The New York Times - 05.11.2026 — 2026-11-05

Where the House Stands ... Results as of 7 p.m. Eastern

... and the Senate Results as of 7 p.m. Eastern

Comparing the 2026 Senate vote with the 2024 presidential vote

Notes: The tally of seats won by each party includes uncalled races in which all candidates are of the same party. Party seat totals include third-party candidates who caucus with Democrats. Rios have not been shaded in states where districts have been redrawn since 2024.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Signal Trump's Era Is Starting Its Twilight

By PETER BAKER

President Trump implored voters over the course of the midterm campaign to "pretend I'm on the ballot." He said it not once, not twice, but 47 times this fall.

And voters did — just not the way he hoped.

The Democratic wave in the

NEWS ANALYSIS

ocratic wave in the

congressional elec-

tions on Tuesday

amounted to a

stinging rebuke of a

deeply unpopular president after more than a decade in which he has dominated the national stage. More than any of his predecessors, Mr. Trump deliberately made the midterm contest a referendum on himself, only to pay the price.

The electoral backlash extended even into deep red states and indicated that Mr. Trump has lost his hold over the coalition that lifted him to the White House twice. Frustrated by high gas prices, an intractable war with Iran and allegations of flagrant prolifering by Mr. Trump and members of his circle, voters who previously took a chance on an outsider promising change either rejected his party or stayed home.

As of Wednesday, the Democratic margin of victory in the overall national vote for House seats was expected to be 13 percentage points, the largest that either party has lodged in a congressional election since at least 1976, according to estimates by The New York Times. It would dwarf even the margins that the Republicans won in their two big landslide victories of modern times when they defeated congressional Democrats when Bill Clinton held the White House in 1994 and Barack Obama was president in 2010.

Thanks to redistricting, that margin may not translate into as many seats as the winners gained in those watershed years. Gerrymandered House districts leave far fewer seats available for poaching by the other party

Continued on Page A13

[Vance Cites War — Johnson to Step Back] By CATIE EDMONDSON and MICHAEL LEVENSON

WASHINGTON — Democrats promised on Wednesday to use their sweeping congressional majorities to check and investigate President Trump, while Republicans started pointing fingers after a devastating midterm wipeout left their party searching for a path forward in a drastically reordered Washington.

Democrats were on track to secure at least a 50-seat majority in the House and had captured solid control of the Senate after notching seismic victories that extended deep into Republican territory and promised to shift the balance of power for Mr. Trump's final two years in office.

Triumphant as the scale of their wins came into sharper focus, Democrats vowed to take quick action to challenge Mr. Trump and to aggressively investigate him and his administration.

The party flipped Senate seats in Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and even Texas, according to The Associated Press. Ballots were still being counted in Alaska's contentious Senate race and in the unlikely battleground of Mississippi, where fewer than 70 votes separated the two candidates as of Wednesday afternoon.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, who is expected to become the next House speaker; predicted that Democrats would win at least 255 seats in the 435-seat House. "It wasn't a blue wave; it was an American tsunami," he said.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader and a fellow Brooklynite, called it "a generational remake of the Senate majority."

Democrats surged in crucial House battlegrounds and beyond, picking off Republicans who had not expected competitive races in conservative-leaning seats from Indiana to Missouri to Alabama.

They were on track to secure the largest majority in the cham-

Continued on Page A12

Seismic Change As Texas Breaks Grasp of G.O.P.

By J. DAVID GOODMAN and LAUREN McGAUGHY

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas may never be the same.

Democrats shattered the 32-year-long Republican grip on statewide offices in what had been, until Tuesday, the nation's most populous conservative state.

James Talarico's victory over Ken Paxton, a scandal-scarred Republican candidate, in the U.S. Senate race was only the beginning of a series of seismic victories for Democrats on Tuesday in Texas.

Gina Hinojosa made history with her defeat of Gov. Greg Abbott, the third-term governor and political powerhouse who, just a few months ago, appeared to have a lock on winning a record fourth term. She becomes Texas's first Hispanic governor.

In one night, the state was transformed.

"Talarico is a symbol. Gina is an earthquake," said Garry Mauro, a Continued on Page A17.

Continued on Page A17

The Senate Seats That Turned Blue

Democrats flipped at least seven seats in the Senate to retake control of the chamber with the party's biggest majority since 2014. Races in Alaska and Mississippi remained too close to call. Page A11.

NORTH CAROLINA

Roy Cooper

Josh Turek

The Paralympian and state lawmaker won an open seat in a red state.

The former governor defeated the president's handpicked candidate.

OHIO

Sherrod Brown

The populist who lost his seat in 2024 will return to the chamber.

The centrist Democrat is the pastor of the largest church in the state.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Annie Andrews

The pediatrician upset Darlinc Graham, who filled her brother's seat.

MAINE Troy Jackson

The former logger won against Susan Collins, the longtime incumbent.

TEXAS

James Talarico

The state lawmaker prevailed in a bruising and costly campaign.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Addressing Israeli Deadlock

President Isaac Herzog, who began party meetings, is a savvy mediator whose skills could be vital after an unsettled vote. News Analysis. PAGE A8

BUSINESS B1-5

A.I. Scrutiny on the Horizon

After years of little A.I. oversight, voters rejected data centers and backed Democrats who supported regulation. PAGE BI

NATIONAL.A10-19

A Win for 'Taxing the Rich'

An appeals court ruled the Mamdani administration can roll out a tax on second homes in New York. PAGE A19

OBITUARIES A22

He Captured a 1960 Massacre

Ian Berry, the only photographer that day in Sharpeville, South Africa, was 92.

ARTS C1-6

Fight Over Kinky Art's Legacy

A man who helped Tom of Finland elevate gay erotica is clashing with a foundation that protects his work. PAGE CI

INTERNATIONAL

An article on Wednesday about Britain's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade misspelled the name of the president of Guyana. He is Mohamed Irfaan Ali, not Mohammed Ifraan Ali.

Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. For recently published corrections, visit nytimes.com/corrections.

[Inside The Times] The Story Behind the Story

Supporters of Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, at his election night party in Portland after Senator Susan Collins conceded.

JOHN TULLY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Interview by MICHAEL BARBARO

On Tuesday night, the blue wave that polls predicted landed with extraordinary force across the United States as Democrats flipped control of both the House and the Senate. In an episode of "The Daily" recorded early Wednesday, just past 1 a.m., the host Michael Barbaro discussed the results with The Times's chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, and the national political correspondents Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher. Their conversation has been edited.

Fill in the blank: Tonight was . . . what?

NATE COHN: A tsunami. It's the largest victory in the national popular vote since at least 1976 in any congressional election. No party has managed to flip so many scats that are so safely in the other side's hands as far back as I looked.

LISA LERER: Tonight was a prairie fire that swept the nation. I'm over the water analogies. The water doesn't capture the level of anger over gas prices, housing prices and everything else.

SHANE GOLDMACHER: I think it was a punishment. It becomes less about the individual Democratic candidates, or even the Democratic Party. This is a rejection of President Trump and his approach, and his party's complete hended knee to his approach for the last two years.

Nate, when did you realize what was happening on Tuesday night?

COHN: It was clear Democrats were overperforming immediately. But in South Carolina — a state certainly thought to be competitive, but that very few people really believed would be likely to flip — the early vote was just plainly better for the Democratic Senate candidate, Annie Andrews. She prevailed with room to spare. The Republican candidate Darline Graham's

greatest sin in this election was that she was anointed by the president.

Usually in a red state like South Carolina, Trump as kingmaker is the beginning and the end of the conversation. In this case, it seemed to backfire.

GOLDMACHER: The bad news for me as a political junkie is there's just one story here: the country rejecting Trump and Republicans. That's how you end up losing in Texas by potentially double digits. It's how you get a Democratic senator from Kansas for the first time in nearly 100 years. It's how you oust probably the most enduring moderate Republican in Maine.

James Talarico not only pulled off a victory in Texas; he pulled off a victory whose scale is a little hard to comprehend.

GOLDMACHER: You see him winning in a way that was basically unfarthomable. And yes, we've talked about how his opponent, Ken Paxton, was a particularly weak Republican candidate, the state attorney general who has faced a series of scandals. But it wasn't just Talarico winning, but the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa, who beat a fixture of Texas politics, Greg Abbott.

LERER: What I think those results show us is how much broader this is than any candidate. It's not about any individual Republican. It's just this wholesale repudiation.

What happened to Republican voters? Did they stay home? Or did they turn around and vote for Democrats?

COIN: The answer is both. It's clear from the states where we have great data, like Florida and New Jersey and Nevada, the Democrats had a much better turnout than any election in those states in recent memory. And it's also clear from the same states and others that many people who are registered as Republicans and voted for Trump voted for the Democratic candidate.

LERER: In Iowa, you had Democrats win the governor's mansion, the senate seat and flip three of the four congressional

seats. Why did that happen? Guess what there are a lot of in Iowa: farmers who voted for Trump. And their bottom line was hurt again and again: by the increase in diesel prices, by tariffs.

There is just such a direct connection between President Trump's policies and the fall of his coalition. And I don't know that you always see that. Presidents don't control macroeconomic trends, but they get credit or they're blamed for the economy. In this case, actually, President Trump did create the atmosphere on economic conditions that turned his voters against him.

GOLDMACHER: I think if Texas is ground zero of this year's defeat for Republicans, I also think Iowa is really interesting, because it's where they're going to start their next nominating process. The next Republican presidential candidate is going to need to win a caucus in that state where the Democrats just won all these things.

Which governor's races stand out?

GOLDMACHER: I think the most interesting governor's race outside of Texas is in Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms is about to become the first Black woman in American history to be a governor. And she did it by a wide margin.

COHN: It is worth noting that the Democrats did really well in a lot of potential Sun Belt battleground states. Many of their weakest performances were in more traditional northern, white battleground states, like Minnesota, Michigan or Maine. And I'm not saying they did badly in those states. But it's worth imagining what someone would have said 10 years ago if I told them that the Democrats were going to do a lot better in Texas than Michigan, and North Carolina and Georgia than Maine and Minnesota.

There is something happening here in the Sun Belt, and it may be where the Democratic Party's next opportunity is as we look at the wreckage of the Trump coalition at this low point in Trump's presidency.

Listen to the full episode at nytimes.com/thedaily.

The Newspaper and Beyond

Crossword C3

Obituaries A22

VIDEO

TRAVEL

Opinion A20-21

Weather B10

In the latest “Anatomy of a Scene” video, the writer and director Curry Barker narrated a sequence from his indie horror hit, “Obsession.” Watch Mr. Barker explain how he made a sad face terrifying at nytimes.com/movies.

This week's Great Adaptations challenge focuses on animal-centered novels. Match popular films to their literary source material with the Book Review's multiple-choice quiz. Take a walk on the wild side at nytimes.com/books.

Does eating delicious street food at a night market and staying at a hotel that resembles a temple sound like the perfect vacation? Get insiders' perspectives on where to eat, shop and sleep in Taipei, Taiwan. tmagazine.com

[A Headline From History] 4 PRESIDENTS JOIN REAGAN IN DEDICATING HIS LIBRARY

November 5, 1991. For the first time, five presidents gathered for an official public ceremony, appearing at the dedication of the \$60 million Spanish-style Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., The Times reported. According to Lodwrick Cook, the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Foundation, the event was "the largest gathering of American Presidents and Presidential families ever assembled." In addition to Ronald and Nancy Reagan and their family, the 3,500 guests included Richard M. and Pat Nixon; Gerald R. and Betty Ford; Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter; George H.W. and Barbara Bush; Lady Bird Johnson, the widow of Lyndon B. Johnson; and descendants of both John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Rouscvelt. Guests received souvenir jars of jelly beans, Mr. Reagan's favorite candy. The last time five living presidents appeared together was when Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump gathered for Mr. Carter's funeral in January 2025.

Facts of Interest

After Tuesday's elections, about 75 percent of Americans will live in a state with a Democratic governor, according to the Democratic Governors Association. In Generational First, Democrats Will Hold Most Governorships All

The average N.F.I.. player today is 26.5 years old. Only 40 of the roughly 2,200 players on active rosters and practice squads are 35 or older; just eight are in their 40s.

They Ward Off the Fiercest Rue

In the Sport: Age D6

The satirical series "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" is Canada's version of "Saturday Night Live." Taped in Nova Scotia, it runs Tuesday nights on the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. North of the Border. On Top of the Chaus C3

Anthrax is a zoonotic disease caused by a bacterium found naturally in soil. It often affects livestock and wild animals that can become infected when they breathe in, eat or drink spores in contaminated soil, plants or water.

Anthrax in African Park

Anthrax in African Park

Kills Dozens of Hippus A6

More than \$516 million was spent on advertising in Ohio's Senate race, making it the most expensive general election in the country, according to AdImpact. Ohio's Senate Race Is a Rare Loss For Crypto. B1

The fashion industry has historically catered to customers from sizes 0 to 12, offering them the latest trends and a full range of silhouettes, even though the average-size American woman wears a 16. After GLP-1a, Restocking the Closet D1

In Our Inbox

LIKE MOTROWSO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sabrina Tavernise, a national reporter, talking to a college student in Michigan before the election.

Times journalists were back at work on Wednesday after a long night reporting the midterm results. Editors of the Backstory newsletter shared a few statistics that show just how busy our journalists were in the New York newsroom and beyond.

■ More than 400 Times staffers, including reporters, editors, data analysts, video journalists and photographers, covered thousands of races. About 100 reporters were in at least 30 states on election night.

■ For the election forecast tool known as the Needle, The Times wrote more than 200 data scrapers and data pipelines to capture results data from House and Senate races.

■ More than 100 data journalists crunched the election results.

■ Patricia Mazzei, a political correspondent, drove more than 1,525 miles through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South

Carolina this year while reporting on midterm races.

■ The Times launched Times Voter Trends to break down estimates for the results of House and Senate elections by age, race, education and gender in every state. To make this project as authoritative as possible, The Times recontacted more than 7,000 of the nearly 30,000 people interviewed this year for Times/Siena polls to verify whether they voted and for whom.

■ We ordered 125 pizzas and about 120 pounds of barbecue to fuel our New York newsroom through the day and night. Many (many) M&M's were also consumed.

Sign up for The Backstory, a newsletter that explains our decision making, at nytimes.com/newsletters.

In Our Inbox

LIKE MOTROWSO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sabrina Tavernise, a national reporter, talking to a college student in Michigan before the election.

Times journalists were back at work on Wednesday after a long night reporting the midterm results. Editors of the Backstory newsletter shared a few statistics that show just how busy our journalists were in the New York newsroom and beyond.

■ More than 400 Times staffers, including reporters, editors, data analysts, video journalists and photographers, covered thousands of races. About 100 reporters were in at least 30 states on election night.

■ For the election forecast tool known as the Needle, The Times wrote more than 200 data scrapers and data pipelines to capture results data from House and Senate races.

■ More than 100 data journalists crunched the election results.

■ Patricia Mazzei, a political correspondent, drove more than 1,525 miles through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South

Carolina this year while reporting on midterm races.

■ The Times launched Times Voter Trends to break down estimates for the results of House and Senate elections by age, race, education and gender in every state. To make this project as authoritative as possible, The Times recontacted more than 7,000 of the nearly 30,000 people interviewed this year for Times/Siena polls to verify whether they voted and for whom.

■ We ordered 125 pizzas and about 120 pounds of barbecue to fuel our New York newsroom through the day and night. Many (many) M&M's were also consumed.

Sign up for The Backstory, a newsletter that explains our decision making, at nytimes.com/newsletters.

Here to Help

How to Keep Your Home From Smelling Like Cat Litter

We all know the smell of a litter box. And, boy, is it strong. That's because cat waste contains stinky chemicals to help felines communicate, said the cat behaviorist and scientist Mikel Delgado. When these chemicals are combined with fragrances that are sometimes added to litter, they can make a sharp cocktail. Here's how to keep your home smelling fresh and your cat content. CAROLINE MULLEN

Scoop daily, and change out litter weekly. These regular habits go a long way. Some cat caretakers at Wirecutter even recommend scooping right after your pet uses the box. To avoid lingering odors, replace the litter frequently — even if it looks clean.

Deep clean your litter box. Doing this at least twice a month helps prevent bacteria buildup and those telltale smells, according to the Wirecutter pets writer Mel Plaut. If your cat's litter-box habits are consistent, and you're not struggling with odors, deep cleaning the box once a month may be fine.

Switch to unscented litter. Scented litter doesn't absorb or neutralize odors — it just masks them. That's why we suggest using an unscented litter that's easy to scoop (and thus removing the cause of malodor), such as Dr. Elsey's Ultra Unscented litter.

Move the box to a well-ventilated area. You may be tempted to hide the box in a corner, thinking it will sequester smells. But if you're not diligent about cleaning, hiding a box can have the opposite effect. Increased airflow can prevent odors from collecting.

MARK SHINNUTIS/NYT WIRECUTTER

Add a litter mat. Litter can make its way beyond the box when a cat kicks it up or tracks it around your home. A reusable litter mat helps contain stinky particles by trapping the granules in the mat's coils.

Ditch your plastic box. Plastic litter boxes have a tendency to hold onto odor-causing bacteria. By contrast, stainless steel litter boxes won't hold onto odor. They're also simpler to clean but pricier and heavier.

Keep litter waste sealed away. That signature litter smell can also emanate from the trash. If you toss litter waste into an indoor trash can, consider getting a dedicated litter pail to seal smells inside instead.

Caroline Mullen is a staff writer for Wirecutter, a product recommendation site owned by The New York Times Company. For more advice, visit nytimes.com/wirecutter.

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The "Adventure" Compass Locket

In 18K Gold or Sterling Silver

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International

The New York Times

Synthetic Drugs Ravaged Him. His Candor Exposed a Crisis.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MENDETH SORUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Abandoned housing units in Estonia, one of the first nations battered by fentanyl. An addict known as Hapkomah has gained fame for his writings. Left, a chemist tested powder. Nitazenes now change regularly, outpacing each ban.

Raw and Riveting Posts While Estonia Struggles With a Dizzying Market

By AZAM AHMED

The drug coursed through his arm like white phosphorus, he said, leaving a scorched trail in its wake.

Rather than slowly nod off, as he did with fentanyl, Hapkomah collapsed immediately, while still on his feet, he said. When he came to, he said, his vein was destroyed. For most of his adult life, he had abused drugs, a shocking journey he chronicled in his viral blog. Yet now, for the first time, he said, he was afraid.

His small country, Estonia, has long been on the frontline of a drastic change in the drug trade: One of the first nations in the world to be bludgeoned by fentanyl, it is battling even stronger synthetics that the authorities struggle to identify, let alone stop.

Hapkomah, his pseudonym, quickly became an underground celebrity in this terrifying shift, known for his raw, unvarnished blogs on how ruthlessly these new substances were tearing through his body and the world around him.

Tens of thousands of people in Estonia have read his short confessional posts, following his blunt, sometimes grotesque accounts of his descent in a 21st-century cross between William S. Burroughs and Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater."

"My bones ache, my skin flushes, bodily fluids drip from my ass, and my muscles are cramping," Hapkomah, which means junkie, wrote of a withdrawal episode in his first post.

His writings amount to a street-level archive of Estonia's crisis, narrating the demise of other addicts like himself on the edges of society: a woman raped daily by her husband's friends in exchange for synthetic opioids; a dealer who feels nothing for the users he kills with his potent wares.

Some credit his work with forcing the government to pay attention to the extreme dangers of synthetic drugs, especially at a time when much of the world was still blind to them.

"It was huge," said Margus Hanno Murakas, a former journalist for an Estonian newspaper, Postimees, who has focused on drugs in Estonia. "The guy blew the lid open."

As Estonia did the remarkable and got fentanyl under control — an accomplishment the United States can only hope to replicate — newer lab-made concoctions emerged almost immediately. Hapkomah soon realized that dealers rarely had a clue what they were selling him. Only one constant was clear to him. The substances on the streets kept getting worse — as his own body could attest.

"People are right to say they miss fentanyl," he told me in an interview last year, repeating a surprisingly common refrain among addicts and law enforcement officials in Estonia. While the fentanyl crisis that gripped the nation for years was devastating, they say it now seems so much milder than the scourge of ultrapotent new synthetics attacking the country today.

His pseudonym enabled him to unveil Estonia's drug crisis without being prosecuted for his long involvement in the underworld. As he sat for the interview on the condition that his real name not be used, his fear of the crippling withdrawal that would soon overtake him intensified. His knees bounced and hands fidgeted while he described the cruelty of synthetic drugs, like nitazenes, that had replaced fentanyl.

The highs are shorter, the withdrawals kick in faster and they are a lot more severe, he said, a perspective shared by more than a dozen current and former addicts I interviewed in Estonia. What's more, they added, that punishing cycle gets worse every time a new iteration of nitazene hits the street.

That is the quixotic struggle between cops and criminals in the synthetic era: The authorities race to ban poisonous new drugs, inadvertently spurring clandestine chemists to come up with something new and, often, even more powerful.

These days, nitazenes change regularly to outpace each new ban, which is how Estonia came to have more than a dozen different kinds crowding the market. Hapkomah had tried all of them, he said, and called nitazenes far more destructive than anything that came before them.

That is, until last year, shortly after our interview — when he came across drugs that were even worse.

Just a few years after nitazenes stormed across Estonia, new substances were suddenly popping up across the country, drugs so powerful that they knocked him out while standing and fired through his arm like a tracer round.

The agonizing withdrawals came on so quickly that he woke up in the middle of the night, needing to inject again.

"You go to bed at 11, wake up at 3 am drenched in sweat, and shoot up," he texted on an encrypted app. "Then I'm up again at 7 am, looking for the next bag."

It got so bad that he shot up in his neck, struggling to find a vein, and gave himself an infection. He called the new drugs, and the effect they had on him, "demonic."

As his addiction deepened, he said, he called for an ambulance two dozen times in February and March of 2025, convulsing and struggling to breathe.

"I honestly feel like killing myself with a gun if I find no help," he texted me one morning.

Whatever part of his life had remained intact with nitazenes — whatever semblance of self, routine or individuality he'd managed to hold onto — these new drugs were eradicating it.

And he still wasn't sure what they were.

"Was foaming at the mouth, flying in a 50 kmh zone towards the bag," he wrote another day. "I've lost all hope."

Spiraling completely, Hapkomah begged rehab centers to take him. Only, he asked for specialized treatment tailored to this new generation of synthetic drugs. None agreed to modify their standard treatment programs, he said.

So, he decided to go it alone.

He plumbed online forums and consulted with a vanguard of drug users who were convinced that conventional treatment is no longer enough to combat the roster of increasingly potent, and often polluted, synthetics.

By their logic, the world of treatment has not kept pace with the realities of the street. New drugs come, each more deadly than the last, yet the approach to addiction has barely changed in more than 50 years, they say.

Hapkomah's solution? To devise a medical regimen himself.

He selected a cocktail of five drugs that he hoped would help him detox, including a highly potent opioid, a few common medications and a benzodiazepine to help manage anxiety and seizures.

And it seemed to work — until he suddenly vanished.

He stopped answering my messages.

The First Fix

It was not the first time that Hapkomah abruptly disappeared from public view.

He started using fentanyl in 2010, long before many Americans had even heard of it. As a teen, he and his friends would drive to an old Soviet housing bloc in the capital, Tallinn, where addicts and prostitutes congregated in amber-lit alleys.

They laughed at the users and johns who dipped behind buildings and then re-emerged, posture slackened.

"We thought it was funny and crazy, these zombies and these prostitutes," he said. "The paradox was that, years later, we became them."

One night, Hapkomah called over one of the prostitutes and asked her to score them some fentanyl. He snorted some in the back seat. Everything seemed to

A van used by a nonprofit group that runs a needle exchange and harm-reduction program in Tallinn, the capital.

click into place for him, a euphoric present and its future promise.

"I felt like it fixed me," he said.

Fentanyl was more than a high; it was a passport.

"That moment changed everything," he said.

In the years since, he has cycled through hopeless addiction, rehab and college, maintaining a keen and curious mind, despite injecting what he conservatively estimates to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in synthetic opioids.

His account was pieced together through months of interviews, both in person and over encrypted messages and calls. Key dates and details were confirmed with rehab clinicians, government officials and harm-reduction specialists who know him, as well as his friends.

Hapkomah has spent as much of his adult life inside of Estonia's underworld as he has outside of it, yet he didn't grow up poor or marginalized. His parents loved him, he says, even if they fought bitterly over his drug use. He just liked getting high and by 17 had drunk alcohol, smoked weed, snorted coke and popped amphetamines.

“Basically, anything I could get my hands on,” he said.

But after that night in 2010, when he was barely old enough to buy a beer, fentanyl pushed out everything else.

By 2014, deep in the throes of addiction, he began his blog. Two years later, having taken the admittedly small world of Estonian publishing by storm, he landed a book deal. Though he remained anonymous, his book was a best seller: "How I became HAPKOMAH."

He promoted his work online and became an activist of sorts, sounding a rallying cry from the streets while pillorying the government for what he considered its punitive approach to addiction.

And then he went offline.

As public awareness grew, so did his profile, and paranoia. He started to worry he might be targeted by the authorities. He stepped away from the limelight — and decided to get sober.

A Stint in Rehab

Hapkomah went to rehab at Viljandi Hospital, the nation's main detox clinic, and spent five months kicking his synthetic opioid addiction. It was brutal, but it worked.

When he got out, he told himself he would re-enroll in college, get his life together. He was smart, could write, had a depth of experience and a sense of purpose.

But the real world subsumed his plans, he said, and the small failures of daily life mounted and overwhelmed them.

Not long after getting clean, in early 2021, he was using again. The staff at Viljandi knew — not because he told them, but because a small theater troupe in town had decided to stage a play based on his book.

They had invited him to opening night, which he attended. But the staff could tell he was high. No one said anything. Relapse was expected, if disappointing. Hapkomah stood around, glassy eyed, then left during the intermission.

By that time, Estonia had largely beaten back its fentanyl crisis, but nitazenes were on the loose. Soon enough, the onslaught of mysterious new drugs came.

Even methadone, the opioid substitute long used to ease users' cravings, wasn't helping with these new drugs, he said. Word also spread on the street that naloxone, a medicine that quickly reverses opioid overdoses, wasn't working either.

"It was the moment I understood that someone needs to ring the alarm," said Mart Kalvet, an addiction specialist helping Hapkomah.

Mr. Kalvet began to triangulate between a network of users and government officials, hoping to figure out what, exactly, was polluting the drug supply. Hapkomah began to suspect that he was taking medetomidine, a powerful animal tranquilizer found in American cities like Philadelphia, but still relatively unknown in Europe.

In March of 2025, Mr. Kalvet confirmed medetomidine in samples collected by the Estonian Forensic Sciences Institute. Traffickers were polluting synthetics with medetomidine to prolong the vanishingly short highs.

"It extends the high but enslaves the user," Hapkomah explained.

It was months later that Hapkomah took rehab into his own hands, trying to get clean with the dangerous cocktail of drugs he prescribed himself — before vanishing for almost an entire year.

In his absence, the drug market continued to evolve. Before long, a new threat emerged: cyclophrine, a synthetic opioid 10 times as potent as fentanyl.

But it wasn't new for Hapkomah. He was certain it was the drug that had destroyed one of his veins, terrifying him. Back then, few had heard of it. Now, it is one of the deadliest drugs in Estonia.

The half-life of new drugs is itself halving. Fentanyl was around for 15 years, and nitazenes barely seven.

Who knew how long cychlorphine would be around before, it, too, was replaced with something just as, or even more, pernicious?

I searched for Hapkomah for months, messaging him, calling, reaching out to Mr. Kalvet and other friends. None of them had heard from him.

A few weeks ago, he finally responded.

He is OK, he says, still clean, staying off the phone — and away from his old life. He said he had just celebrated one year of sobriety.

U.S. Helped Venezuela in Attack on Rebels, Officials Say

POOL PHOTO BY FERNANDO VERGARA

Distribution Hub For Cocaine Is Hit

This article is by Annie Correal, Eric Schmitt, Isayen Herrera and Julie Turkewitz.

For years, a Colombian rebel army operated freely across the border in Venezuela, allowed to traffic cocaine and oversee illicit gold mines under Nicolás Maduro, the country's former president.

But with Mr. Maduro forcibly removed by the United States and Venezuela's government under the thumb of the Trump administration, Venezuela's military last week launched a deadly attack on the group, the National Liberation Army, better known by its Spanish initials, ELN.

The attack, according to four U.S. officials, was carried out on Friday with the help of U.S. intelligence and drones. It was not previously public who had been responsible for the attack.

The joint operation underscores how the Trump administration is increasingly enmeshed in Venezuela's domestic affairs and how it has embraced a militarized strategy to combat drug trafficking in Latin America.

The attack was not the first joint operation in the country. In June, a strike by the United States and Venezuela killed a leader of Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang.

The New York Times reported this week that the Trump administration is aiming to establish a long-term U.S. military presence in Venezuela.

A Venezuelan human rights organization, Fundaredes, first alerted the public to Friday's attack, which took place in the Apure region near the Colombian border, after organizers spoke with survivors and local residents.

At least 23 people were killed and many more injured, the group said, after drones bombed an ELN site that was a known hub for cocaine distribution.

The U.S. officials who confirmed details of the attack requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

For years, the ELN operated freely in Venezuela, viewing the country as a refuge from military attacks in Colombia and a prime location for flying cocaine smuggled from Colombia to other countries. The Venezuelan government was seen as its ally.

On a visit to Colombia in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the E.I.N could no longer be allowed to operate "with impunity" in Venezuela, and that the topic had been raised with the interim government of Delcy Rodriguez.

"We have to confront it," he said.

While it was not clear who piloted the drones used in Friday's attack, the type of drone involved is typically operated by U.S. forces, one of the U.S. officials said.

The State Department referred questions about the attack to the Department of Defense, which said questions should be directed to Venezuela's government. Venezuelan officials did not respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, a senior Venezuelan military official confirmed that the country's armed forces had carried out the attack on the ELN in Apures. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, asked not to be named. The person had not been personally briefed on the U.S. role.

Representatives of the ELN did not respond to requests for comment.

Juan Francisco Garcia, the Fundaredes coordinator for the Apures region, said residents who lived on ranches near the site of the attack had described hearing

Anatoly Kurmanaev, Simón Posa-da and Federico Rios contributed reporting.

two large explosions on Friday morning. They approached and found bodies scattered around the bombed site, which Mr. Garcia, who works in the area, said was known to be used by the ELN for shipping cocaine.

Security analysts say the ELN had consolidated control of much of the Venezuelan border and used air strips there to ship Colombian cocaine by plane to other countries in Latin America, including Mexico.

Mr. García shared photos and videos with The Times he said were taken by residents on Friday. One photo shows, from a distance, a helicopter and several smaller, dark shapes hovering over pastureland. A video shows bodies amid debris.

Mr. Garcia, who said he visited a nearby morgue and saw several victims' bodies over the weekend, said that many of the corpses had been "mutilated" by explosives.

He said that interviews with survivors of the attack, and relatives of victims, had indicated that not all the victims were fighters.

Those killed included pilots, goods suppliers and the relatives or partners of ELN members, he said. One was a woman in her 60s whom he described as the wife of a pilot.

The ELN is known to recruit members from poor communities where there are few employment opportunities. In areas where the group is the de facto authority, locals say they often feel they have

to cooperate.

Mr. Garcia noted that, while less than half of the victims had been identified by Monday, government IDs found on some bodies showed that the victims were Venezuelan, not Colombian.

