The historic repudiation of the MAGA right at the ballot box opens up new avenues to democratic revival.
Students at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, march to the polls on Tuesday. (Azariah Wells / Jackson State University via Getty Images)
The 2026 midterm elections were a genuine earthquake—an across-the-board, unspinnable drubbing that left the 2024 Trump coalition in smoking ruins. Democrats made massive gains in once-impenetrable Republican strongholds like Texas and South Carolina and acquired vast new power in state legislatures. Tuesday was the night that liberals and progressives have been waiting a decade for: a long overdue and richly deserved repudiation of President Trump’s MAGA movement, everything it represents, and everyone who enabled it.
The scale of the GOP’s defeat is almost unfathomable, with significance beyond simply running up the score in both chambers of Congress. Democrats will have at least 54 Senate seats and are now projected to win as many as 260 seats in the House for a 43-seat gain, numbers that went far beyond consensus forecasts and came very close to 99th percentile, best-case-scenario outcomes. Those gains will make the lives of the party’s senior leadership dramatically easier, but they are hardly the most far-reaching outcomes of the evening.
First, Democratic gains in state legislatures look like they will rival the GOP’s 2010 midterm rout, when Republicans flipped more than 700 seats in a critical election before what was then once-a-decade redistricting. On Tuesday, Democrats captured a coveted trifecta—both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office—in the battleground of Wisconsin, wiping out the devastating post-2010 gerrymander that locked them out of power in the state legislature even when they won clear majorities of the popular vote.
They did the same in perennially purple Pennsylvania, where incumbent Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro won by nearly 22 points, his coattails sweeping Democratic majorities into both chambers of the state legislature. Not only can Democrats now draw fairer maps for House districts both states; they can also unrig the state legislatures so that they don’t need a sweeping national tsunami to win bare majorities.
Democrats flipped North Carolina’s House and nearly captured its Senate, which means that extremist GOP supermajorities will no longer be in a position to deny power to Democratic governors. They also finally broke the GOP’s stranglehold on Georgia state politics, making Keisha Lance Bottoms the first Black woman to win a race for governor in American history, and appear to have flipped the Georgia House.
They easily recaptured trifectas in Michigan and in Minnesota, where Democratic Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan won by double digits, throwing cold water on the GOP’s years-long quest to use a minor welfare scandal to ratchet up fear and loathing of the state’s Somali American minority. Perhaps even more shocking are new Democratic trifectas in Arizona, a GOP stronghold just a decade ago, and Nevada, which had been trending to the right. In both states, significant Latino minorities shifted hard to the left—a trend that will make it hard for the GOP to come back unless and until it purges r the racist nativists from the party.
The impact of these wins will go far beyond the ability to prevail in the mid-decade redistricting war that Trump stupidly started last year. Democrats now control enough states to put the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact into practice—a kind of back-door abolition of the Electoral College that has twice this century delivered a Republican popular-vote loser into the White House. That agreement, which has already been passed by states possessing 222 electoral votes, would go into effect when it clears the electoral vote threshold of 270.With the new Democratic trifectas in Pennsylvania (19 Electoral Votes), Michigan (15), Arizona (11) Wisconsin (10) and Nevada (six), states now have more than enough to get it done.
States that have passed the NPVIC agree to give their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner regardless of who wins the state’s popular vote. That would be extraordinarily messy in practice, but some advocates of the plan argue that the threat alone could compel a bipartisan compromise capable of making it through the constitutional amendment process.
In many ways, though, the most unexpected and momentous outcomes of the 2026 midterms were the Democratic gains across the Deep South, starting in the Lone Star State. The debased political style and lurid policy agenda of the Texas Republican Party had long been the bedrock of the national GOP, and that arid fortress of mean-spirited extremism is now in complete ruins. Democrat James Talarico inflicted an astonishing 12-point drubbing on the profoundly repellant Ken Paxton, a morally bankrupt and politically talentless hack who personifies every awful thing imaginable about the Trump-era Republican Party.
Paxton ran one of the most inept and disgusting campaigns that has ever been mounted in American politics, wasting tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans attack ads, including a repulsive spot with an AI-generated Talarico talking about how God is nonbinary and believes there should be “six genders.” But Talarico’s victory was resounding enough to suggest that outgoing Senator John Cornyn would have gotten clobbered too—-the fate that greeted the three-term incumbent Governor Greg Abbott, who lost decisively to state Representative Gina Hinojosa.
