Yesterday was an emphatic rebuke of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. In what follows, The UnPopulist’s editors, along with regular contributor Robert Tracinski, each give us a key takeaway from an election that has completely reshaped the political landscape.
Trump’s Kakistocracy Lost to Democrats’ Multicultural Meritocracy
by Shikha Dalmia
Under authoritarian regimes, F.A. Hayek wrote, the worst get to the top because they are the only ones willing to engage in the kind of depravity that the Dear Leader demands. So this election season, Trump’s Own Party put its dregs on the ballot. By contrast, Democrats leaned into a strategy of liberal inclusion—meritocratic multiculturalism—and ferreted out political talent wherever it existed: Muslims, Hispanics, gays, even a Paralympian.
What resulted was a contest between kakistocracy and meritocracy—and kakistocracy lost. Bigly.
Even by the standards of authoritarians, Donald Trump is in a class apart—a rational strongman would have helped his party field candidates with the best shot at keeping its grip on Congress, or at least not losing as badly as it did. A Democratic Congress with a totally neutered GOP, after all, means investigations into his administration’s multifarious corruption and abuse of power, and possible impeachment of him and his Cabinet members. But no—Trump was so driven to achieve absolute control of his party that he forced it to put Ken Paxton on the Texas Senate ballot: an impeached attorney general whose own top deputies reported him to the FBI for bribery and whose wife divorced him on “biblical grounds.” He rejected four-term Sen. John Cornyn, whom every sane Republican preferred and who had voted with him 99.2% of the time, for the sin of resisting his demand to scrap the filibuster. Trump’s thinking was that if he could shove a lumpen like Paxton down his party’s throat, he would have total control over it. If it could swallow him, it would swallow anything! Moreover, if Paxton won (with the help of nearly $200 million of Elon Musk’s money), he would have an ally for life for every abuse, every excess. Likewise, in South Carolina he picked the late Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, a political neophyte, for the simple reason that she pledged total loyalty to him. The list goes on and on, revealing Trump’s total contempt for his party and its voters—indeed, for anything except himself.
By contrast, the Democratic Party picked candidates who were not just less bad than their Republican opponents but genuinely politically talented. You can disagree on policy with Senate winners like Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Texas’s James Talarico, but it is hard to deny that they are massively talented. Like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, they have a vision, are exceptional communicators and immensely likable—and true liberals in their commitment to pluralism, toleration, and the equal rights and dignity of all Americans.
Moreover, in a direct rebuke of the GOP’s majoritarian strategy, under which even an Indian American like Vivek Ramaswamy pandered to the worst prejudices of white men (running a despicable ad against his gubernatorial opponent, Amy Acton, even if it meant disregarding her trauma as a child rape victim), Democrats chose diversity in all its resplendence and elected the first:
Black woman governor in American history, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is also Georgia’s first female and first Black governor (a threefer)
Latina governor of Texas, Gina Hinojosa
Muslim senator, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, from Michigan
Openly gay male senator, Chris Pappas, from New Hampshire
Paralympian senator, Josh Turek, from Iowa
None of these candidates shied away from their identity; to the contrary, in his victory speech, El-Sayed went out of his way to introduce himself with his name, emphasizing his Muslim background. But they were not identity candidates, picked primarily for their skin color or religious background or sexuality. They all ran immensely strong campaigns.
The moral of the story is that merit is scattered across all groups and types, and a party that harnesses it is qualitatively superior.
Having won the midterms so handily, the Democratic Party has its work cut out for it if it is to win the presidential election in two years. There are many ways it can go wrong. It can underplay its hand—or it can overplay it—or both.
But one thing is certain: it will enter that contest with a generation of new stars harvested from all over America while the GOP confronts a desert whose bright lights are creeps like JD Vance and invertebrates like Marco Rubio. Or, heaven forbid, daddy’s boy, Don Jr., Trump’s best bet for evading accountability!
Authoritarianism is devastating not just for a polity—but also for a party. Who knew?