Since no government officially took responsibility for the attack, theories have swirled in recent days about who was responsible

U.S. intelligence, and drones, are said to be behind deadly strikes.

and whether any group leader had been killed.

The attack came on the heels of several bombings against ELN targets in Colombia ordered by the country's conservative new president, Abelardo De La Espriella, who has vowed to crush armed groups that do not surrender:

After the E.I.N released a video in September in which a well-known commander defied the new president and said the group would keep fighting, Mr. De La Espriella responded by calling the E.LN commander; known as Silvana Guerrero, a "terrorist" who would end up in a body bag.

On Friday, the day of the attack in Venezuela, Colombia's armed forces reportedly dropped fliers over the border city of Cúcuta offering reward money for the ELN's top commanders.

Colombian defense officials denied playing any role in the operation in Venezuela.

Security analysts said the military strategy against the ELN — which is said to have around 6,000 fighters — now appears to be to squeeze the group on both sides of the border at once so that it does not have a place to hide.

The attack comes as the Trump administration has designated around two dozen criminal groups in Latin America as terrorist organizations and is launching a military plan to crush Latin America's "narcoterrorists." It has also put pressure on leaders to target trafficking groups and to capture or kill group leaders.

Though legal experts say the terrorist label does not confer the authority to use lethal force as a first resort, the label has, nonetheless, been frequently invoked by top Trump administration officials when publicizing military strikes against accused traffickers, including boat strikes that so far have killed 244 people.

"The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said after a lethal strike last October on a boat allegedly linked to the ELN. "They will be hunted and killed, just like Al Qaeda."

Formed in rural Colombia in the

PEERSON BOS for the New York Times

A Colombian rebel army,

known as ELN, has operated

across the border with Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco

Rubio, far left, with Colombia's

President Abelardo De La

Espriclla and Omar Bula, its

foreign minister, said during a

September visit that the ELN

needed to be confronted.

1960s, the ELN merged Marxism with Roman Catholic liberation theology. It later resorted to violent tactics like kidnapping and drug trafficking, and in 1997 it was among the first groups to be placed on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

The E.I.N suffered severe setbacks amid a major U.S.-backed military offensive two decades ago, but survived and outlasted other Colombian groups that laid down arms in peace deals.

Analysts say a significant reason for its survival was its ability to seek refuge and expand its territorial control into Venezuela.

U.S. officials have accused the Maduro regime, including Diosdado Cabello, the powerful interior minister, of allowing the group to seize control of large areas along the border. Residents say the state largely overlooked the effects of its illegal activities, including gold mining, on the environment and everyday people.

Venezuelan officials were said to have profited from these activities. The United Nations has long cited reports of the Venezuelan military and ELN fighters working together to smuggle gold.

The United States, in its criminal indictment against Mr. Maduro, also claimed that the former Venezuelan leader and Mr. Cabello partnered with the ELN to send cocaine to the United States.

The ELN also operated as an extension of the Venezuelan military, confronting other criminal groups and enforcing state interests, according to International Crisis Group, an independent organization that has done fieldwork on the border.

As Venezuela became more isolated — and economically desperate — the ELN also filled the vacuum left by the state, providing Venezuelans with work, services and even basic goods.

The Venezuelan military official who said Venezuelan armed forces had carried out Friday's attack, noted that only after Mr. Maduro had been removed were military units encouraged to attack the E.I.N.

Spain's Chief Of Transport Steps Down After Crash

By CARLOS BARRAGÁN

MADRID — Spain's transport minister has announced his resignation, the week after the deadliest train crash in a decade killed nearly 70 people and raised doubts about the country's once-vaunted rail system ahead of national elections.

"A transport minister cannot remain in office after two accidents of such severity in less than a year," the minister, Óscar Puente, told lawmakers on Tuesday evening after days of resisting calls for his resignation.

Mr. Puente's resignation came at the end of a bruising day of questioning for the minister, who gave lawmakers a detailed account of the events leading to the accident, in which one high-speed train rear-ended another on the same tracks.

"You're so good at explaining why people die on trains, and so bad at preventing them from dying on trains," said Ester Muñoz, the spokeswoman for the main opposition conservative party, the Popular Party.

Mr. Puente's resignation reflected his increasingly untenable position ahead of snap elections on Nov. 29 and suggested that he had become a liability to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who had stood by him. Many political parties had demanded his resignation, and recent polls showed that a majority of Spaniards believed Mr. Puente should step down.

"Óscar Puente has faced up to his responsibilities, offered solutions and then stepped aside," Mr. Sánchez said on social media after the minister's resignation. He added, "Politicians like him bring dignity to our country."

The crash shook Spaniards' confidence in their high-speed railway system, long considered the jewel of a modernizing country that had shown it was on par with the rest of Europe. But in January, a crash on the same line between Madrid and Seville killed 46 people, and 69 died in the collision last week.

After the crashes, analysts said, Spaniards increasingly felt that the country's infrastructure was not working and was unsafe, a view that could damage Mr. Sánchez politically as his party already trails in the polls. Mr. Puente's reputation as an attack dog for the government, known for lashing out at political rivals on social media, only increased the calls for his resignation.

Mr. Puente began his parliamentary hearing at 5 p.m. with a lengthy explanation of how the crash happened, faulting the errors of rail traffic controllers in Madrid, who had taken over after an automatic safety system went down in the area near Toledo, in central Spain. The controllers authorized a train to proceed at high speed though another was stalled in front of it, he said. He also announced a battery of measures and new protocols to improve railway safety.

But lawmakers across the political spectrum held him responsible for the accidents on his watch and demanded his resignation.

Ms. Muñoz of the Popular Party said it was “incomprehensible” that two deadly tragedies had occurred on the same rail line. “This is not an isolated failure; it is a systemic failure,” she said.

Pepa Millán, a lawmaker from the far-right party Vox, asked Mr. Puente whether he could "sleep soundly."

Even coalition partners in the left-wing government asked him to step down, and Mr. Puente framed his resignation as a necessity.

"It is a matter of political dignity, consistency," he said, "and empathy for the victims."

Copter Collision Kills One And Injures 3 Near Everest

By EPHRAT LIVNI

A midair collision of two helicopters near Mount Everest on Tuesday left one Indian tourist dead and a visitor from New Zealand and two pilots injured, according to Nepal's civil aviation authority.

The helicopters collided as they were attempting to land in the Pheriche area of the Solukhumbu district of Nepal around 8 in the morning, the aviation authority said in a statement. Pheriche is a village at an altitude of about 13,900 feet along the Everest Base Camp trekking route.

Video of the accident showed that, in apparently clear weather, the propellers of a lower helicopter made contact with a second aircraft that had been flying higher nearby and swooped downward rapidly. Both helicopters fell to the ground not far apart and appeared to have been destroyed in the collision.

The crash cast a pall on the popular tourist destination during the autumn climbing season and highlighted the dangers that some locals and government officials have warned of as flights in the region have proliferated.

The Nepali authorities identified the dead tourist as Vasanth Kumar Balaramaramadu, 44, of India and the injured visitor, who was being treated at a hospital in Kathmandu, as Shailesh Kisan Patel of New Zealand. The aviation authority's statement expressed hope for a speedy recovery for the injured, including two unnamed pilots.

In a post, the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu expressed “its deepest condolences on the unfortunate demise of an Indian national” and said it was working “in close coordination with Nepali authorities for early repatriation of the mortal remains of the deceased.”

The aviation authority in Nepal said it was investigating the collision and would take any actions or corrective measures needed to address potential issues. "Preliminary reports suggest miscommu-

NEPAL. POLICE, VIA REUTERS

nication between the pilots, as the area is outside the coverage of Lukla Airport's air traffic control tower and pilots have to communicate with each other," Mukesh Dangol, director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, told The Kathmandu Post.

One of the damaged helicopters in a photo from the police in Nepal. The two aircraft collided while landing along the Everest Base Camp trail.

The perils of heavy helicopter traffic in the mountainous region are well known, and the Nepali government has struggled to strike a balance between the needs of a thriving tourism industry and the demand for better regulation to ensure safety and preservation of the natural environment.

In 2023, five visitors from Mexico and a Nepali pilot were killed when their helicopter crashed during a sightseeing trip over Mount Everest.

Local officials and those at the Sagarmatha National Park, home to Mount Everest, have clashed with government regulators over helicopter restrictions in recent years. In 2024, the park authorities said they would begin restricting helicopter sightseeing tours and some other flights in 2025, a rule that civil aviation regulators initially said the park had no authority to enforce.

Copter Collision Kills One And Injures 3 Near Everest

By EPHRAT LIVNI

A midair collision of two helicopters near Mount Everest on Tuesday left one Indian tourist dead and a visitor from New Zealand and two pilots injured, according to Nepal's civil aviation authority.

The helicopters collided as they were attempting to land in the Pheriche area of the Solukhumbu district of Nepal around 8 in the morning, the aviation authority said in a statement. Pheriche is a village at an altitude of about 13,900 feet along the Everest Base Camp trekking route.

Video of the accident showed that, in apparently clear weather, the propellers of a lower helicopter made contact with a second aircraft that had been flying higher nearby and swooped downward rapidly. Both helicopters fell to the ground not far apart and appeared to have been destroyed in the collision.

The crash cast a pall on the popular tourist destination during the autumn climbing season and highlighted the dangers that some locals and government officials have warned of as flights in the region have proliferated.

The Nepali authorities identified the dead tourist as Vasanth Kumar Balaramaramadu, 44, of India and the injured visitor, who was being treated at a hospital in Kathmandu, as Shailesh Kisan Patel of New Zealand. The aviation authority's statement expressed hope for a speedy recovery for the injured, including two unnamed pilots.

In a post, the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu expressed “its deepest condolences on the unfortunate demise of an Indian national” and said it was working “in close coordination with Nepali authorities for early repatriation of the mortal remains of the deceased.”

The aviation authority in Nepal said it was investigating the collision and would take any actions or corrective measures needed to address potential issues. "Preliminary reports suggest miscommu-

NEPAL. POLICE, VIA REUTERS

nication between the pilots, as the area is outside the coverage of Lukla Airport's air traffic control tower and pilots have to communicate with each other," Mukesh Dangol, director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, told The Kathmandu Post.

One of the damaged helicopters in a photo from the police in Nepal. The two aircraft collided while landing along the Everest Base Camp trail.

The perils of heavy helicopter traffic in the mountainous region are well known, and the Nepali government has struggled to strike a balance between the needs of a thriving tourism industry and the demand for better regulation to ensure safety and preservation of the natural environment.

In 2023, five visitors from Mexico and a Nepali pilot were killed when their helicopter crashed during a sightseeing trip over Mount Everest.

Local officials and those at the Sagarmatha National Park, home to Mount Everest, have clashed with government regulators over helicopter restrictions in recent years. In 2024, the park authorities said they would begin restricting helicopter sightseeing tours and some other flights in 2025, a rule that civil aviation regulators initially said the park had no authority to enforce.

Mayoral Hopeful in Johannesburg Sees Opening in Decline of A.N.C.

By JOHN ELIGON and ZIMASA MATIWANE

Helen Zille, 75, who is running to be mayor of Johannesburg, is betting voters care less about race and more about public services.

JOAO SIXNATHE NEW YORK TIMES

JOHANNESBURG — To the beat of a Zulu rap song, the polished, 1990s-era BMW convertible rolled into the political rally in Johannesburg, greeted by delirious cheers from hundreds of South Africans. The car, known as a "gusheshe," became synonymous with the hip culture that emerged from the largely impoverished townships where Black people were forced to live under apartheid.

But sitting atop the gusheshe (pronounced GOO-shay-shay) was someone South Africans may hardly associate with Black culture. It was Helen Zille, 75, a white grandmother who has been criticized for her stances on race, including past statements suggesting that colonialism had its benefits, denouncing affirmative action in South Africa and embracing American right-wing terms like "wokeness."

Yet, as she campaigns to lead South Africa's largest city, Johannesburg, ahead of Wednesday's election, Ms. Zille is betting that race no longer guides many South Africans' decisions in the voting booth.

Instead, she argues, South Africans are more concerned with quality-of-life issues like water shortages, crumbling roads and public safety. And her blunt, rugged style, she says, is best suited to getting Africa's wealthiest city working again.

With an outsize persona and social media outreach that feels more Gen Z than baby boomer, Ms. Zille has injected excitement, and some controversy, into the typically bland, predictable ritual of South African electioneering.

"Lots of people don't like me," Ms. Zille, the mayoral candidate for the Democratic Alliance, or D.A., said in an interview. "It's fine. You don't even have to like the D.A. You just have to love Johannesburg to consolidate your vote behind us."

Ms. Zille's strategy has put her ahead in the polls in Johannesburg, the biggest prize in an election in which millions of voters are expected to choose mayors and city councilors across the nation. The local elections could have important repercussions for the national political landscape, analysts said.

The African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela that led South Africa out of apartheid, has experienced a sharp electoral decline. In the country's past two major elections, less than half of South Africa's voters chose the A.N.C., an unheard-of development for the party since it came to power after apartheid ended in 1994.

Polls and analysts suggest an even further slide is coming this election, with the A.N.C. projected to be surpassed as the largest party in most of South Africa's eight major metropolitan cities. (It's currently the largest in six of them.) The A.N.C.'s diminution could deepen fighting within the party, experts say, and intensify tensions in the national government coalition led by the A.N.C. The party could also be forced to moderate its policy ambitions and accede to some of its rivals' demands.

Most metro areas in South Africa are not projected to have clear-cut winners in the election, raising fears among some analysts that parties will form unstable governing coalitions that will make life harder for ordinary South Africans.

"I'm really pessimistic about the future of this country," said Bheki Mngomezulu, a political science professor at Nelson Mandela University.

Historically, the A.N.C. had not announced mayoral candidates before elections, instead relying on its brand to attract voters. This year, with Ms. Zille's popularity presenting a possible threat, the A.N.C. broke with tradition and announced three finalists for its mayoral candidate in Johannesburg, a sprawling city of nearly five million people.

But the party bungled that effort when its leadership failed to formally submit the name of one of those finalists, Frank Chikane, to the electoral commission. That means he is currently not eligible to become mayor.

The A.N.C. has turned to Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa's president and the party's leader, in an effort to defy the grim projections about how it will fare in the elections. He is the party's most respected figure.

Mr. Ramaphosa has been barnstorming the country trying to persuade voters to stick with the party. Last month, he waded through crowds in the township of Soweto, speaking with voters complaining that they lacked water, electricity and jobs.

"When you do the balance, when you look at the balance sheet, there's more positive than negative," Mr. Ramaphosa told a crowd gathered on the street, referring to the A.N.C.'s governing record.

In South Africa, voters select parties that then form coalitions to pick the mayor. About 80 parties are competing in Johannesburg. But Ms. Zille is polling way ahead of other candidates, though still less than the 50 percent needed to become mayor outright.

Her campaign has been hyper-focused on making the A.N.C.'s governing failures go viral.

She has posted to social media videos of her "snorkeling" in a huge pothole filled with water from a burst pipe; paddling an inflatable boat in flooded Soweto streets; and directing traffic at a broken traffic light. She conducted an unannounced "oversight" visit to a crumbling, abandoned municipal building, unveiling a dramatic video that included being chased by security guards.

Shortly before the political rally last month in which she rode on the back of the convertible, she posted a video of herself screeching a gusheshe in circles, kicking up smoke and leaving skid marks. Spinning cars is a popular activity in South African townships.

"Other parties will spin you stories," she said into the camera. "We'll spin into action."

The comments section lit up with laughing emojis, clapping hands, flames and praise for "Gogo Helen." (Gogo is the term used for grandmother in Black communities.)

"You know what, take my vote," one commenter wrote.

Critics, though, have accused Ms. Zille of pandering to Black communities by reaching for caricatures and stereotypes. Some have called her stunts gimmicks that avoid the hard work of engaging Black voters.

And Dada Morero, the current mayor of Johannesburg and a member of the A.N.C., has criticized the D.A. for fomenting inequalities in the cities it has governed and cast doubt on Ms. Zille's commitment to Johannesburg.

"This sudden interest in Johannesburg by the D.A. is not about residents; it is about politics," he told a South African news outlet in response to one of Ms. Zille's viral social media posts.

Most public polls have Ms. Zille shy of 40 percent of the vote, a tally that may make it difficult for her to pull together a coalition of parties to become Johannesburg's next mayor. But some analysts say her path to office could run through a coalition with the A.N.C., which the D.A. is already partnering with in the national government.

Before entering political office in the late 1990s, Ms. Zille was a journalist for a newspaper that was critical of the apartheid regime. She famously debunked the apartheid government's claim that the activist Steve Biko had died from the effects of a hunger strike. Her investigation found that he had sustained extensive brain damage and bruising, suggesting that he had been killed in police custody.

In 2007, Ms. Zille became the mayor of Cape Town, South Africa's second-largest city, and she later served a decade as the premier of Western Cape Province. It seemed as if Ms. Zille's political career was approaching its twilight last year; when, as a top D.A. official, she was tasked with leading the party's selection of a Johannesburg mayoral candidate.

She surveyed the field, she said, and thought about her own experience in cutthroat municipal politics.

"People get killed here, and you are always being attacked and then your name gets dragged through the mud on social media and in mainstream media," she said. "So it's not a job that many people want."

Ms. Zille found that the party "didn't have anyone who could quite rise to that," she said.

It struck her, she said, that as a woman whose aunt lived to 104 and whose mother smoked but made it to 95, she had a lot left to give.

So she threw her hat into the ring.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Deadly Drones Fail to Provide an Edge in Sudan

H. TAYER SIDOG/REFERS

A Sudanese man received medical treatment after a drone strike in North Kordofan in September.

By MATTHEW MPOKE BIGG

NAIROBI, Kenya — Donkey carts and three-wheeled taxis hauled away the dead and the wounded. The staff at a hospital, run by the charity Doctors Without Borders, was so overwhelmed that security guards had to help unload victims.

Nyala, a city in southwestern Sudan, was attacked last week when a drone landed in a market where people were buying food for dinner and drinking tea in cafes, residents said. Many of the wounded had been hit by shrapnel or suffered severe burns, according to Dale Koninckx, the local project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders.

The use of drones in Sudan's bloody civil war is accelerating, the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, said last month. The weapons have enabled the Sudanese military and its adversary, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, to reach far beyond the front lines and wreak havoc deep inside enemy territory.

But analysts say the use of sophisticated drones has not given either side a decisive edge in the civil war. Instead, they have become the No. 1 killer of civilians this year, adding to famine and a drought that the United Nations says now covers half of Sudan.

The main benefit of the drone war goes to the Turkish and Chinese companies making the drones, as well as the foreign powers who help to supply or fund them, analysts say.

"It's a war of attrition," said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of security studies at King's College London. "You are trying to grind down the other side and their willingness to sustain pressure and cost."

The widespread use of drones in Sudan is part of a global trend that includes wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; in Sudan the warring parties have acquired sophisticated military technology through powerful foreign allies.

The Sudanese military has acquired drones made by Iran and Turkey, several analysts said, while the R.S.F. has relied on powerful Chinese drones supplied or operated by the United Arab Emirates.

A spokesman for the Sudanese government told journalists last week that a drone strike that hit the capital, Khartoum, had been launched from Ethiopia, which has strong ties to the Emirates. The Ethiopian government did not respond to a request for comment. The Emirates denies backing the R.S.F.

Drones are not unique to Sudan's war. Many African governments as well as armed groups on the continent have scaled up their use of drones in recent years. But Sudan has experienced more drone attacks than any other African country since 2023, according to a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. More than 300 people were killed in drone strikes in the first three weeks of October alone, Mr. Türk said.

Emergency Lawyers, a human rights group that is tracking the violence in Sudan, put the toll in the attack on Nyala at 103 dead. Doctors Without Borders said that it had treated more than 150 patients at the hospital that it runs in the city and that 36 others had been killed. Other casualties had been taken elsewhere.

Neither side in the war claimed responsibility for the attack, but Nyala is a stronghold of the paramilitaries. A spokesman for the Sudanese Army did not reply for a request for comment.

The Sudanese Army and the R.S.F. have used drones differently throughout the war, according to Mohamed Osman, a researcher on Sudan for Human

Rights Watch. The army has used them to strike enemy commanders and supply chains, including fuel depots.

In Nyala, paramilitary commanders live in proximity to the civilian population, Mr. Osman said. Casualties in the attack included combatants, according to Human Rights Watch.

The R.S.F. has used drones to target civilian infrastructure, such as electrical grids in Khartoum and other major cities. Those strikes have affected hospitals and water supplies, threatening civilian life. Both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.

Nafisa Hamid, a mother of five who sells onions at a market in Nyala, said in an interview that the war and its economic fallout had already pushed her to her limit before the attack last week.

"I am very afraid," she said.

Drones have made it nearly impossible for life in Sudan to return to normal, even in areas once considered far from the battlefield.

El Obeid, a city in the North Kordofan region, has been a strategic target for the paramilitaries for months. During the summer, the R.S.F. appeared to be closing in on the city in preparation for a siege.

That direct threat receded when the Sudanese Army retook nearby towns, and a highway

that runs north from El Obeid to the city of Omdurman, near the capital, remains open.

Even so, a report by the U.N. Human Rights Council last week said that “sustained drone attacks along the route continue to impede civilian movement.” It added that strikes on infrastructure in the city had disrupted “access to water, health care and other basic services.”

The increasing prominence of long-range drones in the war has come at a time when there is little movement along the front lines. Sudan is increasingly split; the R.S.F. holds Darfur and much of Kordofan in the west, while the Sudanese armed forces control Khartoum and much of the east.

Blue Nile State, near the border with Ethiopia, also remains heavily contested, and in recent weeks the Sudanese military has gained ground in parts of Kordofan.

While the drones have enabled the combatants to penetrate battle lines without having to launch costly ground offensives, they are unlikely to lead to a shift in battlefield positions.

“Increasingly sophisticated drone capabilities enabled both parties to strike far beyond immediate front lines,” the U.N. said in a report in September.

But it added that “greater technical capability did not bring greater civilian protection.”

Deadly Drones Fail to Provide an Edge in Sudan

H. TAYER SIDOG/REFERS

A Sudanese man received medical treatment after a drone strike in North Kordofan in September.

By MATTHEW MPOKE BIGG

NAIROBI, Kenya — Donkey carts and three-wheeled taxis hauled away the dead and the wounded. The staff at a hospital, run by the charity Doctors Without Borders, was so overwhelmed that security guards had to help unload victims.

Nyala, a city in southwestern Sudan, was attacked last week when a drone landed in a market where people were buying food for dinner and drinking tea in cafes, residents said. Many of the wounded had been hit by shrapnel or suffered severe burns, according to Dale Koninckx, the local project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders.

The use of drones in Sudan's bloody civil war is accelerating, the United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, said last month. The weapons have enabled the Sudanese military and its adversary, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, to reach far beyond the front lines and wreak havoc deep inside enemy territory.

But analysts say the use of sophisticated drones has not given either side a decisive edge in the civil war. Instead, they have become the No. 1 killer of civilians this year, adding to famine and a drought that the United Nations says now covers half of Sudan.

The main benefit of the drone war goes to the Turkish and Chinese companies making the drones, as well as the foreign powers who help to supply or fund them, analysts say.

"It's a war of attrition," said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of security studies at King's College London. "You are trying to grind down the other side and their willingness to sustain pressure and cost."

The widespread use of drones in Sudan is part of a global trend that includes wars in Ukraine and the Middle East; in Sudan the warring parties have acquired sophisticated military technology through powerful foreign allies.

The Sudanese military has acquired drones made by Iran and Turkey, several analysts said, while the R.S.F. has relied on powerful Chinese drones supplied or operated by the United Arab Emirates.

A spokesman for the Sudanese government told journalists last week that a drone strike that hit the capital, Khartoum, had been launched from Ethiopia, which has strong ties to the Emirates. The Ethiopian government did not respond to a request for comment. The Emirates denies backing the R.S.F.

Drones are not unique to Sudan's war. Many African governments as well as armed groups on the continent have scaled up their use of drones in recent years. But Sudan has experienced more drone attacks than any other African country since 2023, according to a report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. More than 300 people were killed in drone strikes in the first three weeks of October alone, Mr. Türk said.

Emergency Lawyers, a human rights group that is tracking the violence in Sudan, put the toll in the attack on Nyala at 103 dead. Doctors Without Borders said that it had treated more than 150 patients at the hospital that it runs in the city and that 36 others had been killed. Other casualties had been taken elsewhere.

Neither side in the war claimed responsibility for the attack, but Nyala is a stronghold of the paramilitaries. A spokesman for the Sudanese Army did not reply for a request for comment.

The Sudanese Army and the R.S.F. have used drones differently throughout the war, according to Mohamed Osman, a researcher on Sudan for Human

Rights Watch. The army has used them to strike enemy commanders and supply chains, including fuel depots.

In Nyala, paramilitary commanders live in proximity to the civilian population, Mr. Osman said. Casualties in the attack included combatants, according to Human Rights Watch.

The R.S.F. has used drones to target civilian infrastructure, such as electrical grids in Khartoum and other major cities. Those strikes have affected hospitals and water supplies, threatening civilian life. Both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.

Nafisa Hamid, a mother of five who sells onions at a market in Nyala, said in an interview that the war and its economic fallout had already pushed her to her limit before the attack last week.

"I am very afraid," she said.

Drones have made it nearly impossible for life in Sudan to return to normal, even in areas once considered far from the battlefield.

El Obeid, a city in the North Kordofan region, has been a strategic target for the paramilitaries for months. During the summer, the R.S.F. appeared to be closing in on the city in preparation for a siege.

That direct threat receded when the Sudanese Army retook nearby towns, and a highway

that runs north from El Obeid to the city of Omdurman, near the capital, remains open.

Even so, a report by the U.N. Human Rights Council last week said that “sustained drone attacks along the route continue to impede civilian movement.” It added that strikes on infrastructure in the city had disrupted “access to water, health care and other basic services.”

The increasing prominence of long-range drones in the war has come at a time when there is little movement along the front lines. Sudan is increasingly split; the R.S.F. holds Darfur and much of Kordofan in the west, while the Sudanese armed forces control Khartoum and much of the east.

Blue Nile State, near the border with Ethiopia, also remains heavily contested, and in recent weeks the Sudanese military has gained ground in parts of Kordofan.

While the drones have enabled the combatants to penetrate battle lines without having to launch costly ground offensives, they are unlikely to lead to a shift in battlefield positions.

“Increasingly sophisticated drone capabilities enabled both parties to strike far beyond immediate front lines,” the U.N. said in a report in September.

But it added that “greater technical capability did not bring greater civilian protection.”

Anthrax in African Park Kills Dozens of Hippos

By EPHRAT LIVNI

An anthrax outbreak in a park in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been killing hippopotamuses, threatening vulnerable wildlife and raising concerns about human exposure to the disease.

The outbreak at Virunga National Park — Africa's oldest national park — has killed 30 hippopotamuses since September, when observers first started noticing suspicious carcasses, Laura Parker, who leads the park's conservation programs, said in an email on Tuesday. The cause of the animals' deaths, and the outbreak, has since been confirmed by laboratory analyses, she noted.

This is the second outbreak of anthrax in the park since last year, and it comes as Congo is contending with an Ebola epidemic that has killed more than 4,800 people since May and strained the country's resources.

Doctors who have analyzed anthrax outbreaks in the region say that the disease represents a significant public health challenge, intersecting with issues like food insecurity, conflict and poverty, and disproportionately affecting rural populations with limited access to health care.

Park officials have been raising awareness among local communities to ensure people do not touch or consume meat from any affected carcasses and report any such finds to the authorities, Ms. Parker said.

"Virunga's response is focused on surveillance, safe carcass management and reducing risks to both wildlife and people. Teams are monitoring the affected area, documenting new mortalities and coordinating the safe handling and disposal of carcasses," she said.

Anthrax is a zoonotic disease caused by a bacterium found naturally in soil around the world. It often affects livestock and wild animals that can become infected when they breathe in, eat or drink spores in contaminated soil, plants or water. The spores can lie dormant in soil for years or decades, so outbreaks recur in areas where they are already in the environment, as in the national park.

Last year's anthrax outbreak killed about 65 hippos in the park and affected people in the region. Human exposure to anthrax is most commonly linked to contact with infected animals, and community outreach is vital to preventing deaths or illness in people, public health experts say.

Anthrax outbreaks are linked to unusual climatic conditions, including prolonged dry periods, and a lack of rain may be to blame for the latest episodes of the disease, park officials surmise. There has been significant rainfall of late and no new cases confirmed in two weeks, so they are cautiously optimistic, but monitoring protocols continue, Ms. Parker said.

Virunga National Park is recognized by UNESCO as a World

Calls Grow Among Iranians to Develop a Nuclear Arsenal

By ERIKA SOLOMON

A poster of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the slain supreme leader, at a Tehran rally Wednesday marking the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover.

ARASH SHANGUISHI/POLARIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

From pulpits at Friday Prayer to street rallies, Iranian clerics and officials are increasingly urging the country's leaders to reverse their longtime pledge not to pursue nuclear weapons.

This demand, once seen as a fringe position held by hard-liners, is moving into mainstream public debate, and the shift could have dramatic consequences for Iran, whose government has for decades argued that its nuclear program was solely for peaceful purposes.

"We must be equipped with nuclear weapons — so that we can fight the criminal America with strength, God willing," Ali Sepahvand, the Friday Prayer leader in Iran's western city of Kuhdasht, said last week, according to a widely distributed video.

As his voice echoed through a prayer hall, covered in photographs of commanders killed in the war with the United States and Israel this past year, the congregants chanted: "Nuclear deterrence is our inalienable right!"

The growing calls for Iran to pursue nuclear weapons come as the country's leaders engage in diplomatic efforts to stave off renewed war with the United States and Israel, an outcome widely considered likely after the American midterm elections on Tuesday.

For decades, Iran's officials have publicly endorsed the fatwa, or religious edict, from its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which forbade the development and use of nuclear weapons. Issued in his capacity as the head of Iran's theocratic state, his decree barred Iranian institutions, including the military and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, from pursuing a nuclear bomb.

Yet at the same time, Western intelligence agencies in past years reported signs Iran was enriching uranium to levels close to those that could be used to develop a bomb. Some officials in Israel and the United States accused Iran of preparing to build one, regardless of the fatwa.

To curb this threat, the United States and other world powers reached an agreement with Iran in 2015 to restrict its nuclear activities. Three years later, President Trump pulled out of that agreement.

Ayatollah Khamenei's strategy, regional analysts say, had been to keep Iran's nuclear intentions ambiguous in hopes of deterring attacks on Iran without it actually becoming a nuclear power.

But that approach failed to prevent the two wars Israel and the United States have waged against Iran since June 2025 — including

Leily Nikounazar and Sanam Ma-hoozi contributed reporting

the one in which Mr. Khamenei was himself killed in February.

"He created this neither-in-nor-out situation, where they paid for a bomb they didn't have," said Mohammad Ali Shabani, an Iran analyst who edits the independent regional news site Amwaj.media. "Now, there is this sense that unless you have this ultimate weapon, you could end up at the mercy of not just the U.S., but Israel, at any point."

President Trump's own comments may strengthen this assessment, analysts say.

"If they had a nuclear weapon, I'd be calling the supreme leader and I'd be saying, 'Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?' As opposed to bombing the crap out of him," Mr. Trump said at the Republican midterm convention in September.

Inside Iran, calls for withdrawing from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or N.P.T., which prohibits development of a nuclear weapon, have been growing ever since Israel and the United States attacked in 2025.

