With high inflation, elevated gas prices, and a Democratic president whose popularity is underwater, most observers went into election night expecting a red wave that would not only gum up President Joe Biden’s policy agenda, but also set the stage for a turbulent 2024 election cycle that could put the very notion of America’s representative democracy at risk. Instead, we got something much more interesting – a shift to Republicans in blue states, a shift to Democrats in some swing states and, by and large, a rebuke to election deniers and those Republicans who’re a little too friendly with former President Donald Trump. To make sense of it all, I compiled this list of the biggest winners and losers of election night – not just who literally won each race, but which groups of politicians got the biggest slaps in the face or pats on the back from voters, and what they might signal for American politics going forward.   

Winner: Florida Republicans

While it’s gained a reputation as a conservative haven over the past few years, Florida seemed like a credible swing state as recently as 2018, when Republicans Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott won their respective races for governor and Senate by less than a point each. In fact, both of those races were so close that they required a machine recount, and Democrats Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson weren’t compelled to concede until over ten days after votes were cast. These races were bitter pills to swallow for Democrats, but their tight margins gave the party hope that they could still break through in a large state full of racially and economically diverse voters as they tried to reclaim the White House and Senate from Republican control.

Isn’t it amazing how much a global pandemic, an anti-trans panic, and a demographic shift can change things? DeSantis, whose opposition to COVID restrictions and championing of social conservative causes made him a darling of the right, soared to reelection over former governor Charlie Crist, notching a margin of over 19 points, the largest victory in a Florida gubernatorial election since 1982. Incumbent Republican Senator Marco Rubio also won by a double digit margin, and both campaigns managed to flip Miami-Dade County, a one time Democratic stronghold. The Sunshine State’s House Republicans also romped, flipping two Democratically held seats, eliminating another Democratic incumbent via redistricting, and picking up the newly drawn 28th district for a net gain of four. Republicans even managed to add seats to both chambers of the state legislature, which were already comfortably in GOP hands.

So what explains these massive victories? The most obvious factor is the shift in the state’s Latino population, which went from supporting Gillum by a 20% margin in 2018 to backing DeSantis by an 18% margin in 2022, lopping off one of the most significant pieces of the Democratic coalition. National observers had expected this shift to the right among Latino voters, 33% of whom supported Donald Trump’s reelection bid, but Democrats were able to stave off major losses in other heavily Latino states like Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and California. The discrepancy is likely due to the origins of these voters – Florida has very high Cuban and Venezuelan populations, and Republicans have gone to lengths to link Democrats to those respective countries’ far-left regimes which, parlayed with some Latinos’ conservative Catholic and Evangelical social views, has been enough to persuade a large chunk of the demographic. Combine this shift with absurd margins in Florida’s rural areas and big concentrations of elderly populations like The Villages, and you have a recipe for a blowout Republican victory.

The big question, of course, is whether or not DeSantis decides to run for president. He hasn’t committed publicly one way or the other, but Republicans’ disappointing performance has made the likelihood of the party establishment backing an alternative to Trump much more likely, with DeSantis their first choice. Polls conducted by Club for Growth, a one time Trump ally, have shown DeSantis leading Trump by double digits in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, but we saw this song and dance in 2016, when Republicans were expected to fall behind Jeb Bush/Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio to stave off Trump’s nomination. It didn’t work then, but if anyone can beat Trump in a Republican primary, it’s DeSantis. Anti-Trump Republcains will just have to hope he doesn’t decide to bide his time until 2028.

Loser: Rick Scott

Perhaps the only Florida Republican who had a bad week, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Rick Scott came into Election Day hoping to deliver his party a new Senate majority, and had been saying as early as 2020 that he thought the GOP could win in not just the swing states, but in solidly Democratic states like Connecticut and Illinois as well. Of course, he had reason to be optimistic: polls showed a tighter than expected race between Washington Senator Patty Murray and Republican challenger Tiffany Smiley, while the race in New Hampshire between incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan and retired general and active conspiracy theorist Don Bolduc looked to be in play too. If Republicans were pulling close in those states, then surely they could win at least one of Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada which, assuming they held onto all of the Senate seats they had in the 117th Congress, would be enough to give them a majority.

