We woke up in a different country on Wednesday than we’d lived in the day before.
A nation that had lost its mind regained its sanity.
The 2026 midterms weren’t just a blue tsunami. They were a national reckoning. An emphatic rejection of corruption, of cruelty, of self-enrichment, of presidential overreach. It was a national revolt against all this nasty, heartless, autocratic, crude administration stands for.
Decency and empathy and honor are back in style – or at least, they will be once the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. It can’t come soon enough.
But this wasn’t just a landslide sweeping Democratic control back into the House and Senate. It was a rare, electrifying moment when an entire nation seemed to rise from its collective malaise, walk to the nearest window, throw it open and scream, “ENOUGH!”
Red is out. Blue is in. Gold is out. Bold is in.
We didn’t just win in traditional battleground states. We stormed Republican strongholds that had been considered virtually impregnable. As I wrote these words, Democratic candidate Scott Colom was 43 votes in front of his Republican opponent Cindy Hyde-Smith for the U.S. Senate in Mississippi. Mississippi! That’s unimaginable – or at least, it would have been before Titanic Tuesday.
President Trump and Vice President Vance still don’t get it, of course. Trump believes the thrashing happened because he wasn’t on the ballot. No, Mr. President, you have it precisely backwards. You were on the ballot in every state. And Vance blamed it on the war in Iran and the inflation that resulted. Sure, that was part of it, but not the biggest part. It was a country rising up to save democracy before it was too late. And it nearly was.
The electorate delivered Trump and his Republican enablers a battering so complete, so geographically improbable, so unmistakable in its message that even the most accomplished GOP spinmeisters are having a difficult time explaining it away.
Texas. Kansas. South Carolina. Iowa.
Read those names again.
These weren’t Democratic victories on the margins. They were political earthquakes in places where the Republican Party had grown accustomed to treating statewide elections as little more than coronations.
And what made this extraordinary repudiation possible? It wasn’t a brilliant television commercial. It wasn’t some clever new Democratic slogan dreamed up by consultants charging $2,500 an hour.
It was Trump. Period.
The consummate con artist who has spent more than a decade insisting that he alone represents the authentic voice of the American people had his a-- handed to him by tens of millions of those same citizens delivering an altogether different message. It was this: we despise you and everything you’ve done to ruin our country.
For nearly two years, Americans have watched a president who promised prosperity preside over a nation where the cost of everyday life rose exponentially. His response was to openly cheer on the profiteers while turning a blind eye to those being forced to do without.
They watched an administration that promised peace unapologetically take the country into a deeply unpopular war.
They watched a president who vowed to fight for ordinary Americans devote all of his attention to his own power, priorities, personal grievances and perpetual gratification – focusing his waning energy on ballrooms and arches and shimmering gold laminate while they struggled to afford heat and groceries.
And they watched a Republican-controlled Congress that was duty-bound to serve as an independent branch of government instead bend to the will of their king and disappear.
Trump thought he was immune from judgment and consequences. His spineless sycophants believed him invincible.
They were all wrong.
When Texas elects a Democratic senator and governor; when Kansas sends a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since the Great Depression; when South Carolina turns away a Republican Senate candidate in a state Trump carried by nearly 18 points two years earlier; you know a historic denunciation and reset has washed over the land.
This was a warning that no party owns the American voter. No amount of money and no gerrymandered redistricting can change that. Texas rose up to tell Elon Musk that he can take his hundreds of millions of dollars and shove it. And while you can redraw the lines, you can’t dictate what the people inside those lines believe.
In the wake of the epic electoral hammering the Republicans endured, we might well ask what took Red State America so long to awaken to the soulless, self-dealing Trump and how little he cared about them all along. Why did they need to elect him twice to understand what’s been so obvious to the rest of us from day one?
We may never understand it. But it’s far better late than never.
Trump is still scheduled to remain in office for 26 ½ more months. He will be, however, the lamest of ducks. He’ll no longer be surrounded by flatterers and enabling cowards but weasels who will do all they can to separate themselves from his toxic stench. They know as well as we do that the MAGA movement is effectively dead.
Not that any of this means the country’s problems have magically disappeared. The incoming Democrats will have a massive reclamation task ahead of them, as the one thing the Republicans are great at is making a mess and leaving the clean-up to others.
The Republicans have made the lives of everyone but those at the very top appreciably worse, and it’s up to those who won on Tuesday to start to repair the economy, the deep ideological divisions and the institutional damage that have fueled so much fear and anxiety and hardship. Our collective sense of trust has been broken.
But we can begin to address those issues tomorrow. Today, we deserve time to rejoice in the rescue of our country from the brink and release a collective exhale. This is a moment for celebration. We’ve more than earned that.
For one remarkable night, Americans demonstrated that the presidency is not a throne, Congress is not designed as a cheering section, and political power remains something the people can rise up to snatch back.
Those who have preached that our vote remains sacred were proven right after all.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)