Median county shifted about 11 points toward Democrats
Republican House candidates ran behind President Trump’s 2024 margin against Kamala Harris in all but about 170 of roughly 3,000 counties where at least half the expected House vote had been tallied, according to a Wall Street Journal newsletter on Tuesday’s results. In the median county, the result shifted about 11 percentage points toward the Democrats, the newsletter said.
The Journal described the losses as amounting to one of the most decisive repudiations of an American president, and described a blue wave that touched nearly every part of America. The blowout was a direct result of Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran, which sent gas prices up 40% and left many of his most loyal supporters disillusioned, the newsletter said.
Foreign policy was not the only drag, according to the newsletter: Trump also lost his advantage on immigration.
The Journal’s newsletter assessed that Chuck Schumer emerged as one of Tuesday’s biggest winners.
Beyond the vote, the same edition carried separate reporting that formed no part of its account of Tuesday’s results — on Israeli military orders, a corporate breakup at CVS, household staffing, and a Vietnamese pastime.
Israel has ordered billions of dollars worth of American military hardware beyond what the U.S. has committed to paying for, illustrating how hard it would be to phase out Washington’s funding for the country, the Journal reported. Beyond 2028, Israel would need approximately $10 billion to pay for outstanding orders as of April 1, according to a State Department document sent to Congress and reviewed by the Journal. Jared Malsin reported that it was unclear how much that amount might have changed since then. The disclosure came as Trump said Tuesday that he planned to end aid to Israel.
A small group of top CVS executives spent months engaged in a strategic review that developed into a secret plan to split up the $400 billion healthcare giant and hive off its ubiquitous pharmacies — an unlikely and radical step, according to the newsletter. The breakup will put CVS’s Aetna health-insurance unit and Caremark pharmacy-benefit manager into one company, and its approximately 9,000 retail pharmacies into another, Anna Wilde Mathews and Alexander Saeedy reported. The newsletter said the logic was that CVS’s balance sheet was strong enough to support the two resulting companies, and that the breakup would create more agile, focused firms.
Requests for house managers at the domestic placement agency Town + Country jumped so far this year compared with 2025, the newsletter reported. Once a luxury reserved for the ultrawealthy, house managers are operations-minded professionals — a hybrid of cleaner, planner and household organizer — and the newsletter said rising demand now comes from middle- and upper-middle-class families looking to run their homes like corporations.
Like many American tourists in Asia, Kendall Stempel and Chloe Starr were on high alert for a hustle, the newsletter reported. When a gaptoothed, 6-year-old boy named Hieu approached them at Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake, they braced for the pitch, but he wanted their vocabulary rather than their money. The women had become the latest targets of san tay, the increasingly popular Vietnamese pastime of hunting foreigners for English practice; at Hoan Kiem Lake, the newsletter said, tourists of a certain complexion are coveted as living, breathing Duolingo lessons.