Well, unfortunately for Scott, not only have Republicans failed to flip a single Democratic Senate seat so far this cycle (we’re still waiting on the Georgia runoff), but they also managed to cough up the retiring Pat Toomey’s seat in Pennsylvania. Even if Herschel Walker manages to unseat Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock in Georgia’s runoff election in December, Democrats will still maintain control of the Senate by virtue of holding 50 Senate seats and the vice presidency, which casts tie-breaking votes. We’ll dive into some of the specifics as to how Republicans flopped so hard in the Senate in other venues, but the overarching theme is that former President Donald Trump essentially had his pick of the litter when it came to candidates, and he picked a bunch of runts. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Bolduc in New Hampshire all came off as unrelatable, unhinged, or both, by doubling down on unpopular ideas like a total abortion ban and harping on election conspiracy theories, alienating swing voters in the process. 

Granted, Scott can’t control who wins the primaries, but he is in charge of making strategic choices about which races to prioritize – something he did poorly by sending resources to stretch races in Colorado and Washington where Democratic incumbents handily won. Throughout the election cycle, Scott came off as tone deaf and tin-eared, touting a policy agenda that would’ve raised taxes on working class Americans and sunset all federal legislation, and burning campaign funds on aggressive and inflammatory digital tactics instead of more traditional (and effective) TV spots.

Scott tried to redirect blame for Republicans’ Senate loses to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who’s been accused by some senators pulling funds from swing state campaigns and not properly aligning with the more right wing, “populist” candidates, an effort that culminated in Scott’s unsuccessful challenge for McConnell’s job. McConnell’s victory was never really in doubt, but Scott did receive votes from big names like South Carolian Senator Lindsey Graham and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley – enough to signal that there’s a serious divide within the party. A divide, it should be noted, he’s played an outside role in forming.

Winner: Midwestern Democrats

When Donald Trump won the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in 2016, some Democrats (and writers for this site) began to wonder if it was time for the party to divest from the region and focus their efforts on winning rapidly growing sunbelt states like Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia instead, shifting the national focus away from the white, non-college educated voters that realigned to the Republicans in the Trump era.

Perhaps we were all getting ahead of ourselves. Democrats may never replicate Barack Obama’s numbers in the Great Lakes region, but thanks to some talented top-of-the-ticket candidates, the party staged something of a revival last week, winning sweeping victories in states where it appeared that the modern Democratic brand would hold them back for another generation at least. In Pennsylvania (which is not technically located in the Midwest, but votes like it is), Democratic state Attorney General Josh Shapiro notched a dominating victory over Republican state Senator Doug Mastriano, a steadfast election denier who attended the January 6 riots, in the Keystone States’ gubernatorial election, while tall and tatted Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman managed to defeat Republican nominee Mehmet Oz for the Senate despite a stroke limiting his campaign. Both Shaprio and Fetterman’s decisive victories helped boost Democrats Susan Wild and Chris Deluzio in their difficult House matchups and gave Pennsylvania Democrats a majority in the state’s House of Representatives, something they haven’t had in over a decade.

On the subject of state legislatures, Democrats in Michigan managed to take control of both the Michigan House and Senate for the first time in 40 years, riding the coattails of Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the rest of the executive ticket, while Minnesota Democrats created a Democratic trifecta of their own by winning the state Senate and reelecting Governor Tim Walz to a second term. Democrats even managed to hold serve in Wisconsin, where incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers outran his 2018 numbers in a race many expected him to lose and Republicans failed to win a legislative supermajority, which will allow Evers to veto any changes Republicans may want to make to the state’s election certification system. Further south, another Democratic governor, Laura Kelly of Kansas, held on – and Sharice Davids, the state’s lone Congressional Democrat,, won by an even higher margin than she did two years ago despite being redistricted into a more Republican-leaning district.

And while no Ohio Democrat won a statewide race, Congressman Tim Ryan’s valiant but doomed Senate campaign helped drag a few Democratic House candidates over the line, holding on to two vulnerable districts in the northern part of the state and flipping the Cincinnati-based 1st district. 

As I said, Democrats are unlikely to relive their Midwestern glory days, when they won state’s like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by comfortable margins in presidential elections. But while these states may be home to a decent chunk of Trump’s base, they also contain a lot of suburbs and cities as well, where the Democratic message has stayed potent even as rural and industrial communities move away from the party. It won’t be easy for them, but 2022 laid the groundwork for future Democratic success in the Midwest, something the party would be more than happy to hear given how bleak their prospects in the region seemed after 2016 and 2020.

