THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

James Talarico talked a lot during his campaign about the so-called wilderness—as in, the electoral wasteland and morale morass that Democrats had been languishing in since President Trump’s reelection, in 2024. In Texas, this felt like something of a permanent condition. Talarico preferred a more sanguine interpretation of wilderness, something I’ve thought about after he became the first Texas Democrat to win a Senate race since 1988. The wilderness, he said from early on in his campaign, could in fact prove a fertile ground for reinvention.“There is an opportunity to redefine the Democratic Party,” Talarico told me. “And you can’t do that if the brand is super set, or if there’s a strong leader at the top of the party.” This was a little over a year ago, and we were sitting in the lobby bar of an Arlington, Texas, hotel. “The wilderness,” Talarico continued, “is where new ideas and new leaders and new movements come forth.” At the time, I was inclined to dismiss this as a rationalization from another one of those fool’s-gold Democratic hopefuls in Texas. In retrospect, maybe Talarico was onto something.If nothing else, the Democrats’ midterm rout of Trump and his supine coalition of Republicans would seem to put to rest, at least for now, the long-running discussion of Democrats as a party out of touch, ill-defined, lacking in purpose, and perpetually ambling in this “wilderness.” I admit that I participated in a fair amount in this Democratic-doldrums discourse myself, including in an opus about the party adrift that ran in February, which now feels like a decade ago. I stand by that story. It was true then, and had been for nearly four years, if you start the clock with the 2022 midterms and the disastrous denouement of the Biden years.[Read: Democrats will likely disappoint voters soon]The sheer magnitude of Tuesday’s drubbing of Republicans should provide an antidote to the wallowing that Democrats can be prone to. It’s impossible not to see the geographic reach of their victories, the generational ascent of so many potential stars, and the stunning margins that Democrats ran up across the country and not conclude that the party has legitimate reason to feel good about itself. This was a bona fide “thumpin,’” as another unpopular Republican president, George W. Bush, called his own midterm debacle 20 years ago.The requisite chest-thumpin’ from Democrats commenced immediately on Tuesday night. “We have… [TheTopNews] Read More.

It was the morning after the midterm elections, and Jeff Flake couldn’t stop laughing. Not necessarily a mean laugh—Flake, who is preternaturally good-humored, tends to chuckle amiably through most conversations. But I thought I detected a quantum of vindication or glee in the voice of the former senator from Arizona.I’d called Flake to ask what he made of his party’s historic electoral meltdown. “It feels literally like a 10-year fever just broke,” he told me. “I’ve been saying to my wife, It’ll break. It’ll break, and she’s been saying, When? When? When? And it looks like it has.”During the first Trump administration, Flake distinguished himself as one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken Republican critics of the president—of his character, his policies, and his coarsening of America’s political culture. Flake was heartbroken by his party’s craven accommodation of Donald Trump and routinely called it out. “One day in the not too distant future,” he’d predicted in 2019, “Republicans will wake up and say, ‘We did this for this man?’”Flake believes that day has finally arrived. “Republicans have to be asking themselves, ‘What did we get out of this?’” he said. “Twelve trillion dollars added to the national debt during the two Trump terms so far? Our trade deals in tatters? Our allies don’t trust us? China has not been restrained?”Yes, Flake conceded, the border has been secured (though many of Trump’s immigration policies could be undone by a swipe of his successor’s pen). And yes, the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority (though any Republican president would have achieved that, and the current 6–3 majority owes more to Senator Mitch McConnell than to Trump). But the trade-off for even these qualified accomplishments, Flake argued, has been that “the party has lost its soul.” He pointed to the “sickening” crony capitalism that dominates the president’s orbit, and to the GOP’s continued support for Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.[Eugene Robinson: The end of the Trump era]And now, after thoroughly remaking the party in his image and purging it of anti-MAGA dissidents such as Flake, Trump has handed his party a generationally devastating midterm wipeout. “That’s what I think Republicans looking in the mirror are saying: ‘We did this for this man? Was it worth it?’”I reminded him that one of those Republicans, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, once derided Flake’s principled resistance to Trump as feckless and self-defeating. No… [TheTopNews] Read More.

