2026 Midterms: Results pour in nationwide

We'll also keep you updated on some of our local elections. And that's where we bring back our political analyst, Bruce Gordon. You are the man of the hour. The people in the live stream chat seem to have loved you the last time so much. So we had to bring you back. We've got so many races being called for us right now. And I'm just curious as to what it all means. Like, for example, hearing that Governor Josh Shapiro keeps his seat. Did we see this coming? Absolutely. The question was merely what the margin would be. You may remember that four years ago, Shapiro beat Doug Mastriano by 14 percentage points. Widely believe that Mastriano ran a rather poor campaign, disorganized, didn't want to do interviews, wasn't particularly interested in debating. It was a bit of a mess of a campaign. Shapiro wins by 14 points. Thank you very much. These numbers aren't going to hold. He's not going to win this race by 62 points. But the expectation is he will win by a very, very sizable margin. And that certainly sets him up for a possible run in 2028 for the presidency. Obviously, you have to wait and see about that. Shapiro has been rather coy about it when asked, but that's a big number for him. And so far, at least, and what we're looking at across the country, it is looking like a pretty good night for Democrats. We've seen that Georgia Democrats have held the Senate seat, John Ossoff, the incumbent. Uh, easily winning that over Mike Collins in Ohio, the former Senator Sherrod Brown, the Democrat challenger leads John Husted the incumbent by about 16 percentage points with nearly 40% of the vote in that would be a pickup for, uh, Democrats. Uh, you saw, you mentioned a moment ago, North Carolina, Roy Cooper, uh, that is a pickup for Democrats, South Carolina, Annie Andrews, the Democrat challenger. Leading the incumbent Republican Darlene Graham, remember she's the sister of the late Lindsey Graham, by six percentage points, with about 53% of the vote counted. That would be a pickup for Democrats. And in Texas, James Tallarico, the Democrat, leading Ken Paxton, the Attorney General there, by about 19 percentage points, with about 30% of the vote in. Again, that would be a pickup for Democrats. So, so far, a rather strong night for Democrats. I caution, though, that with these... Incomplete results, these partial results, it's important to really dig down deep and figure out where the vote has come from. For example, just a few minutes ago in South Carolina, as I dug deeper into the vote. The numbers that were looking pretty good for Annie Andrews, the Democrat, begin to look a little better when you realize that virtually nothing had come in yet from Charleston, South Carolina. That is a blue area of the state where she would expect to do quite well. Nothing counted, virtually nothing counted from Charleston yet. That means that her numbers will likely grow, at least from that area of the state. So important to note where the numbers are coming from before we get too excited or too downhearted about what the numbers show so far. Have you ever seen where they were confident enough to call a race the rest of the numbers start rolling in and maybe by shock like something we just didn't expect to happen an area that typically votes one way all of a sudden decided they wanted to do something completely different? It is, it's certainly possible. It is incredibly rare. And that's in part because there's a lot that goes into these numbers. The math and the science and frankly, the history and the tradition, what they know about certain areas and numbers. It's like polling, like pre-election polling to a certain extent in the sense that you can take these numbers and extrapolate what you believe will happen. And they don't call these races, by the way, until they are quite certain that they They know what's going to happen. Even though in some cases it may only be 20 or 30 percent of the total vote counted so far, they are darn sure that the numbers that they see are going to hold, that the leader will remain the leader and be the winner, and that things aren't going to flip at the last minute. Certainly it's possible to get it wrong. It's happened before. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head the last time it was literally called and then retracted. Certainly it could happen, but again, these numbers are crunched in about 15 different ways to make sure that it is clear there is a real winner, even though it may look like, wow, only 20, 30% of the votes have been counted. They're certain before they actually make a call. That's fair. And thank you for entertaining my question. I got another one coming your way. So we've been keeping our eye on a lot of these different local races. And District 1 is one that's piquing my interest because we just showed a seat being flipped. In this particular case, the incumbent is a Republican, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick. We're still waiting for the numbers to come in. But his Democratic challenger, Bob Harvey, might be putting up a fight. What are you seeing here? Yeah, let me see if I can pull up some numbers here just to give you a little sense. The numbers are very scant. Yeah, here we go. 24% of the vote in there. And let's see, that's about what we see there. Harvey with a big lead again. I caution that within any congressional district, there can be deep blue areas and deep red areas. And I couldn't tell you right off the top of my head without digging deeper here where these numbers came from. This is a district. That is almost exactly overlaying the county of Bucks County. It is virtually the entirety of Bucks County, that congressional district, as you probably know. Congressional districts in the U.S. usually contain about three-quarters of a million people, give or take a few. And this is pretty much the entirety of Bucks County. But within Bucks County, as in almost any county, you can have deep blue areas and deep red areas. At the moment, things are looking rather good for Bob Harvey. Of course, he's no