The Bulwark

THE BLUE TSUNAMI WAS CAUSED BY A LATINO EARTHQUAKE. Two years after helping Donald Trump return to the presidency, Latino voters swung hard toward the Democrats and played a decisive role in the national repudiation of MAGA. There were lots of reasons why—but the administration’s immigration policy was a big one.

Poll after poll this year showed Americans, including Latinos, were motivated to vote by the cost of living and a desire to curb the president’s corruption. But my reporting both before and after Tuesday’s election suggests that Latino fury at ICE and the Republican deportation agenda proved to be a powerful motivator.

“Theres definitely a response that people are having to the abuse of ICE, you see that whether that’s in Texas or Florida where Latinos switched strongly back,” Sen. Ruben Gallego told me on election night. “It’s obvious some had to do with the economy, but a lot had to do with Latinos targeted by ICE.”

Hispanic voters understood Trump to be opposed to immigrant crime, but over the past two years, Latinos in America experienced degrading levels of racial profiling. It went beyond the racial profiling you might expect from law enforcement looking for criminals, Gallego said. He pointed to the Supreme Court’s toleration of racial profiling—the so-called “Kavanaugh stops”—that “allowed going to workplaces known to hire Latinos, if you’re speaking Spanish in particular, giving license to target Latinos for being Latinos.”

Recognizing this boiling frustration, Democratic consultant Chuck Rocha, who worked on two dozen races across the nation, told me his firm ran only three kinds of ads this cycle: ads about the cost of living, ads about corruption, and ads about ICE. His firm creates everything from bilingual mailers to radio spots and Spanish-language TV ads—working in all those media and multiple languages, the ads must be focused on the top-performing issues.

“In every working-class community in America, you saw people move back toward Democrats who were super mad that going to war drove up the costs of gas and diesel, and trade wars brought up the cost of everyday goods,” Rocha said. “But in the Latino community, there was that same economic anxiety in addition to fear that your father is going to be picked up and beat up by masked federal agents because he’s brown.”

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The blue wave that washed away Greg Abbott’s three-term governorship in Texas making Gina Hinojosa the first Latina governor in the state’s history also saw James Talarico defeat the scandal-riddled Ken Paxton. And here, too, it was fueled by a historic Hispanic backlash against MAGA.

Talarico outperformed expectations to such an extent that journalists and data gurus had to reach for unbelievable comparisons to properly contextualize how he did. In Cameron County, where nearly nine in ten voters are Hispanic, Talarico performed better than Democrats have in South Texas since the 1930s, when the party represented something very different in the South. A Texas Tribune reporter described FDR-level support in places like Hidalgo County, which is 92 percent Latino. In Starr County, 97 percent Latino, Talarico executed a more than 70-point swing.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) highlighted that turnout in the Rio Grande Valley exceeded that of 2024. For him the reason was clear—and it wasn’t high prices and a poor economy.“For a lot of people, that’s their everyday life, but they’re a resilient and resourceful community that figures out how to get by in tough economies,” he told me. “But we haven’t seen this huge a Latino voter surge before. The difference is ICE and the mass deportation campaign.”

Talarico also put his money where his mouth was, his adviser Rocha said, spending more money communicating to Hispanics over the last year than anyone in the history of Texas politics. The spend included $5 million on TV during the primary, an “unprecedented” $1 million on World Cup ads, and an additional $10 million during the fall campaign, putting Talarico’s total at more than $16 million on television alone. Rosa Mendoza, who worked on the outside Lone Star Rising PAC supporting Talarico, said the Democrat embraced a trend she saw in her polling: While the economy was the top issue, voters wanted someone ready to fight on immigration—not necessarily a reflexively anti-ICE candidate, but someone vocal about the immorality of ICE’s extreme actions.

Talarico threaded the needle well, using biblically inflected language about welcoming “the stranger” while keeping “people out who mean to do us harm,” but also describing ICE as a “secret police force of masked men in unmarked vehicles kidnapping children off our streets”—remarkably frank language for a Texas Democrat. When he spoke about the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, he called him a “fellow Texan” and “child of God” who embodied the American Dream and deserves justice.

Talarico ignored the fear some Democrats had of being viewed as a defund-ICE candidate, choosing instead to reflect the sentiments many Latino (and other) Texans were feeling about ICE. “It’s part of the reason Latinos do view him differently,” Mendoza said. Talarico said the “legitimate part out loud: this is secret police, an organization that has the highest taxpayer funded budget, more than the FBI, and yet has zero accountability or transparency into how they’re going about roundups.”

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Rocha said ICE motivated voters even in traditionally red states: His firm ran Spanish-language ads emphasizing the issue in both the Kansas and Nebraska U.S. Senate races and Texas’s 15th Congressional District, where Tejano singer Bobby Pulido unseated Rep. Monica De La Cruz, despite the latter’s efforts to showcase her immigration bona fides.

Rocha’s firm hammered Trump’s extremism on immigration in TX-15, emphasizing not just De La Cruz’s complicity in the mass deportation agenda, but her specific votes to fund ICE.

One particular ad amplified the story of the Gámez-Cuéllar family, in which three South Texas brothers and mariachi players were taken by ICE but released after bipartisan pressure, including from Pulido and De La Cruz. The ad contended that De La Cruz not only failed to challenge ICE, but actively funded it. “The idea is she says she’s helping you as your representative but doing something different with her vote, which led to these mariachi kids getting detained,” Luis Alcauter, a partner in Rocha’s firm, told me. The ad ran on English-language local TV, local Spanish-language TV, and on digital media.

