2026 Midterms: Results, Firsts, and What's Next

A body in danger cannot grieve. It can only brace. That is the plain, physical claim at the center of this episode of We Can Do Hard Things, recorded two days after the 2026 midterms, and it turns out to be the key to almost everything the hosts say next. "A body that has to be stuck in fight or flight cannot relax enough to feel grief," one host explains, describing why so many listeners were feeling joy and sudden, unexplained sadness at the same time (16:11). The sadness, she says, was always there. It just had nowhere to go until the threat let up.

The hosts open by admitting they scrapped their planned episode. Instead they wanted to sit with what had just happened: Democrats had posted sweeping wins across the country, and their kids had already named the mood online "hope scrolling" (00:07). One host describes watching returns come in while feeling outside her own body, cycling between elation and a wariness she calls "the paralysis of hope" (01:48), the fear of letting herself feel good about something that might still be taken away.

Once the numbers settle, they are striking. Democrats hold 54 Senate seats to the Republicans' 44, a swing of 7 seats that flipped from red to blue, including a Trump-backed candidate's defeat in South Carolina (23:41, 24:22). In the House, Democrats have taken 247 seats to 153 for Republicans, a gain of 31 seats, with projections climbing higher as late ballots are counted (25:25). The hosts walk through a run of historic firsts: Georgia's Keisha Lance Bottoms, the great-great-granddaughter of a man once listed as property valued at $1,400 in an 1860 record, becomes the first Black woman elected governor in any U.S. state (26:34). New Mexico's Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, becomes the first Native American woman elected governor in U.S. history (26:55). Texas elects its first Latina governor, Gina Hinojosa, a former school board member from the border town of Brownsville (27:23). Alabama elects its first openly transgender official, Allison Montgomery, who beat a Republican incumbent with 53 percent of the vote (28:45). And Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed will become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate, after predicting back in May that he would win by seven points. He won by exactly seven (35:28).

"It is as if an abuser has been arrested." — Glennon Doyle [15:35]

That line is not throwaway. The hosts spend real time on the idea that years of political threat register in the body the way abuse does, and that relief, when it finally comes, can feel disorienting before it feels good. One host recalls finally exhaling on election night and realizing, for the first time, how long she had been holding her breath (05:36). It is a useful reminder that political analysis and nervous-system science are not actually separate conversations. They are the same conversation, told from two directions.

The Petri Dish Problem

The hosts are not interested only in celebrating. They spend a long stretch of the episode on a harder question: who inside the Democratic Party tried to stop some of these wins from happening. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan primary; Stevens lost, then endorsed El-Sayed's Republican opponent on the Sunday before the general election (36:01). In Florida, the party's Senate committee gave money to Alexander Vindman to run against organizer Angie Nixon in the primary, then offered Nixon nothing in the general. She lost by three points anyway, running with less than $1 million against an opponent with $16 million, and her campaign is credited with breaking the Florida legislature's Republican supermajority by flipping four gerrymandered seats Democrats were not supposed to win (33:14, 38:29). Mississippi's Senate race was excluded entirely from a $40 million party organizing fund because it was deemed unwinnable; as of the recording, Democrat Scott Collum led by 1,138 votes (39:43).

One host names the pattern a "petri dish politician," a candidate manufactured and funded by party leadership rather than grown out of a community (54:56). The logic, she argues, is not mysterious: whoever anoints you is who you answer to. A leader who owes his seat to donors will protect donors. A leader who owes her seat to the people who knocked doors for her will answer to them instead. That is the distinction she draws between establishment picks and organizers like Nixon and Tennessee's Justin Pearson, who forced a controversial data center out of his district before ever running for office (55:50).

"I'm not a politician. I'm an organizer, and organizers don't abandon the mission after an election." — Angie Nixon [53:01]

That line, delivered in Nixon's concession speech, becomes something close to the episode's thesis. Wins, the hosts argue, do not start the night they are declared. They start years earlier, in the unglamorous work of a loss that lays groundwork. Stacey Abrams, the Georgia organizer who never won the governor's mansion herself, gets credited with building the infrastructure that helped elect Keisha Lance Bottoms this cycle (48:35). The hosts frame her as proof that a loss can be a seed, not a dead end.

A Compact That Could End the Electoral College

The most concrete piece of the episode is a plain explanation of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a mechanism one host says listeners are going to be hearing a lot more about. The Electoral College, she explains, did not arrive in the Constitution because the founders considered it the fairest way to pick a president. It came out of an 1787 compromise with slaveholding states, which wanted enslaved people counted toward congressional and electoral representation while denying them any vote, the origin of the Three-Fifths Compromise (58:53). That math still shapes how many electoral votes a state gets today.

The compact does not abolish the Electoral College, and it does not require a constitutional amendment. Instead, states that join agree in advance to give all of their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, once enough states have signed on to guarantee the outcome (60:36). It has already happened twice in recent memory that a candidate lost the popular vote and still won the presidency: George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 (57:27). With Virginia's 2026 addition under Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, the compact now covers 18 states plus Washington, D.C., totaling 222 of the 270 electoral votes needed to take effect (61:06, 61:30). Five more states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada, now have full Democratic control of their governorship and legislature after this cycle but have not yet joined. If just four of those five sign on, the compact would clear 270 votes and the national popular vote, not the Electoral College map, would decide the presidency (61:58).

The hosts do not pretend this is close to finished. "I mean, right now I think things will happen that we decide need to happen," one host says, before the other adds the practical version: call the representatives (62:32). It is a modest, specific ask inside an episode that otherwise runs on feeling, and it lands because of that contrast. The compact will not pass itself.

By the end, the episode returns to where it started, in the body. The hosts talk about reaching out to thank an organizer, dropping off a meal, acknowledging the unpaid work that got the country here, because, as one of them puts it, nobody stumbled into this result (67:27). The Supreme Court resignation some expected, timed to let Trump name a younger replacement, does not appear to be coming before the new Congress is seated, one more crisis the hosts count as narrowly avoided rather than solved (65:32). The nervous system can rest a little. The organizing, they keep insisting, cannot.