By now there’s little left to say about what might happen in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Democrats seem all but assured of taking the House of Representatives according to experts, but the outcome in the Senate could be anything from a modest Democratic gain of two or three seats to a heretofore unimaginable wave that leaves Democrats with 55 or 56 seats. This latter scenario would include wins in places like Kansas and South Carolina that weren’t even on the radar a few months ago.

Without diminishing the obvious importance of Democrats’ reclaiming control of Congress, the stakes of Tuesday’s elections are as much existential as they are practical. Substantive Democratic gains in reliably Republican states and districts would serve as confirmation that the breathtaking, two-year display of self-dealing, cruelty, and ineptitude we have just lived through carries a penalty larger than the standard thermostatic midterm backlash. If it doesn’t, Republicans will rightfully conclude that they can get away with just about anything, as long as their next president doesn’t start a stupid war.

After all, it’s not particularly earth-shattering that swing states like North Carolina would go blue this year. Wins there and in Maine, together with holds in purple states like Georgia and Michigan, wouldn’t suggest by themselves that a tectonic political shift is under way. They’re closer to the outcomes you’d expect in a normal, pre-Trump midterm election, when voter sentiment shifts against the party in power enough to give the out party the advantage in many competitive districts and states.

It is the Senate contests in more sharply Republican-leaning states like Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Alaska, as well as in House districts that Trump carried by double digits that are the real test of the American electorate’s tolerance for abusive authoritarianism and rank corruption. The outcomes there will serve as a measure of whether negative polarization is a force so strong and resilient that it has warped the ability of voters to make informed judgments and hold their representatives accountable.

In the House, Democrats can build a majority of 232 seats without winning a single seat in a district that Trump carried by 10 or more points in 2024. If you had asked anyone on the left in, say, April 2025 whether they would be happy with a 17-seat gain in the House and a 232–203 majority, they would have replied with an exuberant, justified yes—especially if they knew that Republicans would make the prospect even harder by ordering fresh, Supreme Court–assisted gerrymanders in a series of red states.

But here, as in the Senate, the test of whether America is truly rejecting Trumpism will be how many seats Democrats can win deep in Trump territory. Given the sheer level of depravity on display from the Trump administration, failing to win a significant number of the hardcore Trump districts now in play will be not just disappointing but soul-crushing.

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It will be satisfying, for example, if Democrat Brian Poindexter wins Ohio’s seventh district, which Trump carried by 11.1 points in 2024 and where incumbent GOP Representative Max Miller has been credibly accused of horrific acts of domestic violence by multiple women. But the GOP candidate shouldn’t have to be a physically abusive, misogynist dirtbag for Republican-leaning voters to support a Democrat amid the rampant authoritarian corruption of today’s GOP. Trump’s dreadful policy record and consistently unconscionable conduct in office should be enough to warrant dismissal of any congressional Republican who spent the past two years obsequiously surrendering constitutional power to Trump and his MAGA putsch—which, to be clear, would be all GOP incumbents on Capitol Hill.

ICE’s reign of terror alone should be enough to persuade even committed Trump voters to change their minds. Trump’s masked federal agents have terrorized both big metropolitan areas and rural communities, violently seizing tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom had committed no serious crimes. These public renditions, often carried about by sadists in a repressive apparatus funded more lavishly than the Manhattan Project and glorified by unapologetic white nationalists in the Department of Homeland Security, are a permanent stain on America’s pretensions to be governed by laws and not men. These vicious brownshirt raids have inflicted extraordinary trauma on immigrant families and communities, led to the unlawful detention of hundreds of American citizens, and caused the tragic deaths of innocent noncitizens as well as dissenting US citizens like Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

The blatant corruption of the president himself is also grounds for broad and deep repudiation of his party in a functional republic. Trump continues to nakedly manipulate the stock market by selling access to his market-moving social-media posts and then conducting thousands of transactions whose sheer brazenness makes the phrase “insider trading” seem like a polite euphemism.

Trump has also corrupted the president’s pardon power by effectively selling freedom to oligarchs and partisan allies and turned American foreign policy into a tool to enrich himself and his circle of oligarchs. For the crime of living in a blue state, he has withheld relief from people whose lives were destroyed by natural disasters, and he has not been subtle about it.