Rocha’s firm produced a second immigration-related hit on De La Cruz, this one featuring a retired sheriff who said he had never seen anything like Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown in his entire career.

Colin Rogero, a Democratic admaker and director of Conexión, a political firm that worked on thirty races, told me he also emphasized ICE’s illegal actions in his firm’s ads.

“Everywhere, in every district that we were a part of, we were messaging against ICE or for the humane treatment of immigrants, depending on the makeup of the district,” he said. “Sure it is more salient in Latino districts, but it’s an issue about humanity that everyone looked at. They were saying, ‘I may have been for a secure border and don’t think Biden did a good job, but I wasn’t for this.’”

Rogero emphasized that the way voters rank issues when asked by a pollster can get overly simplified in the media. It sometimes doesn’t matter whether immigration or opposition to ICE comes in first, second, or third in priority in a given district, because a thirty-minute polling conversation does not necessarily capture how people react to ads. Immigration has long been an issue that captures people’s emotions—sometimes in healthier ways than others. This cycle, sympathy and solidarity seemed to overwhelm fear and suspicion.

Rogero is right: Immigration broke through as a top-tier message for voters in unexpected ways. In California, for example, Randy Villegas, running in the 22nd Congressional District in the southern Central Valley, eschewed the family-separation messaging common in 2018. Instead, he developed a Latino-centric message that connected the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants with the impact felt by business owners wondering where their customers had gone, Jose Muñoz, who consulted for his campaign, told me. Villegas won a race that was expected to be close in a blowout.

Rogero agreed with this approach, noting that his ads sought to connect the issue of immigration to “everything being so fucking expensive.”

“People are pissed off that housing prices and rents are too high, but you can’t create more housing if you’re going after the people who build homes,” he said. “You have small business owners saying no one is coming to work because they’re scared they’re going to be deported to an African country.”

Poll data seems to support the admakers’ case. In polling by Shared Future, a group founded to identify the commonalities between immigrants and Americans, data journalist and pollster G. Elliott Morris found that immigration was the third-highest-priority issue among 363 Trump 2024 voters who no longer back Republicans, but it was second among the Latinos in the group, and the top issue for 18-to-29 year olds regardless of whether they were Hispanic.

Mendoza, who also conducted polling in congressional battlegrounds for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said affordability drove the Latino backlash against Trump everywhere, but what that looks like varies district to district. In the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, affordability is linked to construction and jobs, while in California’s Central Valley, it’s more about farming and the impact of immigration raids.

She saw an eleventh-hour spike in enthusiasm from young Latino swing voters who see the ways immigration and affordability intersect. “The economy is number one by far, but immigration rose to the top as a motivating factor as a reason they can not stomach supporting a Republican at this point in time,” she told me. “A lot of Republicans had the potential to run against the atrocities ICE is committing in our communities, but unfortunately you didn’t see that type of leadership among GOP incumbents. They could have voted in a different way, but instead doubled down on enforcement, which we know is not enforcement, but racial profiling.”

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DEMOCRATS AND ORGANIZERS NATIONWIDE told me they saw the strongest voter enthusiasm in places where the administration’s enforcement crackdown was heaviest. In Minnesota, site of heavy ICE and Border Patrol activity last winter that left two U.S. citizens dead, people left their “I Voted” stickers at memorials for Renée Good and Alex Pretti. There, the early Latino vote increased 217 percent compared with 2022, with influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina sarcastically remarking it’s almost as if “having ICE and Border Patrol hunt down and murder people on the streets is not a popular policy among our community.”

Siembra NC, which sent door-knockers to more than a hundred thousand doors across North Carolina over the last eight weeks, said calls to their hotline, which used to be about ICE, increasingly became about questions on where to vote or how to volunteer. The group said that in Mecklenburg County, where ICE launched Operation Charlotte’s Web in November 2025, Latino early voting tripled compared to 2022.

Trump opponents told me the election shows that issues don’t exist in a vacuum and that pundits and strategists should not use the economic framing to flatten the moral urgency of what is happening on immigration.

“What happened here is a horrible perfect storm of Trump terrorizing our community with ICE raids and crackdowns and tariffs . . . shutting down the housing industry,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who specializes in Latino voter data, zeroing in on Texas as an example. “At some point, it’s so horrible it’s hard to discern which is which.”

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DONALD J. TRUMP IS A SUPER-LAME DUCK. The man who has dominated the Republican party and the American right for over a decade suffered a thorough repudiation in the midterms. The GOP was utterly shellacked, surrendering House and Senate seats they once thought were impregnable.

Trump has treated the Republican party like one of his own failed casinos, and in turn the Republican party, once the more ideological of the two main parties, has remade itself in Trump’s image. Sometimes literally.

But, after this historic repudiation of Trump’s narcissism, wars, tariffs, and deportation agenda, where does the party go from here? For better or worse, the Grand Old Party is one of the two viable national parties. It is going to have to put forth a candidate in 2028, and the ambitious aspirants for the presidency are quickly going to start exploring ways to differentiate themselves. So even as the Republican base and the vast right-wing media universe try to figure out how to think about what just happened and what comes next, the potential candidates are already beginning to think through the ten thousand practical questions—of funders and hires, of speeches and interviews, of travel and allies and especially policy—that will define their campaigns, and thereby reshape the party.