In recent weeks, an increasing number of Iranian political and religious figures have added their voices to this chorus, suggesting to some Iran analysts that there is an effort orchestrated, or at least enabled, by the country's leadership.

It is unclear whether serious debate over Iran's nuclear doctrine has reached the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. But on Saturday, Iran's top national security figure, Mohsen Rezaei, said in an interview on state television that Iran's leaders were discussing it.

"No new decision has been made yet," he said. "Of course, the debate now is whether we want to

Facing renewed war and wondering what is gained by restraint.

keep the same doctrine we had before the war, if war breaks out again."

Advocating for withdrawal from the N.P.T. was once a minority position within Iran's leadership, said Mohammad Ghaderi, a foreign affairs expert in Tehran.

Now, he argued, it is becoming a majority view. "They argue that if the military threats from the United States and Israel persist, withdrawing from the N.P.T. represents a crucial step toward establishing deterrence," he said.

Raising the nuclear prospect at a time when Iran could be at the cusp of another possible attack by the United States or Israel may itself be a strategy, said Omid Memarian, an Iran analyst at DAWN, a Washington-based Middle East research group.

Mr. Rezaei's entry into the debate, while Qatar has been leading intensive mediation efforts between Washington and Tehran, may be an attempt to push the United States to reach a deal, Mr. Memarian said.

"They are playing with this card: If the negotiation fails, we will seek a different path, and it will be costly for you," he said.

Especially notable has been the number of Friday Prayer leaders adding their voices to the calls and effectively challenging the late ay-atollah's fatwa.

"The taboo is gone," said Mr. Shabani. "A religious foundation for the shift is here. The question is whether a strategic or political shift will follow."

Some of Iran's leading reformist figures, like President Masoud Pezeshkian and former President Hassan Rouhani, continue to back Iran's peaceful nuclear doctrine.

In Iran's leading reformist newspaper, Shargh, a former diplomat, Kourosh Ahmadi, warned this week that abandoning that doctrine poses grave risks. The plethora of pro-weapon statements from prominent figures, he said, "is dangerous because it makes the work of officials trying to prevent another war more diffi

cult."

And until Iran could manage to build a bomb, he argued, the chances of being attacked would actually increase.

After U.S. and Israeli strikes wiped out most of Iran's top leadership and battered its infrastructure, it is harder for critics of the nuclear option to make their case, said Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank.

"The central problem for advocates of restraint is explaining what Iran gained from remaining below the nuclear threshold," he said.

At the same time, he said, a new round of U.S. attacks “could strengthen the very arguments for the nuclear weapons that Washington says it wants to prevent.”

At public prayers in Tehran on Friday, the prayer leader, Mohammad Javad Haj Ali Akbari, declared that changing Iran's nuclear doctrine was "a national demand," according to a video posted on social media.

His congregants immediately responded with a refrain common at government-sponsored rallies from decades past: "Nuclear energy is our inalienable right!"

"This is an old slogan," he told them, and smiled: "We have gone way beyond that."

Sellers Blur Location of West Bank Properties, Canadians Claim

A Palestinian harvesting olives last month near the Israeli settlement of Shiloh in the West Bank.

LTD CORREA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

By EPHRAT LIVNI

Should consumers be told if so-called dream homes promoted for sale in a foreign country stand on land their government deems illegally occupied?

Six Canadians think so, and recently filed a complaint with their country's Competition Bureau about Israeli real estate roadshows targeting customers abroad. Some firms, the complainants say, deceptively tout properties in the occupied West Bank as if these were within Israel, obscuring legal, financial and other risks associated with the sales.

The complaint, a novel legal approach to the issue, follows protests over Israeli real-estate marketing tours in Canada, Britain and the United States in recent years. It comes as the Canadian government wrestles with how to respond to years of rapidly expanding Israeli settlement in the West Bank and the Israeli government's failure to curb a rise in extremist settlers' violence.

About three million Palestinians and, as of now, about 500,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, a territory Israel occupied in 1967 after a war with neighboring Arab states. Over the years, Israel has allowed settlers to build and expand the country's hold on the territory, which some religious Jews consider part of a divinely promised homeland.

Much of the international community considers Israel's occupation and settlement of the territory to be illegal under international law, a position Israel disputes.

In September, Canada joined Britain and France in announcing it will ban imports of goods from Israeli settlements to underscore the position that Israeli occupation of the West Bank is illegal and undermines prospects for peace and establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Canadian government in August "strongly" advised businesses against "economic and financial activities associated with Israeli settlements," warning of "significant legal, financial and reputational risks" in view of the occupation's illegality.

The recent Canadian complainants argue that the Canadian government's statements and actions highlight the threat to consumers who may be exposed to deceptive marketing. Some sales pitches and materials, the complainants say, obfuscate important information, giving Canadians the impression that investing in homes in the occupied West Bank is indistinguishable from buying property within Israel's internationally recognized borders.

"Given the possibility that future Canadian measures could extend to settlement real estate or related services," their filing states, "the financial and legal consequences for Canadian consumers interested in purchasing

Israeli real estate that may in re-

ality be located in Israeli settle-

ments could be grave and far-

reaching."

When the location of properties in the West Bank is obscured, and the implications of purchasing there are not made clear, "there's so much at stake for the Canadian consumer," said Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, the executive director of Global Echo Litigation Center, one of the nonprofits behind the complaint.

It accuses real-estate firms marketing to foreigners of a "pattern of false and misleading representations," echoing the condemnation that such roadshows have drawn on multiple continents but targeting the approach using competition law.

In England, about 100 lawmakers in June called for the cancellation of traveling Israeli real-estate events, calling them inconsistent with international law. In New York, ducling protests took place when such events were held in May, with some demonstrators objecting to and others defending the presentations. The various Israeli roadshows have also generated demonstrations in New Jersey and California, as well as in Canada.

The six Canadians bringing the complaint, primarily from Palestinian and Jewish communities, want competition-law enforcers to scrutinize the websites and other marketing materials of several businesses in Israel and Canada that participated in events in Toronto and Montreal from 2024 to 2026, and to stop any obfuscation by these firms and others.

While five firms are specifically named, the filing argues that the tactics of these businesses — including mingling listings of properties within and outside Israel proper, or referring to homes in settlements as "in Israel" — are representative of a broader approach by some property promoters that puts Canadians in peril. The live named companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Any six adult residents of Canada can apply to the Competition Bureau for an inquiry into claims of anticompetitive activity, including accusations of misrepresentation to advance business interests. The bureau must launch a formal investigation if the request meets technical requirements, Rosalie Leblanc, a spokeswoman for the Competition Bureau, said in an email confirming receipt of the complaint. But she declined to provide details, citing confidentiality requirements.

Pierre Larouche, a competition law specialist and law professor at the University of Montreal who was not involved in the filing, said in an interview that the complaint takes a “clever” approach to a fraught issue, though it is not guaranteed to succeed. While the backdrop is obviously political, the claim that businesses may be misrepresenting critical information to consumers about property location is a relatively straightforward legal matter within the Competition Bureau’s remit, he said.

The recent challenge to promotions of West Bank real estate — filed on behalf of the parties by Global Echo Litigation Center and Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights — is reminiscent of a lengthy legal battle brought by one man in Canada in 2017 over wines produced in settlements in occupied territories that were sold as products “of Israel.”

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency ultimately ruled in 2022 that "Product of Israel" labels affixed to wines produced in illegal West Bank settlements were "false" and violated consumer protection law.

Firm Making Drone Boats Wins Its Suit Against Navy

By KATE KELLY

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has found that the U.S. Navy improperly barred the drone boat provider Saildrone Inc. from competing for a potentially lucrative contract, a striking victory for a small defense-technology company.

Saildrone, based in Alameda, Calif., bid early this year for a chance to build a new type of unmanned vessel for the Navy, taking advantage of budget dollars provided by President Trump's sprawling domestic policy bill he signed into law last year. But after the initial phase of competition, the company was excluded from demonstrating its boat at sea, ruining its chances to be selected for the new program.

Saildrone and a similarly situated drone boat company, Blue Water Autonomy, then sued the government in the Washington-based U.S. Court of Federal Claims, alleging that the Navy's evaluation process had been improper.

The Navy disagreed. But in an opinion dated Nov. 3, a claims court judge sided with Saildrone. "The court finds that the Navy engaged in disparate treatment," Judge Philip S. Hadji wrote.

In contrast, the judge found that the Navy's review — and elimination — of Blue Water Autonomy for the drone boat contract was reasonable, denying its protest.

The fierce competition for the drone boat contract was explored in a New York Times article over the summer.

In his opinion, Judge Hadji demanded that the Navy offer Saildrone a new opportunity to test its vessel for the Navy at sea — the final, and most rigorous, step of the competition after which contract decisions are made.

The judge also ordered that until the evaluation is completed, the Navy must not obligate any more than \$1.5 billion for the construction of the type of drone boat Saildrone seeks to build. That cap leaves about \$600 million untouched for a period.

A Navy spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a statement Monday, Richard Jenkins, Saildrone's chief executive, said that "the future of naval warfare will be fought on the water, not in a courtroom."

"We are eager to move beyond this litigation and return our entire focus to delivering world-leading maritime autonomy for the U.S. Navy," the statement continued.

Judge Hadji's decision marks an unusual victory for the industry, in which most company protests against government bidding decisions do not prevail. It is also a challenge for the Defense Department as it tries to streamline its sourcing and purchasing of equipment to better arm troops.

Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon has sought to modernize and quicken the procurement process. Prolonged waits for contracts and funding are so customary that contractors sometimes refer to the gaps between developments — periods so long that they can go out of business before government money arrives — as “the valley of death.”

The bidding to build medium-sized unmanned surface vessels, as the competition at issue in Saildrone's lawsuit was known, was supposed to exemplify the department's new approach.

Drone-based defense equipment has become increasingly critical in war zones like Ukraine, and the Navy has been trying to build out a drone vessel program for years. The merits of such equipment were apparent in June, when a sea drone rescued two downed helicopter pilots from the Strait of Hormuz.

But the medium drone boat program was messy from the start, leaving some participants confused and frustrated about the Navy's review process.

Saildrone and Blue Water each filed suit in late June; each contended that its r elimination from the sea trial phase of the competition was unjust.

Tony Mazzeo, a former Navy lawyer who represents government contractors at the Norfolk, Va.-based Woods Rogers, said Saildrone's favorable ruling was notable because winning a fight over a government bidding process "is an uphill battle."

Mr. Mazzeo noted that in fiscal year 2025, the Government Accountability Office, which adjudicates bid protests, sustained just 14 percent of the protests it got. The Court of Federal Claims, where Saildrone sued, has a higher legal threshold, he said, indicating that a company's chances of success there are even slimmer.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

The Israeli Election

NEWS ANALYSIS

A President With a Tough Hand to Play Has a Hole Card: A Pardon

President Isaac Herzog with Central Elections Committee members on Wednesday in Jerusalem.

POOL PHOTO BY OLIVER FTOUSSI

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — For five years, Isaac Herzog has tried to avoid controversy and heal rifts in his largely ceremonial role as the president of Israel. Now, following last week's inconclusive election, he must make a decision that is likely to roll one half or the other of a fractured country.

One of the president's few powers is the ability to grant a party leader the mandate to try and form a government. Typically, this is assigned to the head of the party that has won the most votes or appears to have the best chance of building a coalition that would command a majority in Parliament. But the law is vague, giving the president a lot of leeway in the process.

Mr. Herzog, the scion of an illustrious Israeli family who is expected to remain involved in the backroom talks throughout the process, will have to draw on his skills as a savvy negotiator and mediator — expertise he honed over his years as a lawyer and politician, including as leader of the center-left Labor party.

After working in law, he served as a government secretary under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and as a minister in multiple governments. He ran a credible but unsuccessful campaign to replace Mr. Netanyahu in the 2015 election and went on to lead the Jewish Agency, an organization that serves as a bridge between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

A longtime advocate of national unity, he will most likely work to enable as broad a government as possible, analysts say, to try to get Israel out of what many call the political "plonter," a Yiddish word to describe a mess, like an intricate knot that is hard to unravel.

"This is his big moment," Nachman Shai, a former Labor minister and lawmaker, said of

Mr. Herzog.

"He is a polished, creative politician," Mr. Shai added. "Not everyone will like his ideas, but I'm sure he will be looking for solutions to build a coalition that are out of the box."

On Wednesday, representatives of the 11 political parties elected to the new Parliament started to troop through the presidential residence in a leafy neighborhood of Jerusalem to consult with Mr. Herzog and to recommend their candidate for the premiership.

Most party leaders were expected to back either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime right-wing leader, or his main center-right rival, Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief.

Neither man's political bloc won an outright majority of 61 seats in the 120-member Parliament. Mr. Netanyahu's Likud took 27 seats, making it the largest party, but his hard-right, religious coalition's tally fell to 53 seats.

Mr. Eisenkot's main bloc of Jewish opposition parties secured 48 seats. If the Arab-led parties that oppose Mr. Netanyahu and won 19 seats are recommending him to Mr. Herzog, the president may well grant him the first opportunity to try and form a government. Some of Mr. Eisenkot's Jewish allies, however, have balked at the idea of a government relying on Arab support.

Mr. Herzog cannot take political sides and must remain a unifying figurehead above the fray. He has called for a “stable” government without specifying how it should be formed and has called on the parties’ representatives to consult with him with open minds and hearts.

The law allows the assigned candidate 28 days to try to form a government, though the president can extend that period by up to 14 days. If the first attempt fails, the president can give another candidate a chance or refer the efforts to Parliament. If no party leader is able to form a governing coalition, new elections would be held — an outcome Mr. Herzog has urged the leaders to avoid.

The kind of broad unity government that Mr. Herzog may envisage would most likely require some kind of power-sharing deal between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Eisenkot — a prospect that faces huge obstacles.

Mr. Eisenkot says that Mr. Netanyahu must be replaced and has ruled out serving under him. Mr. Netanyahu, who has been on trial for six years following corruption charges in three separate but interlocking cases, cannot serve in a government as a minister. According to Israeli law, only a prime minister can serve under indictment.

Mr. Herzog has a potentially valuable, if highly contentious, card to play to try to bring Mr. Netanyahu on side with a unifying coalition, analysts say.

The president has the authority to issue pardons, generally for people already convicted of crimes. Mr. Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing, submitted a pre-emptive request for a pardon during his trial a year ago.

Mr. Herzog has instead offered to try to initiate a mediation process to reach a plea deal and invited the attorney general and Mr. Netanyahu's lawyer for talks. Mr. Netanyahu's team never replied.

"A pardon can be part of a package deal," Mr. Shai said. "It could be a way for Mr. Herzog to come to a compromise with him. Everyone is tired of the trial by now, and nobody knows how it will end."

"Herzog is energetic, superactive, primed for action," he said.

"People forget he is one of the most experienced people around," he added.

Mitchell Barak, an analyst who worked as an aide to Mr. Netanyahu and later for President Shimon Peres, a former Labor leader, said Mr. Herzog's history with the prime minister and the "ace" of a potential pardon could be viewed either as a conflict of interest in negotiations or as an advantage.

"He is holding a get-out-of-jail-free card for Netanyahu," Mr. Barak said.

"Or you could call it leverage," he added.

The president's office dismissed suggestions of a conflict of interest, saying the pardon and the efforts toward forming a government were two different tracks based on separate laws.

As president, Mr. Herzog oversaw negotiations that tried, and failed, to reach a compromise over the Netanyahu government's plans for a judicial overhaul that caused turmoil in Israel. Mr. Shai said that many Israelis had expected Mr. Herzog to take a stronger stand against the government's moves, and that the episode harmed his public standing.

Mr. Herzog also appears to have tried to build confidence on both sides of Israel's political divide.

He has spoken out against what he called “a terrible process of brutalization” creeping into Israeli society, citing a surge of “mob” violence by Jews against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the abuse of detainees in Israeli custody.

Mr. Herzog also recently expunged the criminal record of Elor Azaria, a former soldier who fatally shot a severely wounded Palestinian man at close range while he lay on the ground a decade ago. The man had earlier been seriously injured after he attacked an Israeli checkpoint. The president's move baffled and angered many liberal Israelis but fulfilled a long-sought demand from Israel's right.

Mr. Herzog also has his family legacy and reputation to consider. His grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, was the first Chief Rabbi of the state of Israel. His father, Chaim Herzog, served as the sixth president of Israel.

After the 1984 election, when Mr. Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, then the Likud leader, were in a deadlock, Mr. Herzog's father played an active role in promoting the formation of a unity government, resolving the political impasse.

Mr. Herzog "is part of the country's old guard and political elite with a storied tradition of excellence," said Mr. Barak. "There's a certain responsibility that comes with that."

NEWS ANALYSIS

A President With a Tough Hand to Play Has a Hole Card: A Pardon

President Isaac Herzog with Central Elections Committee members on Wednesday in Jerusalem.

POOL PHOTO BY OLIVER FTOUSSI

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — For five years, Isaac Herzog has tried to avoid controversy and heal rifts in his largely ceremonial role as the president of Israel. Now, following last week's inconclusive election, he must make a decision that is likely to roll one half or the other of a fractured country.

One of the president's few powers is the ability to grant a party leader the mandate to try and form a government. Typically, this is assigned to the head of the party that has won the most votes or appears to have the best chance of building a coalition that would command a majority in Parliament. But the law is vague, giving the president a lot of leeway in the process.

Mr. Herzog, the scion of an illustrious Israeli family who is expected to remain involved in the backroom talks throughout the process, will have to draw on his skills as a savvy negotiator and mediator — expertise he honed over his years as a lawyer and politician, including as leader of the center-left Labor party.

After working in law, he served as a government secretary under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and as a minister in multiple governments. He ran a credible but unsuccessful campaign to replace Mr. Netanyahu in the 2015 election and went on to lead the Jewish Agency, an organization that serves as a bridge between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

A longtime advocate of national unity, he will most likely work to enable as broad a government as possible, analysts say, to try to get Israel out of what many call the political "plonter," a Yiddish word to describe a mess, like an intricate knot that is hard to unravel.

"This is his big moment," Nachman Shai, a former Labor minister and lawmaker, said of

Mr. Herzog.

"He is a polished, creative politician," Mr. Shai added. "Not everyone will like his ideas, but I'm sure he will be looking for solutions to build a coalition that are out of the box."

On Wednesday, representatives of the 11 political parties elected to the new Parliament started to troop through the presidential residence in a leafy neighborhood of Jerusalem to consult with Mr. Herzog and to recommend their candidate for the premiership.

Most party leaders were expected to back either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longtime right-wing leader, or his main center-right rival, Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief.

Neither man's political bloc won an outright majority of 61 seats in the 120-member Parliament. Mr. Netanyahu's Likud took 27 seats, making it the largest party, but his hard-right, religious coalition's tally fell to 53 seats.

Mr. Eisenkot's main bloc of Jewish opposition parties secured 48 seats. If the Arab-led parties that oppose Mr. Netanyahu and won 19 seats are recommending him to Mr. Herzog, the president may well grant him the first opportunity to try and form a government. Some of Mr. Eisenkot's Jewish allies, however, have balked at the idea of a government relying on Arab support.

Mr. Herzog cannot take political sides and must remain a unifying figurehead above the fray. He has called for a “stable” government without specifying how it should be formed and has called on the parties’ representatives to consult with him with open minds and hearts.

The law allows the assigned candidate 28 days to try to form a government, though the president can extend that period by up to 14 days. If the first attempt fails, the president can give another candidate a chance or refer the efforts to Parliament. If no party leader is able to form a governing coalition, new elections would be held — an outcome Mr. Herzog has urged the leaders to avoid.

The kind of broad unity government that Mr. Herzog may envisage would most likely require some kind of power-sharing deal between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Eisenkot — a prospect that faces huge obstacles.

Mr. Eisenkot says that Mr. Netanyahu must be replaced and has ruled out serving under him. Mr. Netanyahu, who has been on trial for six years following corruption charges in three separate but interlocking cases, cannot serve in a government as a minister. According to Israeli law, only a prime minister can serve under indictment.

Mr. Herzog has a potentially valuable, if highly contentious, card to play to try to bring Mr. Netanyahu on side with a unifying coalition, analysts say.

The president has the authority to issue pardons, generally for people already convicted of crimes. Mr. Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing, submitted a pre-emptive request for a pardon during his trial a year ago.

Mr. Herzog has instead offered to try to initiate a mediation process to reach a plea deal and invited the attorney general and Mr. Netanyahu's lawyer for talks. Mr. Netanyahu's team never replied.

"A pardon can be part of a package deal," Mr. Shai said. "It could be a way for Mr. Herzog to come to a compromise with him. Everyone is tired of the trial by now, and nobody knows how it will end."

"Herzog is energetic, superactive, primed for action," he said.

"People forget he is one of the most experienced people around," he added.

Mitchell Barak, an analyst who worked as an aide to Mr. Netanyahu and later for President Shimon Peres, a former Labor leader, said Mr. Herzog's history with the prime minister and the "ace" of a potential pardon could be viewed either as a conflict of interest in negotiations or as an advantage.

"He is holding a get-out-of-jail-free card for Netanyahu," Mr. Barak said.

"Or you could call it leverage," he added.

The president's office dismissed suggestions of a conflict of interest, saying the pardon and the efforts toward forming a government were two different tracks based on separate laws.

As president, Mr. Herzog oversaw negotiations that tried, and failed, to reach a compromise over the Netanyahu government's plans for a judicial overhaul that caused turmoil in Israel. Mr. Shai said that many Israelis had expected Mr. Herzog to take a stronger stand against the government's moves, and that the episode harmed his public standing.

Mr. Herzog also appears to have tried to build confidence on both sides of Israel's political divide.

He has spoken out against what he called “a terrible process of brutalization” creeping into Israeli society, citing a surge of “mob” violence by Jews against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the abuse of detainees in Israeli custody.

Mr. Herzog also recently expunged the criminal record of Elor Azaria, a former soldier who fatally shot a severely wounded Palestinian man at close range while he lay on the ground a decade ago. The man had earlier been seriously injured after he attacked an Israeli checkpoint. The president's move baffled and angered many liberal Israelis but fulfilled a long-sought demand from Israel's right.

Mr. Herzog also has his family legacy and reputation to consider. His grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, was the first Chief Rabbi of the state of Israel. His father, Chaim Herzog, served as the sixth president of Israel.

After the 1984 election, when Mr. Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, then the Likud leader, were in a deadlock, Mr. Herzog's father played an active role in promoting the formation of a unity government, resolving the political impasse.

Mr. Herzog "is part of the country's old guard and political elite with a storied tradition of excellence," said Mr. Barak. "There's a certain responsibility that comes with that."

NEWS ANALYSIS

Arab Israelis Gained. Will They Help Govern?

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and NATAN ODENHEIMER

Israel's democracy is facing a huge test after Arab political parties made historic gains in last week's election.

And opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are facing an enormous dilemma over whether Arab lawmakers should now be given a share of power in a new government.

Mr. Netanyahu's opponents secured a clear majority in the Parliament by winning 67 out of 120 seats. But 19 of these were won by the Arab parties, and their inclusion in a governing coalition is seen as so problematic by many Israeli Jews that opposition leaders are putting themselves through contortions looking for ways to form a government that would not rely on Arab lawmakers.

The aversion to building a government with the two main Arab factions — the United Arab List, or Raam, and the Joint List, which comprises three smaller parties — is enormously frustrating to political activists who helped drive Arab turnout to a near-record high of 77 percent last week.

"Why is it so complicated? A vote of an Arab citizen of Israel should equal no less than the vote of a Jewish citizen," said Alon-Lee Green, a founder of the Jewish-Arab organization Standing Together.

The efforts to sideline the Arab parties also fuel complaints among many Arab citizens, who represent about 20 percent of the country's population, that Israeli Jews welcome their participation in the political process only up to the point where they might wield real power.

"This is the problem with Israeli democracy," said Thabet Abu Rass, a longtime advocate for Arab-Jewish partnership. "It's a democracy for Jews, but it's a Jewish state for Arab citizens like me. We Arab citizens are entitled to the same rights, and would like to use them to dictate who's going to lead the country."

"But some Jews say no, democracy is for Jews only," he said. This has become especially true since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, he said.

Indeed, welcoming the Arab parties into a new government, particularly at a time of conflict, is dismissed by many Jewish Israelis as unworkable, overly risky, and even unconscionable.

Few would deny that racism plays a part. But Israeli Jews also view the particular Arab parties — Raam, headed by Mansour Abbas, and the Joint List, led by Yousef Jabareen — with varying degrees of skepticism.

RAHMOOD ILLEAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Mr. Abbas's party has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood movement, as does Hamas, a history that right-wing critics often highlight in denouncing him.

Supporters of the Raam party on election night last week. That coalition, and the Joint List, picked up 19 seats for Arab Israelis.

But Mr. Abbas was once the first lawmaker from an independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, and he has won many Jewish admirers by working with Jewish lawmakers. He has focused on domestic issues affecting Arab citizens, like violent crime and discriminatory housing policies, and devoted little attention to Israel's policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Joint List's members, by contrast, have focused more on Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories and have generally preferred to criticize government policy from the opposition. Some have denounced Israeli military actions, assailed Israel's war in Gaza as genocide or referred to slain Palestinian militants as "mar-tyrs."

"Abbas managed to make himself more legitimate because he made it very clear he's in politics to look after the domestic affairs of his own community," said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. "But you don't hear the same music from the members of the Joint List."

Mr. Plesner noted that even Mr. Abbas, when asked whether he supports toppling Hamas, deflects the question. "Any Zionist Israeli expects that any government would work toward toppling Hamas, because of what Hamas did and wants to do to Israel," Mr. Plesner said.

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Jabareen bristle at such questions as demeaning and tantamount to demanding loyalty oaths. Both men have condemned the Oct. 7 attack, and Mr. Abbas has said that such violence has only harmed the Palestinian cause.

Before last week's election, Arab parties never held more than 15 seats in Parliament. Until Mr. Abbas joined the governing coalition in 2021, Arab party leaders generally resisted taking part in governments and thus sharing in responsibility for Israel's occupation and military actions.

Jewish lawmakers see their inclusion as problematic.

But discriminatory policies, like the demolition of Arab citizens' homes built without official permits, and soaring crime in Arab towns that Arab Israelis attribute to police negligence, have prodded lawmakers like Mr. Jahareen and others in the Joint List to vow to do all they can to drive Mr. Netanyahu's government from power.

Discrimination against Arab citizens also undercuts Israel when it trumpets its democratic credentials beyond its borders.

For the anti-Netanyahu opposition, led by the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, the options for assembling a governing coalition are all uncomfortable.

He could try forming a minority government of fewer than 61 seats in which one or both of the Arab parties would be left outside the coalition but would cooperate to some degree, opposing no-confidence votes in Parliament. Or he could agree to a unity government, if Mr. Netanyahu or some of his allies were to accept the opposition's terms to share power.

Mr. Eisenkot could also accept a new round of elections in hopes of a better result, though many in the opposition fear this would benefit Mr. Netanyahu, whose alliance netted only 53 seats in the balloting last week.

Rula Daood, another leader of Standing Together, said that by shying away from including Arab parties in a new government, Mr. Eisenkot was playing into Mr. Netanyahu's hands. She accused the prime minister of seeking to delegitimize the Arab vote by claiming, without evidence, that Arab parties stole the election.

Zvi Hauser, a former center-right lawmaker, warned in the newspaper Israel Hayom that bringing the Arab parties into government could cause a catastrophe. Coalition members, he

said, would hold "worldviews that disagree even on basic questions of national security."

Mr. Hauser wrote that every vote on policies affecting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, enforcement of housing rules in Arab communities or the demolition of the homes of those who attack Israelis could become "a test of coalition survival."

Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, said that he was crestfallen last week when Mr. Abbas, whom he admired, sidestepped a television interviewer's challenge that he

label Hamas a terrorist organization.

Mr. Halevi has denounced Mr. Netanyahu for dividing the Israeli mainstream into his coalition — which puts a priority on Israel's Jewish nature — and an opposition that prioritizes Israel's democratic values. But Mr. Halevi said he feared that if Mr. Eisenkot formed a government relying on the two Arab parties, it would destroy the possibility of repairing that rupture for a generation.

"We will be seen as preferring anti-Zionists to our fellow Jews," he said. "And that will be seen very widely by Jews on the right, and even some in the center, as a betrayal of the most basic Jewish solidarity."

Among Mr. Eisenkot's allies, Yair Golan of the left-wing Democrats party has spoken most enthusiastically of Arab party support. In an interview, he said Israel needed to cure itself of the "psychosis" of treating Arab citizens as potential traitors or second-class citizens, arguing that the Arab public had overwhelmingly proved its loyalty and solidarity since Oct. 7.

"They are a part of us," he said. "We are on the same team."

Mr. Golan, a former deputy chief of staff in the Israeli military, also dismissed the idea that it was risky to national security to include Arab lawmakers in the cabinet, saying that they would be excluded from the smaller security cabinet where operational decisions are made.

Mr. Golan said he envisioned a government including Raam and relying on outside support from the Joint List. He compared this to the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, which led effectively with just 56 seats in Parliament and outside Arab backing.

Some Israelis say the election results have presented Israel with a golden opportunity. By making common cause with Arab lawmakers, they say, the opposition could finally establish a national commission of inquiry into the security failures that led up to the Oct. 7 attacks and adopt military conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have long been exempt.

"It's the most delicious moment," said Yosef Abramowitz, a Jewish renewable-energy entrepreneur who said he had voted for Raam.

"Everybody has to grow up — now," he said. "The Arabs have to break free of the Palestinian narrative as their organizing thesis. And Israeli Jewish society has to say that a national commission of inquiry and a full military draft are more important than the mythology that all Arabs are terrorists and terror supporters."

From Celebration to Silence, World Reacts to Trump's Midterm Loss

This article is by Jim Tankersley, Damien Cave and Annie Correal.

A banner in Iran on Wednesday with Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy; President Trump; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel; and Vice President JD Vance.

ARASH KHAMOOSHUPOLARS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Global leaders offered little sympathy to President Trump after his party was blown out in the midterm elections, even as they wondered what the result might mean for trade, energy and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Mr. Trump's enemies abroad — and many of his estranged frenemies — could not hide their glee on Wednesday morning after Democrats seized the House and Senate. There were celebrations in Iran and China, in Spain and South Africa, and from some European officials in Brussels.

From many of Mr. Trump's closest allies, there was largely silence. There was no official reaction from leaders in Britain, France, Germany or Italy — or in the Latin American countries now led by right-wing leaders.

It was a reflection, analysts said, of the shocking scale of the defeat — and of a desire not to further antagonize Mr. Trump.

"In response to a Democrat-controlled Congress," said Ja-Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, "Trump could try to find distractions elsewhere, including on tariffs and the use of force."

Here are six things to know about the global fallout.

1. U.S.'s aggrieved friends cheered. Mr. Trump has antagonized some traditional American allies this term, and those allies were happy to needle him on Wednesday.

Ronald Lamola, South Africa's foreign minister, said in a text that the election results were "a great victory for democracy and the rule of law in the USA and the world." The relationship between the two countries has been tense since Mr. Trump took office and falsely alleged that white South Africans were being killed in a genocide and that the government was seizing white-owned land.

Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, a vocal Trump critic facing a snap election this month, said the returns showed a global surge of far-right parties was "no longer growing: It is collapsing."

"Yesterday, American society voted against policies that only impoverish," he wrote online.

