The Trump obliteration

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Make no mistake: Democrats won by epic, sometimes historic margins across red and blue states, up and down ballots, obliterating almost everything President Trump, and a Republican Party remade wholly in his image, built over the past decade in American politics, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a “Behind the Curtain” column. Why it matters: Trump and Republicans are left with a mostly white, mostly old House and Senate minority, confronting a younger, more diverse ascendant Democratic Party with power and margins it hasn’t held in 18 years, since the dawn of the Obama era The results speak louder than any words we can write: Democrats won Senate races in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio, and perhaps Mississippi en route to what could be a 55-seat majority. Democrats won swing districts all across red America, with national average margins of victory of roughly 13 points, according to a New York Times estimate. Dems appear headed for a 250+-seat majority, an 18-year high.Texas is now a Democratic state, top to bottom — unthinkable mere months ago. James Talarico crushed Ken Paxton (55% to 43%) like it was Connecticut. State Representative Gina Hinojosa will become the first Democratic governor of Texas in 32 years.Pastor Adam Hamilton is the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Kansas in 94 years.North Carolina looks like a true-blue state after Democrats flipped the Senate seat and likely ousted Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) — meaning he led the GOP drive to keep the House.North Carolina’s congressional delegation could swing from 10R-4D to 5R-9D. Georgia was even worse for Republicans, where they lost all power at the state and U.S. Senate levels.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) predicted on X that the losses were so widespread, so deep, so severe that Republicans might not “have a shot at Senate control until 2032. “ How to think about last night more broadly: This is a 50-50 nation with fast, whiplash shifts in power at the federal level due to persistent discontent with the party in power. So, on one hand, this isn’t terribly surprising. On the other, Republican losses were so deep, so wide, so everywhere that it would be foolish to see this as anything but a massive repudiation of Trump, his agenda, his style, his rhetoric and his presidency. If anything, what’s left of the Republican Party is more pro-Trump and less likely to challenge him. His critics, even the timid ones, were ousted long before the general election. So Republicans are left with two more years of riding a very unpopular leader managing a very unpopular war. A trapped, embarrassed Trump is even more unpredictable. Democrats have the numbers to investigate Trump, his family and supporters, and the power to set the agenda in the House and Senate.The bottom line: Voters nationally said government corruption was a “crucial issue” in their vote for Congress. Democrats will spend months trying to rehab a party that, despite its victory, remains deeply unpopular as a brand. Expect a vigorous fight between Mamdani-like socialists and Schumer-like center-leftists.

2. Blue tsunami breaks MAGA

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

The 2026 midterms will go down as one of the most sweeping repudiations of a sitting president in modern American history, on a scale reminiscent of the post-Watergate reckoning of 1974, Axios’ Zachary Basu writes. Democrats seized control of both chambers of Congress, on course to hold at least 54 Senate seats and potentially more than 255 in the House. The wave swept deep into Republican territory, from Texas and Georgia to both Carolinas, flipping hundreds of legislative seats and delivering Democratic trifectas in the unlikeliest of states. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed defeated Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan’s bitterly contested Senate race and will be the nation’s first Muslim senator.Cover: The New York PostTakeaways: 1. Texas turns blue: Democrats finally conquered the nation’s most coveted Republican stronghold — in a landslide so sweeping that even three-term Gov. Greg Abbott was driven from office. Gina Hinojosa became the state’s first Latina governor, while James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Ken Paxton to become the first Texas Democrat elected to the Senate since 1988. The Democratic onslaught extended across statewide offices and into the legislature after 32 years of GOP dominance. 2. Democrats storm Senate: What once looked like an impossibly difficult map for Democrats gave way to a historic rout, as Republicans watched their 53-seat majority crumble in states Trump carried by double digits. Democrats broke a 94-year losing streak in Kansas, ousted Republicans in Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina, and captured South Carolina for the first time since 1998. In Maine, Democrats finally toppled five-term Sen. Susan Collins after many failed attempts. 3. MAGA coalition collapses: The multiracial, working-class coalition that powered Trump’s 2024 comeback fractured spectacularly. AP’s nationwide voter survey found roughly 70% of voters under 30 and 60% of Hispanic voters backed Democratic House candidates, amid widespread anger over the economy and the Iran war. 4. GOP House firewall crumbles: Democrats are on course for their largest House majority since 2009.Casualties spanned the entire GOP conference, from MAGA firebrands to battle-tested moderates. Even seats redrawn to shield Republicans from a blue wave fell to Democrats, turning Trump’s redistricting offensive into a spectacular miscalculation.Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) arrives to deliver a victory speech at an election night party in Atlanta. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images5. 2028’s winners and losers: Yesterday’s landslide elevated a new generation of Democratic contenders and cast a shadow over Vice President Vance’s presidential ambitions. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, whose race was called 15 minutes after polls closed, immediately vaulted into the top tier of Democratic prospects. Keisha Lance Bottoms’ historic victory for governor removed a key obstacle for both Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock: She could appoint a Democrat to fill their seat if either became president. Vance, Trump’s presumed political heir, now faces the fallout from a deeply unpopular Iran war and the collapse of a once-in-a-generation coalition he hoped would carry him to the White House.Share this story.