Can the GOP find a way up from Trumpism?

The fight within the Republican party over who is to blame for Tuesday night’s results is going to be a fierce, savage free-for-all. Some in the grifter-commentator class, like Matt Walsh, will be ready to blame Trump; others, not quite. But at an institutional level, expect a clash between, on one hand, the MAGA establishment that attempted to turn Trump’s insecurities, idiosyncrasies, hatreds, lusts, and idées fixes into a governing agenda, and, on the other, the America First movement that reflexively blames elected Republicans for everything.

MAGA establishment figures Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance are bellwethers here. (Pete Hegseth is toast.) Cruz will redouble his efforts to revive Tea Party–era conservatism as a return to “true” Republican values. Vance will start leaking to every journalist he meets in an effort to put space between himself and Trump.1 What he says or implies will indicate the strategic thinking of the right’s illiberal intellectual class. Rubio, as always, will attempt to put himself at the dead center of wherever he thinks the party is going.

Meanwhile, America First bombthrowers like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene will hammer Republicans for acquiescing to Trump’s war of choice in Iran, for covering up the Epstein files, and for failing to deport enough immigrants. It’s unlikely the kook right will rally behind another candidate the way they did around Trump; their participation in the coalition will likely be more ad hoc, less reliable, and more dependent on how much nuisance value they can extract from the larger blocs.

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Trump’s political death is going to leave a vacuum at the top of the Republican party, and the struggle to fill that void starts now. Of course, Trump still has two years left in his term, but the befuddled and now-repudiated Old Man no longer possesses the menace and gravity he once had. So while he’ll capture headlines and make bad, even dangerous, decisions, he’s less electorally relevant than ever.

The recent history of American conservatism suggests four possible pathways for Republicans:

The media-intellectual-political apparatus that the American right has built over the past fifty years remains powerful. A good chunk of that system of podcasts, infotainment networks, think tanks, publishing houses, magazines, and so on has been thoroughly MAGAfied. These are the cadres that will maintain that true MAGA has never been tried. Think tanks and other organizations like the Center for Renewing America, America First Policy Institute, the Claremont Institute, American Compass, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have made or remade themselves in efforts to elevate Trump’s instinctual illiberalism to the level of political theory. Committed to this hard-right ideology, they will push the GOP to maintain the MAGA trajectory—potentially abetted by Vance, replacement-level Republican senators with four or more years left in their terms, and the “based” under-30 staffer class that knows only Trumpism.

There are two key indicators of the viability of this pathway. One is Vance, who has worked himself into the leading position among the MAGA intellectual elite. If he tries to become the Acolyte of True Trumpism, then it’s a good bet there’s some energy behind that project. If he tries to reinvent himself as a New New JD, then Trumpism is done for. The other indicator is the Heritage Foundation, which started as the intellectual home to Reaganism, then became a vestigial organ on an electioneering effort increasingly uninterested in ideas at all, and since Trump’s first term has become a sort of Higher Party School of MAGA. If Heritage swaps out its embattled president, Kevin Roberts, with someone of a less populist-authoritarian mold, then change could be coming for the GOP.

The MAGA grifters and podcasters will be at sea for the near future as they search for a new message. Until the newly elected Dems are in office—and possibly for some time afterward—they will have relatively little to complain about. What they will have is low morale and cratered audience trust. But they are alert to audience signals, so when they land on a narrative, it will be a useful sign.

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Although much diminished, there remains a segment of elected Republicans who are old enough to antedate Trump’s takeover of the GOP. Fewer than fifty of the Republican House members who will be serving in the new Congress were already in office by the time Trump was first elected in 2016. On the Senate side, only twenty or twenty-one Republicans who served before Trump’s election will be back.2 Still, there are enough of them that some in this subset of Republicans might prefer a return to the Reaganite–Tea Party conservatism that dominated the right from 1980 until 2016. It’d be an easy move for folks like Cruz, Rubio, and the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, as well as Dispatch-type conservatives who have already started asserting Trump should have tried conservatism.

In many respects, small-government, anti-tax, and back-the-blue law-and-order conservatism is the natural political ideology of the party’s historically middle- and upper-middle-class base and its donor class. It’s a worldview the conservative movement and Republican party have spent decades insisting is the natural American Way.

Republicans will be tempted to lean heavily into Obama-era constitutionalism and demands for fiscal discipline as rhetorical devices to rein in Democrats and claim the moral high ground. There are some problems with this strategy, though. America Firsters will scream bloody murder that the “neocons” or “establishment” are trying to reclaim the party. And at the same time, Republican demands for constitutional propriety and tight financial belts have been exposed as hypocrisy. Plus, Reaganite conservatism hasn’t really been a winning message since . . . 1988? 2000?

Republicans may struggle to escape the Trumpian millstone for the next decade—which could mean they will have to prove to skeptical voters that they can be a normal, competent party capable of leadership. It may take a while for them to win back voters’ trust. Or maybe they will be forced to emulate the centrist Democrats of the 1980s and 1990s who, in an effort to move away from the left-wing candidates defeated by Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, began presenting themselves as “New Democrats.”