Liberal E.U. officials, who have battled Mr. Trump on tariffs, were even more biting.

"This is a spectacular slap in the face for Donald Trump and his policies, and a major victory for American democracy," Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament's international trade committee, said. Sandro Gozi, who represents a French constituency in the European Parliament, called the vote the "beginning of the end of the Trump era."

Central and Eastern Europe, where right-wing nationalist politicians once hitched their fortunes to the president and backed his false claims of winning the 2020 presidential election.

In France, Italy and elsewhere, far-right leaders offered muted reactions that seemed to distance their parties from Mr. Trump.

The president of France's far-right National Rally, Jordan Bardella, told an interviewer, "I am not an American voter, and we must respect the American people's vote, whatever it may be."

Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, said on Wednesday, “I am confident that we will continue to find partners in America with whom we can work closely together.”

3. There was confusion over what's next in Iran...

In Asia, which relies heavily on energy from the Middle East, the Democratic victory initially produced a wisp of optimism that Mr. Trump, rebuked over the war on Iran and high gas prices, would seek to resolve the conflict.

4.... and with trade.

Mr. Trump still has sweeping trade powers. Now that he is no longer concerned about drawing attention to inflation before the elections, he might make a reinvigorated push to impose tariffs on countries like Japan, Vietnam and, especially, China.

"People are deeply uneasy about the Trump administration's past actions and remain anxious about the future," said Kazuhiro Maeshima, a professor of American politics and diplomacy at Sophia University in Tokyo, discussing the mood in Japan.

There were similar concerns in China, along with public revelry. On Weibo, China's dominant social media platform, the hashtag "Trump suffered a complete and utter defeat" trended as results were announced.

Analysts see little reason to believe that Democrats in Congress would be friendlier to Beijing than Mr. Trump. Democrats, too, have increasingly adopted a tougher posture on China when it comes to economic competition.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said the Democratic victories could rattle U.S.-China relations.

Xi Jinping, China's leader; and Mr. Trump reached an understanding at a summit in May in favor of what China calls "constructive, strategic stability." But Mr. Shi predicted that this understanding would break down "because Trump suddenly becomes far from all-powerful."

5. What does it mean for Ukraine?

Ukraine and its European backers spent the last month agonizing over increased tensions between Kyiv and Washington.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration agreed to purchase Russian diesel and urged Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries even as Moscow destroyed Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

There was no immediate consensus about how the vote might change policy on Ukraine.

Moscow was optimistic. "President Trump continues to be in office, and we sincerely hope that he will also continue his peacemaking efforts," the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in comments reported by a Kremlin pool reporter on Telegram.

Several analysts suggested that European leaders should effectively ignore the midterms as they support Ukraine; Washington, they said, would pull back regardless of who is in charge.

It would be a mistake to assume that a Democratic win meant that "we don't have to solve our problems ourselves and the big brother U.S.A. will do everything for us," said Nico Lange, a Ukraine backer who is the director of the Institute for Risk Analysis and International Security in Berlin.

America, he said, "won't do it" — no matter who controls Washington.

6. Caution in the Americas

Mr. Trump's second term has brought major shifts in Latin America. His administration has captured Venezuela's leader, waged an intense pressure campaign on Cuba and clamped down on the Mexican border.

He has also pursued a new military response to drug-trafficking, bombing boat crews, conducting strikes inside Ecuador and Venezuela, and pressing leaders to deliver security wins like taking down cartel heads.

Most of the region's leaders stayed silent after the election, or spoke carefully. "We'll have to wait and see," President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said Wednesday. "Regardless of the election results, we seek the best possible relationship with the United States, always ensuring respect for our sovereignty and territorial integrity."

In Brazil, where the left-wing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won in last month's presidential election, José Guimarães, a minister and adviser to the president, was jubilant, calling the results "a true American tsunami."

5. What does it mean for Ukraine?

Ukraine and its European backers spent the last month agonizing over increased tensions between Kyiv and Washington.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration agreed to purchase Russian diesel and urged Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries even as Moscow destroyed Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

There was no immediate consensus about how the vote might change policy on Ukraine.

Moscow was optimistic. "President Trump continues to be in office, and we sincerely hope that he will also continue his peacemaking efforts," the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in comments reported by a Kremlin pool reporter on Telegram.

Several analysts suggested that European leaders should effectively ignore the midterms as they support Ukraine; Washington, they said, would pull back regardless of who is in charge.

It would be a mistake to assume that a Democratic win meant that "we don't have to solve our problems ourselves and the big brother U.S.A. will do everything for us," said Nico Lange, a Ukraine backer who is the director of the Institute for Risk Analysis and International Security in Berlin.

America, he said, "won't do it" — no matter who controls Washington.

6. Caution in the Americas

Mr. Trump's second term has brought major shifts in Latin America. His administration has captured Venezuela's leader, waged an intense pressure campaign on Cuba and clamped down on the Mexican border.

He has also pursued a new military response to drug-trafficking, bombing boat crews, conducting strikes inside Ecuador and Venezuela, and pressing leaders to deliver security wins like taking down cartel heads.

Most of the region's leaders stayed silent after the election, or spoke carefully. "We'll have to wait and see," President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said Wednesday. "Regardless of the election results, we seek the best possible relationship with the United States, always ensuring respect for our sovereignty and territorial integrity."

In Brazil, where the left-wing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won in last month's presidential election, José Guimarães, a minister and adviser to the president, was jubilant, calling the results "a true American tsunami."

2. Europe's far right was quiet — and so were centrist leaders.

There was mostly silence from outspoken Trump backers across

Reporting was contributed by Pei-Lin Wu in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Chris Buchley in Taipei; Keith Bradsher in Beijing; Laura Chung in Sydney; Javier C. Hernández and Kialo Notoya in Tokyo; Max Kim in Seoul; Pragati K.B. in New Delhi; Megan Specia in London; Jeanna Smialek in Brussels; Carlos Barragán in Madrid; Siobhán O'Grady in Kyin; Ukraine; John Eligon in Johannesburg; Andrew Higgins in Warsaw; Giulia Imbert in Paris; Josephine de La Bruyère in Rome; Tatiana Firsova in Berlin; Veganeh Torbati in Istanbul; Oleg Matsnev in Munich; Emiliano Rodríguez Mega in Mexico City; Genevieve Glatsby in New York; Jody Garcia in Guatemala City; and Jorge Valencia in Bogotá, Colombia.

Iranian leaders stoked that sentiment with a taunting message.

"Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message," Iran's speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote on social media.

On social media, some Iranians joked that while Mr. Trump had started the war partly to topple Iran's authoritarian government, the most significant consequence had been in the United States.

"Eight months of war with Iran. The achievement? Regime change in America!" wrote Seyed Alireza Salehi, an Iran-based religious scholar and commentator.

But some analysts, in Iran and elsewhere, expressed concern that Mr. Trump could indeed re-escalate the war; possibly in conjunction with the embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, worsening the squeeze on oil and gas supplies.

After a recent Russian drone strike in Dnipro. It is unclear what the U.S. election means for Ukraine.

DAVID GUTTERFINDER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Trump's defeat is a victory for the democratic world," he said.

Both chambers of Congress are expected to pursue inquiries into the lethal boat strikes and the deportation agenda.

"Foreign countries and groups know that there will be greater oversight and transparency under the new Congress," Stephen McFarland, a former U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, said on social media, "and that they must prepare for a post-Trump administration — whomever wins — that will not tolerate corruption and authoritarianism."

Gimena Sánchez, the Andes director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group, said she did not envision a "radical cutting of all security assistance or anti-narcotics efforts."

"What I do reimagine," she said, "is conditioning of that assistance to guarantee that the U.S. part of it is not inadvertently supporting war crimes."

Election Results Show Israelis That U.S. Relationship Is on Tenuous Ground

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — For many Israelis, the results of the U.S. midterm elections showed how far their country's relationship with the United States had deteriorated and underscored the limits of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reliance on his long friendship with President Trump.

The Democrats' rout of the Republican Party, with some House and Senate members increasingly critical of Israel in the run-up to the vote, has only added to Israel's growing sense of international isolation after years of war.

The results come at a sensitive time for Israel, as it grapples with its inconclusive election and faces more conflict with Iran.

Now, its future relationship with the United States, its most important ally, is also on the line, as are billions of dollars in annual U.S. military assistance, in a sign of how far traditional support for Israel has fallen among both Democrats and Republicans.

Mr. Netanyahu's critics and po-

Damien Cave contributed reporting.

litical rivals seized on the results as proof of his mishandling of Israel's national security interests.

"The results we see today are precisely the reason Israel always tried to maintain a bipartisan policy toward America," said Jeremy Issacharofi, a former Israeli ambassador to Germany. He dealt with many aspects of Israel's strategic relations with the United States during his diplomatic career, including two stints at the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

Mr. Netanyahu, a conservative, largely abandoned that approach about a decade ago, Mr. Issacharoff said, becoming “the most dependent Israeli prime minister on an American president.”

Early this year, Mr. Netanyahu declared that Israel had "come of age" and he wanted to do away with the financial aspect of America's military assistance within a decade. He said he wanted to see Israel fund weapons purchases, build up its own defense industry and move "from aid to partnership," possibly articulating a position that he thought Mr. Trump would like to hear:

But on Election Day in America, Mr. Trump surprised Israelis by declaring that he was cutting off the nearly \$4 billion in annual aid to the country “at the end of the year,” even though Israel’s current aid agreement with the United States expires in 2028.

Mr. Trump said, during an interview with Fox News, that the move was a political step to take "a bad talking point" away from the left wing of the Democratic Party, after aid to Israel became a divisive issue during the midterms. He suggested that Mr. Netanyahu was on board with the decision, though the prime minister has not yet commented.

As Mr. Netanyahu battles for his political future, after an election that afforded neither his bloc nor his opponents a clear path to forming a government, the opposition was quick to reap political capital out of the situation.

Mr. Netanyahu's main challenger, Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief and centrist leader, said the fact that Israel's defense establishment had learned about such a drastic change in the strategic relationship through the news media "illustrates just how much Benjamin Netanyahu's conduct is a real danger."

"He can't be trusted anymore," Mr. Eisenkot added in his statement, "and he must be replaced."

The leader of Israel's left-wing Democrats party, Yair Golan, a former deputy military chief, said, "An end to American aid is very damaging to Israel's security and to the quality of life in the country."

And Avigdor Liberman, another Netanyahu rival from the right, said, "The cost of Trump's support for Netanyahu — \$3.8 billion annually," an apparent reference to Mr. Trump's endorsement of Mr. Netanyahu ahead of Israel's election last month.

Mr. Netanyahu's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The change in the aid relationship set the stage for even deeper concern as the midterm results emerged.

Tzipi Livni, a former minister in a Netanyahu-led government, wrote in a social media post that “Netanyahu gambled on the Republicans, broke the alliance that we maintained throughout all the years with both parties and has no way of defending the legitimacy of the existence of the Jewish people's state and our right to defend ourselves," citing the election of some candidates who are vehement critics of Israel.

Israel had long had bipartisan support in the United States, which it viewed as a strategic asset. But as American public opinion has shifted, political support for Israel has eroded on both sides of the aisle, particularly over the war in Gaza ignited by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel.

The large civilian death toll in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed, along with a humanitarian crisis and the lack of an Israeli exit strategy, stoked tensions with the Biden administration.

As relations deteriorated, Mr. Netanyahu prided himself on his close ties with Mr. Trump, culminating in the campaign against Iran. That conflict ground on and Israel went to war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and tensions arose with the Trump administration as Israeli and American interests diverged.

In April, Mr. Trump said Israel was “prohibited” from further bombing in Lebanon, and after the American leader reached a preliminary cease-fire deal with Iran in June, which many Israelis felt would not address their security needs, relations between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters devolved into insults.

Support among Americans for Israel fell to new lows this year, worsened by the actions of Mr. Netanyahu's hard-right government in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli election offered the possibility of a reset, and once a government takes shape, analysts say, one of its urgent tasks should be to repair the relationship.

"For Israel, there is an important distinction between its relationship with the U.S. and its relationship with the Trump administration," said Gedaliah Afterman of the Abba Ehan Institute for Diplomacy and International Relations at Reichman University in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv.

"The U.S. will remain Israel's most important strategic partner," he said. But the strong showing for the Democrats in the midterms "should be a wake-up call to invest more seriously in relationships across the American political spectrum," he added.

Election 2026

N

The New York Times

Democrat James Talarico overcame a barrage of Republican spending and attack ads to win the Texas Senate race against state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

HAIYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

ELECTION TAKEAWAYS

American Voters Punish Trump and the Republicans

NICOLE CHAINF FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Keisha Lance Bottoms, center, a Democratic former mayor of Atlanta, became the first Black woman ever to be elected governor in the United States.

By SHANE GOLDMACHER and PATRICIA MAZZEI

Democrats marched to a landslide victory in the midterm elections on Tuesday as voters across the country raged at President Trump's party, dealing Republicans stunning defeats from the Deep South to the prairie lands.

For the first time in decades, Democrats won statewide in Texas, taking not just a Senate seat but also the governor's mansion. They won a Senate seat in Kansas, which had not happened in nearly 100 years. They flipped a Senate seat in South Carolina, a state that had barely been on the battleground map. And they seized House seats in such deep-red territory that Democrats are on a glide path to their biggest congressional majority in years.

Economic anxieties at home and a war abroad proved to be a politically toxic combination for Mr. Trump and his party. Democrats were on track to win the national House popular vote by the largest margin in a half-century.

The results amounted to a mandate from the public for a check on a president who has pushed the limits of his power, and they imperiled whatever was left of a legislative agenda for Mr. Trump. Now he and his administration will face investigations that are expected to consume much of the next Congress.

Here are some takeaways from a brutal night for Republicans:

Democrats stormed to power in the Senate.

A pediatrician in South Carolina. A minister in Kansas. A seminarian in Texas. A Paralympic gold medalist in Iowa. A logger in Maine.

Democrats had flipped a half-dozen Senate seats by the time the clock struck midnight, taking control of the chamber in a sweep that seemed unthinkable just a year ago.

Entering Tuesday, Democrats did not hold a single Senate seat in a state that Mr. Trump had won all three times he ran for president. By Wednesday, they had senators-elect in six of them — including five that the president won by double digits in 2024. Democrats will enter 2027 with at least 54 seats.

The rout meant that for the rest of Mr. Trump's second term, none of his nominees — whether for the Supreme Court or top administration posts — will be confirmed without Democratic consent. And because senators serve for six years, the Democratic victories promise to remake the chamber's complexion into the next presidency.

The Democrats who flipped seats included Annie Andrews in South Carolina, the Rev. Adam Hamilton in Kansas, James Talarico in Texas, Josh Turek in Iowa and Troy Jackson in Maine.

In North Carolina, Roy Cooper, a former governor, became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state since 2008. In Ohio, former Senator Sherrod Brown completed a comeback two years after being voted out.

The breadth of the Democratic victories suggested that the dire political climate for Republicans did more to power the opposition party's successes than anything else.

Democrats are amassing a big House majority.

Democrats flipped House seats in rural North Carolina and central Kentucky, in the suburbs of St. Louis and Omaha, and all along the Texas border. They seized three seats in Iowa and four in Pennsylvania. They rebuffed redrawn lines in Florida.

It was a romp.

Democrats made inroads deep into Republican territory, prevailing in a Kentucky district, for instance, that Mr. Trump carried by 15 percentage points in 2024. But they also ousted some of the sturdiest Republican survivors, like Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, who had been the lone House Republican to win election three times in a district that Mr. Trump lost three times.

Now Democrats are on track for a sizable House majority, with Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York poised to become the first Black speaker in American history.

Mr. Jeffries rushed to the rooftop of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington on Tuesday night to film a video declaring that Republicans were "shook."

The final size of the Democratic majority was still to be decided. But as of Wednesday, Republicans had yet to win any of the most competitive races.

War, prices and an unpopular president cost the G.O.P.

"Pretend I am on the ballot," the president said. His problem was that voters listened.

Before he lost the election, Mr. Trump lost the public's trust on the issue that got him elected in the first place: the economy. And as the war in Iran dragged on, he struggled to defend a conflict that caused gas prices to rise, his MAGA coalition to fracture and Democrats to unite.

The president aggressively campaigned in the final month, jumping from one red state to another in hopes of reviving the energy of his flagging base. But the results showed the extent of the rebuke for Republicans.

In 2018, in Mr. Trump's first midterm election, Republicans lost the House as suburban women revolted against his leadership. This time, the rejection seemed to come from virtually every corner of his coalition, including white working-class voters in places like Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Mr. Trump was defiant, distancing himself from his own defeat.

He began Tuesday morning by calling into Fox News to downplay the war in Iran. "When you talk about war, this isn't

really war," he said.

He ended election night back on the phone with his favorite network that he sometimes loves to hate, speaking with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier.

"It's just a point in time, Bret. Just a point in time. It's the way it is," Mr. Trump mused. "There was a mood in the air, I guess."

Democrats scored seismic victories in Texas.

Democrats had dreamed for a generation of winning in Texas, one of the nation's largest states, but they repeatedly fell short.

On Tuesday, they stormed to victory in the marquee statewide races. Mr. Talarico toppled Ken Paxton in the Senate contest, and Gina Hinojosa, a huge underdog, ousted Gov. Greg Abbott, a three-term incumbent.

Either outcome would have been momentous on its own. Both at once? That was more than Democrats could have hoped for not long ago.

At 37, Mr. Talarico is now one of the Democratic Party's biggest stars. He overcame Mr. Trump's attempt to cast him as outside the mainstream — "Talafreako" was the president's derisive nickname — as well as the more than \$200 million that Elon Musk spent trying to keep the state red.

"We just took back Texas," Mr. Talarico told supporters in Austin.

At least some Hispanic voters in South Texas, a region that had swung toward Mr. Trump in 2024, swung back. Democrats claimed all four districts in Texas that border Mexico, which have some of the densest Latino populations anywhere in America.

"The nation will look at Texas and say we want something far more important than an election," Ms. Hinojosa said in her victory speech. "They will look at Texas and say that faith in government has been restored."

Republicans' redistricting gambit sputtered.

In the summer of 2025, the White House pushed Republican state legislators to redraw their congressional lines to bolster the party's chances of holding a majority.

The effort started in Texas and spread to North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. A Supreme Court ruling that dealt a new blow to the Voting Rights Act expanded the efforts to Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana.

But the surge of Democratic voters on Tuesday overwhelmed some of the new G.O.P. seats.

The first Democratic House flip of the night came in North Carolina, a state that Republicans had remapped. Jamie Ager, a Democratic farmer, won a western North Carolina district that Mr. Trump had carried by 10 points. And the chairman of the House Republican campaign arm, Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, was in danger of losing his seat.

In Florida, Representatives Kathy Castor and Jared Moskowitz survived despite a new map that put them into more Republican territory.

In an interview, Mr. Jeffries praised House Democrats who ran in new, tougher terrain.

"So many of our colleagues made the patriotic and courageous decision to stay and fight," Mr. Jeffries said, adding: "They didn't run away from the fire. They ran toward the fire and helped put it out."

Historic firsts.

Democrats reclaimed a majority of the nation's governor's offices for the first time in two decades. They won at least five competitive races, in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin.

Voters also elected three new Black governors: a Republican, Byron Donalds, in Florida, and two Democrats, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and David Crowley in Wisconsin. Before Tuesday, only three Black governors had ever been elected.

Ms. Bottoms is the first female Black governor ever to be elected.

Ms. Hinojosa was the first Latina elected to lead Texas. Another Democrat, Xavier Becerra, was the first Latino elected governor of California. Deb Haaland, a Democrat, will be the nation's first female Native American governor after winning in New Mexico.

Michigan elected the nation's first Muslim senator, Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat. New Hampshire elected a Democrat, Representative Chris Pappas, who will become the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate.

Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat from Minnesota, became the first Native American woman to win election to the Senate. A second Indigenous woman, the Democrat Mary Peltola, could join her if she is elected in Alaska.

Musk's millions didn't make a difference.

Mr. Musk, the world's richest man, spent nearly a half- -billion dollars on the midterms. His party lost anyway.

Republicans, powered by Mr. Musk's money and Mr. Trump's \$400 million super PAC, dominated Democrats in spending in the Senate races. The Democrats still swept through the battlegrounds.

It was the second consecutive election in which the national party that spent more lost, after former Vice President Kamala Harris's cash advantage was not enough in 2024.

Now Republicans face a daunting financial future. Democrats continue to dominate them at raising small-dollar donations online. And the lone Republican who has energized Republican small donors for the last decade is Mr. Trump. He will not be atop the ticket again.

Across Nation, Voters Give Direct Orders To Their States

REFERENDUMS

By MAIA SPOTO

As voters chose state and local officials on Tuesday, many also weighed in on how future elections would be run and how their own votes would be counted.

In a show of disgust over the role of "dark money" in politics, Montana voters approved a ballot measure to ban corporations, nonprofits and labor unions from doing business in the state if they had made political contributions. The result appears likely to create a legal test of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that said independent political spending by businesses is protected free speech.

Michigan voters approved a similar measure, deciding to bar electric and gas utilities as well as many government contractors from making political donations.

In Virginia, voters backed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies upon their release. In Utah, they rejected a measure that would have raised the share of votes needed to approve certain changes to taxes.

Voters protected their right to propose ballot initiatives with a constitutional amendment in Montana, and raised the bar for state lawmakers to alter voter-backed initiatives in Missouri. And in South Dakota, they rebuffed an effort to require a 60 percent supermajority vote to amend their state's constitution.

In Massachusetts, voters rejected a proposition that would have ended closed-party primaries and instead allowed all candidates to appear on the same ballot, with the top two vote-getters advancing.

Measures to ban noncitizen voting or require voters to present identification also passed in a few states — West Virginia, Arkansas, South Dakota and Ohio — with more votes still being counted. But voter identification initiatives were rejected in Colorado and California.

Drawing Districts

In Maryland, voters cleared a path for a new congressional map that could boost Democratic representation in 2028. In Missouri, they rejected a redrawn map that could have provided Republicans an advantage. Those moves followed a redistricting blitz that came at the urging of President Trump, with the intention of gaining more Republican seats. Ultimately, the efforts did not stave off significant Democratic victories.

"Given the blue wave it's basically what you'd expect — voters blocking a Republican gerrymander in Missouri and greenlighting a future Democratic gerrymander in Maryland," Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor, said in a text message. "It's a partisan story, not one of consistency with respect to redistricting."

The election measures were a sizable chunk of the more than 140 statewide ballot questions that gave voters the opportunity to set policy directly on Tuesday, on issues ranging from abortion and transgender rights to taxation and affordability.

Many of the measures were handed down by state lawmakers for voter approval. Others were written by voters themselves, often with a goal of changing or creating policies that their representatives otherwise wouldn't have taken up.

As the focus shifts to the 2028 presidential election, how the initiatives performed will help set the tone for political debate by pointing to the issues that were important to midterm voters.

Regulating Abortion

In Missouri, voters rejected an attempt by state lawmakers to repeal a constitutional right to abortion, recently approved by voters, by pairing the initiative with a ban on gender-transition care for minors.

Virginia voters enshrined abortion rights into their state's constitution and repealed a ban on same-sex marriage, safeguarding the right should the Supreme Court overturn it in the future.

Transgender Rights

In Nebraska, voters passed restrictions on transgender students' participation in sports. Voters' views on transgender rights were also tested in deep-blue states on Tuesday with initiatives in Washington State and Colorado.

Patriotic Rituals

In Alabama, voters passed a measure requiring public schools to have pupils recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day and allow for student-led prayer. They also approved an initiative requiring public schools to play or arrange for a performance of the first stanza of "The Star-Spangled Banner" once every week.

Setting Rates

A Florida ballot measure to cut homeowners' property taxes also passed. Opponents said that limiting property taxes would tighten a major source of funding for services like police and fire departments and programs for low-income residents. But supporters billed it as a way to provide relief for homeowners as the cost of living has ballooned.

SEA CHANGE IN STATES

In Generational First, Democrats Will Hold Most Governorships

By JACK HEALY

A string of stunning Democratic upsets in governors races across the country will put Democrats in charge of deep-red states where they have not held the top jobs in decades.

Democrats flipped five governors' seats, all in states that President Trump won in 2024, sometimes by double digits. The victories gave them a total of 29 governorships and control of a majority of American governorships for the first time in a generation.

A race for the Republican-held governor's seat in Alaska had still not been called by early Wednesday evening.

Their wins could expand the state-level resistance to Mr. Trump's policies on tariffs and immigration, while also putting new Democratic-run states into play as potential swing states in the 2028 presidential election.

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, celebrated the wins as the product of years of work, chiseling away at Republicans' longtime dominance of governors' mansions.

“Tonight, we delivered a Democratic governor in every swing state from the past several elections, and we expanded the map," Mr. Beshear said in an interview on Tuesday. "There will be some 2028 candidates who can compete in a place like Iowa or Ohio."

Note: Results as of Wednesday at 1 p.m.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. Beshear said the Democrats won with campaigns that were "laser focused on the lives of our people, and not just fealty to Donald Trump."

In Texas, Gina Hinojosa un-seated Gov. Greg Abbott to become the state's first Latina governor as well as its first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. She has criticized Mr. Trump's moves to expand the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and could become a new opponent to his immigration enforcement efforts in a state with one of the largest Latino populations.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, flipped a Republican-held governor's seat in Georgia, to become the country's first Black female governor and Georgia's first Democratic leader since 2003.

In the Midwest, Amy Acton was elected Ohio's first Democratic governor in 20 years after a bruising, bitterly personal campaign, and Rob Sand became the first Democrat Iowa has elected since 2006.

Voters in the swing states of

Michigan and Wisconsin elected new Democrats to replace their departing Democratic governors.

The race in Kansas to succeed Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, was still too close to call early Wednesday evening, but the Democratic candidate, State Senator Cindy Holscher, was narrowly leading.

The Democrats' wins were a remarkable turnaround from eight years ago, when the party held just 16 of the country's 50 governorships. They steadily gained ground to hold 24 governors' seats going into the midterm elections.

After Tuesday's elections, about

75 percent of Americans will live in a state with a Democratic governor, according to the Democratic Governors Association.

Even in states where Republican governor candidates prevailed, some won by surprisingly slim margins. In Florida, Representative Byron Donalds, a Republican, won the race to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis by fewer than two percentage points — a race Republicans won by nearly 20 points four years earlier.

One unlikely bright spot for Republicans was New England. There, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Phil Scott of Vermont — both considered moderate Republicans — easily won re-election.

But nearly everywhere else, Democrats won by tapping into national anger over high prices, the war in Iran and Mr. Trump, in general.

They also tailored their appeals to their state's specific anxieties.

Mr. Sand, who flipped a governor's seat in Iowa, focused on cancer rates in farm country. Ms. Lance Bottoms highlighted the erosion of Black voting rights in Georgia. Ms. Hinojosa campaigned on the proliferation of

Resistance to Trump border and tariff policies could expand.

data centers in Texas.

In Nevada, the state's Democratic attorney general, Aaron Ford, campaigned on worries over a slowdown in Las Vegas's tourism economy to unseat the incumbent Republican governor, Joe Lombardo.

But fundamentally, they all tapped into a pervasive feeling among voters that Americans' lives were getting worse and that leaders in Washington and state capitols were not listening.

It is unclear whether the new Democratic governors in Texas, Iowa, Ohio and Georgia will actually be able to do much about that.

Many are expected to face Republican-run state legislatures unlikely to grant Democratic wish lists by undoing abortion bans, raising minimum wages or expanding union protections. Republicans still appeared to have majorities in most of those state legislatures on Wednesday, though Democrats in Texas took the Texas House of Representatives.

Still, the Democratic governors will be able to reshape their states by appointing their own agency heads, signing executive orders and vetoing Republican bills they don't like.

They may also be a new barrier to any Republican efforts to redraw legislative districts ahead of the next presidential election.

The 7 States That Flipped and Broke Republican Control of the Senate

1 Maine elected an independent in 2024 who caucused with Democrats.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Maine

SENATE SHIFT

With Biggest Majority Since 2014, Powerful Counterbalance to the President

Note: Seat counts before 2026 are from Election Day to Election Day. THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article is by Albert Sun, Minho Kim, Marco Hernandez and Emily Davies.

Democrats have seized control of the Senate in a sweeping repudiation of President Trump just two years after his triumphant return to Washington.

Propelled by concerns over affordability and broad dissatisfaction with the president, the Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats on Tuesday in a map that was daunting for the party, according to results tallied as of Wednesday afternoon.

Most of the seats had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. For Kansas, it has been almost a century.

The resurgence penetrated states long thought of as bedrocks of conservatism, with Democrats pulling off unexpected upsets in Kansas and South Carolina, and clinching Texas, which until Tuesday had been the nation's most populous conservative state and a symbolic center for the Republican Party.

Among the most significant takeaways from the midterm elections was just how much has changed in two years. In this divided era, only a sliver of the electorate had appeared open in recent elections to crossing party lines. On Tuesday, that presumption was largely shattered. Five states that voted for Mr. Trump by more than 10 points in 2024 instead opted for Democrats.

Republicans lost key blocs of the voters that brought Mr. Trump back to power two years ago. In the seven states that flipped, the voters that moved significantly toward Democrats included Hispanics, voters under 30 and working-class whites without college degrees, according to a Times Voter Trends analysis.

While the transfer of power comes down to seismic swings in the electorate, there is one outlier: Maine, a state that has long preferred Democrats statewide. Senator Susan Collins, the sole Republican representing New England in Congress, had been the exception. Her loss is more of a referendum on her relationship with Mr. Trump than a shift toward Democrats. The president lost the state in 2024 by seven points.

The Democrats have not had a Senate majority of this size since 2014, when the party controlled 55 seats.

The victory offers a significant vehicle to check Mr. Trump's power, from which the Democrats are expected to swiftly begin investigations into allegations of corruption, excessive immigration enforcement tactics and presidential pardons.

Democrats will also have veto power over Mr. Trump's judicial and administration nominees, and will occupy leadership of the committees that have the authority to subpoena administration officials

and others.

Elections in Mississippi and Alaska were still too close to call as of Wednesday afternoon, and it could be days before the results are known. In Mississippi, fewer than 100 votes separated the candidates, and the state will continue to count late-arriving mail ballots for several days. In Alaska, neither candidate appeared likely to pass the 50 percent threshold of votes needed to bypass ranked-choice voting. If Democrats win in those two states, their advantage would grow to 12 seats.

The historic night answered how Americans feel about the president and the Republican Party, but it has created a new set of questions about what comes next. For the Democrats: how to govern. For the Republicans: how to rebuild a coalition that can outlast Mr. Trump.

Shift From the 2024 Presidential Election

Note: Maine, which also flipped Democratic, is not shown, as detailed results are not yet available.

2026 Election

NEWS ANALYSIS

Congress Poised to Dust Cobwebs Off Its Job as Check on President

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, in line to become the next speaker, said the outcome was the start of a "great American comeback."

KENNY HOLLSTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

From Page AI

tions and the scope of their elec-

toral victories, Democrats may

be limited in their ability to re-

strain the president. Mr. Trump

has demonstrated a disregard for

the power of Congress and the

traditional norms that govern the

relationship between the legisla-

tive and executive branches.

Mr. Trump told Fox News before the elections that he intended to be “Mr. Veto” if Democrats seized control. But as the results — and the obvious backlash — poured in from across the nation, the president struck a more conciliatory tone, saying he would be willing to cut some deals.

It was reminiscent of his first term, when the president, embracing his art-of-the-deal per-

Democrats are likely to face limits on their efforts to restrain the White House.

sona, seemed open to bargaining with Democrats on big issues. But partisanship has hardened considerably since then, and Democrats, bolstered by the reach of their victory, are going to press for any deals to be made more on their terms than his.

It is also likely that the administration will put up fierce resistance to attempts by Democrats in Congress to demand answers from executive branch officials, which could ignite major conflict and poison efforts to work together legislatively.

In their appearances before Congress over the past two years, Trump administration officials have been dismissive and confrontational with minority Democrats sitting on panels run by friendly Republicans. Democrats will wield those gavels beginning in January, with the accompanying subpoena power to pursue what they see as a target-rich environment of activities and people that merit thorough investigation. Senate Democrats will also have veto power of their own and will be able to delay or block confirmation of Mr. Trump's judicial and executive branch nominees if they choose.

Top Democrats say they hope the election defeats attributed in many respects to the president will persuade more Republicans to break with Mr. Trump — even at the risk of angering the now weakened president — and join them in pushing back against the White House and even undoing some of its actions.

But Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and current majority leader, took a combative stance as the losses piled up Tuesday night, saying Republicans would not let "fringe" Democratic positions become mainstream. Even with their gains, Democrats remain short of the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster, allowing Republicans to retain some leverage.

"Senate Republicans will not stand idly by as the far-left, socialist wing of the Democrat Party attempts to unwind everything we've done," Mr. Thune said. "Thankfully, we still have President Trump in the White House, and we'll work with him to stop the worst impulses of Democrat extremism."

Democrats say they intend to give Republicans the chance to show whether they took any lessons away from the drubbing by forcing votes on reversing cuts to health care and other safety net programs that hurt rural areas where voters rejected Republicans.

“We are going to challenge them,” Mr. Schumer said. “We are going to put some easy things on the floor and see if they vote for them.”

Democrats will have some challenges of their own. Their members have sharp ideological differences that could be difficult to bridge, hindering the party's ability to reach consensus. And despite Mr. Trump's sudden impulse to cut bargains, legislative agreements could be hard to come by, frustrating voters who demanded sudden change.

Spending fights could be particularly thorny. Democrats will want to reclaim congressional spending authority after Republicans used a special party-line process to fund Mr. Trump's immigration crackdown after Democrats balked, leading to an extended shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration also refused to spend some money Congress had allocated and shifted other money to pay for Mr. Trump's pet projects in ways lawmakers have not approved. The administration has also applied its "rescission" authority to strip out money in a way that lawmakers in both parties say breaks budget laws.

Democrats will be eager to restore Congress's spending prerogatives and could look for help from some Republicans on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees who were quietly unhappy with the president's spending decisions.

The congressional obeisance to Mr. Trump was clearly a factor in the election outcome, as Democratic candidates skewered Republicans on Capitol Hill for standing on the sidelines while Mr. Trump neutered them and took actions detrimental to their states and districts.

"We've got a Republican senator, Roger Marshall, who in essence is a 'yes man' to the president," Adam Hamilton, the Democrat who defeated Mr. Marshall in Kansas, said on MS NOW. "Instead of fighting for the people of Kansas, he comes back as though he's a spokesperson for the White House."

In his remarks after the results, Mr. Jeffries said the outcome was the beginning of the "great American comeback." It could be a comeback for Congress as well.

FLIP OF CONGRESS

New Path Paved in Blue As Democratic Landslide Leaves the G.O.P. Shaken

unified in its approach.

From Page AI

EC M:GINNIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ber since 2008, when they won 257 seats.

The shock waves from the election quickly reverberated among Republicans, who had feared widespread losses but had not anticipated such a sweeping repudiation of their party.

Vice President JD Vance blamed the war with Iran for the Republican rout, in a remarkably public break from the president, who has staunchly defended the war and demanded loyalty from his party.

"If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so," Mr. Vance, who is considering a run for president in 2028 and had privately cautioned Mr. Trump against an attack on Iran, wrote on social media on Wednesday. "Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost."

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana told aides that he would not seek to lead the House G.O.P. conference in the minority, setting off a scramble among ambitious Republicans to succeed him. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio announced he would seek the role, arguing that Republicans needed to take a combative approach toward the Democratic majority next year.

Josh Turck, above, an Iowa Democrat, flipped an open Senate seat in one of the top battleground races. Senator Susan Collins, below left, Republican of Maine, lost to Troy Jackson and will conclude her three-decade run. Vice President JD Vance blamed the war in Iran for his party's defeats.

"In these next two years, our job cannot be merely to spotlight how radical this new Democrat party is," he said. "Offense, not defense, wins elections."

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, announced that he would also run to be the minority leader in the next Congress. He called for "substantive changes to the way our conference operates," arguing that the party needed to be more

Mr. Trump, who had made the midterms a referendum on himself, sought to deflect blame for his party's losses, declaring that Republicans were drubbed because he was not on the ballot.

Catie Edmondson reported from Washington, and Michael Levenson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Shawn McCreesh, Erica L. Green, Tim Balk, Emily Davies, Annie Karni, Michael Gold, Lourdes Medrano and Chris Cameron.

KENNY HOUSTON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

LENT PARRA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

"I wasn't on the ticket," Mr. Trump said Tuesday night in an interview with The New York Times. "And because I wasn't on the ticket, we couldn't get enough people out to vote."

But many Republican leaders and voters blamed Mr. Trump and his policies for the party's stunning losses. Some expressed frustration with the president's tariffs and the war in Iran, which they blamed for driving up prices. Others took issue with the president's focus on renovation projects in Washington.

"We pushed the envelope too far," said Luis Gio, 59, a court translator who was at Senator Jon Husted's election-night party in Columbus, Ohio, watching as Mr. Husted, a Republican, lost to former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat. "The White House ballroom. I mean, why push things like that when the country needs more important things?"

Barbara Olson, a retired city employee from Tucson, Ariz., said she usually votes for both Democrats and Republicans, but voted only for Democrats on Tuesday out of frustration with Mr. Trump. "He is too petty," she said. "And mean. And has no dignity, and he has taken our country's dignity away."

Mr. Trump, in his first public appearance after the election, spoke on Wednesday from the site of the ballroom he is building at the White House, reveling in the details of the project and others he is working on in Washington. It was a remarkable choice of venue after voters appeared to send a strong message that there was a huge disconnect between his priorities, like his construction projects, and those of everyday Americans.

"Watch the beam go up," Mr. Trump said as he walked inside the construction site. He pointed at the ceiling, and said, "now envision chandeliers."

Later, answering reporters' questions, he spoke ambiguously of his relationship with the Democrat-controlled Congress that will be seated in January. "I'll get along probably with the Democrats unless they want to be destructive," he said, noting he had "the power to veto."

Mr. Trump said that he was not considering replacing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who had been singled out in many Democratic attack ads.

"I think he's doing a very good

job," Mr. Trump said.

He also brushed aside Mr. Vance's social media post criticizing the war in Iran.

"I know how he feels about it; I think it was fine," he said. But he added, "As far as that war is concerned, I would have done nothing different."

Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, said his party had been hurt by its focus on "politics and personality" over issues. He cited in particular the Republican drive to redraw congressional districts in hopes of flipping blue seats.

"When you do redistricting, you jam it down people's throat, you're focusing on politics and not people," he said, adding that. "Republicans lost this election more than the Democrats won them by failing, in my opinion, to put Americans first or to make clear that they're putting Americans first."

House Democratic leaders said they were thrilled that Republican redistricting efforts had back-fired.

House Democrats say that Republican efforts to redraw districts backfired.

"The American people hate it when politicians try to pick their voters," said Representative Suzan DelBene, Democrat of Washington and chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The Democrats' landslide, flipping seats that had spent decades in Republican hands, did not reach just the federal races but also state and local governments. The party notched firsts in governors' races and won down-ballot races like those for state treasurer, secretary of state and state legislatures.

In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat and the former mayor of Atlanta, was the first Black woman to be elected governor in the nation's history. Ms. Bottoms galvanized voters by positioning herself as a bulwark against Mr. Trump's policies. She ran in a campaign that was closely coordinated with that of Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator, who won his re-election campaign by nearly 20 percentage points.

Abdul El-Sayed, Democrat of Michigan, will become the nation's first Muslim senator after he defeated former Representative Mike Rogers in one of the country's most bitter and expensive races. Representative Chris Pappas, Democrat of New Hampshire, will be the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate, a milestone he did not talk about much during the campaign as he focused on issues like high prices and corruption in Washington. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa, a state representative, scored a stunning victory over Gov. Greg Abbott, becoming the state's first Hispanic governor and the first Democrat to hold the job since Ann Richards left office in 1995.

Despite their dismal night, there were a few bright spots for Republicans.

In Florida, Senator Ashley Moody defeated Angie Nixon, a progressive Democrat. Byron Donalds, a staunch Trump supporter, was elected Florida's first Black governor, keeping the Republicans' hold on that office. Mr. Donalds had pledged during the campaign to address high property taxes, streamline government agencies and expand school choice.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

"I wasn't on the ticket," President Trump said Tuesday in trying to save face, "and because I wasn't on the ticket, we couldn't get enough people out to vote." Many voters said they felt hoodwinked by him.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Midterm Debacle May Signal Trump's Era Is Starting Its Twilight

Mr. Trump delivered his final pre-election address at the Reflecting Pool, a reminder of his obsession with pet building projects.

From Page AI

than in the past. But the overall margin of Democratic victory indicates that while the president has two more years left in office and can still wield power to great effect, Americans are signaling the beginning of the end of the Trump era.

"It's basically a repudiation of Trump and the Republicans and what they've done for the last two years," said Douglas B. Sosnik, who was White House political director for Mr. Clinton and closely tracked the races this fall.

A rebuke for a leader who has dominated the stage for a decade.

"I do think starting tomorrow, we're in this new phase and it's a transition phase and it will last two years. And it will be much more volatile than the last two years."

Mr. Trump quickly tried to save face by insisting that the rout by Democrats was not really a rejection of him since he was not actually on the ballot — never mind that he told voters repeatedly to vote as if he were.

"I wasn't on the ticket, and because I wasn't on the ticket, we couldn't get enough people out to vote," he told The Times in an interview Tuesday night.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Even many Republicans would roll their eyes at that assertion, as this was a campaign that revolved so demonstrably around Mr. Trump.

It was Mr. Trump who decided to start a war with Iran that jolted energy markets and sent prices at the pump soaring. It was Mr. Trump who chose the candidates, the issues, the strategy and the message.

It was Mr. Trump who demanded complete loyalty from a party whose candidates were nervous about distancing themselves from him. And it was Mr. Trump who has shrugged off questions about the ethics of his moneymaking in office, helping propel voter concerns about corruption.

The defeat of two Senate Republican candidates that he personally selected over potentially more electable contenders in deep red states — Ken Paxton in Texas and Darline Graham in South Carolina — demonstrated the consequences of his interventions. His push to throw out the normal process and redraw House districts in the middle of the decade to try to stack the deck for Republicans backfired.

Many voters told pollsters and interviewers that they felt hoodwinked by Mr. Trump, believing that he was going to bring down prices and not start new wars. They expected him to close the border, but bristled at what they saw as heavy-handed arrests of people living in the country for years. They rebelled against tariffs that increased costs for consumers.

The way Mr. Trump spent his last day before the election proved to be a metaphor for how out of sync his political instincts were with the season. Instead of emphasizing plans to address the cost-of-living worries weighing on many voters, he delivered his final pre-election address at the Reflecting Pool, talking about algae and pipes. It was a vivid reminder of his obsession with pet construction projects in Washington, despite the warning signs of how it ranked voters — as if Richard M. Nixon had made his final pre-election speech in front of the Watergate complex.

Even if Trumpism may be receding, Mr. Trump has the power of the presidency for two more years and will do everything he can to remain a dominant voice for as long as he can. His allies warned against assuming that he is a spent force.

"Trump's critics have written his political obituary before and been wrong every time," said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, a group that promotes conservative economic policies.

"The fix is Republicans getting back to our principles," he added. "That's how we win in 2028."

There is, of course, a natural tendency to draw great lessons from a big midterm wave, to assume that it represents a fundamental shift in the American electorate. It certainly may. But history has seen plenty of examples when it did not last long. And it remains to be seen whether Tuesday's results signal a broader ideological shift among voters.

The post-Watergate wave of

1974 was thought to presage a long winter in the political wilderness for Republicans, but Ronald Reagan brought the party back to the White House just six years later. The 1994 and 2010 Republican sweeps were ex-

pected to presage the end of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, but both came back to win re-election handily two years later.

Lynn Vavreck, a professor of American politics and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the most important factor in the election was sky-high gas prices so it may not follow that the country's political character has profoundly changed.

"It doesn't mean the MAGA coalition is crumbling," she said. "Does it mean the shine has come off Donald Trump a little bit? Yes. Are people less enamored of him? I think the answer to that is yes." But she said it does not necessarily mean that Republicans are going to abandon the "identity-inflected policies" on issues like immigration and diversity that have animated the party under Mr. Trump.

This is, after all, a fundamentally altered party, one that Mr. Trump forged in his own image, empowering those who defer to him and purging those who exhibit independence. "We don't know how the president's going to react, but thus far we've only seen members of his party acquiesce to him," said Christina M. Greer, a political science professor at Fordham University.

Joe Grogan, who served as Mr. Trump's domestic policy adviser in his first term, said that regardless of the election results, the president has changed the political landscape by advancing issues that were not adequately addressed enough before, like pushing for better trade deals and securing greater military spending by NATO allies. The party, he said, is not moving back to what it once was.

"We're still in Trump's party, regardless of what happens tonight," Mr. Grogan, now at Covington & Burling, said before the polls closed. "People who expect Trumpism to get repudiated I think are mistaken. There will be some debates that I think will be healthy for the party. But I just don't see there being a huge wellspring for the party to go back to the one that George W. Bush led for two successful elections."

At the same time, Democrats will debate how to interpret their victory. Their main identity this year was simply being against Mr. Trump, which was more than enough. But progressives will say that it was energy on the left that powered the success, while moderates will say it was the appeal to disaffected Republicans in states like Texas and Kansas that was crucial.

"The biggest story is non-MAGA Republicans have broken with the Republican Party," said Rahm Emanuel, a former Democratic Chicago mayor and ambassador exploring a run for president. "The question is do we want to make this election transactional or transformational? What we do in 2027 will determine that."

James Blanchard, who was first elected to Congress in the post-Watergate Democratic sweep of 1974 and later served as governor of Michigan, said this year's election felt similar to that historic year. But he said that does not mean that American politics will return to the way they were before Mr. Trump. "We can never go back, unfortunately," he said. "We're going to have to go forward."

"It's the end of Trump," he added, "even though he's still going to be there."

TAMIR KALIFA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Dallas watch party for Senate candidate Ken Paxton of Texas, left, and Mr. Trump with Darline Graham in South Carolina, above. The president personally selected the two Senate Republican candidates, and both lost their races.

Reporting from 50 states and 150 countries.

Bringing expertise to important stories.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY MADDIE MAGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ohio has been solidly red since President Trump first won office, but on Tuesday Sherrod Brown returned to the Senate after losing his seat two years ago, and Amy Acton won the governor's race.

BELLWETHERS

With Sweeping Victories, Democrats May Have Put Ohio Back in Play

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and EMILY DAVIES

CLEVELAND — Two years ago, Sherrod Brown lost the U.S. Senate seat he had held for three terms in Ohio when President Trump and the Republicans routed Democrats across the country. Now he is back, and deepred Ohio may be back as a swing state.

"We made Ohio competitive after decades of Republican control," Kathleen Clyde, the Ohio Democratic Committee Chair, shouted at a victory party in Columbus on Tuesday night. The Democrats had two big wins to celebrate: Mr. Brown beat the Republican incumbent, Senator Jon Husted, and Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire former biotech executive, in the governor's race.

Ohio was officially in play as a potential bellwether in the 2028 presidential campaign.

"If we're still talking about the affordability of life, if we're still talking about the affordability of housing, that does put Ohio back into the conversation," David Niven, a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, said on Tuesday in anticipation of Democratic wins.

Jessica Contrera contributed reporting from Columbus, Ohio, and Patrick Cooley from Brecksville and Parma, Ohio.

Ohio was once so representative of the national mood that it voted for the winning presidential candidate regardless of party in every election from 1964 to 2016. (And the state inspired the old political saw "As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.")

John Kerry would have been elected president in 2004 had he won Ohio and its electoral votes, despite losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. Barack Obama won Ohio comfortably against John McCain in 2008. His margin was tighter against Mitt Romney in 2012, but Ohio carried Mr. Obama over the top in the Electoral College, sealing his re-election.

Mr. Trump's victories in Ohio in 2016, 2020 and 2024 — particularly his 11-point win against Kamala Harris — made the state seem out of reach for Democrats. But there had been signs, even before the midterms, that things were changing, chiefly because of the economy.

"I've seen a shift in mind-set," said Patrick Moran, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union that represents 1.4 million workers nationwide, including 100,000 in Ohio, who hold jobs like school bus driver, sanitation worker and janitor. "People are angry, and they have a right to be angry. Because they can't afford anything anymore."

Mr. Moran was at a rally on Sunday for Ms. Acton and Mr. Brown outside Cleveland at a United Auto Workers' union hall, Local 1250, which represents members who build engines for the Ford Expedition and the Ford Explorer. "We have Republican members who are stepping up and saying, 'I can't do this anymore, this is out of control.' "The president, he added, "made \$1.4 billion while in office."

Mr. Trump won Ohio three times by making inroads with unions and other blue collar workers, once the foundation of Mr.

Frustration over the economy was seen as decisive in stinging Republican losses.

Brown's — and Democrats' — base. In Mr. Brown's first campaign for Senate in 2006, he won Mahoning County, which includes the industrial city of Youngstown, by nearly 47 points over the Republican incumbent, Mike DeWine. In 2024, Mr. Brown lost the county by 0.2 percentage points to Bernie Moreno, showing how much defections of blue collar voters to Mr. Trump had hurt Democrats.

On Tuesday, Mr. Brown was winning Mahoning County by seven points, with 95 percent of the county's results in. He also took his first victory in Delaware County, a longtime suburban Republican stronghold outside Columbus, winning by four points.

At a Skyline Chili restaurant in Delaware County, Amanda Volenick, a 39-year-old Democrat who had voted for Mr. Brown and Ms. Acton, said she thought the county was changing. She was having lunch with her brother, Jared Acker.

"Our parents are still huge Trump supporters," Ms. Volenick, a nurse, said. "A lot of our family in that generation just voted a straight Republican ticket." She was raised in an evangelical home, she said, and her parents thought Republicans were uniquely religious.

At another table, Matt Morris, a 50-year-old Republican, said he had voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but not in 2020 or 2024. "I think he's an idiot," he said. In 2016, he said he "agreed with some of the stuff he was trying to do."

He continued: "But he runs his mouth. Now he's just serving his ego."

A friend Mr. Morris was having lunch with, a Republican who had voted for Mr. Trump three times, said he voted this year for Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Husted. He did not want to talk or give his name and got up quickly to pay his bill.

In another closely watched race in Ohio, Representative Max Miller, a Republican from the Cleveland area, lost his seat to Brian Poindexter, a Democrat. Mr. Miller had been accused of physically abusing his ex-wife, who is Senator Moreno's daughter; he denied the accusation.

The one slightly positive sign, if it could be called that, for Ohio Republicans is that their losses were narrower compared with those in some other battleground states. Mr. Brown was winning overall by five points, with almost all votes counted. Ms. Acton was winning by eight points.

Robin Brilla, of Parma, a large Cleveland suburb, said she voted straight Republican on Tuesday, hoping to stave off any possible third impeachment of Mr. Trump. Ms. Brilla, 68, said she saw Mr. Trump as a defender of her values and way of life. She cited the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade as a key promise kept by the president.

"I'm a Christian, that's my worldview," she said. "And that's something I agree with morally."

In Brecksville, an affluent Cleveland suburb, Jane Molina, 53, said she was also a reliable Republican voter — once. But in the 2024 presidential election and in Tuesday's midterms, she cast her ballot entirely for Democrats.

"Up until about 10 years ago I voted pretty much straight Republican," Ms. Molina said after voting on Tuesday. "I hated politics. I didn't pay attention. I didn't understand it. I just knew that was what my mom was doing."

From 2016 onward, Ms. Molina said, she started following the political news cycle and disliked what she saw from conservatives, particularly Mr. Trump.

"Now I vote straight Democrat," she said.

For his part, Mr. Brown was not yet willing to declare Ohio a swing state. "I'm not a pundit," he said soon after polls had opened on Tuesday. "But I do know that Amy Acton and I are going to win."

He was at home in Columbus and had answered his wife's cellphone while she was out of the room. While his campaign did not want him gabbing with the national media on Election Day — local media interviews would potentially bring in more last-minute votes — he seemed eager to talk.

His wife, Connie Schultz, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, soon arrived and took her phone back. "He just wants to talk to everybody right now," she said. "He's bouncing off the walls. We told him to go down and work out on his bike for a little bit."

She, for one, thought that Mr. Trump's unpopularity and the wins for her husband and Ms. Acton could make Ohio competitive again.

As Ms. Acton said at the victory party on Tuesday, "As Ohio goes, so goes the nation."

REACTION AT THE POLLS

Frustrated Voters Opted To Shake Up Status Quo

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

From Texas to Maine, Democratic voters thronged to the polls on Tuesday. Independents turned their backs on President Trump. And Republicans seemed to be slipping out of the thrall of a president who has defined American politics for a decade.

In interviews and at the ballot box, voters declared that they were unhappy with the way things were going in their country and wanted a change.

In 2024, Joshua Buchanan, 39, a train-design engineer in Woodruff, S.C., voted for Mr. Trump. Two years later, he had regrets.

istration stands for, and that we want better."

SABRINA SHANEMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

'I would crawl on my belly over broken glass to vote against that awful man.'

In interviews, voters often expressed frustration with how much life costs. Prices are still considerably higher than before the pandemic, but voters said that Mr. Trump, who had promised to lower prices in 2024, now seemed to shrug off their concerns.

"He wouldn't know what it is to pull into a gas station and put gas in your car," said Suzanne Murray, 78, a retired hairdresser in Peoria, Ariz. "He wouldn't know what it is to go into a grocery store and buy groceries on a limited income."

RONAN DONOHOF, a retired high school history teacher in Portsmouth, N.H.

JILLIAN ANTHONY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NATE SCHWEER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

'Why be so extreme that we can't accept someone else's viewpoints? We're all in the same country at the end of the day.'

'I am so fed up with being lied to. I feel that there has to be some sort of change.' DAN BAILEY, a sanitation driver in Glen Cove, N.Y.

"I probably made the wrong choice," said Mr. Buchanan, who this time voted for Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate for Senate. Her victory over the Trump-endorsed Republican, Dartline Graham, would have been unimaginable not that long ago.

Donald Trump took the American political system by storm a decade ago, electrifying working-class voters with his hard-edged populist message. But as the back half of his second term draws near, his job approval has collapsed under the weight of unpopular economic policies and a war with Iran.

"I would crawl on my belly over broken glass to vote against that awful man," said Ronan Donohoe, 85, a retired high school history teacher in Portsmouth, N.H.

He said his vote on Tuesday for Democrats was about "letting everybody know that we are fed up with everything the Trump admin-

Democrats, who were dejected just two years ago, vibrated with fury — and determination to go to the polls. The actual candidates for governor, Senate or the House could seem almost secondary.

Jillian Anthony, Murray Carpenter, Jonathan J. Higuera, Ryan Patrick Hooper, Caitlin Philippo, Nate Schweber, Sabrina Shankman and Tiffany Tan contributed reporting.

She added: "He's so reckless with the United States."

Ms. Murray has leaned toward Democrats, but Republicans expressed exasperation with Mr. Trump, too. The reasons included affordability, the Epstein files and corruption. And a number of more traditional Republicans said in interviews that they no longer recognized their party.

"The Republican Party has lost its way," said Van Z. Hampton, 71, a registered Republican in Dodge City, Kansas, who said he had voted straight ticket Democrat for the first time since in 1976. Mr. Hampton, a retired Kansas state judge, voted for Mr. Trump twice, but has become repelled by what he described as unbridled corruption.

"The ship was hijacked by thieves," he said, referring to the Trump administration's stewardship of the U.S. government. "It's going in the wrong direction — toward their shore to loot it and unload it."

For Dan Bailey, a sanitation driver from Glen Cove, N.Y., it was Mr. Trump's casual brushoff of the Epstein files, as well as Mr. Trump's cabinet, which included, he said, "a secretary of war who doesn't know anything about war."

"I am so fed up with being lied to," said Mr. Bailey, who said he hasn't voted for much of his adult

LAMONT FISHER, a broadband technician in Austin, Texas.

life, but showed up and voted straight ticket Democrat on Tuesday. "I feel that there has to be some sort of change. I'm hoping my little bit can make a difference."

Many Republicans and independents said they defected simply to stop a president they say no longer represents them.

Mr. Hampton, the retired Kansas judge, for example, had advice for Democrats who won on Tuesday: They won votes "not because we love you, but because we need you to do the right thing. Be wise about support you got."

Many voters expressed deep discomfort about where they fit in the political system. Many said they felt politically homeless. Mr. Trump has so defined the Republican Party that it was hard to predict what it would mean when he leaves office. And many voters also struggled to define the Democratic Party, beyond its opposition to Mr. Trump.

"There's no Republicans or Democrats anymore," said A.J. Asci, 49, who works in the hotel industry in Savannah, Ga. "America looks more confusing than ever."

Mr. Asci emigrated from Turkey and became a citizen 18 years ago.

He said he had learned everything about life in America from his neighbor at the time, who he still visits in a nursing home. But life in America today feels unstable; he does not think he will be able to afford to retire here.

And he thinks the money flood-

Unpopular economic policies and the war with Iran have eroded support for the G.O.P.

ing into politics is gumming up the wheels of American democracy.

"You cannot get justice and uphold the laws if you get paid by somebody else," he said. "It's a crooked system."

Many voters talked about their distress at the vitriol that has overtaken political discourse, and said they voted in part to counter it.

Sheldon McCormick, 68, a handyman standing outside his polling station in Waldo, Maine, said he would vote for anybody who stood up for civility.

"For me, decency can go a long way," he said. "There's good in the world, and it's time to get back to it."

A registered independent, Mr. McCormick said he split his ticket, voting for Susan Collins, the Republican senator, and Matt Dunlap, the Democratic candidate for Congress.

Lamont Fisher, 46, an independent voter in Austin, Texas, expressed similar distaste for the country's angry politics.

"Why be so extreme that we can't accept someone else's viewpoints?" said Mr. Fisher, a broadband network tech who grew up in a Republican family. "We're all in the same country at the end of the day."

He said he had voted for James Talarico, who will be the first Democratic senator from Texas in decades.

"His view is, I want purple," Mr. Fisher said. "That's what I believe in, too."

Not everyone feels that way. A number of G.O.P. voters said they were perfectly happy with Mr. Trump, and voted the straight Republican ticket with a light heart.

"I don't live with the guy," said

Ofelia Armendarez, a registrar clerk at an elementary school in Visalia, Calif., who voted for Trump three times. "If he's doing the job correctly, that's all that matters to me."

One of their biggest concerns was a takeover by Democratic socialists, which far eclipsed any frustration with Mr. Trump.

Patricia Fay, 69, a retired software engineer in Phoenix, said she does not typically vote a straight Republican ticket, but did on Tuesday.

"I don't want Arizona to become another New York or Southern California," she said. Socialists, she said, want "everything for free."

Still, others were excited about progressive candidates.

Jeff Fawaz, 42, who owns oil change and auto shops in Dearborn, Mich., voted for Mr. Trump twice, because of his promises to stop wars and help small business owners. "I just believed him," he said of Mr. Trump. Now, he thinks that "he's the most bought and paid-for president I've ever seen."

On Tuesday, he voted for the Democrat for Senate, Mr. Abdul El-Sayed.

2026 Election

MICHIGAN

El-Sayed Celebrates Senate Victory for 'the Unlikeliest of Candidates'

By MICHAEL KRUSE

Abdul El-Sayed with his wife, Sarah Jukaku, in Detroit on Tuesday night. The Democrat defeated former Representative Mike Rogers in Michigan's Senate race.

TOOD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

DETROIT — The first Muslim elected to the Senate in United States history stood on the stage early Wednesday in front of a Michigan flag and an American flag and introduced himself.

"My name," he said, using the full, proper, guttural pronunciation, "is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed."

Hot, sweaty and packed shoulder-to-shoulder into the main space at Democrats' ticket-wide election night party in downtown Detroit, the crowd let loose a roar of applause.

"Thank you," he said. "You took a chance on the unlikeliest of candidates."

Mr. El-Sayed, a Michigan-born Rhodes scholar and former public

Outlasting a G.O.P. rival in a race marred by personal attacks.

health official in Detroit and Wayne County, was not just an anti-establishment economic populist winning on what proved to be a beyond-their-wildest-dreams night for Democrats. He was all of that and the son of Egyptian immigrants.

And he didn't merely beat former Representative Mike Rogers. He won after prevailing in a contentious primary election against Representative Haley Stevens — and then shrugging off her 11th-hour endorsement of Mr. Rogers. He won, too, after a general election that was among the ugliest, most racist, most Islamophobic campaigns in the history of American politics, with President Trump again and again calling him "a jihadist" and Mr. Rogers and his supporters all but painting him as a terrorist.

"As I was campaigning, some of you would come up and ask, 'How come you don't hit back? How come you don't call them racist or hateful?" Mr. El-Sayed told the partyers during his victory speech an hour before The Associated Press made its official call.

"They weren't targeting me. They weren't just attacking me. They were targeting and attacking you. They were targeting and attacking the very idea of Amer-"

ica." he said.

Hours earlier, before even the first polls closed, Rasha Basha, 56, stood near the stage. She wore an American flag handanna tied around her neck. Atop her head scarf was a blue cowboy hat with white letters spelling out "AB-DUL."

"He's like my son," she said. "He grew up with my kids."

Dana Mosa-Basha, 31, had a matching cowboy hat and an American flag sash.

"He was one of the first people in our community that had a commencement speech at the University of Michigan," she said. "Growing up, I mean, we would never have thought in a million years someone with his name six years after 9/11 would be the graduation speaker at one of the best universities in the country."

"The last month — the bigotry, the hate — it actually reminded me a lot of the Sept. 11 attacks," said Abe Basha, 37. "My name is Ibrahim, but I changed my name to Abe."

Mr. El-Sayed's election to the Senate "would be bigger than anything maybe we've ever experienced as Muslim Americans," Mr. Basha said.

For months, polls had suggested it would happen. Still, the onslaught of insinuations and accusations, plus the recent soap opera of the decisions of Ms. Stevens, made the outcome feel uncertain.

On Tuesday night in a quiet, out-of-the-way corner, Mallory McMorrow, a state senator who ran against Ms. Stevens and Mr. El-Sayed in the primary, said in an interview that voters were "disgusted."

"Mike Rogers's message, if I could summarize it, was 'Health care costs are too high, and that guy's a Muslim,' Ms. McMorrow said. "It's going to backfire in a big way."

Elsewhere as the evening progressed, Democratic Senate candidates kept winning. In North Carolina and Georgia and New Hampshire. In South Carolina and Texas and Kansas. In Iowa and Ohio and Minnesota and Maine.

In Michigan, which last elected a Republican to the Senate in 1994 but also was instrumental in sending Mr. Trump to the White House in 2016 and 2024, votes trickled in past midnight.

