Following a historic blue wave of midterm election wins, Democrats are gathering in Denver for a What’s Next conference hosted by a new group called Majority Democrats.

President Donald Trump wants Vice President JD Vance to talk less about the Iran war and more about corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states. Vance's blunt post-election analysis blaming the war and its economic reverberations for the sweeping Republican losses was getting attention.

And the sweeping Democratic gains in Congress are teeing up an onslaught of expected investigations into the Justice Department, which has functioned for nearly two years as an extension of the White House, unchecked by a Republican-controlled Congress as it pursued investigations into Trump’s enemies, fired waves of career employees and defended the administration in ways that judges across the country repeatedly deemed legally dubious.

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Some Republicans gingerly push back on Trump rhetoric

Few echoed Trump’s argument in a social media post this week that there were problems with the election. In conceding her closely fought Senate contest in Mississippi, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said she would “respect the decision” of voters.

And several Republicans, including Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Tim Scott of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas and Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, posted pictures of incoming Democrats in a nod toward postelection unity.

Rep. James Comer of Kentucky meanwhile pushed back against White House warnings that oversight could amount to “blatant criminality.”

“Regardless of who is in the White House, there’s always going to be a strong desire for the Oversight Committee to be a check and balance on the executive branch,” said Comer, who oversaw extensive investigations of Democratic President Joe Biden as House Oversight chairman.

Hegseth vote was a test of Republican independence from Trump

It’s perhaps their biggest question going forward. Trump’s policies on trade and the war in Iran contributed to voter discontent with the GOP, and now that he’s in the last two years of his second term, the election defeats challenge the durability of his Make America Great Again movement.

But House Republicans showed no rush to distance themselves from the president as even his critics helped block an effort to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Only Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who led the push alongside Democrats, broke ranks.

“What I found out tonight is they still haven’t broken from the spell of Donald Trump,” Massie said after the vote. “He still controls this conference.”

Senate Republicans showed less desire for combat

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., unsuccessfully sought to delay his party’s leadership elections in the Senate, arguing for a different approach.

“You cut rural healthcare spending, when you abandon pro-lifers, when you abandon the poor, when you abandon the needy, when you abandon working people, you’re gonna get your butt kicked,” Hawley said. “And you’re gonna deserve it.”

Hawley and a small group of conservatives huddled for hours in the Old Senate Chamber arguing for a consideration of alternatives to John Thune of South Dakota. But no one came forward.

“It’s a bad job,” Hawley acknowledged before Republicans ultimately backed Thune without so much as a voice vote.

“We’re going to let our leader be the leader,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who will lead party efforts to regain seats in 2028.

House Republicans opted for a bare-knuckled leader

Republicans are weighing how to proceed, balancing calls for moderation against an impulse for hard-line positions that might reenergize the party’s base. Each chamber took different tracks, previewing divisions that may lie ahead.

In the House, the Republicans who will remain in Washington next year largely represent staunchly conservative districts where Trump remains popular. Their decision to elect Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as their next leader reflected a fighting stance.

Jordan is a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, currently chairs the Judiciary Committee and has previously chaired the Oversight Committee. From those positions, he’s waged heated fights against Democrats and become a top Trump ally.

“The way that Jim fights says a lot about where this conference is,” said Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla.

GOP lawmaker’s lament: ‘We have failed’

There was widespread frustration that Republicans who were awarded full control of the White House and Congress just two years earlier had lost touch with voters.

“We collectively failed,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., who is trailing her Democratic challenger in a district Republicans carried by more than 18 percentage points in 2024. “The American people let us know we have failed in this governing experience for this Congress.”

The anger is sharp in part because of the rosy predictions from top Republicans ahead of the election. House Speaker Mike Johnson had insisted the polls were wrong and Republicans would retain their majority. Back on Capitol Hill this week, Johnson blamed voters, saying they made the “wrong choice.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who is also trailing a Democratic rival, said people kept telling her she couldn’t lose. But she knew otherwise.

“I couldn’t get anybody to listen to me,” she said. “People just didn’t think it could happen, but we knew it could.”

