Two days after the midterms, the shape of the new Congress is clear except at the edges, and the edges remain significant.
Mississippi’s Senate race is still uncalled. Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by a margin that has shifted with every batch of counted votes, ranging in various reports from a few dozen to roughly a thousand votes depending on which counties had reported at the time. Both candidates declared victory on Tuesday night. The Associated Press has not called the race. Colom’s campaign estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 affidavit ballots remain outstanding statewide. Because it is a federal general election and not a primary, there is no runoff; the plurality winner takes the seat. No one takes it tonight.
The last time a Democrat won a Senate race in Mississippi was 1982. That was John Stennis, who first won the seat in 1947. If Colom holds his lead when the final count is complete, it would be the eighth Senate seat Democrats have flipped in this cycle.
In Alaska, Democrat Mary Peltola leads incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan in early returns, according to NBC News. The race has not been called. Alaska consistently takes weeks to complete its full count. In 2022, the state’s Senate race wasn’t called until November 23. Election officials described the extended timeline as standard practice. The Associated Press will call it when it has the numbers to call it.
House vote counts are still coming in. As of Wednesday night, roughly 42 races remained undecided, according to NBC News. CNN has projected Democrats winning at least 245 House seats. The final margin will continue shifting as remaining districts report. Democrats have enough called races to hold the majority when the 120th Congress convenes in January.
Speaker Mike Johnson announced Wednesday he won’t seek to remain as House Republican leader in the new Congress, according to NBC News. If Democrats elect House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York as Speaker, he would be the first Black person to hold that office. The vote for Speaker takes place when the new Congress is seated.
The last time Democrats held both chambers was during the 117th Congress, which ran from January 2021 to January 2023. That Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law before Republicans reclaimed the House in the 2022 midterms. What the 120th Congress can accomplish depends on the final margins, the composition of the caucuses, and what the White House is prepared to sign.
(NBC News and CNN tracked the ongoing race calls and their implications.)
President Trump addressed reporters at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. He said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would stay in his job. CBS News had reported earlier that Trump had been asking advisers privately whether Hegseth should remain. Fox News subsequently reported Trump had ruled out a change. The Wednesday appearance confirmed it. Trump described Hegseth as “doing a great job.”
Asked whether the Iran war had contributed to Tuesday’s Republican losses, Trump said: “I think it’s largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term.” He added that he would do it again.
The war, which began in February when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has been an ongoing military engagement for eight months. Trump said he thinks the long-term result will justify it.
Democrats, who will control the House when the new Congress is seated, are expected to pursue investigations into Pentagon decisions under Hegseth, including the firing of senior military officers, the legal authorization for strikes, and the management of the conflict. Those investigations, if they proceed, begin in January.
(ABC News covered Trump’s Wednesday remarks on Hegseth and the Iran war.)
Pennsylvania’s Department of Health confirmed a sixth measles-related death in the state’s outbreak on Wednesday. The deceased was an unvaccinated Jefferson County resident. The cumulative case count reached 1,467, with 34 newly confirmed in the latest reporting period.
The 1,467 figure is the highest number of measles cases Pennsylvania has recorded in nearly half a century, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. Elimination, in public health terms, doesn’t mean eradicated. It means the continuous chain of domestic transmission has been broken. Any case that appears is imported or traceable to an imported case, not spreading on its own. The United States reached that threshold after a sustained national vaccination program that brought case counts from roughly 500,000 reported cases per year in the early 1960s to near zero over three decades. The vaccine was first licensed in 1963. By 1983, the annual count had fallen below 1,500.
The 2000 declaration was not a finish line. It’s a threshold that has to be maintained. The Pennsylvania outbreak, concentrated in communities with low vaccination rates, is what happens when it isn’t.
Measles spreads through the air. An infected person can leave viable particles in a room for up to two hours after leaving. The vaccine, which requires two doses, provides roughly 97 percent protection. Unvaccinated people account for the overwhelming majority of cases in this outbreak. There is no treatment for measles once it takes hold. There is a vaccine. The two facts don’t interact unless someone chooses to let them.
