The great scrambling has begun

A friend told me a few weeks ago that if the bottom fell out for Republicans on Election Night, DC Democrats would have to scramble to track down the phone numbers of candidates who won without ever being on anyone’s radar, just to congratulate them. That appears to be exactly what’s happening in my home state of Tennessee, where Victoria Broderick, a working mother of two, is on track to take out Rep. Scott DesJarlais in TN04, who has held his seat for fifteen years. Her race didn’t even crack the top three in Tennessee among the contests the national parties or press considered competitive, in part because Trump carried the district by 24 points in 2024.

Last night, a Blue Tsunami overwhelmed Republican candidates up and down the ballot and in every corner of the country, from Maine to Arizona. Georgians elected the first Black woman to serve as governor of any state in the nation. Texans flipped the Lone Star State blue at every level, sending James Talarico to the U.S. Senate and Gina Hinojosa to the Governor’s Mansion. Michigan elected a progressive Muslim who supports Medicare for All to the U.S. Senate. South Carolinians elected their first female senator, who happens to be a Democrat, and Mississippians are on the verge of sending a Black man to the U.S. Senate for the first time since Reconstruction.

Across the South, Black voters fought back against MAGA’s attempts to strip away their voting rights, while the Latino and young voters who broke for Donald Trump two years ago swung back hard toward Democrats. Even in key congressional districts that MAGA Republicans hoped to steal via gerrymandering (like Alabama’s 2nd), voters elected Democrats anyway. Oh, and Democrats are projected to gain anywhere from 600 to 800 state legislative seats, a down-ballot wave reminiscent of the Republicans’ own state legislative tsunami 15 years ago.

Yesterday’s elections were a bloodbath on a level American politics hasn’t seen in nearly two decades, and there will no doubt be weeks of analysis and hundreds of Substack posts sorting through the rubble.

Some of that analysis will be nauseating. The various factions of the Democratic Party will stretch the results to argue that their side, their organization, their pet issue, or their identity was the one thing that really mattered this cycle. Memos are already flying, and the random DC press briefings risk crashing Zoom and GoToWebinar today. The amount of credit-claiming by national operatives and groups will be on another level. For example, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the head of the party’s campaign arm, Kirsten Gillibrand, started taking their victory laps last week, and they will no doubt embark on a full media tour to claim credit for their caucus’s stunning new majority. Plenty of DC journalists will take the bait, but any reporter worth their salt should ask the two of them why their genius, behind-the-scenes interventions didn’t extend to winnable races in Montana, Louisiana, and Florida.

My only take right now is this: Democrats won nationwide last night because voters feel like life in this country is getting worse, more expensive, and out of control. The election was fought over costs, data centers, corruption, Trump, Epstein, tariffs, war, broken promises, and so much else. Americans repudiated the President and his party, rather than endorsing some overarching Democratic agenda. Politics is cyclical, historic midterm trends came roaring back, and the electorate that showed up yesterday will not be anything close to the electorate of 2028. 

I started this newsletter during the week of Trump’s second inauguration with a bet that we are living through unprecedented times, and that our political cycles are getting shorter, fiercer, and, well, more chaotic. If anything, this year has confirmed that we are heading into a great scrambling of American politics, in which voters are abandoning old coalitions and forming new ones, the issues that defined the two parties for decades no longer move anybody, and the candidates who win will be the ones who seize on the issues emerging to replace them.

Operatives, reporters, and the Democratic donor class would do well to remember that, and if they do, the MAGA fever dream actually has a very good chance of breaking soon.

This was a quick reflection on last night’s results — many of which are still outstanding. I’ll be back in your inbox soon with updates, round-ups of analysis, and original charts and data on what’s happened in the midterms and what’s next.