3. Susie Wiles: Foot on gas

Via Truth Social

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles made these remarks to senior staff gathered in her office last night, a person in the room tells me:“We’re going to take a page out of President Trump’s playbook and keep fighting for the American people. We will not stand by while radical Democrats try to undo the progress we’ve made by reopening our borders, making our communities less safe, and raising taxes on hardworking families. Anyone who thinks President Trump or this team is going to take our foot off the gas over the next two years is sorely mistaken. We know exactly what’s at stake, we know what we’re fighting for, and we have no intention of backing down. There is work left to do, and we intend to finish the job.”Via Truth Social President Trump told The New York Times in a phone interview shortly before 10:30 p.m. ET that he’s “absolutely willing” to accept the results, and is prepared to work with Democrats: “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them … We’ll probably work something out. “He called his decision to go to war with Iran a “very wise decision. “On Republican Darline Graham’s stunning loss of her Senate race in South Carolina, Trump said: “I’m just looking at these results as I’m talking … I see that Darline lost. Wow, that’s amazing. “Referring to Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July, Trump added: “How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?”

A Democratic Congress could curb the Iran war but not Trump’s tariffs, former ambassador says

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Jay Ganglani

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November 3, 2026, 11:53 AM ET

Former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius speaking at the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit on Nov. 3, 2026.Lucas Schifres for Fortune

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As U.S. voters headed to the polls on Tuesday, former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Ted Osius predicted that a Democratic-controlled Congress could curb President Donald Trump’s ability to wage war in the Middle East, but would likely struggle to unwind his tariffs.

The U.S. midterm elections could have major implications for both the Iran war and the global economy, Osius said at Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam on Nov. 3.

“The Iran war is extremely unpopular in the United States, and it’s one of the factors that will be decisive in this election,” said Osius, who served as ambassador to Vietnam from 2014 to 2017. “I expect that Congress would use the power of the purse to curb the president’s ability to wage war in the Middle East.”

About 65% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the U.S. military action in Iran, according to a Pew Research Center survey released on Oct. 8. The polling outfit noted that the war has been unpopular since it began; a March survey reported 61% disapproval of his handling of the conflict.

Most polling averages put the Democratic Party ahead of the Republican Party on the generic ballot; several independent forecasts suggest the Democrats will retake control of the House of Representatives, with control of the Senate being more uncertain.

Tariffs—Trump’s other signature foreign policy—would be harder to touch. “I don’t think we’ll suddenly go back to the status quo ante,” Osius said. “Unfortunately, it’s actually harder to unwind tariffs once you put them in place.”

A Democratic House and Senate might pressure the Trump administration into more predictable trade policy, but Osius conceded that tariff power “rests with the executive.”

