Democratic leaders and seat-flipping victors from Tuesday’s ‘blue tsunami’ offer post-election comments

The broad repudiation of Donald Trump, his policies and the Republican party, focused on Trump’s personal unpopularity, high costs of living and the Iran war, offer Democrats an opportunity to reset the US domestic agenda. But what will they do with it?

Here, Democratic leaders and seat-flipping victors from Tuesday’s “blue tsunami” offer their post-election comments.

Former president has given series of blistering speeches to help candidates in key races – and deployment has proved a hit with party’s progressive wing

That could have been awkward. Barack Obama, campaigning for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, acknowledged that his fellow Democrat has criticised some aspects of the Obama presidency.

“Yeah, Abdul didn’t agree with some things we wanted to do – that our administration was doing – when I was president,” he told a rally in Detroit. “You know who else doesn’t agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama.” The crowd erupted in laughter. “I’d say about five times a day, she says, ‘You knucklehead. Why you do that?’”

Russia's sanctioned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is heading to a G20 meeting in the US, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated. Moscow plans to use the trip to argue against sanctions, days after Russian ballistic missiles hit Kyiv. Ukraine, meanwhile, is still waiting for Washington's sign-off on the air defense missiles it needs.

Ukraine is fighting Russia's air war while its main ally squeezes it too, from capped Starlink links to missing US warnings of incoming ballistic missiles, leaving Kyiv weaker before any talks. A new round of the US-Russia-Ukraine trilateral talks is expected in Abu Dhabi in November.

Moscow's sanctioned minister plans to argue against sanctions

Lavrov will lead the Russian delegation at the G20 foreign ministers' meeting, which the US hosts in Atlanta on 30–31 October. In his speeches, he will denounce “the use of economic ‘weapons’ to fight opponents, including sanctions,” Russia's Foreign Ministry stated. The US Treasury sanctioned Lavrov on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The ministry claimed its delegation ran into American red tape over visas. Journalists in Lavrov's press pool still received US visas without movement restrictions, Russian state news agency TASS reported.

The State Department's announcement of the meeting doesn't mention Russia or say whether Lavrov got a sanctions waiver. Republican Congressman Don Bacon told RFE/RL that Russian leaders “should not be welcomed in any of these forums.” “They lead a pariah state,” he said.

Moscow's demands arrive days after its missiles hit Kyiv

Lavrov will also stress “the cornerstone importance of indivisible security” as the basis of multipolarity, the ministry stated. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out neutrality and limits on Ukraine's army.

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Russian ballistic missiles hit a Kyiv university campus, then return before dawn for the Southern Bridge again

A day before the trip was announced, Lavrov called the US-Russia diesel deal a purely business arrangement. “There were no strings attached,” he claimed.

Lavrov brings these demands days after Russian ballistic missiles hit a Kyiv university campus and the Southern Bridge, killing a 46-year-old woman, the Kyiv City Prosecutor's Office reported. Kyiv has waited almost a month for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's signature on Patriot and NASAMS missiles, Zelenskyy wrote.

Moscow keeps collecting from Washington

The visit adds to a run of US moves in Moscow's favor. This month, the US Treasury cleared Russian diesel blocked by sanctions. US President Donald Trump then waived tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright also said investors could buy sanctioned shadow-fleet tankers and return them to legal trade. Russia, for its part, kept striking Ukraine's energy sites during the truce Trump announced.

Russian officials are also back in G20 rooms in person. In late August, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov attended a G20 finance meeting in Asheville, North Carolina. It was his first in-person G20 appearance since 2022, and European officials refused to join the group photo with him. The State Department has stated that Russia is welcome at all G20 meetings, and a senior US official said Russia would be invited to the leaders' summit in Miami in December.

Western ministers used to push back at those tables. When Lavrov spoke at the G20 meeting in Johannesburg in February 2025, then-British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he saw no appetite for peace.

In Atlanta, Obama accuses the White House of selling out Ukrainians

Former US President Barack Obama campaigned in Atlanta on 28 October, two days before Lavrov's meeting there.

“And while we're alienating key allies like Canada, the White House is bending the knee to Vladimir Putin of Russia and selling out Ukrainians who are fighting for their freedom and democracy,” Obama said.

He also likened Trump's self-enrichment in office to “what dictators in other countries do.”

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With days until the midterm elections, a new poll from CNN places Democrats well in the lead in key Senate races in Texas and Michigan, while projecting tighter contests in Kansas and Maine.

In Texas, the poll found 49% of likely voters would back James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, over Republican Ken Paxton, who netted just 43%.

Former US president comes to Georgia to support Jon Ossoff for US Senate and Keisha Lance Bottoms for governor

Former US president Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “whole of government” response to his critique of his successor’s gilded White House renovations as he rallied Democrats in the final week of the US midterm election campaign.

“These are not serious people,” Obama said of Trump and the Republican party at a campaign rally in suburban Atlanta on Wednesday evening. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”

Obama has been accused of ‘snobbery’ over his Trump diss, as people rush to defend the restaurant chain’s ‘affordable opulence’

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, a Rolls-Royce stopped at the intersection of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly Hills, California. Local people in athleisure walked past Balenciaga, Dior and Prada boutiques, as visitors on Hollywood bus tours ogled nearby Rodeo Drive, where Burberry and Louis Vuitton shops meet at a celebrated street corner.

Up the street, across from the upmarket Erewhon grocery store – home to $21 smoothies – a few diners sat outside an American landmark: the Cheesecake Factory.

Both Obama and Trump are on the campaign trail, but only one of them appears to be descending into madness

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Barack Obama versus Donald Trump. It is the presidential election that never happened but has come to define an era of US politics.

Obama is back on the campaign trail for the midterms, still electrifying crowds, earning shouts of “We love you!” and skewering his successor. “What’s up with the gold?” he asked a crowd in Detroit. “I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” This has, predictably, set off a mini culture war involving questions of elitism and the tastefulness of chain restaurants.