Nick De Leeuw: Will the costumes get more flamboyant?

It's impossible to narrow it down to one thing, so let me start with a couple of historical notes. We now have the largest state Senate Democratic majority in my lifetime, the largest since 1979. And it was the biggest House flip for Democrats since LBJ.

My one big thing is life imitating art. Folks who know the firm know I read and write comic books. There's a through line in a lot of comics: until the superheroes arrived, there weren't really supervillains, and vice versa. Spider-Man's first villains were bank robbers. Batman was fighting street thugs. But after Batman shows up, all of a sudden you've got these costumed crazies running around.

We see that in politics, too. There's a constant race toward the extremes. The reaction to the Obama administration fueled populism on the right and the rise of Trump. In response to Trump, you saw a rise in progressivism, a democratic socialist bent, and a push toward more extreme leftward policies and personalities in the Democratic Party.

So, what happens to Republicans as we enter the post-Trump era? Do the costumes get more flamboyant, or is there a return to some kind of historical normalcy, with more emphasis on local politics? By that I don't mean local candidates, but local issues: family budgets, gas prices, the things that really impact people at home.

Matt Resch: What happens next?

My one thing follows Nick's line of thinking: what happens next?

It's easy in the hours and days after an election to get caught up in what just happened. But you only have to go back two years to see the shoe on the other foot. The Democratic Party was dead. Donald Trump had taken over the country in a legitimate Electoral College landslide, and everyone was asking what Democrats would do to come back.

We're now in the complete mirror image of that. It's easy for Democrats, rightfully so, to feel proud of the massive numbers they reached on Tuesday. It's also legitimate and needed for Republicans to be introspective and figure out what to do differently after performing so badly. But I don't know that any of it will matter in two years, or four.

I think back to so many of the candidates in this year's Republican primary for governor who took Donald Trump's talking points from his last victory and made them part of their campaigns in July and August. That ship had sailed. The narrative had shifted. The issues were different. The political reality of two Novembers ago was not the same, and they didn't seem to recognize it.

Republicans obviously have a much bigger hole to dig out of than Democrats did two years ago. But this country just keeps going back and forth, back and forth. I wonder when it's going to stop, and what comes next.

Anna Heaton: What will Democrats do with this opportunity?

To play off that, I'm hugely curious what Democrats are going to do with this opportunity, both nationally and at the state level.

Nationally, I'm already pre-annoyed thinking about two straight years of dragging Trump administration officials through oversight hearings, deserved or not, and hearing about the Epstein files 4-5 days a week. Will they have a policy agenda that addresses why voters sent them there? Voters want lower gas prices, so will they wave a magic wand to fix them? Voters clearly want change in our approach to national security and the economy. Will Democrats do anything to change those things, or will they just take a revenge tour for their years of anger at President Trump and his followers?

At the state level, it's the same question. We are now completely blue, top-down. When Republicans had a trifecta in 2011, they moved their policies swiftly: immediate changes to the small-business tax and corporate income tax, a new balanced budget process, and a whole host of other things in the first few months. When Democrats had the same trifecta opportunity two years ago, they didn't do much with it.

So are they ready? Do they have consensus policies ready to roll out, or did they just run on anti-Trump anger? I guess we'll see.

Bonus round: All politics is presidential

Anna: Before I decided to follow your trains of thought, my one thing was how the national, top-of-the-ticket races dominated absolutely everything, and how depressed I am about what that means for Michigan's future. Maybe with age comes the wisdom that the closer a politician is to you, the more they affect your daily life. Taxes, whether the trash gets picked up, local regulations: these affect your day-to-day far more than anything Trump does or anything El-Sayed will or won't do in the Senate.

Yes, the top of the ticket is blue, but it already was. We've had eight years of that leadership in Michigan. I don't know that Gov.-elect Benson has a plan to make sure our kids can start to comprehend things in school and aren't behind the kids in Mississippi, or a plan for tax relief for families. Maybe she does, but everything was so overshadowed by the Senate race and Congress that we don't know what, if anything, is well-thought out and ready at the state level to change the direction we're headed. And that direction is bleak. Extremely bleak.

Matt: After the high-profile primary between Haley Stevens and El-Sayed, a lot of people wondered whether the governor's race would take its natural spot at the front of the line for headlines. I was one who thought it would, because the governor's race always dictates the conversation. Instead, calling it the undercard last Tuesday is probably an understatement. Our issues and campaigns have become nationalized. It's more about the conversation on Twitter than the conversation in kitchens.

Nick: The constant back-and-forth in midterms has been a trend our entire lives, but it really goes back to about 1946. Interesting things started happening after World War II, with radio, TV, and the nightly news bringing national and global events into our living rooms. I've been thinking about the idea that "all politics is local." It's credited to Tip O'Neill, though I think the phrase predates him. In a lot of ways, it's no longer true. All politics is presidential now. What's happening with the administration in D.C. colors the conversation so much that, anecdotally, folks went to the ballot not knowing what races were on it besides the Senate race, then voted based on how they felt about that race. That's a shame for a lot of local candidates who put their hearts and souls into their campaigns and maybe didn't get the fair shake from voters they'd hoped for.

Anna: To put it more succinctly: nationally, there was a huge vote for change, an anti-Trump vote. At the state level, voters did not vote for change. The constitutional offices all stayed with the same party. Even the MSU Board of Trustees re-elected the same people already on the board, and if you follow that at all, you know change is needed there badly. Voters chose change on one level, and no change at all on the other.

Nick: I think there's a difference between technically and practically. Technically, they didn't vote for change at the state level. But practically speaking, I think this was a change election in Michigan.

Matt: The 2026 election is over. That's the "one" thing we're thinking about.