One of the biggest Republican wins in an otherwise-terrible midterm night for the GOP was the victory of the Trump-supporting Byron Donalds in Florida’s race for governor. Donalds will become the first Black governor of that state. If you could resurrect Jefferson Davis and tell him that the governor of Florida will be a Black Republican married to a white woman, he would crawl straight back into his coffin.
That this was MAGA’s big win in a night of defeats is remarkable, given the movement’s hostility toward diversity, and its nostalgia for an America where rigid race and gender hierarchies were enforced by the state. Even where Republicans won, in other words, President Trump’s racially exclusive conception of American citizenship lost. Trump could browbeat corporate America into eliminating DEI programs; he could threaten colleges to let in fewer students of color; he could direct the full power of the federal government toward deporting immigrants. But he could not will away the America that actually exists.
The America that emerges from the midterm elections is not the monochrome world of Madison Avenue ad campaigns from the 1950s. It is a diverse country, made up of many different kinds of people, all of whom are American. The victories of Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Aaron Ford in Nevada, and David Crowley in Wisconsin, in addition to that of Donalds, mean that there will be more Black governors than ever in U.S. history. In Texas, where Mexican Americans were subject to legalized forms of racial discrimination until the mid-20th century, Gina Hinojosa will become the first Hispanic governor. Xavier Becerra is the first Hispanic governor to be elected in California, and Deb Haaland will become New Mexico’s first Native American governor. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota will become the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. And Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan will become the first Muslim U.S. senator.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Chip Somodevilla / Getty.
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Midterm elections typically go poorly for an incumbent president’s party. But the 2026 election delivered the kind of resounding rebuke that feels more like a reckoning. Across America, a blue wave has crested deep into red territory, washing through many of President Trump’s formerly safe spaces, endangering his preferred candidates and putting his presidency—and his broader MAGA coalition—at risk of a historic collapse.
If this is America’s response to what has been almost two years of a president flouting norms, driving up prices, breaking promises, raking in billions of dollars, and running roughshod over ethical guardrails, it is an unmistakably emphatic one. Democrats, independents, and Republicans turned out in massive numbers to showcase their displeasure with Trump and his party, flipping the Senate and making the GOP sweat even in contests that were not previously considered competitive.
An easy win by Senator Jon Ossoff, in what was once expected to be a tough race, was an early sign of what was to come throughout Election Night. “The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump,” the Georgia Democrat said to raucous cheers at his victory party. “The first light of dawn is on the horizon.”
Ossoff’s victory itself wasn’t a particular surprise for Democrats, but the fact that his watch party could celebrate to the strains of Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” before 8 p.m. set the tone for the night. The deluge of Democratic gains quickly flooded across the South. In South Carolina, which has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998, Annie Andrews prevailed over the incumbent Senator Darline Graham. Andrews’s ascendance was a sign of how quickly the political winds have shifted in Democrats’ favor just two years after Trump’s victory left the party rudderless and despondent. “It’s about the pain people are feeling, decisions that are being made in Washington, D.C., that have resulted in record high gas and diesel prices,” Andrews told my colleague Madeleine Carlisle on Election Day.
Across the border, Roy Cooper won his race handily in North Carolina—a state Trump carried in 2024. The state’s former governor had run perhaps the most boring and low-key campaign of all Democrats vying for the Senate in competitive states. Cooper’s victory appeared so assured that top Republican super PACs shifted their spending away from the contest toward defending seats in traditionally solid-red states, including Kansas, in early October. Just shy of an hour after polls closed, Cooper posted a video on social media to thank voters: peaceful scenes from across North Carolina, with no spoken words except Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”
From there it was on to more challenging targets, including the elusive dream of turning Texas blue. Supporters of the Senate nominee James Talarico gathered at a performing-arts center on the banks of the Colorado River, with sweeping views of the Austin skyline. They ate street tacos and ice cream from food trucks, and drank beers from a bar as news coverage played on a giant screen. The screens were on CNN when the race was called and cheers of “USA! USA! USA!” broke out, followed by “Tal-a-rico! Tal-a-rico! Tal-a-rico!” About a minute later, the governor’s race was called for Gina Hinojosa. The screams grew even louder. People jumped and hugged. Others had tears in their eyes. “I’m feeling great! We’re winning!” Mario Jimenez, a 54-year-old salesman who drove four hours from Laredo with his wife, said. He kept repeating exclamations. “This is great. Fantastic. Amazing. It’s a true blue wave!”
As the depth of the democratic victories sunk in, Republicans looked for a scapegoat, with some turning their attention toward the man who has reshaped the party in his likeness over the past decade.
“It’s hard for me to think of a White House that has done more to sabotage their own fellow members than this one has,” Marc Short, former chief of staff to Vice President Pence, wrote on X as the result trickled in. The election results showed, he added in another post, that “voters don’t like” global tariffs, the government taking stakes in private companies, and price controls.
