• We’re starting to get a fuller picture of what the incoming Congress is going to look like under President-elect Donald Trump. Republicans have clinched a majority in the Senate and seem poised to take the House, too. But on the whole, it’s a less rosy picture for the party than Trump’s win suggests. Republican Senate candidates drastically underperformed the incoming president. Over in the House, the GOP isn’t expected to make any significant gains on its existing narrow majority. Burgess Everett, Congressional bureau chief for Semafor, explains why Trump’s big win didn’t translate to more down-ballot success.
• And in headlines: California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a special legislative session to “Trump-proof” state law, Trump’s White House starts to take shape, and Target stores removed ‘Wicked’ dolls from shelves amid a packaging error that included the address of a porn website.

• Check out Burgess reporting – www.semafor.com/author/burgess-everett
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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, November 11th. Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service. I’m Jane Coaston. And this is What a Day, the show that is not happy to hear that more than 40 monkeys escaped a research facility in South Carolina. Look, I have some very simple rules. No caves and no cave diving, no climbing Everest and no monkeys. [music break] On today’s show. The Biden administration will continue to send aid to Ukraine and trans people are not to blame for the Democrat’s loss. Let’s get into it. We’re starting to get a fuller picture of what the incoming Congress is going to look like under President elect Donald Trump. Republicans have clinched a majority in the Senate and seemed poised to take the House, too as of our recording time. Which is bad, but look under the hood of those Republican majorities and things start to get a little weird. Over the weekend, Nevada Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen officially won her race for reelection. She edged out Republican Sam Brown by a little more than a point. Rosen spoke to her supporters Saturday after she was declared the winner. 

[clip of Jacky Rosen] So it might have taken a few long days, a few long days. But Nevada voices have been heard. And, you know, my opponent spent more than 75 million bucks, 75 million bucks against me to flip the seat. Uh. They spent tens of millions trying to tear me down, trying to tear us down, trying to lie about my record and turn me into something that I am not. But Nevadans saw the truth. 

Jane Coaston: There’s only one Senate race left to call in Arizona, but there too, Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego is ahead of Republican Kari Lake. Decision desk has called the race for Gallego, but the Associated Press has not, whose results we use here at Crooked. Speaking on election night, Gallego was confident he’d win. 

[clip of Ruben Gallego] While we’re still waiting for results to come in. I believe that when all those ballots are counted and every Arizonan’s vote is counted. A poor Latino boy who grew up sleeping on the floor will be headed to the floor of the United States Senate. [cheers]

Jane Coaston: Barring any drastic shifts in the votes still being counted, Republicans are on track to win just one of the five swing state Senate races. One, and that’s by a hair, too. The AP has called Pennsylvania’s race for Republican Dave McCormack, but incumbent Democrat Bob Casey hasn’t conceded. He says the race is still too close to call with votes outstanding. The candidates are separated by about a half point and the race could go to a recount. Over in the House, the best case for Republicans is the status quo, a very slim majority of about four or five seats. We’ve all seen how that’s been working out for them over the last two years. So in an election where Trump made gains in nearly every county nationwide, why didn’t that translate to bigger wins for Republicans? To help me unpack that question, I talked to Burgess Everett. He’s the congressional bureau chief for Semafor. We talked about ticket splitting, the Trump effect on down ballot races, and what Democrats can do with their existing Senate majority while they still have it. Burgess Everett, welcome to What a Day. 

Burgess Everett: Thank you so much for having me, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: So Trump swept all seven swing states. So why didn’t Republicans also sweep the five swing state Senate races? 

Burgess Everett: Yeah. I mean, this was something that we saw in the polls a little bit uh to a greater degree than what we actually saw in the results. But we saw these Democratic candidates running ahead of Trump in the polls, sometimes by five, seven, eight points. That did not happen on Election Day, but there were hints um that there was going to be a different performance for Senate Democratic candidates than there was for Kamala Harris. What’s interesting, though, is when you look at the data and I was just reviewing this before we started talking, other than in Arizona, it’s less of a Democratic overperformance than Harris. It was actually a case of Republican underperformance. There were tens of thousands of people in a bunch of these states, places like Nevada, places like Michigan, and to a lesser extent Wisconsin, although it was still there, even though that race was very narrowly called, um where people voted for Donald Trump at president and then either didn’t vote for a Senate candidate or voted for a third party candidate and these states, um that was what made the difference. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. So it seems like people voted for Trump and then voted for Ruben Gallego or for Tammy Baldwin or they just didn’t vote for anyone. So was it less a split ticket situation as far as we know, or was it more that people just voted for Trump and just left the rest of the ballot blank? Is there any way to know? 