Republicans dazed by election defeats grapple with what went wrong

The chair of the House GOP’s campaign arm wanted a triumphant return to Capitol Hill this week after steering Republicans to another majority. Instead, the North Carolina Republican is facing the reality that he and dozens of colleagues will soon clear out their offices.

“It was really people coming out to send a message,” Rep. Richard Hudson told The Associated Press. “They, rightly so, felt gas was too high, things were too expensive.”

“The mistake Republicans made,” he added, “is we didn’t convey to them that we cared about that and cared about them.”

Trump praises Democrat Scott Colom for courting MAGA voters at his Mississippi rally

Trump on Thursday heaped praise on Mississippi’s Sen.-elect Scott Colom for courting some of his hardcore MAGA supporters in the final days of the midterm election campaign, a rare example of the Republican president showing admiration for a Democrat.

When the president traveled to Corinth, Mississippi, last month to campaign for incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, Trump denigrated Colom as a “Marxist radical,” a “fake” and a “shameless phony who pretends to be a moderate.”

But on Thursday, during an appearance on Stephen A. Smith’s “Straight Shooter” podcast, Trump acknowledged that Colom demonstrated chutzpah by showing up at the Trump rally to mingle with some of the Republican president’s staunchest “Make America Great Again” supporters.

“I heard it the other day, where I had a rally there, and we had lines that went 10 miles long, and he campaigned on that line, telling everybody on the line what a good job he did,” Trump said of Colom, a 43-year-old local prosecutor who capitalized on the electorate’s discontent with the economy in his successful underdog campaign. “I give him a lot of credit for that.”

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Democrats flock to Denver for a post-midterms introspection-turned-celebration

Fresh off the best electoral performance in half a century, Democratic officials and strategists converged on Denver Thursday to plot a further course for the party and revel in their gains.

The two-day What’s Next conference, hosted by a new group called Majority Democrats, was put on politicos’ calendars months ago as another stepping stone as the party charted its way out of its post-2024 political wilderness.

Now Democrats will have to figure out what to do with majorities in both chambers of Congress and control of at least 12 new state legislative chambers.

“The fever has broken. The fog has lifted,” said Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. “And now it falls upon us to rebuild the foundation of this great nation and to fulfill the promise of America.”

Barely a week after voters repudiated Trump and his Republican Party, Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico said Democrats must work with him. Voters are hungry for results and can’t wait two years for Trump to leave office, he said, urging Democrats to avoid both intraparty fights and excessive caution.

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Trump’s Justice Department faces a new era of scrutiny under a Democratic-led Congress

The Justice Department has functioned for nearly two years as an extension of the White House, unchecked by a Republican-controlled Congress as it pursued investigations into President Donald Trump’s enemies, fired waves of career employees and defended administration stances that judges across the country repeatedly deemed legally dubious.

Now, sweeping Democratic gains in Congress have shifted the balance of power in Washington, teeing up an onslaught of expected investigations into those actions and others as well as scrutiny from the majority party that the current Justice Department had until now managed to skirt.

The department has, at least publicly, appeared unbowed by the altered landscape.

Attorney General Todd Blanche says the department will cooperate with Congress but has also insisted that “we will not back down” from the Republican president’s agenda. Meanwhile, a top aide told prosecutors on a call to prepare to be on “wartime” footing and a U.S. attorney publicly warned a top Democrat about planned congressional investigations.

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Trump bluntly tells JD Vance to shift focus from Iran to targeting ‘corruption and crime’ at home

President Donald Trump on Thursday directed Vice President JD Vance to shift his focus away from the Iran war and instead devote himself to fighting what the president says is corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states.

Vance, who served as the lead negotiator for a short-lived truce in the eight-month-old war, has been blunt in blaming the war — and the economic reverberations it has caused — for Republicans’ sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections in the United States.

But Trump brusquely told the vice president in a social media post Thursday to shift his energies away from the Iran war to what he argues is a more pressing — and perhaps more politically salient — issue after Republicans were trounced at the polls.

Trump earlier this week said he believed the war “militarily is effectively over,” and appeared to double down on that message by pointedly directing Vance “to focus his complete and total attention” on his anti-fraud campaign.

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