The Voters Have Spoken

Americans delivered a massive rebuke to Trump and his sycophants. Now it’s time for Democrats to deliver.

The magnitude of the Democrats’ tsunami that ripped through the MAGA political landscape, uprooting bastions of red governance in places that have not elected Democrats in decades, cannot be underestimated. This was a personal repudiation of Donald Trump and his reign of corruption, but also of fascist, brutal, reactionary, and xenophobic MAGA rule and policies. An entire generation of dynamic, diverse Democrats rose to power in one dramatic night.

Though Senate races are not yet called in Alaska or Mississippi (that’s right, Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom leads by 43 votes with thousands of outstanding provisional ballots to be counted), Democrats will hold at least 54 seats. If they sweep in the last two, for a total of 56 seats, that will mark a nine-seat pickup. They did not lose a single seat held by a Democrat.

On the House side, Democrats will likely net over 40 seats, winding up in the ballpark of 258 seats. Republican efforts to re-redistrict backfired spectacularly, with Democrats prevailing in “dummymandered” seats throughout Florida (keeping the 9^th, 22^nd, and 25^th and coming within a hair’s breadth in the 7^th and 27^th) and Texas (winning four of the five re-redistricted seats), for example. Republican strongholds — in places such as Indiana’s 5^th; Kentucky’s 6^th; Iowa’s 1^st and 3^rd; Pennsylvania’s 1^st, 7^th, 8^th, and 10^th; and Wisconsin’s 1^st and 3^rd — fell into Democratic hands. In New York, Mike Lawler lost in the 17^th. Democrats won New Jersey’s 2^nd and 7^th and Michigan’s 7^th (and perhaps the 4^th).

Red-state gubernatorial races went to Democrats in Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Georgia — with Kansas and Alaska also likely to fall. Purple Nevada flipped its governor’s mansion from red to blue as well. Democrats swept statewide offices in Texas and Georgia and will have trifectas in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Minnesota.

In Los Angeles, Democratic socialist Nithya Raman was narrowly leading incumbent Karen Bass for mayor. If she wins, she will join a group of so-called “sewer socialists,” socialist-identifying mayors (e.g. Zohran Mamdani in New York, Katie Wilson in Seattle, and Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C.) who are focused on problem solving.

In Missouri, ballot initiatives defeated the attempted Republican redistricting, an effort to repeal the income tax, and to reverse abortion rights, and made it harder for the state legislature to override popular referenda. Nevada and Virginia secured abortion rights (Virginia also protected gay marriage and reinstated felon voting rights).

Two years ago, it was hard to imagine a repudiation of Donald Trump and MAGA authoritarian rule as complete as what we just witnessed. Trump may have suckered voters into giving him another shot in 2024 with empty promises of reducing prices and avoiding forever-wars, but reality had a sobering effect on the nation. A perfect storm of Trump-induced inflation, a reckless and dangerous war, abject corruption, brutal ICE attacks, stuffing the pockets of oligarchs (with money taken from healthcare and food stamps for ordinary Americans), destruction of our healthcare system, assault on the operation of the federal government, weaponization of the Justice Department, a fusillade against the First Amendment, appointment of grossly unfit officials, and abhorrent racism and cruelty appears to have shaken Americans from their slumber.

Certainly, the unprecedented attack on voting rights — both on the Voting Rights Act itself and in a spate of junk litigation and lawless action aimed at suppressing Black and Hispanic voting — backfired spectacularly, giving Democrats unprecedented wins in the South and in other red locales. Democrats now have a chance to reconfigure congressional and state district lines to restore minority voting power, beef up voting rights protection, and move to curtail the MAGA Jim Crow push.

The vile overreach on immigration, effectively launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing, turned a favorable MAGA issue into a liability. As the New York Times reported, immigration helped drive Latino gains in particular. (Polling before the election showed Democrats with a 27-point lead, and turned it into the most important issue for about 20 percent of Latinos.) It also galvanized Democrats and independents, including so-called moderates who had been hesitant to raise the issue for fear of looking weak on border security.

The fruitless search for noncitizen voters and a colossal legal flop served only to reveal their true motives: voter suppression. As the New York Times reported, the meager results, with only a couple hundred people charged (and considering DOJ’s shattered credibility and utter incompetence revealed in court filings, the number of convictions will be a fraction of that) — turned out to be a “minuscule share of the more than 158 million ballots cast in the 2024 general election,” compared with the ludicrous claim of “250,000 potential noncitizens were registered to vote in just four states alone.” The reality, which voting rights advocates have hammered for years, has demolished the canard that “noncitizens is pervasive and tilting elections for Democrats.” It should be no mystery what this is all about: trying to delegitimize an election they knew they’d lose while disenfranchising voters they have betrayed.