But at 1:29 a.m. Wednesday, to ecstatic chants and cheers, Mr. El-Sayed took the stage.

"All the kids who watched this last month, all the parents who struggled to explain why the president openly mocked someone for their name and how they pray, let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost," he said.

And then he named names.

Mike Rogers.

"Enjoy your retirement," Mr. El-Sayed said. "You chose hate. And Michigan chose hope."

Vice President JD Vance.

"There is this delicious irony in the fact that you're constitutionally obligated to swear me in," he said.

And President Trump, who had called him "Abdul Ramadan" and used his middle name as an epithet.

"I know you struggled with my name," he said. "You can just go on and call me senator."

MAINE

'Stars Aligning': How an Accidental Candidate Took Down a Five-Term Senator

Troy Jackson at his campaign watch party on Tuesday. After replacing Graham Platner as the Democratic nominee, he had less than four months to prepare to face Senator Susan Collins.

JOHN TULY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By BETH REINHARD

PORTLAND, Maine — Troy Jackson was nobody's first choice to run for the U.S. Senate from Maine. Only weeks before stumbling into one of most consequential races in the country, he had come in third in the Democratic primary for governor. He looked like a political washout.

But today he is a giant slayer, having toppled a five-term Republican incumbent, Senator Susan Collins, in Tuesday's election.

How Mr. Jackson, a former logger and state lawmaker from a struggling northern outpost, got from there to here — in just 101 days, no less — is an extraordinary story of the man meeting the moment.

Less than five hours after the polls closed, as he scanned a raucous crowd of supporters chanting his name, he shook his head in apparent disbelief.

"I will be thinking about generations of Mainers who worked in our woods, built our ships, kept our mills running, the people who built this state and deserve a government that works for them," Mr. Jackson, 58, told a packed hotel ballroom in Portland shortly after midnight. "That is what I am going to fight for every damn day."

Even amid the blue wave that swept Democrats into power across the country, Mr. Jackson's triumph over Ms. Collins was notable, considering her seniority in the Senate and five previous statewide wins, versus his abbreviated campaign and limitations as a candidate. A fortuitous mix of personal narrative, message and timing powered him to a victory no one could have imagined just months ago.

Drawing on his working-class roots and populist record as a state senator, Mr. Jackson could empathize with voters' frustrations and fears like few other congressional candidates. Perhaps even more important, Ms. Collins, despite her efforts to assert her independence, could not escape the shadow of an exceedingly unpopular president — especially in a state hit hard by his tariffs and war with Iran, inflating costs for Mainers dependent on heating oil

Tim Balk contributed reporting from Maine.

and trade with their Canadian neighbors.

"It is stars aligning," Heather Quinn Cuzzi, a Democratic consultant who has worked in Maine politics for more than 20 years. "It's the blue wave. It's the right time. A lot of union folks and working class people have not had a candidate they could be excited about, and Troy gave them a voice."

Mr. Jackson was an accidental Senate candidate, with no burning desire to go to Washington. But he quickly recalibrated after the implosion of the Democratic Party's chosen nominee. Graham Platner, an oyster farmer hastily anointed a rising star, was forced to quit the Senate race amid allegations of sexual misconduct. As the possibility of chaos loomed, Mr. Jackson, a card-carrying union member, called in a cavalry of ship-builders, teachers and mill workers who helped him easily sew up the nomination at a Democratic convention in late July.

Mr. Jackson had less than four months to wipe out Ms. Collins's 30-year record of constituent services and federal patronage that had brought billions of federal dollars to the state.

"A lot of people were wondering if he was up to the challenge," said Ethan Strimling, a former state senator and mayor of Portland. "This is the big time, up against one of the all-time pros of Maine history."

Even before Mr. Jackson sealed the nomination, Maine was rocked by the fatal shooting of a Colombian immigrant by a federal agent in the coastal city of Biddeford. As Mr. Jackson condemned President Trump's deadly immigration crackdown, the incident helped set the tone for a campaign in which Ms. Collins was pressed to defend the administration's most unpopular policies.

Mr. Jackson lacked Mr. Platner's rugged charisma and rhetorical skills, and he suffered by comparison — what his senior campaign adviser, David Farmer, called "the Platner hangover." But at more than 100 public events, including 15 town halls, he endeared himself to voters by sharing stories of his hardscrabble youth in Aroostook County, along the Canadian border. At 19, he followed his father into Maine's North Woods. At 30, he helped to lead a logging blockade at the border to protest powerful landowners hiring cheaper Canadian labor. Mr. Jackson greeted supporters as "brothers and sisters," and the labor anthem "Solidarity Forever" became a campaign staple.

"He's a once-in-a-career candidate for many of us," said Will Bergeron, a representative of the painters union.

When he wasn't leaning into his up-from-the-bootstraps biography. Mr. Jackson was pledging to hold the line against a Trump administration he argued was destroying the dreams of the working class. Mr. Jackson, a disciple of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, pushed a progressive agenda that included doing away with Mr. Trump's tax cuts, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and establishing a universal health care program. His unflattering portrayal of Ms. Collins as a corrupt creature of Washington was reinforced by a widely circulated ProPublica report that said the F.B.I. had examined her interac tions with a donor seeking federal contracts. (Ms. Collins denied any wrongdoing.)

Jia Yang, a 36-year-old restaurant worker from Lewiston, was among the voters who had backed Ms. Collins in the past but said her retirement was overdue.

"I think she's lost touch with what it means to be an average cit-

A fortuitous mix of personal narrative, message and timing.

izen," said Mr. Yang, a new father who can tell you the price of diapers and baby formula. "Things are getting worse, and I think we need change."

Anger over the rising cost of living was a driving force in Senate races across the country. But in Maine, Mr. Jackson also seized on simmering resentment over Ms. Collins's vote to elevate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which cemented the conservative majority that gutted the federal right to abortion.

This race was the first for Ms. Collins, one of the only Republican senators who favor abortion rights, since the demise of Roe v. Wade.

The campaign's lineup of debates — four in 10 days — posed a major test for Mr. Jackson, a halting and sometimes awkward speaker. He pushed for a townhall format over traditional debates, but Ms. Collins would not agree, according to Mr. Jackson's campaign. The matchups ultimately offered few fireworks or gaffes by either candidate until the fourth and final one. "Oh shut up," Mr. Jackson said to Ms. Collins, after she suggested a heckler "obviously" was his supporter.

Ms. Collins turned the moment into an attack ad that reminded voters about an episode five years earlier when Mr. Jackson was Senate president. During a heated argument with a female lawmaker, he had flung a water bottle, an incident that drew media scrutiny just as he was poised to clinch the nomination. Questions about his temperament surfaced again in the campaign's early days when the Bangor Daily News surfaced a 1988 police report describing his arrest on a charge of misdemeanor assault.

Mr. Jackson apologized for the water-bottle episode. He took responsibility for the fight, which had occurred when he was 19 years old. He did not express regret for his retort during the debate, however.

“What I'm not going to be is talked down to by Senator Collins,” he said in a televised interview. During the debates, she had repeatedly referred to Mr. Jackson, who served as a legislator for nearly 20 years, including six as president of the Maine Senate, as “Troy.”

Her apparent disrespect toward Mr. Jackson permeated the race — and may have hackfired. A Republican super PAC denigrated Mr. Jackson's longtime partnership with Lana Pelletier, his second cousin, in an ad that included a crude jingle. Ms. Collins called for the spot to come down but weeks earlier, she had arguably laid the groundwork by taking a swipe at Mr. Jackson's relationship. "I never imagined U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and her allies would stoop this low," Ms. Pelletier, who has two sons with Mr. Jackson, wrote in a column responding to the attacks.

Ms. Collins also ran a widely criticized ad in the homestretch of the campaign featuring a supporter who scoffed, "We're not talking about buying a cord of wood here. We're sending someone to the U.S. Senate, and Troy doesn't have the tools he needs to be effective."

Ms. Collins and her allies outspent the Democrats by about \$40 million, according to AdImpact, with a deluge of attack ads that decried Mr. Jackson as a "crook" and a "creep." Voters at town hall meetings urged Mr. Jackson to fight back more aggressively.

"In general, he allowed those things to roll off his back," said Charles Dingman, chairman of the Maine Democratic Party. "Or he greeted them with humor."

For Halloween, Mr. Jackson dressed up as a cord of wood. Three days before the election, he was already having the last laugh.

TEXAS SENATE RACE

No Scandal Seemed to Stick to Paxton, but the Teflon Has Worn Off

Ken Paxton, the G.O.P. attorney general of Texas, lost his U.S. Senate bid to James Talarico despite President Trump's backing.

HAIYUN JIANG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By LAUREN MCGAUGHY

AUSTIN, Texas — Ken Paxton had survived indictment, impeachment and years of scandal. He counted on surviving another election.

For more than a decade, the Republican attorney general of Texas won election after election despite rarely campaigning, dismissing accusations of adultery, bribery and fraud as partisan attacks.

But his bid for U.S. Senate ended in defeat against his foil, James Talarico, a Democrat who tied Mr. Paxton's scandals to the rising costs facing Texans.

Mr. Talarico, 37, drew support from voters in both parties with an energetic campaign that relentlessly tried to make Mr. Paxton's scandals feel tangible to voters. His victory marked the first Senate win for a Texas Democrat since 1988 — the year before Mr. Talarico was born.

In a short concession speech at his watch party in Dallas on Tuesday night, Mr. Paxton said he was grateful for the 12 years he spent as attorney general and wished Mr. Talarico well.

"The best part of it is the memories of working with so many great Texans," Mr. Paxton said. "As soon as I'm out of office, I still have a lot of friends in Texas."

Mr. Paxton's loss underscored a midterm election season where many voters who had soured on the economic and foreign policy choices of President Trump put their pocketbooks over their party.

Mr. Paxton, 63, leaves behind a checkered, but lasting, legacy. He sued the Obama and Biden administrations more than 100 times, influencing state and federal policy on issues such as abortion, immigration and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. He also challenged the 2020 presidential election results, securing him the loyalty of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Paxton also helped purge Texas of Republican moderates and push his party further to the right, with the help of a few far-right megadonors.

But Mr. Paxton's career was shadowed by scandal — an indictment, an impeachment and allegations of two extramarital relationships — that cost him key allies and donors who grew tired of defending him. Elon Musk and national Republican groups spent tens of millions of dollars on ads to try to shore him up, to no avail.

To be sure, the outcome of the Senate race was as much about Mr. Talarico's assets as it was about Mr. Paxton's liabilities. But in a state that was supposed to be reliably Republican, the fingers in the state's G.O.P. have already begun pointing to the biggest loser.

As a standard-bearer for his party's far-right contingent in Texas, Mr. Paxton had become known as Teflon Ken, the man who, despite his many problems, always pulled out a win. Now, he is the face of the worst Republican wipeout in modern Texas history.

"People will study this campaign failure, this ridiculous candidate, for decades," said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist who worked on the campaign of the incumbent Senator John Cornyn, whom Mr. Paxton defeated in the Republican primary in May. "Every single person that had a chance to stop this when it could have been stopped is to blame."

Mr. Paxton was far from the only Republican to lose in Texas. From governor to state judges, Republicans fell short up and down the ballot in Texas and across the country.

"It's a blood bath, everywhere," Matt Wolking, an adviser to a super PAC backing Mr. Paxton, said at his watch party.

Mr. Paxton had risen by challenging his party's establishment, aligning himself with far-right activists in the Texas House and winning the attorney general's office in 2014 with support from Senator Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.

When Mr. Paxton was indicted on charges of defrauding investors in a technology company in 2015, he smiled in his mug shot. To his critics, the image captured his apparent indifference to the allegations.

The fraud case hung over him for years, but opponents failed to make it disqualifying. He won re-election in 2018 and again in 2022.

Backed by the billionaire donors Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, Mr. Paxton emphasized his fights against Democrats and his alliance with Mr. Trump, often ignoring his opponents and refusing debates.

"The reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated," Mr. Paxton joked during his victory speech in 2022.

Mr. Paxton faced the most serious threat to his career in 2020, from within his innermost circle.

That October, senior aides reported him to the F.B.I., accusing him of doing favors for a campaign donor in exchange for home renovations and a job for a woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair.

Mr. Paxton denied wrongdoing and fired four of the aides, who sued his agency under the state's whistle-blower law. The agency agreed to a \$3.3 million settlement, subject to legislative approval.

Chip Roy, a Republican congressman who once worked under Mr. Paxton in the attorney general's office, said Mr. Paxton's "leadership problems" drove away senior employees at the agency.

"When you treat the office of AG as a personal and political playground, people inside and out tend to notice," he told The New York Times after Mr. Paxton's loss.

Faced with these new corruption allegations, Mr. Paxton drew closer to Mr. Trump. In December 2020, he asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the presidential election results in four states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., seeking to overturn Mr. Trump's defeat.

Mr. Paxton lost that fight, but gained Mr. Trump's loyalty. He spent the next four years suing to block the Biden administration's policies on immigration, abortion and other issues.

But his request for state funding to settle the whistle-blower lawsuit rekindled problems in his home state and prompted a Texas House investigation. In May 2023, a majority of House Republicans joined Democrats to impeach him on corruption charges.

After a 10-day trial in the Texas Senate, Mr. Paxton was acquitted, largely along party lines. His wife, now a state senator, was recused from voting.

The next spring, Mr. Paxton settled the 2015 securities fraud case against him. He never faced a jury and did not admit guilt.

"I learned early on how utterly corrupt and amoral Ken Paxton is. And tonight he finally had to answer for it," Brian Wice, a Houston attorney who prosecuted the securities fraud case against Mr. Paxton, said on Tuesday.

Survival actually buoyed Mr. Paxton's power in Texas, and his hubris.

He began to travel more, spending tens of thousands of dollars on trips to South Africa, India and Taiwan. He began dating a second woman, a Christian influencer and registered Democrat from Louisiana. He helped out some of the Republicans who had voted to impeach him.

In 2024, Mr. Trump was elected to a second term, and Mr. Paxton turned his sights to a higher prize: the U.S. Senate.

Mr. Trump remained an X factor. For weeks ahead of the Republican primary runoff, Mr. Trump withheld his endorsement. He eventually backed Mr. Paxton, citing his loyalty, and Mr. Paxton bested Mr. Cornyn by more than 30 points. At his watch party, Mr. Paxton thanked Mr. Trump.

"When everyone in Washington told him to abandon me," Mr. Paxton said, "he didn't listen."

But Mr. Paxton's fortunes faltered with the president's. Mr. Talarico, a Christian seminarian and former teacher, ran on an expansive and detailed economic platform that centered the cost of food, housing and health care. He also made the corruption allegations newly relevant.

"He now owns 15 homes, while most Texans can't afford one," Mr. Talarico said on the campaign trail, referencing Mr. Paxton's growing real estate portfolio.

As polls began favoring Mr. Talarico, Mr. Paxton shifted his message, emphasizing his modest upbringing in a military family. He launched a statewide tour, appearing with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz. Mr. Musk eventually came to his aid, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into ads.

As Election Day neared, Mr. Paxton returned to his partisan attacks, warning conservative voters a win for Mr. Talarico would mean the end of conservative Christian values in the state of Texas.

But the momentum failed to materialize.

In the final weeks of the race, Mr. Paxton invoked the imagery of the Texas Revolution to rally his supporters. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick compared the Republican ticket to the defenders of the Alamo.

Those men lost their battle nearly 190 years ago, just as Mr. Paxton did on Tuesday. Whether this was his last stand remained an open question.

In his concession speech on Tuesday, Mr. Paxton said, "We've had a difficult night across the country but it's not over."

'AN EARTHQUAKE' IN TEXAS

Seismic Change as the State's Voters Break a 32-Year-Long Republican Grip

Supporters of James Talarico at his election night watch party in Austin on Tuesday. His Senate win over the Republican Ken Paxton was only the beginning in Texas.

HAYUN JIANG/THE NEW YORK TIMES

From Page AI

former Texas land commissioner who was among the last Democrats to win a statewide race, in 1994. "It's a tsunami. The world has changed. The political maps will never be the same again."

The decades of total Republican Party domination are over. Its hegemony had resulted in increasingly conservative leaders, from George W. Bush to Rick Perry to Greg Abbott, and increasingly conservative lawmaking, including abortion bans, Christian teaching material in public schools and expanded gun rights.

Democrats in Texas rose as national blowback against the Trump administration mounted among voters troubled by the war in Iran, an immigration crackdown and cost-of-living concerns. But Mr. Paxton owed much of his success to his closeness to Mr. Trump and Mr. Abbott tied himself closely to Mr. Trump's policies.

Republican leaders in the state also embraced a data center boom that was unpopular in many rural and suburban areas and pushed through a school voucher program that many saw as undercutting public schools. In 2026, some party members made the state's swelling South Asian community a boogeyman. A candidate for a top regulatory job attacked his opponents with slurs for gay and disabled people.

"I've watched Republicans fumble this ball from bottom to top," said Austin Vaughn, 31, of Fort Bend County, who said he "literally checked every blue box for the first time in my life."

He said he used to feel at home in the Republican Party in Texas, and worked for a state legislator. But in recent years, the party “got really out of control socially.”

He now has a daughter and did not like the state's stringent abortion ban. And, he said, while the party had a good message boosting and attracting businesses, they long ago lost that plot.

"No one can afford anything anymore," he said. "Our water and air is the dirtiest and our education is horrible."

Also swept away Tuesday was the assumption that Texas's political future would resemble its past. In its place, something far less certain, more contested and decidedly Democratic emerged.

It was, for Democrats, so unexpected and so sudden, that many were still processing the implications.

"I'm jubilant," Rafael Anchía, a Democratic state representative from the Dallas area, said as he watched the returns at Mr. Talarico's election night party in Austin.

J. David Goodman reported from Austin and Lauren McGaughy from Dallas. Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting.

"This is exceeding my wildest expectations."

Mr. Anchía said that Democrats had racked up big gains all over the state, even in formerly conservative suburbs, even in rural areas where they had not competed for years: "It's a nuke."

The magnitude of the Democratic wave was amplified by the remarkable spectacle of Elon Musk, the world's richest man, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a doomed effort to preserve the state's Republican leadership. After moving parts of his business empire to Texas, Mr. Musk poured at least \$212 million into supporting Mr. Paxton, which was part of at least \$224 million devoted to races in the state.

Republicans were left rattled and trying to explain not only Mr. Paxton's spectacular loss, but how Mr. Abbott, seen as such a formidable opponent, could have been washed away as well in the national Democratic wave.

"Our party is going to have a reckoning unlike any in the history of our state," said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator John Cornyn's doomed primary campaign earlier this year against Mr. Paxton, who had been Texas's attorney general.

As the results crystallized, Democrats believed their victory would draw more campaign money into Texas for future elections, along with greater national support. The party could seize more offices and perhaps have a shot at flipping Texas blue in a presidential election.

"You never give your enemy a beachhead; once they get it, they advance," said Chad Wilbanks, a Republican political consultant and the former executive director of the Republican Party of Texas. "The dam is broken."

Democratic officials said the election could also reshape state policy, ending Texas's role as a laboratory for conservative laws nationwide. Mr. Talarico, as a U.S. senator, will not directly affect day-to-day governance in Texas. But Ms. Hinojosa will have the power to veto legislation and to appoint agency leaders.

"Texas is ready for change," said Kendall Scudder, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party. He said Democrats were "excited and ready to deliver on the policies that will make life more affordable" and to "root out the corruption that has plagued our politics for too long."

President Trump crisscrossed the state, hoping he could save Mr. Paxton's campaign in its final weeks. But his efforts at bringing Texas Republicans together against a shared Democratic enemy masked deep underlying divisions within the party.

The state's Bush-era conservatives long opposed Mr. Paxton and his Trump-aligned wing of the party, and supported Mr. Cornyn in the primary. They argued that the Republican Party had drifted too far from its principles.

The two main factions of Texas Republicans have been at odds for years. Mr. Paxton often found himself at the fault line of those conflicts. His 2023 impeachment on allegations of corruption by a majority in the Texas House became a referendum on the direction of the party. His defense team argued that a faction of old-school conservatives — aligned with the Bush family and Republican strategist Karl Rove — had been behind the impeachment. Republicans in the Texas Senate, overseen by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, an ally of Mr. Paxton, acquitted him.

Even before the vote on Tuesday, Republicans in Mr. Paxton's camp were seething at those they saw as having supported him with insufficient vigor.

Steve Toth, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House and a Paxton ally, said those close to Mr. Cornyn and the Bush family were to blame for "dirty" Mr. Paxton with the failed impeachment and during the Republican primary.

"They never got on board," Mr. Toth said on Monday at one of Mr. Paxton's last campaign events, in Conroe, a city outside of Houston.

Those in Mr. Cornyn's camp remained frustrated that Mr. Paxton had challenged him at all. Mr. Cornyn had shown little vulnerability among general election voters, even as Republican activists accused him of being insufficiently supportive of President Trump. Mr. Paxton, the hard right's choice, easily defeated him in a primary runoff despite being vastly outspent.

Before Tuesday, the closest Republicans in Texas had come to a statewide loss in recent years was in 2018, when Beto O'Rourke, a U.S. representative from El Paso, came within three percentage points of defeating Senator Ted Cruz. In response, Republicans in the state appeared to moderate their agenda in the next legislative session, focusing less on cultural issues and more on property tax and school financing reforms.

Now, any change in direction will involve the decisions not only of Republicans. It will involve Democrats as well.

"It's a whole new day for Texas," said Mr. Mauro, the former land commissioner. "After I lost in '98, I was thinking we were one cycle away from winning to the next election. It's been a long wait."

2026 Election

NEW JERSEY

Kean, Who Was Absent From Congress for Months, Loses His Seat to Bennett

Rebecca Bennett, a Democrat and a first-time candidate, defeated Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr., a Republican, in New Jersey.

JOSE A. ALVASADO JR. FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article is by Tracey Tully, Mark Bonamo and Tammy LaGorce.

Rebecca Bennett, a Democrat who stressed her experience as a Navy helicopter pilot, has unseated Representative Thomas H. Kean Jr., the scion of a prominent New Jersey Republican family, according to The Associated Press.

"Tonight is about something bigger than any one of us," Ms. Bennett told supporters gathered on Tuesday night in Bridgewater, N.J. "It's about all of us coming together to demand change."

Ms. Bennett was leading Mr. Kean by nearly 16 points on Wednesday, with more than 95 percent of the vote tallied, according to The A.P.

As in other swing districts across the country, Mr. Kean's record as a reliable vote for the House's Republican majority and his strong support for an unpopular president overshadowed much of the campaign. But questions over Mr. Kean's health and his fitness for office also influenced the race after he vanished from the public eye this spring with little explanation.

When he returned to Capitol Hill at the end of June, Mr. Kean, 58, said his nearly four-month absence had been linked to a long-term hospital stay for depression.

He indicated that he had fully recovered, but his campaign never bounced back.

Ms. Bennett, 39, ran an energetic and well-funded race. A first-time candidate, she emphasized her 15 years of military service and her experience as a health care executive while campaigning on a platform centered on lowering costs for New Jersey families.

She significantly outpaced Mr. Kean in fund-raising during the race's final two quarters, and his efforts to tarnish her with a barrage of negative advertising largely fell flat. Ms. Bennett was leading Mr. Kean by 51,000 votes in a district he had won two years ago by about five percentage points.

Attitudes toward President Trump guided many voters' decisions.

Justin Morris contributed reporting.

Richard Dodds, a Republican and a former mayor of Kingwood, N.J., said he broke with his party and voted for Ms. Bennett because "it's time for a change."

"If we could roll back virtually everything that's happened since Donald Trump took office," Mr. Dodds, 67, said, "that would be a good start."

Kim Dial, 72, said Mr. Kean's long absence from Congress played a role in her decision to support Ms. Bennett, who she hopes will bring "new, fresh insight" to the job. "We're in a state of chaos right now," said Ms. Dial, a retired teacher from Basking Ridge. "I want some stability."

Only one Republican — Representative Christopher Smith, who was re-elected on Tuesday to his 24th term — is expected to represent New Jersey when the new

Congress is seated in January.

Representative Jeff Van Drew, a close Republican ally of the president, conceded defeat on Tuesday to Zack Mullock, a Democrat who has stressed his hope for a return to "normalcy and decency" in politics. Dr. Adam Hamawy, a progressive Democrat, will replace Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, who is retiring after six terms.

All of the state's other Democratic members of Congress on Tuesday's ballot, including Senator Cory Booker, were re-elected.

Mr. Kean's loss will mark at least a temporary end of an era of public service for one of the state's most prominent political families. A son of a former governor, Mr. Kean served in the State Legislature for two decades before being elected to Congress in 2022 on his fourth try. His grandfather and great-grandfather also served in Congress, and the state's first governor, William Livingston, was a distant relative.

But even after so many years as a politician, he had never appeared comfortable in the public eye. He refused to release a campaign schedule in advance and often met questions from reporters with stony silence. In August, when a New York Times reporter showed up at a golf club where Mr. Kean was set to address donors alongside the House speaker, Mike Johnson, his campaign asked a club employee to call the police to have her removed from the parking lot.

Harrison Neely, Mr. Kean's political adviser, told a sergeant who responded to the call that "some of the folks were uncomfortable having her here," according to police body-worn camera footage. He added: "It just kind of, like, escalated into: 'Let's get rid of her.'"

The New Jersey Republican Party's gathering on Tuesday night, where Mr. Kean spent much of the evening, was closed to reporters. Mr. Kean declined to comment as he arrived, but Ms. Bennett said that he had been gracious when he called her to concede. She said he expressed his "commitment to the peaceful transition of power, a tradition that is deeply American."

Jon M. Bramnick, a Republican state senator whose district overlaps parts of Mr. Kean's, said the results were a denunciation of Mr. Trump's divisive brand of politics. "No longer can members of my party blame 'voter fraud' or 'mail-in ballots.' The era of politics of hate is over," Mr. Bramnick, a longtime critic of the president, said in a statement.

"Our Republican values are solid," he added. "Trump did not represent them."

Ms. Bennett lives in Bridgewater with her husband and their two young daughters but grew up in a Republican household in Texas. She joined the Democratic Party in 2016, when Mr. Trump was first running for president.

Her centrist policy prescriptions and military background made it harder for Republicans to label her a tax-and-spend liberal, though they did try. Mr. Kean and groups aligned with his party spent more than \$15 million on ad-

A Democratic pickup in a competitive House district.

vertising — \$4 million more than Democrats, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.

Throughout the campaign, Ms. Bennett remained disciplined in her messaging, stressing her goals in Washington of ending the war with Iran and bringing down costs, including freezing child care expenses at 7 percent of a family's income.

She emphasized Mr. Kean's wealth and the stock trades he signed off on while missing from Congress from March through June. Ms. Bennett also made it clear that she was not likely to align with the far-left faction of the Democratic Party in Congress, noting in a debate that she would not vote for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York progressive weighing a run for president.

"I believe our best days as a nation are yet to come," Ms. Bennett said in a victory address. "In the Navy, I was a test pilot. And the job was about identifying problems and fixing them — to go out and make things better for my fellow service members.

"This is the same job," she said, adding, "just hopefully with a little bit less time at sea."

STREAMLINING

Voters Pass Ballot Measures That Push Mamdani Agenda

By EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS

finding \$1 trillion in savings.

New York City voters on Tuesday approved five ballot proposals that could allow Mayor Zohran Mamdani to move more quickly to build housing and to expand outdoor dining and bike lanes, according to The Associated Press.

The measures came from a charter revision commission created by Mr. Mamdani, who argued that they would allow him to carry out his agenda more expeditiously.

“Tonight, New Yorkers voted for a government that moves as fast as they do,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement on Thursday night, asserting that the measures were “cutting red tape that will directly address the affordability crisis.”

"Now comes the work of turning these votes into results," he added.

The first four proposals aim to streamline procedures for building permits and street safety projects. The fifth proposal requires the city to do more to plan for an economic downturn and to put more money into a "rainy-day fund" that could be used when the city has a budget shortfall.

With more than 80 percent of the vote counted just before midnight, each of the ballot proposals had more than 62 percent support. The measure involving rainy-day fund contributions was backed by 72 percent of voters.

The measures might seem wonky or insignificant. But the commission's leaders said that the city's current rules slow down housing development and the building of bus and bike lanes. Critics said that the measures would give Mr. Mamdani too much power.

The results are a victory for Mr. Mamdani, a Democrat in his first year in office who is popular in polls. He has set an ambitious goal of building 200,000 affordable homes.

He also had political motivation to create the charter revision commission, which he named the Commission on Government Efficiency, in a barb aimed at President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which did not meet its promise of

Sean Piccoli contributed reporting.

Mr. Mamdani's predecessor, Eric Adams, created his own charter revision commission before leaving office, devoted to creating an open primary system, which Mr. Mamdani's allies oppose. Mr. Mamdani dishanded that commission and sought to turn attention to his own.

The ballot measures were embraced by pro-housing groups, including Abundance New York. The fourth measure would require the city's Buildings Department to develop a single central system for permits by 2030. Abundance New York said that it was unfair that builders "must seek 40 unique approvals from across 18

Building permits and lanes for buses and bikes in New York.

agencies $^{®}$ and that one permitting hub made more sense.

The first measure would make it easier to create a sidewalk cafe, requiring fewer steps to get one approved and eliminating a requirement for a public hearing.

Republican leaders urged New Yorkers to vote against all five proposals, with the Brooklyn G.O.P. warning voters that it would weaken oversight and was a power grab by the mayor.

Some civic groups opposed specific proposals. The Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, was against the fifth measure and said that the city should set higher targets for its rainy-day fund.

D'Arcy Hearn, 35, a social worker who lives in the St. George neighborhood on Staten Island, said on Tuesday that she had mixed feelings about the proposals. She voted against the first measure and in support of the other four.

"My friend and I were going back and forth even up until we walked in," she said, adding: "The way that it's worded makes it sound really good. I feel like there's a lack of community input in some of these."

ATTORNEY GENERAL

James, a Frequent Trump Target, Earns a Third Term

FRANK FRANKLIN II/ASSOCIATED PRESS

At an election night party, Letitia James said she had "used the sword and shield of the law to protect the rights of New Yorkers."

By JEFFERY C. MAYS

Letitia James, New York's Democratic attorney general who gained a national following after clashing with President Trump, won a third consecutive term, defeating Saritha Komatireddy, a little-known Republican ex-prosecutor, according to The Associated Press.

With 85 percent of the vote counted, Ms. James was leading Ms. Komatireddy by 20 percentage points.

Ms. James, 68, a Brooklynite, was first elected attorney general in 2018 after having served as a city councilwoman and as public advocate in New York City. In her statewide role, she quickly became one of Mr. Trump's chief antagonists.

Ms. James won a fraud suit against Mr. Trump in 2022 that was eventually thrown out. In 2025, she was indicted on a charge of mortgage fraud by federal prosecutors. That indictment was dismissed, but prosecutors attempted to indict Ms. James again.

"We have used the sword and shield of the law to protect the rights of New Yorkers, no matter what God they worship, no matter what the color of their skin, no matter their gender and who they love, no matter their immigration status or their socioeconomic status," Ms. James said at the New York Hilton Midtown ballroom where top Democrats had gathered for an election night party.

During the campaign, Ms. James accused Ms. Komatireddy, 42, an Upper East Side resident who worked as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, of supporting Mr. Trump, who is deeply unpopular in the state.

