Heather Cox Richardson
“The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule.”
November 4, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
And so, one era passes and another begins.
Yesterday, voters flipped control of both chambers of Congress from the Republicans to the Democrats. Votes in some races are still being counted, but NBC News projects that the Democrats will win at least 259 seats in the House of Representatives, far more than the 218 they needed to win a majority.
A Democratic victory in the House had been widely expected, but what would happen in the Senate, which had a bad map for Democrats this cycle, was unclear. There, too, voters were emphatic. Democrats flipped seven seats in the Senate: Iowa, Kansas, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas.
The Senate race in Alaska hasn’t yet been called, but Democratic challenger Mary Peltola is currently slightly ahead of Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan there. Even more eye-popping, as of this writing, Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom is ahead of the Republican incumbent in Mississippi. If he wins, he will be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction.
In governors’ races, Democrats flipped Iowa, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada, and Texas. None of the new Democratic governors will be hamstrung by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. Republicans in Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio either lost or failed to regain supermajorities that could override a governor’s veto.
The topline races don’t tell the whole story. Voters elected Democrats up and down the ballot. In Texas, the most prominent example of this phenomenon, Democratic senatorial candidate James Talarico won by about 12 points. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa won by 7 points. Voters flipped two congressional seats in districts Trump won by at least 14 points in 2024. Voters elected a Democratic attorney general and four Democratic supreme court justices, and they flipped control of the lower chamber of the legislature.
Many of the races across the country were not close. Some races flipped by double digits from the margins of 2024. Some flips were as high as 20, 30, or even 40 percent. Observers called the results “seismic” and “jaw-dropping,” not just a blue wave but a “tsunami.”
The 2026 midterm elections marked a revolution in American politics. Election scholar Michael McDonald estimates that about 124.3 million people, or just under 50% of those eligible, turned out to vote. That rate is just under the voting rate in the 2018 midterms, which itself was the highest midterm turnout rate since 1914.
The election came off without anything more than the usual hitches, a tribute to the quiet work of dedicated lawyers and voting rights groups who have been fiercely contesting the administration’s efforts to rig the vote or to stir up opposition to accept the outcome. It was, as organizers had hoped, “too big to rig.” After months of suggesting he would contest the outcome of the election if Democrats won, Trump told New York Times reporters Erica L. Green and Tyler Pager that he would accept the results.
The historic nature of this election cannot be overstated. It is a rejection of Trump, who insisted voters should imagine he was on the ballot. But more than that, it is a rejection of the Republican ideology that has driven American politics since the 1980s: the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule.
That ideology took root in American politics in the late 1970s, in response to the nation’s push toward equality for racial minorities and women. The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected the right of Black and Brown Americans to vote, while the introduction of reliable birth control that same year began to permit women to enter the workforce on terms equal to men. It seemed that the equality promised in American democracy was within reach.
But to win election, Richard M. Nixon brought into the Republican Party voters who opposed the expansion of American democracy while Democrats looked to expand their tent. In 1972, even as Nixon won in a landslide, Democrats sent to Congress giants like Barbara Jordan of Texas, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the South and the first woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.
In 1974, voters infuriated by Watergate flipped 49 House seats and 5 Senate seats from Republican to Democratic and elected 93 new members of Congress, 76 of whom were Democrats. In 1976 they sent Democrat Jimmy Carter to the White House, where he signed legislation that made it illegal to fire women or cut their pay because they were pregnant, expanded contracting rules to boost Black-owned businesses, worked to end racial discrimination in hiring, and created the Department of Education.
Carter’s Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, won election by attacking the modern American state and warning that people like the “Welfare Queen,” a Black woman who abused the welfare system to live large, were taking money from hardworking white people. The government should get out of people’s lives, he said, and he promised to slash taxes and regulations to permit people to accumulate wealth. In turn, he claimed, they would invest in the economy, creating jobs for everyone. Reagan and his allies tied racial and gender inequality to economic prosperity.
That combination worked—more or less—to attract voters until Trump’s second term tore it apart. Trump and appointees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have purged the government of minorities and women and undermined the health and well-being of nonwhite Americans, immigrants, and women. But rather than benefiting regular Americans, those policies have hurt them. And administration leaders have been quite open about their intention of using the government to loot the country for themselves and their cronies.
In their determination to stop Trump and MAGA, Americans came together across the artificial lines that Republicans have exploited for more than a generation to stand against what the nation’s founders would have called tyranny. The rural areas that have made up the backbone of MAGA support joined more Democratic urban areas to elect Democrats. The racial, gender, and cultural divisions Republicans have exploited to stay in power have collapsed in the face of a rising oligarchy.
Even billionaire Elon Musk’s investment of close to half a billion dollars in Republicans in the midterms could not overcome voters’ frustration with a government that works only for the very wealthy. People across the country, organized in No Kings rallies, along overpasses, in webcasts, and in everything from political clubs to knitting communities, have come together to stand against the extraordinary corruption of the Trump regime, to oppose Trump’s rejection of constitutional limits in favor of autocratic power to declare tariffs and start wars, to demand the government address the needs of Americans, and to insist on the rule of law. Yesterday, they voted.
In Georgia, voters elected Keisha Lance Bottoms to be the first Black female governor in the nation. In New Hampshire, voters elected Chris Pappas to be the Senate’s first openly gay member. In Texas, voters elected Gina Hinojosa to be the state’s first Latina governor and the state’s first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. In New Mexico, voters elected former Interior secretary Deb Haaland to be the nation’s first female Indigenous governor. Voters in Minnesota sent Ojibwe Peggy Flanagan to the Senate. In Michigan, voters elected Abdul El-Sayed, the nation’s first Muslim senator. Voters in Ohio sent Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker, to the House of Representatives and returned Sherrod Brown, known for his defense of unions, to the Senate.
It is a historic rebuke of the Republican ideology that derailed the movement for equal rights in the 1970s in order to sway the system back toward wealthy white people.
This sea change has some immediate repercussions. By putting Congress under the control of Democrats, last night’s results will mean that it will focus on Americans’ needs and will check Trump and his administration.
Asked if the Democrats would focus on costs or corruption, Senator Rafael Warnock of Georgia told CNN that the Democrats could “walk and chew gum at the same time.” Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, reelected for a third term yesterday with almost 60% of the vote, released a 75-page road map for the congressional majority, asking it to end the war in Iran, raise the minimum wage, pass comprehensive immigration reform, provide universal healthcare and childcare, put guardrails around AI, and codify abortion rights into law.
Just after 10:00 last night, Eastern time, as Democratic victories piled up, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia of California, had one comment for administration loyalists. On social media, he wrote: “LAWYER UP.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who will retake a position as the head of the Senate Finance Committee, posted: “Subpoenas.” Among other things, Wyden has been trying to get financial information about sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein’s circle for years but has been stonewalled by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The Senate Finance Committee reposted Wyden’s comment with the caption: “Let’s f*cking go.”
Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), who will likely retake the top spot at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on October 28 that he is interested in hearing from Musk about his conversations with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin about satellites. “One more thing to add to the list of questions for Musk when I subpoena him,” Coons posted.
First thing this morning, Republicans set out to try to figure out a way to spin the results. President Trump posted on social media: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” He then posted an image of a red MAGA hat with the word “VETO” on it in huge white letters, a reminder that he is still the president and a threat to veto any legislation the Democratic-dominated Congress passes.
But the election has made him the lamest of lame ducks and has already turned his attention back to his Washington, D.C., development projects. He showed up today at the White House ballroom construction site, where he described his fantasy world in which former President Joe Biden had turned Washington, D.C., into a “killing field” before he, Trump, took office the second time and fixed everything. Mostly, though, he praised his ballroom plans.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis called the election “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country.” In an evident bid to set himself up to run for president in 2028, he pointed out that Florida remains controlled by Republicans while Texas underwent a Democratic sweep. This is true as far as it goes, but the surge of Angie Nixon and David Jolly in Florida, running for Senate and governor, respectively, was such a surprise that Democrats didn’t invest much in their races, which might have turned out differently if they had.
Vice President J.D. Vance doubled down on the culture wars—including backing the vile ad Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran against Democrat Amy Acton in Ohio, weaponizing that she was raped as a child—and now is faced with the fact Acton won her election by 8 points. In a long post on social media today, Vance blamed the loss on the Iran war, a clear attempt to throw responsibility for the dramatic losses onto Trump and Hegseth.
Vance insisted that voters did not turn on the Republicans over their immigration policies, despite the poignant images of people putting their “I VOTED” stickers on shrines to Renee Good and Alex Pretti and others murdered by federal agents during immigration enforcement raids. Vance has sold himself to the white Christian nationalism at the heart of MAGA that claims immigrants are destroying “Western culture,” and it appears he will not be giving that up.
But for now, anyway, Americans have moved on.
—
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/11/04/us/elections/midterms-senate-states.html
https://www.npr.org/2026/11/04/nx-s1-6022216/midterms-democrats-trump-republicans-analysis
https://thehill.com/policy/international/6198389-democrats-foreign-policy-power-congress/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/03/politics/house-districts-midterms-trump-vis
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/politics/trump-midterm-election-results.html
https://gov-pritzker-newsroom.prezly.com/gov-pritzker-releases-fighting-for-illinois-day-one-agenda
https://thehill.com/policy/international/6198389-democrats-foreign-policy-power-congress/
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/11/04/texas-democrats-blue-wave/
Trump’s Truth:
Bluesky:
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