Last night, in the streets of Austin, Democrats honked their horns and hung out their windows, like it was V-E Day. In the nation’s capital, they blasted “Party in the U.S.A.” near the White House. But in southeast Iowa, the blue revolution came quietly.
The Democrats of Des Moines County—a place that does not actually contain the state capital, but a small, industrial river city and rural areas along the Mississippi—have not come to associate Election Night with joy.

Over the past few years, Google’s low-priced laptops have become an AI Trojan horse in America’s schools. Students can use a school-issued Chromebook to automate much of their homework. Fire up the Gemini app, and Google’s chatbot will spit out a full essay about the meaning of The Giver. Type an algebra question into the Google search box, and an “AI Overview” will solve it for you.

Heading into the midterms, everyone who follows American politics had the same question: Were the polls correct, or would they underestimate Republicans once again? The answer turned out to be neither. This time around, the polls undercounted a different kind of voter: Democrats.
According to the Silver Bulletin polling averages, Democrats were on track to win the U.S. House popular vote by nine points and narrowly flip a few Senate seats in states that Donald Trump had won by double digits.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Democrats were jubilant last night, and for good reason: Few midterms in modern American history have produced such a thorough repudiation of a party as the Republicans experienced in this election. But celebrations have a pesky way of being followed by hangovers.

Last month, in Minneapolis, I visited the homegrown memorials that still stand in the spots where Alex Pretti and Renee Good were killed by federal agents. To me, they looked like living organisms fed by pain and hopefulness—handfuls of teddy bears with matted fur, crayon drawings of the victims, fresh daisies, tall red candles, cloth banners bearing expressions such as Only Love. Yesterday, on Election Day, these shrines were refreshed—this time by I voted stickers.