Mr. Trump nominated Ms. Ko-matireddy as a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York in 2020. He gave her a “Complete and Total Endorsement” on social media last month, calling her an “America First Patriot.” Ms. Ko-matireddy said she was honored.

Ms. Komatireddy said Ms. James was so focused on the president that she was not using the office's powers to address issues such as fraud and street crime. In their only debate, both women accused each other of not understanding the power of the office.

"She's obsessed with national politics. I'm focused on the safety of New Yorkers," Ms. Komatireddy said. "The right attorney general can tackle crime, homelessness and fraud. You just need a prosecutor as attorney general."

Ms. James responded that the office's work is mostly civil in nature. She listed the lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and tech companies that her office has pursued and said "politics stop at the door in my office." She has said her willingness to fight Mr. Trump in court demonstrates that she can take on powerful interests on behalf of New Yorkers.

Ms. Komatireddy also attacked Ms. James for her comments expressing sympathy for a former Cornell student who has accused several men of raping her.

After Ms. James made the remarks, Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed her as a special prosecutor in the case, but some have called for Ms. James to recuse herself because of her comments. Ms. James faced a similar critique when she first ran for attorney general for her comments about Mr. Trump.

Ms. James rejected that idea in a statement, saying that she was "committed to leading a comprehensive investigation" that would be "guided only by the facts, the evidence and the law." Ms. James was also seeking an outside law firm to examine the case.

In spite of what was considered a strong debate performance — her campaign said it raised \$1 million in the days after the debate aired — Ms. Komatireddy could not overcome Ms. James's name recognition and national reputation.

As the campaign neared its end, Ms. James rolled out a commercial with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and rallied in Brooklyn with Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas.

Ocasio-Cortez Is Re-elected to the House for a Fifth Term

NEW YORK

By DANA RUBINSTEIN

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 37-year-old democratic socialist from Queens, defeated her Republican opponent, Diamant Hysenaj, on Tuesday, winning a fifth term in Congress, according to The Associated Press.

"To the Bronx and Queens," Ms. Ocasio-Cortez posted on Instagram late Tuesday, "thank you for this overwhelming vote of support. Now let's keep changing the world for working people everywhere."

She included a red heart emoji. Twenty minutes after polls closed in New York, with 45 percent of ballots tallied, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had secured nearly 79 percent of the vote.

Alexandria

Ocasio-Cortez

Mr. Hysenaj, 44, a real estate developer, never mounted never mounted

never mounted much of a challenge to the congresswoman, raising only \$440,000 this election cycle, an amount dwarfed by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's \$38 million haul.

So confident was she in her popularity in New York's 14th Congressional District, encompassing portions of the Bronx and Queens — including segments of the so-called Commie Corridor that helped elect Mayor Zohran Mamdani — that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez spent much of the election season barnstorming elsewhere.

She traveled across New York State campaigning for other Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, and she crisscrossed the country campaigning for national contenders, too, including Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Senate candidate in Michigan, and Angie Nixon, a Senate candidate in Florida.

Her backing was more than rhetorical. She donated \$300,000 to New York State Democrats and transferred \$1 million to the Abdul for Michigan Victory Fund.

Her campaign-season support for other Democrats comes as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is openly considering a run for president or for the Senate, a decision she has said she will make after the midterms.

"There's an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot," she said recently, adding, "life doesn't wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you."

Appeals Court Hands Win to Mamdani in Fight Over Tax on Second Homes

Mayor Zohran Mamdani appealed a court ruling blocking the rollout of a tax on high-end second homes in New York City.

DAVE SANDERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By MIHIR ZAVERI

An appeals court on Wednesday ruled that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration can proceed with efforts to collect a new tax on high-end second homes in New York City, handing the mayor his first major legal victory over a core piece of his progressive agenda.

Uncertainty had clouded the tax for weeks, after a Staten Island judge ruled in September that the city had mishandled the rollout and ordered it to start over. The city immediately appealed, and continued rolling out the tax as the lawsuit proceeded. The decision on Wednesday, from a panel of appellate judges in Brooklyn, reversed the judge's ruling.

The tax still faces other legal challenges. But the ruling is a win for the mayor, whose lawyers are also defending other policies he campaigned on, including a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments.

Mr. Mamdani had embraced the tax as a way to make good on his campaign promise to “tax the rich,” as well as a way to help close the city’s budget gap.

The mayor said in a statement on Wednesday that he was "heartened" by the ruling.

"From Day 1, those with the most have attempted to use every legal avenue available to shield their wealth and avoid contributing more to our city," he said.

Randy Mastro, a lawyer representing the group of homeowners who brought the lawsuit, did not say whether he planned to appeal. But in a statement, he said that the tax rollout, which he called "lawless and chaotic," would "go unremedied." Mr. Mastro said he believed that challenges to the constitutionality of the tax itself — the core argument in the other lawsuits, including one he brought — would succeed.

The process of introducing the tax on second homes, also known as pieds-à-terre, has been turbulent.

The tax was unveiled by Gov. Kathy Hochul in the spring with Mr. Mamdani's support, and passed in the state budget. It must be paid by people who live outside New York City most of the time while also owning a high-value home in the city.

Levied as a surcharge on property tax bills, the tax applies to condos and co-ops that are used as second homes and have a "market value" — a complicated metric determined by the city's Finance Department — of at least \$1 million. It also applies to one-, two- and three-family second homes with a "market value" of more than S5 million. (The tax does not apply if the home is being rented to someone, or if a relative of the owner lives there most of the time.)

It is expected to raise some \$500 million annually for the city.

The lawsuit that led to Wednesday's ruling did not challenge the legality of the tax. Instead, it argued that the city had sowed confusion by sending out notices to about 17,000 New Yorkers informing them that their properties might be subject to the tax, with out first making sure that they were not full-time residents.

The suit also took issue with the city's publishing an online list of nearly one million “properties that may be subject to the charge” that included the owners' names.

The city has maintained that it acted in accordance with the law that established the tax.

The notices asked property owners to provide proof of residency, such as a driver's license, or a copy of a lease to show that the home was being rented out. As of Oct. 28, the city had approved around 8,800 applications from homeowners who said they were primary residents.

The city has said in recent days that even as that figure has grown, it remains confident that the tax will yield the anticipated \$500 million in annual revenue.

In a six-page decision, the appellate court said that the homeowners who sued had not demonstrated "that any bad actors have misused the information" on the published list of properties, "or that the publication itself subjected them to any crime, harassment or defined public ridicule."

The court also said that the mailed notices did not constitute harm, concluding that the homeowners lacked the standing to sue.

Despite the ruling, two separate pending lawsuits are seeking to overturn the tax itself. Both of those suits argue that the law establishing the tax violates provisions of the state constitution that limit how much the city can collect in real estate taxes every year. Among other claims, they also argue that the tax is discriminatory under the U.S. Constitution because it applies only to residents of states other than New York.

One of the lawsuits was brought in September by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, his wife, Hilary Geary Ross, and the casino mogul Steve Wynn, all of whom live in Florida but own second homes in New York City.

The other was brought by the corporation that owns an Upper East Side co-op building known as the Montclair, as well as a handful of homeowners, including some who live in Florida and in Suffolk County on Long Island. That lawsuit is backed by the Real Estate Board of New York, an influential lobbying group.

Appeals Court Hands Win to Mamdani in Fight Over Tax on Second Homes

Mayor Zohran Mamdani appealed a court ruling blocking the rollout of a tax on high-end second homes in New York City.

DAVE SANDERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By MIHIR ZAVERI

An appeals court on Wednesday ruled that Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration can proceed with efforts to collect a new tax on high-end second homes in New York City, handing the mayor his first major legal victory over a core piece of his progressive agenda.

Uncertainty had clouded the tax for weeks, after a Staten Island judge ruled in September that the city had mishandled the rollout and ordered it to start over. The city immediately appealed, and continued rolling out the tax as the lawsuit proceeded. The decision on Wednesday, from a panel of appellate judges in Brooklyn, reversed the judge's ruling.

The tax still faces other legal challenges. But the ruling is a win for the mayor, whose lawyers are also defending other policies he campaigned on, including a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments.

Mr. Mamdani had embraced the tax as a way to make good on his campaign promise to “tax the rich,” as well as a way to help close the city’s budget gap.

The mayor said in a statement on Wednesday that he was "heartened" by the ruling.

"From Day 1, those with the most have attempted to use every legal avenue available to shield their wealth and avoid contributing more to our city," he said.

Randy Mastro, a lawyer representing the group of homeowners who brought the lawsuit, did not say whether he planned to appeal. But in a statement, he said that the tax rollout, which he called "lawless and chaotic," would "go unremedied." Mr. Mastro said he believed that challenges to the constitutionality of the tax itself — the core argument in the other lawsuits, including one he brought — would succeed.

The process of introducing the tax on second homes, also known as pieds-à-terre, has been turbulent.

The tax was unveiled by Gov. Kathy Hochul in the spring with Mr. Mamdani's support, and passed in the state budget. It must be paid by people who live outside New York City most of the time while also owning a high-value home in the city.

Levied as a surcharge on property tax bills, the tax applies to condos and co-ops that are used as second homes and have a "market value" — a complicated metric determined by the city's Finance Department — of at least \$1 million. It also applies to one-, two- and three-family second homes with a "market value" of more than S5 million. (The tax does not apply if the home is being rented to someone, or if a relative of the owner lives there most of the time.)

It is expected to raise some \$500 million annually for the city.

The lawsuit that led to Wednesday's ruling did not challenge the legality of the tax. Instead, it argued that the city had sowed confusion by sending out notices to about 17,000 New Yorkers informing them that their properties might be subject to the tax, with out first making sure that they were not full-time residents.

The suit also took issue with the city's publishing an online list of nearly one million “properties that may be subject to the charge” that included the owners' names.

The city has maintained that it acted in accordance with the law that established the tax.

The notices asked property owners to provide proof of residency, such as a driver's license, or a copy of a lease to show that the home was being rented out. As of Oct. 28, the city had approved around 8,800 applications from homeowners who said they were primary residents.

The city has said in recent days that even as that figure has grown, it remains confident that the tax will yield the anticipated \$500 million in annual revenue.

In a six-page decision, the appellate court said that the homeowners who sued had not demonstrated "that any bad actors have misused the information" on the published list of properties, "or that the publication itself subjected them to any crime, harassment or defined public ridicule."

The court also said that the mailed notices did not constitute harm, concluding that the homeowners lacked the standing to sue.

Despite the ruling, two separate pending lawsuits are seeking to overturn the tax itself. Both of those suits argue that the law establishing the tax violates provisions of the state constitution that limit how much the city can collect in real estate taxes every year. Among other claims, they also argue that the tax is discriminatory under the U.S. Constitution because it applies only to residents of states other than New York.

One of the lawsuits was brought in September by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, his wife, Hilary Geary Ross, and the casino mogul Steve Wynn, all of whom live in Florida but own second homes in New York City.

The other was brought by the corporation that owns an Upper East Side co-op building known as the Montclair, as well as a handful of homeowners, including some who live in Florida and in Suffolk County on Long Island. That lawsuit is backed by the Real Estate Board of New York, an influential lobbying group.

Universities Are Enticing Donors to Other Schools To Give to Them Instead

By ALAN BLINDER

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Every university has targets for donations.

Alumni. Parents. Grandparents. Former hospital patients. Wealthy people with niche interests.

But some of the biggest contributions these days are coming from people without traditional ties to the universities getting the checks. In September, a \$3 billion contribution to Carnegie Mellon University came from just such a donor, the hedge fund titan Kenneth C. Griffin. It was the largest single contribution to an American university.

“What we're seeing is donors more loyal to a particular purpose than an institution, so they look across different institutions and ask which can best advance that purpose,” said James M. Langley, a consultant who led fund-raising for several top universities.

Sometimes, that purpose is to avenge an alma mater's perceived wrongdoing over matters like campus protests. In other instances, donors are looking to transform where they live and join with universities eager for satellite campuses in affluent enclaves from South Florida to San Francisco.

"There's always a reason why someone gives. I don't think you just say, 'I'll pick one out of a hat' or something like that," said Stephen M. Ross, the real estate magnate who owns the Miami Dolphins.

Mr. Ross is the largest individual donor to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, to which he has given at least \$478 million.

But he has also pledged \$50 million for a Vanderbilt University outpost in West Palm Beach, Fla., a city he has spent years trying to cultivate. If anything, he said, his donation was "more of an enticement" to Vanderbilt.

It is not unprecedented for universities to collect checks from people with no pre-existing ties. MacKenzie Scott, for example, has surprised scores of colleges with multimillion-dollar gifts, many of which have gone to schools, like tribal or historically Black institutions, that rarely receive big contributions.

But the surges benefiting schools like Carnegie Mellon and Vanderbilt, which saw its year-over-year unaffiliated giving rocket from \$19 million to \$276 million, are unusual for their speed and scale.

Donna E. Shalala, a former University of Miami president, said major unaffiliated donations were "very random."

"Does it happen? Yes," Dr. Shalala said, recalling a \$20 million donation from a woman whose connection to the school was the fact that her lawyer had gone to junior high school with Dr. Shalala.

She guessed that perhaps 10 percent of the billions she had raised had come from unaffiliated donors.

But at Vanderbilt, which markets itself as an innovative maverick and whose tuition is approaching \$70,000, unaffiliated gifts amounted to more than one-third of its fund-raising in the 2026 fiscal year. Some donors have been attracted to Vanderbilt because they see it as more aligned with their politics.

The hedge fund executive Bill Ackman, for instance, recently pledged \$25 million after he delighted in how Daniel Diermeier, the Vanderbilt chancellor, blasted elite higher education as too cloistered and intolerant.

Vanderbilt, Mr. Ackman said, was "preserving the meritocracy of a higher education."

"A university should be — I hate to use the words — a safe space where people should be able to talk about whatever they want, whether you're conservative, progressive or otherwise," said Mr. Ackman, a Harvard alumnus who has become a critic.

"It is Harvard's loss because I'm not a natural supporter of Vanderbilt — almost no one I know has gone to Vanderbilt," Mr. Ackman added. But, he said, "There are a lot of people who are very disappointed with their alma maters."

Dr. Diermeier's iconoclastic approach to higher education's ills has invited eye rolls from peers who sometimes see him as an opportunist who is too eager to signal conciliation to conservatives. And his fund-raising strategy has also led to worries among Vanderbilt faculty members who fear that the university is both overextending and aligning itself with contentious figures.

Vanderbilt has drawn big-ticket donors who previously had nothing to do with the university.

DAVID BRYTUS/IMAGN IMAGES, VIA REUTERS

Stephen M. Ross has donated to Michigan and Vanderbilt.

NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

"The politics of it are extremely alarming to a lot of people who don't believe you can take vast quantities of money and not be beholden to people," said Jessie Hock, an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt who also leads Tennessee's conference of the American Association of University Professors.

More broadly, other critics fume over how billionaires' education gifts often go toward more buildings instead of more scholarships. (Mr. Ackman and Vanderbilt have not announced the purpose of his gift.)

Dr. Diermeier acknowledged Vanderbilt's expansion and the political climate since Hamas's attack on Israel three years ago had helped the university attract donors. After pro-Palestinian demonstrations rocked many campuses, some colleges faced blowback for not appearing politically neutral or inadequately suppressing activism that some saw as antisemitic.

LANDON EDWARDS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Vanderbilt's Daniel Diermeier has been a magnet for donors.

But Dr. Diermeier has been among academia's most vocal proponents of institutional neutrality — the idea of universities themselves steering clear of debates that do not affect their operations — and he has argued that people on campuses should hear a wide range of views.

"We're now getting a reputation that as everybody is on the ropes or playing defense, we're moving," he said. "We're getting things done."

MARTINA TUITY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Kenneth C. Griffin contributed \$3 billion to Carnegie Mellon.

He bristled at the suggestion, though, that Vanderbilt was becoming a haven for conservatives whose contributions may be as much about politics as academics. Indeed, several major donations will help underwrite Vanderbilt's growing network of campuses.

For example, a \$75 million matching gilt from the Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and his wife will support Vanderbilt's new art, architecture and design college in San Francisco, where the university will soon take over the California College of the Arts campus.

Eric Jensen, the Huang Foundation's chief operating officer, said that the Vanderbilt contribution followed millions in giving to the arts school and that the foundation "supported Vanderbilt not as a political statement."

Mr. Griffin's Carnegie Mellon donation will largely go toward a new campus in Miami. Although one of Mr. Griffin's companies had given to the university more than a decade ago, he had no personal ties to Carnegie Mellon.

But Mr. Griffin, a Harvard alumnus who has contributed more than \$500 million to that university, said he had concluded that Carnegie Mellon was well-suited to transform his adopted Miami. Invoking his business experience, he argued no university could automatically expect a graduate's giving.

"I built a business that's predicated on meritocracy," he said, adding, "I think you're seeing people give to other institutions of higher education, rather than where they went to college, based on the merits."

(Mr. Griffin said in 2024 that until Harvard resumed teaching people "to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I'm not interested in supporting the institution." In an interview in September, he said he had lately given modestly to Harvard and expected to back it "for decades to come" because it had improved on matters like antisemitism.)

The fundamentals of higher education philanthropy have been changing. Mr. Langley recalled that when he became Georgia Tech's external relations leader in the 1980s, about 80 percent of higher education contributions came from about 20 percent of donors. Today, roughly 1 percent of contributors account for about 90 percent of donations.

School leaders seeking money from unaffiliated donors, Mr. Langley said, often train their pitches on what he described as “an alignment of interests.”

"You don't talk loyalty," he said. "You don't talk institutional support. You talk commonality of interests and strategic alignment and partnership, not a gift for the good of the institution."

The sustainability of fund-raising that relies so significantly on unaffiliated donors is uncertain. There can be philanthropic droughts, and political winds can change. And big contributors may adjust, again, their own priorities.

Mr. Ross said he had not ruled out giving Vanderbilt more.

Still, his newfound passion for the university goes only so far: His cellphone's ringtone remains Michigan's fight song.

Former Federal Prosecutor Is Named to Investigate Sexual Assault Case at Cornell

By HURUBIE MEKO and SANTUL NERKAR

The New York attorney general on Wednesday appointed Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, to lead a criminal investigation into a former Cornell University student's allegations that she was sexually assaulted at a fraternity party in 2024.

Ms. Kelly served as the inaugural chief of the civil rights unit in the criminal division of the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York.

In the Cornell investigation, she will oversee a team of lawyers both from the attorney general's office and from the firm Boies Schiller Flexner, where Ms. Kelly is now a partner, according to a news release.

The team will review evidence and interview witnesses related to what the former Cornell student, now known as Jane Doe, described in a lawsuit as a sexual encounter that began on Oct. 19, 2024, and spiraled into a drug-fueled assault inside a fraternity house by several men.

All of the men have denied wrongdoing, and none have been charged with a crime.

"All New Yorkers deserve a fair and thorough inquiry into the facts of this case," Ms. Kelly said. "I look forward to lending my years of experience as a federal prosecutor to the office of the attorney general as we examine all available evidence."

In a news release, the attorney general, Letitia James, said she is confident that Ms. Kelly will lead a "fair and comprehensive investigation."

The appointment of Ms. Kelly follows a weekslong search by the attorney general for a lawyer who would take on a case that has convulsed Cornell's campus in Ithaca, N.Y., and plunged the Ivy League institution into crisis.

In making the appointment, Ms. James has selected a veteran litigator who has overseen high-profile sex crimes prosecutions, including by leading the team that won the conviction of the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs of prostitution-related offenses last year. Mr. Combs was acquitted of racketeering conspiracy and sex traf ficking, the most serious charges against him.

But Ms. James has also enlisted the aid of a firm with a complicated history of involvement in other such cases.

Lawyers from Boies Schüller Flexner have represented victims of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And one of its founding partners, David Boies, was also close to the disgraced Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein was accused in 2017 by multiple women of abusing his power to sexually assault them, and he was later convicted of sex crimes in New York and California.

A team of lawyers will review evidence from an incident in 2024.

Before articles appeared in The New York Times detailing some of the allegations against Mr. Weinstein, Mr. Boies personally signed a contract with a private intelligence firm that was hired to quash the articles about Mr. Weinstein.

A representative of Boies Schiller Flexner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Kelly did not join the firm until July 2025.

student's allegations were detailed in a lawsuit filed in Manhattan on Sept. 16. The suit unleashed a flood of outrage on social media and college campuses over the handling of her claims, both by the university and the Tompkins County district attorney, Matthew Van Houten.

In the Cornell case, the former

Ms. Kelly's appointment also comes amid criticism of Ms.

James, who has been accused of showing bias in describing the case on social media.

"I'm holding her in my heart and in my prayers," Ms. James wrote at the time. "To her, and to all survivors: you're not alone. We stand with you."

On Sept. 28, the same day that Mr. Van Houten issued a statement saying he would reopen a criminal inquiry into the former student's allegations, Ms. James posted on social media that what Jane Doe "has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable."

Later that week, Gov. Kathy Hochul said she had "lost faith" in Mr. Van Houten, who had initially declined to pursue a criminal case in response to Jane Does's earlier complaint. In the same statement, Ms. Hochul said she had appointed Ms. James as special prosecutor to oversee a new investigation into the case.

After Ms. James was appointed, her office said it had narrowed the search for outside counsel to support the investigation.

But in two separate filings in the weeks since, lawyers for men accused by Jane Doe have argued that Ms. James should be removed from the investigation and that a separate special prosecutor should be appointed. A hearing in one of those matters was held in Sullivan County Supreme Court last week, where lawyers for Ms. James defended her against one of the motions. A judge has yet to make a ruling on the request to remove Ms. James.

Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer representing the man whose request was heard in Sullivan County, said Ms. Kelly's appointment "changes the face of the investigation without establishing any change in ultimate authority."

“Nothing announced today states that Attorney General James has recused herself, relinquished supervisory or charging authority, or surrendered the ability to direct, approve, reject, or override substantive prosecutorial decisions,” he said.

Ms. Kelly's appointment would offer Ms. James's office, which does not typically prosecute sex crimes, added experience to the Cornell investigation.

After getting a bachelor's degree from Cornell and a law degree from Columbia University, Ms. Kelly began her legal career at an international law firm. She then clerked for federal judges in Manhattan and New Jersey.

During her time as a federal prosecutor, Ms. Kelly oversaw cases spanning from fraud and racketeering to human trafficking.

Opinion

The New York Times

ROUND TABLE

'Americans Have Chosen a New Path'

DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE Democrats have taken the House and the Senate — flipping seats virtually no one thought possible even just a few weeks ago.

On election night, Times Opinion asked nine columnists and contributors to look back on these midterms and explain what mattered most. Some said tariffs, others gas prices. But what's clear is that the American people were angry — and ready to repudiate the president and his policies. "Decency won," one of our columnists wrote. "In an era of grubby corruption under a president who reveled in wanton cruelty, Americans have chosen a new path."

What mattered most

Binyamin Appelbaum: Antipathy toward the president trumped everything else. But for Democrats, winning was the easy part. Memories of this election cycle will be shaped by what Democrats do with their power. And they made a mess of their recent opportunities.

Josh Barro: Donald Trump promised to bring down inflation and avoid new foreign wars. Instead, he launched a war that drove energy prices up (while failing to achieve its strategic purpose) and imposed tariffs that raised the cost of living. Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that's a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it.

Jamelle Bouie: The thing that stands out most to me was Vivek Ramaswamy's closing argument, an ad that hinged on attacking his opponent Amy Acton for being the victim of sexual assault. An astoundingly poor decision.

Michelle Cottle: This is what happens when a political party allows itself to be hollowed out and wholly defined by one man. When the public sours on that man, the party falls right along with him.

9 writers on the best and worst moments from Trump's midterm rout.

David French: The state-level changes may ultimately be as consequential as the House and Senate races. Democrats may have a chance to control the entire Texas government. We haven't begun to consider the long-term implications of that outcome.

Jean Guerrero: The president wasted billions on foreign wars and waged a brutal assault on immigrants here at home. On Tuesday, voters woke up from the delusion that Trump's an ally of working people.

Daniel McCarthy: Americans supposedly don't vote on foreign policy, but they certainly vote on its domestic consequences. The Iran war knocked down two pillars of the Trump coalition by raising fuel prices and alienating everyone opposed to more Middle East wars.

Tressie McMillan Cottom: MAGA will end one day. The election results last night suggest that it could be sooner rather than later. Texas elected a Democratic governor. Georgia elected a Black female governor. North Carolina flipped innumerable contested races blue. This repudiation of Trump's small, racist, profoundly unserious vision of America needed to be decisive. And it was.

Lydia Polgreen: To borrow from Marxist thinking: We are watching the revenge of the material. You can't lie to people about the price of a gallon of gas or the price of a pound of ground beef or the price of a ton of fertilizer. Tariffs and the lunatic war on Iran have clobbered ordinary people while Trump and his billionaire cronies have lined their pockets.

What surprised you

Appelbaum: The strength of Southern Democrats. Newly elected senators like Annie Andrews and James Talarico certainly benefited from their cartoonishly objectionable Republican opponents. But the part of the South where Democrats can't possibly compete suddenly looks a lot smaller.

Barro: In states like North Carolina and Texas, Democrats are winning races for the House and in state legislatures where they did not even expect to compete. Democrats have shown that they can win back the working-class voters they had lost. To keep them, Democrats will need to maintain a focus on affordability — including keeping energy prices down.

Bouie: The thing that mattered most was the vast unpopularity of the president's core agenda: mass deportations, trade wars, actual wars and attempted cultural transformation. The headline results of the night reflect the public's anger with each of these.

Cottle: A blue Texas?! That stuns like a snowstorm in Laredo.

French: The House popular vote margin, without question. If projections are accurate, it was the biggest popular vote rebuke since the post-Watergate elections of the 1970s.

Guerrero: Xavier Becerra will become California's first Latino governor in more than 150 years. But in his campaign, his identity as a Latino wasn't a major talking point. That seemed to reflect a dying confidence in Latino identity as an organizing political force.

McCarthy: The Carolinas, Texas and Georgia together show that the South now offers Democrats the kind of opportunity that Trump found in the Rust Belt. This shouldn't come as a complete surprise to anyone closely watching long-term trends, but the

implications are stark. Southern states won't stay red just because of their strong economies.

McMillan Cottom: Keisha Lance Bottoms's election surprised me. Stacey Abrams had two brutal losses in 2022 and 2018. That had tempered my hope.

Polgreen: Trump, king of the vulgar spectacle, won the presidency twice, though never with an outright popular majority. But this time, decency won. The Democrats who scored major wins include a megachurch pastor and a seminarian, a pediatrician and at least one public health official. In an era of grubby corruption under a president who reveled in wanton cruelty, Americans have chosen a new path.

Most memorable moment

Appelbaum: The arrival of artificial intelligence ads, which used manufactured or manipulated imagery in attempts to trick voters. Many were crude, and they didn't have discernible impacts on the results, but the tactic is likely to become more common — and more dangerous.

Barro: Lacking a strong argument about how they had governed well, Republicans leaned into name-calling: Talarico was "Talafreako." Andrews was "Trannie Annie." Acton was a drunk liar whose mother hates her. Republicans apparently assumed that every voter shared their contempt for Democrats. Their attacks weren't just juvenile and unpleasant; they made Republicans look as though they had lost sight of voters' top concerns: the cost of living and a pointless war.

Bouie: For me, the most surprising outcome was the scale of the sweep in Texas. These victories might fundamentally change the trajectory of the state's politics, and it appears to rest on deep anger among Hispanic voters. If you wanted to liken it to the fallout from California's Proposition 187 in the 1990s, you would not be off base.

Cottle: In the Rio Grande Valley, in a district Trump solidly carried in 2024, I talked with a Hispanic voter who had taken a chance on

Trump two years ago because of his economic promises but now felt taken for a ride. She and her husband were voting blue this time. Clearly, they were not alone.

French: When Darline Graham said, "National security is not my thing," during a primary debate, she demonstrated a remarkable disrespect for her own voters.

Guerrero: I was struck by how proudly Abdul El-Sayed campaigned on abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Our government spends billions on an agency that operates outside of the law to terrorize our neighbors," he said in an ad pitching himself as "the only Senate candidate for abolishing ICE." With his win, he showed that "Abolish ICE" is not a position that alienates many voters anymore.

McCarthy: The most telling moment came from someone who wasn't even running. The day before the elections, the departing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Sirius XM that the Iran war was a "big, big drag" and warned Republicans against being the party of Big Tech and data centers.

McMillan Cottom: The Democrat Angie Nixon's Florida campaign really stuck with me. Florida is not just red; it is Trump's political home base. Nixon ran as a democratic socialist, and while she fell short, she lost by less than 3 percentage points, with a huge financial deficit — which suggests that the Democratic brand is being remade and the whole map is in play.

Polgreen: Nothing appalled me quite so much in these midterms as the brazen double standard applied to El-Sayed, who will become America's first Muslim senator. At every turn he was faced with baseless accusations of antisemitism and made to answer for the statements of people who supported him. His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, was not held to anything close to the same standard. Indeed, his supporters engaged in gleefully Islamophobic tropes throughout the campaign. It was a painful reminder that bias against Muslims is not just tolerated but even celebrated, and not just in the Republican Party.

Something small but important buried in the results

Appelbaum: It was a big night for Democratic candidates who talk publicly about their faith. That's an important development for a party that needs to find ways of connecting with a broader cross-section of the American people. In future elections, Trump won't be on the ballot.

Barro: Florida voters appear to have approved a constitutional amendment that will severely restrict property taxes in the state, which already lacks an income tax. Property tax revolts around the country are undermining a revenue stream that supports important local government services. State and local officials need to do a better job convincing voters that government is efficient and worth paying for.

Bouie: This is not small, but it is important: The suburban G.O.P. collapse that turned Virginia blue and made North Carolina and Georgia competitive is extending beyond those states into South Carolina, in a trend that threatens the Republican Party's ability to build national majorities.

Cottle: I am a relentless nag about paying attention to down-ballot races, so let me take this moment to cheer the Dems' big gains in the Texas Legislature. Well played, President Trump!

French: It looks as though Scott DesJarlais might lose his House race in Tennessee. He was a pre-Trump version of Trump, and it's fitting that DesJarlais's sun would set alongside Trump's.

Guerrero: Texas is undergoing the same shift California had in the 1990s. In response to racist, rabid immigration raids, voters are souring on Republicans. That includes Latinos, whose 2024 red shift turned out to be temporary.

McCarthy: Voter ID ballot initiatives succeeded in places like North Carolina and Ohio, showing that passing a key piece of legislation Trump pressed on Senate Republicans — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would expand ID requirements nationwide — could have given Republicans a desperately needed boost.

McMillan Cottom: Women did not give up. That didn't get enough attention. MAGA is a movement built on men's grievance about women's economic and political advancements. Democratic women ran historic races this year. The women who stood out ran on economic issues without demonizing gay, trans or poor voters.

Polgreen: The culture war was a dead end in this election cycle for Republicans. Conservatives like to refer to liberal causes like transgender rights and support for Gaza as luxury beliefs, disconnected from the values and concerns of ordinary Americans. But this time around, it was Republicans who seemed out of touch. No amount of scare-mongering about boys in girls' locker rooms could motivate voters in red states where transgender people have faced draconian laws that made their lives hellish. Threats of a migrant invasion fell flat when Trump had basically sealed the border and was hunting down anyone who looked foreign in the streets of American cities. It turns out that the Trump agenda may represent the true luxury beliefs after all.

Above, Gina Hinojosa in September during her successful campaign for Texas governor, and right, Abdul El-Sayed, two months before winning a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan.

