Early Votes Hit a Record as Midterm Battles Turn on Senate, House and Michigan

Live from New York, Joe Matthew and Kailey Leinz opened the broadcast on election day with polling open nationwide and 57 million Americans already having voted early. Matthew said that early vote could decide the trajectory of the next two years and what the lame-duck period of President Trump's final term could look like.

Matthew asked whether the House alone would flip to Democrats or whether the Senate would as well. Leinz said prediction markets indicated a strong chance that both flips would happen that evening, but added that the votes would have to be counted and that the process could take days depending on the path the results took.

The anchors also pointed to the economic backdrop, including affordability concerns and the highest gas prices ever seen on an election day in America, noting that diesel prices were also elevated. They said markets would watch the fiscal and geopolitical implications of the outcome, including how a Democratic Congress might try to rein in the ongoing conflict in Iran. The U.S. had conducted what were described as defensive strikes around the Strait of Hormuz the previous day, and oil prices had not risen on the news.

Bloomberg's White House correspondent Tyler Kendall said President Trump would host a viewing party at 7 p.m. Eastern in the East Room. Kendall said the White House was watching the election closely because the results would shape how much the president could accomplish legislatively in the remaining two years of his term. Republicans had sought to rely on the president to drive turnout in reliably red states where he had won by double digits.

Kendall said polling showed Republicans on the defense and that the night would be about the margins and the hunt for a majority. He said Democrats needed only a net gain of three seats in the House and four in the Senate to flip those chambers.

Kendall also said economic headwinds had put Republicans on the back foot in many places, citing a national average gas price of $4.15 a gallon. He added that Republican strategists said some of their private data still showed a path to keeping the chamber, and that Republicans held a considerable cash advantage.

Bloomberg's Romaine Bostick, reporting from Detroit, said Democrats were on the defensive in the swing state of Michigan. The Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, was in a tight contest with Republican Mike Rogers, who had narrowly lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin a couple of years earlier.

Based on various polls, El-Sayed was either ahead by high single digits or by low double digits, depending on which poll was believed. Bostick said Rogers had been trying to narrow that gap on a statewide bus tour that ended the previous night in Rochester Hills, where he was joined by Republican gubernatorial candidates and others trying to appeal to centrist Democrats.

Bostick said polling places he visited expected record turnout for a midterm and potentially for any election, midterm or presidential. The anchors also noted that Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz had won his race by 2.6 points, and that the race there was also expected to be closer than before.

Jim Messina, speaking in person in New York, said he was quietly, cautiously excited about the day. He said he cared only about the early vote numbers, arguing that polls could bounce all over the place and that Democrats had been talking about polls for years.

Messina said the early vote showed historic numbers among two demographics he followed closely, African American voters and young voters, which he noted was unusual in a midterm because young voters typically did not turn out in high percentages. He pointed to large numbers in early voting in Georgia and Texas and said that bode well for Democrats.

Messina cautioned against overconfidence, saying Democrats had done things worse than this in the past and were not taking anything for granted. He then turned to North Carolina, where more than 2.8 million residents had already cast ballots, with registered Democrats holding 38.3% of total ballots, unaffiliated voters at 35%, and Republicans at 26%. He said North Carolina had been the one state he targeted for Obama in 2012 that Democrats lost, and that the early numbers showed large turnout among women, especially suburban women, and Republicans voting two or three points below their usual share.

Asked whether Democrats should return to a 50-state strategy, Messina said the phrase had become a laugh line in the years after Barack Obama's campaigns. He said that if Democrats won the House and Senate, they would have won largely because of rural and more Republican districts, and that this was the most important point.

Messina said he had just met with his 29th potential presidential candidate, noting that the Democratic side was full of people testing the waters. He said that when discussing the map, the conversation now included Texas, Arizona and Georgia, states where Obama had not competed, and that North Carolina was moving toward blue.

