The Tuesday Night Massacre

Takeaways from a stunning election night.

Last night, the reckoning finally came.

In a way that the polls and the pundits completely failed to predict beforehand, Democrats absolutely beat the brakes off of their Republican opponents in every single race that mattered across the country. The culture war glue that was supposed to hold the right together didn’t stick, and the endlessly lauded multiracial populist Trump 2024 coalition shattered like glass. Races expected to be close came in as complete blowouts. Others saw Democrats put up some of their best numbers of the entire Trump era. Just one year after it was christened as America’s new majority party, the GOP of Trump 2.0 now looks like like a rump minority, only supported by a shrinking base with major turnout problems. A full-on blue wave in 2026 suddenly now suddenly appears within reach.

But is this true? Can we really infer so much about the political state of the nation just from a few local elections in a couple states? Did we really learn anything that we didn’t know before? The answer is yes, especially as it concerns the third question. Here are the biggest reasons as to why last night was not just as bad as it looked for the GOP, but could very well be remembered as the death knell of the 2024 Trump coalition when all is said and done.

#1: Trump may be far more unpopular than we think