What to expect today—and in the days and weeks ahead.  Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux In my salad days as a reporter, Election Night was a festive one: editors and writers stayed late, ate cold pizza, and rapped out news stories and instant analyses as best they could. The newsroom resembled a convention floor, with makeshift signs poking up denoting one state or another. What’s changed most of all is not the technology—that goes without saying. What’s changed most of all is the mood. Elections never lacked for a sense of political consequence; now it does not require a catastrophist’s state of mind to worry that this election will be the last of its kind. That has arguably been Donald Trump’s most corrosive contribution to our public life—the doubt that he has cast on the functioning of American democracy. Our writers will do everything they can, from Washington, D.C., and around the country, to provide clear reporting and analysis of the midterm elections. But now they are also duty-bound to make sense of the aftermath, reporting on how various candidates do or do not follow the Trumpian grift of accepting results in case of victory, denying them in case of defeat—and all the chaos that could result. Most analysts are predicting some variation of a “red wave,” a Republican triumph in the House of Representatives (almost certainly) and in the Senate (perhaps), to say nothing of local races of real consequence. If the wave is that dramatic, the implications could be immense: Will it lead to a Trump candidacy for 2024? Will Joe Biden run again? What will it mean for American democracy that the dominant party on Capitol Hill is under Trump’s influence and features dozens of election deniers? Alexander Hamilton once said that American elections provided “a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” Will these elections and what they imply for 2024 lead us to think that Hamilton was naïve? —David Remnick With your support, we’ll continue to bring you in-depth interviews and incisive expert analysis to help you make sense of this moment in American politics. Subscribe to The New Yorker today » | 
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