The Source with Kaitlan Collins 11/4/26 | CNN Breaking News Today November 4, 2026

Hey Kaitlan, and I am Dana Bash at Capitol Hill today. Here's just some of what the president said.

We ordered the marble for the floor. The marble is a really magnificent marble. It's a cut, it's a vein that people have been after for 50 years. And the owner of the quarry didn't want to sell it, but he liked me. And he also was so honored to be doing it for the country, for the White House. And the marble floor, you'll see it is the most beautiful marble you'll ever see. It's a special vein. This is a vein that everybody wanted for a long time, and I got it, and I got it for the floor of the ballroom at the White House.

A beautiful vein of marble. Only when asked much later did he mention the midterms and the results that showed a shellacking for his party and for him last night. And he was asked about whether he can work with the Democrats. He said, 'Yeah, he thinks so.' Kaitlan.

If you could really just boil it down to how this state is feeling, it is that everyone is holding their breath, and they know they're going to have to hold it for weeks. I just want to talk about those several hundred votes that separate Peltola, the Democrat, from the Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan. It's 626 votes. If you look at the number of precincts that are reporting, we're talking about 394 precincts out of 403 that have already reported. So what are the precincts that are outstanding? Those are in areas that are not close, that are difficult to access, and people in the state are well accustomed to what that means. That means it is going to be a waiting period. It is something that the candidates have certainly laid out to their supporters. Both the Democrat and the Republican got in front of their supporters last night, and they shared the same exact message: that people are just going to have to wait, that this is how it goes in Alaska, and that the initial process of just trying to get those ballots from cities and towns that are inaccessible by roads — that's 10 days here in the state of Alaska, 15 days for those overseas ballots. So it is something that the state, again, is used to, because if those ballots are postmarked on election day, they still count 10 days and then 15 days after. And then there's the ranked-choice ballot. If no candidate gets 50% plus one, what that means is that they go into the rounds: round one, round two, it just keeps going until somebody reaches that threshold. Dana.

Kyung, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. I now want to go to John King at the Magic Wall. And John, just listening to Kyung talking about the number of votes separating the top two candidates there, we're talking about a matter of hundreds of votes. Think about Mississippi: 65 votes. If anybody is curious whether their vote matters, just look at these two examples, right?

Their votes matter. And what the American people did last night — and we'll see what happens in Alaska, we'll get that final number in Mississippi — we're talking about a Mississippi Senate race, potential Democratic win the morning after a midterm election. Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas. What the American voter did last night was to revolt and to repudiate the president. And in the process, Dana, they just crushed and crumbled the MAGA coalition. Pick a place. Let's go to Iowa. President Trump won it three times. See these three House districts, three Democrats flipping Republican seats in the state of Iowa. That's a state the president carried easily. Iowa also elected a Democratic senator, and it elected a Democratic governor. The MAGA coalition out in Iowa — mostly white working-class people, farmers, small cities — crushed. Move over to another place. You can go to North Carolina. Look at House races here. Again, another state the president won three times. Out in western North Carolina, Democrats have not been able to win in rural, white, working-class America in forever. This seat, not in more than a dozen years. Not only did the Democrat win, look at that margin: 57 to 41 in white working-class America. The MAGA coalition in western North Carolina crumbled. Let's pick another place. Well, how did the president get reelected in 2024? Well, he had a giant surge in Latino votes across the country, including in Texas. What did Texas do? Look down here in the Rio Grande Valley. Remember the Republican redistricting plan? Let's just bring this up for you here. Remember Republicans redistricted? They said they were going to pick up five seats in Texas alone. They did that at the president's demand — not request, demand. Well, what happened with that? Four of the five went to Democrats. Democrats winning by bigger margins than they did two years ago in districts the Republicans redrew to make them more difficult, largely on the power of Latino voters. That's not all Texas did. Texas, as you know, elected a Democratic senator for the first time in 38 years, and a Democratic governor, a Latina, for the first time in 36 years. I could go on and on and on, but let me end with the crumbling of the MAGA coalition in the home state of the vice president, JD Vance. Vivek Ramaswamy, MAGA himself, crushed — 12 years in a state President Trump carried easily three times. Sherrod Brown back to the Senate in JD Vance's own old seat in Ohio. So MAGA was on the ballot big time here, and MAGA here and just about everywhere got crushed. A lot for the Republicans to think about. They followed Trump, and last night they followed him off a cliff.

