	FLIP
NJ-7	D Bennett	D+15.7	Trump +1.1	16.8 blue	FLIP
CO-8	D Rutinel	D+14.7	Trump +1.8	16.5 blue	FLIP
OH-9^†	D Kaptur	D+5.4	Trump +10.5	15.9 blue	HOLD
FL-14^†	D Castor	D+5.3	Trump +10.5	15.8 blue	HOLD
PA-10	D Stelson	D+10.0	Trump +5.2	15.2 blue	FLIP
PA-7	D Brooks	D+12.0	Trump +3.2	15.2 blue	FLIP

Seat	Winner	Margin	2024	The tide
NC-1^†	D Davis	D+2.8	Trump +11.5	14.3 blue	HOLD
AZ-1	D Shah	D+11.1	Trump +3.1	14.2 blue	COUNTING
WA-3	D Gluesenkamp Perez	D+10.8	Trump +3.3	14.1 blue	HOLD
WI-3	D Cooke	D+6.6	Trump +7.3	13.9 blue	FLIP
FL-25^†	D Moskowitz	D+4.7	Trump +9.1	13.8 blue	HOLD
MI-10	D Hines	D+6.1	Trump +6.5	12.6 blue	COUNTING
IA-3	D Trone Garriott	D+7.4	Trump +4.4	11.8 blue	FLIP
AZ-6	D Mendoza	D+8.0	Trump +0.7	8.7 blue	COUNTING
VA-2	D Luria	D+8.5	Trump +0.2	8.7 blue	FLIP
MI-7	D Lawrence	D+3.2	Trump +1.2	4.4 blue	COUNTING
NY-17	D Conley	D+4.5	Harris +0.5	4.0 blue	COUNTING

† Redrawn since 2024. The baseline is Trump’s margin on the new lines, so the map cannot grade itself. The full form: the Politics page.

What is left to him, reconciled

By RuthThe Money Desk

Okay then. I ran the new seats against the only number a veto cares about. A bill he sends back becomes law anyway if two thirds of each chamber passes it again. Two thirds of a full Senate is 67 votes; Democrats have 54 seats called. Two thirds of a full House is 290; they have 231 called so far. That is a gap of 13 in the one column and 59 in the other as of this count, and the seats still out will not close the first one.

What it leaves him is the pen, and a pen does not need a vote. It needs a date. In 60 days the gavels change hands. The pen does not, hon.

Maine changed hands and barely moved

By MitchInvestigations

Everybody find your place. We are on the Maine row, and the number in the tide column is 0.7.

Here is the thing about 0.7. Harris carried Maine by 7.0 in 2024. Jackson carried it by 7.7 on Tuesday. That is the flattest race on this entire board in the year of the flood: a Senate seat changes party, a sitting senator is out, and the state itself moved seven tenths of a point. The Feinstein rule runs both directions at this paper, so it falls to us to say it first — Maine is the worst race on our own side of the sheet.

Now follow the bouncing ball into the paperwork, which is where it gets strange. I went up to the nominating convention in a borrowed necktie under the name Eldon T. Pilcher, which is to say I read the tally. Ballotpedia, 30 July: that convention went 566 to 5, and it made Jackson the first replacement nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Maine since 1918 — the 28th in the country since then, the 15th on the Democratic side. All together now, down to the last line of that entry: of those 28, seven had ever been elected. On Tuesday the count made it eight.

Seven tenths of a point, and the first name Maine has swapped onto a Senate ballot since 1918.

Why the seats undersell the water

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk

Votes are counted by the million. Seats are handed out by the district, and the district is drawn by whoever holds the pen.

Texas, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina redrew their lines under Republican majorities. Florida's own supreme court let the new map stand on 10 June, six to one; Republicans held twenty of that state's twenty-eight seats, and the new lines were drawn to add four. California answered with a map of its own, approved by its voters on 4 November 2025 and drawn against Texas's.

The old word for it is the entail: land settled so it cannot be sold away from the heirs. A seat drawn that way is meant to descend rather than to be won.

Texas's 34th was redrawn to Trump +10.1. It went D+15.8. Ohio's 9th was redrawn to Trump +10.5. It went D+5.4. The lines held. The seats did not.

