Hi, this is Melissa. I'm calling from Canestota, New York. I'm currently standing outside of my polling place, watching an amazing lunar eclipse, while waiting for my fellow poll workers to come help set up our polling place.

This episode was recorded at...

107 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday 9th November.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show!

And thank goodness for the poll workers. Shout out to all of them. Thanks for the work that they did.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamer Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis at Cover Politics.

And I'm Mara Lias and National Political Correspondent.

The picture after voting concluded last night is still fuzzy, but it is getting somewhat clearer.

And one thing that is quite clear is that the red wave that Republicans had hoped for and predicted turned out to be more of a ripple.

There were some big wins for the GOP, especially in Florida, where incumbent Governor Ron DeSantis romped to a nearly 20-point victory.

And he framed it as a victory over what he called the woke culture.

We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.

Florida is where woke goes to die.

The Democrats managed to flip Pennsylvania's open Senate seat with Lieutenant Governor John Federman prevailing over his Republican challenger, Men at Oz.

We had our slogan. It's on every one of those signs right now. Every county, every vote. Every county, every vote.

And that's exactly what happened. We jammed them up.

And Democrats also held onto seats that were thought to be competitive, both in the House and in the Senate, like New Hampshire Senate race, the Governor's mansion in Kansas,

also in states where abortion was actually on the ballot. Vermont, Michigan, California, and Kentucky voters supported protecting the right to abortion access.

Right now, as we tape this podcast, we still don't know for sure who will have control of the House or the Senate.

The races are close in Arizona and Nevada for those states incumbent Democratic governors and senators. And while Democrat Raphael Warnock holds a narrow lead over his Republican challenger, her shall walk her for Georgia's Senate seat, the vote is going to a runoff in December.

And I think there have been many a takeaway from last night, but perhaps the biggest one is just expectations. So that Republicans just did not have the big, bad blowout night that they were planning for.

They didn't. And the question is why. And I think one of the answers, and it's something we talked a lot about on this podcast, and then run out to the election, was candidate quality.

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