Really, really remarkable. Still processing and still counting a lot of votes just to see how deep and wide that damage is. John, thank you. I mean, Kaitlan, think about it: Iowa, Texas, Ohio. I'm just recapping what John just said. North Carolina, South Carolina. It just — wow.

Well, the American people want a Congress that is going to lower costs and raise wages, that's going to focus on what's good for working families across the United States. That's what every Democrat ran on. And every Republican had to figure out how they're going to talk about the war in Iran, which has raised the cost of gas, raised the cost of diesel, raised the cost of fertilizer for farmers, and how they're going to talk about the trade wars. And we're in a trade war with Canada, with our Canadian friends, and with Mexico. Nobody could have imagined that a couple of years ago. Now your grocery prices are through the roof. So I think that's what happened across the country. And now we have an opportunity. Democrats got victories in the House and in the Senate. We have an opportunity to actually carry out an agenda that really means something for working families.

Well, there's an easy way to start. Let's raise the minimum wage in the United States. I mean, $7.25 is the federal minimum wage. You can't survive on $14,000 a year with a single full-time job. People, even with two full-time jobs at $7.25, that's $28,000. You can't raise a family on that. Barely survive yourself. So that seems like an easy first step, but there's so many other things. I mean, even before you get to the harder things like universal health care, which I think a lot of people want to make sure happens, what about just focusing on giving people a few paid days off? We here in Illinois, we give people a whole week off paid, because if you're a working person, I mean, you just can't survive. You can't go on vacation. There's no joy anymore. You're just barely surviving by paying your bills if you can. So I think there are some pretty easy things that they can go after. Look, will President Trump veto those things? I hope not. I would hope that he understands what the American people have said, but I can tell you Democrats need to be very clear that we are sticking up for raising wages and lowering costs for American families.

Maybe he imagines that he can distract from what happened yesterday, but it was a resounding rebuke of everything that he has stood for and of his MAGA coalition. And all I can imagine is it's either that he's trying to, you know, make people look over there, look over there, or there's just something wrong with the man. And I've been saying for a while that I think that might be the case.

Well, let's face it, JD Vance has been Donald Trump's number one cheerleader. He's supported everything about the president. Now he wants to seem like he's breaking with the president. But the reality is that everything that's happening to American families — right, the rising cost of everything at the grocery store, your gas pump, all of that — JD Vance is out there promoting. He was out campaigning, and he was out, you know, actually sticking up for Vivek Ramaswamy's terrible ad attacking a woman who had been raped when she was 12 years old. So I think he's got a lot to answer for. I don't think he can run away from what he's been, which is a MAGA loyalist, a bootlicker for Donald Trump.

I was not. He has no experience giving me a call. I welcome it, by the way. I'd love it if he'd give me a call. Would love to talk to him. But the reality is that he seems like he's got some problem with Illinois, some problem with me. Can't get over it. I'm always open to talking to Republicans. Every once in a while they have a good idea, although the president I disagree with on a whole lot of things. But I can't imagine who it was that he reached out to. And I would hope that whoever it is gave him some advice about working with the new Democratic Congress that needs to get big things done and is going to put forward an agenda that, well, he may not love it, but it's something the American people really want.

Thanks, Kaitlan.

This is CNN's special coverage of election day in America continued. We are live on Capitol Hill, where there is about to be a massive shift in power. Democrats, they may not even be done adding to their majorities. In the Senate in Alaska, the race is too close to call. In Mississippi, it is also too close to call. Democrat Scott Colom is leading Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by just a couple dozen votes in a state President Trump won just two years ago by 23 percentage points. Joining me now is Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Republican Congressman Buddy Carter of Georgia, and CNN's Manu Raju is still here. Congressman, I know that you ran to try to be the candidate to defeat John Ossoff in the Georgia Senate. Didn't work out that way for you. What is your take on why your party lost not just a little bit, but so badly and so deep into major Republican terrain?