Investigative Reporting

WHO PICKS THE JUDGE

Chapter 2: Seventy-Two

Here is a sheet of paper twenty-three and three-quarter inches wide and twelve and a half inches tall. It is printed on both sides, forty lines to a side, and every line is a person. The person's street goes in the first column, then the house number, then whether the household owns or rents, then what the house is worth or what the rent costs, then the name, then the relationship to the head of the household — "wife, daughter, father, mother-in-law, grandson, lodger, lodger's wife, servant, hired hand." Age at last birthday. Place of birth. Whether the person worked the week of March 24 to 30 for the CCC, the WPA or the NYA. Income for 1939. This is the 1940 population schedule of the…

Continued on the Investigative Reporting page

§83 — 05 November 2026

On the spanking

By LouThe Word

Democrat

On Tuesday the country answered. Democrats take the House and the Senate in January, NBC News projects. They flipped seven Senate seats: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. They flipped five governorships. An NBC analysis on Wednesday put them at 258 House seats at least, a figure that can still move a few seats ¹. Early exit polls had his approval at 38 percent ². The Dow rose more than 1,500 points Wednesday ³.

Dad's statement came in parts. "I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE" ³. Fox News "bears the responsibility" ³. The vice president blamed the Iran war, and he called that "largely true" ³. Then he posted a red cap reading VETO ¹. Democrats will fall short of the two-thirds it takes to override one ¹. The gavels change hands January 3, in 59 days. He keeps the veto. He keeps the nuclear codes for 807.

Sources

Republican

Give the word its due: it was theirs first. In October 2023 his campaign sent the press a statement headed "DeSanctus Campaign Gets Spanked on CNN," in which the governor of Florida was "getting thoroughly spanked" ¹. That November a campaign memo read "DeSantis Gets Spanked on FOX News" ². In October 2024, in Duluth, Georgia, Tucker Carlson widened the program to the country: "You've been a bad little girl, and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now" ³.

There is one more entry, under oath. In May 2024 Stormy Daniels testified in Manhattan that she looked at a magazine with him on the cover and said, "Someone should spank you with that" ⁴, and then did, "right on the butt" ⁵. He denies the whole story ⁶. The judge said some of the testimony "would have been better left unsaid" ⁷. That is a statement, a memo, a stage and a witness stand. On Tuesday it came back with a count.

Sources

“I went looking for who started this and I've got a stack. A campaign statement from October 2023, a governor "getting thoroughly spanked." Another one that November. A speech in Georgia, 2024, the whole country this time. And sworn testimony from a courtroom in Manhattan, which he denies, so I set that one to the side, and then I picked it back up. Sorry, one thing before you go. Tuesday night he wrote that he wasn't on the ballot. Then it was Fox News. Then he said the Iran explanation was largely true. That's three reasons. If he wasn't on the ballot, why does he need the other two?”— Lou

“Spanked. And before anybody writes in, it's not our word. It's theirs. Go look. His campaign put it in a press statement in 2023. In 2024 Tucker Carlson stood up at a rally in Georgia and told the whole country Dad's coming home and it's getting a vigorous one. So the country goes to its room and thinks about what it did for two years. Tuesday it came downstairs. Seven Senate seats. Texas. Dad's statement is he wasn't home. And Wednesday the Dow goes up fifteen hundred points. I'm not saying those two things are connected. I'm saying the guy next to me bought a round.”

Sal

“I'd push back on "spanked" as a characterization of what was, in fairness, a preliminary count, and I think we can all agree that kind of language has no place in our politics, outside of a campaign statement, where it is a metaphor, and a rally, where it was also a metaphor.”

Chip

Permanent link to §83
The Record — every day that has run

Continued on Page W83

The rest of the paper is still printing: today’s stories, Page A2 · the wire.

“Thirty-two races in and thirty-two of them ran away from the one guy who was not on any of the ballots — that is not a wave, that is a receipt with his name on it.”

— Sal

HELP WANTED Crypto cops, recently disbanded. Reapply after the family bank clears. Bring your own handcuffs; we sold ours. — Classifieds

LOST The East Wing. Last seen April, near a bulldozer. If found, do not return. He's redecorating. — Classifieds

LOST Measles, eliminated in the year 2000, since recovered. Reward for its re-loss. Ask a kindergarten. — Classifieds

“Republicans held Nebraska and still lead Alaska, and 54 Senate seats is thirteen short of the 67 it takes to override a veto, so the agenda stands exactly where it stood on Monday.”

— Chip

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Our ability is the link under every claim; your need is to check it. Free, forever. Continued: the serials · the -m edition · the classic front · contact us.

From§Each

Trump loses the House and the Senate.

The Senate, all fourteen on the card

Mississippi is tied at 0.0 and still counting

This reporter returns to the political desk

The House, the twenty-three on the card

What is left to him, reconciled

Maine changed hands and barely moved

Why the seats undersell the water

WHO PICKS THE JUDGE

On the spanking

SPANKED

Sources

SPANKED

Sources