Messina also remarked that Democrats had last won a statewide race in Texas in 1994, and he joked about his own membership in AARP. When asked how many of the nearly 30 potential candidates were on the ballot this cycle, he said not very many, and that the list could grow. He noted that a senator from Georgia whom many thought was running had not yet been met, and Messina said he did not know whether Jon Ossoff intended to serve out a six-year term.

Matthew observed that Barack Obama was still the biggest draw for Democrats on the campaign trail, a decade later, alongside Donald Trump. Messina said that was good for the party because Obama could unite its wings, which he said were internally divided like both parties.

Messina called Obama the gold standard for every wing of the party and said that his holding it together until there was a Democratic nominee was very helpful. He said the party needed a new voice but expected one to emerge after the Democratic presidential primary, which he described as a natural transition point.

Messina also noted that new voices were entering the scene, citing the Democratic nominee in Michigan as a progressive and members of the Democratic Socialists of America who could join Congress. He said there was a perception in New York that the party was moving far left, but argued that was not true: moderate or conservative Democratic candidates had won three-quarters of primaries, and he named Roy Cooper, who would win a Republican Senate seat in North Carolina.

Jason Crow, a Democratic congressman from Colorado, was introduced as co-chair of Red to Blue for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and as someone who had endorsed around 36 candidates. Asked how many seats Democrats could pick up, he declined to give a number.

Crow said the party had put itself in a position to win, had outstanding candidates across the country and had the conditions for a very big win. He stressed, however, that Democrats had been overconfident before and had thought they had it in the bag when they did not. For that reason he said Democrats would run as though they were behind until the last vote was counted.

Crow said he had recruited, mentored and helped dozens of candidates over the past 18 months, and that those candidates were on the ground chasing late votes and getting people to return their ballots. He described that approach as the party's approach and said it would continue if Democrats won.

Crow said Congress decided how many ships, tanks and planes to buy and where to spend money and build bases, and that these were its duties as elected representatives. He said Congress could not make those decisions if the executive branch did not provide information.

Crow said he had introduced legislation about a month earlier to force the executive branch to disclose how many casualties the United States had incurred in the war against Iran, including how many Americans had been killed or wounded. He said the administration had not given a straight answer even on something so basic, and that the relationship had to be fundamentally reset before Congress could make those decisions.

Crow said he was not presumptively for or against any basing decision and wanted a conversation about what made sense for troops and national security, what it would cost, and what the trade-offs were. He noted that a decision to base forces in one place meant deciding not to base them elsewhere.

Crow said the administration had stonewalled the normal tempo of briefings and hearings, and that this was not about congressional vanity. He said the information was needed to set budgets, understand what was happening and make good policy. He said that even during the first Trump administration, the information had largely flowed day to day as it was supposed to, but over the last year and a half it had fallen off a cliff.

Crow argued that the administration was in violation of laws passed on a bipartisan basis that required it to provide certain information about military operations and how money was spent. If it continued to withhold information, Congress could hold money back, since appropriations remained its biggest and most powerful tool.

Asked about affordability, which Democrats had campaigned on alongside ending the war in Iran, Crow said there were three specific things the administration had done that had blown holes in people's budgets. He began with the war in Iran, which he said had increased costs.

Jeannie Zeno said Crow's remarks previewed the priorities Democrats would pursue: rolling back what the administration had done in the war in Iran and with its tariffs, and addressing health care. She said those three should come before any consideration of impeaching anybody, including the defense secretary, and noted that Crow's view was his personal interest.

Zeno expected rolling back, checking and investigating over the next two years, and said oversight could extend beyond the Trump administration and the president's family to corporate America.

Rick Davis said the Democrats he had spoken with were not interested in subpoenaing the president's sons and daughters, because they would ignore the subpoenas and a pardon could follow. He said corporate America, by contrast, had an obligation to talk, and that deals involving government shares in private companies would be fair game in hearings.