(SER’s Carol Gifford wrote this fall about which vaccines are worth getting now, including why vaccine status matters well before an outbreak arrives. That piece is here. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and NBC News covered Wednesday’s sixth death.)
Spanish authorities confirmed this week that all 69 victims of the October 28 rail crash near Urda, in the province of Toledo, have been identified. The dead came from several countries. Among them were four Americans, one Canadian, and two Australians.
The crash occurred when a Renfe high-speed train struck a stationary Iryo train on a section of track in central Spain. Investigators haven’t determined the cause. Transport Minister Oscar Puente said the collision resulted from what he called an “inexplicable” instruction from the central rail command center after a safety system failed. He said the train engineers were not at fault.
Puente said he wouldn’t resign. Protesters gathered outside the Transport Ministry in Madrid. Police used tear gas. The main opposition People’s Party and the CSIF rail workers’ union called for his removal. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Puente retains the government’s full confidence.
The October crash was the second major high-speed rail accident in Spain in 2026. A collision near Adamuz, in Cordoba province, in January killed 46 people. Two crashes in a single calendar year have opened questions about safety systems in a network that had been considered among the most reliable in Europe. A Spanish general election is scheduled for November 29.
The deadliest rail accident in Spain’s modern history was at Santiago de Compostela in July 2013, when a train traveling at 179 kilometers per hour went into a curve rated for 80, killing 80 people and injuring 144. The driver had been talking on his phone. The network was expanded significantly in the years after, with safety improvements installed alongside new routes.
Greenland’s parliament voted 16 to 0 on Tuesday to approve a trilateral security agreement with Denmark and the United States, with seven abstentions. The agreement must still be ratified by Denmark’s parliament, which is expected to take it up later this month. It doesn’t require approval from the U.S. Senate.
The deal was signed in September in New York by President Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, and Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Under its terms, the United States can expand military activity at Pituffik Space Base and open additional installations on the island. It bars China and Russia from building military infrastructure on Greenland without the consent of all three parties. Denmark retains authority over Greenland’s foreign and defense policy. Greenland keeps its right to self-determination and its natural resources. If Greenland eventually chooses independence, the agreement stays in force.
The United States has had a formal defense relationship with Greenland since 1951, when Washington and Copenhagen signed a Defense Agreement for Greenland, the foundational document that established American basing rights on the island. That treaty followed a wartime arrangement under which U.S. forces built air bases on Greenland with Danish permission beginning in 1941. Pituffik, formerly Thule Air Base, has operated under American authority since the 1951 agreement.
Trump called for outright U.S. control of Greenland in January 2025, shortly before his second term began. The September agreement doesn’t deliver that. It significantly expands the American military footprint on the island, with Greenland’s parliamentary consent.
(Al Jazeera and the Washington Post reported on Tuesday’s Greenland parliament vote.)
Something good.
Doctors at Hannover Medical School in Germany reported preliminary results this week from a base editing trial in seven patients with a hereditary disease affecting both the liver and the lungs. Base editing is a form of genetic medicine that makes precise changes to individual DNA letters rather than cutting and replacing segments of the genetic code. The team found early evidence that the targeted mutation had been corrected in the patients’ liver cells.
Seven patients is a small number. These are preliminary findings. The researchers were careful to describe their work as early-stage.
Base editing was first demonstrated in human cells in 2016, in work by David Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute. The first approved gene therapies using CRISPR technology reached patients in 2023. Base editing in humans had already begun in 2022, with early clinical reports emerging from trials across Europe and the United States. What is being accumulated, carefully, is a track record. A technique that existed only in published papers ten years ago is now being used on people, with results, some of which are good.
The disease these seven patients have affects them from birth. There is no cure. Treatment has historically managed symptoms. What base editing is trying to do is correct the underlying cause at the genetic level.
It didn’t cure seven people this week. What it did was give a research team in Germany reason to keep going. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked.
(Science news reports on the Hannover base editing trial appeared November 3, 2026.)
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
