Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in this week's midterms, overcoming the more than $400 million that Elon Musk's super PAC spent largely without result, according to WIRED's politics team. The outlet reported the outcome on its Uncanny Valley podcast, where Leah Feiger, Hugo Lowell, David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott assessed the races and the role of Big Tech money.
Democrats needed a net gain of four Senate seats and three House seats and surpassed both thresholds. Feiger said Democrats picked up Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina and Michigan. Gilbert said even Mark Lamb, who had been considered a certainty to win in Arizona, had yet to see his race called.
The panel described Republican losses in states previously seen as safe. Lowell said Darline Graham, who was handpicked and endorsed by Trump, lost in South Carolina, and that Cindy Hyde-Smith, a long-serving senator, was trailing in Mississippi though the race had not been called. Feiger said the results exceeded what Democrats had expected.
Trump blamed the quality of the candidates and the fact that he was not on the ballot, and also faulted Fox News, according to the podcast. The MAGA base instead pinned the losses on Trump and the Iran war. Gilbert said figures including Matt Walsh attributed the reversal from 2024 to the war, and Feiger noted Walsh called Trump an 80-year-old lame duck president and the results a political catastrophe of historic proportions.
Lowell said attention also fell quickly on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who had encouraged Trump for months to continue the Iran war and championed continued strikes and extended deployments in the Middle East. Lowell reported that Hegseth's accounts of the war to the president were so rosy that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought their own intelligence briefings because they were not getting an accurate assessment of conditions on the ground.
The podcast also covered voters restricting 39 of 40 data center ballot measures, an outcome WIRED called the data center referendum. It noted that election deniers went quiet after the results and discussed what the midterms mean for 2028.
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