If MAGA really is obliterated and the GOP becomes a rump regional party, its future may lie in distinctly branded “New Republicans,” consciously and explicitly non-Trumpian—perhaps even pragmatic, good-governance types—drawn from moderate governors in purple or blue states. It’s an unlikely scenario, but we might see the emergence of something like a Republican Leadership Council or a Coalition for a Republican Majority—centrist organizations pushing for a centrist, post-Trump future. I won’t hold my breath.

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Inertia is a powerful thing. It’s quite possible that a combination of party loyalty, polarization, the right-wing infotainment complex, and perceived Democratic overreach or lack of focus may produce a haphazard Republican revival. A GOP that muddles through won’t magically become coherent or well-led. Having undergone ten years of Trumpism, the party’s depleted human capital will not be easily replenished. Republican candidates for years to come will likely largely be MAGA or conservative drones drawn to the party but out of step with the nation. Its staffers and thinkers will be shallow, as real talent will be drawn either to the Dems or to private-sector careers. The biggest concern here is the current GOP staffer class, which has been selected (and self-selected) for its allegiance to MAGA. New leadership can remove some of these people, and it would help if that leadership made clear to them that they’re no longer welcome. Think: DOGE, but for Republican staffers. Whether and how quickly those positions can be filled by people of more consequence and competence is another matter.

But even a shell GOP may well still be competitive at a national level, as the Republican party was at the presidential level in the second half of the twentieth century despite Congress being dominated by Democrats. Just about every democratic nation has a center-right party; they’re arguably necessary for a democracy to survive. And ours, for better or worse, is the Republican party. It’s too soon for us to know what they will stand for, except that they will oppose Democrats, and in some elections that will be enough. The party did just fine back before it was the party of ideas, when conservatism was a series of “irritable mental gestures,” as Lionel Trilling described it.

Whatever the way forward, Republicans will have to finally reckon with Trump and his legacy. He’s a super-lame duck now, and he won’t live forever. In fact, his standing will only decline over time as the media and historians correctly portray him as a disastrous president and Trump supporters’ feelings toward the president become less entangled with their own decisions to vote for him. Distance will lead to clarity. Republicans will find that they have to repudiate Trump in some way or another.

Republican candidates in 2028 will have to thread the needle delicately—presuming Trump is alive and cognizant (or, for that matter, not mounting an unconstitutional bid for another term for himself). But after that, as with every cult of personality, someone will have to finally name it. Perhaps it’ll be a moment like Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” or maybe it’ll be closer to the Chinese Communist Party view of Mao—70 percent good, 30 percent bad. Regardless, Republicans will have to say publicly where they stand regarding Trump. And if they dodge the question, Democrats should wave the bloody shirt of Trumpism for as long as they can.

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Oh, look, he’s already started.

Depending on the outcome in Alaska.

Yes, we’ll be honest—we’re enjoying the chaos a little. Can you blame us? But there’s serious work ahead, too, and we’d love to have you along for the ride. Become a Bulwark member and help us keep the momentum going. And you’re in luck—we’re running a flash sale for 20% off for the next year of Bulwark+. Offer ends this Friday.

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Sam Stein and Will Sommer break down Donald Trump’s bizarre response to Republicans’ crushing midterm defeat. While Republicans are scrambling to explain what went wrong, Trump headed to the White House ballroom construction site to celebrate chandeliers, kitchen layouts and the final steel beam, seemingly more interested in his vanity project than the political disaster unfolding around him. The spectacle was especially surreal as MAGA turns on itself, with Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Levin, Nancy Mace and other right-wing personalities trading insults and pointing fingers over the losses. The knives are out, and Trump is nowhere to be found.

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We’ve been through a lot these past few years, and after last night, it feels like we’re finally turning a corner. There’s a new generation of political leaders to get to know, plenty of fights still ahead, and a lot to be excited about. We’re looking forward to covering it all, and we hope you’ll be along for the ride. If you’ve been thinking about joining the Bulwark, now’s a pretty great time to come ride with us. And you’re in luck—we’re running a flash sale for 20% off for the next year of Bulwark+. Offer ends this Friday.

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The voters have delivered a historic rejection of Trump and MAGA, and the political fallout is only beginning. Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and JVL break down the stunning Democratic victories, what Sarah heard from Trump voters who abandoned Republicans, and JD Vance’s extraordinary attempt to distance himself from Trump’s disastrous Iran war. Plus, the reckoning ahead for Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of MAGA.

In the second half, Sam Stein and Bill Kristol join JVL to examine Vance’s remarkable break with Trump, the possibility of a Republican civil war, and what the election means for the Supreme Court, the next Congress, and the balance of power heading into 2028.

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Not done basking in the warm sunshine of good news? Us neither. Tim, Sarah, and JVL will be live on Substack and YouTube at 10:00 a.m. EST, with (possibly) Sam and Bill to follow after. Happy, happy Wednesday.

by Andrew Egger

The whole game changed last night. We’re all still grappling with what Democrats’ once-in-a-century rout will mean. JVL is right: Trumpism has not been fully defeated, not yet. But one of its darkest elements has been smashed for good.

In 2020, Trump tried to steal a presidential election by sheer force. After he failed, he and his movement spent years systematically grinding down the institutions that got in his way. After his re-election, he stocked the government with loyalists and attempted to seize unprecedented federal control over elections. The inescapable question has hung in the air like a miasma: What happens if he tries to do it again?