Well, I think we need to be careful here not to read too much into it. I mean, to me, it's pretty simple. It's about the economy. It's about affordability. Gas prices are high. People don't like that. Groceries are high, and people vote with their pocketbooks, and they see that, and they don't understand — and maybe they understand, but they still experience the high prices. Even though if you look at what's happening with petroleum, if you look at what's happening with gas, it's because of the Iran war. I agree with the president. I agree with the vice president. I think that's what this was about. I think it was, you know, in the most ferocious, the most simplistic terms, I think it was about the war in Iran resulting in high gas prices, and high gas prices resulted in people being very disenchanted, and they want change. But, you know, we'll see what happens as far as change goes.

Is this the beginning of the end of the MAGA movement, and do you think the party is going to move more in a different direction, or should it?

No, I don't think it's the end of the MAGA movement. I mean, if you look at it, you know, we had the Tea Party, then we had MAGA, and you've always got those types of movements. But MAGA is real, and I think it will remain relevant in a number of different ways. It may change some, but I think that basically the America First agenda is something that we will continue to pursue.

Senator, you're about to get a whole batch of new Democratic colleagues in the Senate.

Yeah. And you know what? I want to respond just to this discussion. So I had a chance to visit Georgia, I had a chance to visit Mississippi and Illinois and North Carolina and Ohio, and the sentiment was fairly unanimous: that the American people were not duped. They understood exactly what they saw. And it was not just that the cost of living had become too much for them — that they could not afford their gas or their food, utilities, their housing, their health care. But there was a second component to this, and the exit interviews yesterday really covered this: is that the American people felt costs were too high and corruption. There was the real sense that it was not only that they couldn't afford their cost of living, but that it was done really on the backs of the American people while they watched the president and his allies become richer and richer. And so this was unavoidable. I think that so many said this on both sides. I saw a number of exit interviews where people said we felt duped. You know, they watched people enrich themselves while they became poor.

One of your new colleagues is going to be a Democrat from the state of South Carolina. Did you think that was going to happen again in your lifetime?

Not in my lifetime.

Okay. Well, red state.

No, exactly. And there are lots of ruby red states that are sending Democrats.

And I mentioned that because Annie Andrews, who won last night, beating Nancy Mace, she's speaking right now in South Carolina. I mean, Manu, I know that you were down there. You have been all over in this election cycle. I mean, that is stunning because even when I was down there last week, there was real fear among Republicans that Nancy Mace could lose. And that's why they sent in the cavalry to try to save her, try to nationalize this race. They brought in every Republican surrogate under the sun, including Congressman Carter's home state governor, Brian Kemp, was out there. President Trump was out there. Ted Cruz was out there. They thought nationalizing the race, getting Republicans to come home, would be enough to sink Annie Andrews. Clearly they miscalculated on that front. Not just because Nancy Mace — a lot of voters did not simply think that she was qualified for that position. She was thrust into that position. Trump sort of forced her onto that electorate. There was a Republican rebellion against this. And it's also, as Congressman Carter — I agree with him about the Iran war, people associating what happened with Iran to higher costs. There's no question about that. But it's also the way the Iran war was sold to the public. There was no sales job to the public beforehand. And then afterwards, Trump has been saying since the beginning, four to six week war, four to six week war. The American public saw that, and that's why there was so much backlash. One reason why there was so much backlash for a lot of the Republican candidates, because a lot of the American voters thought this will be over by now.

Yeah, I agree. You know, the communication was not good. But let's face it, we're talking about Iran here. You're talking about this is a war that's been going on for 47 years. And the president has tried to negotiate with them, and he's offered a carrot and he's offered a stick. He offered the carrot when he offered the memorandum of understanding that JD Vance took over there, laden with incentives for them to exhibit good behavior and they would share in the economic prosperity of the world. They rejected that, and they played us along. It just reminded me in the 1980s and in the Ayatollah Khomeini who decided who was going to be president. Iran is the one who has caused the increase in gas prices. But when Trump keeps saying the gas prices are going to keep coming down, when they're not.

There's some backlash to that.

Well, they're not now. And you just wait until the Democrats get into power. They're going to be going up even more.

Let's go ahead.