As millions of 2026 ballots are being counted, our contributors will offer real-time commentary on the state of play. This article will be updated throughout the evening.

Live Election Night Commentary

Allysia Finley— 10:45 p.m. Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms will be Georgia’s next governor, and her decisive win over Republican Rick Jackson puts Gov. Brian Kemp’s reform agenda in jeopardy. It will likely take tax cuts off the table. Democrats are also hoping to take control of the state House by flipping seats in Atlanta’s suburbs. Mr. Kemp successfully pushed for tort reforms and education savings accounts, and one risk now is that GOP legislators who resisted those ideas might join Democrats to roll them back. Some could also jump on board Ms. Bottoms’s plan to expand Medicaid under ObamaCare. —Ms.

Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board. She writes the weekly “Life Science” column.

Kim Strassel— 10:15 p.m. If Republicans want to understand the difference between eking out elections and winning big, they can look to the results in Florida. While GOP Sen. Ashley Moody has won re-election to the Senate, and Rep. Byron Donalds has taken the governorship, both margins are smaller than state Republicans have come to expect. The difference: the swing Hispanic vote.

It’s impossible not to compare these narrow Florida wins to the thundering Republican performance four years ago. Gov. Ron DeSantis stormed to re-election by about 20 points, carrying nearly every demographic. Sen. Marco Rubio won re-election by more than 16. A huge factor was that Mr. DeSantis had a 15-point advantage with Hispanic voters over his Democratic challenger that year, Charlie Crist. Donald Trump’s 2024 election was also powered by greatly improving his share of Hispanic voters.

But now 2022 looks like the anomaly. Before then, Florida Republicans had to fight for statewide offices. Mr. DeSantis initially won the governorship in 2018 by less than half a point. Sen. Rick Scott won with just 50.05% of the vote. This year the GOP looks to be losing Hispanic voters again. They elected Republicans to improve the economy, and they feel let down.

The Florida results could bode ill for GOP House seats in Texas and elsewhere as the night rolls on.

—Ms. Strassel is a member of the Journal’s editorial board. She writes the weekly “Potomac Watch” column. Moira Gleason— 10:19 p.m. It’s a bad night for Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina. Some news outlets are now calling it for Democrat Annie Andrews, who has a comfortable lead of 51% to Ms. Graham’s 47%, with 89% of the votes counted. What’s telling is that Ms. Graham is trailing in Greenville County and barely ahead in Spartanburg County.

Mr. Trump won them in 2024 by 22 and 33 points, respectively. These results might partly be a referendum on the Trump administration, but don’t discount candidate quality as a factor. Mr. Trump nudged Ms. Graham to try to win a full term to succeed her late brother Lindsey, but I’m not convinced Darline really wanted it. Ms. Gleason is a Rago Fellow at the Journal.

Matthew Hennessey— 9:50 p.m. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul easily dispensed with her Republican challenger, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. Among tonight’s unanswerable hypotheticals: Would Rep. Elise Stefanik have given Ms. Hochul a tougher time? President Trump’s apparent unwillingness to bless Ms. Stefanik’s candidacy in late 2025, despite her record as a Republican team player, set up a potential GOP primary with the nationally unknown Mr. Blakeman.

Ms. Stefanik decided she’d rather spend time with her young family instead. Mr. Trump will take lumps for a lot of losses in the coming days. He shouldn’t escape blame for this one. —Mr. Hennessey is editor of Free Expression. Allysia Finley— 9:45 p.m. The exit polls show Republicans performing much worse, among nearly all demographic groups, than in the 2022 midterms. Women favored Democrats by a 16-point margin this year, compared with eight points four years ago.

But the decline was even greater for men, who favored Republicans by a single point this year, versus 14 in 2022.

Among white men specifically, the GOP advantage shrank by half, to 14 points, from 28. Seniors over age 65 preferred Republicans by four points, compared with 12 in 2022. College graduates favored Democrats by 25 points this year, versus 10 in 2022. The GOP advantage among non-college grads fell to six points from 12.

Republicans performed best among white men without a college degree, boasting a 31 point edge, but this is still down from 46 points in 2022.

Maybe the one silver lining for the GOP is that the relative turnout among older voters is higher than in the last midterms, while it’s lower for younger voters who heavily favored Democrats. —Ms.

