On TV, the Midterms Offered Drama and a Casting Change

The word of the night was “Wow!”

You started hearing it early in the coverage of the 2026 midterms, as NBC’s analyst Steve Kornacki got the first returns from Indiana and sniffed the salt breeze of a coming Democratic wave.

There was a hushed “Wow” or two in the Fox News studio as the network called both the Texas senate and governor’s races for Democrats. There was a “Wow” and an offscreen chuckle at MS NOW as Rachel Maddow announced the first Democratic Senate win in Kansas since 1932.

“I can’t quite believe it,” she said.

Believe it. We have become used to televised election nights that are as lengthy and unresolved as an overstuffed Netflix serial, counted into the wee hours, resolved days later. In 2018, Donald J. Trump’s first midterm, the newsroom narrative meandered, as what first appeared to be a fizzled Democratic outing eventually turned into something more decisive, if not absolute.

Tuesday night, you couldn’t miss the wave. You were soaking in it. A sane viewer not writing on deadline could have gone to bed at a reasonable hour with a solid sense of the story.

The news came in a rush of percentages and benchmarks and counties flipping from red to blue. Every square inch of the networks’ Jumbotron-sized smart screens was tested as the data nerds were thrown more surprising numbers than they could point at.

But if the magic walls provided the stats, the faces and voices in the studios told the story. There was the electric sense of a big change, even before the networks were able to officially call the Democratic takeover of Congress. “The trend lines appear to be moving in one direction,” said CBS’s Major Garrett early on, “and that is a blue-hued direction.”