Trump’s initial tariffs hit Southeast Asia harder than almost any other region in April 2025, with Vietnam in particular hit with a 46% rate, later cut to 20% in a deal, based on its large trade surplus with the U.S. Since then, Southeast Asian governments have launched negotiations with Washington to get tariffs reduced, offering to lower their trade barriers and to buy more U.S. products.

Since the Supreme Court’s Feb. 20 ruling that Trump’s tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, including his“Liberation Day” levies were unlawful, the administration has resorted to other justifications, including widespread duties imposed following allegations of forced labor and overcapacity.

Still, Osius predicted that a Democratic victory would show that Trump’s more coercive foreign policy doesn’t work. “When you sort of run a state like a mobster, it may work in the short term, but in the long term it doesn’t,” he said. “It’s much more effective, especially in this part of the world, to have predictable policies, and to show that rule of law and rules-driven trade works to everyone’s benefit.”

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U.S. protectionism hasn’t dented Vietnam’s growth. The Southeast Asian country grew almost 10% in the third quarter of 2026, following growth rates of 8.2% and 8.8% in the first and second quarters of the year, respectively.

More broadly, the Asian Development Bank expects developing Southeast Asia to grow by 4.7% this year and 4.9% in 2027.

Jens Lottner, the CEO of Vietnamese bank Techcombank, explained that exports were up 30% year-on-year despite the 12.5% tariff currently on Vietnamese exports to the U.S. “If you’re a bank, you’re a proxy on the economy,” he said. “We still have a couple of very good years ahead of us.”

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Amol Gupte, Asia South head at Citi, argued that global trade isn’t shrinking under Trump’s tariffs, but is instead being rerouted, often to Southeast Asia. “The aggregate amount of trade in the world is not really reducing; it’s just changing flows,” he said. “Exports from China to the U.S. have shrunk quite drastically, but China’s aggregate exports have not reduced—they’ve actually grown substantially.”

The region still sits at the center of several flashpoints. Lynn Kuok, the Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at the Brookings Institution, highlighted continued tensions over ownership of the South China Sea. “We see off Vietnam’s coast, for instance, a greater Chinese presence. And after a decade’s pause, China is actually starting its rebuilding of islands off the Vietnamese coast,” she said.

Kuok added that the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has exposed a second vulnerability: the Strait of Malacca, the narrow passage between Malaysia and Indonesia through which much of Asia’s trade travels. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore have all pledged to keep the strait open, but she warned that “a future more nationalist government might actually seek to close off the strait, or come under pressure from various powers to close off the strait.”

Kuok said members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are invoking international law as a way to defend their interests without taking sides in the rivalry between Washington and Beijing. “They’re not choosing U.S. or China; they’re choosing principles of international law,” she said.

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Abdul El-Sayed became the first Muslim elected to the Senate after a hostile campaign in which his religion was frequently highlighted by critics. Live blog: https://trib.al/8FfrPOB

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Iranian official Mehdi Tabatabaei has said the “world listened to the resounding message of the American people in the Senate and Congress elections,” after the Democrats took control of the US Congress from the Republicans.

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Nov 4, 2026“It is a bad, bad night for the Republicans.” The Democrats continue to make inroads and are likely to win both the House and the Senate “comfortably”, says Times Radio’s Andrew Neil. Read the best of our journalism: https://www.thetimes.com/ Listen live to Times Radio: https://www.thetimes.com/radio/live Subscribe to The Times and The Sunday Times YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_… Find us on Facebook: / timesandsundaytimes Find us on X: https://x.com/thetimes Find us on Instagram: / thetimes

This ‘city of libraries’ is now the world’s leading tech empire

By Bronwyn Thompson

November 01, 2026

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This bookstore is famous on social media – but Shenzhen’s actual relationship with books is far more fascinating. And influential

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From unstaffed self-service book-borrowing kiosks open 24-7, to a grand building that has robots fetching paperbacks from its multimillion collection of titles across nine floors, there’s a reason that Shenzhen is known as China’s “city of libraries.” Sure, this may sound kind of boring, but the city in the southern Guangdong province has also just been named as the country’s leader in wealthy entrepreneurs and is the beating heart of China’s AI and tech industry.

