The Blue Wave
Donald Trump asked voters to pretend his name was on the ballot and vote accordingly.
They did.
He got shellacked. It only took a few hours once returns began to come in to recognize that Trump and his MAGA cohorts were drowning in a blue wave. It would rise through the night to reach tsunami proportions.
Pre-election polls have not done well in the last few cycles. My personal theory is that a lot of people who planned to vote for Trump were embarrassed to admit it and so hid from pollsters or lied outright. This time the truth was told and the polls pretty much got it right.
The Trump Republicans not only lost majority control of the House and Senate. They also lost up and down the ballot, tipping governors and state legislatures from red to blue.
Republicans dropped from 53 in the Senate to no more than 46, with losses in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas as well as Georgia, North Carolina and Maine. In the House, Democrats are expected to have around 258 seats, a pickup of at least 43. Many Republicans in supposedly safe districts narrowly escaped defeat.
Democrats flipped more than 500 state legislative seats. They took control of at least a dozen legislative chambers. They gained control of House, Senate, and Governor mansion in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nevada. They captured legislative chambers in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, and increased their majorities in blue strongholds like New York, California and Illinois.
The exit polls contained some interesting surprises. While the bread-and-butter issue of affordability was a top concern, so too was the issue of government corruption and the war with Iran. The social issues which have been a focus of Republican campaign strategy were not as much of a factor this year.
The new Republican coalition, young people and working-class white men, who played such a major part of Trump’s 2024 campaign, proved to be a fickle friend, not the sign of a long-term conservative trend. These groups changed sides in record proportions, switching by as much as forty percent from red to blue.
The most prominent of these losers was Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. His Senate campaign cost nearly $500 million, and it wasn’t even close. He lost by 12 points and became the first Republican nominee to lose a Texas US Senate seat since 1988. Paxton outspent 38-year-old winner James Talarico, spending nearly half a billion dollars on his campaign. Much of that money came from Elon Musk, who famously moved his Tesla and SpaceX companies from California to Texas because he didn’t want to be in a blue state. Surprise, surprise.
Democrat Adam Hamilton, a minister, unseated Republican incumbent Roger Marshall, securing Kansas‘s first Democratic Senate seat since 1932. In North Carolina, former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper flipped an open seat previously held by retiring Republican Thom Tillis, defeating Republican Michael Whatley by double digits.
In South Carolina Annie Andrews pulled off a major upset by defeating appointed Republican Senator Darline Graham in a state traditionally considered safely conservative. In Iowa Democrat Josh Turek defeated Representative Ashley Hinson to flip the seat blue, making history as the first Paralympian elected to the Senate.
In Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won an open-seat contest, making history as the first Muslim U.S. senator. In Ohio, incumbent Jon Husted (Ohio) lost to the returning former Senator Sherrod Brown.
In Maine, the election delivered one of the biggest upsets of the cycle. Democratic challenger Troy Jackson defeated longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins to flip the seat blue. Collins was a six-termer. That’s 30 years. A self-proclaimed centrist, I never saw her vote against Trump unless her vote didn’t make a difference. She famously expressed disappointment that some of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees mislead her, telling her one thing when she interviewed them prior to confirmation. Then voting the other way once on the Court. The people of Maine finally had enough of this. I haven’t heard her reaction to her defeat. I’m sure she is disappointed.
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