Last night, those fears popped like a soap bubble. Whatever dirty tricks Trump might have been planning—and you can bet he was planning them—were trampled by the stampede of the Democratic wave,1 which was, to borrow a phrase, too big to rig.

For eight years, we’ve been building a pro-democracy community unlike any other. There’s never been a better time to join it.

Yesterday morning, Trump was deploying a thousand DOJ employees to monitor polling places in blue areas and leading the charge for Alaska to refuse to certify a Democratic victory in the Senate race, while MAGA influencers got busy circulating election-fraud conspiracies and lies. Hours later, Trump was meekly promising to accept the results and work across the aisle. “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with [Democrats],” he told the New York Times. “We’ll probably work something out.”

Trump’s stop-the-steal plans didn’t just get trampled in 2026. They’re also DOA for 2028. Trying to steal an election requires a lot of institutional support that Trump simply won’t have in two years: No Republican Congress to vote not to certify races, fewer Republican governors in swing states to help him monkey with the totals where he’d need it. Six of the seven 2024 presidential swing states had governor’s elections last night; Democrats won all six.

Trump’s problems won’t end there. And neither will his party’s. Elected Republicans are now caught in an excruciating bind: They’ve arrived at Trumpism’s electoral dead end, but the combination of Trump’s massive, touchy ego and the total lack of other power centers in the party means they have zero cover to try to stake out new territory either.

For Republicans trying to figure out their political future, that means either continuing to tie themselves to the lame-duck president, or risking having him try to end their careers out of sheer pique. Meanwhile, the factional knives are coming out: Not many Republicans are brave enough to blame Trump for this loss, but you can bet that, for instance, supporters and opponents of the war in Iran will be spending the rest of the year trying to lay this disaster at each other’s feet.

But right now, in the afterglow of the Democrats’ world-historical stomp, I’m setting all that aside for the moment to focus on one simple, shining fact. Trump’s election lies—which have done unbelievable damage to America since 2020 and until yesterday seemed an indelible part of our political moment—now suddenly have been utterly neutralized, such that it no longer seems insane to contemplate the possibility that Trump will never successfully peddle that poison again.

by William Kristol

Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.

–Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. 1, December 23, 1776

Election Day 2026 was the true celebration of our 250th anniversary.

The childish events staged earlier this year by Donald Trump, for Donald Trump, and about Donald Trump, are already fading into the mists of history. The votes of perhaps one hundred and twenty million Americans yesterday are what will be remembered about this year.

It was a heck of a night, a bigger wave than even those of us who were bullish on a wave anticipated.

Indeed, it’s probably time to retire the “wave” metaphor. I’ve used it many times, and it does capture the way in which an election like yesterday’s can sweep over barriers and sweep away obstacles. But it suggests that what happened was some kind of force of nature.

It was a human choice. Americans chose to repudiate a debased and degraded version of what this nation should be, and instead to open the door to a better future.

I dare say Thomas Paine would have been proud. So would Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the first Federalist Paper that

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Yesterday was a notable act of reflection, and a striking instance of choice, on the part of the people of this country.

The question of course, as it was at the founding, is what comes next. In choosing to hand the Republican party an historic defeat, the public gave the Democratic party a landslide victory. Democrats seem to have won the national popular vote by as much as 14 points, the largest margin in any House election—midterm or presidential year—in half a century. Democrats picked up between seven and nine Senate seats and something on the order of forty-five house seats. Democrats will now hold a majority of the nation’s governorships, including those of thirteen of our fourteen largest states.

So the Democratic party has a mandate. But as yesterday’s election wasn’t a normal one, the party’s mandate isn’t a normal one. The mandate is to look beyond the normal horizons of party politics. It’s a challenge to Democrats to think big. And it’s an opportunity for Democrats to act not just as Democrats but as defenders and strengtheners of liberal democracy; not just as representatives reflecting the will of the people but as leaders entrusted with high office to help shape a better future for all of us.

Can the Democrats rise to this challenge and opportunity? This will be a major topic for discussion in the days, months, and years to come. But surely we’re entitled now to a day not of thinking or worrying or arguing, but of celebrating.

But only one day!

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In case you missed it, JVL wrote an emergency Triad late last night just as the full magnitude of the Democrats’ victory was coming into view.

The polls slightly understated Democratic strength. Florida nearly flipped both the governor and Senate. Annie Andrews didn’t squeak out a win over Darline Graham—she thumped her. Same with James Talarico. Same with Adam Hamilton.

Gina Hinojosa, who ran a race almost entirely on her own, beat a three-term incumbent governor in TEXAS.

We don’t have the final numbers yet, but Susan Collins is almost gone and Michigan looks safe.

As I write this, 54 seats is the baseline. 55 seats is probable. 56 might materialize before the counting is done.

The double-nickel. Remember where you read that first.

In the House, the next speaker will have a lot of room to maneuver. He can protect all of these new Democrats by letting them trade off on tough votes.

In the Senate, 55 seats means that impeachment of cabinet members is a live possibility. Could you get 12 Republicans to join in removing the architect of the Iran war?

I’d like to test that proposition.

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A conscious, intentional wave.

Election night delivers a stunning rebuke of Donald Trump as Democrats seize control of Congress and score extraordinary victories in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Maine, Ohio and beyond. Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, JVL, and the Bulwark team react to the results in real time, joined by Pete Buttigieg, Ro Khanna, Lis Smith and others to break down the races, MAGA’s meltdown, and what comes next for Trump.