It’s Civil Rights, Stupid!
by Robert Tracinski
The most extraordinary result last night was the complete reversal for Republicans in Texas. Democrats won every statewide election: senator, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general—all the way down to railroad commissioner (a race that gained salience because of the Republican’s open and blatant racism, including a screed against Indian-Americans). A mid-decade Texas redistricting was supposed to gain five House seats for Republicans, but they have so far ended up with one fewer seat than before. On the state level, Democrats look likely to gain a majority in the Texas House and significantly reduce the Republican majority in the state senate.
Texas is for Republicans what California is for Democrats, so this isn’t just a loss of a few races. It’s a loss of the Republican heartland. On top of its practical effects, it will have a profound psychological impact.
The open secret in Texas is that Republicans can win only with significant support from culturally conservative Hispanic voters. If they lose this bloc, they can’t win in Texas, and it’s questionable whether they can win nationally—and they lost it. According to a Washington Post analysis of exit polls, majority Hispanic counties nationwide moved toward Democrats by about 28 points. In Texas, they moved more than 33 points.
It’s not hard to figure out why. A New York Times interview of Hispanic voters there found that a lot of people backed Trump because they still thought he was that businessman on TV who would be good for the economy, and because they thought he would only deport criminals and gang members. Then they found they had to start carrying their passports with them because they would be harassed by masked goons on the street, and they all knew people who had been stopped, imprisoned, even shot. They found themselves treated as second-class citizens in their own country.
That’s how we got an epic wipeout specifically in Texas.
While Hispanic voters made the big difference in Texas, this is part of a wider transformation of the South, partly due to surging Black turnout in response to overtly racist rhetoric and policies and a Supreme Court ruling that effectively dismantled the Voting Rights Act and allowed blatant racial gerrymandering.
That is my big takeaway from last night’s vote. This was not an election about “affordability,” it was an election about civil rights.
There was a deeply entrenched conventional wisdom among Democrats that voters don’t really care about Donald Trump’s abuses of power, they don’t care about his violations of civil rights, all they care about is the price of gas. I encountered this last year, when I ran in the Democratic primary for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District. I lost to an established local Democratic politician, who went on to run a straightforward “affordability” campaign focused almost entirely on a promise to bring down prices. Yet while the district moved significantly toward Democrats, it didn’t move far enough. This is a pattern repeated across the country, where many pro-Trump Republicans who are used to winning by more than 10 points eked out narrow victories—but they still eked them out.
It’s entirely possible no other kind of campaign could have worked here, that for every white liberal in Charlottesville who is hopping mad about ICE—and I talked to a lot of them—there is a conservative in a place like Appomattox County who thinks immigrants are getting what they deserve. Either way, it’s clear that campaigning on affordability alone did not move the needle enough.
Mere economic discontent does not explain the breadth and specific shape of last night’s result. Instead, this election looks more like Black and Hispanic voters—and many white voters who support our friends and neighbors—demanding that they be treated with respect and viewed as equal citizens.
The symbol of this is a custom that began as early voting started. At memorials for victims killed by our new immigration police state—in Houston and Minneapolis—people began posting their “I Voted” stickers. It’s a gesture that tells us exactly why they were voting and what they were voting against.
This is a very heartening result. I’ve heard a lot of bitterness about the prospect that Americans wouldn’t vote against Trump because of his tyrannical policies or disregard for constitutional rights, that they would only vote against him if it inconveniences them economically. The midterm election result seems to show the opposite.
It gives us hope that the cultural forces that won the Civil Rights Movement are still alive and well, and we won’t all just bow down to a king because he hates the same people we hate. God bless America.
The Blue Tsunami Shakes Up the South
by Andy Craig
Democrats took Congress on Tuesday, along with several governorships. But something more fundamental has happened in the South.
