One week later…

Hey, good morning. Pete Hegseth just held his first press conference in six months. President Trump watched live and graded it. Plus: Dianna Russini is launching a new show, Netflix is unveiling the official trailer for “Ink,” and Bruce Springsteen is in a good mood. But first…

One week later…

Now that the midterm results have had some time to sink in, what lessons have we learned at the intersection of politics and media?

Well, for one thing, Democrats have figured out how to compete in the Attention Wars. It turns out Republican TV ad spending was swamped by the “blue wave.” And the pre-election Fox News ratings decline really was a foreshock.

Here, we have compiled some of the other lessons learned:

Trump’s time as a master media manipulator might be up:

Remember his made-for-TV GOP midterm convention? Probably not. It failed to move the needle. Fox even stopped carrying many of his rallies live. And his attention-grabbing stunts — like his election-eve speech at the Reflecting Pool — made him look out of touch.

A president who prided himself on commanding the media’s attention seems to be losing his grip on it. Right-leaning media critic Jeffrey McCall wrote, “With Trump’s influence on the wane, it’s time for a different approach to journalism, one that doesn’t put Trump at the center of every story.”

Democrats learned new-media tricks:

Winning campaigns communicated in new ways and produced lots and lots of vertical videos. Substack pointed out that “all seven Democrats who flipped Republican-held Senate seats… ran a Substack publication during the race.”

Dem strategist Joshua Karp, who advised Annie Andrews’ campaign in South Carolina, said, “I think the single biggest reason why 2026 was a breakout year for smart, integrated comms strategies is that we had a remarkable crop of Millennial candidates (and a few savvy Gen-Xers) who are actually native to the grammar of the modern information ecosystem.” Karp shared lessons from Team Andrews here.

Now audiences want to follow along as these new lawmakers adjust to DC. There’s viewer and reader appetite for videos and profiles about candidates who, in some cases, didn’t think they’d win…

Many pre-election polls were wrong:

“The polls were wildly inaccurate,” outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday. That’s true, insofar as many (not all) polls wildly underestimated Democrats’ leads ahead of election day. In my New Jersey backyard, the only public poll showed Rebecca Bennett five points ahead of Tom Kean; Bennett ultimately won by 16 points.

There were dozens of similarly dramatic polling misses… but there’s been relatively little hullabaloo since the polls were directionally correct, capturing the public mood and showing Democrats ahead.

“Unpredictable electorates can lead to overcorrecting after presidential elections,” the Financial Times explained. “After a decade of underrating Donald Trump’s support, pollsters finally underestimated Democrats,” The Atlantic concluded.

The approval rating polls were right:

“The midterms weren’t a surprise or an aberration; they were an expression of how the electorate has always felt about Trump and his movement, albeit a particularly emphatic one,” Paul Waldman commented yesterday.

Trump “is uniquely unpopular,” Waldman went on, and it’s worth considering whether the newsrooms that have worked hard to recognize and report on Trump’s MAGA base appeal have also worked hard enough to reflect the public’s prevailing anti-Trump sentiment.

Reality reasserted itself:

For years, Trump’s lies “never seemed to catch up with him, no matter how much they were fact-checked,” NYT columnist Lydia Polgreen wrote. But “Americans know their own wallets” and “they know that, Trump’s dismissal notwithstanding, the affordability crisis is no hoax.” The Trumpian reality distortion field is long gone.”

Investigative reporting had an impact:

Writing from Maine, media historian Michael Socolow asserted that aggressive media coverage was a key factor in Sen. Susan Collins’ loss to Troy Jackson: “Corruption was a major theme in this campaign, and its resonance with recent independent, critical and accurate reporting in the Maine media undoubtedly damaged Collins,” he wrote in this blog post.