After the carnage, Democrats currently sit at a 55-seat Senate majority.
Well, we lost. We lost it all, we lost generationally, and we lost in an unmistakable, coalition-shattering way. Whom do I blame for the GOP’s epochal setback? Have a guess!
Who lost? Everyone. And when I say “everyone,” outside of Florida, I mean pretty much everyone. In what looks to have been a D+12 electorate, Republican control of the House of Representatives was swept away in one of those massive blue tsunamis that we are reliably told just can’t happen anymore in this era of gerrymandered polarization. (Democrats have already flipped 26 seats and look likely to gain as many as 40 when the counting is through.) Old stalwarts have been swept away: Missouri’s Ann Wagner is gone. NRCC chairman Richard Hudson — who gerrymandered himself to doom in North Carolina — is gone. Lauren Boebert seems to be going down.
Nearly any race that could break against the GOP broke bad last night. We lost Senate seats in Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa. (We lost every major race in Iowa — Senate, governor, all three of the state’s contested House seats; were the position of dogcatcher federally elected, a feral Democratic pit bull mix would be heading to Washington this morning.) We lost South Carolina — turns out voters really did not appreciate Trump bigfooting Darline Graham into the Senate nomination — and, unless late-counted votes break in the GOP’s favor, Cindy Hyde-Smith is about to lose her seat in Mississippi, a race I never even thought to write about over a year’s worth of campaign season.
Texas is now blue — not just its Senate seat, where James Talarico wildly overperformed his polling numbers to squash Ken Paxton, but its entire statewide elected slate as well. Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick both unexpectedly lost their bids for reelection. The Texas state house has flipped to the Democrats. Overnight, this massive state — the core of any winning GOP presidential campaign — has flipped from a red redoubt to a state where charismatic powerhouse Ted Cruz remains the state’s sole Republican representative.
Democrats currently sit at a 55-seat majority after the carnage. And we’re not through yet — with results still outstanding in Mississippi and Alaska, it is entirely possible that the Democratic Party will end the 2026 midterms holding a whopping 57 seats, a number of them in deep red territory. It will be six years, at a minimum, until the GOP gets those back. Even were a Republican to win the presidency in 2028 — have fun storming the castle, JD Vance! — it is numerically impossible for Republicans to retake a Senate majority given electoral geography . . . especially with Trump at the helm.
“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump said. They did.