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THE. JOB’S. NOT. DONE.

Tonight was a remarkable result—a generational realignment in American politics. But it was the product of ten years of struggle. Ten years of fight. Ten years of insisting that we would not give up on liberalism.

It might take another decade of work to finish off Trumpism.

So take tonight to celebrate.

Below I have some initial thoughts about tonight’s results. I want us to take a victory lap and then get back to work. I want you to internalize the reality that this election is just the beginning—a very big beginning—of the long march to roll back Trumpism.

In 2020 we thought the fever had broken and the world would return to normal on its own. We know now that this doesn’t work.

There are still two more years. Trump still has a great deal of power. The general public will get bored.

But we won’t.

The Bulwark exists to expose the fascists’ corruption and fight for liberalism. We’ll remain committed to reporting on all of the investigations, doing all of the accountability. We were built to fight Trumpism and we’re tooling up to do even more over the next two years.

We can do this work only because we’re supported by our members. We don’t have Elon Musk; we have people like you.

We want you with us. The only way through is together. This is the time. Let’s fucking go.

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No sections tonight. Just some forward-looking thoughts on what we know so far, what we should learn from this election, and what we must prepare for.

The polls slightly understated Democratic strength. Florida nearly flipped both the governor and Senate. Annie Andrews didn’t squeak out a win over Darline Graham—she thumped her. Same with James Talarico. Same with Adam Hamilton.

Gina Hinojosa, who ran a race almost entirely on her own, beat a three-term incumbent governor in TEXAS.

We don’t have the final numbers yet, but Susan Collins is almost gone and Michigan looks safe.

As I write this, 54 seats is the baseline. 55 seats is probable. 56 might materialize before the counting is done.

The double-nickel. Remember where you read that first.

In the House, the next speaker will have a lot of room to maneuver. He can protect all of these new Democrats by letting them trade off on tough votes.

In the Senate, 55 seats means that impeachment of cabinet members is a live possibility. Could you get 12 Republicans to join in removing the architect of the Iran war?

I’d like to test that proposition.

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Did you donate to Trump’s ballroom? Did you get a pardon? Have you done any business of any sort with members of the Trump family and/or their hangers-on?

Did you take part in DOGE? Did you receive no-bid contracts for the Reflecting Pool?

Did you trade on insider information?

Did you shoot an American citizen on the street? Or run over a “suspect”?

Did you file a false incident report about an encounter with a member of the public? Did you give illegal orders? Did you follow illegal orders?

Did you perjure yourself before Congress? Did you file documents with a court that were false or misleading?

I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: Get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.

James Talarico is a great candidate. So is Gina Hinojosa. So is Annie Andrews.

Did Democrats run any bad candidates this cycle? Troy Jackson. That’s about it. Every other Dem in a stakes race was average or better.

And on the Republican side how many good candidates did they have? Susan Collins?

Good candidates matter and matching candidates with their electorate matters.

If Democrats come out of this saying, “The lesson is you have to run candidates like X,” then they’re crazy. The lesson is: You have to run the right candidates in the right places.

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Donald Trump has a compliant Congress for nine more weeks. What is he going to do?

I will be shocked if he doesn’t lean on Sam Alito to retire so the GOP can try to ram through a replacement.

But before that happens, he’s going to make some choices about his war in Iran. Will he escalate? Will he pull the plug?

Will he push forward in Cuba?

This is not 2006 or 2014 where a normal president absorbs the loss, learns some lessons, and recalibrates to try to hold the political order together.

America tried to move past Trumpism without making it into a whole thing.

“Don’t martyr him! Let the Republican party dump him! Look forward, not back!”

That didn’t work.

The general public won’t care about accountability. But Democrats have to do it anyway.

We must establish deterrence for the next batch of aspiring authoritarians. If we don’t, we’ll be right back here—maybe in two years, maybe later, but for sure eventually.

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Think about the Republican incentive structure tomorrow. Any R who wants to lead the post-Trump party needs his blessing. But Trump will try to punish any R who defects. Some governors might be able to pull this off (Ron DeSantis is clearly already angling for it). But congressional Republicans are in a bind.

Democrats should force Republicans into an endless series of votes in which they are forced to either defend Trump or anger him.

Make them vote on the Iran war.

Make them vote on the Epstein files.

Make them vote on impeaching Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr.

And guess what: The lesson Trump is going to take from tonight is that he needs to be on the ballot in order for Republicans to win. He’s already said as much. I promise you, he is thinking harder about a third term right now than he ever has.

Dare them to disown that idea.

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It is the greatest human delicacy.

Ken Paxton, who crimed his way through Texas politics, is finished, for forever.

Greg Abbott, who welcomed fascism into his state, will forever be the guy who got rolled to the curb.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a guy who is better suited to being a chud streamer, has been shown the door. He did a fake campaign for president, so he could run for governor, so that he could then run for president for real. Now he’ll be lucky to get a podcast.

Susan Collins, who thought she was the indispensable woman, will be remembered as a loser who tried to pretend she wasn’t enabling Trump.

Darline Graham will be a punchline. An answer to a trivia question.

And JD Vance?

Let’s talk about JD Vance.

He’s a rat in a trap. He’s spent his entire life maneuvering in order to convince more powerful people to give him things. And now the one guy who can give him the Republican nomination is a poison pill.

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Election Day is here. Let’s be together tonight as the polls close across the country.