Loser: New England Republicans

 Wave elections tend to generate some weird results in the House of Representatives (remember Ben McAdams and Kendra Horn in 2018?) and Republicans were hoping that a Red Wave would help them break into New England, the only region of the country with no Republican House seats. They had always expected to be competitive in New Hampshire, the swingiest and most libertarian minded of the New England states and one with vulnerable Democratic House incumbents, but they also felt good about former Cranston, Rhode Island Mayor Alan Fung’s chances in the Rhode Island’s open 2nd district, as well as George Logan, their candidate in western Connecticut’s tight 5th district.

The polls seemed to vindicate Republican optimism. Fung, Logan, and New Hampshire’s Robert Burns and Karoline Leavitt all polled well against their opponents and even led a couple of times. It began to seem possible, if not likely, that a strong Republican performance across the country would lift at least a few of these candidates to office. Instead, they all lost, and, with the exception of Logan, did so decisively. Fung managed to flip a few municipalities in Rhode Island’s 2nd district but still failed to crack 47% against Democrat Seth Magaziner, while both New Hampshire candidates fared even worse, with Burns taking only 44% and Leavitt taking 46%. Even Maine’s 2nd congressional district, the only New England district to vote for Trump in 2020 (and, because of Maine’s weird election laws, award him an electoral vote) remained in Democratic hands, with Jared Golden victorious once the ranked choice tabulation finished.

New England Republicans fared poorly in statewide elections too, handily losing elections for New Hampshire’s Senate seat and Maine’s governorship that seemed – at various points in the election cycle – winnable. They also conceded Massachusetts’ governor’s mansion before the election truly began after Trump endorsed state Senator Geoff Diehl over popular moderate incumbent Charlie Baker, who opted not to run, setting up a glide path to victory for Democratic state Attorney General Maura Healey. Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu managed to win reelection to a fourth two-year term, but he won by slimmer margin than he did in 2020 (granted, he went from 32 points to 16 points, so hardly a major cause for concern) and nearly coughed up the state House in the process.

While a Republican path to victory in the land of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders was always going to be an uphill climb, their struggles in New England reflected their struggles nationwide. Statewide candidates like Don Bolduc and Paul LePage were too extreme and belligerent to win in their liberal states, and outside of Sununu and Vermont Governor Phil Scott, their moderate candidates were dragged down by association. There’s a lesson in this, but given the rhetoric coming out of the party over the last few days, it’s unclear if they’re willing to learn it, which I’m sure suits New England’s Democrats just fine.

Winner: Lee Zeldin, Republican martyr

A Republican has not won a statewide election in New York since 2002, when then-Governor George Pataki was reelected to a third consecutive term in office. At the top of the ticket, they never even come close – in gubernatorial races, their Democratic counterparts won at least 54% of the vote for four straight elections between 2006 and 2018, reflecting a trend wherein New York City’s liberal voting patterns reached beyond the city limits and into wealthier bedroom communities on Long Island and traditionally Republican suburban counties like Westchester, Dutchess, and Ulster. Even after Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned following a sexual harassment scandal, few observers expected Kathy Hochul, his successor, to be seriously threatened in 2022 by Congressman Lee Zeldin, an avid Trump supporter who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But as the election neared the polls began to tighten, and when all was said and done Zeldin managed to keep Hochul at 52.6% of the vote, the worst statewide performance for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate since Carl McCall’s loss in 2002.

A moral victory in its own right, Zeldin’s stronger than expected performance is all the more consequential when you realize that his coattails dragged at least four Republican House candidates over the line. Republicans swept the Long Island seats (including New York’s 4th, now the second congressional district at least partially within New York City’s limits to be represented by a Republican) and picked up two Hudson Valley districts that were won by Joe Biden in 2020. When all is said and done, it’s entirely possible that either a weak performance by Hochul or a strong performance by Zeldin will be responsible for providing Republicans with their slim House majority. Kevin McCarthy (or whoever ends up as speaker) owes him a drink or two.

But where we can assign credit, we can also assign blame. The New York state legislature’s aggressive so-called “Hochulmander” would’ve likely created a House delegation of 22 Democrats and just four Republicans, but it was struck down in court, and instead a special master drew a more competitive map. This new map drew together progressive darling Mondaire Jones and DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney in the new 17th district. Maloney pulled rank and sent Jones packing all the way to the Manhattan-based 10^th district, refusing to run in the 18th, which included more of Maloney’s old House seat but also happened to be more Republican.

