Well. Where do you begin?
Truth be told, I thought that I would have been better prepared to see a result like last Tuesday’s when we were coming into it. In the months leading up to November 3rd, I wrote extensively about the possibility of a full-on blue tsunami like the one we just saw. I published my lengthy (and ultimately correct) case as to why the polls might have been underestimating Democrats on September 1st and followed it up with an overview of what would happen if such an underestimation occurred on September 18th. I understood the theory; I had reviewed the history; I could have given anyone who asked a thorough answer as to why such a reckoning was going to occur now when it had not occurred in 2016 or 2020 or 2024. If anything, it was the only outcome that would have truly been in line with what I had always claimed Trumpism was: a historically unappealing, structurally defective, and culturally alien “movement” that had only ever secured bare wins against weak opponents thanks to positive economic perceptions that had completely inverted during his second term.
I had done all of this and I had known all of this, and I was still left taken aback by what I saw. It’s not just that, as has often been remarked about people my age, that I have never known American politics without Donald Trump and Trumpism. It’s that under him, I had never been able to experience politics in America, period. When I first started following American elections as a young teenager in 2016, I was introduced to a fluid world of infinite possibilities, where voters could and did react strongly to the big events that took place in front of them. And the electorate that year did indeed prove itself to be immensely fluid and reactive, realigning itself in unprecedented ways in response to an unprecedented campaign. But then, as soon as Trump was inaugurated, it was as if the country suddenly froze in place. Russiagate. Charlottesville. Mueller. Impeachment. COVID. BLM. January 6th. A disastrous midterm and 34 felony convictions and a near-assassination and a candidate swap and one of the worst debate performances in history. The most important voters in the country saw all of this and responded with little more than a shrug, delivering the same close results with the same maps showing the same trends over and over again. Absent a diminishing pool of swing voters in a diminishing pool of swing states, nothing ever moved. By 2024, pollsters could hardly register anyone changing their minds in response to anything.
You could, as I did, argue that this wasn’t actually the new, ultra-polarized era centered around immutable cultural divides that it seemed to be. You could make all the points you wanted about the historically unusual unpopularity of Hillary, Biden, and Kamala, the follies of the first round of liberal #Resistance during Trump 1.0, and the lack of real evidence that the extreme right’s online culture warring had actually moved voters. You could set everything up in your head to give the median Texas or Ohio voter the benefit of the doubt one last time—one last chance to prove that their years of support for the Trump movement came from anything other than blind, slavish loyalty. But until the day it happened, it was impossible not to think back to all of the past horrors we had gone through and wonder how this time could possibly be different.
Then it happened. On the evening of Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026, the American electorate definitively proved that it had not become perpetually locked in place by Elon Musk, The Daily Wire, and the legacy of lady Ghostbusters. It broke the back of the President’s party, smashing it in the exact states that were supposed to serve as an unbreakable foundation for rightist state-level and Congressional power. In the House, the new 260-seat Democratic majority they elected will be the largest won by either party since 1990 and easily the most liberal in all of American history. In the Senate, they flipped so many double-digit Trump states blue (seven!!!) that they gave Democrats a near-lock on the chamber until at least 2030 and probably 2032. Democratic Senators will now represent the states of South Carolina and Mississippi. 75% of the American population will live under a Democratic governor. When all is said and done, the GOP of 2026 will go down as having suffered the largest popular vote defeat that either party has since Walter Mondale lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election.
In other words: politics is back. Exactly like their counterparts across the aisle ten years ago, an elite class once convinced that it had reached the end of history has woken up in horror to see its wheels still turning. From the philosophies they had adopted to the strategies they had drawn up to the talent they had recruited, every single major decision the Republican Party has made over the past decade has been proven to have been built on faulty pretenses. Democrats, meanwhile, have been shaken out of their comfortable and familiar posture of anxiety and self-doubt by their most resounding win since the days of the New Deal era. Now closer to a Senate supermajority than minority status in the chamber that they once feared would be controlled by Republicans for decades, their habitually conservative and pessimistic voters and elites will be forced to contemplate the prospect of true political domination in a way they haven’t in countless years. And as we all sail out into this uncharted territory, we will do so in the midst of the primary season for the first open presidential election since 2016—one that, like then, appears to be wide open on both sides.
Now, without further ado, here are the five biggest takeaways about what we just saw and what to expect next in this brave new political world.
#1: The GOP as We Knew it is Dead
Yes, even more than you already think.