• Starting at 7:00 p.m. EST: The Next Level gang—Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and JVL—will set the stage and report on the returns as the polls close across the Southeast.

• At 8:30 p.m. EST: Sam Stein, Andrew Egger, and Catherine Rampell will take over and check in with our reporters on the ground: Lauren Eagan in Georgia, Jim Swift in Ohio, Jonathan Cohn in Michigan, Tim Miller in Texas, and Joe Perticone in D.C.

• Then at 10:00 p.m. EST: Will Sommer, Bill Kristol, George Conway and Sarah Longwell will continue our coverage as the polls close across the West.

Bulwark Election Night Live is for everyone and will be simulcast on Substack, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. See you soon!

Dumfries, Virginia
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been campaigning furiously in the final stretch of this midterm election cycle, visiting states across the union to boost a range of candidates who hope that the charismatic congresswoman’s considerable name I.D. will help them run up the numbers against their Republican opponents. It’s usually helpful for a party star to campaign with others, especially in this attention economy, and Ocasio-Cortez is being a good team player here. But campaigning hard now also positions her well for a potential presidential bid in 2028.

It’s not unusual for a lawmaker with higher ambitions to travel as much as Ocasio-Cortez has done this year. Arizona’s Sen. Mark Kelly, a widely discussed potential presidential candidate from the other side of the Democratic spectrum, has ventured to twenty-three different states this cycle to promote candidates up and down the ballot. For all the talk of factionalism in the Democratic party, most senior Dems are doing a good job maintaining a big tent approach, and Ocasio-Cortez’s final stop bridged the gap between the Democratic Socialists of America and the centrist New Democrat Coalition.

On Friday evening, Ocasio-Cortez showed up to a crowded auditorium in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District—which, according to nonpartisan ratings, is not in much jeopardy—to boost incumbent Democratic Rep. Eugene Vindman.

“We cannot simply hope that voters will return their ballots or get to the polls,” AOC said. “We gotta bring them there. And that’s why all of us have been knocking doors. It’s why I myself have been touring the country. And this is my last stop on the swing.”

Virginia State Delegate Rozia Henson told me Ocasio-Cortez’s presence would likely juice Vindman’s turnout, while also shoring up the congresswoman’s favorability in the state for a theoretical primary campaign in two years. The DNC has scheduled Virginia to vote sixth in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, just before Super Tuesday.

“I think it is important [that AOC is in Virginia], because in my district, I represent Route 1 all the way up to Fort Belvoir. There was some concerns with progressive voters and how they felt with [Vindman],” Henson said. “So to have that additional voice just like AOC here, it helps shorten that narrative relating to his votes [in Congress].”

“I thought that from the perception—her being super progressive, socialist, et cetera, et cetera—and him more on the moderate side, to see that collaboration here today makes a difference,” Henson commented. Acknowledging Virginia’s newfound status as an early presidential primary state, he added, “There might be possibilities of what happens next, but we’ll see when that bridge gets here.”1

The fact that Ocasio-Cortez is campaigning in locales home to centrist or moderate voters is a sign of the importance of progressives to the Democratic coalition, said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a leftist organizing group.

“I think the left and progressives are leading this party forward with bold and visionary ideas that voters actually want to see us fight for,” Andrabi told me. “It makes sense that more establishment-aligned candidates are trying to align themselves with those campaigns, candidates, and issues, because they are simply what the people are demanding.”

Part of being in a broad coalition is making a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose bargain with the other factions. If Democrats underperform today, progressives will blame moderates for failing to deliver the radical change that people want, while moderates will blame progressives for poisoning the party’s brand with more moderate voters. If Democrats have lots to celebrate, the credit will shift in equal and opposite directions. And in that case, you can expect to see more candidates like Ocasio-Cortez barnstorming these purple-ish districts in the future.

“We cannot simply exist where our base already exists, right?” Andrabi added. “We’ve had a really successful cycle on the left, and now we have an opportunity to continue growing and organizing working-class communities in these purple and red districts in the South and across the country, because that is the future of building power for working-class communities and for the left.”

Maybe so, but during Friday’s event, Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t spiking the ball for the party’s progressive wing, and actually emphasized the need for a broader appeal and even drew comparisons between herself and Abigail Spanberger, Virginia’s more centrist governor.

“In 2018, your great Governor Abigail Spanberger flipped Virginia’s 7th district. Governor Spanberger and I were elected in the same class, and I had the absolute honor of serving with her,” she said. “It is such a testament to the hard work of your community and everything you did to deliver that victory on a razor-thin margin.”

Things weren’t always so collegial, however. During their time in Congress, Spanberger was part of a bloc of early-career House Democrats who distanced themselves from Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called “Squad” composed of staunch progressives.

After the 2020 elections, Spanberger continued to deride politicians who brand themselves as far-left, an apparent shot at Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in Congress.

“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again,” Spanberger said in 2020. “We lost good members because of that.”

Five years later, though, Ocasio-Cortez and Spanberger found common ground. AOC sent a fundraising appeal for Spanberger’s 2025 gubernatorial campaign, soliciting her large and powerful base to support Spanberger, whom she called “a brawler for the working class.”

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Virginia is a funny place for a high-profile Dem to be campaigning this late in the game—but maybe not for someone who travels as much as AOC does. Ocasio-Cortez released a campaign memo Tuesday, highlighting her campaign stops in pivotal primary states, fundraising prowess, and heavyweight status as a coveted endorser for candidates across the country.