(The factual results and legal faceplants should inform the Times and other legacy media outlets’ coverage of future specious legal challenges.)

Beyond Republican incompetence and mendacity (which has been significant), credit for the historic win goes to Democrats who, after a sluggish start following the 2024 election, found their bearings to focus on corruption, affordability (especially healthcare), and democracy.

Most important, and too often ignored by Beltway pundits, their overwhelming victories can in large part be attributed to the quality of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. Consider the matchups between generational talents like James Talarico and Sen. Jon Ossoff vs. their respective opponents, the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton and neo-Nazi sympathizer Rep. Mike Collins; between Amy Acton and slimy, depraved Vivek Ramaswamy; between pastor Adam Hamilton and patient-suing Sen. Roger Marshall; between working-class champion Troy Jackson and the disingenuous Trump flunky Sen. Susan Collins; and between the savvy, progressive Abdul El-Sayed and the Islamophobic MAGA cheerleader, Rep. Mike Rogers. A slate of Hellcat women veterans and working-class Democrats outshone their MAGA opponents.

Good candidates usually beat bad ones, and in this cycle, Democrats had a disproportionate number of skilled, sophisticated, tenacious candidates, while Republicans relied on hacks, cynical incumbents, and exceptionally off-putting characters, many of whom had never run in competitive races.

There were big losers, starting with Trump, who insisted on making the election about himself and then reminded us how crazy, abusive, out-of-touch, and dangerous he is. His closing weeks, topped off by his bonkers appearance at the Reflecting Pool, are what Republicans deserved when they assiduously refused to oppose him, let alone seek his removal under the 25^th Amendment or impeachment.

Other big losers included AIPAC, which tried to bully its way into the Democratic primaries and then go to war with candidates such as El-Sayed. It wound up blowing millions of dollars, alienating millions of voters, and giving up on the endorsement racket (but remained determined to use dark money to influence races while hiding its blemished brand). It has done more to turn the tide against uncritical support for Israel’s right-wing government than any domestic group or candidate in memory.

Also in the loser category: establishment Democrats who freaked out over a smattering of Democratic Socialist candidates (they were somehow convinced New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was a greater threat than disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and El-Sayed was more menacing than Trump foot-soldier Mike Rogers). In backing moves such as the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and haranguing against progressives trying to mount a tougher stance against ICE, they wound up with egg on their faces, looking past their prime and out of touch.

It remains to be seen what impact, if any, their devastating losses will have on the few Republican survivors of the blue tsunami. One option for the party would be to move on from, if not repudiate, Trump and try to rebuild a pre-MAGA coalition. That task is complicated by the party’s handiwork in undermining virtually every conservative principle and in running the government and country into the ground like no administration since Herbert Hoover. A frightful, alternative vision would be to double down on the fascism, repudiating Trump’s corruption and personal inadequacies but pushing forward with a platform of ethnic cleansing, authoritarian rule, and plutocratic economics.

Democrats now have choices to make. While soured establishment Democrats might like to pooh-pooh progressive wins in Minnesota and Michigan Senate races, for example, on the theory that any “D” could have won this year, and progressives might want to underplay the utility of moderate, overtly religious candidates able to win in Republican bastions, the lesson of the election should be that a “big tent” party, properly unified on big issues and flexible enough to field adept candidates appropriate to their jurisdiction, is a formula for success.

Going forward, Democrats will need a cohesive strategy in Congress. Given the magnitude of the victory, pressure will be on House and Senate leadership to resist every significant Trump initiative by, for instance, defunding the war and ICE, canceling Medicaid cuts, and halting confirmation of any judges. They will need the spine to force Trump to shut down the government. Concerning accountability for criminality and wrongdoing: robust, sweeping, and swift investigations of Trump’s massive graft, involvement in the Epstein pedophile scandal, and systemic wrongdoing in office must precede the decision about what to do with the information they uncover. There will be enough time to decide whether to pursue impeachment of Cabinet officials (beginning with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche, then perhaps Trump himself).

Meanwhile, the 2028 presidential race is about to begin. A dramatic, aggressive reform agenda, including items such as expanding the Supreme Court, moving toward a popular vote for president, radical expansion of voting rights (e.g., elimination of all gerrymandering, a constitutional right to vote), tenacious enforcement of antitrust law and tech regulation, extensive tax reform (ending the reverse Robin Hood tax giveaway to the rich that has grossly expanded income inequality), and some variation of Medicare-for-all will be up for debate.

At issue is nothing less than the potential to launch a new progressive era akin to the New Deal or the Great Society. There are inflection points in history when one party’s total incompetence and abuse open the door to a new era for democracy. Whether this will be one of them remains to be seen. But the first step — slamming the door on the heinous fascist MAGA era — has been accomplished. The rest is up to all of us.

---