Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana went on Sean Hannity’s show Wednesday night and said out loud what Fox News had spent a week trying to talk around. “This was not a normal midterm election loss,” Kennedy told Hannity. “If you think that, congratulations, you’re stupid.” Then, borrowing from West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, he added that Toby and Edith “didn’t stay home.” Kennedy talks like every Senate vote has to be explained to a man buying bait. On Wednesday, that made him the clearest political analyst in the building.
Two nights earlier, on that same set, Hannity had delivered what he called “a real civics lesson.” He rattled off Obama, Clinton, Ford, Reagan, Johnson, Eisenhower and FDR as presidents who had suffered bigger midterm losses. I teach civics for a living. A list of presidents is what I give students before I ask them to do the analysis. Sean read the list, skipped the assignment and gave himself a round of applause. Then Kennedy showed up and wrote the grade in the margin for me. Congratulations, you’re stupid.
Brandon Tatum turned in the same assignment in all caps. His post was headlined “Republicans Lost the Midterms. SO WHAT?” and featured a section called “This Happens Almost Every Midterm!” This is what you get when somebody learns that the president’s party usually loses seats and decides that one sentence will carry him all the way to retirement. A routine midterm loss and a wave can move in the same direction. The size of the swing, where it happens and how much power changes hands tell you which one you’re looking at. Tatum got as far as identifying the direction and hit publish. If I asked him how much money was missing from his checking account, I bet he’d suddenly discover the analytical value of a number.
Start with the baseline Hannity left out of his “real civics lesson.” A party defending a large House majority generally has more vulnerable seats to lose. Republicans came in with 220 seats to the Democrats’ 215. Democrats are now projected to hold at least 255 seats, a gain of 40 from that baseline and a larger majority than Republicans have won in any postwar House election. A useful comparison asks how much ground a party gave up relative to where it started. You can lose more seats than these Republicans did and still end up with more power than they have now. That distinction matters if your job involves counting votes. It matters less if your job involves counting the seconds until the MyPillow ad.
They took the Senate, too. Voters have handed both chambers to the opposition in midterms like 1954, 1994 and 2006. The House and Senate operate on different electoral calendars. Every House seat comes up every two years, while only about a third of the Senate is regularly up in any one cycle. A national swing can wreck a party in the House while the particular Senate seats on the ballot insulate it from the same backlash. That’s why taking both chambers tells you something about how far the swing reached. It takes a special kind of dumbass to get through that history and conclude the most important thing about this election is that it happened two years after a presidential one.
The Senate is where Hannity’s argument really falls apart. In January 2025, betting markets gave Republicans an 80 percent chance of holding it. A year ago this month, even after Democrats’ big off-year wins in Virginia and New Jersey, The Cook Political Report still saw a Senate map tilted toward Republicans. Democrats needed four net pickups. Cook calculated that if the Senate battlegrounds moved toward Democrats by the same margins Virginia and New Jersey had shifted from 2024, only Maine and North Carolina would move into Democratic-leaning territory. Democrats flipped both of those seats and picked up Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina and Mississippi. Sean, if that happens almost every midterm, show me the part of your syllabus where Kansas and South Carolina usually elect Democratic senators.
I could spend the rest of this piece on Texas, Iowa, South Carolina and Mississippi. Texas and Iowa elected Democratic senators and governors on the same damn night. South Carolina and Mississippi sent Democrats to the Senate. Go ahead and take all four states off the table. Give Sean the eraser himself. He’ll still have to explain why the same electorate that took Congress away from Republicans was busy taking power away from them in state capitals. The number of people who can name their state representative is considerably smaller than the number who can name Donald Trump. Republicans still managed to make enough of them mad enough to find the right line on the ballot.
Start with the governors. Republicans held a majority of the nation’s governorships for 16 years. That run ended on November 3. Democrats flipped Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas and held Maine, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governor’s race while Jon Ossoff held his Senate seat. Those wins have consequences long after Hannity finds something else to yell about. Governors sign or veto state budgets, decide which bills become law and shape how their states respond to Washington. When Congress changes how a federal program is funded, the people charged with making it work at the state level can determine what that change actually means to a family. I’m sure Sean will cover that in the second week of his civics course, right after the unit on how to count to seven without looking at a map.
Then there’s Florida, the state Ron DeSantis held up as proof Republicans withstood the wave after calling the national results “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans.” Democrats flipped 16 seats in the Florida House and broke the Republican supermajority. Republicans kept the governor’s office, but they lost their Senate supermajority, too. Without two-thirds in either chamber, they can’t override a veto without Democratic votes. A regular majority can still pass ordinary bills, which I mention because one of us is actually teaching civics here. DeSantis gets to brag that his party kept the keys to the governor’s mansion. Fine. I’m asking how many Republicans in Tallahassee had to clean out their desks while he was giving the victory tour. If losing 16 seats in your own backyard is the success story, Ron, please take us through the bad news.
Keep going down the ballot. Arizona Democrats won the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature, their first trifecta since 1966. Wisconsin Democrats took both chambers for the first time in 16 years. New Hampshire flipped both chambers, too. Republicans even redrew congressional maps to protect their majority and still lost seats drawn to favor them. Imagine picking your own voters and having those motherfuckers pick somebody else. And Brian Fitzpatrick, the Republican who kept winning a Pennsylvania House district Trump kept losing, finally went down. That’s the kind of incumbent whose survival usually gives you a sense of where the wave stopped. If Hannity’s grading on a curve, he’s going to need a protractor and a priest.