Jones lost his primary in the safe Democratic 10th, and Maloney bungled his general election campaign, somehow losing in a district that Biden won by over ten points in 2020 (incumbent Democrat Pat Ryan, elected only a few months ago in a special election, won the race in the 18th which Maloney had more or less insisted was impossible for a Democrat to do. Whoops!). Instead of gracefully admitting his mistakes, Maloney took shots at Hochul’s underwhelming performance (not unfairly, it should be noted) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who he said “had almost nothing to do with what turned out to be a historic defense of our majority.”

If Maloney wants to take some credit for limiting Democratic losses in what many thought was going to be a wave election, so be it. But while he may not be the direct cause of Democrats’ woes in New York, he has become the face of them, and his attempts to pass around blame have only made him look worse and added to the sense of dysfunction within the state party. New York is unlikely to become a Republican state anytime soon and the House seats the GOP won in 2022 could easily be wiped out in 2024, but in the meantime, Democrats have a lot of work to do to rebuild the party outside of New York City. They should start by getting the egos of their most prominent officials under control.

Loser: Trafalgar Group

If you follow polls and election projections closely, you’re no doubt familiar with the Trafalgar Group, a Republican leaning polling firm that made waves when as one of the few prognosticators to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Despite incorrectly showing that Trump would win reelection, Trafalgar maintained their reputation as a top tier pollster for six years and received an A- rating from FiveThirtyEight. Their opaque methodology and reliance on adjustments for “social desirability bias” (i.e., adjusting their polls for people who they thought were too embarrassed to say they were voting Republican) made them easy for Democrats to scoff at, but their success in 2016 paired with some good calls in 2018 and 2020 had to make them wonder if these guys were onto something. Sure, Trafalgar was probably stretching credulity by releasing polls that showed Republican Senate candidates neck and neck in Washington, Vermont, and Colorado, but everyone would’ve said the same thing about their 2016 poll that showed Trump winning in Michigan. Who’s to say that Trafalgar wouldn’t prove us wrong again?

Voters, apparently. In the past, even when Trafalgar missed, they had a tendency to keep it close. But they were absolutely blown out of the water in 2022, missing the margin of Peter Welch’s win in the Vermont Senate seat by a whopping 34 points, and picking the wrong winner in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Arizona’s Senate elections too. While their final poll in Georgia did indicate that the race would go to a runoff, it estimated that Walker would win the vote by three points – instead, Warnock won it by just under one. The notion that Republicans were simply too scared of social sanction to respond accurately to polls was more or less debunked. If anything, the polling this cycle undercounted millennial and Gen Z voters, demographics that broke left and are also unlikely to answer phone calls from strange numbers.

Will Trafalgar recover from this? Who knows! Robert Cahaly, the firm’s bow-tie loving, Fox News-guesting founder has not tweeted since election night, and their website still proudly displays some very wrong polls. Polling’s niche nature means that the firm is unlikely to disappear completely, but their credibility, along with their top rating from polling aggregators, should take a huge hit, and make aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics reconsider if they’re even worth paying such high attention to anymore.

Winner: The integrity of the 2024 presidential election

The notion that a given election is “the most important in our lifetime” has been repeated to the point of parody, but there is some reason to believe that this may have actually been the case in 2022. After the many attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election failed, Republicans across the country began making moves to stack state and local election apparatuses to combat “fraud” (i.e., Democrats winning elections). The highest profile of these attempts took place in the various races for secretary of state (most states’ top election official), where Republicans in Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan nominated avowed election deniers who promised to do anything in their power to ensure Democrats never won a race in their state again.

While secretary of state is an important office, it isn’t exactly a high publicity one, and the notion that underperforming Democrats would drag down their secretary of state candidates and hand a bunch of election deniers a victory, and therefore put the legitimacy of the 2024 presidential election in doubt, was palpable. Luckily this proved to be a moot point, not only because Democrats overperformed expectations across many of these swing states, but also because Democratic secretary of state candidates in swing states tended to overperform the top of the ticket.

Election denying gubernatorial candidates also had a rough go of it, no more so than Arizona’s Kari Lake, who built her entire campaign around the alleged “fraud” committed in the Grand Canyon State during 2020, and after a protracted vote counting process, lost to…Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who administered the very elections that Lake said were corrupt. While even the furthest right candidates this cycle, like Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, conceded, Lake has indicated that she may dig in and challenge the results of her race, although it’s unclear what, if any, recourse she has. But whatever stunt she may try to pull, it’s nice to know that voters living in the most important political states of America are sick of her – and the movement that birthed her’s – schtick.