Not A Wave. A Verdict

Last night the Trump era ended.

You were not dreaming. Last night happened, and it was better than we could have imagined.

To put it as plainly as I can: last night the Trump era ended. The corruption, the grift, the greed, the cruelty — the country looked at all of it and said no. And the minions who latched onto his political gravity hoping for a piece of the power, hoping to carry the legacy forward, got buried with him.

JD Vance’s political career is over. Marco Rubio’s legacy is now a foreign policy that 62% of voters say we should never have started, that 74% say was a major factor in how they voted, and that Donald Trump himself blamed for the loss.

The Numbers

Last night was only the third time in fifty years that control of both chambers changed hands in a single election. Since World War II, the House and Senate have flipped together in the same midterm exactly three times: 1946, 1994, and 2006.

Democrats are on track for the largest popular-vote margin since 1974.

In NBC’s exit poll, Trump’s approval was 38 approve, 62 disapprove. Independents broke for Democrats by seventeen points.

Trump’s margin in rural America collapsed from thirty points to eighteen.

Last night wasn’t just a turnout story. Trump’s voters didn’t all stay home. Many of them voted. And they rejected him and his chosen candidates.

As of this morning, Democrats hold at least 54 Senate seats and 228 in the House. Simon Rosenberg projects it finishes closer to 255 House seats and 56 in the Senate. Alaska and Mississippi are still counting; Mississippi is sitting on a forty-three-vote margin. Yes, Mississippi might flip blue. That’s how big we won last night.

This was not a tsunami or a wave. This was a verdict, and it was ten years in the making.

Seven Senate Seats Flipped

Maine. Iowa. Kansas. Ohio. North Carolina. South Carolina. Texas.

Four of those are states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Texas by fourteen. Ohio by eleven. Kansas by sixteen. South Carolina by eighteen.

Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Not since Hoover. Adam Hamilton just won it.

Texas hadn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. James Talarico beat Ken Paxton.

South Carolina hadn’t since 1998. Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham.

And Susan Collins is gone.

Big Names Defeated

Greg Abbott is out as Governor of Texas, defeated by Gina Hinojosa, who becomes the first Democratic governor of Texas since Ann Richards and the first Latina ever to hold the office.

Dan Patrick lost. He has run the Texas Senate like personal property since 2015. Vikki Goodwin beat him.

Prominent congressional Republicans went down. Mike Lawler of New York, the most heavily targeted House Republican in the country, lost to Democrat Cait Conley. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina lost by ninety-nine votes to Chuck Hubbard. Tim Moore, also of North Carolina, lost to Lakesha Womack. Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey lost to Rebecca Bennett. Jen Kiggans of Virginia lost to Elaine Luria — the Democrat she had unseated in 2022. Gabe Evans of Colorado lost to Manny Rutinel. Addison McDowell and Brad Knott, both of North Carolina, lost seats their own party had just redrawn for them.

And Richard Hudson of North Carolina lost. Hudson is the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and the fifth-ranking Republican in the House — the man whose entire job this cycle was holding the Republican majority. He lost his own seat to Democrat Richard Ojeda.

Michael Whatley, the sitting chairman of the Republican National Committee, lost.

Both men who ran the Republican Party’s campaign operations lost their own seats last night. Whatley at the RNC. Hudson at the NRCC.

Lauren Boebert may join them. Her seat is still too close to call, with Democrat Eileen Laubacher narrowly ahead.

Vivek Ramaswamy lost Ohio to Amy Acton, after spending $4 million on an ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother calling her daughter, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, a liar.

The Gerrymander Broke

Gerrymandering failed miserably.

Republicans spent two years redrawing this country for the express purpose of preventing what just happened.

North Carolina. In October 2025, Republicans redrew the congressional map mid-decade. The map was built to make it 11–3. Democrats won seven of the fourteen.

Five Republican incumbents lost on a map their own party drew to protect them.

Florida. The redraw was designed to deliver Republicans as many as 24 of the state’s 28 seats, up from 20. Democrats won three of the four districts it specifically targeted — Kathy Castor by more than five points in a Tampa seat redrawn to add rural counties Trump won by ten, Pia Dandiya in the 22nd, Jared Moskowitz in the 25th.

Tennessee. Republicans carved Memphis and Shelby County into three pieces, destroying a majority-Black district, for the stated purpose of going from 8–1 to 9–0. Republican Brent Taylor won that seat.

And then they lost the 4th District. Democrat Victoria Broderick beat Republican incumbent Scott DesJarlais by 280 votes, in a district nobody was watching.

They dismantled Black Memphis to pick up a seat and finished the night at 8–1. Exactly where they started. All of that, for nothing.

Too Big To Rig

Democrats flipped the governorships of Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada. They won every one of the six 2024 swing-state governors’ races on the ballot. In Wisconsin, Democrats flipped both chambers of the legislature — their first control there since 2011 and their first trifecta in sixteen years. In Texas, Republicans have held the state House since 2003, and Democrats are within a seat or two of taking it.

Every piece of election interference machinery built over the last two years — the voter-roll lawsuits, the certification threats, the $1 million fraud bounty, Todd Blanche refusing to rule out blocking state certification — all of it runs through state officials. Governors. Secretaries of state. Legislatures.

They just lost the states.

Andrew Egger put it best: the election-subversion playbook is dead for 2028. There is no Republican Congress to refuse certification, and there is no friendly governor in the states that decide it. Trump spent two years telling us he might not leave, and the answer turned out to be the most boring one available — make the margin too big to argue with.

Too big to rig.

Ten Years

Ten years of this. Ten years of showing up to town hall meetings. Ten years of the marches that pundits said accomplished nothing, the postcards, the phone banks, the special elections in districts nobody was supposed to win. Ten years of people telling you that you were hysterical, that you should calm down, that it wasn’t that bad, that it’s both sides, that this is just how politics works now.

It wasn’t just how politics works now. And you weren’t hysterical. The country now clearly sees what Donald Trump is, and it voted to end it.

The Trump era is over. What comes next? I’m not sure. But last night this country — in Kansas, in South Carolina, in Texas, on maps drawn specifically so it couldn’t — returned a verdict.

We’re done with MAGA. We’re done with Trump.