Roy Cooper won the open Senate seat in North Carolina by about 20 points, and Jon Ossoff held his seat in Georgia by nearly as much. Keisha Lance Bottoms took the governorship there. Then came the surprises: an upset in South Carolina and a Democrat narrowly ahead in Mississippi. In Texas, James Talarico won the Senate seat against Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general, and Democrats won a clean sweep of every statewide election.
The races Republicans won are telling, too. No Republican candidate for governor anywhere in the South cleared 55%. In my home state of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who won 63% four years ago, took 54%. Sen. Tommy Tuberville held off former Sen. Doug Jones with 52% in Alabama. Alan Wilson carried South Carolina with 52%, Byron Donalds took Florida with 50%, and Marsha Blackburn held Tennessee with a mere 46% plurality.
Since Reconstruction, the South has mostly been a one-party region. It was solidly Democratic for nearly a century, kept that way by mass disenfranchisement and brutal violence. Later it became nearly as solidly Republican, its real contests settled in Republican primaries. For a time, some states were reliably red for federal races and still electing conservative Democrats to state and local offices. Genuine two-party competition has been the exception. Tuesday suggests that has changed and the Republican hold on the South is broken. It is the biggest change in Southern politics in decades.
Much of this is the national environment. Trump’s approval stood at 35%, a near-record low at a midterm. But 2018 was also a strong Democratic year, and the South mostly held then for Republicans. The difference this time lay in the region itself, above all in Black turnout.
After the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted the Voting Rights Act’s protection against discriminatory maps, Republican legislatures across the region moved to break up Black-majority districts. But the backlash was immense. Black early-vote turnout in North Carolina ran 70% ahead of 2022’s pace, and in Louisiana, Democrat Jamie Davis came within two points of a Senate seat. The new maps could dilute Black votes in House races, but not in statewide races for senator or governor.
Something similar happened among Latino voters in Texas, who split nearly evenly in 2024. ICE has detained more than 100,000 people in Texas in two years, and by October Pew had Trump’s approval among Latinos at 24%. Democrats in the state did not shrink from campaigning heavily against ICE, and were rewarded for it.
It wasn’t only minority turnout, either. White Southerners, who have backed Republicans by lopsided margins for decades, were far less monolithic this time, breaking a long pattern of notoriously strong racial polarization.
Nor did Southern Democrats win by running as conservatives or even centrists. The Blue Dogs who once held on in the region did so by keeping their distance from the national party. Many of this year’s candidates ran as authentic liberals and not social conservatives, and won.
One-party government tends to get too comfortable with itself. No Democrat had won statewide in Texas since 1994, and Gov. Greg Abbott was seeking a fourth term. Texas has long been the crown jewel of the GOP’s national map. Its era of unquestioned Republican dominance is no more.
South Carolina was another stark case. After Lindsey Graham died in July, Trump had Graham’s sister Darline, a political novice, appointed to the seat, then endorsed her. Annie Andrews beat her by about four points in a state Trump carried by 18. Andrews will be the first Democrat South Carolina has elected to the Senate since 1998, and her party had not won any statewide office there since 2006.
In Mississippi, a state Trump won by 22 points, Democrat Scott Colom is very narrowly ahead of Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, his Republican opponent, and the vote remaining to be counted heavily favors him. If he holds on, Colom will be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction. The last one, who left office in 1881, had been born a slave.
If you haven’t seen it, Colom’s closing ad, filmed outside the Jackson home where civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, is worth watching to appreciate the deep significance of this happening in Mississippi. It would be more than a partisan win, and more even than a rebuke of Trump.
Likewise in Georgia, where Bottoms has become the first Black woman to be elected as a governor, not just in Georgia but in the entire United States. And in Texas, Gina Hinojosa will be the state’s first-ever Hispanic governor.
Wave years recede, and Democrats won’t hold all these states. But a South where general elections are seriously contested, not in occasional flukes but across the board, will be a radically different place. And one where America’s oldest and deepest wounds, while still far from gone, will have healed to a degree we have never seen before.
