I’ve been saying for two years that the most important thing in American politics by far is Democrats finding a way to win a Senate majority, and Democrats found a way to win a Senate majority. That’s the most important thing here.
A huge House majority is also nice! The hard left was semi-openly hoping for a narrow majority that would allow a dozen or so members to hold Hakeem Jeffries’ speakership hostage to various demands. It now seems like there will be a very comfortable majority that will avoid that.
Beyond Congress, Democrats sweeping statewide elections in Texas seems huge. I assume Gina Hinojosa is going to become a huge star. Business people seem semi-panicked that she’s going to bring Texas’ data center boom to a halt, though it’s not clear to me how true that actually is.
A number of people told me that they thought a huge Democratic landslide would kill the caucus’ appetite for doing a bipartisan permitting deal. I hope Democrats think harder about that. You can’t win a huge landslide on the back of an affordability message and then immediately abandon a bipartisan affordability bill.
Our Slow Boring slate did great! Bobby Pulido and Johnny Garcia are part of the Texas sweep. Don Davis, Manny Rutinel, and Lindsay James won. Keisha Lance Bottoms and Anita Earls won. And, of course, Josh Turek won. Bale Dalton, sadly, fell short but came very, very close. Thank you to everyone who helped.
Candidate quality matters! Obviously the gaps you see between good candidates and bad ones are modest in scale compared to the huge swing in the national political environment between 2024 and 2026. But if you look at how Peggy Flanagan performed in Minnesota, it’s clear she would have lost in Iowa or Kansas.
Conversely, despite intensive coverage of Haley Stevens endorsing Mike Rogers, there is zero evidence that this mattered — Abdul El-Sayed won very comfortably in a Democratic landslide year. Nobody particularly cares about Stevens, and there are very few single-issue pro-Israel voters in America — especially at a time when Israel played a key role in getting America embroiled in a toxically unpopular war.
At the same time, Josh Shapiro thrashing his opponent so badly that the whole Pennsylvania governor race wasn’t even covered at all calls into question how many people really care about this issue from the other side either.
The real ideological fuckup was in ME-2, the only House seat that flipped from blue to red, where Democrats replaced Jared Golden with Bernie-endorsed Matt Dunlap, who lost despite a huge blue wave.
The only three Republicans I’m aware of who put up impressive electoral performances were Susan Collins (who lost anyway) and the Republican governors of New Hampshire and Vermont. These two aren’t charismatic dynamos and voters aren’t rewarding them for delivering sweeping change — people just kinda like do-nothing governors.
In that vein, I expect Bottoms and Hinojosa to end up being pretty popular once in office because they’ll be checked by Republican state legislatures, and I think one or both of them may end up becoming major national political stars.
A friend texted me at 11:23PM: “New concern is we won by too much.” And I do see where that’s coming from. How much of Democrats’ margin was provided purely by Donald Trump blundering into a war with Iran that spiked gas prices? You don’t want to get complacent given that Democrats can’t just count on that happening again in 2028.
I want to push back, though, against the view that Democrats didn’t actually change anything and only got lucky. The things some of the key candidates said about fossil fuel production, girls’ sports teams, and even immigration — notably including some strong remarks from El-Sayed — would have been unthinkable in the 2024 or 2022 cycles. It’s important to keep these changes in mind, because Democrats are going to need to stick with their new, better messages if they want to win in the future.
The most interesting failure of the cycle is Dan Osborne in Nebraska. He overperformed by a large amount in the bleak national political climate of 2024 and in principle should have won given the scale of the national swing. It seems to me that in the intervening two years, he lost a lot of his independent brand and also stopped emphasizing his conservative views on immigration.
In Montana, an effort to replicate the success of Osborne 2024 ended up backfiring and making the race unwinnable for Democrats by splitting the vote. In Alaska, the “find another guy named Dan Sullivan” tactic also seems to have backfired. By contrast, having moderates win the primaries in Kansas and Iowa was hard work, but it turned out to be totally doable. I think Democrats should focus less on gimmicks and more on simply doing the work of trying to have good candidates win primaries.
Is this going to be, in some sense, the end of the Trump Era? I hope so! There’s also something sort of bleak about the fact that if the Trump Era ends, it will have ended because of moderately high gasoline prices rather than January 6. But you’ve got to take the opportunities that life hands you.
It’s a great day for America.