neophyte. He's known to county voters as being a member of the county commission. So, he's not an unknown quantity by any stretch of the imagination. Brian Fitzpatrick, of course, won his first go-round at this seat back in 2018, would have taken office in January of 2019, replacing his older brother, Mike Fitzpatrick. Brian Fitzpatrick, of course, the former FBI special agent, widely viewed as a very moderate Republican, by no stretch of the imagination a MAGA Republican, Republican, but. No surprise, Democrats attempted to paint him with the Donald Trump rubber stamp brush throughout this campaign. Whether it worked or not will remain to be seen. But at the moment anyway, with about a quarter of the votes in, Bob Harvey, the Democratic challenger, is doing quite well. Oh, interesting, because in some races you're seeing Donald Trump's kind of stamp of approval as like a scarlet letter. But then in some, we've been hearing from our, we call them MMRs, but there are national reporters that are saying... President Trump is who got people out to the polls, so I'm just curious, like, what makes people decide, yes, they want to go with him, no, they don't like who he's picked this time around. Well, the challenge here for the Trump administration is that, and you've heard this before, Donald Trump saying to his supporters, pretend I'm on the ballot. In other words, let me get the base excited to come out, pretend I'm on the ballot. The problem with that line of thinking, of course, is the Democrats are pretending he's on the ballot, and in some ways they're not wrong. Some of the Republicans they're voting against are people they view as a rubber stamp. Except for Donald Trump's policies and positions. In some cases, that's a legitimate claim. In other cases, it's just pure politics. But in any event, the Trump brand certainly agitates people for and against. And at this point, he's obviously not on the ballot tonight, but his shadow looms large over virtually every race. And in many cases that are after the last name Is hurting the candidate simply by association with Mr. Trump, whose job approval numbers have been down virtually in uncharted territory for a number of months now, given what's going on with affordability, the Iran war, tariffs, et cetera. This next question that I have for you strictly comes from my own curiosity. Let your imagination run with that one. So we have seen in a couple of our different races, specifically out in Texas, where candidates are spending like stupid money, like hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements. And I'm just curious, too, because I also see people talk about how they get fatigued when they see the candidates in election ads all over their stuff all the time. It's like they can't turn it off. Is it proven that the more you spend, the more likely you get in front of people and the more likely they are to vote for you? I think money will take you just so far. We've seen that in a few races around the country where the candidate that outspent the other candidate still loses the race. There's only so much you can do to put lipstick on the pig, to use a political expression from back in the day. There's only so much you can do to make a bad candidate look good or to try and hammer the opposing candidate. As you know, the vast majority of these campaign ads, once you get outside of the early days where you put together your own sort of autobiographical campaign commercial, hi, I'm Bruce Gordon, here's my back story. Once that's out of the way, it is all attack all the time. And yeah, do people get tired of it? They say they do, but there has been research over the years that suggests that this, at least to a certain extent, works. The more money you can pour into the negative ads, the more impact you can have. Again, doesn't always work because the candidate at the end of the day has to be someone you can support and not just be against the other candidate. That's fair. That's fair. All right. We'll bring you back to the local elections. We've talked to you guys about a couple of different key races, and we called from the Associated Press the race for Senator Chris Coons out in Delaware. Now, that's not the only race that we're seeing out there, and our social media chat continues to remind me that there are plenty more going on there, so we've got to bring those up, too. I'm just curious about the... The bigger storyline here potentially, Democrats possibly having the control of the General Assembly. Are you able to talk to us a little bit more about what's at stake in Delaware, depending on who wins the race? Deep blue state. It would be a massive shock if for a Republican to win almost any of the races, whether it's governor, whether it's either the Senate seats. You mentioned Chris Coons easily moving on to victory tonight or the at large seat. That's the single House of Representatives seat in Delaware. It's been a blue state for a very long time. And so here's the example. This is the at large seat. That's the lone U.S. House. seat for Delaware. And that race has been called for Sarah McBride, frankly, in a cakewalk. No surprise whatsoever. And it's probably candidly one of the reasons why Delaware doesn't get as much discussion is that there are no real surprises, generally speaking. Democrats win. They have won, and for the foreseeable future, it looks like they will continue to win unless something massive changes, and so no surprise is really there tonight. We still have the possibility for some flips in New Jersey and, of course, in Pennsylvania, a clear purple state, New Jersey. A blue state, but with some red pockets, especially in our area. In southern New Jersey, in south Jersey, there are some blue districts. The Jeff Van Drew District, for example, the second district, is a somewhat red district. So there are some interesting story possibilities there. But again, in Delaware, overwhelmingly blue, no real surprises. All right. Well, Bruce, don't go too far because we're going to pick your brain again in the 9 o'clock hour. Yeah, we've got a lot more to talk about.