Campaign Supernova: Democrats Score Generational Political Landslide

Well, what did you think was going to happen?

Democrats on Tuesday night did even better than the polling data, which had predicted massive victories for the party: They are on track to win larger-than-anticipated majorities in both chambers of Congress, won a US Senate seat in Kansas for the first time since the 1930s and swept the statewide races in Texas after not winning there for three decades. 

They broke Republican gerrymanders in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, and took total control of Wisconsin. They defeated the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. They finally ousted Maine Senator Susan Collins. More results are still coming in from western states. 

It’s the largest set of wins since the backlash to Watergate in 1974.  

And it all made sense. President Donald Trump, at rally after rally, had urged voters to pretend he was on the ballot, and it appears they did.

Trump had broken many of his campaign promises in the eyes of the public — raising tariffs instead of lowering prices, starting the type of foreign wars he had promised to end and caring more about his billionaire allies and pet architecture projects than the working man he allegedly championed. 

Tuesday saw “the highest ever national average for gasoline and diesel prices ever on election day,” according to Patrick De Haan, a petroleum industry analyst. And voters agreed: Trump did that. 

Still, the scope of the rebuke is stunning. Democrats are projected to win the House and the Senate, conquering states and districts Trump had won with ease just two years ago. 

“The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump,” said Senator Jon Ossoff, a rising star of the Democrats who marched to a decisive victory over Republican Mike Collins.

“Let tonight’s results give you courage that the first light of dawn is on the horizon.”

If there was one lesson from 2024, it was that people hate high prices, and it doesn’t matter if there’s low unemployment and good economic growth.

Economists argued about how much former President Joe Biden’s policies contributed to inflation, but the Iran war’s impact has been overwhelmingly obvious, and midterm voters rated the economy ahead of all other issues.

Republicans in Congress made little effort to distance themselves from the president. They voted in favour of the Iran war, went along with the tariffs, approved his nominees and supported his vanity projects, including the surprise demolition of the East Wing of the White House. Some of them even proposed putting his face on Mount Rushmore or the $100 bill. 

As a result of their loyalty to Trump, Republicans will no longer control Congress. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson chalked up Republicans’ losses to the historical pattern of a president’s party doing badly in midterms. 

“From the first day of this election, we knew that to keep the House and sustain our majority we would have to defy more than a century of midterm history. It’s very difficult to overcome, and it looks like history will be kept tonight,” Johnson said on Tuesday evening. 

But this wasn’t an ordinary midterm election. Democrats flipped Senate seats in Texas, Kansas and South Carolina — states that haven’t sent Democrats to the Senate in decades. 

Not even an unprecedented scheme to redraw House districts in their favour, despite the next census being half a decade away, could save Republicans from voters’ huge shift toward Democrats.

Incumbent Democrats survived in Florida and Texas thanks partly to Latino voters swinging away from Trump after they swung toward him in 2024.

“They thought they would gerrymander their way to a permanent majority,” Democratic Representative Suzan DelBene, chair of House Democrats’ campaign arm, said at a victory party, adding that Democrats prevailed by recruiting quality candidates.

“They built broad bipartisan coalitions, and they had messages that resonated with voters, and they understand that their job title is representative, not rubber stamp.”

Trump also made it much more difficult for Republicans to defend their Senate majority by meddling directly — and ineptly — in Senate races.

He pushed out incumbent Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn in favour of loyalists who were easier for Democrats to beat.

Trump backed Darline Graham over a better-known Republican in South Carolina, and he backed Mike Collins in Georgia’s Senate primary runoff over a candidate who had support from the state’s popular governor.

Graham and Collins both went down in flames, and so did Ken Paxton in Texas. 

Still, Trump suggested on Tuesday evening that if he had actually been on the ballot, instead of just in people’s minds, then everything would have been better. 

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”