Trump tried to put his thumb on the scale in unprecedented ways for this election, asking that voters to pretend he was on the ballot, and they repudiated him. He pushed out Republican incumbents he considered insufficiently loyal and replaced them with acolytes who lost. He urged Republican states to redraw their congressional districts years before the decennial census, an attempt that appears to have backfired.He dismissed Americans’ concerns about inflation and called the skyrocketing cost of living a “hoax,” even though groceries and gas got even more expensive after he started a war. In the closing week of the election, he spoke in great detail about his efforts to redecorate the nation’s capital and an Ohio senator’s physique.
Even so, Democrats were in shock when the results came in, seeking to make senseof how their party, so despondent just two years ago, had managed to become a force in so many parts of the country. Trump had seemed unstoppable after winning in 2024, barreling into traditionally Democratic territory and then governing with a maximalist approach to presidential power. “Chaos, corruption, a failing economy, a catastrophic war: Donald Trump is historically unpopular, and Republicans are paying for never standing up to him,” Joel Payne, the executive director of MoveOn, told me.
But a decisive victory doesn’t mean that legislating will come easily under a president who gives Congress little credence and has said that he plans to circumvent a body controlled by Democrats, labeling himself “Mr. Veto.” Speaking on Fox News on Election Night, Trump laid out his vision of how a divided government would work over the next two years. “They’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them,” he said, predicting that Democrats would eventually negotiate after “a couple months of vetoes.” Before any of that can happen, the party must also deal with its internecine battle between progressives and moderates, which will not be put to rest by an Election Night that saw members of both wings of the party elected.
On Tuesday, none of that mattered, at least for a night. In Phoenix, pop music blared and Dos Equis flowed at the Arizona Democratic Party’s watch party. Senator Mark Kelly told the crowd that Democratic gains reflected just how fed up Americans are “with the chaos, the corruption, the rising costs, and a wannabe-dictator in the White House.” Dora Cruz, a 69-year-old retiree who worked in customer service and wore an American-flag scarf, exuded joy as she watched the results. The outcome gave her hope that she was “getting our flag back. It’s just been so ugly with all this division, corruption.”
In Alaska, three federal employees asked a waiter at 49th State Brewing in Anchorage whether he could change a television showing a college-football game to the election results. The women worked for an agency that had been gutted by the Trump administration. The three women, all Democrats, were feverishly refreshing their phones. He looked at their faces and turned the channel.
Now they were watching what seemed like a seismic victory. One woman noted the New Mexico governor’s race. Another mentioned the Georgia victory. “This is huge,” she said.
The Alaska results still hadn’t come in, yet. “Is it too early for us to celebrate?” one of them asked the others. It was not. The Senate was called for the Democrats soon after.
-From The Atlantic
Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Madeleine Carlisle, Kevin Sieff, and Elaine Godfrey contributed to this report.
COMMENTARY
Donald Trump is now radioactive The president's hand-picked candidates were wiped out. Can the party he cannibalized escape his legacy? By ANDREW O'HEHIR From Salon.com
Pretend I’m on the ballot, the president of the United States repeatedly told American voters over the last several weeks. Millions of voters did exactly that. Be careful what you wish for, my dude.
The astonishing results of the 2026 midterm elections do not just represent a rebuke or a political setback for Donald Trump. Those neutral-sounding terms of art are not remotely adequate. This was a historic smackdown, a massive, crushing defeat on a scale suffered by no incumbent president in living memory. It represents this nation’s collective awakening — admittedly rather late in the game — to this individual’s uniquely poisonous effects on our public life and civil society.
Many larger political questions will emerge from this epic defeat, which will see any and all surviving elected Republicans (not that there are many) scurrying for cover and trying to establish as much distance as possible from Trump. They will lose his number. They will profess that they were never convinced MAGA believers, or that they secretly disagreed with the ICE reign of terror, with the war in Iran, with the disastrous tariffs, with the ideological assault on liberal democracy.
Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Election Day
Will the country rebuke Trump or let him continue to destroy the country?
Just talked to a lady at Starbucks in my section who was reading TWS Journal. Naturally I had to start a conversation. Among our topics were Anthropic, greatly in the news these frenzied days, about to go public. She says, “Thinking about throwing 10,000 at it and see what happens.” Bold but risky for sure.
Only since Donald Trump got to the White House have Americans realized how much they took for granted the sobriety and politeness of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Trumpism’s assault on liberal democracy isn’t only a matter of laws and policies. From the beginning, it has been about legitimizing cruelty. When Trump mockingly imitated a disabled reporter, or said police officers shouldn’t be “too nice” when putting suspects into police cars, or pardoned an American soldier convicted by a court martial of murdering civilians, he was sending the message that he approves of cruelty, and will support those who commit it.
The federal government and the Republican Party resisted that message in his first term; in his second, they have mostly stopped resisting. We are still a long way from the Europe of Shklar’s childhood. America has been a liberal democracy for a long time, and the majority of Americans are not ready to embrace a politics of cruelty. But that prospect feels a lot less theoretical than it did when “The Liberalism of Fear” was written. In the essay, Shklar says that government terror and cruelty weren’t things of the past, but could be seen in “the foreign news in the New York Times.” Now it’s not just the foreign news that reminds us how much we have to be afraid of—and how much we need the values and institutions of liberalism, no matter how unfashionable they’ve become.
