Now that the midterms are mostly behind us, I have a confession: I hate the midterms. Not as a concept but because of the grind that having to do this every two years puts the country through. While the two-year term limit for House members was meant to be a safeguard against tyranny, in today’s world it acts more as an impediment to good public policy.

The current election cycle forces House members to constantly be campaigning and viewing every move they make through the lens of their next election. You could argue that this is what the founders intended, making members of Congress beholden to the people of their district’s views. But three factors throw this dynamic out of whack: money, primary elections and gerrymandering. 

The high cost of running a campaign at the federal level means that House members have to spend hours every day fundraising, aka calling people up and begging for donations instead of getting actual work done. The GOP primary structure in particular has neutralized the incentive for compromise, lest they be attacked from the right. And partisan redistricting has created enough “safe” districts that members feel divorced from the need to cater to all of their constituents in order to remain in office.

But, as ever, the Senate complicates things. Because even if you were to expand term limits in the House to four years, to line up with the presidential election cycle, we’d still have to vote on off-years thanks to the Senate’s six-year terms. And while you could lengthen the terms of senators as well, eight years is an insane amount of time to remain in office without an election. And so we must persist in this current state of affairs, with our lawmakers constantly distracted from, you know, actually passing laws.

Digging deeper into state-level polling data outside of national exit polls, Latino support for the Democratic winners in Pennsylvania was exceptionally strong, suggesting the state’s 6% eligible voter share was indeed an influential decider.

According to the Pennsylvania section of the 2022 Midterm Election Voter Poll, organized by the African American Research Collaborative, President Biden’s 70% approval rating from the state’s Latino voters easily translated to similar support for both Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro and Sen.-elect John Fetterman. In the same poll, Shapiro got 73% of Latino voter support and Fetterman got 70%.

These are Barack Obama-like Latino voter numbers from 2012 and essentially ensure clearly solid Democratic support from Pennsylvania voters, who are mostly Puerto Rican. From 2010 to 2020, the state’s Latino population of about 1 million increased by 45.8%. Census data listed the following five counties as having the largest percentage of Latinos: Lehigh (25.9%), Berks (23.2%), Monroe (17.0%), Philadelphia (14.9%) and Luzerne (14.4%).

It’s no wonder that a candidate like Fetterman made sure to reach out to Puerto Ricans during the campaign.

Besides Pennsylvania, the AARC poll also noted that Biden had approval ratings of over 70% with Latinos in Georgia and Michigan.

Donald Trump wasn’t on the ticket, but his endorsements sure were, and many of them underperformed in this year’s midterm elections.

Although the former president projected that the elections would be a “humiliating rebuke” to the Democratic agenda, many of his closest key allies failed to win their races (though several key races have yet to be called). While it would be fair to assume that their ties to the former president could be responsible, Trump is reportedly pointing the finger at someone else: his wife.

According to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Trump is furious at Melania Trump for supporting his own decision to back Republican Mehmet Oz.

But he’s not just attacking the woman in his own life, he’s also going after other people’s wives. Just last night, he attempted to emasculate his potential 2024 presidential rival Ron DeSantis with a misogynist claim that his wife is running his campaign.

Trump was reportedly planning to announce his presidential bid in Florida to “stick it” to DeSantis, but given his poor standing in the party, he may be running out of women to blame for his own underperformance

Having avoided the worst-case scenario in the midterms, Democrats are feeling a little punchy today. Here’s what one “senior Democratic official” texted a Washington Post reporter:

That’s a bit rosy of a take in my opinion, given the number of people who said that “the economy” or “inflation” was their biggest concern in multiple pre-election polls. But is it fair to say that other things outweighed any doubts voters had about inflation or other economic factors? Yeah, that makes more sense to me.

While Arizona’s gubernatorial and Senate races remain too early to call, we do know of one big state-wide victory there. Voters overwhelmingly backed Proposition 211, aka the “Voters’ Right to Know Act.” The measure will require any groups spending more than $50,000 on state-level races, or $25,000 on local races, to disclose all donors of $5,000 or more.  

The upshot: Dark money spending will be much harder to disguise in Arizona. “Sadly,” writes Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts, “it won’t affect federal spending. For that, we’d need to elect federal officials who believe in sunshine.”

While the right to abortion had a great night, Republicans weren’t as consistent. 

One of the clear trends unfolding in this midterm election is that when abortion was on the ballot, voters wholeheartedly opted to protect it. Five states had explicit ballot measures regarding the medical procedure, and all of them sided with a woman’s right to choose. Voters in Kentucky, Vermont, Michigan and California voted to ensure that their states keep abortion legal, and in Montana, voters rejected a proposal that would have made any embryo or fetus a legal person, which would have criminalized doctors. 

Even in Kentucky where, three-quarters of the population identifies as Christian and half as evangelicals, and where Republican Sen. Rand Paul won his seat, a ballot measure to protect abortion passed. Just based on the numbers, it would seem that Paul was re-elected despite his anti-abortion zealotry, not because of it. In fact, standing up for reproductive justice is what gave momentum to candidates. Just look at Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose lead only started to crystalize after she made abortion a cornerstone of her campaign.

Republicans succeeded at making abortion a top issue for voters, but it’s not leading to their intended outcome. While they’ve spent the past decade building up a robust political strategy around dismantling a woman’s right to choose, it has only made the right to abortion more popular, and their desire to destroy it, seem cruel and out of touch. Even though it wasn’t their plan, Republicans proved that banning abortion is no longer a wedge issue, it’s a losing issue.

The House is still too close to call but Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is feeling good about the odds. So good that this morning he sent out a letter to his caucus officially announcing his bid to become the next speaker of the House.

While he’s the presumptive frontrunner in that race, how easy a time he has will depend a lot on the size of any Republican majority. It requires a simple majority of the House to win a speaker’s race — and McCarthy knows better than anyone the challenge of locking down those votes. His attempt to become speaker in 2015 was dashed by opposition from the right-wing Freedom Caucus, leaving former Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as the compromise candidate.

Like I noted last night, if McCarthy is operating with a majority of only a few seats, he’s going to need every single vote he can get to take up the speaker’s gavel. And not only is the Freedom Caucus reportedly willing to give McCarthy grief again, there are whispers that his number two, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., is already watching for signs of weakness from his supposed boss.