Asked whether the risk was overreach from winning control of both chambers, Zeno said it was a huge risk and that Democrats had been guilty of it many times. She said that if Democrats won that night, it would be because voters were holding the Republican Party and the administration accountable, not because they had fallen in love with the Democratic Party, which polls showed was not the case.

Zeno said midterms are usually a referendum on the party in power, and that voters were saying so in focus groups and polls. She also said that controlling both chambers would make it tougher for the 2028 presidential hopefuls to differentiate themselves from Washington, since they would not be able to run against Washington as a whole.

Davis agreed that the margin would matter, saying that if one could win both the Senate and the House, one would want to win the Senate tonight.

Davis argued that Republicans would be held accountable for inflation and an unpopular war, just as Joe Biden had been in 2022, and said there was no escaping that. He described the midterm as a referendum on what the party in power has done and not done, and said the president's repeated reminders that he was on the ballot had been a mistake. Matthew then pushed back that Democrats should not treat the result as a mandate, because the poll numbers showed little love for the Democratic Party even though Democrats led the generic congressional ballot by seven points in the same NBC News poll. He pointed to the 29% positive rating for Democrats against 38% for Republicans, and said both parties would likely need time to rebuild.

Matthew said both parties would likely need time to rebuild, and the segment then turned to closing remarks and the markets.

Bloomberg's Eric Wasson, reporting from Raleigh, said the Senate race in North Carolina seemed locked up. Both parties had stopped spending money several weeks earlier because Democratic nominee Roy Cooper had pulled far ahead of Republican nominee Michael Whatley. Wasson said Cooper was already planning, at an event he attended that morning, to press the president on health care bills to roll back Medicaid cuts, restore Obamacare premiums and vote to end the war in Iran.

Wasson said the House race in North Carolina's first district, where Democrat Don Davis was holding on in a gerrymandered coastal district against Laurie Buck, could be a real nail-biter. He also pointed to North Carolina's 11th district, where Democrat Jamie Edgar could take the seat being vacated by Chuck Edwards, a scandal-plagued representative in western North Carolina that was hit by Hurricane Helene.

Wasson said results would be watched closely for early signs of a blue wave in the House, where Hakeem Jeffries would be seeking a more secure majority. He also noted that vote counting in some counties could be delayed by about an hour.

Sarah Chamberlain, the CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership, said both chambers absolutely could flip, and that the stress had been awful. She said Main Street had 101 members in the House and Senate, many of them on the bubble. She said she unfortunately felt the House would be lost, though not as badly as people anticipated.

Chamberlain said some senators she had spoken with felt the polls were coming back around, citing Roger Marshall in Kansas. She said the Senate would be extremely close and would come down to Michigan, where Republicans were feeling pretty good after what she called the latest Democratic debacle.

Chamberlain said that for Hakeem Jeffries to hold a workable majority, Democrats needed to pick up about 20 to 25 seats, and that a large number of new members, including about 18 from the Democratic Socialists of America, would make the margin difficult.

Asked whether Democrats winning both chambers would mean working with Donald Trump, Chamberlain said they would have to work with President Trump. She said that if the majority were less than about 18 seats, Jeffries would also have to work with Republicans in the House and potentially in the Senate, which she said would be extremely close.

Chamberlain said Democrats would have to work with Republicans and the administration regardless of what happened, and that it would help them to find some Republican friends quickly when they took over in January.

The segment then returned to moderates. Chamberlain was asked about a claim by DCCC chair Susan DelBene that there were no moderates left in the Republican Party. Chamberlain was also asked what would happen if moderate Republicans in the Main Street caucus lost their seats; she responded that the Republican Main Street Partnership had a large number of members at risk.

Chamberlain said the question of whether Mike Johnson would lead Republicans if they lost the majority was being discussed by members, including on a call that morning. She said she did not think the decision would be made by Friday and expected it to wait until early the following week, although she thought candidates would be known by Friday.

Chamberlain also said she did not expect the speaker to be the only candidate. The broadcast then closed by noting that coverage would continue through the night, with the Late Edition airing at 5 p.m.