Missouri Voters Reject Trump-Backed Effort to Steal House Seats

Missourians blocked a new congressional map pushed by the state’s Republicans and President Donald Trump Tuesday by nearly 62 percent of the vote. Proposition A would have redrawn the state’s map to favor Republicans and push Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose district currently comprises most of Kansas City along with nearby suburbs, out of office. The vote follows months of television ads mostly opposing the new map drawn by Republicans last year, according to St. Louis Public Radio. Republicans tried to force their new map through before the midterms, but the Supreme Court halted their efforts in an unsigned order in September. In the months since then, Democrats successfully canvassed across Missouri in an effort to defeat the measure, while Republicans, who were hoping to have the map in place already, had less enthusiasm.Trump began pushing for rapid redistricting last year in an effort to keep a Republican majority in Congress and prevent Democratic investigations of himself and his administration. That set off a gerrymandering war, with Republicans successfully getting new maps in place in seven states: Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Ohio. The effort was helped by the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act in April, allowing Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts. Democrats were only able to respond with one successful redistricting effort in California, and picked up a seat in Utah thanks to a federal judge rejecting a Republican-drawn map in favor of independent redistricting reform approved by voters in 2018. In Missouri Tuesday, voters sided with Democrats, but the redistricting fight will continue there and across the country for 2028’s presidential election. Read about redistricting:Donald Trump demanded that the midterm elections be another referendum on his popularity, but now he can’t seem to accept the results.The president called in to Fox News around midnight to complain about the conservative media behemoth’s polls, which reflected Trump’s tanking approval ratings.“And then I read at Fox that I’m not popular. The Fox polls are terrible. You ought to get yourself a good pollster ‘cause your polls are the worst,” Trump said live on air.Host Brett Baier pushed back: “But tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed.”But Trump wasn’t willing to confront reality. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he snipped.Democrats won big all over the country—even in historically deep red districts—taking control of both chambers of Congress in the process. Despite the obvious blow, Trump told Fox News that he had the “greatest two years in the history of the presidency.”An NBC News exit poll found that more than half of voters saw the election as an opportunity to rebuke Trump and his MAGA agenda, which has thus far included an aggressive foreign policy that tied Americans to a wildly unpopular war with Iran, economic tariffs that vastly inflated the cost of living, and a militaristic deportation scheme that has pitted federal agents against the general population.Republican candidates saw the writing on the wall months ago, but were unable to successfully peel their campaigns away from the president’s influence. Instead, the president urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” By late Tuesday, Trump was already trying to rewrite history.In a separate interview Tuesday night, Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns that his party would have won big if he was on the ballot.“I wasn’t on the ballot, and we didn’t get the people out, but I wasn’t on the ballot,” Trump said. “If I was on the ballot, we would have won. We would have won it all very easily.”“But Mr. President, you told voters that you were on the ballot, to vote as though you were on the ballot,” Burns reminded him.“I said, ‘Think about me being on the ballot,’ but they didn’t agree and they didn’t like the candidates in most cases. Just one of those things,” Trump said.He then offered that he didn’t want to blame any one individual, but that he watched the results roll in with “great interest” and that he “learned from it.”“What did you learn, sir?” Burns pressed.“Well, we’re going to work with the Democrats, to make sure things go well for our country. They’ve already called and—I have the right to veto everything, but I don’t want be just sitting there vetoing everything,” Trump said. “We have a lot of friends in the Democratic Party.”Read more about the midterms:After wasting almost half a billion dollars supporting Republicans in the midterm elections, tech oligarch Elon Musk is having trouble digesting the Democratic landslide. Musk took to his X platform in the early hours Wednesday morning, offering some lame observations as his preferred candidates were trounced. At about 1:12 am, Musk posted, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” before following that up with, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time 🤷‍♂️” a minute later. A couple of hours later, he commented, “Interesting” on a repost of exit polling purporting to show that voters supported the Trump administration’s immigration policies, but massively opposed the Iran war.It’s not clear where that polling is from or whether it is credible, but in any case, Musk appears to be trying to cope with the negative results as best as he can. Stocks in his Tesla and SpaceX companies are plummeting Wednesday despite other tech companies doing well in early trading. His plan to merge SpaceX and Tesla might now hit some obstacles in a Democratic-controlled Congress, which has already signaled that investigations of the tech oligarch are on the way. Plus, Musk moved his companies from California to Texas to escape Democratic oversight, only to now have a Democratic governor in the Lone Star State, Gina Hinojosa, who campaigned against Musk. She also called for a moratorium on new data centers and an end to tax breaks for the industry. Now Democrats in Texas, as well as across the country, have him and other tech barons in their crosshairs. “They are going to need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” posted Democratic Senator Ed Markey Tuesday night.Michigan voted to send Democrat Abdul El-Sayed to the Senate Tuesday night, making him the first Muslim senator.El-Sayed beat Republican Mike Rogers with 51.89 percent of the vote, Decision Desk HQ projected, with 77 percent of the votes counted.“You’ll notice I always say ‘Inshallah’ [God-willing],” El-Sayed said in his victory speech Tuesday evening. “Tonight, we can turn that ‘Inshallah’ into ‘Alhamdulillah’ [Praise Be to God].”El-Sayed survived a brutal election campaign beginning with the state’s Democratic primary in which millions of dollars in outside money was spent to try to defeat him, particularly from donors and organizations affiliated with the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC.In the end, El-Sayed’s message that money spent on the Iran war and on aid to Israel should be used to help struggling Americans propelled him to victory over Rogers. The former Detroit and Wayne County health commissioner also fought off Islamophobic attacks from Rogers, President Trump, and Vice President JD Vance.“JD, habibi, there’s a delicious irony in the fact that you’re constitutionally obligated to swear me in in January,” Vance said in his victory speech.Last month, a Republican plant at a Michigan town hall attempted to trip up El-Sayed by asking him to condemn the Muslim Brotherhood, only for El-Sayed to turn the tables on the questioner, and create a viral campaign moment about his allegiance to the Constitution.President Clinton, who inspired El-Sayed to go into politics, went to Michigan to campaign for El-Sayed and condemned the Islamophobic attacks on him in a powerful speech in late October. Former President Obama also campaigned in Michigan for El-Sayed, as did Vice President Kamala Harris.El-Sayed’s victory in a close battleground state that Trump won in 2024 is even more good news for Democrats’ control of the Senate, but also for whoever the Democratic nominee for president will be in 2028. In order for Democrats to take back the White House in two years, they will almost certainly need Michigan’s electoral votes. This story has been updated.Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine has been unseated by Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, bringing an end to her decades-long stint as the “rubber stamp” for the GOP’s agenda.Collins called Jackson to concede Tuesday evening, MS NOW and CNN reported, as Jackson led with 52.2 percent of the vote and the race had not yet been called.Despite Collins’s attempts to distance herself from President Donald Trump on the campaign trail, it seems that there was no shaking the black mark of the president’s endorsement. “I hope she wins,” Trump said during an interview in August. “She’s a good person, actually.”Jackson, a former state senator, replaced erstwhile Democratic nominee Graham Platner in July, and quickly mounted a campaign that focused on Collins’s failure to meaningfully challenge Trump’s disastrous agenda.It’s been a tough year for the five-term senator. In September, it was reported that the FBI was investigating Collins for an alleged illegal pay-to-play scheme with a defense contractor—until the Trump administration killed the probe. Earlier this year, the 73-year-old lawmaker revealed that she’d been diagnosed with a condition called essential tremor, which causes shakiness in the voice and hands.Collins’s defeat represents a crucial step toward Democrats reclaiming control of the Senate.