Welcome to All Things with Kim Strassel, a newsy analysis of the workings of D.C. (and beyond). Get the inside track on both the overhyped and overlooked events of the week. here, and read this week’s edition below.

It was a bloodbath. Republicans went into Tuesday night dismissing the polls, and the polls turned out to overestimate their strength. The GOP lost at least seven Senate seats (including in notably red states), at least 25 House seats (it will get worse), at least five governorships (marking the first time since 2010 that Democrats hold a majority), and control over at least six chambers in state legislatures (more likely to come).

This was no usual midterm “loss,” and what’s striking is that it was almost entirely self-inflicted. Donald Trump and his party won an impressive victory in 2024, only to squander the good grace of voters with a raft of bad policy, bad optics and bad candidates. A look at the bigger mistakes: The fallout will continue for months (Speaker Mike Johnson already plans to step down from the leadership), with potentially huge implications for the 2028 GOP presidential race.

Democrats also face big choices, since the results show that this election was more a rebuke of Republicans than an embrace of the left’s agenda. We can at least all agree on one thing: Politics isn’t getting dull.

Political junkies may remember how the Democratic National Committee in 2023 cut ties with legal pit bull Marc Elias, after the litigation hit man racked up a string of scandals. Less noticed is that apparently all past sins have been forgiven, and all sides are back on the same (hardball) page. Elias is front and center in the ongoing Alaska Senate mess—a race that hasn’t been called.

The Elias name featured in both of the New York Times’s bombshells about Alaska Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola’s campaign. A Times story in September detailed Peltola’s abusive behavior toward staff and explained that the campaign at one point pulled in its ‘law firm, the Elias Law Group” to terminate or reassign aides: “Two of them, Anton McParland and Elisa Rios, had been running Ms. Peltola’s political operation through three campaign cycles. Ms. Rios, her campaign manager, was fired, and Mr. McParland, her chief of staff, was demoted.”Rios ultimately talked to the Times.

Last week’s Times story about how the Peltola campaign worked with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to recruit a decoy candidate named Dan Sullivan to pull votes away from the real Sen. Dan Sullivan in his race against Peltola. The Times notes that part of their scheming to confuse the election involved a woman named Jacquelyn Lopez, “an attorney with the Elias Law Group, the firm that represents both the committee and the Peltola campaign.”

The Times story cites Federal Election Commission records showing that a pro-Peltola super PAC paid money to a firm co-owned by the Democratic operative who worked with the Peltola team to recruit the decoy. In my podcast below, Karl Rove asks what role the Elias firm was playing, given that coordination between PACs and campaigns is a violation of federal law.

The answer might be that the firm has always played for keeps—at times landing on the wrong side of judges, even drawing sanctions. That means Democrats just can’t get enough of him, now that they are turning more to the courtroom to win political battles. Despite the split with the DNC in 2023, Elias was retained by Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024 in case of election-related litigation. Now, in addition to his work at the DSCC and Peltola campaign, Elias recently bragged that he is “currently litigating 92 voting and election cases in 42 states plus D.C.”

Politico reports Elias is among more than 20 people who received letters from the Justice Department informing them that “they could be targets of a criminal investigation related to the Alaska Senate race.”This summer, Abdul El-Sayed (who won Michigan’s Senate race last night) described how he’d go about excising nonprogressives from the Democratic Party. “Ideally you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” he said of his goal of ousting Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. He didn’t even have to wait for Fetterman’s 2028 primary; his party is already giving Rep. Haley Stevens the pike.

Stevens shocked the political world on Sunday morning by endorsing El-Sayed’s opponent, Republican Mike Rogers. Stevens posted her endorsement at 8:30 a.m. Our editorial columns noted the quick condemnation by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who described the endorsement as a “despicable betrayal.”By 9:45 am, Curtis Hertel, head of the Michigan state party, had already posted that Stevens was no longer a “member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.”

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi labeled the endorsement “horrific,” and socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders said her staff was “right to resign in disgust.”Even Michigan’s Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin—who two years ago praised Liz Cheney’s endorsement of her as proof the former GOP congresswoman simply cared about having “decent, normal people of integrity in office”—condemned Stevens. Other Democrats piled on to suggest Stevens was “unstable.”

An even more bizarre bit of criticism came from long-time Democratic strategist James Carville, who did his ragin’ Cajun thing, ranting at Stevens in a video that Republicans would discard her like “a used condom” and adding: “The Democrats don’t even think you’re worth a used condom, but that’s about where you are.”This is the same Carville who this summer said that he’d leave the Democratic Party if the likes of Hasan Piker—a left-wing influencer and El-Sayed surrogate—was helping lead it: “I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy.”Piker’s influence with El-Sayed was among the reasons Stevens changed endorsements.

Nowhere in any of these statements did Democrats address the reason Stevens switched her endorsement—El-Sayed’s nasty attitude toward Israel and American Jews who support the country, and her worry her party is losing a longtime constituency. Which says something about the new progressive militancy. How many times have Democrats lectured Republicans that they ought to put “country” over Trump? The treatment of Stevens (who voted twice to impeach Trump) is more proof that progressives are intent on blackballing anyone who doesn’t keep his toes precisely on the line. This is more than a “feud,” as Bloomberg blandly calls it.

Former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema left the Senate before their party could run them out. Stevens will be finished with Congress in January. But the episode bodes ill for would-be “moderate” candidates eyeing a Democratic presidential run—former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. It’s hard to think the party of El-Sayed and Piker will have any tolerance for their message.

Point margin by which late-deciding voters (those who chose in the last month) favored Republicans in a final set of New York Times/Siena polls of seven key Senate races. It wasn’t enough in any of the six that have been decided.

Share of registered voters who told Gallup they were “more enthusiastic about voting than usual” in this year’s midterms. The outlet says that it has only once since 1994 found a higher level—2018, when 69% reported higher enthusiasm than usual. Any guesses as to which side was more enthusiastic?

Number of candidates and incumbents Speaker Mike Johnson campaigned with “at more than 90 events across 24 states in the last month alone,” says Punchbowl. It didn’t come close to saving the majority.

Millions of dollars spent to oppose California’s proposed wealth tax (Proposition 40), as well as to support two competing measures (Props 41 and 42), reports Cal Matters. The “no” votes to the wealth tax are currently leading 55-44, with 60% of the votes in. That would be at least one piece of good news from Tuesday night.

“Somewhere there will be long lines to vote. Depending on where they are, CNN will cover them.” —Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyer Christian Adams, writing in PJ Media about five things that were certain to happen on an uncertain Election Day. In this case, the lines did all seem to favor Democrats.