“In the coming days and weeks, much will be discussed about the future of the Democratic Party and 2028. You may be asked whether you support her running for President or for Senate in New York or staying in the House of Representatives,” the memo read. “We’d recommend you rely on the details of this memo and answer that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez will continue to do what she’s always done: look for ways to do the most good for the most people. But, over the course of the last two years, she has proven herself to be one of the most effective voices in the country for America’s working class.”

With the exception of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who travels more than virtually everyone else in the potential 2028 field) and nearby Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, few outside Dems have stumped in the Old Dominion, primarily because Democrats feel confident about their prospects in the state and their exertions are needed elsewhere. The Northern Virginia suburbs were hit hard by the Trump administration’s DOGE agenda, turning some of the state’s metropolitan areas sharply against Republicans—a shift felt in the state’s off-year elections in 2025 in which Democrats significantly overperformed. Polls indicate Virginia is almost certainly poised to continue on that blue trend today.

Looking forward to 2028, Virginia has become especially important for prospective Democratic presidential candidates. Not only is it now an early primary state, but it represents a useful cross-section of the new Democratic coalition: highly educated voters in the sprawling D.C. suburbs, a diverse immigrant community, college students, and black voters. Added to this is the fact that Virginia is close to D.C., making it easy for Washington-based candidates to hop over and campaign while Congress is in session. Virginia will be a busy destination for anyone looking to lock up support early in the next election cycle.

There will no doubt be many Democrats making trips down to Virginia to announce their presidential bids in the near future. But if she decides to jump in, Ocasio-Cortez is already one step ahead.

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This election cycle brought many surprises. Among them was the return of the sex scandal—or at least sex scandals with real consequences.

After the bipartisan effort to force the Trump administration to make good on its promise to reveal the contents of its files on Jeffrey Epstein, various candidates and public officials found themselves tethered to criminal or otherwise slimy behavior. Candidates across the country have been the target of campaign ads highlighting their ties to the many individuals named in the files, even when there’s been no confirmed wrongdoing.

Beyond that, several candidates in key races have been dogged by allegations of sexual impropriety. After allegations of sexual misconduct against Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner and California gubernatorial candidate Eric Swalwell emerged, the pressure became so great that each had no choice but to abandon their campaign.

The dynamic is different in the Republican party, where candidates marred by sex-related allegations have maintained a fighting chance, perhaps because of their party leader’s seemingly unequivocal support for accused perverts and philanderers. (And also . . . because of the party leader himself.) Voters, however, may not be as forgiving as the institutional GOP. Candidates with messy personal lives include Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, whose affairs and divorce have been well documented; and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who was kicked out of a performance of the Beetlejuice musical for disruptive behavior that included aggressively sexual PDA with a man, denied rumors of sexual relationships with male and female staffers, and had to address her son Tyler’s child abuse conviction and the separate charges against him of producing and distributing sexually explicit material depicting a minor. On October 23, the Cook Political Report shifted Boebert’s race from “Solid Republican” to “Lean Republican.”

In a similar vein, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has stayed in his race for Ohio’s 7th Congressional District despite credible allegations of physical and domestic abuse against his ex-wife and daughter. Top Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and his potential replacement, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), have continued to support Miller despite the allegations.

The sex scandals circling over these GOP candidates have not come without some electoral consequence, however. Paxton is at risk of becoming the first Republican to lose a U.S. Senate race in Texas since 1988, despite his and his surrogates’ efforts to paint his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, as another kind of deviant.

There’s an obvious difference between the two parties here. The Democratic candidates embroiled in these scandals have been forced from their respective races. The Republican candidates have maintained support despite their personal issues. But voters don’t seem very keen to lend their support. We’ll know in a few days.

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All right. It’s Election Day. Once you’ve voted, there’s not much more to do other than to stay vigilant and watch the returns. You can do that by tuning into The Bulwark’s livestream tonight starting at 7 p.m. ET.

But I’d like to make it a little more fun for you. So here are two cocktail recipes to keep yourself refreshed this evening with some patriotic flair.

For the blue cocktail, make a classic negroni, but replace the Campari with some blue curaçao. This is one of the easiest cocktails out there, and it’ll be a bright blue to celebrate a blue wave.

• 1 oz gin

• 1 oz sweet vermouth

• 1 oz blue curaçao

• A dash of orange bitters

• Garnish with an orange peel

For the red one, I’d recommend a Kir Royale. It’s an easy twist on a mimosa made by replacing orange juice with a splash of crème de cassis, which adds some bitter flavor turning the standard glass of sparkling white wine a bright red.

• 4–5 oz of champagne or prosecco

• 1 splash of crème de cassis

If you end up making either of these cocktails, I’d love to see the results. Send me a picture and a toast over on X or in an Instagram story. I’m @JoePerticone on both platforms.

Bridges aren’t known for traveling to specific destinations. But there will certainly be many to cross when the 2028 cycle gets started, however soon that may be.

Trump’s Justice Department is deploying 1,000 election monitors across all 50 states, while MAGA influencers are already pushing claims of voter fraud and the DOJ is targeting Democrats in an extraordinary Election Day investigation. Andrew Egger and Will Sommer break down the latest developments, the parallels to Trump’s 2020 election playbook, and what could happen if key races are close.

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