Finley is a member of the Journal’s editorial board. She writes the weekly “Life Science” column. Elliot Kaufman — 9:30 p.m. “Everything Is Going Good.”That’s President Trump’s line of the day. In a Fox News interview this morning, billed as his Election Day message to voters, he made headlines by announcing an end to U.S. military aid to Israel. But one question earlier, the President said something else remarkable.

Asked why Americans should vote Republican, Mr. Trump listed off his accomplishments, on topics ranging from illegal immigration and inflation to the Strait of Hormuz. Then, as if to sum up the state of the union, he said it: “Everything is going good.”He added, “Everybody respects us again.”

Many voters see it differently. On illegal immigration, polls suggest Mr. Trump’s deportation blitz looked uglier than most could stomach. Inflation might have come down, but voters don’t like what they pay at the gas pump. On Iran, eight months in, even the war’s supporters can’t be confident of what’s next and how it will lead to victory. The President’s bluster hasn’t helped.

—Mr. Kaufman is a member of the Journal’s Editorial Board. Jack Butler— 9:20 p.m. North Carolina’s Senate race is now being called for Democrat Roy Cooper. As the former governor, Mr. Cooper was a stronger candidate than Republican Michael Whatley. Could GOP Sen. Thom Tillis have held the seat, though? Mr. Tillis won re-election in 2020 by fewer than 100,000 votes, so perhaps he would have struggled against Mr. Cooper as well.

But we’ll never know, because President Trump effectively forced Mr. Tillis out of office. That’s now confirmed as a GOP backfire on Mr. Trump’s part. There may be more to come tonight. —Mr. Butler is deputy editor of Free Expression. Barton Swaim— 9:15 p.m. One thing at stake in the Michigan Senate race: the future of the Democratic Party. Abdul El-Sayed has run from the label “socialist,” but he represents a kind of radical progressivism that so far hasn’t prevailed in statewide races for the U.S. Senate.

The House, yes. Candidates associated with the Democratic Socialists of America have won seats in deep-blue cities. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez originated the strategy by knocking off a longtime Democratic incumbent in her Queens, N.Y., district. Other members of “the Squad” did the same, and so will more socialists tonight: Chris Rabb will easily win in Philadelphia, as will Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, Melat Kiros in Denver and Donavan McKinney in Detroit.

Yet Mr. El-Sayed is trying to win Michigan, which President Trump carried in 2016 and 2024. A victory for Mr. El-Sayed would seem to prove that the party’s leftward-most candidates—socialist in economics, radical on cultural issues, fixated on the alleged crimes of Israel—can break out of blue districts and into purple states. If that happens, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has backed Mr. El-Sayed and refused to acknowledge the nominee’s radicalism, belligerence and antisemitism, can expect more such trouble in 2028, assuming he hangs on the leadership.

If, on the other hand, Mr. El-Sayed falls to Republican Mike Rogers, the DSA project will have stalled—an outcome Mr. Schumer may secretly prefer. As for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the man likely to be House Speaker, he might wonder why over the last eight years his party has exchanged Democratic team players for a band of recalcitrant ideologues. —Mr.

Swaim is a member of the Journal’s editorial board. Matthew Hennessey— 9:00 p.m. At my polling place in Yonkers, N.Y., just across the northern border of the Bronx, I experienced something similar to what Free Expression contributor Howard Husock described earlier in the day. An election machine snafu affecting all of Westchester County meant ballots weren’t being scanned but rather deposited in large orange bags of the sort you’d expect to see at the back of a bank vault.

A volunteer instructed me to fold my rectangular ballot twice, so it could fit in the slot atop an overstuffed satchel. The school gymnasium was more chaotic, with voters and volunteers, than it has been in many election moons. An atmosphere of exasperation prevailed. “Are we having fun yet?”I asked a poll worker. She rolled her eyes in playful exhaustion. I must say, like Howard, I left the gym with low confidence that my vote—and the votes of my neighbors—would make it into the ultimate tally.