Burgess Everett: I mean, if you look at the rod candidate totals, you can tell that in Arizona there are people that voted both for Donald Trump and for Ruben Gallego. So and that was suggested in the polls all along because he was whipping Kari Lake in the polls all along. Now, obviously, that race has ended up being much closer than that. But we had a hint that there were going to be some Trump Gallego voters. Elsewhere, I think that Harris and and say Elissa Slotkin. They’re super close. They actually the Democratic candidates underperformed Kamala Harris just raw vote total wise in a bunch of these states. But the Republicans underperformed Trump by a much greater degree. And even in states that Democrats lost, like Montana and Ohio, the Republican candidates ran way behind Trump in a way that could have made these these seats actually closer if the presidential election had been closer. So I think if you look ahead to 2026, Republicans are going to have to figure out, you know, they have a Trump problem, but it’s not the one that maybe we thought it was. We thought Trump maybe dragged these candidates down. That’s not what’s happening here. Trump is the strongest Republican on the ballot. Trump’s popularity, his appeal, it’s not 100% transferable. 

Jane Coaston: So what do you think the lessons are that Democrats should be taking from this? Because it does seem in a weird way, it makes me feel a little bit more optimistic for 2026 when you have the fact that if you don’t have Trump on the ballot, it seems like Republicans who have reimagined themselves as being very Trumpian candidates are underperforming. So is that a good thing for Democrats looking forward? 

Burgess Everett: Well we should definitely see how the final Senate races turn out, because the margin is going to matter so much because–

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Burgess Everett: Some of these states that Democrats will need to compete in are just super tough for them. Places like Iowa, Texas, Montana, places like that, that those are going to be states where they they need to get a majority. Ohio is going to have another Senate race now in 2026. But I do think Democrats should probably be feeling like they could put themselves in a position to to ride an anti-Trump wave in 2026. And we saw in 2018 Trump would campaign for a lot of these candidates that that didn’t end up winning. Um. And in 2022. So I don’t think Democrats should be 1,000% despondent about the Senate races. It’s going to be a rough two years for them. But I do agree with your your bottom line, which is that they should not be thinking they’re totally out of the picture. And I think a lot of people are looking at maps right now and saying they’re despondent. We have a ceiling, Democrats say, on how many seats we can get, etc.. Politics aren’t static. These things change. Um. So, you know, it’s just too early to say that Democrats have no chance in 2026, even though Republicans holding 53ish seats makes it a lot harder. 

Jane Coaston: Republicans appear likely to also hold on to the House, though we don’t know yet. But despite the national shift to the right, their majority would remain just a handful of seats, just as it is now. 

Burgess Everett: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: What do you attribute that to? 

Burgess Everett: You know, I think when I first started covering politics, it was more than a decade ago, Republicans had these redistricting advantages that seemed insurmountable in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania. You know, they had huge advantages in their House delegations compared to where their party would perform in Senate races or the presidential race. I think that’s flipped a little bit. You know, you saw Democrats lose ground overall with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket in a place like New York or New Jersey. But those candidates on the down ballot in the House races um were able to flip some seats and hold tough seats at the same time. So what I think this tells us is the redistricting/gerrymandering, whatever you want to call it, advantage for Republicans is basically gone. Democrats seem to be operating either on a neutral playing field or perhaps have an advantage because some of the numbers that I’ve seen suggest that raw vote total wise, Republican House candidates nationwide had more votes than Democratic candidates. 

Jane Coaston: We’re already starting to see some jockeying among Republicans for majority leader in the Senate and speaker of the House. In the Senate, people more closely aligned with Trump and his beliefs or whatever are pushing for Florida Senator Rick Scott over more establishment types, though it’s funny to say establishment in this time. Like. 

Burgess Everett: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: Everybody’s pretty Trumpy right now. And in the House it’s an open question whether Mike Johnson will be able to hold on to his speakership even if Republicans win the majority. What does all of this mean for the party’s ability to push through Trump’s agenda? Because we saw Mike Johnson is in his spot because we went through like multiple conversations about this. So what does that mean for the future? 

