On Tuesday night, candidates across 435 House races, 35 Senate contests, 36 gubernatorial elections, and thousands of other state local campaigns, all looked on anxiously as results started to trickle in for the 2022 midterm elections.

But days later, some are still waiting for those official results, while others are looking around and surprised and wondering, how did we get here?

I'm Gustav Ariano. You're listening to The Times, essential news from the LA Times. It's Friday, November 11, 2022. Today, we try to make sense of the midterms. Upsets, favorites, what happened and didn't, and what this election says about 2024.

Joining me to talk about Tuesday's election results are my L.A. Times colleagues

and 2022 midterm maestras.

Julia Wick covered the Los Angeles mayoral election, and Sima META covers national politics.

Julia, Sima, welcome the times.

Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for having both of us on.

What an election week.

So, Sima, the big story from election night was that Democrats didn't do as poorly as was

expected.

All we heard through the midterms was talk about a red wave that was just going to take over not just a capital, but all across the United States, but didn't quite play out like that.

Republicans are expected to control the House, but by a smaller margin than they thought.

And the U.S. Senate, it's still up for grabs.

So what happened?

I mean, the Democrats definitely had a much better

night than people were expecting. And Republicans at one point, you know, we're talking about taking over the House by like, you know, maybe even like 60 seats. And I mean, that's clearly not happening. It's going to be a much smaller margin. And we don't know all the details, but some of the things that, you know, we're talking about are, first of all, the Supreme Court overturning row v. Wade was obviously a huge thing. And Democrats were hopeful that that would

motivate young voters, first of all, the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade was obviously a huge thing. And Democrats were hopeful that that would motivate young voters, voters of color, women, potentially Republican women. So that's one of the things we're really going to dig into once we know more about voter turnout. Who ended up voting? Then also in some cases it was candidate selection. I mean, there were some candidates who, for example, in Pennsylvania, John Federman versus Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz, he just didn't sort of fit the voters in the Pennsylvania. Fetterman, you know, I mean, he had a stroke during the campaign. You know, obviously that was a major issue, but he did connect with voters in a way that obviously Dr. Oz didn't. So in some cases, it was candidate selection. In some cases, you know, President Trump weighed in in some of these races and the president is flirting with another presidential run. And I think that put it back in voters' minds. I mean, this is the first election in years where either he wasn't in an office or he wasn't at the top of the ticket. And so there was a question about how much he would influence things. But I think, you know, how much he got involved in the campaigns in recent days that also refocused some Democratic voters.

So you mentioned all these stumbles that the Republicans had.

But then why were Republicans predicted to do so well in these midterms?

So the party in power in the White House usually almost always loses seats in the House in the first midterm during its

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