At the urging of President Trump, Republican legislators spent the better part of a year trying to fortify their House majority against an expected midterm onslaught from Democrats. They surgically redrew congressional districts in their favor, with the goal of making it almost impossible for Democrats to win in Republican-controlled states. On Tuesday night, however, the wall that Republicans had gerrymandered for themselves collapsed into dust.Republicans are poised to lose nearly all of the seats that they remapped and are likely to lose many more that blue-state Democrats redrew in response. Targeted Democratic incumbents who were thought to be doomed under the new maps prevailed in Florida, Ohio, and Alabama. In Texas, where Trump launched his gerrymandering blitz, a pair of candidates—Bobby Pulido and Johnny Garcia—benefitted from a sharp swing left among Latino voters to win seats that were redrawn.Nowhere did the president’s aggression backfire more clearly than in the purple state of North Carolina. Previous rounds of GOP gerrymandering had already given Republicans control of 10 out of the state’s 14 U.S. House seats. But they wanted more, and last year, the party’s majorities in the North Carolina legislature created new lines aimed at forcing Representative Don Davis out of the state’s largely rural First Congressional District. To make Davis’s seat redder—Trump would have carried this new constituency by 12 points had it been in place in 2024—lawmakers had to pull Republican voters from other districts, cutting into their advantage elsewhere.Davis won his race on Tuesday, but that was the least of the GOP’s problems in North Carolina: With most ballots counted, Republicans are on the verge of losing five of their original House seats, and they held only narrow leads in four others. Democrats were virtually assured of controlling a majority of the delegation and came within several thousand votes of sweeping all 14 districts.The Republican redistricting nationwide was no match for a landslide that has Democrats projected to claim as many as 255 House seats—a gain of more than 40 districts, which would be far greater than forecasters had predicted. Analysts pointed to two factors that spoiled the GOP’s gerrymanders. First, Black-voter turnout surged in reaction to both Trump-administration policies and the Supreme Court’s decision to gut a key section of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling spurred Republicans in southern states to redraw additional seats that the VRA had kept intact for majority-Black communities. “It galvanized… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last night, in the streets of Austin, Democrats honked their horns and hung from their windows, like it was V-E Day. In the nation’s capital, they blasted “Party in the U.S.A.” near the White House. But in southeast Iowa, the blue revolution came quietly.The Democrats of Des Moines County—a place that does not actually contain the state capital, but a small, industrial river city and rural areas along the Mississippi —have not come to associate Election Night with joy. The half dozen white-haired Iowans at the Burlington office’s “watch party” were blinking in disbelief at the TV as MS NOW election alerts flashed across the screen. Their party had retaken the governorship of Ohio—and somehow won a Senate seat in South Carolina? Texas was within reach. So, it seemed, was Kansas? “This might be a very big night,” Tom Courtney, a 79-year-old former state senator and former leader of the county party, told me, in what was already sounding like a colossal understatement.Iowa’s results had yet to come in. He and the other Democrats in the room seemed to be experiencing happiness only distantly, like birdsong from deep within a dark wood. This county, which had elected Barack Obama by about 23 points in 2008, was one of 31 Iowa counties that swung to Donald Trump in 2016. Two years ago, Trump won Des Moines County by 15 points, and Democrats began speaking of the “river counties” in the past tense—pieces of Iowa’s blue wall, lost forever.Courtney was on the phone. He paced the office, passing lawn signs, a cooling pot of chili, and the final slices of a Casey’s taco pizza. Then, suddenly, gasps. The countywide results were in, and a map of election results showed Des Moines County faintly—yet undeniably—blue. The county’s voters had opted to send a Democrat to the state house and another to the U.S. House; they’d also voted to make Rob Sand the state’s first Democratic governor elected in 20 years. “Did you hear that?” Courtney asked me, from across the room.By the end of the night, Iowa would also send Josh Turek to the Senate, plus three Democrats to the House. Kansas would send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since the invention of beer in a can. In Ohio, the party would send Sherrod Brown back to Congress, and Amy Acton to the governor’s mansion. At the office in… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last night, in the streets of Austin, Democrats honked their horns and hung out their windows, like it was V-E Day. In the nation’s capital, they blasted “Party in the U.S.A.” near the White House. But in southeast Iowa, the blue revolution came quietly.The Democrats of Des Moines County—a place that does not actually contain the state capital, but a small, industrial river city and rural areas along the Mississippi—have not come to associate Election Night with joy. The half dozen white-haired Iowans at the Burlington office’s “watch party” were blinking in disbelief at the TV as MS NOW election alerts flashed across the screen. Their party had retaken the governorship of Ohio—and somehow won a Senate seat in South Carolina? Texas was within reach. So, it seemed, was Kansas? “This might be a very big night,” Tom Courtney, a 79-year-old former state senator and former leader of the county party, told me, in what was already sounding like a colossal understatement.Iowa’s results had yet to come in. He and the other Democrats in the room seemed to be experiencing happiness only distantly, like birdsong from deep within a dark wood. This county, which had elected Barack Obama by about 23 points in 2008, was one of 31 Iowa counties that swung to Donald Trump in 2016. Two years ago, Trump won Des Moines County by 15 points, and Democrats began speaking of the “river counties” in the past tense—pieces of Iowa’s blue wall, lost forever.Courtney was on the phone. He paced the office, passing lawn signs, a cooling pot of chili, and the final slices of a Casey’s taco pizza. Then, suddenly, gasps. The countywide results were in, and a map of election results showed Des Moines County faintly—yet undeniably—blue. The county’s voters had opted to send a Democrat to the state house and another to the U.S. House; they’d also voted to make Rob Sand the state’s first Democratic governor elected in 20 years. “Did you hear that?” Courtney asked me, from across the room.By the end of the night, Iowa would also send Josh Turek to the Senate, plus three Democrats to the House. Kansas would send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since the invention of beer in a can. In Ohio, the party would send Sherrod Brown back to Congress, and Amy Acton to the governor’s mansion. At the office in Des… [TheTopNews] Read More.