Burgess Everett: I think Mike Johnson is probably relatively safe in comparison to what’s going on in the Senate, where it’s just a huge food fight right now. Um. And so what does that mean for getting through his agenda? If Rick Scott, who I’ve long thought was the underdog but is picking up more public support than I would have guessed, not just from outside voices, but from senators themselves, like Marco Rubio just endorsed him. You have him running against two, a current whip and a former whip. People who know how the Senate works, who know how to move things through the floor. Um. I still think that’s probably the best argument for a Republican to win an internal election. Um. But yeah, I do. I do think if Rick Scott were to win, he may face a learning curve. He hasn’t run the floor before. Um. And and it would be more challenging. And I do think that’s a reason why his rivals, John Thune, the current whip, and John Cornyn, the former whip, are reminding people a lot about, hey, I’ve done this before, I know what I’m doing. 

Jane Coaston: And what are Democrats going to do between now and the new year when the new Congress is sworn in to mitigate the effects of a second Trump presidency? 

Burgess Everett: Well, their options are somewhat limited. I think the most utility they can get is by confirming lifetime judicial appointments. You know, they can probably do a decent amount of those. It’s limited by a calendar. It takes a couple of days to do a single judge. So it’s not like they can just do unlimited judges. There’s also this is something Elizabeth Warren was talking about, confirming nominees whose appointments are a term rather than a presidency. Um. Places like just off the top of my head that, you know, at the NLRB, places like that, where the appointments can last through another presidency. So those are some things that Democrats can do with their narrow majority, but they need everybody to show up, which is no easy feat when you’re talking about Thanksgiving. You’re talking about Christmas. So we just got to see how much of a grip Schumer can keep over the caucus to do all that. But it’s pretty limited what they can do, to be honest with you. 

Jane Coaston: Burgess, thank you so much for joining me. This has been really helpful. 

Burgess Everett: Sure. Thank you, Jane. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Burgess Everett, the congressional bureau chief for Semafor. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: And now the news. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Jake Sullivan] Our approach remains the same as it’s been for the last two and a half years, which is to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position on the battlefield so that it is ultimately in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table. 

Jane Coaston: National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Face the Nation on Sunday that President Biden will back Ukraine until the end of his term. The remarks come just days before Biden and Trump are set to meet again. The two will talk at the White House on Wednesday to discuss foreign policy as the administration prepares to transfer power to the president elect. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled that he and Trump aren’t aligned on how to end Russia’s yearslong invasion of his country. Trump has vowed to resolve the conflict quickly and threatened to cut off funding to Ukraine altogether. Sullivan said the U.S. will send all the military aid it can to Ukraine in the last 70 days of Biden’s presidency, and that the White House will encourage the incoming administration to do the same. 

[clip of Jake Sullivan] And it should be up to Ukraine to decide for its own sovereignty and its own territorial integrity when and how it goes to the negotiating table. It should be up to the United States and a coalition of nations that we have built to continue to supply Ukraine with the means to defend itself. 

Jane Coaston: White House officials told CNN on Sunday that Russia is readying tens of thousands of troops to reclaim the Ukrainian occupied Kursk region in the coming days. Ukrainian officials told The New York Times that Moscow has amassed 50,000 soldiers, including those from North Korea. California Governor Gavin Newsom has called for a special session of the state’s legislature. His office told the Associated Press that Newsom and state lawmakers hope to Trump proof California state law. He spoke about the session during a livestream for his PAC, Campaign for Democracy, on Friday and said the session will focus on getting the California Department of Justice more funding in order to fight the Trump administration. 

[clip of Gavin Newsom] We’re not going to shrink and we’re not going to shy or fall prey to the rhetoric around demeaning and belittling vulnerable communities, scapegoating vulnerable communities. We’re going to have their back. We’re going to have your back. Even if you don’t live in the state of California, we’re going to have your back. 

Jane Coaston: The session will begin December 2nd after newly elected state legislators take office. Donald Trump is building out his cabinet. Whee! And he did make history with his first appointment. His campaign manager, Susie Wiles, will be his chief of staff. She’ll be the first woman to serve in the role. You may not know Wiles by name, but she’s credited as the architect of Trump’s victory. She’s a veteran political consultant from Florida because of course she is. She’s known for her work on several winning Republican campaigns in the Sunshine State, including Senator Rick Scott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. We’re still waiting to see who else will make Trump’s cursed list of cronies. Besides tech billionaire Elon Musk and failed independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But the president elect made it clear on Truth Social who won’t be part of his cabinet. He wrote, quote, “I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to join the Trump administration, which is currently in formation.” He added, of course, make America great again. Holiday season is officially upon us, and the Wicked movie adaptation is one of the most anticipated films of the season for people who enjoyed getting Defying Gravity sung at them non consensually in high school. And with movies comes merch. The film’s leading ladies, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, got a glimpse of the Mattel dolls of their character for the first time. 

