[music]

Speaker 1: If you can hang in, hang in there a little bit longer-

Speaker 2: So ya'll just hang in there.

Speaker 1: -just hang in there a little bit longer.

Speaker 2: I'm feeling good.

Speaker 3: Definitely not a Republican wave, that's for darn sure.

Speaker 4: It hasn't been as big of a wave as I'd hoped it would be.

Speaker 5: That big sound that you hear is Democrats having a big sigh of relief.

Speaker 6: Nothing and no one can ever get in your way except your own imagination, and that's not going to happen.

Speaker 7: I want to thank you for your votes. I want to thank you for your trust.

Speaker 8: What we're seeing today, is that in Maryland, we can come together.

Speaker 9: Let's keep the faith.

Speaker 10: I never expected that we were going to turn these red counties blue.

Speaker 11: We must recommit ourselves to the cause of our country.

Speaker 12: We will make Michigan a leader, a place where every person is respected.

Speaker 13: Every single decision I make as governor will have a direct impact on the life of every kid in Arkansas.

Speaker 2: So y'all just hang in there.

Speaker 1: If you can hang in, hang in there a little bit longer, just hang in there a little bit longer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. All the votes have been cast in Midterms 2022, and many of the results are in. Florida Republicans are celebrating statewide victories in the elections for governor and Senate, but outside the Sunshine State, it's hard to find evidence of a significant red wave. For the most part, Republican candidates, they won in Republican districts, Democrats, they carried Democratic districts, and the statewide races didn't bring many surprises either. Yes, Republican JD Vance took Ohio, and Democrat John Fetterman secured Pennsylvania, and as of Wednesday morning, many of the tossup statewide races, well, they were still up in the air.

Early Wednesday, Senate races in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada, all remained undecided. After $16.7 billion was spent in this cycle, and despite deep concerns about an imperiled democracy throughout much of the country, Wednesday morning, America was looking pretty, well, normal. A little dip in turnout because it was a midterm, basic baseline partisanship, a bit of a split ticket voting. Even though as of Wednesday morning it's still unclear exactly which party will control the House and the Senate, it does seem that the party controlling the White House has likely lost some seats, as has been true in the vast majority of Midterm Elections, and there are plenty of votes still being counted in tight races.

Here to talk with me about that, is Joel Payne, Democratic strategist and CBS News political contributor. Also with us is Brendan Buck. He's a partner with the political communication firm, Seven Letter. Brendan was a press secretary for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and former House Speakers' John Boehner and Paul Ryan. I spoke to Joel and Brendan on Wednesday morning to get their reactions to Tuesday night. Okay, Joel, how is the party of Democrats feeling on the morning after the election?

Joel Payne: Look, I think most Democrats were expecting, in President Obama's old parlance, a shellacking, and that's really not what happened. I think what we saw happen outside of Florida, by the way, Florida held true to form and we can talk about that because that's a state that Democrats have completely lost the thread on. I think in the rest of the country, Democrats were significantly more competitive than you would have expected, and my hot take is, none of us know what we're looking at. After COVID, after George Floyd, after Trumpism, we have not really gathered a seat-level understanding of where this country is.

I think that that's reflected in the analysis, in the polling, and what we're missing. We're missing things on the left and on the right. I think that's how you arrive at a scenario where, after an election day like that, people are still trying to figure out what happened.

Brendan Buck: I think one thing we do know about the country is that we are really closely divided. It's super polarized, and that may be the bottom line of what happened. No one party is going to be given control to have too big of a majority. I mean, if the House goes Republican, it will probably be a pretty narrow majority. Just like two years ago, the country gave Democrats a really narrow majority in the House. We are just a really divided country.

Clearly, Democrats didn't sit this one out like a lot of Republicans maybe thought that they would. Democrats came out really strong, maybe motivated by the abortion issue more than Republicans expected. We also got caught up in a little bit of expectations getting away from us, and so we're looking back last night and asking ourselves what happened.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To your point, Brendan, about division, all of the close races are, in fact, close, right? Many of them still too close to call on Wednesday morning. Joel, I'm wondering-- I want to be able to admit when I'm wrong, and I have to say, I remember when you were here on the show and saying, "Well, Democrats supported these Trump-backed Republicans in order to make these closer races." At the time, I was like, "Oh, no, that's not going to work. That's a mess. That was a terrible strategy," but it turns out, I may very much have been wrong in that case. Joel, talk to me about that Democratic Party decision to support more Trump-like, more MAGA conservatives to run in these Republican spaces.

Joel Payne: When you win, or when you, let's just say, have a better than expected outcome, it means you never have to say you're sorry. Whoever made that decision at the head of the Democratic Party and the Democratic committees, if it was successful, they would be lauded, and if it was wrong, they would be torn to shreds. It turns out that they were right. It turns out that Hillary Scholten, looks like she's going to be the new representative from the district that Peter Meijer, the Republican who actually voted to impeach Donald Trump but lost in a primary, it looks like Hillary Scholten is going to be a Democrat that's representing that district.