Even Republicans who support dramatically lower levels of immigration to the United States should oppose a secret police force whose members can commit violent crimes on camera in front of hundreds of witnesses and never face any kind of accountability. Even those who believe, for example, that facilitating Somali immigration to the United States was a mistake should be disgusted and chilled by the GOP’s racist, menacing rhetoric and actions against Somalis, including the preposterous raid on the home of Representation Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

Trump voters who agree with many of his economic and social policies should be able to see that a president’s exploiting his office for the enrichment of himself and his family is disqualifying. Diehard Republicans should likewise grasp that the abuse of federal money and power to punish the citizens of states who withheld their support from the ruling regime a recipe for the eventual dissolution of the republic—-as, on the other side of the ledger, are Trump’s repeated promises to bribe citizens who give the GOP their support in this election.

Pick your issue, and you’ll almost certainly find conduct that is an affront to human decency or the rule of law—-and usually both. There’s the vindictive and inhuman assault that the Trump administration has conducted against the small and vulnerable trans minority; the wanton, illegal air strikes against boats suspected of drug trafficking; the bizarre threats of violence against long-standing democratic allies like Canada and Denmark; and the illegal, unprovoked war against Iran that started with the murder of schoolchildren and the country’s head of state and has turned into a geopolitical and economic calamity. This is to say nothing of the myriad abuses and public fleecings carried out by Trump’s coterie of fanatical MAGA allies in and around his cabinet, from Elon Musk’s illegal DOGE reign of destruction to Russell Vought’s deep-state machinations to punish applicants for scientific grants who don’t toe the party line.

The Nation would have to build its own data center to host a full accounting of this administration’s misdeeds. The names of congressional Republicans up for election this year who have done anything at all to push back on this bacchanal of abuse and crime, on the other hand, could fit on the back of a cocktail napkin.

If the characterization of these threats as “existential” seems overblown, it bears reminding that we are in this position only because we flunked a very similar test two years ago. Whatever motivated someone to vote for the disgraced Trump in 2024, be it the price of eggs or resentment against the Biden administration’s immigration policy or even just the boredom of affluence, there should have been little doubt about what he intended to do with a second term. Throughout that election cycle, Trump barnstormed around the country loudly promising mass deportations, partisan vengeance, ruinous tariffs, and vindictive persecution. The Supreme Court even drove home the apocalyptic stakes of that year’s election by granting American presidents almost monarchical power in its stupendously wrongheaded executive immunity decision, Trump v. United States.

Rarely has the American electorate faced such a stark choice between the rule of law and the whims of an aspiring autocrat. And yet here we are. Living through the second Trump administration has been like feeling, in the memorable phrasing of New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, “the air go out of an entire social order.” That’s the net result of a sustained campaign of eager MAGA capitulation led by elites in tech, law, academia, the judiciary, and the media. So it’s down to the electorate, again, to do the job that those tasked with defending the Constitution could not.

Democratic wins in unexpected places like South Carolina, which Trump carried by 18 points in 2024 and where a gold-standard New York Times/Siena College poll on Wednesday found a tie between Republican Darline Graham Nordone and Democrat Annie Andrews, would send an unambiguous message to the forces of Trumpism: that there is actually a line and they have crossed it, and that another electoral walloping awaits them in two years if they continue to empower authoritarian impunity in Washington.

It’s true that even a resounding Democratic win on Tuesday may mean nothing more than that these awful people that we have now twice put in charge of the country have at long last alienated enough voters to be thrown out on their ear. It could also be the case that it was mostly inflation and spiraling energy costs putting some of these races in play, and they will snap back to being GOP strongholds in a year or two. Still, such losses would be unspinnable, even by the talented propagandists that populate the MAGA media universe.

On the other hand, modest gains or, God help us, a failure to capture either chamber of Congress would send an unambiguously grim message—that an electorally decisive plurality of the American people likes violent, corrupt authoritarianism, wants more of it, and indeed enjoys being governed by hapless gutter racists, lazy podcasters, and moneyed rapists. They’d also effectively be saying that they don’t care how incompetent and negligent their leaders are, so long as the libs are being owned and the right people are getting hurt.