[clip of Ariana Grande] It’s perfect!

Jane Coaston: But it was not perfect. On Sunday, Target stores removed the dolls from shelves after shoppers realized Mattel apparently printed the name of a pornographic website on the packaging instead of the website for the movie. So if you’re just dying for more information about Hollywood’s recycled IP du jour that features a musical that annoys me, please make sure you go to Wickedmovie.com and not just wicked.com because that website is not for musicals. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing, the intra Democratic blame game has picked up steam over the last couple of days, and we’ve heard a bunch of potential reasons why Kamala Harris didn’t win the White House. It was inflation. It was misogyny. It was transgender people? Apparently transgender people, you know, our friends, coworkers, neighbors, aunts, uncles, spouses, teachers and roughly less than 1% of the population are why Donald Trump won the White House. Well, to be clear, not transgender people. Just caring about them or discussing them at all, despite the fact that it was Trump’s campaign, not Harris’s, that spent millions on anti-trans messaging, a whole host of commentary has centered on the hypothesis that Democrats spent too much time defending trans people, and that’s somehow how they lost the White House. For example, Representative Seth Moulton told The New York Times that Democrats were too afraid of talking about trans girls, and it’s always girls, playing sports. And Barry Weiss of the Free Press argued on Fox News that being trans or non-binary was an extraordinarily niche issue that ordinary Americans don’t care about. 

[clip of unknown news reporter 1] It turns out that running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police or any number of things that people in places where I live get extremely excited about don’t actually matter or frankly, feel profoundly out of touch. 

[clip of unknown news reporter 2] Yeah. 

[clip of unknown news reporter 1] To ordinary Americans. 

Jane Coaston: Come the entire fuck on. This is a conversation. Well, less a conversation than a largely unhinged monologue that is entirely about cisgender people deciding that only elites care about trans people, that even thinking about trans people, trans rights, trans health care is an elite concern, despite the fact that trans people who live everywhere in the United States, by the way, and are more likely to live in poverty and more likely to deal with unemployment than cis people. People like J.D. Vance even argue that being transgender is such an elite preoccupation that people are becoming trans to get into Ivy League schools. 

[clip of J.D. Vance] If you are a, you know, middle class or upper middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, Like, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle class kids. But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans. If you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege. 

Jane Coaston: By the way, I checked. 0.2% of the 1143 Yale students who responded to a survey question on the subject a few years ago, that 1143 represented about 70% of the class of 2021, identified as trans. After some quick math, that breaks down to two people. Yes. Two, this is stupid, especially since so much of it is coming from people who you guessed it, think being trans is suspicious and bad in the first place. And when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But also, this is irritatingly important because a wider strategy on the right is to say that a trans woman who works at a Starbucks in Iowa City is a coddled elite, while Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is currently setting up an estate in Texas so he can live alongside his kids and the women who gave birth to them is somehow just some ordinary, everyday Joe. Elite doesn’t mean anything if it never applies to the richest people alive and only applies to minorities some people decide to get mad at a few times a year and the people who care about them. We’ve been here before. Back in 2004, Karl Rove and the GOP wielded marriage equality as a cudgel in battleground states, including in my home state of Ohio. He helped put 11 anti-marriage equality bills on the ballot in a host of states, using that issue to drive rightwing voters to the polls. And a whole bunch of terrified Democratic commentators used John Kerry’s loss as proof that marriage equality was a poisonous issue that everyone needed to run away from as fast as humanly possible because everyday Americans don’t support it. 20 years later, 70% of Americans support marriage equality because Democrats, that’s you and me folks, not just the people who run the party, didn’t give up on it. There are lots of reasons why Kamala Harris lost the presidential election. I mean, inflation? And I have more theories. And so do you. But scapegoating trans people, isn’t it because it’s not just untrue? It’s morally wrong. It is wrong to cast a group of people to the wolves because you want to pick up more votes with people who actually don’t care very much about trans people one way or the other. It is wrong to argue that Democrats are elitists while ignoring the GOP elites currently figuring out how to make as much money as possible off a Trump presidency. And it is wrong to say that caring for and supporting our fellow Americans is ever the wrong thing to do, especially because of politics. [music break] That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Maybe rewatch the Lord of the Rings movies and bother someone you don’t know about why the scouring of the shire wasn’t included. And tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how monkeys have been known to commit murder like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and I must make it so clear, no monkeys. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

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