It looks like, in some other places, like in Maryland, where Democrats set up Wes Moore to run against a Trumper in Dan Cox, obviously Wes Moore won pretty easily at the governor's race. It seems like those decisions panned out. Again, I don't think there is any charm in suggesting that you knew what you were doing. I think you're following your gut instinct, and you're following what the political winds tell you to do, which is it's better to run against a weaker opponent.

Can I just say something really quickly, Melissa, about one thing that Brendan had earlier. Brendan talked about abortion as an issue. I think looking at some of the exit polling and looking at some of the early feedback that we've gotten from voters, in Pennsylvania in particular, that was one state where abortion outpaced inflation and the economy as the issue. It's probably the reason why John Fetterman looks like he's going to be the next senator from Pennsylvania. It's because abortion, and maybe there was even a silent, hidden abortion vote that maybe the polling and maybe a lot of the public analysis did not catch. I found that to be pretty fascinating.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Watching what's happening in Pennsylvania, Brendan, what are you taking away from this?

Brendan Buck: A lot of the Republican expectations were just basically built around polling, and I think we had just another polling [unintelligible 00:07:41] Of course, there's also the Donald Trump question, and that's the one that we're going to have to be answering for some time now and looking at. A lot of these candidates had to run through primaries and get Donald Trump endorsements, or at least play the role of Trump candidate, and I think that came back to bite a bunch of them.

Certainly, if you look at Pennsylvania, if you look at Georgia, if we had better candidates, I think we would probably easily be winning those seats. Candidates matter particularly in Senate races, and House tends to go a little more based on environment, but even in the House, you had a lot of people who had to run really hard right campaigns, and that's the reality that we live in in this primary system. If you're a Republican trying to get on the ballot anywhere, even in a swing district, you have to tack pretty far to the right. I think that is one of the things that will end up costing us and we may need to think long and hard about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Former President Trump is a force of nature personality, and it's one thing to be a Trump-endorsed candidate, it's another thing to be former President Trump. Are you counting him out already, Brendan?

Brendan Buck: I'm certainly not counting him out. One thing I know about my party is we're not very good at introspection, and so I don't think there's going to be actually a deep period of reflection. I honestly don't think Donald Trump cares a whole lot, and that's really what it comes down to. Even if we wanted to turn the page from him, I don't think he's going to let us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Joel, it wasn't a particularly good night for African American women candidates at the statewide level. Certainly, the sense that the Democratic Party needed to awaken to the centrality of black women voters has been part of the discourse really since 2016. Talk to me about what you feel like you saw in the loss of Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Val Demings in Florida. What do you think this will say to the party, to the Democrats about investing or failing to invest in Black women candidates?

Joel Payne: It's a really mixed picture net as we should all have that disclaimer that, you look at certain places like Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, the first Black woman to represent a district in the state of Pennsylvania, that's a big deal. You're right, Stacey Abrams and Val Demings in particular, are results that are going to disappoint that key part of the Democratic constituency. I guess what I would say is it feels to me more like wrong candidate, wrong race.

Like Stacey Abrams decided to run against Brian Kemp in a rematch that for Brian Kemp, who is a fairly popular Republican governor, I'm not sure how much more Stacey Abrams could have squeezed out of that race. Val Demings who ran at the bottom of a ticket that was weighed down by Charlie Crist. Ron DeSantis is going to end up, I think, winning by almost 20 points against Charlie Crist. That is a situation where I don't think that that was Marco Rubio outflanking her as a candidate. I think that those are state dynamics and in a situation in Florida where Democrats have somewhat lost the thread.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Brendan, Republicans really hoped to make some inroads this year with Latino voters. What did we see? Did the Republicans expand that big tent?

Brendan Buck: This was a place where Republicans thought we had a real opportunity to change the narrative. We had made some pretty good inroads in 2020. This was going to be the night. I was told by a lot of people very confidently that we cement those gains, that we elect a number of diverse House Republicans in a way that we haven't seen in a long time, but some of those at the same time were stretched districts.

Mayra Flores in the Rio Grande Valley, Republicans were very confident she was going to win in a district that Joe Biden carried by 17 points, and that just didn't pan out. Whether that is because we just had a bad night or if there is something specific there, I think we still have to figure out. Certainly, this was one of the stories that Republicans wanted to come out of election night telling, and it seems like that is just not panned out for us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It is Wednesday after the midterms. That means the presidential election cycle has begun. Every reason to think on the Democratic side that some member of the Biden-Harris administration is going to seek reelection, any chance, and every reason to believe that former President Trump will throw his hat in the ring on the Republican side. Obviously DeSantis is in conversation, but what about former Vice President Mike Pence? You have a sense of what his political future looks like?

Brendan Buck: He seems like he is trying to get the party back to perhaps more traditional conservative values, if you will. He's talking to all the right people, he's going to all the right places. He was in, of course, Georgia, something for Brian Kemp. He seemed to be attaching himself to all the candidates who weren't quite so Trumpy. I still think that's a really tough road for him. I do say I am pretty skeptical that anyone other than Donald Trump is going to be our nominee, and I'm pretty skeptical that we're going to have much of a real primary contest.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Brendan Buck is former press secretary for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and for former house speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Joel Payne is Democratic strategist and CBS News political contributor. We spoke with Joel and Brendan on Wednesday morning.

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