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This week’s midterms look all the more remarkable when you turn back the clock. In November 2024, Donald Trump’s 49.8 percent showing against Kamala Harris in a cost of living election was proof positive that the country had lurched irredeemably to the right. America, asserted triumphant Republicans, was a conservative nation after all and the vaunted MAGA realignment had finally arrived. Evidently eager to concede the point, misanthropic centrists seemed to agree. The Republican right had decisively won the argument and, clearly, the Democratic Party was still just too damned liberal.
How laughably silly that all looks now. In incredibly sweeping fashion, Democrats won elections up and down the country and — though some results remain outstanding at time of writing — 2026 was a decisive rebuke of Trumpism and a blue landslide in every sense. Buoyed by victories in the Midwest and Sunbelt, Democrats will now control both the House and the Senate. No less than seven Senate seats have flipped and, despite the best efforts of the world’s richest man, Texas has finally been turned blue. Kansas will soon have its first Democratic Senator since 1932 and the Democrats may yet pick up another seat in Mississippi. At least five governors’ mansions have changed hands too and Florida, of all places, came within just a few points of electing both a Democratic Senator and a Democratic Governor. At the state level, they’ve also secured trifectas in at least five legislatures (Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and made plenty of further gains elsewhere.
By every standard, these results are historic. A blue wave. A blue tsunami. A “volcanic eruption of blue crayola” (in the grandiloquent phrasing of CNN’s Van Jones) — these kinds of hyperboles are mostly accurate for a change. Compared to several other wave elections, in fact, 2026 looks to be even larger in scale.