Shenzhen was recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2013 as global leader in promoting the value of reading. A decade earlier, in 2003, the city introduced pivotal moves to give everyone – well, Chinese citizens and foreigners aged three and above – a unified library ID number that gave them access to hundreds of borrowing outlets already spread across the developing metropolis. This was known as the City of Libraries initiative.

This week, The Wall Street Journal was the latest news outlet to highlight the dismal statistics of reading across the US. While, with some irony, it’s hard for most people to read this article because it’s behind a paywall, it essentially echoes what The New York Times and The Atlantic have addressed over the last few months: Smartphone scrolling may be the first real sign of the “end of reading.”

Well, in some places.

Because in every subway station and train carriage, in restaurants, on park benches, in airport lounges and throughout the city’s massive malls, Shenzhen residents are also spending a whole lot of time staring at their small screens, no book in sight. And there’s plenty of scrolling of China’s TikTok, Douyin (抖音) to be seen, too.

This pivotal 2026 paper looking at US readers found that people picking up a book – digital or otherwise – has continued to decline each year over the last two decades. What’s more, plans for giving Americans better access to libraries were rolled back in 2025. In the people sampled for this study, only 0.3% reported reading at a library on an average day in 2023, with 0.5% visiting a library for any activity.

This is neither a criticism of the US nor a comparison between a city and a country (with far more differences than number of libraries per neighborhood), because there’s plenty of digital distractions competing for people’s attention in tech-forward Shenzhen. What’s fascinating, though, is how reading culture appears to have developed in step with the geographical and economical growth of the city.

Prior to 1979, Shenzhen was largely a patchwork of rural farming and fishing villages; now it’s home to some of the tallest skyscrapers and most ambitious architectural projects you’re likely to see in a city that’s yet to celebrate 50 years of one hell of a reinvention.

As this translated account from Shenzhen local government details, it was around the time the seeds of the city of the future were planted that its residents seemed to see new potential on a personal level. In the 1980s, people sought out textbooks – math, chemistry, physics – to self-study, which led to a whole new industry of learning. Pretty soon, reading – and libraries – were woven into the city’s development strategy.

“The activity of ‘read more and read good books’ had created a reading craze among Shenzhen’s young employees in the 1980s,” according to the government site. “Themed ‘rejuvenating China,’ it had four major characteristics. First, it had a wide scope. Second, it was diverse, lively and rich in content. Third, the participants had high enthusiasm, realizing the transformation from ‘I have to learn’ to ‘I want to learn.’ Fourth, it was practical and targeted. English and finance classes were also set up, which effectively improved the educational level of the employees.”

In the most recent data gathered, Shenzhen’s public libraries recorded 54.3 million visits and 29.5 million physical book loans according to city-level data compiled moving into 2026.

A recent Hong Kong-Shenzhen report on libraries and engagement cited Xinhua, which reported that Shenzhen adults, on average, read 22 books in 2024. What books is unclear, however. Either way, it’s putting my 2026 Goodreads count to shame.

That same report also noted that in the same year, Shenzhen had 322 24-hour self-service “book bars” that recorded 1.17 million borrows (4.5% of total loans across the city). These spaces are often manned by volunteers to help visitors but are otherwise unstaffed.

And as of 2024, Shenzhen was home to 925 public libraries – some buildings housing millions of physical titles. These spaces, as well as the book bars, hold “68.3 million items.” Interestingly, even though libraries have adopted the technology Shenzhen is famous for, physical book loans rose 12.4% in 2024 compared with the previous 12 months.

Obviously, the success of modern-day Shenzhen is not just because there are plenty of places to borrow books; it’s been just one aspect of the city’s development strategy.

