The 2018 midterm elections could change American politics

House Democrats will unveil full details of their first bill in the new Congress on Friday — sweeping anti-corruption measures aimed at stamping out the influence of money in politics and expanding voting rights.

This is HR 1, the first thing House Democrats will tackle now that a new Congress has been sworn in. To be clear, this legislation has little to no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate or being signed by President Donald Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already bluntly stated, “That’s not going to go anywhere.”

Republicans, about to lose their grip on power in a number of states, are souring Democrats’ election wins — and Wisconsin is taking charge.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed a slate of bills — passed by Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature — that will curb incoming Democrat governor-elect Tony Evers’s power in office, and potentially make it harder for Democrats to get elected in the future.

Americans are more civically engaged than they have been in more than 100 years.

The two years between President Donald Trump’s win in 2016 and the 2018 midterms ushered in a new era of political engagement in America, not seen since the early 1900s and the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements.

Nancy Pelosi is signaling she is open to letting less senior Congress members take charge of House committees — a key ask from some of her detractors.

Pelosi said she’s open to a conversation about term limits for committee chairs, a rule House Republicans have but Democrats do not. The Democratic leader added she’s “sympathetic” to the concerns of incoming freshmen and younger members during a Tuesday press conference. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) — the incoming chair of the Rules Committee — has also heard from new and current members who want term limits put in place.

Kevin McCarthy has some explaining to do.

As the California Republican prepares to lead the House GOP in the minority, there’s an unavoidable irony that Republicans in his state took the biggest beating in the election.

Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL) will be the new face of the campaign arm of House Democrats.

After a contentious four-way race for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair, Bustos was elected on Thursday, and will be in charge of guiding House Democrats through the 2020 campaign season. It’s going to be a tough job; Democrats must defend the 40 seats they just flipped in more conservative districts.

“What is wrong with white women?” Moira Donegan asked at the Guardian after November’s midterm elections.

“Why do half of them so consistently vote for Republicans, even as the Republican party morphs into a monstrously ugly organization that is increasingly indistinguishable from a hate group?”

The number of House Democrats opposing Nancy Pelosi’s bid for House speaker has been fluctuating over the past few weeks.

A total of 16 Democrats are on a letter signaling their opposition to Pelosi, the intent of which is to demonstrate she doesn’t have the 218 votes to be speaker and encourage another person to challenge her.

The race is on for House Democrats in Congress — and not just for who gets to hold the gavel.

Everyone will be paying the most attention the contest for House Speaker (House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is currently the only candidate, but a small contingent of Democrats is determined to vote against her). But the House leadership hierarchy is much more than just one position.

Progressive Democrats in the House and progressive activist groups aren’t just supporting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s bid to become the next speaker of the House; they’re going so far as to talk about primarying those who oppose her.

Groups like MoveOn, Daily Kos, and Indivisible are keeping a close eye on the list of 16 Democrats who recently released a letter saying they’ll vote against Pelosi.

Marcia Fudge, the Ohio Democrat who was considering challenging Nancy Pelosi, will not pursue a bid for House speaker, she announced Tuesday night.

Fudge, a 66-year-old, six-term Congress member from the Cleveland region, had been mulling over whether to challenge Pelosi for the speaker’s race, after a vocal contingent of anti-Nancy Pelosi Democrats have ramped up calls for new leadership. But Fudge stopped short of a challenge on Tuesday.

Sixteen House Democrats have signed their names to a letter released Monday opposing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in her bid to become the next speaker of the House.

The letter from Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) and 15 other Democratic members was released on Monday, after a week of intense speculation about whether it would come out.

Over the weekend, the recount in Florida’s Senate race ended. Republican Rick Scott, who’s currently the governor of Florida, beat Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson by a mere 10,033 votes — a razor-thin margin in an election where more than 8.1 million votes were counted.

But if people with felony records could have voted in the state this year, Nelson would have had a very good chance of remaining in the Senate.

Days after raising eyebrows with a campaign trail joke about attending a “public hanging,” Mississippi Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is now facing backlash for saying it might be a good idea to “make it just a little more difficult” for college students to vote.

Her campaign says that one was all in good fun, too.

In Florida, America’s most notorious swing state, a recount for the governor’s race hasn’t changed the final results — Republican Ron DeSantis is still edging out Democrat Andrew Gillum by less than half a percentage point. But the recount in the Senate race rages on, as the state begins a mad dash to hand count the ballots by the state’s Sunday deadline.

Gillum only picked up one additional vote in the machine recount that ended Thursday, leaving him less than 34,000 votes behind DeSantis. But Gillum has refused to concede, leaving the future of election up to the courts, where the fate of tens of thousands of ballots lay in the balance.

