This week on Uncanny Valley, Hugo Lowell, David Gilbert, and Vittoria Elliott from WIRED’s politics team join Leah Feiger to break down how Democrats flipped both the House and the Senate, and why the MAGA base is pinning the losses on Trump and the Iran war. We look at how more than $400 million from Elon Musk’s super PAC largely came up empty, why voters restricted 39 of 40 data center ballot measures in what WIRED called the data center referendum, why election deniers suddenly went quiet, and what it all means for 2028.
You can follow Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, Hugo Lowell on Bluesky at @hugolowell, David Gilbert on Bluesky at @davidgilbert, and Vittoria Elliott on Bluesky at @telliotter. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Zoë Schiffer: I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor.
Leah Feiger: Not this week, folks. Sorry, Zoë and Brian. The midterms have just wrapped up and the politics team is taking over the feed. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I am Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. This week we're bringing you a special midterms episode. I'm joined by three of my WIRED colleagues, Hugo Lowell, a senior correspondent covering the Trump White House.
Leah Feiger: David Gilbert, senior reporter who focuses on disinformation and extremism.
Leah Feiger: And senior writer Vittoria Elliott, who focuses on the internal machinations of the US government.
Vittoria Elliott: Good to be here, Leah.
Leah Feiger: We'll get into how these candidates supported by Elon Musk and AI super PACs ended up faring and why these elections were rebuked by Americans of not just the current government, but also of Big Tech. So the Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the Senate and three in the House. They blew by both. What were your biggest shocks of the evening, everyone?
David Gilbert: Well, because I am based in Ireland, I woke up on Wednesday morning and the landscape had just completely changed. Even people who were in deep red states like Arizona, like Mark Lamb, who was a certainty to win, his race still hasn't been drawn. It's just exceptional.
Vittoria Elliott: I was floored by how tight Mississippi is and the win in South Carolina. I would not have put my money on that. Incredible.
Hugo Lowell: Yeah, I agree with Tori. South Carolina, Darline Graham was handpicked by Trump and endorsed by him to win that race. And it was not this close in previous cycles.
Leah Feiger: To inherit her brother's seat.
Hugo Lowell: Insane. And she ended up losing it. And then also in Mississippi, the fact that Cindy Hyde-Smith, who's been in the Senate a long time, was once considered to be a very, very safe incumbent losing in deep red Mississippi. I mean, it's not been called yet, but that was also a massive shock. And I think what really stood out to me was having been at Trump's election night party in 2024 for that presidential run and how everyone there was talking about how Trump had put together this historic coalition, was making big gains in all sorts of places where they didn't expect to and took all of the battleground states. What happened on Tuesday night, on election night was a reversal of all of those gains and then some. I mean, if you think about Trump winning double digits in battleground states and then seeing what happened on Tuesday, those states swung 10 points back in the other direction for Democrats. And it just, I think, goes to show how in 18 months and 20 months, Trump has managed to undo everything and all of the goodwill that Republicans have built up in the '24 election cycle through all of his vanity projects, all of the cuts with DOGE, all of his acts in the federal government, and really the fact that he led the country into an unpopular war that led to higher prices, which are even more unpopular.
Leah Feiger: Absolutely. I mean, I was messaging with Democrats on Tuesday night who were telling me that they really couldn't have, in their wildest dreams, though that this was going to happen. It wasn't like just picking up Maine or just picking up South Carolina. It was Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, Michigan. And obviously for Republicans, the blame game has started. This was an unpopular president leading an unpopular war with a variety of, as you mentioned, policies that really hit home for a lot of Americans and residents. So Trump, after the election, blamed the quality of the candidates and the fact that he wasn't on the ballot. The MAGA base didn't totally agree. David, you reported out a story about how MAGA basically went feral, I think is the fair way to put it on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning looking at all of the results come in. What did you see?
David Gilbert: Yeah, it was interesting to look at how it played out because Trump also blamed Fox News, let's not forget, because he said they had a lot to bear because they platformed a lot of Democrats because that's what they do. But I think the first reaction was kind of silenced because a lot of people just could not believe it. If you looked at what Steve Bannon show and they kept bringing up new results in Texas in particular, he just kind of couldn't believe that what he was seeing was actually happening. So I think initially they were just shocked like pretty much everyone else that this was actually happening to the extent that it was happening. But slowly then they began to say, "OK, well, this is because of the war and the war that Trump more particularly got us into." So figures like Matt Walsh, who has been critical of the war for quite a while now, was kind of laying it all out saying, "This is exactly why we've had such a reversal from 2024."