It’s hard to overstate the centrality of Texas to the national Republican project. If Democrats can maintain the inroads they clearly made with the state’s now fervidly anti-Trump Latino plurality, it will be difficult for a Republican presidential candidate to win there, making the party’s Electoral College math very difficult. But it wasn’t just Texas.
As of this writing, Democratic challenger Scott Colom leads incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by 65 votes out of nearly a million ballots in Mississippi, a state that Trump won by almost 23 points in 2024. In deep-red South Carolina, Democrat Annie Andrews didn’t just win but easily knocked off appointed incumbent Senator Darline Graham Nordone—one of the many laughably inept candidates that Trump was personally responsible for elevating in Republican primaries. Even a tiny national investment of time and energy could likely have put Democrat Jamie Davis over the top in Louisiana, where the hapless Republican Julia Letlow (you guessed it: a Trump pick who primaried a sitting senator) prevailed by fewer than two points. Senate candidate Angie Nixon in Florida—yes, Florida—also came close to winning, despite the complete absence of support from the national Democratic Party.
These results mean that the backlash to the Supreme Court’s final demolition of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais was a vastly underrated factor in the region. Black voters in the South made their power and fury known—effectively signaling that they would not allow the work of generations to be erased by these unconscionable Republican goblins. Incredibly, with Don Davis leading in North Carolina and Shomari Figures winning in Alabama, it looks like Republicans only successfully redrew a handful Black Democrats out of their seats. The biggest drop in Black representation in Congress will actually come from several GOP Black House representatives who sought higher offices rather than from the neo-Confederate gerrymanders that Trump unleashed in the region.
These are all paradigm-shifting upsets that promise to revive the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the Deep South. This midterm cycle marks the last time that Republicans could afford to take these states for granted—or that national Democrats starve great Southern candidates like Jamie Davis of resources and support. If Democrats can win in Mississippi and South Carolina, they can win anywhere.
But they could not have done it by increasing Black turnout alone. We don’t yet have exit polls or data for individual states, yet it seems possible that several of the pillars that have propped up Republicans in the region may have crumbled. In the rest of the country, college-educated white voters have become a core Democratic constituency, but in the Deep South they remained a sharply Republican group. That looks like it changed on Tuesday night. New York Times data shows that college-educated white voters shifted left by 18 points in the South Carolina Senate race, 17 points in Texas and 16 points in Louisiana. If that holds beyond this election, the consequences would be far-reaching for long-term Republican control of this region.
And in Texas, Latino voters who had long been redder than their counterparts in the West, Midwest, and Northeast clearly broke decisively for Democrats. The magnitude of that shift in Texas (42 points according to The New York Times) is staggering. If it lasts beyond this election—and it’s hard to imagine Latinos forgiving and forgetting the GOP’s inhumane, disastrous mass deportation campaign anytime soon—that would lead to a longer-term collapse of the GOP’s position in Texas reminiscent of how California Republicans committed collective political suicide in the 1990s by turning Latino voters against them. Ask the California GOP how that’s going 30 years later.
The scale of this once-in-a-generation wipeout is already forcing Republican media outlets to genuinely come to terms with a crushing defeat for the first time since 2012. Party elites famously did not conduct any kind of autopsy after 2020, throwing their lot in instead with Trump’s sore-loser election denialism. And the Republicans’ broad but shallow victory in 2024 led virtually every elected Republican to believe that nasty authoritarianism overseen by clueless edgelords was a winning formula. It was not.
Republicans looking for a silver lining in last night’s results have a harder task than the grunts tasked with finding those mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The truth is that Trumpism was repudiated up and down the ballot as comprehensively as anyone could possibly have hoped. Popular anger about stupid wars, high energy prices, brownshirt vigilantes in our cities, rising costs, corruption and attempted election-rigging is the real vibe shift before us now.
Each of these calamitous policy outcomes was tied directly or indirectly to the MAGA authoritarian project, and none of them would have happened with a functioning Congress even remotely interested in upholding its role in the constitutional order or pushing back against the Mad King unraveling by the hour in the White House. On Tuesday night, Americans revolted decisively against this indecent, flailing autocrat, sending scores of his pathetic congressional enablers into retirement. In the process, they’ve given Democrats their first glimmers of real hope in many years and affirmed, at long last, that voters still have enough decency to reject the profound, disorienting ugliness of the past two years.
David FarisDavid Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Washington Monthly. You can find him on Bluesky at @davidfaris.bluesky.social.