Never-Trumper and Trump-skeptical voters defied conventional wisdom last week: They mattered. Their numbers were small, but in tight races, suburbanite registered Republicans voted for Democrats over Republicans, helping to send them to Congress.

My colleague Ezra Klein wrote that the 2018 midterms marked the fall of the “not-quite Trumpers,” noting the loss of some of Trump’s biggest critics within the Republican Party and in Congress, like Sen. Jeff Flake (who retired) and Sen. Mark Sanford (who lost his primary). But Trump should remember that Never Trumpers and the Trump-skeptical — or as Henry Olsen called them in the Journal for American Greatness, “RINOS” (Republicans in name only) — still vote — and still matter.

To all the House Republicans who are planning on running in suburban America in 2020 with Donald Trump on the ballot, “good luck,” says Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), the four-term Congress member who lost his reelection bid last week. You’re going to need it.

“Donald Trump is about Donald Trump, and what Donald Trump is, is he wants to be the center of attention every single day,” Coffman said, reflecting on Republicans’ newfound position in the House minority. “He wants to dominate the news cycle every single day, and good luck trying to get a message out of that.”

The narrative that congealed election night before polls had even closed on the West Coast was that while Democrats may have taken the House, they also underperformed relative to expectations and the hoped-for blue wave had turned into, in the words of columnist Nick Kristof at the New York Times, “only a blue trickle.”

This was a questionable interpretation at the time it was offered, but subsequent events have shown it to be almost entirely a psychological illusion based on timing.

A week after Election Day, three major statewide races in two states are still too close to call — and some are undergoing a recount.

In Georgia’s governor race, Democrat Stacey Abrams is holding out hope for a recount or even a runoff; and in Florida two recounts are underway for the governor and Senate races, both of which Republicans narrowly lead.

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has been elected the next senator from Arizona. It was a close race against Republican Martha McSally — almost as close as the Florida Senate election between Republican Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.

Arizona’s elected leaders handled the emerging electoral consensus with comparative grace, though there was still fear-mongering to be found among GOP loyalists while the state kept counting votes. Still, it was nothing compared to what we’ve seen from the top Republicans in 2018’s other hotly contested Senate election, who have taken a much more aggressive and ultimately unsettling approach.

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has officially defeated Republican Martha McSally in the super close, hotly contested Arizona Senate race. Her win marks the first time Democrats have been able to flip the seat since the 1980s. Shifting Arizona a bit more to the left is a long-held Democratic goal, and it’s one they were finally able to pull off this year.

A confluence of factors including demographic changes, anti-Trump enthusiasm and the strength of Sinema’s candidacy likely contributed to the party’s success.

There is no evidence of voter fraud in Florida. But as Republicans face the increasing possibility that last week’s midterm elections didn’t turn out as great for them as they initially thought, GOP officials are claiming voter fraud anyway.

Over the past week, the vote count has narrowed in Florida’s gubernatorial and Senate races. On Wednesday morning, Republican Ron DeSantis led Democrat Andrew Gillum in the governor’s race by nearly 72,000 votes, and Republican Rick Scott led Democrat Bill Nelson by around 51,000 votes. That’s now changed: In the final count, DeSantis only led Gillum by less than 34,000 votes, and Scott led Nelson by less than 13,000 votes. Both of the tallies are close enough that a recount is underway — and a recount could very well flip the results.

Most eyes Tuesday night were on the key House, Senate, and governor races — and Democrats had a mixed night, taking the House but watching as newfound heroes Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Gillum went down to defeat. But there were several climate change- and energy-related ballot initiatives up for a vote across the country as well.

For the most part, they did not go well for fans of clean energy. The ones that utilities and oil and gas companies mobilized and spent big against lost. After being boxed out of climate and energy policy at the federal level, the left has turned to states, but at least last night, the states did not deliver much good news.

California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the most pro-Russia Republican in Congress for decades, just lost his seat to Democrat Harley Rouda. The Associated Press called the race for Rohrabacher on Saturday night.

That’s bad news for the politician who’s been referred to as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “favorite congressman.” Rohrabacher used secret documents from Moscow to remove a Kremlin enemy’s name from a global anti-corruption law and has boasted about drunkenly arm-wrestling Putin in the 1990s. The FBI worried that Russian spies wanted to recruit him.

Democrats flipped seven governorships, six state legislative chambers, and more than 300 state House and Senate seats on election night. The party went a long way to regaining control at the state level after suffering devastating losses throughout the Barack Obama years.

In some states, the consequences are obvious. Maine elected Democrat Janet Mills as its next governor and put Democrats in complete control of the Maine Legislature, which should bring a rapid end to a year-long fight over Medicaid expansion in the state. Tens of thousands of low-income Mainers should soon get health insurance, now that Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s obstruction of a voter-approved ballot referendum is coming to an end, and 70,000 people will gain health insurance.