Leah Feiger: I mean, Walsh, who's an infamous right-wing podcaster, quite literally called Trump, "An 80-year-old lame duck president," and called the results, "A political catastrophe of historic proportions." It doesn't get more official than that. And this for me was the first time that I saw this blame game laid out so concisely, so specifically, and so squarely on Trump's shoulders.
David Gilbert: Yeah, I think they realized very quickly that they couldn't look anywhere else except at Trump because the pushback or the reaction was so strong that there really wasn't anywhere else to look.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, I want to get into that. Specifically, Hugo had a newsletter that came out on Wednesday afternoon all about the blaming process inside the White House and inside the Trump administration where staffers have been essentially trying to assign blame without exactly pinpointing the president. Let's talk scapegoats. Who's getting thrown under the bus this time?
Hugo Lowell: Yeah, I still think it's early, but it is very quick how people coalesced behind blaming Pete Hegseth, for one, the Secretary of Defense, or Secretary of War because of his encouragement of Trump for months and months about continuing the Iran war. He has been a big cheerleader for continuing to have kinetic strikes, for continuing to extend deployments in the Middle East, and being pretty unapologetic about championing the conflict essentially.
Leah Feiger: You had one piece of reporting in there that was absolutely mind-blowing to me, honestly, that Hegseth's reports from the Iran war to the president were so rosy, so glowing that Vice President JD Vance and Marco Rubio from State, they ended up having to ask people for their own intelligence briefings because they were very aware they were not getting an accurate assessment of the war on the ground. That's pretty unbelievable.
Hugo Lowell: Yeah, I mean look, Rubio and JD Vance have both been very voracious consumers of intelligence products. That was the case even before the Iran war, but our sources tell us that interest in getting an unvarnished somber look at the situation in Iran became a top priority for those guys because at the end of the day, they have their own political ambitions, but they also have to advise the president themselves. And so they felt like they needed to arm themselves with the facts of the matter in order to guide the president in the best way. And this all coalesces, right? It's like the fact that the Iran war was being presented to Trump in such a rosy way meant he felt more emboldened to continue it. People inside the administration thought, "Well, this is actually not the situation." And had Trump been maybe, I want to say misled, but had he received a different characterization, maybe he would've been less interested in continuing the conflict, especially months before the midterms.
Leah Feiger: It's amazing. There's really no other word for it. So let's talk about spending. If we're going to talk about spending, we have to talk about Elon Musk. He spent over $400 million in this midterm cycle, largely attacking Democrats and supporting Republican candidates. He virtually set his money on fire. According to a WIRED analysis, by Wednesday morning, candidates backed by Musk's America PAC had lost 20 races and won only 1. There are still several that haven't been called yet, but to put another way with where we're at right now with the information we have, of every traceable dollar that Musk put into a race that has now been decided, more than 99 cents went to a race that he lost. Just unbelievable figures there.
Vittoria Elliott: I mean, I think it's pretty incredible that two years ago, America PAC was this new force in Republican politics. Everyone was starting to play to the sort of America PAC donation situation, and it pulled in not just money from Musk, it pulled in money from big VCs like Shaun Maguire. And in 2024, as we reported, their ground game wasn't exactly super strong, but it was just the willingness to pump money in. Similar to how VCs make things work, you pump money in until your team wins. And just to watch that strategy really crash and burn, but I think we saw some early indications that, particularly in the months post DOGE, that Elon himself became a really toxic thing for Republicans to start attaching themselves to.
Vittoria Elliott: And so then it became this sort of monkey's paw situation where it's like you can take the America PAC money and then you get tarred with the Musk brand. And those two things, maybe at best they cancel each other out, but it seems like actually the Musk brand is more toxic than he and his candidates could buy their way out of.
Leah Feiger: I 100 percent agree with you. Hugo, you were very involved in the WIRED tracking project where we built a live tracker of Musk's political spending. Can you take us through a couple of the candidates that he put all of this dough behind and how they ended up doing?