—Mr. Hennessey is editor of Free Expression. Zachary Kessel— 8:30 p.m. The Georgia Senate race was called early. Sen. Jon Ossoff is at 63.6% and Rep. Mike Collins at 36.4%, with 56% of the vote counted. Mr. Ossoff is already being floated as Democratic presidential material, so watch if this lead comes even close to holding or narrows as more ballots are tallied.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s massive victory in 2022, by nearly 20 points, helped launch him into the GOP’s presidential primaries two years later. Mr. Ossoff’s fans might say that a huge win tonight propels him into the top candidate tier for 2028. —Mr. Kessel is an assistant editor of Free Expression. Kim Strassel— 7:58 p.m. In Alaska, one thing is already clear: Plenty of voters spent confusing moments in the voting booth, including contemplating two Senate candidates named Dan Sullivan.

Ever since the New York Times reported that Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola’s campaign was behind the dirty “Decoy Dan” trick—recruiting a doppelganger named Dan J. Sullivan to draw voters away from the real Sen. Dan S. Sullivan—the Beltway refrain has been that Alaska did enough distinguishing to make the ballot clear. That’s a hoot.

Even before Decoy Dan, Alaskans were stuck with a byzantine system of ranked-choice voting (RCV). Instead of picking just one of several candidates, voters receive a complex grid, with a line of names down one side, ranked positions along the top, and 25 bubbles—for each separate race. A 2025 Political Behavior study looked at U.S. jurisdictions that use RCV, and found voters in those contests were nine times as likely to have their votes rejected because of improper markings.

Now add in two Dan Sullivans, as well as the gamesmanship that is a feature of RCV. Official GOP organizations have tried to educate their voters on the best Senate strategy, namely, the need to rank “all” the Dans on the ballot, to ensure that even if they misrank the two names initially, their votes will ultimately go to Sen. Sullivan. Yet an outfit deceptively calling itself the Center for Honest Voting sent false-flag mailers telling Republicans that Donald Trump wants them to “trust” their “first choice” and “only vote once.”What’s more, different races call for different voting strategies.

In the runup to Tuesday, I spoke to several voters who wanted to re-elect the “real” Sen. Dan Sullivan, but who remained unclear as to his middle initial. Several more had been told to vote only once in the House contest—for U.S. Rep. Nick Begich (which makes sense, as he’s the only Republican in that race)—and assumed they should similarly vote only once in the Senate race. Others had been told to “rank the red” (the GOP advice in the governor’s race, which features three Republicans and one Democrat), but they were confused because only one Dan on the sample Senate ballot (the “real” Dan) had an “R” after his name.

Should they mark the other Dan? Or not? At least one confided that she was so daunted by the whole thing that she was debating not voting at all.

Hopefully, Alaska’s result is clear enough to avoid a prolonged Senate dispute. But no voters should be subject to this kind of ballot mess.

—Ms. Strassel is a member of the Journal’s editorial board. She writes the weekly “Potomac Watch” column. Kyle Peterson— 7:32 p.m. One potential outcome in tonight’s close Senate races is . . . a lot of waiting around. In Alaska, mail ballots are valid if they arrive Nov. 13, and overseas voters get longer. If Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola are close, it could be tough to call, and if neither hits 50%, it goes to the state’s ranked-choice system.

“Ranked Choice Voting results will not be available until November 18,” the state Elections Division says, “once all eligible ballots are reviewed.”

Maine’s race between GOP Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson could have a similar delay, if write-in votes keep both under 50%. “If a race goes to an RCV tally, Maine requires that the paper ballots or memory devices from each town are physically transported to the state capital of Augusta,” the group FairVote explains. In a 2024 House race, Maine needed 10 days officially to confirm the winner.

Perhaps it won’t happen this time, but consider it another reason for RCV skepticism. —Mr. Peterson is a member of the Journal’s editorial board and Chief Editorial Writer. Kyle Peterson— 7:15 p.m. Will Democrats run the table tonight, taking the Senate with a big enough margin to save Chuck Schumer from two years of coalition headaches? Will Republicans stun the pollsters and hold the Senate, perhaps with a 50-50 tiebreaker from Vice President JD Vance?

As voting closes on the East Coast, months of speculation will begin to give way to reality. Welcome to WSJ Opinion’s live commentary on the 2026 midterms, and please stay tuned throughout the night for the latest quips, observations and analyses from the Journal’s editorial page writers. —Mr. Peterson is a member of the Journal’s editorial board and Chief Editorial Writer.