Steve Inskeep

But Democrats are also claiming victory after Tuesday night's results.

NPR's Stephen Fowler has been following the campaign.

Stephen, good morning.

Good morning.

Why did this race receive so much attention?

Oh, really interesting result then.

And it seems that Democrats turned out a lot of voters.

Who's right in declaring victory then?

So in last month's elections, we heard a lot about affordability.

I'm thinking about that as a political slogan, six syllables, lots of syllables.

But anyway, the economy is what that was about.

How did it factor in?

Oh, this is really interesting.

The Democrat maybe didn't talk about Trump so much because she wanted the votes of former Trump voters, and the Republican didn't talk about Trump so much because he's not so popular at this moment.

But with all of this said, I mean, we're reading all of this to look at 2026 and trying to find...

how we can forecast the future.

Is there anything about Tuesday's result that truly matters when thinking about the midterms where things will be different?

NPR's Stephen Fowler, thanks so much.

And that's Up First for this Wednesday, December 3rd.

Today's Up First was edited by Rebecca Rossman, Jason Breslow, Megan Prats, Mohamed El-Bardisi, and Alice Wolfley.