Florida: MAGA’s Fading Fortress
by Berny Belvedere
Until last night, the 2010 Tea Party wave—which saw Republicans flip 63 House seats, the most in a midterm since the FDR era—was the most dramatic electoral rout I had ever personally witnessed.
Welp!
Democrats just won the national vote by roughly double the margin Republicans managed that year (although 2010 flipped about twice as many House seats). You have to go as far back as the 1974 midterms—which followed a little old scandal called Watergate—to find a thumping on this scale.
Watergate, of course, was a single scandal; Trump’s second term has basically been a thousand Watergates per year, as our Executive Watch tracker has chronicled. Democrats also took the Senate, even winning a seat in Kansas, where I grew up, for the first time in nearly a century. They also, as Andy Craig details in his entry above, broke the Republican chokehold on the South.
The one thing they didn’t do is win back Florida.
Look, they gave it a real go. Democrats flipped Miami-Dade County (my home turf), which Gov. Ron DeSantis had carried by double digits four years ago; they broke the Republican supermajority in the state House; they held (at least) three of the four congressional seats DeSantis redrew earlier this year to stack the deck in Republicans’ favor; and they shrank a nearly 20-point Republican margin in the last governor’s race to a single, solitary point this time around, with Donalds barely scraping through.
But it was not enough. Come January, as DeSantis boasted today, Florida will be the only one of the country’s 10 largest states under full Republican control.
I was one of more than 8 million Floridians who voted. Farther north in the state, Election Day voters cast their ballots amid a state of emergency due to torrential rain, with some polling places moved at the last minute. Down here in Miami-Dade, after days of storms and truly insane levels of flooding (with a flood advisory still in effect as polls closed), turnout hit its highest for a midterm in more than 20 years. Floridians were simply not going to be deterred from delivering an unmistakable rebuke to Trump, DeSantis, and the GOP. It’s naive to judge success only by topline results; the resistance to Trump made real gains in the Sunshine State.
Consider the state’s Hispanic voting population. In 2022, DeSantis won nearly 60% of Florida Latinos. Two years later, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate in nearly four decades to carry Miami-Dade. Well, on Tuesday, Florida Hispanics swung an unbelievable 21 points toward the Democratic Party—more than any other group! Immigration enforcement, which has terrorized Hispanic communities, goes a long way toward explaining why. In a poll from last month, 55% of Florida’s Hispanic voters said enforcement had gone too far, and 41% worried that they or someone close to them could get caught up in it. This is the state that built “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Still, the fortress held for MAGA.
Part of the reason is the party’s registration surge. Barack Obama won Florida twice, back when Democrats held the registration edge; today, Republicans lead by roughly 1.5 million voters. Another part of it is money. Byron Donalds, who will be Florida’s first Black governor, had the backing of both Trump and DeSantis. He spent about $150 million to the $12 million spent by David Jolly, his Democratic opponent. Meanwhile, national Democratic funders largely abandoned the state.
There’s also the fact that the electorate that showed up was built for Republicans. Voters 65 and older made up nearly 40% of it, 10 points above their share of eligible voters, and they barely budged from 2024. Miami-Dade flipped on the strength of Black and white neighborhoods; Hispanic-majority precincts there still went for Donalds, though with just under 52%, significantly down from the 65% they handed DeSantis just four years ago. Not even a tsunami could overcome that combination.
Texas’s era of unquestioned Republican dominance is over, as Andy notes. DeSantis himself warned today that without Texas as an anchor, Republicans “won’t be viable nationally.” Home to Mar-a-Lago, Florida becomes the new Texas. But it’ll be a far weaker citadel than the Lone Star State and one where Democrats are likely to be far more competitive in the future.
Over the last decade plus, Trump and DeSantis turned Florida into the front line of the right’s divisive culture wars and built a monumental Republican advantage. On Tuesday, Democrats erased most of it. This just might force Donalds to moderate some of his party’s excesses, which can only help the nation’s health.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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