AHMED GAFER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

EDITORIAL

TRUMP HAS MET HIS MATCH

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TAM STOCKTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEXANDER COOLIN, ROGER KISVY, NICK HAGEN, MICHELIE CUSTAFSON, JOHN TUTY, WILL WARASHA, JENN ACERMAN, MADDE MCGARATY

The Editorial Board

A group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

PRESIDENT TRUMP has spent the past two years trying to subvert American democracy. On Tuesday, voters stood up to him.

In the face of the president's many attempts to manipulate the midterm elections — through extreme gerrymandering, false claims of voter fraud, efforts to block mail voting and more — tens of millions of Americans responded by turning out and rejecting the Republican Party that has enabled him. Democrats retook control of the Senate and the House as well. The repudiation was broad enough to overcome America's political polarization. Republicans lost races even in traditionally deep red places, including Kansas, Kentucky, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas. They lost because many independents and even Republicans consider Mr. Trump's second term to be a failure.

The outcome creates a crucial check on Mr. Trump's autocratic behavior. It empowers Democrats to investigate his corruption and lawbreaking and pass legislation that offers an alternative to his counterproductive agenda. The country already feels changed, and it will in fact be changed in January.

The United States still faces many long-term problems to which neither party has offered clear solutions. And over the next two years, while Mr. Trump remains president, Congress and judges will need to be prepared to counter further attempts by him to undermine the constitutional order.

Nonetheless, this is a time to feel pride. Aspiring authoritarians often use legislative elections to cement their power and further undermine democracy. In 2026, the American people refused to allow Mr. Trump to do so. The system has held.

IN ADDITION TO VOTERS, three groups deserve particular credit: election workers, legal advocates and judges.

Election workers did their jobs this year in the face of relentless pressure from Mr. Trump. He has long claimed that widespread fraud decides American elections, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Election workers across party lines responded to these lies by doing their jobs as diligently as they long have, helping people cast their ballots and counting those ballots.

In many states, election officials took specific actions to stop interference from the Trump administration. Last year, the Justice Department demanded that states provide the federal government with voters' birth dates, driver's license information and partial Social Security numbers. Officials, including several Republicans, refused to comply.

Among the standouts were Utah's Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson; Michigan's Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson; and West Virginia's Republican secretary of state, Kris Warner. Each refused to comply, each drew a lawsuit from the administration, and each won in court.

Their ability to resist the president underscores an advantage of America's decentralized government. They could refuse because the president has no power to over-

Americans must remain vigilant until the midterms' winners take office.

rule them. The elections clause of the Constitution lets each state decide how its elections are run. This federalism proved a bulwark against Mr. Trump's authoritarian instincts.

A SECOND GROUP that stood up for democracy this year were legal advocates. When Mr. Trump tried to interfere in the elections — through executive orders that sought to complicate voter registration, bar states from counting some mail ballots and direct the Postal Service to decide which voters would receive mail ballots — advocates quickly responded by filing lawsuits.

The advocates included the Brennan Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and Democratic attorneys general. Some prestigious law firms have been afraid of confronting the Trump administration's legal abuses over the past two years, making the work of nonprofits all the more important.

The lawsuits frequently succeeded because of the third group: federal judges who insisted on following the law and upholding the Constitution despite intimidation efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies. Judges appointed by presidents from both parties, including Mr. Trump himself, blocked key parts of the executive orders concerning election rules. In 27 straight district court rulings, judges rejected the Justice Department's demands for state voter rolls.

The Supreme Court deserves both credit and criticism. The court was wrong to issue rulings that made possible Mr. Trump's extreme partisan gerrymandering and his administration's efforts to create a national voter database. But the justices did act to protect Americans' ability to cast votes this fall. In September, the court upheld a lower-court ruling that barred the Postal Service from taking steps that could have restricted mail voting.

That ruling was a reminder that this court does have its red lines about elections. After the 2020 election, the justices refused to hear cases with Mr. Trump's false claims about election fraud. The justices may need to swat down similar claims in the weeks ahead.

But the challenges ahead should not overshadow what Americans accomplished. This year, election workers, lawyers and judges defended the rules that protect the vote. And tens of millions of Americans went to the polls to exercise their most fundamental democratic right. Americans showed that the power to choose their leaders belongs to them. Now they must remain vigilant until officials certify every race and the winners take office.

LETTERS

America Sends a Resounding Message

TO THE EDITOR:

Re "Democrats Rout G.O.P." (nytimes.com, Nov. 4):

Thank you to my fellow Americans; my heart is full. You voted with clarity, knowledge and fortitude.

We can now begin to rebuild our status in the world, our shared alliances, our strength, our common values and, most important, our humanity.

ANN TRINKAUS

MIDDLETOWN, CONN.

TO THE EDITOR:

As Democrats celebrate their nationwide success in the midterms, we should remember it was President Trump's appalling character and dismal leadership that enabled Tuesday's victories.

Most of my conservative friends voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 because they believed that conservative ends justified his menacing means and immorality. Yet discounting his abysmal character has back-fired twice over: The president has led Republicans to an electoral wipeout, while his right-wing populism has supplanted traditional conservatism within the G.O.P.

Resist the pull toward extreme D.F.I. politics, which I believe alienate more people than they persuade.

Theodore Roosevelt once declared, "Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike." Republicans seemed to have forgotten this maxim and face the consequences today. As Democrats look for tomorrow's leaders, we must prioritize character. The long-term success of our party — and nation — demands it.

Most of all, as a Jew, I ask Democrats to stop making room for antisemitism. It exists on the right, too, but it has found too comfortable a home in parts of this party and its coalition. I will be watching that more closely than anything else.

I am one voter among millions, and I could be wrong about plenty. But I am looking for truth and decency, and I suspect I am not alone.

JOYCE KAMANITZ

WEST HARTFORD, CONN.

TO THE EDITOR:

Well, the people have spoken. The Democrats gave the Republicans quite a shellacking, and perhaps Republicans need to recognize that they have become their own worst enemies.

Between ICE being far too aggressive, the cost of living becoming almost unbearable and the constant outbursts and divisive rhetoric from the Republican leadership, maybe people have simply had enough.

As a Republican, I want to say congratulations to my Democratic friends. That's what democracy is all about. Sometimes your side wins, sometimes it loses, and you have to respect what the voters have decided.

T. MICHAEL SPENCER

WASHINGTON

Hopefully, my party will take a good look in the mirror and figure out what went wrong.

TO THE EDITOR:

I went to bed early on election night. When I woke up, my husband told me that Democrats had won control of Congress. My first feeling was relief. By the time the coffee was ready, it had company — ambivalence, and a weariness that has been building for years.

What wears on me most is the tone of our politics: The other side is no longer merely mistaken but contemptible as well. President Trump's greed, grift and rhetoric have given permission to the worst impulses in all of us. But the judgmental arrogance of the far left, the certainty that anyone who disagrees is morally deficient, is corrosive too.

So I have a few hopes for the new majority.

Let freedom ring!

Govern; don't retaliate. Vengeance may feel satisfying, but it isn't a program.

Listen to what voters have been saying for years: The cost of living is crushing families, immigration needs a sensible policy, and our public life has sunk into the gutter.

DAVID TULANIAN HENDERSON, NEV.

TO THE EDITOR:

Reading and watching the news reports, one would think that affordability (especially gas prices) and the Iran war were the two factors to best explain the Republican thumping (shades of "It's the economy, stupid"). Perhaps that is right, but I hope that it's wrong.

I would like to think that voters also rebelled against a Republican Party that blindly supported President Trump's every action and utterance, no matter how preposterous, meanspirited or illegal. Even more than that, I would like to believe that they could not stomach masked ICE agents terrorizing, killing and wounding people within our borders, law-abiding people and citizens among them.

If I am right, my faith in the United States may be restored. Now, I can only hope that the Democrats understand that they don't have a mandate. They didn't win nearly as much as the Republicans lost. Don't mess up.

MICHAEL WILDER

MAHWALI, N.J.

Justice Kagan Sounds an Alarm

Jesse Wegman

A contributing Opinion writer and a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.

LIKE a lot of Americans, I've grown accustomed to Supreme Court justices speaking out much more frequently and informally than they once did. Yet still there was more than one moment in a public conversation Elena Kagan had at Catholic University last month when I almost couldn't believe what I was hearing.

The justices like to say that their opinions speak for themselves. In the old days, they nurtured the mystique of their delicate yet elevated position in government, rarely if ever revealing their own feelings about the law, American politics or life in general.

That is no longer true. Today's bench is among the most voluble in the court's history — the justices seem constantly to be writing books, giving speeches, engaging with interviewers and, increasingly, complaining about the institution they serve and (sometimes) the colleagues they serve with.

Even by that new standard, Justice Kagan's comments, which came during an hour-plus sit-down interview at Catholic University's law school, broke the judicial omertà.

The Catholic University law professor J. Joel Alicea, who interviewed Justice Kagan, started the conversation by asking her about rulings involving partisan gerrymandering, voting rights and money in politics, all of which were decided on party-line votes with her and the other Democratic appointees in the minority.

"The court got it wrong" in each of these cases, Justice Kagan said, because of a "lack of appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions." She pointed to the Republican-appointed majority's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in April, which was followed almost immediately by a mad scramble in states across the

South to pass new, more partisan gerryman-ders.

Protecting Black political participation and representation was precisely what the Voting Rights Act was enacted to do, she noted. By eliminating the last meaningful tool of that landmark law, she explained, "the court kind of said, 'Oh, well.'"

Justice Kagan concluded that “the court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works, and has created a democracy that does not work as well as it should.” This wasn’t the first time she has leveled such sweeping criticisms; you can find similar charges in her dissenting opinions in that and other democracy-related cases.

But Justice Kagan was offering this critique off the bench, in public — where the justices know their words carry a special significance, particularly before the midterms. Even more surprising, of all the Democratic appointees, if not all nine justices, Justice Kagan has a reputation as the most restrained and institutionalist.

At a judicial conference in July, Justice Kagan took pains to defend her conservative counterparts against accusations that they were acting as a rubber stamp for the Trump administration. So it was that much more remarkable to hear her admit, just a few months later, such wide-ranging frustrations with her fellow justices.

And she wasn't done: "This court is deeply conservative, and in that way very different from the court I joined 16 years ago." That court, she added, "was by no means liberal" — it still had a 5-to-4 conservative majority and had only months earlier decided Citizens United v. E.E.C., which transformed the role of money in politics (and in which Justice Kagan, then serving as President Obama's solicitor general, had argued the losing side). Still, as recently as 2017, "nobody in America thought the court was in the pocket of any one group or any one party or any one anything," she said. "The court had a kind of legitimacy. And when the court has a kind of legitimacy of that kind, it helps to create a stable country."

Justice Kagan had one more dig, which verged on the personal. Reflecting on the role of originalism in the court's jurisprudence, she said, "I've never thought originalism really works," adding that the "cart-wheels" originalists perform to reach their preferred outcomes are "almost embarrassing." In sum, she said, "the whole project is kind of misconceived, and it's not a very good match with the Constitution we have."

Originalism has been the coin of the conservative judicial realm for decades and is currently ascendant at the Supreme Court; as Justice Kagan said ruefully at her own confirmation hearings, "We are all originalists." Calling it "misconceived" and its practitioners "embarrassing" may sound relatively mild to ears accustomed to the crude invective of the Trump era, but it suggests that the interpersonal conflicts on the bench aren't getting resolved anytime soon.

I would go so far as to infer a deeper message in Justice Kagan's remarks: When taken together, her critiques of her colleagues offer a coherent case for reforming the court.

It goes something like this: The conservative majority has been arrogating outsize power to itself over the past several years, claiming the authority to decide many of the most contested questions of American legal and political life, while Congress has stood idly by. Even when the court rules that it has no power to act, as it did in the partisan gerrymandering case, it has "deleterious effects" on democracy, as Justice Kagan pointed out.

Next, pair the court's arrogation of political power with the fact that the right-wing justices apparently consider themselves accountable to no one. As Justice Samuel Alto wrongly claimed about Congress in 2023, "No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court — period."

Finally, consider this in the broader con-

The Supreme Court's most restrained member has broken the judicial omertà.

text of judicial life tenure, a functionally impossible-to-amend Constitution and — to Justice Kagan's point about originalism — a majority in thrall to a theory of constitutional interpretation that privileges the supposed consensus of people living more than two centuries ago over the values and wishes of those alive today.

Put it all together, and the American people have no way to push the Constitution in a more democratic direction.

The court's profoundly antidemocratic attitude was summed up neatly by Chief Justice John Roberts, who said in a 2009 interview: "The most important thing for the public to understand is that we are not a political branch of government. They don't elect us. If they don't like what we're doing, it's more or less just too bad."

The chief justice offered one remedy: impeachment followed by conviction in the Senate. However, as he also noted, that has never happened in American history.

There is a better and easier solution, and Justice Kagan's critiques last month point directly to it: major court reform imposed by Congress.

Structural failures demand structural repairs. Whether these repairs take the form of term limits, an expanded bench, binding ethics rules, restrictions of the court's jurisdiction or other measures, they are the only way for the American people to reclaim power over a court gone rogue.

Is this what Justice Kagan was saying, implicitly, in her talk at Catholic University? I can't be certain, but I'm comfortable speculating.

In this moment of rock-bottom public confidence in the court, Justice Kagan was not unaware that she was speaking outside of the formal boundaries of court decisions, and thus challenging the public appearance of judicial comity. Indeed this may be Kagan's restraint showing up after all: With her comments, she is ringing alarm bells about the seriousness of problems at the court.

Ian Berry, 92, Only Photographer at '60 Sharpeville Massacre, Dies

By ADAM NOSSITER

Ian Berry captured protesters running from the police during the Sharpeville, South Africa, massacre in 1960. At left, the authorities arriving at the police compound in Sharpeville, just before they opened fire on the crowd. As many as 90 people were killed.

IAN BERRY/MAGNUM PHOTOS

IAN FERRY/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Ian Berry, the only photographer who documented the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, a critical turning point in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and who went on to cover conflicts in Vietnam, Israel and Eastern Europe, died on Sept. 13 at his home in Salisbury, England. He was 92.

His death was announced by Magnum, the global photo agency with which Mr. Berry was associated for over 60 years.

As many as 90 people — peaceful demonstrators protesting apartheid's passbook laws, which

Arresting images that helped turn public opinion against apartheid.

severely restricted the movements of Black South Africans — were killed during the Sharpeville massacre. Most of them were shot in the back by the police as they tried to flee, outside the police station in the township 40 miles south of Johannesburg. Hundreds more were critically injured. The event is still commemorated every March 21 in South Africa.

Mr. Berry's arresting images of frightened townspeople — men, women and children — running as the police calmly reloaded their weapons in the distance reinforced the world's perception of the brutality of apartheid and helped turn public opinion against South Africa's cruel status quo.

After the massacre, the authorities further cracked down on dissent, outlawing the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress, the leading opposition groups. They were forced into "a clandestine existence, prompting the switch from peaceful resistance to the embrace of violent strategies to overturn white minority rule," The New York Times wrote on the 25th anniversary of the killings.

On the day of the massacre, the celebrated South African photographer Peter Magubane — Mr. Berry's colleague at Drum, a magazine that reported on apartheid's abuses — was on another assignment. Their editor sent Mr. Berry to Sharpeville, where a man had already been shot and a protest was scheduled.

He followed a convoy of armored police cars along with dozens of other journalists. The police ordered them to turn back, and all but three cars complied.

Further up the road, the remaining journalists were warned again. Only Mr. Berry and his colleague from Drum, in the same car, ignored the order.

The convoy reached a police station, where a peaceful crowd of about 5,000 demonstrators was assembled outside.

All seemed calm. Mr. Berry, who had left his car to talk with the police, began to walk back, prepared to call it a day.

"As soon as I got there, the police opened fire," Mr. Berry recalled in a 2013 interview with

Vice magazine. "Bodies started to fall around all over the place." Instinctively, he whipped out the small, lightweight Leica camera favored by news photographers of the day.

"A woman racing in front of me was hit, and as I saw more people fall, I dropped to the ground myself," Mr. Berry told The British Journal of Photography in 1975. "There seemed little point in trying to get away, because you were just as likely to get hit running."

When the firing finally stopped, he hurriedly photographed some of the bodies and jumped into his car, acutely aware of the South African police's hatred of the press.

"The pictures were crap, just pictures of people running towards me," Mr. Berry told Vice. "But it was an event that sort of went around the world. And got

me in Magnum."

He was too modest. Calm, precision, courage and luck helped the photojournalist that day.

His editor at Drum, fearful of repercussions, declined to publish the photographs. So Mr. Berry sent them to a photo agency in London. They were picked up by Life magazine and Paris Match, among others.

In 1968, Mr. Berry went to Prague to document the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Here, protesters in Wenceslas Square.

IAN BERRY/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Remarkably, surviving demonstrators were later charged in South African courts with the offense of affray, a common law term for a public fight that disturbs the peace or frightens people. Mr. Berry, called as a witness, testified that he had seen the police reloading, signaling that their shooting was intentional, which proved to be crucial evidence in the demonstrators' acquittal. He was barred from South Africa the next year.

In 1962, Mr. Berry was invited to join Magnum by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the agency's founders. Mr. Berry became the first contract photographer for The Observer, in London, in 1964. He went on to photograph conflict, social conditions and nature all over the world for publications such as Life, National Geographic and Geo.

In August 1968, Mr. Berry was the “only known foreign photographer” to cover the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, according to Magnum, sneaking his way across the border by pretending to be headed to an architects’ conference. He later smuggled his film out in the hubcaps of his rental car. His tender images of stricken Czech citizens, silently confronting Soviet tank turrets, captured the devastation of the moment.

One of a select group of photographers who traveled the globe covering conflict, from the Six-Day War in Israel to Vietnam to Congo, Mr. Berry said he had been driven by the simple desire to expose audiences to the unseen and unknown.

JAN FERRY MAGNISM PHOTOS

Mr. Berry photographed a nanny and a child at a National Party meeting in Harrismith, South Africa, in 1994.

"We wanted to show people on one side of the world what was happening to people on the other side of the world," he told WePresent in a 2020 interview.

Ian Berry was born in Preston, England, on April 4, 1934, the son of Walter Berry, a garage owner, and Ethel (McKimmings) Berry. He attended Rossall School in Lancashire. At 17, already interested in photography, he moved to South Africa to work for a family friend who had apprenticed with the American landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Berry worked for The Rand Daily Mail, a South African English-language newspaper, covering the treason trial in which Nelson Mandela was a defendant. By the end of the decade, Mr. Berry had moved on to Drum, edited by Tom Hopkinson, a well-known British journalist. It was Mr. Hopkinson who sent him to Sharpeville.

In later years, Mr. Berry published several books of photographs of South Africans, works notable for their penetrating vision of the effects of apartheid and its aftermath: "Black and Whites: L'Afrique du Sud" (1988), for which the French president François Mitterrand wrote the foreword, and "Living Apart" (1996), with text by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Mr. Berry's book of photographs of England in the 1970s, "The English" (1978), captures the social nuances of that muted decade before Thatcherism transformed the country.

PETER MARLOW/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Mr. Berry in London in 1995. He said he had been driven by the simple desire to expose audiences to the unseen and unknown.

He is survived by his third wife, Kathie Webber, a writer.

Unassuming and understated, Mr. Berry always insisted that the pictures he took that day in Sharpeville were more important for their subsequent impact than for their intrinsic value.

"From my point of view, the only good thing that came out of this was that, as the only nonpolice white guy to witness the people running away who were shot in the back, I was able to testify when they were charged with affray and it came to court," he told Magnum in 2018.

Jossey, Flayne

Takhor, Rajinder

Strauss, Victor

Zimmer, Harriet

Deaths

ina the project, Victor pioneered an innovative cleaning technique using an unlikely household staple: baking soda. Known for his boundless generosity, infectious good humor, and devotion to family, children's clients, and his brother, The Point Bucker. Victor took his greatest pride not in the monuments he helped preserve, but in the family he chenshed. He is survived by Fran, his beloved wife of 63 years; his devoted children, David Kainan, and Haron Klein (Bruce); and his added grandchildren, Isabel, Abigail, Ben, and Samantha. Funeral services will be held at Riverside Memorial Chapel. Thursday at 12 noon.

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Deaths

Rajinder Sinah Takhar of Hilmar, California, passed away on October 30, 2026 at the one of 86, doing what he loved: farmins. He was born on May 17, 1940 in Shankar, Punjab, India to Naranjan Singh Takhar and Ganga Devi Takhar as the youngest of five. Rajinder earned a civil engineering desire in Phawwara, married his beautiful wife, Anand, and

Deaths

came to the United States in 1979 where they created a life for their family in Hilmar. Startins as a visitor of foster and his family, he was a career that he held for two weeks before his first promotion, he had been a good position, and the supervisor, and helped create opportunities for a better life for thousands of people. With her family, he was a member of order and Anand proudly started their first diamond orchard in 1972, which they continued to be able to see him and beloved member of his community, he was President William and John Saks Temple in Arlington for many years. Rajinder was a brilliant, hardworking, and working with her family. He was on extraordinary father with an incomparable moral compass, whose driving was made by the family, who he covered his family, who he covered more than anytime. Insequacy, he had been a great role of marriage, Rajinder and Anand built an incredible life

Deaths

together, a testament to their love and devotion to each other and their children who will continue to celebrate and honor his memory along with her. He is also the father. He survived by his wife, Anand Takhar; his son, Dr. Sukhit Sinah Takhar, and his partner, Vanessa Brown; his daughter, Kulit Kaur Takhar, and her brother, Jansh Kaur Takhar, and his brother, Dr. Santokh "Tokil" Takhar, and his wife, Amrit Takhar, and many nieces, nepnews and extended family. He also has a freedom of his parents, Naranjan Sinah Takhar and Gansia Devi Takhar, his two sisters, Jagir Kaur Johal and Janinder Kaur Gill, and his brother, Jansh Kaur Johal and his families will be held at Allen

Deaths

Mortuary in Turlock, California at 10:00am on Friday, November 6, followed by a prayer service at Guru Nanak Sikh Temple, 884 B. St., Livingston, California.

ZIMMER-Harriet,

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age 107. A woman of valor, Mother to Richard and the late Robert, grandmother to David, Benjamin and Alexander; great-grandmother to June and Charlie. Funeral service Sunday, November 8, 2026 at 9:30pm at Riverside Memorial Chapel, 76th St. and Amsterdam Ave. Burial at Sharon Gardens Cemetery. Shiva at 41 West 96th St., Apt. 4A, Sunday, November 8, 2026, 4:30-8:00pm.

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[The New York Times] Business

TECH | ECONOMY | MEDIA | FINANCE

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2026

The New York Times

An end to uncertainty boosts the markets.

By Sui-Lee Wee, Aruni Soni, Eshe Nelson and Joe Rennison

Stock markets gained on Wednesday, as it became clear that Democrats were set to seize control of Congress in a resounding midterm election victory that surpassed the party's most optimistic expectations.

The S&P 500 rose 1.6 percent, its biggest daily gain in three months. The Nasdaq Composite rose 1.4 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average, which tracks 30 big companies, surged 3 percent, its second best day since President Trump was re-elected.

For investors, perhaps the most important takeaway from the midterms is that they are over. Uncertainty over what might happen on Election Day has historically weighed more heavily on the market than the clarity of a result, regardless of what that result has been.

The Democrats' sweep is likely to produce gridlock in Washington. That can cause political problems in some areas, such as when it comes to approving government spending. At the same time, an extended stasis for policymaking tends to be a bullish signal for investors, allowing them to pay less attention to the political maneuverings behind new rules and laws.

Another reason that markets tend to respond pos-CONTINUED ON PAGE B2

[BROADCAST MEDIA] All smiles on MS NOW. Some regrets on Fox News.

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and JOHN KOBLIN

It was a night when cable news seemed to turn on its head.

The “celebration can absolutely begin,” declared Rachel Maddow just after 10 p.m. Eastern on MS NOW, where she and a band of beaming liberal pundits had just projected a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives.

Two years ago, back when the network was called MSNBC, hangdog faces dominated as President Trump clinched one battleground state after the next. On Tuesday, Chris Hayes was looking giddy.

"There are races on the board right now that have no business whatsoever of being close," he said, marveling at the reach of a blue wave that was sweeping even obscure Democratic candidates into Congress. "I've never seen these people's names before! The Democrat — I'm like, 'Who's this dude?'"

It wasn't long until actual candy was being passed around on set, and that was before the Democrats were projected to win the Senate, too. "The miasma of sugar coming off you guys!" Ms. Maddow said, teasingly, as Nicolle Wallace and Michael Steele giggled and acknowledged they had been sneaking some sweets.

Over on Fox News, the mood was subdued. The CONTINUED ON PAGE B4

NICK HAGEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

BACKLASH An anti-data-center sign. Angered by tax breaks, higher electricity costs and rapid approvals of data centers, voters moved to limit their development, approving 40 of 41 state and local ballot initiatives.

BHANKIN LAUSZIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

SPIRALING PRICES The cost of gas and other necessities prompted voters' anger. Energy shares dropped on Wednesday, and oil prices fell sharply, extending declines as negotiations took place between the U.S. and Iran.

MEDIA REACTION Keeping an eye on the TV at the watch party for Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. Within hours after the polls closed, it was clear on all networks that the results were headed in one direction.

LEAI PAKKA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A target on industry as power balance shifts.

By CECILIA KANG and SOPHIA JUNE

WASHINGTON — Voters on Tuesday slammed the brakes on data centers and swept in governors and legislators who have promised to protect individuals from threats posed by artificial intelligence.

Despite record donations by tech executives to tech-friendly candidates, voters chose a new Democratic leadership raring to investigate the cozy ties between A.I. companies and the administration.

In 40 out of 41 local ballot initiatives across the country — more than half of them in Ohio — citizens voted to limit or prevent data center development. Governors and congressional candidates who ran on anti-tech platforms in Texas, Ohio, Georgia and other states prevailed. And senior Democrats immediately promised to swing a hammer on the industry.

"Expect a tsunami of new rules and oversight," said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

The Republican-led Congress and White House have done little to regulate the A.I. industry over the past two years as fears escalated over the safety of advanced models, the technology's risks of obliterating jobs and even existential threats of A.I.'s ability to end humanity. President Trump took the position that the industry should be largely free of regulations CONTINUED ON PAGE 83

[CRYPTOCURRENCY] Ohio's Senate race is a rare loss for crypto.

By DAVID McCABE and THEODORE SCHLEIFER

Two years ago, a top pro-cryptocurrency super PAC spent \$41 million on ads to help defeat Sherrod Brown, then Ohio's incumbent Democratic senator.

On Tuesday, those results were reversed. Even though the super PAC, Fairshake, spent \$46 million on ads against Mr. Brown, he won the election against the Republican, Senator Jon Husted, by a healthy margin.

It was a rare loss for the crypto industry, which has developed a reputation as a political heavyweight and prospered with a laissez-faire regulatory environment under President Trump.

Tuesday's setback follows years of the crypto industry successfully supporting friendly candidates and targeting industry critics with a barrage of negative ads backed by companies including Coinbase and Ripple. Congress last year approved rules governing stablecoins, helping to legitimize the industry. And Mr. Trump, whose family has a crypto business, has been a booster of policies to benefit the sector.

"It calls into question their strategy," said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, a non-partisan group that tracks spending on elections. "Some of these deep-pocketed donors and people within the industry may have felt that their money CONTINUED ON PAGE B3

[COMPANIES] HP Picks a New C.E.O. Amid a Chip Crunch

HP named Emma Walmsley, a former GSK chief and Microsoft board member, as chief executive on Wednesday to steer the computer maker through a memory-chip crunch that has driven up prices and triggered a steep industry downturn.

She will succeed Bruce Broussard, the interim chief, on Jan. 4.

Ms. Walmsley, who led GSK from 2017 until December last

COMPANIES

Kraft Heinz Plans to Sell Its American Coffee Unit

Kraft Heinz said on Wednesday it would divest its North American coffee unit, which houses brands such as Maxwell House and Gevalia, in a deal that values it at \$650 million, as its chief executive sharpens focus on its core packaged food and condiments.

Consumer goods conglomerates have been streamlining their portfolios in recent years. But Steve Cahillane, the Kraft Heinz chief, paused a planned split after becoming C.E.O. in January, opting to fix existing problems first.

The former Kellogg boss is overseeing a \$700 million uptick in spending on marketing and innovation as Kraft Heinz leans into year, takes charge without prior tech hardware experience as HP looks to revive a sluggish PC market and capitalize on demand for A.I.-enabled devices.

Her seven years on Microsoft's board are her closest brush with the tech sector she will now lead.

"Walmsley has no background in hardware, but she has experience steering a large company through a major restructuring, including the separation of Haleon from GSK, and that is closer to what HP needs," said Vitor Madeira, senior market specialist at Capital.com. REUTERS

RICHARD PENKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

protein-heavy foods and electrolyte-infused drinks to attract health-conscious consumers.

The divestiture of the coffee unit to the private equity firm One Rock Capital Partners is expected to close in mid-2027. Kraft Heinz will retain a 30 percent equity stake. REUTERS

Uber Forecast Comes In Below Analysts' Estimates

EARNINGS

Uber forecast fourth-quarter profit below Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, as a shortage of drivers, costlier fuel and the Middle East conflict choked ride-hailing growth from India to Canada.

The slowdown is forcing Uber to spend more on recruiting and keeping drivers even as it funds acquisitions and a push into autonomous vehicles.

Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, told analysts the company was shifting incentive money from riders to drivers, which can mean higher fares.

Shares of the ride-hailing company were up about 5 percent in afternoon trading.

Uber forecast fourth-quarter adjusted profit of 95 cents to 99 cents per share, below estimates of \$1.06 per share, according to data compiled by LSEG.

"Elevated fuel prices and tighter driver availability weighed on supply growth in several international markets," Mr. Khosrowshahi said. REUTERS

An End to Uncertainty Sends the Markets Soaring

THE NEW YORK TIMES

S&P 500 INDEX

+1.6%

7,688.62

Source: FactSet

Stocks & Bonds

DOW JONES INDUSTRIALS

+3.0%

53,356.12

NASDAQ COMPOSITE INDEX

+1.4%

25,736.51

10-YEAR TREASURY YIELD

4.88%

-0.071 points

\$88.12

-\$7.97

\$4,073.00

+\$102.60

Position of the S&P 500 index at 1-minute intervals on Wednesday -- Previous Close: 7.568.92

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE.

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE.

itively to elections is that money

parked on the sidelines to avoid

any potential tumult re-enters the

market, helping to lift stock

prices.

“Stocks are breathing a big sigh of relief this morning, as the midterms are finally done,” said Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group, an advisory firm. “Markets hate uncertainty, and now with the election out of the way, we are seeing buyers step in across the board,” he added.

When early results on Tuesday night pointed to a landslide victory for the Democrats, Asian stocks initially tumbled, as investors fretted about the artificial intelligence trade that has lifted markets to new heights. Before the midterms, the theory was that a Democratic sweep would slow the A.I. build-out, potentially derailing the prolonged rally in technology stocks.

But such concerns appeared to be quickly pushed off. Asian markets turned around and a broad rally in European and U.S. markets followed, with most sectors posting gains.

Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region at the investment bank Natixis, said that she did not expect the Democrats to "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."

The Democratic sweep, according to a research note from Allianz Global Investors, “ultimately brings greater political tension than fundamental policy change.”

The stocks of some key "hyper-scalers" at the forefront of the A.I. build-out — companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — all rose.