But after visiting the disappointing viral “optical illusion” bookstore – essentially an Instagram background for pensive “candid” photoshoots – I nonetheless have it to thank for leading me down a rabbit hole of a far more interesting story, one where libraries and access to books helped shape Shenzhen, probably better known as the birthplace of Huawei, Tencent, DJI, BYD, just to name a few.

If nothing else, it serves as a nice antidote to the doomy stories about reading’s rapidly approaching extinction event.

Source: Libraries Across Shenzhen, eyeshenzhen.com

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• International Continental Scientific Drilling Project of the Songliao Basin: Terrestrial Geological Records of the Cretaceous Dinosaur Age(opens in new tab)WANG Chengshan, Earth Science Frontiers, 2024
• Research advances on the geochronology of Carlin-type gold deposits in the Youjiang Basin, southwestern China(opens in new tab)GAO Wei, Earth Science Frontiers, 2024
• Geophysical characteristics and identification of the coexistence of gas hydrate and free gas(opens in new tab)WANG Xiujuan, Earth Science Frontiers, 2025
• Graph visualization efficiency of popular web-based libraries(opens in new tab)Xin Zhao, Visual Computing for Industry, Biomedicine, and Art, 2025
• Future China-Africa research collaboration in geoscience: Challenges and opportunities(opens in new tab)Michael H. STEPHENSON, Earth Science Frontiers, 2025
• Spatiotemporal Shifts in the Richness and Composition of Mountain Frogs in a Global Biodiversity Hotspot in Southwest China(opens in new tab)Xiaoyi WANG, Asian Herpetological Research, 2024

Edited by Bill Kole.

Dem victory trap

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

Democrats are poised to romp in today’s election — easily winning the House and, according to most forecasts, flipping the Senate, too. Yet the party itself is less popular than the IRS. Even the GOP has a better brand, Axios’ Mike Zapler, Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein write. Why it matters: There’s a difference between a blowout and a mandate. Confusing the two could tempt Democrats to overread the results and forget the serious credibility problem they still face heading into 2028 The big picture: Democrats have done a lot of things right to position themselves for a big night. They recruited candidates who’ve put red-state Senate races within grasp. Many of those candidates vastly outraised their Republican opponents. But polls across the board still show a lesser-of-two-evils election — or, as one Republican tied to President Trump’s political operation described it, a contest of which party voters hate more. Voters are more eager to disempower Trump than to empower Democrats. By the numbers: Just 29% of registered voters have a positive opinion of the Democratic Party, compared with 38% who view the Republican Party positively, according to a pre-election NBC News poll. Yet the same poll shows Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by 7 points, 52% to 45%.Mail-in ballots are processed leading up to the midterm elections at a USPS sorting facility in Golden, Colo., last week. Photo: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters Zoom in: Many Democrats say they’re determined not to repeat the mistake they made after the 2022 midterms. They defied predictions of a red wave and saw it as an endorsement of Joe Biden and their party. Voters were actually growing angrier, setting the stage for Trump’s comeback in 2024. Democrats won the House in 2018 and impeached Trump the next year. This time, likely Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is steering clear of impeachment talk, and his 100-day agenda is focused on affordability. Others say the party still lacks a winning pitch. “We have no economic message. And if we don’t get one, we’re not going to win,” Democratic strategist Jim Messina told party leaders and operatives at a Third Way gathering in South Carolina earlier this year. The bottom line: Many top Democrats believe it’ll take a new presidential nominee — and likely one who wins in November 2028 — to fully repair the party’s damaged brand. Share this story.

Clash Report

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Trump: FAKE ALASKA CANDIDATE DANIAL J. SULLIVAN, JR., IS MISSING IN ACTION! HE HAS TOTALLY DISAPPEARED, GONE! NOBODY HAS BEEN ABLE TO FIND HIM. MAYBE HE HAS BEEN “KIDNAPPED” BY THE CORRUPT DUMOCRAT LAWYERS??? THEY ARE SCARED STIFF OF BEING PROSECUTED FOR ELECTION FRAUD!!!

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