Both chambers of Congress changed hands. Democrats led the Senate count 54 to 44 with two seats still being counted, and the House 228 to 139 with 68 races uncalled, according to UPI’s tally this morning; Ballotpedia put the net gains at no fewer than seven Senate seats and eighteen in the House. The Senate flips ran through states President Trump carried in 2024: Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio’s special election, South Carolina and Texas. Kansas sent its first Democratic senator to Washington since 1932, and Texas its first since 1988. Four Republican senators lost their seats, and fourteen Republican House members lost theirs while no Democratic incumbent did. Trump conceded, credited the Democrats’ campaign, and warned that he could use his veto. On the numbers counted so far, the Democratic caucus clears the 51 votes that control the Senate and the 218 that control the House.

The administration and the rule of law

The Federal Register’s two-day window carried 173 documents: no presidential documents, seventeen rules, ten proposed rules and 146 notices. The absence of any presidential order on the morning after a wave election is the window’s most notable entry; what did publish is the ordinary machinery of a government still in Republican hands.

HHS finalized its revision to the section 504 regulation, clarifying that the statutory exclusion for “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” reaches gender dysphoria absent a physical impairment; it takes effect January 4, 2027. The FCC removed a section of its broadcast and cable equal employment opportunity rules to conform to the Fifth Circuit’s decision in National Religious Broadcasters v. FCC, effective November 3. The National Credit Union Administration published three rules on emergency amendments to the Paycheck Protection Program facilities and loans, on member business lending, and on statutory liens.

Among the proposed rules, the Treasury gave notice of a hearing on which assets Trump accounts may hold before a beneficiary’s eighteenth-birthday year, and the FDIC proposed to modernize its large-bank deposit insurance determination regulation and to index its thresholds to inflation, with comments due January 4, 2027. The notices included two State Department determinations on assistance, one for Syria signed July 20 and one for Yemen signed June 29, both published this morning, along with presidential disaster declarations for Florida and Texas.

The courts

The Supreme Court’s opinion feed recorded nothing in the window and the D.C. Circuit’s recorded nothing, so the visible work sat in the district court. CourtListener recorded fifteen new entries in the District of Columbia, all on November 3. Among them were Novogene Co., Ltd. v. U.S. Department of Defense, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island v. Department of Health and Human Services, Doe 1 v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Teirstein v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Jama v. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Shi v. U.S. Department of State. The pack carries case names and docket numbers, not complaints, so this report can say who sued and not what the suits allege.

Of the five watched dockets, three moved. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, the East Potomac golf case, recorded nine entries on November 3, including docket entries 126 through 131. Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center matter, recorded two minute entries, and MSW Media, Inc. v. Department of Justice recorded one. Phang v. Blanche recorded nothing in the district court, and the consolidated appeal in the D.C. Circuit recorded nothing either.

Markets

Equities closed election day higher in two of the three indexes. The S&P 500 rose 27.52 points, or 0.36 percent, to 7,568.92, and the Nasdaq Composite gained 207.646 points, or 0.83 percent, to 25,372.009, while the Dow fell 197.26 points, or 0.38 percent, to 51,786.72, all as of the November 3 close.

On Wednesday morning the VIX was 18.07 at 6:59 Eastern, down 2.76 or 13.25 percent. The ten-year Treasury yielded 4.925 percent at 7:00, down 2.5 basis points on the day; front-month WTI crude fell 98 cents, or 1.02 percent, to $95.11 at 6:50; gold rose $111.20, or 2.82 percent, to $4,051.60; and the dollar index was 101.372, down 0.495 or 0.49 percent. Those clocks are Eastern, one hour ahead of Central.

Treasury’s curve for November 3 ran 4.61 percent at two years, 4.95 at ten and 5.32 at thirty, a 2s10s spread of +0.34, two basis points steeper than November 2’s +0.32. Total public debt outstanding was $40,502,080,966,097 on November 2, down $22,429,046,965 from October 30. Of that, $32,719,901,942,674 was held by the public and $7,782,179,023,423 was intragovernmental.

The economy

The three BLS series in the pack carry no month newer than September, which remains the newest reading in all three. The all-items consumer price index was 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, up from 334.980 in August and 333.918 in July, a monthly rise of 0.59 percent against August’s 0.32 percent. Unemployment was 4.2 percent in September, a tenth above August and July. Payrolls were 159,044 thousand in September, a gain of 29 thousand after August’s 133 thousand. Taken together the three readings still say what they said a month ago: prices firming while hiring slows.

Elections and the midterms

Polymarket’s midterm board has collapsed into the result. The House contract reads 100.0 percent Democratic on $12,125,694 of twenty-four-hour volume against 0.0 percent Republican on $7,904,957, and the balance-of-power contract reads 100.0 percent for a Democratic sweep on $4,379,180 against 0.1 percent for a Republican sweep on $4,471,716. A settled market is a record of what happened, not a forecast of what comes next.

Two Senate seats remain open, and those contracts are still doing work. Mississippi has Scott Colom at 79.0 percent on $1,266,631 against Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith at 18.9 percent on $1,805,627. Alaska has Mary Peltola at 84.4 percent on $1,294,341 against Senator Dan Sullivan at 15.2 percent on $622,422. A separate contract asking which of Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas Republicans will win puts “None” at 82.5 percent on $3,566,621; Alaska alone keeps that open. These are the venue’s prices, not this publication’s view.

The results behind them are starker than the prices. Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan, at more than 52 percent with 95 percent of the vote counted, makes him the first Muslim elected to the Senate; he defeated Mike Rogers, after beating Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary. James Talarico was projected to win in Texas, which would end nearly four decades without a Democratic senator from that state. Abroad, the reading was immediate and mostly about the war: Iran’s Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said that Americans had voted “NO TO WAR,” and the UK health minister, James Frith, described a “seismic shift in domestic politics for the Americans”.

The world

The war in Ukraine produced the day’s largest single loss of civilian life. Russian aerial bombs struck a school in Komyshuvakha, in the Zaporizhzhia region about twenty kilometers from the front line, on Monday morning as residents gathered for the weekly distribution of humanitarian aid. At least 33 people were killed, among them two rescue workers and four police officers who had responded to the first strike. The regional governor, Mykhailo Semikin, said 48 more were missing, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said more than 50 could still be trapped. Zelensky called it an “exceptionally horrific strike” and said Russian forces “could not have been unaware” that aid was distributed there every week.

The attack came in two waves: a first pass as people arrived, then a second on the shelter where survivors had taken cover. It fell a day after a six-day local ceasefire expired, and six days before American-mediated talks are due in Abu Dhabi on November 10 and 11. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had struck Ukrainian military units near Komyshuvakha and two other settlements, claiming up to 25 servicemen killed and 15 vehicles plus an electronic warfare station destroyed. Rescue work continued into Tuesday morning under the threat of drones.

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on November 4, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (the November 3 close for the equities, and morning prints for the VIX, the ten-year, gold, crude and the dollar), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (November 3), FiscalData (November 2) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. Federal Register counts and document descriptions were read from the register’s own API, and the courts section draws on CourtListener’s search API and its watched-docket feeds. The account of the election result draws on UPI, Ballotpedia, Al Jazeera and Euronews; the account of the Zaporizhzhia strike on Euronews, The Kyiv Independent and ABC News.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman