The two Republican blunders that radicalized the South and ended 50-year rule
Republican U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith speaks to guests at her election night watch party at the Sheraton Flowood The Refuge Hotel in Flowood, Mississippi, US November 3, 2026.
Here are some takeaways from last night’s election.
First, the numbers. NBC News projects that the Democrats will take as many as 258 seats in the US House, 54 in the US Senate. Senate races in Alaska and Mississippi are still undecided. If Democrats prevail there, bring the Senate total to 56. Meanwhile, Democrats could flip as many as seven governorships, including Texas, making it 30 states that are under Democratic control. The penetration is deep, down to the local level. The state House in North Carolina flipped. So did the state House in Texas. Here in Connecticut, Democrats widened their already-wide margins in the legislature to a veto-proof majority. Across the country, every voter demographic moved left, the Times said, including the white working class, but especially youth. Men under 30 who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 moved away from him by 38 points. “Earthquake,” “wipeout,” “landslide” – all these terms apply.
How massive were the midterm results? Consider the history. The margin of victory in the House is greater than all previous midterms going back to 1976, the Times’ Peter Baker said. That was the election right after Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation. Baker said election results “will dwarf even the margins that the Republicans won in their two big landslide victories of modern times when they defeated congressional Democrats when Bill Clinton held the White House in 1994 and Barack Obama was president in 2010.”
The midterms mark the end of the Donald Trump era, but also suggest the beginning of a new age of possibilities. The Texas GOP appears to have broken apart under the weight of corruption and fealty to the president. James Talarico’s Senate victory was expected but few dared hope that Gina Hinojosa would sweep Republican Governor Greg Abbott out of power. All statewide offices in the Lone Star State flipped from red to blue. Even some state Supreme Court elections were lost. This does not bode well for any Republican with national ambitions, as no GOP nominee can win the White House without Texas’ 40 electoral votes.
The map has expanded – in the south. Democratic Senate candidates won in Texas and South Carolina. Mississippi’s Senate race is still being decided, but it looks good for Democrat Scott Colom. A Democrat came within an inch of winning Senate seats in Louisiana (Jamie Davis) and Florida (Angie Nixon). The region has long been neglected by the national party. The assumption has been that as long as the GOP dominates, there is no point. As the most racially diverse stretch of the country, however, some Democrats always saw the potential. “I have been telling my party now for a long time that it needs to invest in the south,” Raphael Warnock said today. “The road to a sustainable Democratic majority in the Congress goes right through the south." If there was hesitance to invest yesterday, there shouldn’t be today.
Hispanic voters and Black voters – they are why the south is suddenly competitive. The conventional wisdom is that affordability doomed Trump, but getting lost in the conversation is that Republicans turned the humanity of these Americans into a subject of national debate so their rights and freedoms were no longer guaranteed. ICE radicalized Hispanics. The Supreme Court, by gutting the Voting Rights Act, radicalized Blacks. The deal had been that the Republicans would control southern states in exchange for Hispanic and Black enfranchisement. That deal is what constituted the 21st-century version of “the Solid South.” ICE and SCOTUS broke it, however. The consequence Tuesday was both groups mobilizing to smash the Republican grip on power. They helped James Talarico in Texas and Annie Andrews in South Carolina. (Hispanic voters also supported Adam Hamilton in Kansas.)
Beware those who whitewash the Democrats. Pundits are already urging them to stay focused on affordability issues. Not only does that overlook the impact of the Republicans’ lawlessness on marginalized communities, it fails to take into account the vast complexity of Trump’s incompetence, venality and destruction. The Democrats do have a mandate – everything! For two years, Trump’s evil was everywhere. His high crimes were omni-directional. So there’s no reason for the Democrats to limit their vision to one direction only. In noting the trap some pundits are laying for Democrats, civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said “this narrowing in the commentary is a way to make the Democrats fear acting on the full range of issues that matter.” She added that “we can do more than one thing at a time. People want an end to the madness, the excess, the lawlessness, and they want affordability.”
Democrats’ mandate messaging is mixed and that’s OK. Some are getting mad at Hakeem Jeffries for telling Joe Scarborough today that "the American people don't want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf." He is right to say that given that Scarborough is a conservative talking head who does not want to see the Democrats flex their full power. However, later in the day, Jeffries also said that "I haven't had a single member of the House Democratic caucus talk to me about impeachment. We've been relentlessly focused on affordability and accountability ... [and] the type of dramatic change that the American people are clearly demanding.” If all this sounds like mixed messaging, that’s because it is, and that’s OK. Jeffries will lead a massive majority with differing priorities. Some will want to grind Trump to dust with relentless exposure. (Yesterday, Robert Garcia told administration officials to “lawyer up!) Others will want to focus on providing health care. Jeffries’ choice of language reflects this while leaving room to maneuver.
Finally, there’s Donald Trump. He seems to accept reality, for now. He said he would work with the Democrats. He conceded the war contributed to the landslide, though he refused to admit he had anything to do with it personally. “I wasn’t on the ticket,” he told the Times. At the same time, he said the war would continue and there's the rub. He may be constrained, but what does that matter to a demented narcissist with no future? The midterms were a repudiation. They mark the beginning of a transition, perhaps to a “sustainable Democratic majority in the Congress,” as Raphael Warnock said. But before the new era can rise in earnest, the old one must fully fall. As Douglas Sosnik, Bill Clinton’s political director, told the Times today: “I do think starting tomorrow, we’re in this new phase and it’s a transition phase and it will last two years. And it will be much more volatile than the last two years.”
